and I am known as 17,177. It’s perfectly ridiculous, but there is nothing I can do about it.
I will add, though, that the multiplicity of my origins has only increased in me the quality and evidence of current Frenchness and stimulated my patriotism. It is the same with all the Polyplasts spread throughout the planet. We are also interested in military inventions, as if the confused sources of our violent blood were continuing their antagonism. Psychological chemistry is as ironic as the majority of human inventions, which rapidly turn against human beings after having served, in an illusory fashion, for their comfort and pleasure.
1. Pus is the past historic of pouvoir [to be able], so the phrase as rendered can be construed, approximately, as “it cannot be” or “impossible,” although it seems more likely that the child is mispronouncing “n’a plus” [is no more] or even “n’a pas” [is not] and is simply indicating absence, in line with her more elaborate comment “a grand pé a pati”—i.e. grand-père a parti [grandpa’s gone].
CHAPTER ONE
AT THE ARISTOTLE FOUNDATION
The Aristotle Foundation, due to the specific legacies and the generosity of a number of Australian and American bankers, is somewhat analogous to what the Institut Pasteur was three centuries ago—with the difference that the latter was devoted to the study of the microbes (as one said then) that were believed to assault the human organism from without, and the juices, or sera, capable of curing the diseases caused by those microbes. Since the advent of the theory of cellular energy, itself creative of benevolent and harmful microorganisms, neither independently nor by means of products and chemical extracts, but by virtue of the new force named cyton.
The Aristotle Foundation is devoted to the study of all the forms, variants and transformations of cyton—of which the history is rather unimportant now, in view of the criticisms to which it has been subjected. These repeated criticisms, some of which are well-founded, have weakened our theoretical studies and laboratory work with regard to cyton to such a extent that we can no longer do anything, so to speak, except discuss between ourselves the events of the day, new armaments and methods of combat, and the rivalries—economic or otherwise—between nations.
A gossip-mongering bear-garden, that is what our venerable institution has become. It is the same for all the foundations of the same category in Europe and America, whose decrepitude and decay have been the object of numerous discouraging theses.
When I arrived the next day at my laboratory—or, more exactly, my talking shop—my male and female colleagues where all discussing the exciting aphanasia of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which filled the papers and wireless broadcasts. I was surrounded and bombarded with questions, to which I replied as best I could.
The term Napus delighted them, and the female doctors made faces, mimicking the infantile appellation and the fateful phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” There was talk of a further event of the same order, which had occurred in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and had “blown away” a foreman at a furniture factory, as well as an epidemic of threes cases in Marseilles affecting a family of Greek cockle-fishers. We were well-read people, Polyplasts for the most part, and hypotheses were being produced in abundance.
“It’s the beginning of the end of the world,” asserted my cousin 17,178, knowing nothing about it. He was the product of a mixture of Germanism and mysticism that had caused him to be baptized Görres, the name of a celebrated turner of German heads.2 He claimed that the affair had been predicted by a Moldavian monk in the twelfth century and that Nostradamus had made allusion to it in a centurie:3
When the seventh, preceded by a double third,
Will have broken the Ardent of august Sex
And powder expends with nothing found outside.
“The first line,” my cousin affirmed, signifies 2227, the number two being repeated three times. The “august Sex” signifies the little girl, whose courage—the Ardent—was broken by the sudden pulverization of her grandfather, who disappeared without leaving a trace.”
My lovely laboratory assistant Henriette Tastepain, however, who had discovered a new magnetic center in the cell, remarked that the lines of the famous centuries were contrived in such a way that one could always find meat and drink therein.
At that moment, Polyplast 14,026 arrived—the issue of a series of alternating Franco-American and Franco-Hungarian interbreedings crossed with negro, whose physiognomy is like a mosaic of those various nationalities. His erudition is extraordinary. He knows almost all the languages spoken on the planet, the majority of mathematical and biological sciences, and can cite, in bibliographical matters, the abstracts of all the periodicals that have appeared in France, Italy, England and Germany in the last ten years. The little fellow, who is also sensitive and even passionate, is an ambulant index. We asked him what he thought the explanation of the phenomenon might be. He reflected for ten minutes before answering, in the fashion of a prodigious calculator, and then his strong, cracked voice set forth the following:
“The disease, epidemic today, is, in my opinion, very ancient, having probably appeared in uncivilized countries and in a sporadic form. Complete disappearances that occurred before witnesses were recorded in Patagonia a hundred years ago. There have been others more recently in New Guinea. In the deserted part of Ireland, where the uninterrupted civil war has only left a few buildings standing, an observation mistaken for a legend—which is quite frequent—has established the sudden and total disappearance, about thirty years ago, of three members of the same family. I believe I remember, though, that Marco Polo, in his account of his journey to China, had already.…”
The laboratory door opened to admit my Lyonnais laboratory technician Mouillemouillard, who has the face and accent of Chignol,4 minus the “sarsifie.” He was both alarmed and terrified.
“The hourly wireless broadcast has announced that two other people have just disappeared from the Rue de Rivoli, while they were trying on shoes in a store. The young woman who was assisting them with the shoehorn is half-mad.”
We burst out laughing—which finished widening Moulemouillard’s pale gray eyes. The bizarrerie of the Napus, in the early hours, simultaneously excited an easily comprehensive fear and a kind of bizarre rictus, which must have been that of our earliest ancestors before the invention of fire or the appearance of the mammoth. In addition, scientific curiosity mingled with it. Stuffed with theories to the point of nausea, it was a veritable feast for us to get hold of a raw, undeniable and patent phenomenon. That is why amusement was associated in our souls with anguish.
Although it carried people off without any warning and sometimes prematurely, aphanasia at least offered the advantage of avoiding the formalities and embarrassments created by bodies, and, as Bossuet put it, “unfortunate residues.” With that, no more coffins, no more funeral processions, no more cemeteries. It had no deleterious effect on religious beliefs—on the contrary, in fact: corporeal disappearance could be considered as the acme of spiritualism, giving free range to all certainties of a mystical order, which are in any case the least unsteady. It reinforces the belief in the miraculous that inhabits even the most materialistic among us, if they care to reflect that everything down here is miraculous, beginning with the fact of their existence.
“Messieurs,” said Professor Ailette, “there is no doubt that, in the general disarray procured by the appearance of a new plague—for doubt in that regard is, alas, no longer possible—the public will turn to us and demand explanations. Let us therefore get to work and seek the cause, or the causes. Then we can think about the means of combating it. At first glance, however, it doesn’t seem very convenient.”
The general hilarity was increased by this speech, officious in appearance and in conformity with the specialty of Professor Ailette, who has a dry tone, small, pale and hairy