Paris in the Twentieth Century (4 page)

present,
such subjects of derision would not have been available to him, for the old
Latin bombast had fallen into desuetude. Who would have understood it? Not even
the Deputy Director of Rhetoric!

A
Chinese speech replaced it to great advantage; several passages provoked
murmurs of approval; a bravura flourish on the comparative civilizations of the
Sunda Islands was actually greeted with cries of
Bis!
This
word was still understood.

Finally
the Director of Applied Sciences stood up— a solemn moment: this was the
principal item on the program.

His furious
oration was remarkably similar to the whistles, groans, jangles, squeals, the
thousand unpleasant noises which escape an active steam engine; the speaker's
rapid delivery suggested a projectile hurtling at top speed; it would have been
impossible to stem this high-pressure eloquence, and the grating phrases locked
into one another like cogwheels.

To
complete the illusion, the Director was sweating profusely, so that he was
enveloped in a cloud of steam from head to foot.

"The
Devil!" giggled his neighbor, an old man whose chiseled features expressed
an immense disdain of such oratorical fatuity. "What do you make of that,
Richelot?"

Monsieur
Richelot was content to answer with a shrug.

"He's
getting overheated, " the old man went on, extending our metaphor.
"Next you'll be telling me he has safety valves, but an exploding Director
of Applied Sciences would set a nasty precedent!"

"Well
put, Huguenin, " replied Monsieur Richelot.

Vigorous
cries for silence interrupted the two speakers, who exchanged a smile.
Meanwhile the orator continued fast and furious, composing a veritable eulogy
of the present, to the detriment of the past; he recited the litany of modern
discoveries; he even let it be understood that in this regard the future would
have little to contribute; he spoke with a benevolent scorn of the tiny Paris
of 1860 and of the pygmy France of the nineteenth century; he enumerated with a
copious supply of epithets such blessings of his age as the rapid communication
between various points of the Capital, locomotives furrowing the asphalt of the
boulevards, electric power in every home, carbonic acid now dethroning steam,
and last of all the Ocean, the Ocean itself, whose waves now bathed the shores
of Grenelle. He was sublime, lyrical, dithyrambic, in short quite intolerable
and unjust, forgetting that the wonders of his century were already germinating
in the projects of its predecessor.

Frenzied
applause broke out at this same place where, one hundred and seventy years
before, bravos had welcomed the Festival of Federation. Nonetheless, since
everything—even speeches—must come to an end, the machine stopped. The
oratorical exercises having been terminated without incident, the Ceremony
proceeded to the actual awarding of the prizes.

The
question given to the Grand Competition of Higher Mathematics was as follows:
Given two circumferences OO': from a point A on O, tangents are drawn to O';
the contact points of these tangents are joined: the tangent at A is drawn to
the circumference O; what is the point of intersection of this tangent with the
chord of contacts in the circumference O'?

The
importance of such a theorem was universally understood. Many were familiar
with how it had been solved according to a new method by the student Gigoujeu
(François N
é
morin) from Briançon (Hautes
Alpes). Bravos rang out when this name was called; it was uttered seventy-four
times in the course of this memorable day: benches were broken in honor of the
laureate, an activity which, even in 1960, was not yet merely a metaphor
intended to describe the outbreaks of enthusiasm.

On this
occasion Gigoujeu (François N
é
morin) was
awarded a library of some three thousand volumes. The Academic Credit Union did
things properly.

We
cannot cite the endless nomenclature of the Sciences which were taught in this
barracks of learning: an honors list of the day would have certainly astonished
the great-grandfathers of these young scholars. The prize giving continued, and
jeers rang out when some poor devil from the Division of Letters, shamed when
his name was called, received a prize in Latin composition or an honorable
mention for Greek translation. But there came a moment when the taunts
redoubled, when sarcasm assumed its most disconcerting forms. This was when
Monsieur Frappeloup pronounced the following words:

"First
prize for Latin verse: Dufrénoy (Michel J
é
rome)
from Vannes (Morbihan). "Hilarity was universal, amid remarks of this
sort:

"A
prize for Latin verse!"

"He
must have been the only competitor!"

"Look
at that darling of the Muses!"

"A
habitue of Helicon!"

"A
pillar of Parnassus!" et cetera, et cetera.

Nonetheless,
Michel J
é
rome Dufrénoy stepped forward and
faced down his detractors with a certain aplomb; he was a blond youth with a
delightful countenance and a charming manner, neither awkward nor insolent.
His long hair gave him a slightly girlish appearance, and his forehead shone
as he advanced to the dais and snatched rather than received his prize from the
Director's hand. This prize consisted of a single volume: the latest
Factory Manual.

Michel
glanced scornfully at the book and, flinging it to the ground, calmly returned
to his seat, still wearing his crown and without even having kissed His
Excellency's official cheeks.

"Well
done, " murmured Monsieur Richelot.

"Brave
boy, " said Monsieur Huguenin.

Murmurs
broke out on all sides. Michel received them with a disdainful smile and sat
down amid the cat-calls of his schoolfellows.

This
grand ceremony concluded without hindrance around seven in the evening; fifteen
thousand prizes and twenty-seven thousand honorable mentions were distributed.
The chief laureates of the Sciences dined that same evening at Baron de
Vercampin's table, among members of the Administrative Council and the major
stockholders.

The joy
of these latter was explained by... figures! The dividend for the 1960
exercises had been set at 1, 169 francs, 33 centimes per share. The current interest
already exceeded the issue price.

Michel
Dufrénoy had followed the crowd, a mere drop of water in this stream
transformed into a torrent by the removal of its obstructions. His excitement
had subsided; the champion of Latin poetry became a timid young man amid this
joyous throng; he felt alone, alien, and somehow isolated in the void. Where
his fellow students hurried ahead, he made his way slowly, hesitantly, even
more orphaned in this gathering of contented parents; he seemed to regret his
labors, his school, his professor.

Without
father or mother, he would now have to return to an unsympathetic household,
certain of a grim reception for his Latin verse prize. "All right, "
he resolved, "let's get on with it! I shall endure their nastiness along
with all the rest! My uncle is a literal-minded man, my aunt a practical woman,
and my cousin a boy out for the main chance—ideas like mine are not welcome at
home, but so what? Onward!"

Yet he
proceeded quite unhurriedly, not being one of those schoolboys who rush into
vacation like a subject people into freedom. His uncle and guardian had not
even thought enough of the occasion to attend the prize giving; he knew what
his nephew was "incapable" of, as he said, and would have been
mortified to see him crowned a nursling of the Muses.

The
crowd, however, impelled the wretched laureate forward; he felt himself borne
on by the current like a drowning man. "A good comparison, " he
thought. "Here I am abandoned on the high seas; requiring the talents of a
fish, all I have are the instincts of a bird; I want to live in space, in the
ideal regions no longer visited—the land of dreams from which one never returns!"

Amid
such reflections, jostled and buffeted, he reached the Grenelle station of the
Metro. This line served the Left Bank of the river along the Boulevard Saint-Germain,
which extended from the Gare d'Orl
é
ans to
the buildings of the Academic Credit Union; here, curving toward the Seine, it
crossed the river on the Pont d'I
é
na,
utilizing an upper level reserved for the railroad, and then joined the Right
Bank line, which, through the Trocad
é
ro
tunnel, reached the Champs-Élysées and the axis of the Boulevards, which it
followed to the Place de la Bastille, crossing the Pont d'Austerlitz to rejoin
the Left Bank line.

This
first ring of railroad tracks more or less encircled the ancient Paris of
Louis XV, on the very site of the wall survived by this euphonious verse:

Le mur murant Paris rend Paris
murmurant.

A second line reached the old faubourgs of Paris, extending
for some thirty-two kilometers neighborhoods formerly located outside the
peripheral boulevards. A third line followed the old orbital roadway for a
length of some fifty-six kilometers. Finally, a fourth system connected the
line of fortifications, its extent more than a hundred kilometers.

It is
evident that Paris had burst its precincts of 1843 and made incursions into the
Bois de Boulogne, the Plains of Issy, Vanves, Billancourt, Montrouge, Ivry,
Saint-Mandé, Bagnolet, Pantin, Saint-Denis, Clichy, and Saint-Ouen. The heights
of Meudon, Sevres, and Saint-Cloud had blocked its development to the west. The
delimitation of the present capital was marked by the forts of Mont Valérien,
Saint- Denis, Aubervilliers, Romainville, Vincennes, Charenton, Vitry,
Bicêtre
, Montrouge, Vanves, and Issy; a city of
one hundred and five kilometers in diameter, it had devoured the entire
Department of the Seine.

Four
concentric circles
of
railways thus formed the Metropolitan
network; they were linked to one another by branch lines, which, on the Right
Bank, extended the Boulevard de Magenta and the Boulevard Malesherbes and on
the Left Bank, the Rue de Rennes and the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Victor. It was
possible to circulate from one end of Paris to the other with the greatest
speed.

These
railways had existed since 1913; they had been built at State expense,
following a system devised in the last century by the engineer Joanne
[3]
. At that time, many
projects were submitted to the Government, which had them examined by a
council of civil engineers, those of the Ponts et Chausées no longer existing
since 1889, when the École Polytechnique had been suppressed; but this council
had long remained divided on the question; some members wanted to establish a
surface line on the main streets of Paris; others recommended underground
networks following London's example; but the first of these projects would
have required the construction of barriers protecting the train tracks, whence
an obvious encumbrance of pedestrians, carriages, carts, et cetera; the second
involved enormous difficulties of execution; moreover, the prospect of even
temporary burial in an endless tunnel was anything but attractive to the
riders. Every roadway formerly created under these deplorable conditions had
had to be remade, among others the Bois de Boulogne line, which by both bridges
and tunnels compelled riders to interrupt reading their newspapers
twenty-seven times during a trajectory of some twenty-three minutes.

Joanne's
system seemed to unite all the virtues of rapidity, facility, and comfort, and
indeed for the last fifty years the Metropolitan railways had functioned to
universal satisfaction.

This
system consisted of two separate roadbeds on which the trains proceeded in
opposite directions; hence there was no possibility of a collision. Each of
these tracks was established along the axis of the boulevards, five meters
from the housefronts, above the outer rim of the sidewalks; elegant columns of
galvanized bronze supported them and were attached to one another by cast
armatures; at intervals these columns were attached to riverside houses, by
means of transverse arcades. Thus, this long viaduct, supporting the railway
track, formed a covered gallery, under which strollers found shelter from the
elements; the asphalt roadway was reserved for carriages; by means of an
elegant bridge the viaduct traversed the main streets which crossed its path,
and the railway, suspended at the height of the mezzanine floors, offered no
obstacle to boulevard traffic.