Paris in the Twentieth Century (5 page)

Some
riverside houses, transformed into waiting rooms, formed stations which
communicated with the track by broad footbridges; underneath a double-ramp
staircase gave access to the waiting room. Boulevard stations were located at
the Trocadéro, the Madeleine, the Bonne Nouvelle department store, the Rue du
Temple, and the Place de la Bastille.

This
viaduct, supported on simple columns, would doubtless not have resisted the old
means of traction, which required locomotives of enormous weight; but thanks to
the application of new propulsors, the modern trains were quite light; they
ran at intervals of ten minutes, each one bearing some thousand riders in its
comfortably arranged cars.

The
riverside houses suffered from neither steam nor smoke, quite simply because
there was no locomotive: the trains ran by means of compressed air, according
to the Williams System, recommended by the famous Belgian engineer Jobard
[4]
, who flourished in the
mid-nineteenth century.

A vector
tube some twenty centimeters in diameter and two millimeters thick ran the
entire length of the track between the two rails; it enclosed a soft-iron disc,

which
slid inside it under the action of several atmospheres of compressed air
provided by the Catacomb Company of Paris. This disc, driven at high speed
within the tube, like a bullet in its barrel, drew with it the first car of the
train. But how was this car attached to the disc inside the tube, since this
disc would have no communication with the exterior? By electromagnetic force.

In
fact, the first car carried between its wheels magnets set on either side of
the tube, as close as possible without actually touching it. These magnets
operated through the walls of the tube on the soft-iron disc, which, sliding
forward, drew the train after it, the compressed air being unable to escape
through any outlet. [Author's Note: 
if an electromagnet can bear a weight of 1, 000 kilograms
on contact, its power of attraction is still that of 100 kilograms over a
distance of five millimeters.]

When
a train was to stop, a station employee opened a valve; air escaped and the
disc remained motionless. As soon as the valve was closed, the air pushed on,
and the train resumed its immediately rapid progress.

Thus
by means of a system at once so simple and so easy to maintain—no smoke, no
steam, no collision, and the passengers' freedom to ascend all the ramps—it
seemed that these roadways must have existed since time immemorial.

Young
Dufrénoy bought his ticket at the Grenelle station and ten minutes later got
off at the Madeleine; he walked down the steps to the boulevard and made for
the Rue Impériale, which had been constructed on the axis of the Opera down to
the Gardens of the Tuileries. Crowds filled the streets; night was beginning to
fall, and the luxury shops projected far out onto the sidewalks the brilliant
patches of their electric light; streetlamps operated by the Way System—sending
a positive electric charge through a thread of mercury- spread an incomparable
radiance; they were connected by means of underground wires; at one and the
same moment, the hundred thousand streetlamps of Paris came on. Nonetheless a
few old-fashioned shops remained faithful to the old means of hydrocarburated
gas; the exploitation of new coal pits permitted its current sale at ten
centimes per cubic meter; but the Company made considerable profits, especially
by distributing it as a mechanical agent.

In fact,
of the countless carriages which clogged the boulevards, a great majority were
horseless; they were invisibly powered by a motor which operated by gas
combustion. This was the Lenoir
[5]
machine applied to locomotion.

Invented
in 1859, this machine had the initial advantage of doing away with boiler,
firebox, and fuel; a little lighting gas, mixed with the air introduced under
the piston and lit by an electric spark, produced the movement; gas hydrants,
set up at the various carriage parking places, supplied the necessary hydrogen;
new improvements had made it possible to get rid of the water formerly used to
chill the machine's cylinder. The machine, then, was
simple and
maneuverable;
up on his seat, the driver operated a steering
wheel; a brake pedal, located under his foot, permitted an instant modification
of the vehicle's speed.

The
carriages, with the power of several horses, did not cost, per day, one eighth
the price of a horse; the expense of the gas, carefully monitored, permitted
calculation of the work done by each carriage, and the Company could no longer
be deceived, as in the past, by its coachmen.

These
gas cabs were responsible for a tremendous consumption of hydrogen, as were
those enormous trucks loaded with stones and paving materials, which deployed
some twenty to thirty horsepower. This Lenoir System had the further advantage
of costing nothing when it was not in use, a saving impossible to realize with
steam machines, which devour their fuel even when they are not in motion.

These
swift means of transport operated in streets less clogged than in the past, for
a ruling of the Ministry of Police forbade any cart, dray, or wagon to pass through
the streets after ten in the morning, except for certain special routes.

These
various improvements were certainly suited to this feverish century, during
which the pressure of business permitted no rest and no delay.

What
would one of our ancestors have said upon seeing these boulevards lit as
brightly as by the sun, these thousand carriages circulating noiselessly on the
silent asphalt of the streets, these stores as sumptuous as palaces, from which
the light spread in brilliant patches, these avenues as broad as squares, these
squares as wide as plains, these enormous hotels, which provided comfortable
lodging for twenty thousand travelers, these wonderfully light viaducts, these
long, elegant galleries, these bridges flung from street to street, and finally
these glittering trains, which seemed to furrow the air with fantastic speed?

No doubt
he would have been astonished; but the men of 1960 were no longer lost in
admiration of such marvels; they exploited them quite calmly, without being any
the happier, for, from their hurried gait, their peremptory manner, their
American "dash, " it was apparent that the demon of wealth impelled
them onward without mercy or relief.

At
length the young man reached the house of his uncle, Monsieur Stanislas
Boutardin, banker and director of the Catacomb Company of Paris.

It
was in a magnificent mansion on the Rue Imp
é
riale that
this important person resided, an enormous structure in wonderfully bad taste,
sporting a multitude of plate-glass windows, a veritable barracks transformed
into a private residence, not so much imposing as ponderous. The ground floor
and outbuildings were occupied by offices.

"So
this is where the rest of my life is going to be spent, " Michel mused as
he walked in. "Must I abandon all hope at the door?" And he was
overcome by an almost invincible longing to run away, but managed to control
himself; he pressed the electric button of the carriage entrance, and the
doors, operated by a hidden spring, noiselessly opened and closed behind him.

A
huge courtyard led to the offices, arranged in a circle under a ground-glass
ceiling; at the rear was a
large garage, where several gas cabs
awaited the master's orders.

Michel
made for the elevator, a narrow chamber with a narrow tufted banquette around
the walls; a servant in orange livery was on duty day and night. "Monsieur
Boutardin, " Michel announced.

"Monsieur
Boutardin has just begun his dinner, " replied the footman.

"Be
so good as to tell him his nephew, Monsieur Dufrénoy, is here. "

The
footman touched a metal button set into the woodwork, and the elevator rose
imperceptibly to the first floor, where the dining room was located. The servant
announced Michel Dufrénoy.

Monsieur
Boutardin, Madame Boutardin, and their son were seated around the table and met
the young man's appearance with a profound silence; his place was set for him,
the meal had just begun; at a sign from his uncle, Michel joined the banquet.
No one spoke a word to him. Apparently his disaster was known to all. He could
not eat a mouthful.

There
was a funereal air about this meal; the servants performed their tasks in
perfect silence; the various dishes ascended noiselessly in chutes set in the
walls; they were opulent with a touch of avarice, and seemed to nourish the
diners with a certain reluctance, a certain regret. In this absurdly gilded,
mournful room, everyone chewed rapidly and without conviction. The point, of
course, was not to be fed but to have earned the material on which to feed.
Michel perceived the nuance, and choked on it. At dessert, his uncle spoke for
the first time: "Tomorrow, sir, first thing in the morning, I should like
a word with you. " Michel bowed without speaking; an orange-liveried
servant led him to his room; the young man went to bed; the hexagonal ceiling
reminded him of a host of geometrical theorems; he dreamed, in spite of himself,
of right-angle triangles whose hypotenuse had been... reduced. "What a
family!" he murmured to himself in the depths of his troubled sleep.

Monsieur
Stanislas Boutardin was the natural product of this age of industrial
development; he had sprouted in a greenhouse, rather than among the elements;
a practical man in every particular, he did nothing which was not of some
utilitarian function, orienting his merest ideas to use, with an excessive
craving to be useful, which turned into a truly ideal egotism, joining the
useful to the disagreeable, as Horace might have said; his vanity was apparent
in his words and even more in his gestures, and he would not have allowed his
shadow to precede him; he expressed himself in grams and centimeters, and at
all times carried a cane marked off in metrical divisions, which afforded him
a wide knowledge of the things of this world; he utterly scorned the arts, and
artists even more, though he was quite prepared to suggest that he knew such
creatures; for him, painting stopped with a tinted drawing, and drawing with a
diagram, sculpture with a plaster cast, music with the whistle of locomotives,
and literature with stock market quotations.

This
man, raised in mechanics, accounted for life by gears and transmissions; he
moved quite regularly, with the least possible friction, like a piston in a perfectly
reamed cylinder; he transmitted his uniform movements to his wife, to his son,
to his employees and his servants, all veritable tool machines, from which he,
the motor force, derived the maximum possible profit.

A base
nature, in short, incapable of a good impulse, or, for that matter, of a bad
one; he was neither wicked nor good, insignificant, often ill lubricated,
noisy, horribly vulgar.

He had
made an enormous fortune, if such activity can be called making. The industrial
impulse of the century impelled him; hence he showed a certain gratitude
toward industry, which he worshiped as a goddess; he was the first to adopt,
for his household, the spun-metal garments which first appeared around 1934.
Such textiles, moreover, were as soft to the touch as cashmere, though scarcely
of much warmth; but in winter, with a good lining, they sufficed; and when such
everlasting garments happened to rust, they were simply filed down and
repainted in the colors of the moment.

The
banker's social position was as follows: Director of the Catacomb Company of
Paris and of the Driving Force in the Home.

The
enterprises of this company consisted in warehousing the air in those huge
underground vaults so long unused; here it was stored under a pressure of forty
to fifty atmospheres, a constant force which conduits led to the factories and
mills, wherever a mechanical action became necessary. This compressed air
served, as we have seen, to power the trains on the elevated railways of the
boulevards. Eighteen hundred fifty-three windmills, constructed on the Plain of
Montrouge, compressed the air by means of pumps within these enormous
reservoirs.

This
conception, certainly a highly practical one which came down to the employment
of natural forces, was readily anticipated by the banker Boutardin; he became
the Director of this important company while remaining a member of fifteen or
twenty supervisory boards, vice president of the Society of Tow Locomotives,
administrative director of the Amalgamated Asphalt Agencies, et cetera, et
cetera.

Some forty
years ago he had married Mademoiselle
Athénaïs
Dufrénoy, Michel's aunt; she was certainly the worthy and cantankerous
companion of a banker—homely, stout, having all the qualities of a bookkeeper
and a cashier, nothing of a woman; she was expert in double entry, and would
had invented a triple version if need be; a true administratrix, the female of
any and every administrator.

Did she
love Monsieur Boutardin, and was she loved by him in return? Yes, insofar as
these businesslike hearts could love; a comparison will complete the portrait
of the pair: she was the locomotive and he the engineer; he kept her in good
condition, oiled and polished her, and thus she had rolled forward for a good
half century, with about as much sense and imagination as a Crampton
[6]
Motor.