The Napus. Leon Daudet
volume to it, with diagrams, which he naturally had one of his pupils write, who delegated it himself to a laboratory assistant—hence the extremely vague character of the work, which was immediately crowned by the Académie des Sciences and rewarded with a prize of fifty thousand francs, of which the laboratory assistant received a hundred, the pupil five hundred and Ailette the rest. He had considerable expenses to meet, maintaining, in spite of his advanced age and being as ugly as sin, a nineteen-year-old dancer.
Secondly, partial electrical discharges, veritable lightning-bolts of prodigious amplitude, due to the abuse of waves of every sort, which are running around the planet in all directions at all hours of the day and night. Professor Sidoine became the champion of this ingenious, even plausible idea, to which he soon attributed a character of certainty and evidence such that he flew into a rage if the slightest doubt were emitted on the subject of what he called his “doctrine.” The aforesaid doctrine was soon to have terrible consequences, in the form of clashes between the nations of Europe, America, Africa, and Australia, which had reached different levels of electrical sophistication and exploitation.
Thirdly, a slow and clandestine wastage of the tissues—a cancer without cancer—provoked and accelerated by certain violent hereditary images accumulated over several generations. This hypothesis, due to Professor Eustache, was itself divided into two sub-hypotheses, one envisaging only the toxicity of internal images, the other bringing into consideration the diffusion of “cinetexts,” or books with moving images.
Fourthly, the formation, because of overly frequent ethnic interbreeding and excessive naturalizations, of a race with tissues in unstable and, so to speak, ephemeral equilibrium. The adherents of this final explanation unleashed violent anger in the camp of the Polyplasts, to which I belonged, and almost provoked civil war by virtue of the epidemic character generally attributed to the Napus. I did not participate in these vain furies.
Soon, the rumor having circulated, falsely, that the Aristotle Foundation had discovered, as a consequence of explanation number two—the Sidoine thesis—an electrical vaccination against the Napus, a host of people from all walks of life presented themselves at the doors of our establishment, begging us to immunize them. It was no banal spectacle, the sight of all those panic-stricken individuals forming a queue for hours on end as if at the door of a bakery in a besieged town, only to hear that the news was premature and that several “preservatives”—that was the term of choice—were being studied but that nothing definite had yet been determined. The meager and minimal reserves of pity and charity subsisting among the Polyplasts, other than our friend 14,026, were used up and exhausted by it.
Nothing is more amusing than experimenting on oneself with the distillation of the last drops of the charitable emotion that all humanity experienced after the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I firmly believe, for my part, after having analyzed myself very thoroughly, that the exclusive scientific development of the human mind ended in that extinction of the two sentiments that stimulated admirable works, today almost incomprehensible to Polyplasts and laboratory workers in general. Laughter, in us, has dried up the tears that once passed for a relief, for a veritable anesthetic.
The progression of cases of “death without remains” in Paris, the suburbs and the provinces ensured that the multitude of supplicants thus evinced was augmented in disquieting proportions, at the same time as apprehension rendered them noisy and stormy. The convened authorities addressed themselves to the Foundation and urged it to find some means of calming minds and preventing the anguish of the plague from degenerating into riots, like those already produced in America, England, Germany and Italy.
Sidoine offered the opinion that all high- and very-high-tension electrical installations, as well as all wireless communication, should be suspended over the entire extent of the nation’s territory, even at the cost of the greatest economic, financial and commercial disturbance. It was a big decision to take; the Crown and its Ministers demanded time to reflect, all the more indispensable as the question was international, and, by virtue of the conflict of interests subordinate to wealth in electricity and waves, risked provoking grave diplomatic complications.
Super! the Polyplasts immediately thought. There’s going to be a scientific war! Victory will go to whomever, having discovered the secret of the Napus, can apply it to military operations.
Spurred on by the Ministry of Hygiene and the promise of a signal decoration to be worn in the middle of the thorax, Professor Ailette, for his part, immediately fabricated a cellular, or cytoplastic, broth at three francs a gram, composed of the mesenteries of young pigs and the lymphatic ganglia of previously-ionized veal-calves, with three additional doses of ultra-violet light and two doses of electric eel phosphorescence. According to him, no one who had ingested the remedy would be any longer susceptible to the Napus. He was running no risk of failure, no proof being possible that anyone who died without remains had taken the antiaphanasic broth or not. There was an urgent debate in the Council of Ministers as to whether to make the mixture obligatory for everyone in France, but the same whimsy that had presided over the manufacture caused the legal project to be set aside.
Suitably watered by the budget for so-called beneficial publicity, the press made a remarkable fuss of the “Ailette brew,” and fifty thousand hundred-gram bottles of it were sold within a week, which generated a very tidy profit for the Foundation, for Ailette and for the dancer (who immediately bought a comfortable residence overlooking the location of the ancient Arc de Triomphe devoted to the battles of the First Empire). It was a fine example of the naivety of the public, in which no one made the perfectly simple reflection that it was a matter of sucker-bait, like the powder that prevented flies from laying eggs that was all the rage in the twenty-second century, if one can believes the chronicles of the epoch, or the concoction of dog-dung launched as a general antiseptic and elixir of longevity by the Russian scientist Metchnikoff in 1909 or thereabouts.6
The Americans have always done things excessively, with a sort of intellectual and economic gigantism, as if by contrast with their predecessors the Aztecs, a small race who minimized everything. It was soon evident that the explosion of the Napus was three times as powerful beyond the Atlantic than here, and that its progression there was geometric rather than arithmetic, as in Europe. Undoubtedly, though, there was some exaggeration in the claims.
The Asiatic Napus, notably in Chins and Indochina, was accompanied by a dull thud, which was thought to come from the ground, and left a rather odorous residue, comparable to a piece of the sole of a foot shriveled into three lobes, somewhat reminiscent of a human doll. We asked for specimens, but the coolies on land and sea refused to handle them, claiming that one could catch the Napus by contact with them.
That etymological persistence of the term “Napus” through languages very distant from one another demonstrates the degree of terror and mental anxiety attached to the plague, such that people clung superstitiously to its initial denomination. The Chinese ideogram created with that intention, which the Japanese copied, represented it by a grid composed of three vertical strokes on the right. Introduced to a manuscript or a prayer-wheel, it was equivalent to the doubt arising from the sudden extinction of the personality, without one knowing into which part of the invisible the Dragon has carried it and hidden it. Commercial travelers in the Far East let it be known that the Sons of Heaven, to protect themselves, were chewing the sole-shaped residues, after having crushed them into a sort of disgusting powder.
That means was no more ridiculous or arbitrary than Ailette’s brew, but the members of the Aristotle Foundation were thrown into great perplexity by the fact that there now existed two forms of the Napus, one total, the other with a residue or relic. Electromagneto-radiant installations being less numerous in China and Asia than in Europe and America, Sidoine’s theory acquired a certain prestige thereby, which did not take long to complicate affairs.
With the blissful or artificial optimism characteristic of the ignorant, the most widely-circulated newspapers, which are the ones that provide the most inaccurate news—for the masses abhor truth as nature abhors a vacuum—had started out by declaring that the disease would not be generalized. On the contrary, it would become a rarity, or, at least, a temporary accident, due to obscure causes, and would disappear one day