The World in 2000 Years Read online

  “A man notices a woman; she pleases him; he seduces her, leads her astray, ruins her and enjoys her until the day when he runs the risk of being compromised—and when a child is born o their relations, when the woman is most in need of his support, he abandons her and disappears in a cowardly fashion. Sometimes, he even has the audacity to shelter behind the letter of the law and reply to objections made to him that his position, his future would be injured if he recognized the child. Who can prove, in the final analysis, that the child is really his? With the reputation and future of the young woman he is unconcerned. What does that matter to him? Should he suffer for it? It isn’t worth the trouble, for a caprice, of hindering his career.

  “Thus there is an unfortunate young woman, ruined forever. She has no other resource but to accept the equivocal role of mistress. Always under the threat of the unforeseen, her mind works and become embittered; she suffers from the illicit situation that proscribes her from her family, attempts to free herself, and is further ruined.

  “If her lover abandons her on the fatal day, so much the worse. She has no other prospect than poverty—and yet she is a mother; a new sentiment has taken possession of her; she loves her child. It is necessary to nurse that little creature, to live for the child if not for herself. First she despairs; then resigns herself and works. She can scarcely earn enough to meet her most essential expenses. That lasts until privation has sapped her energy. Then discouragement takes hold of her; she glimpses a easier way of making a living. She is young and pretty; she sells herself.

  “In selling herself, however, her modesty revolts at the idea of setting herself to rights with the moral police. To submit to a weekly inspection, to be mingled with the rejects of society, rolling in the mud, to be classified, with her order number! Never! She still conserves an appearance of dignity. She despises herself, but does not want her shame to be inscribed in the register at the prefecture. The police, however, on the lookout, catch her in flagrante delicto in vagabondage, take her to the Station, and after a few days spent in that horrible place, set her free, on the promise that there will be no backsliding.

  “She continues her infamous trade and, caught again, is taken back to the Station and from there to Saint-Lazare. Henceforth, she is public property; she is no longer a woman but a number. The few generous sentiments battling in her favor desert her heart as soon as she has crossed the threshold of that filthy redoubt. She gradually adopts the kind of life of the women with whom she finds herself in daily contact, acquires their habits, their language, their cynicism. She emerges from there transformed. What does the world’s esteem matter? One can live without that. She receives a police license and exercises her trade under the tolerant aegis of the law, which assigns her a perimeter to exploit, outside of which Saint-Lazare will punish any act of insubordination.

  “That life becomes her element. She rivals her peers in scandal, speculates on men, whom she hates in memory of her first lover, and only adores one God: money. Her child is a hindrance and is handed over to a nurse, then to an obliging boarding-school, and finally, when old age opens the prospect of poverty again, if the child is a girl, she recruits her to her infamous trade; if he is a boy, she teaches him to profit from an even more infamous trade: trafficking in women.

  “That creature, more to be mourned than blamed, would have been a good mother without the deadly counsel of despair. What is the first cause of her debasement? The man, who sows victims on his route, protected by the text of the law.

  “Registered prostitution and licensed brothels are the remedies that modern civilization has brought to bear on the invasion of debauchery. Instead of restraining it, they propagate it.

  “Our descendants have cut off the evil at its root. Placing all the responsibility upon the man, they have thus stifled the seed of prostitution at its inception.

  “To anticipate the imperious needs of nature they have instituted marriage at an appropriate age: men at 25 at the latest, women at 22, the age of legal majority in either case being fixed at 21. A man who exceeds that limit loses his civil rights; he no longer is an integral part of society. A woman is afflicted in what she holds most dear: her dignity. She is placed under police surveillance for fear that her desires, suddenly sharpening, might cause her to disturb the security of families.

  “The paternal consent that is, in our day, a hindrance to the union of two young people, often without sufficient motive, is submissive to the decision of the family council. In case of refusal, the young people may appeal to civil justice, which arbitrates the conflict as a last resort. At 21, they are free to go their own way, without respectful notice; there are precautions in that instance reserved to the law, but to which such a well-organized society does not dream of having recourse. Is not the spirit of the law to cater for the worst possibilities?

  “Every family has its internal government in miniature, under the arbitrage of the government, which only gets involved in its affairs at the final extremity, like the Supreme Court.

  “In the beginning, as I have said, before empires, before cities, before curia, before tribes, there as the family. The family, in multiplying, formed curia, cities, empires. Society began with the family; it with the family that it will end.”

  At this point, Hobson made a sign to indicate that the savant had done enough. As if to put him to sleep, he gathered all his energy and made several passes in an inverse direction over his eyes. Then, to disengage him, he blew lightly on his forehead and finally, by means of sweeping passes from the head to the extremities, all along the arms and the legs, he expelled the fluid to the earth.

  The Marquise’s guests, stirred by the fantastic séance, watched without saying a word. The smiles had left the lips of the most incredulous. The Marquise herself had the serious and reflective expression of a woman who has just attended a religious ceremony.

  Monsieur Landet uttered a profound sigh, like a man relieved of a heavy burden. He rubbed his eyes, opened one and then the other, and looked around him in bewilderment.

  “Where am I?” he murmured.

  “We can see that you’ve come back from far away, dear friend,” said the Marquise, recovering her liveliness. “You’re in the home of your old adversary.”

  “It’s astonishing,” said thee savant, who was beginning to collect himself. “I don’t know what I’m experiencing, but it seems to me that I’m emerging from a dream. I’m exhausted.”

  “And you have, indeed, been dreaming,” Hobson replied.

  “Bah! I was dreaming, that’s true—I don’t, however, remember...”

  “Stenography has remembered for you,” said Hobson, handing him the work of the stenographers. “Here—read it yourself. That language isn’t algebra to you, and even if it were, you’d understand it.”

  “What!” the savant exclaimed “I said all this? But that’s amazing! I’m no longer dreaming! You can assure me that I’m no longer dreaming?”

  “No, you’re wide awake.”

  “There’s an entire theory here, an entire world! Utopia now, verity later. Oh, my dear magnetizer, you’ll render me immortal.”

  “You already are,” said the Marquise.

  “Oh, what is academic immortality in comparison with that which awaits me!”

  “And your wager?” said Hobson.

  “What wager?”

  “You don’t remember that you doubted magnetism two hours ago?”

  “Why, that’s true!” exclaimed the savant. “But this time, my dear sorcerer, I shan’t leave you again until we have given birth to the dream of the future.”

  “The lunch, then...”

  “Is settled—more than ever.” Monsieur Landet held out his hand, adding: “Above all, don’t forget the stenographers.”

  Chapter Three

  METAPHYSICS

  The next day, Monsieur Landet and Mr. Hobson, flanked by the two stenographers, did battle with an excellent lunch in a private room at the Café Anglais. The numerous uncorked bo
ttles and the debris scattered on the plates testified to the gastronomic capabilities of the two gentlemen.

  They were taking coffee, and inhaling the perfume of authentic Havana cigars in the manner of connoisseurs.

  “Do you know, my dear sorcerer,” said Monsieur Landet, whose small eyes were beginning to blink, “that one could get a great deal out of magnetism, in politics?”

  “Assuredly,” Hobson replied. “I’m not far from believing that several of our statesmen make covert use of it in diplomacy.”

  “For myself, I confess that I’m your fervent disciple and that if ever a ministerial conspiracy assigns me to foreign affairs, I shall not take any initiative without having abandoned myself, on the sacred tripod, to the inspirational breath of your magnetic pressure. I shall be my own Pythoness and you will be my Apollo. Is that now how one can explain the oracles of the Pythoness at Delphi and the Sibyl at Cumaea—oracles whose realization were a marvel of antiquity?

  “Those priestesses must have been nervous, impressionable women prepared early in life for the role destined for them, submitted to the fluidic influence of some skilled high priest who—like you, my dear Monsieur Hobson—fulfilled the office of the divinity with respect to them. The vapors escaping from the gulf over which the tripod was laced, the convulsive tremors that agitated the somnambulist priestess, were an ingenious complement to the great scene of inspiration, imagined with the objective of making an impact on the ignorant mass and revealing the presence of the divinity by means of physical effects in harmony with the superstitious ideas of the epoch. And those hallucinations often spoke the truth; at least, history reports that.” The savant had become pensive. He added: “Who knows whether, by publishing this perception of the world in 2000 years, we might accelerate the match of progress?”

  “Don’t believe it. It’s an anticipatory study that will interest intellectual society, but which the ordinary public will regard as a utopia and perhaps condemn it without having taken cognizance of it, on the strength of rumor. What is written in the book of destiny is not effaced by human desires. If the term of 2000 years is fixed for the degree of perfection that you have glimpsed in the somnambulistic state, the world will take 20 centuries to effect its transformation.”

  “Yes, we’re not sufficiently mature, more’s the pity!” said Monsieur Landet, with a half-smile. “And yet, between ourselves, I like it better that this transformation will only take place when I’m gone—my little operations on the Bourse would suffer thereby.”

  The fumes of the wine must have gone to Monsieur Landet’s head for him to be so frank.

  “Oh, you’re very much of your century,” Hobson replied.

  “Eh? I’m not so discontented with what my century provides.”

  “Because your century doesn’t treat you so badly, it seems to me. You’re a senator, a member of the Institut, rich and decorated. What more could you want?”

  “I should like, while alive, to reform society, without that posing any threat to my interests.”

  “Have a little patience. In a few centuries, you’ll return to Earth as an actor of the theory that you have prophesied.”

  “Oh, but then,” Monsieur Landet replied, with the mischievousness of a sophist, “I’ll be reborn with the sentiments of my new epoch, and, improved by successive incarnations, I shall have no regrets.”

  “I’m vanquished by my own weapons,” said the magnetizer, bowing.

  “Do you sincerely believe that we are subject to different incarnations after death?” the savant went on.

  “Didn’t you just say that to me that yourself?”

  “I said it to you for the sake of the argument, to vanquish you with your own weapons, as you just put it. That’s a child’s game. Socrates invented it 500 years before Christ.”

  “But haven’t you denied the existence of Christ in a pamphlet entitled Errors of tradition?”

  “Once, when I had nothing better to say.”

  “Then you make your opinions a question of dialectic?”

  “I might believe in it one day.”

  “When?”

  “On my death-bed” the savant sighed, speaking half-seriously and half in jest. “If Christ existed after all, it would be prudent to have my passport validated for the other world.”

  The good lunch, copiously washed down, had definitely betrayed the secrets of Monsieur Landet’s philosophy. Never had he shown himself so communicative. “But we’re forgetting the principal motive for our rendezvous, my dear master,” he went on. “Time is money, the English say, and they’re right; they think like practical men. For us, time is glory; I’m not young enough to put it off until tomorrow.”

  “As you wish,” Hobson replied. “Install yourself in that armchair as you did yesterday, and now you have faith, go to sleep without resistance.”

  “It seems to me that yesterday, as well as today, you found me as docile as a lamb.”

  “Mental resistance, I meant.”

  “Does that impede the action of the fluid?”

  “The energy I deploy in overcoming that resistance tires us both. That prolongs the passage, already difficult, from the waking to the somnambulistic state; it weighs upon the brain before it has begun to work.”

  “Let’s go! I abandon my free will to you—but don’t abuse the deposit.”

  “My power doesn’t extend that far,” said the magnetizer, gathering all the force of his will. “Now, not another word.”

  The savant let his head fall back on to the back of the armchair. In less than a minute, he was asleep.

  Hobson took his hand and began the customary interrogation, making a sign to the stenographers to take up their post.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes, I’m asleep. I feel quite well; I’d like to remain in this state permanently.”

  “You mustn’t. Shake off that torpor; it will numb you.”

  “What’s the point? I prefer to savior this delightful repose in peace.”

  “What about the world in 2000 years?”

  Monsieur Landet started in his armchair. “That’s true!” he exclaimed. “Science! Science before everything!”

  As on the previous day, Hobson waited for the savant to travel a distance of 20 centuries. “Are you there?” he asked, when he saw a certain expression of satisfaction spread across his subject’s face.

  “I’m there.”

  “Yesterday, you analyzed the family, the fundamental basis of society,” Hobson went on. “Today, would you like to interpret internal politics?”

  “Let us take things in order,” the savant replied—that locution must have been familiar to him in his courses at the Collège de France. “Let us tackle metaphysics. Politics are merely the consequence of the superstitious beliefs of peoples.”

  “Speak—and you, gentlemen, write.”

  On the Existence of God

  “In creating human beings, God imprinted in their souls the notion of a superior principle, of which he is the original.

  “At all times, among all peoples, there has been religion: ‘The social bond is not easy to establish between human beings, who are so various, so free and so inconstant. To give them rules, to institute commandments and make obedience accept them, to make passion yield to reason and individual reason to public reason, assuredly requires something stronger than material force, more respectable than self-interest, surer than a philosophical theory, more immutable than a convention: something that would be both at the bottom of every heart and hold empire over it.

  “‘That thing is a belief. There is nothing more powerful over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not free to modify it at will. It is our creation, but we do not know that. It is human, but we think it Divine. It is an effect of our power, but it is stronger than us; it speaks to us continuously. Humans can tame their nature, but are enslaved by their thought.

  “‘Let us embrace with our gaze the road that humans have traveled. In the beginning, the
family lived in isolation, and humans only knew domestic gods. Above the family formed the phratry, with its own god. Then came the tribe and the god of the tribe. Finally, the city arrived, and a god was conceived whose providence embraced the entire city. A hierarchy of belief, a hierarchy of association. The religious idea was, among the Ancients, the organizing breath of society.

  “‘The traditions of the Hindus, the Greeks and the Etruscans relate that the gods had revealed social laws to humans; beneath that legendary form there is a truth. Social laws were the work of the gods, but the gods, so powerful and so benevolent, were nothing but the beliefs themselves.

  “‘Now, an ancient belief commanded humans to honor their ancestors; the cult of the ancestors grouped the family around the altar. From there, the primary religion, came the first priests, the first idea of duty and the first morality. Then belief expanded, and association with it. As humans sensed that there were communal divinities, they came together in more extensive groups. The same rules, found and established within the family, applied successively to the phratry, the tribe and the city.’10

  “Opinions of divinity therefore differed. Everyone imagined it according to the idea that he formed of it and gave it attributes so various that there were at first as many gods as families, as phratries, as tribes or as cities.

  “Christianity confirmed the Arian doctrine and proclaimed the existence of one single God in three persons. Philosophers made him infinite or limited, universal or partial, material or immaterial, invisible or present—but all of them, save for a few exceptions who built a pedestal for their atheism, were in agreement as to his existence.