Paris in the Twentieth Century (22 page)

He
found himself at the entrance of the morgue, open day and night to the living
as well as to the dead; he went in quite mechanically, as if he were looking
here for someone dear to him; he stared at the corpses, lying stiff, greenish,
and swollen on their marble slabs; in a corner he saw the electric apparatus
used to restore life to those waterlogged bodies still harboring some spark of
existence. "Electricity again!" he exclaimed, and fled.

Notre-Dame
was ahead of him, its windows streaming with light; solemn chanting was audible
as

Michel
entered the old cathedral. Mass was just ending. Leaving the darkness of the
streets, Michel was dazzled: the altar shone with electric light
[73]
,
and beams from the same source escaped from the monstrance raised in the
priest's hand. "More electricity, " the miserable boy exclaimed,
"even here!" And once more he fled, but not so quickly that he failed
to hear the organ roaring with compressed air furnished by the Catacomb
Company! Michel was going mad; he believed the demon of electricity was
pursuing him, and he returned to the Quai de G
rèves
,
entering a labyrinth of empty streets until he came out into the Place des
Vosges, where a statue of Victor Hugo had replaced that of Louis XV, and found
himself facing the new Boulevard Napoleon IV, which extended to the square where
Louis XIV perpetually gallops toward the Banque de France; making a hairpin
turn, he came back along the Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires.

On
the wall of the street perpendicular to the Bourse, he glimpsed the marble
plaque where these words were set in gilded letters:

Historic
Marker.

On the
fourth floor of this house

Victorien
Sardou lived from 1859 to 1862

Michel
now stood in front of the Bourse, temple of temples, cathedral of the age; the
electric dial showed the time: a quarter to midnight. "The night is frozen
too, " he mused, as he walked toward the boulevards. The lampposts relayed
their cones of intense white light, and transparent signs on which electricity
inscribed advertisements in letters of fire glistened on the rostral columns.
Michel closed his eyes; he passed through a large crowd leaving the theaters;
he reached the Place de l'Op
é
ra and
saw that elegant mass of rich people braving the cold in their furs and
cashmeres; he skirted the long row of gas cabs and made his escape through the
Rue Lafayette, which stretched straight in front of him for a league and a
half. "Let's get away from all these people!" he murmured to himself
and sprang forward, skidding, hobbling, sometimes falling, getting to his feet
bruised but numb; he was sustained by a force that seemed outside himself.

As
he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the
distance he saw what looked like a tremendous light; he heard a great noise
that sounded like nothing he knew. Nonetheless he continued, finally arriving
in the center of a deafening racket, an enormous arena which could easily hold
some ten thousand persons, and on the pediment of the building was written in
fiery letters:

Electric
Concert

Yes,
electric concert
, and what instruments! According to a Hungarian method
[74]
,
two hundred pianos wired together by means of an electric current could be
played by the hands of a single artist! One piano with the power of two
hundred! "Away from here, away!" cried the wretch, pursued by this
insistent demon. "Away from Paris, perhaps I will find peace!"

And
he dragged himself along, as often on his knees as on his feet. After two hours
of struggling against his own weakness, he reached the basin of La Villette,
and here he lost his way, imagining he had reached the Porte d'Aubervilliers;
he followed the endless Rue Saint-Maur, and for an hour after that he skirted
the prison of juvenile offenders, at the corner of the Rue de la Roquette.
Here a grim spectacle met his gaze: a scaffold was being erected, and an execution
would be performed at daybreak. The platform was already rising under the
hands of the workers, who were singing at their task. Michel tried to avoid
this dreadful sight, but he stumbled over an open crate in which he glimpsed,
as he got to his feet, an electric battery! Thoughts flooded his mind, and he
understood. Decapitations were no longer in vogue—criminals were now executed
by an electric charge. Surely it was a better imitation of divine vengeance.

Michel
uttered a final cry, and vanished.

The
steeple of Sainte-Marguerite chimed four.

What
became of poor Michel during the rest of that terrible night? Where did chance
lead his uncertain steps? Did he wander without being able to escape this
deadly capital, this accursed Paris? Unanswerable questions.

Apparently
he traced endless circles amid those countless streets surrounding the cemetery
of P
è
re-Lachaise,
for the old burying ground was now in the center of a populous neighborhood.
The city extended eastward to the fortifications of Aubervilliers and
Romainville. Wherever he had been, by the time the winter sun rose over that
great white city, Michel found himself inside the cemetery.

He
no longer had the strength to think of Lucy; his ideas were paralyzed; he was
no more than a wandering specter among the tombs, and not as a stranger, for
he felt at home. He walked up the central avenue and turned right through the
sopping lanes of the lower cemetery; snow-laden trees wept over the glistening
tombs; the vertical headstones, respected by the snow, were the only ones to
offer his eyes the names of the dead. Soon there appeared the ruined funerary
monument to
Héloïse
and
Abélard
;
three columns that supported a broken architrave were still standing, like the
Grecostasis
[75]
of the Roman Forum.

Michel
stared blindly; a little farther along he read the names of Cherubini, Habeneck
[76]
,
Chopin, Masse, Gounod, Reyer
[77]
,
in that corner dedicated to those who lived for music and perhaps died of it!
He walked on.

He
walked past that name encrusted in stone without a date, without carved
regrets, without emblems, without pomp, a name still respected by time: La
Rochefoucauld.

Then
he entered a village of graves as clean as little Dutch houses, with their polished
grills at the front and their pumiced thresholds. He felt tempted to go inside.
"And stay there, " he mused, "resting forever. "

These
graves, which recalled every style of architecture—Greek, Roman, Etruscan,
Byzantine, Lombard, Gothic, Renaissance, Twentieth-century— clustered in a
semblance of equality; there was a likeness in these dead—all had turned to
dust, whether beneath marble, granite, or black wood crosses.

The
young man walked on; gradually he climbed the funereal hill, and aching with fatigue
leaned on the mausoleum of
Béranger
and Manuel
[78]
;
this plain stone cone, without ornaments or sculptures, still stood like the
pyramid of Giza and protected the two friends united in death.

Twenty
feet away, General Foy
[79]
kept watch and, draped in his marble toga, seemed to protect them still.
Suddenly it occurred to Michel that he should seek among these names; yet not
one of them reminded him of those whom time had respected; many, and among
these the most elaborately designed, were illegible amid their vanished
emblems, carvings of clasped hands now parted, of coats of arms quite ragged
now on these graves dead in their turn. Yet he walked on, turned, walked in
another direction, leaning against the iron grills, glimpsed Pradier
[80]
,
whose marble
M
é
lancolie
was
falling into dust, D
és
augiers
[81]
,
mutilated within his bronze medallion, the tumulary memorial of his students to
Gaspard Monge
[82]
,
and the veiled mourner of Etex
[83]
still crouching at Raspail's
[84]
tomb.

Climbing
farther, he passed a superb monument, its style pure, its marble still proud,
with a frieze of naked young girls running and leaping around it, and he read:

To
Clairville
[85]

His
grateful Fellow Citizens

He
walked on. Nearby was the unfinished grave of Alexandre Dumas, a man who all
his life had searched for the tomb of others.

Now
he was in the section of the rich, who still indulged themselves in the luxury
of opulent apotheoses; here the names of honest women mingled unconcernedly
with those of famous courtesans, those who were able to save up for a mausoleum
for their old age; some of the monuments here might easily be taken for
brothels. Farther along, he found the graves of actresses on which the poets
of the day came to deposit their conceited mourning verses. Finally Michel
dragged himself toward the other end of the cemetery, where a magnificent
Dennery
[86]
slept his eternal sleep in a theatrical sepulcher beside B
arrière
's
simple black cross, where the poets encountered each other as in the corner of
Westminster, where Balzac emerging from his stony shroud still waited for his
statue, where Delavigne
[87]
,
Souvestre
[88]
,
Bérat
[89]
,
Plouvier
[90]
,
Banville, Gautier, Saint-Victor, and a hundred others were no more, even by
name.

Lower
down, Alfred de Musset, mutilated on his plinth, saw dying at his side the
willow he had requested in his gentlest and least sentimental verses. At this
moment, Michel's mind cleared; his bunch of violets fell out of his coat. He
picked it up and lay it, weeping, on the grave of the abandoned poet. Then he
walked higher, higher still, remembering and suffering, and through a clearing
in the cypress groves he caught sight of Paris.

Far
behind towered Mont
Valérien
,
to the right Montmartre, still awaiting the Parthenon the Athenians would have
placed on this acropolis, to the left the Pantheon, Notre-Dame,
Sainte-Chapelle, Les Invalides, and farther still the lighthouse of the Port de
Grenelle, thrusting its slender beam five hundred feet into the air. Below lay
Paris and its jumble of a hundred thousand houses, among which rose the smoke-
capped chimneys of ten thousand factories. Farther down, the lower cemetery;
from here, some groups of graves seemed like tiny towns, with their streets and
squares, their houses and their signs, their churches, even their cathedrals,
represented by a more vainglorious grave.

And
finally, up above, floated the armored balloons, lightning conductors, which
deprived the thunderbolts of any excuse to fall upon the unguarded houses, and
wrested all Paris from their disastrous rage.

Michel
would have liked to cut the ropes which held them captive and let the city be
destroyed under a rain of fire. "O Paris!" he exclaimed with a
gesture of despairing rage. "O Lucy!" he murmured, falling unconscious
on the snow.

End of Paris in the Twentieth Century