"Clouds were floating! And, because of the fact that clouds were floating on the horizon, the pictures on the screen grew less distinct or even vanished altogether. It may be said that this was a coincidence. On three separate occasions, when the film lost its brilliancy, I turned towards the horizon: on each occasion clouds were passing. Could three coincidences of this kind be due to chance? Can any scientific mind fail to see herein a relation of cause and effect or to admit that, in this instance, as in that of many visions previously observed, which were disturbed by an unknown cause, the interposition of the clouds acted as a veilby intercepting the projection on its way? I was not able to make a fourth test. But that did not matter. I had now advancedso far that I was able to work and reflect without being stopped by any obstacle. There is no such thing as being checked mid-way in our pursuit of certain truths. Once we catch a glimpse of them, they become revealed in their entirety."At first, to be sure, scientific logic, instead of referring the explanation which I was so eagerly seeking to the data of human science, flung me, almost despite myself, into an ever more mysterious region. And, when, after this second display, I returned home—this was three hours ago at most—I asked myself whether it would not be better to confess my ignorance than to go rushing after theories which suddenly seemed to me to lie beyond the confines of science. But how could I have done so? Despite myself I continued to work at the problem, to imagine. Induction fitted into deduction. Proofs were accumulating. Even as I was hesitating to enter upon a path whose direction confounded me, I reached the goal and found myself sitting down to a table, pen in hand, to write a report which was dictated by my reason as much as by my imagination."Thus the first step was taken: in obedience to the imperious summons of reality, I admitted the theory of extra-terrestrial communications, or at least of communications coming from beyond the clouds. Was I to think that they emanated from some airship hovering in the sky, beyond that cloud-belt? Leaving aside the fact that no such airship was ever observed, we must remark that luminous projections powerful enough to light the screen at Meudon from a distance of several miles would leave in the air a trail of diffused light which could not escape notice. Lastly, in the present condition of science, we are at liberty to declare positively that such projections would be quite incapable of realization."What then? Were we to cast our eyes farther, traverse space at one bound and assume that the projections have an origin which is not only extraterrestrial but extrahuman?"Now the great word is written. The idea is no longer my property. How will it be received by those to whom this report will reveal it to-morrow? Will they welcome it with the same fervour and the same awe-struck emotion that thrilled me, with the distrust at the beginning and the same final enthusiasm?"Let us, if you will, recover our composure. The examination of the phenomena has led us to a very definite conclusion. However startling this conclusion be, let us examine it also, with perfect detachment, and try to subject it to allthe tests which we are able to impose upon it."Extrahuman projections: what does that mean? The expression seems vague; and our thoughts wander at random. Let us look into the matter more closely. Let us first of all establish as an impassable boundary the frontiers of our solar system and, in this immense circle, concentrate our gaze upon the more accessible and consequently the nearer points. For, when all is said, if there be really projections, they must necessarily, whether extrahuman or human, emanate from fixed points, situated in space. They must therefore emanate from those luminaries within sight of the earth to which, in the last report, we have some right to attribute the origin of those projections. I consider that there are five such fixed points: the moon, the sun, Jupiter, Mars and Venus."If, furthermore, we suppose as the more likely theory that the projections follow a rectilinear direction, then the unknown luminary from which the apparitions emanate will have to satisfy two conditions: first, it must be in such a position that photographs can be taken from it; secondly, it must be in such a position that the images obtained can be transmitted to us. Let us take as an instance a case in which it is possible to fix the place and date. The first Montgolfierballoon, filled with hot air, was sent up from Annonay at four o'clock in the afternoon on the 5th of June, 1783. It is easy, by referring to the contemporary calendars, to learn which celestial bodies were at that moment above the horizon and at what height. We thus find that Mars, Jupiter and the moon were invisible, whereas the sun and Venus were at 50 and 23 degrees respectively above the horizon of Annonay and, of course, towards the west. These two luminaries alone then were in a position to witness the experiment of the brothers Montgolfier. But they did not witness it from the same altitude: a view taken from the sun would have shown things as seen from above, whereas, at the same hour, Venus would have shown then from an angle very nearly approaching the horizontal."This is a first clue. Are we able to check it? Yes, by turning up the date on which the projections of the view then secured as observed by Victorien Beaugrand and by determining whether, on that date, the projecting luminary was able to light up the screen at Meudon. Well, on that day, at the hour which Victorien Beaugrand has given us, Mars and the moon were invisible, Jupiter was in the east, the sun close to the horizon and Venus a little way above it. Projections emanating from the last-namedplanet could therefore have fallen upon the screen, which as we know faced westwards."This example shows us that, however frail my theory may appear, we are now able and shall be even better able in the future to subject it to a strict control. I did not fail to resort to this method in respect of the other pictures, and I will give in a special table, appended to this essay, a list of the data which I have verified, a list necessarily drawn up, in some haste. Well, in all the cases which I examined, the views were taken and projected under such conditions that they can logically be referred to the planet Venusand to that planet alone."Yet again, two of these views, that which revealed to Victorien Beaugrand and his uncle the execution of Miss Cavell and that which enabled us to witness the bombardment of Rheims, seem to have been taken, the first in the morning, because Miss Cavell was executed in the morning, and the second from the east, because it showed a shell fired at a statue which stood on the east front of the cathedral. This proves that the views could be taken indifferently in the morning or the evening, from the west or the east; and it is surely a powerful argument in favour of my theory, because Venus, which is both the Evening and the Morning Star, faces the earth at daybreak from the east and at sunset from the west and because Noël Dorgeroux (as M. Victorien Beaugrand has just confirmed to me by telephone), because Noël Dorgeroux, that magnificent visionary, had had his wall constructedwith two surfaces having an identical inclination towards the sky, one facing west, the other east and each in turn exposed to the rays of Venus the Evening Star and Venus the Morning Star!"These are the proofs which I am able to furnish for the time being. There are others. There is for instance the time of the apparitions. Venus is sinking towards the horizon; on the earth twilight reigns; and the pictures can be formed regardless of the sunlight. Remark also that Noël Dorgeroux, deferring all his experiments, last winter altered the whole arrangement of the Yard and demolished the old garden. Now this break coincides exactly with a period during which the position of Venus on the farther side of the sun prevented it from communicating with the earth. All these proofs will be reinforced by a more exhaustive essay and by an analytical examination of the pictures that have been or will be shown to us."But though I have written this report without stopping to answer the objections and difficulties which arise at every line, though I have beencontented myself with setting forth the logical and almost inevitable sequence of the deductions which led up to my theory. I should be failing in respect to the academy and to the public if I allowed it to be believed that I am not fully conscious of the weight of those objections and difficulties. I did not, however, consider this a reason for abandoning my task. Though it be our duty to bow when science utters a formal veto, on the other hand duty orders us to persist when science is content merely to confess its ignorance. This is the twofold principle which I observed in seeking no longer the source of the projections, but rather the manner in which they were able to appear, for that is where the whole problem lies. It is easy to declare that they emanate from Venus; it is not easy to explain how they travel through space and how they exercise their action, at a distance of many millions of miles, on an imperceptible screen with a surface of three or four hundred square feet. I am confronted with physical laws which I am not entitled to transgress. I am entitled at most to advance where science is obliged to be mute."Therefore and without any sort of discussion I admit that we are debarred from supposing that light can be the agent of the transmissions which have been observed. The laws of diffraction indeed are absolutely opposed to the strictly rectilinear propagation of luminous rays and hence to the formation and reception of pictures at the exceptional distances actually under consideration. Not only are the laws of geometrical optics merely a somewhat rough approximation, but the complicated refractions which would inevitably occur in the atmospheres of the earth and Venus would disturb the optical images. The veto of science therefore is peremptory in so far as the possibility of these optical transmissions is concerned."For that matter, I should be quite willing to believe that the inhabitants of Venus have already tried to correspond with us through the intermediary of luminous signals and that, if they abandoned their endeavours, this was precisely because the imperfection of our human science made them useless. We know in fact that Lowell and Schiaparelli saw on the face of Venus brilliant specks and a transient gleam which they themselves attributed either to volcanic eruptions or, as is more probable, to the attempts at communication of which I have spoken."But science does not prevent us from asking ourselves whether, after the failure of these attempts, the inhabitants of Venus did not resort to another method of correspondence. How canwe avoid thinking, for instance, of the X-rays, whose strictly rectilinear path would allow of the formation of pictures so clear that one could wish for nothing better? In fact it is not impossible that these rays are employed for the emission received on the Meudon screen, though the quality of the light when analyzed in the spectroscope makes the supposition highly improbable. But how are we to explain by means of X-raysthe taking of the terrestrial viewsof which we saw the moving outline on the screen? We know, of course, if we go back to the concrete example to which I referred just now, we know that neither the brothers Montgolfier nor the surrounding landscape emitted X-rays. It is not therefore through the medium of these rays that the Venusians can have secured the instantaneous photographs which they afterwards transmitted to us."Well, this exhausts all the possibilities of an explanation which can be referred to the present data of science. I declare positively that to-day, in this essay, I should not have dared to venture into the domain of theory and to suggest a solution in which my own labours are involved, if Noël Dorgeroux had not in a manner authorized me to do so. The fact is that, twelve months ago, I issued a pamphlet, entitledAn Essay onUniversal Gravitation, which fell flat on publication, but which must have attracted Noël Dorgeroux's particular attention, because his nephew, Victorien Beaugrand, found my name written among his papers and because Noël Dorgeroux cannot have known my name except through this pamphlet. Nor would he have taken the trouble to write it down, if the theory of the rays of gravitation which I developed in my pamphlet had not appeared to him to be exactly adapted to the problem raised by his discovery?"I will therefore ask the reader to refer to my pamphlet. He will there find the results, vague but by no means negligible, which I was able to explain by my experiments with this radiation. He will see that it is propagated in a strictly rectilinear direction and with a speed which is thrice that of light, so that it would not take more than 46 seconds to reach Venus at the time when she is nearest to the earth. He will see lastly that, though the existence of these rays,thanks to which universal attraction is exercised according to the Newtonian laws, is not yet admitted and though I have not yet succeeded in making them visible by means of suitable receivers, I nevertheless give proofs of their existence which must be taken into consideration. And Noël Dorgeroux'sapproval also is a proof that they must not be neglected."On the other hand, we have the right to believe that, while our poor rudimentary science may, after centuries and centuries of efforts, have remained ignorant of the essential factor of the equilibrium of the planets, the Venusian scientists long since passed this inferior stage of knowledge and that they possess photographic receivers which allow films to be taken by means of the rays of gravitation and this by methods of truly wonderful perfection. They were therefore waiting. Looking down upon our planet, knowing all that happened here, witnessing our helplessness, they were waiting to communicate with us by the only means that appeared to them possible. They were waiting, patiently and persistently, formidably equipped, sweeping our soil with the invisible sheaves of rays assembled in their projectors and receivers, searching and prying into every nook and corner."And one day the wonderful thing happened. One day the shaft of rays struck the layer of substance on the screen where and where alone the spontaneous work of chemical decomposition and immediate reconstitution could be performed. On that day, thanks to Noël Dorgerouxand thanks to luck, as we must confess, for Noël Dorgeroux was pursuing an entirely different series of experiments on that particular day, the Venusians established the connection between the two planets. The greatest fact in the history of the world was accomplished."There is evidence even that the Venusians knew of Noël Dorgeroux's earlier experiments, that they realized their importance, that they interested themselves in his labours and that they followed the events of his life, for it is now many years since they took the pictures showing how his son Dominique was killed in the war. But I will not recapitulate in detail each of the films displayed at Meudon. This is a work which anybody can now perform in the light of the theory which I am setting forth. But we must consider attentively the process by which the Venusians tried to give those films a sort of uniformity. It has been rightly said that the sign of the Three Eyes is a trade-mark, like the mark of any of our great cinematograph-producers, a trade-mark also very strikingly proves the superhuman resources possessed by the Venusians, since they succeed in giving to those Three Eyes, which have no relation to our human eyes, not only the expression of our eyes but something much more impressive, the expression of the eyes of the person destined to be the principal character in the film."But why was this particular mark chosen? Why eyes and why three? At the stage which we have now reached, need we answer this question? The Venusians themselves have furnished the reply by showing us that apparently absurd film in which Shapes assuredly lived and moved in our sight in accordance with the lines and principle of Venusian life. Were we not the breathless spectators of a picture taken among them and from them? Did we not behold, to make a companion picture to the death of Louis XVI, an incident representing the martyrdom of some great personage whom the executioners tore to pieces with theirthreehands, severing from his body a sort of shapeless head provided withthreeeyes?"Three Hands! Three Eyes! Dare I, on the strength of this fragile basis, go beyond what we saw and declare that the Venusian possesses the complete symmetry of the triangle, just as man, with his two eyes, his two ears and his two arms, possesses bilateral symmetry? Shall I try to explain his method of progressing by successive distentions and of moving vertically alongverticalstreets, in towns builtperpendicularly? Shall I have the courage to state, as I believe, thathe is provided with organs which give him a magnetic sense, a sense of space, an electric sense and so on, organs numbered by threes? No. These are details with which the Venusian scientists will supply us on the day when it pleases them to enter into correspondence with us."And, believe me, they will not fail to do so. All their efforts for centuries past have been directed towards this object. 'Let us talk,' they will say to us soon as they must have said to Noël Dorgeroux and as they no doubt succeeded in doing with him. It must have been a stirring conversation, from which the great seer derived such power and certainty that it is to him that I will refer, before concluding, in order to add to the discussion the two positive proofs which he himself tried to write at the foot of the screen during the few seconds of his death-struggle, a twofold declaration made by the man, who in departing this life,knew:"'B-ray. . . . B E R G E . . .'"When thus expressing his supreme belief in the B-rays, Noël Dorgeroux no longer indicated that unknown radiation which he had once imagined to explain the phenomena of the screen and which would have consisted of the materialization of pictures born within and projected by ourselves. More far-seeing, better-informed asthe result of his experiments, abandoning moreover his attempt to connect the new facts with the action of the solar heat which he had so often utilized, he plainly indicated those rays of gravitation of whose existence he had learnt through my pamphlet and also perhaps through his communications with the Venusians, those rays which are habitually employed by them in the same manner as that in which the light-rays are employed by the humblest photographer."And the five letters B E R G E are not the first two syllables of the word Bergeronnette. That was the fatal error of which Bérangère Massignac was the victim. They form the wordBerger, complete all but the last letter. At the moment of his death, in his already overshadowed brain, Noël Dorgeroux, in order to name Venus, could find no other expression thanl'Etoile du Berger, the Shepherd's Star; and his enfeebled hand was able to write only the first few letters. The proof therefore is absolute.The man who knewhad time to tell the essential part of what he knew:by means of the rays of gravitation, the Shepherd's Star sends its living messages to the earth."If we accept the successive deductions stated in this preliminary essay, which I trust will one day prove to be in a manner a replicaof the report stolen from Noël Dorgeroux, there still remain any number of points concerning which we possess not a single element of truth. What is the form of the recording- and projecting-apparatus employed by the Venusians? By what prodigious machinery do they obtain a perfect fixity in the projections between two stars each animated with such complicated movements in space (at present we know of seventeen in the earth alone)? And, to consider only what is close at hand, what is the nature of the screen employed for the Meudon projections? What is that dark-grey substance with which it is coated? How is that substance composed? How is it able to reconstruct the pictures? These are so many questions which our scientific attainments are incapable of solving. But at least we have no right to pronounce them insoluble; and I will go farther and declare that it is our duty to study them by all the means which the public authorities are bound to place at our disposal. This M. Massignac is said to have disappeared from sight. Let the opportunity be seized, let the Meudon Amphitheatre be declared national property! It is out of the question that an individual should, to the detriment of all mankind, remain the sole possessor of such tremendous secrets and have it in his power, if he please and in obedience to amere whim, to destroy them for all time. The thing cannot be allowed. Before many days have elapsed we must enter into unbroken relations with the inhabitants of Venus. They will tell us the age-old history of our past, reveal to us the great problems which they have elucidated and assist us to benefit by the conquests of a civilization beside which our own as yet seems nothing but confusion, ignorance, the lisping of babes and the stammering of savages. . . ."
"Clouds were floating! And, because of the fact that clouds were floating on the horizon, the pictures on the screen grew less distinct or even vanished altogether. It may be said that this was a coincidence. On three separate occasions, when the film lost its brilliancy, I turned towards the horizon: on each occasion clouds were passing. Could three coincidences of this kind be due to chance? Can any scientific mind fail to see herein a relation of cause and effect or to admit that, in this instance, as in that of many visions previously observed, which were disturbed by an unknown cause, the interposition of the clouds acted as a veilby intercepting the projection on its way? I was not able to make a fourth test. But that did not matter. I had now advancedso far that I was able to work and reflect without being stopped by any obstacle. There is no such thing as being checked mid-way in our pursuit of certain truths. Once we catch a glimpse of them, they become revealed in their entirety.
"At first, to be sure, scientific logic, instead of referring the explanation which I was so eagerly seeking to the data of human science, flung me, almost despite myself, into an ever more mysterious region. And, when, after this second display, I returned home—this was three hours ago at most—I asked myself whether it would not be better to confess my ignorance than to go rushing after theories which suddenly seemed to me to lie beyond the confines of science. But how could I have done so? Despite myself I continued to work at the problem, to imagine. Induction fitted into deduction. Proofs were accumulating. Even as I was hesitating to enter upon a path whose direction confounded me, I reached the goal and found myself sitting down to a table, pen in hand, to write a report which was dictated by my reason as much as by my imagination.
"Thus the first step was taken: in obedience to the imperious summons of reality, I admitted the theory of extra-terrestrial communications, or at least of communications coming from beyond the clouds. Was I to think that they emanated from some airship hovering in the sky, beyond that cloud-belt? Leaving aside the fact that no such airship was ever observed, we must remark that luminous projections powerful enough to light the screen at Meudon from a distance of several miles would leave in the air a trail of diffused light which could not escape notice. Lastly, in the present condition of science, we are at liberty to declare positively that such projections would be quite incapable of realization.
"What then? Were we to cast our eyes farther, traverse space at one bound and assume that the projections have an origin which is not only extraterrestrial but extrahuman?
"Now the great word is written. The idea is no longer my property. How will it be received by those to whom this report will reveal it to-morrow? Will they welcome it with the same fervour and the same awe-struck emotion that thrilled me, with the distrust at the beginning and the same final enthusiasm?
"Let us, if you will, recover our composure. The examination of the phenomena has led us to a very definite conclusion. However startling this conclusion be, let us examine it also, with perfect detachment, and try to subject it to allthe tests which we are able to impose upon it.
"Extrahuman projections: what does that mean? The expression seems vague; and our thoughts wander at random. Let us look into the matter more closely. Let us first of all establish as an impassable boundary the frontiers of our solar system and, in this immense circle, concentrate our gaze upon the more accessible and consequently the nearer points. For, when all is said, if there be really projections, they must necessarily, whether extrahuman or human, emanate from fixed points, situated in space. They must therefore emanate from those luminaries within sight of the earth to which, in the last report, we have some right to attribute the origin of those projections. I consider that there are five such fixed points: the moon, the sun, Jupiter, Mars and Venus.
"If, furthermore, we suppose as the more likely theory that the projections follow a rectilinear direction, then the unknown luminary from which the apparitions emanate will have to satisfy two conditions: first, it must be in such a position that photographs can be taken from it; secondly, it must be in such a position that the images obtained can be transmitted to us. Let us take as an instance a case in which it is possible to fix the place and date. The first Montgolfierballoon, filled with hot air, was sent up from Annonay at four o'clock in the afternoon on the 5th of June, 1783. It is easy, by referring to the contemporary calendars, to learn which celestial bodies were at that moment above the horizon and at what height. We thus find that Mars, Jupiter and the moon were invisible, whereas the sun and Venus were at 50 and 23 degrees respectively above the horizon of Annonay and, of course, towards the west. These two luminaries alone then were in a position to witness the experiment of the brothers Montgolfier. But they did not witness it from the same altitude: a view taken from the sun would have shown things as seen from above, whereas, at the same hour, Venus would have shown then from an angle very nearly approaching the horizontal.
"This is a first clue. Are we able to check it? Yes, by turning up the date on which the projections of the view then secured as observed by Victorien Beaugrand and by determining whether, on that date, the projecting luminary was able to light up the screen at Meudon. Well, on that day, at the hour which Victorien Beaugrand has given us, Mars and the moon were invisible, Jupiter was in the east, the sun close to the horizon and Venus a little way above it. Projections emanating from the last-namedplanet could therefore have fallen upon the screen, which as we know faced westwards.
"This example shows us that, however frail my theory may appear, we are now able and shall be even better able in the future to subject it to a strict control. I did not fail to resort to this method in respect of the other pictures, and I will give in a special table, appended to this essay, a list of the data which I have verified, a list necessarily drawn up, in some haste. Well, in all the cases which I examined, the views were taken and projected under such conditions that they can logically be referred to the planet Venusand to that planet alone.
"Yet again, two of these views, that which revealed to Victorien Beaugrand and his uncle the execution of Miss Cavell and that which enabled us to witness the bombardment of Rheims, seem to have been taken, the first in the morning, because Miss Cavell was executed in the morning, and the second from the east, because it showed a shell fired at a statue which stood on the east front of the cathedral. This proves that the views could be taken indifferently in the morning or the evening, from the west or the east; and it is surely a powerful argument in favour of my theory, because Venus, which is both the Evening and the Morning Star, faces the earth at daybreak from the east and at sunset from the west and because Noël Dorgeroux (as M. Victorien Beaugrand has just confirmed to me by telephone), because Noël Dorgeroux, that magnificent visionary, had had his wall constructedwith two surfaces having an identical inclination towards the sky, one facing west, the other east and each in turn exposed to the rays of Venus the Evening Star and Venus the Morning Star!
"These are the proofs which I am able to furnish for the time being. There are others. There is for instance the time of the apparitions. Venus is sinking towards the horizon; on the earth twilight reigns; and the pictures can be formed regardless of the sunlight. Remark also that Noël Dorgeroux, deferring all his experiments, last winter altered the whole arrangement of the Yard and demolished the old garden. Now this break coincides exactly with a period during which the position of Venus on the farther side of the sun prevented it from communicating with the earth. All these proofs will be reinforced by a more exhaustive essay and by an analytical examination of the pictures that have been or will be shown to us.
"But though I have written this report without stopping to answer the objections and difficulties which arise at every line, though I have beencontented myself with setting forth the logical and almost inevitable sequence of the deductions which led up to my theory. I should be failing in respect to the academy and to the public if I allowed it to be believed that I am not fully conscious of the weight of those objections and difficulties. I did not, however, consider this a reason for abandoning my task. Though it be our duty to bow when science utters a formal veto, on the other hand duty orders us to persist when science is content merely to confess its ignorance. This is the twofold principle which I observed in seeking no longer the source of the projections, but rather the manner in which they were able to appear, for that is where the whole problem lies. It is easy to declare that they emanate from Venus; it is not easy to explain how they travel through space and how they exercise their action, at a distance of many millions of miles, on an imperceptible screen with a surface of three or four hundred square feet. I am confronted with physical laws which I am not entitled to transgress. I am entitled at most to advance where science is obliged to be mute.
"Therefore and without any sort of discussion I admit that we are debarred from supposing that light can be the agent of the transmissions which have been observed. The laws of diffraction indeed are absolutely opposed to the strictly rectilinear propagation of luminous rays and hence to the formation and reception of pictures at the exceptional distances actually under consideration. Not only are the laws of geometrical optics merely a somewhat rough approximation, but the complicated refractions which would inevitably occur in the atmospheres of the earth and Venus would disturb the optical images. The veto of science therefore is peremptory in so far as the possibility of these optical transmissions is concerned.
"For that matter, I should be quite willing to believe that the inhabitants of Venus have already tried to correspond with us through the intermediary of luminous signals and that, if they abandoned their endeavours, this was precisely because the imperfection of our human science made them useless. We know in fact that Lowell and Schiaparelli saw on the face of Venus brilliant specks and a transient gleam which they themselves attributed either to volcanic eruptions or, as is more probable, to the attempts at communication of which I have spoken.
"But science does not prevent us from asking ourselves whether, after the failure of these attempts, the inhabitants of Venus did not resort to another method of correspondence. How canwe avoid thinking, for instance, of the X-rays, whose strictly rectilinear path would allow of the formation of pictures so clear that one could wish for nothing better? In fact it is not impossible that these rays are employed for the emission received on the Meudon screen, though the quality of the light when analyzed in the spectroscope makes the supposition highly improbable. But how are we to explain by means of X-raysthe taking of the terrestrial viewsof which we saw the moving outline on the screen? We know, of course, if we go back to the concrete example to which I referred just now, we know that neither the brothers Montgolfier nor the surrounding landscape emitted X-rays. It is not therefore through the medium of these rays that the Venusians can have secured the instantaneous photographs which they afterwards transmitted to us.
"Well, this exhausts all the possibilities of an explanation which can be referred to the present data of science. I declare positively that to-day, in this essay, I should not have dared to venture into the domain of theory and to suggest a solution in which my own labours are involved, if Noël Dorgeroux had not in a manner authorized me to do so. The fact is that, twelve months ago, I issued a pamphlet, entitledAn Essay onUniversal Gravitation, which fell flat on publication, but which must have attracted Noël Dorgeroux's particular attention, because his nephew, Victorien Beaugrand, found my name written among his papers and because Noël Dorgeroux cannot have known my name except through this pamphlet. Nor would he have taken the trouble to write it down, if the theory of the rays of gravitation which I developed in my pamphlet had not appeared to him to be exactly adapted to the problem raised by his discovery?
"I will therefore ask the reader to refer to my pamphlet. He will there find the results, vague but by no means negligible, which I was able to explain by my experiments with this radiation. He will see that it is propagated in a strictly rectilinear direction and with a speed which is thrice that of light, so that it would not take more than 46 seconds to reach Venus at the time when she is nearest to the earth. He will see lastly that, though the existence of these rays,thanks to which universal attraction is exercised according to the Newtonian laws, is not yet admitted and though I have not yet succeeded in making them visible by means of suitable receivers, I nevertheless give proofs of their existence which must be taken into consideration. And Noël Dorgeroux'sapproval also is a proof that they must not be neglected.
"On the other hand, we have the right to believe that, while our poor rudimentary science may, after centuries and centuries of efforts, have remained ignorant of the essential factor of the equilibrium of the planets, the Venusian scientists long since passed this inferior stage of knowledge and that they possess photographic receivers which allow films to be taken by means of the rays of gravitation and this by methods of truly wonderful perfection. They were therefore waiting. Looking down upon our planet, knowing all that happened here, witnessing our helplessness, they were waiting to communicate with us by the only means that appeared to them possible. They were waiting, patiently and persistently, formidably equipped, sweeping our soil with the invisible sheaves of rays assembled in their projectors and receivers, searching and prying into every nook and corner.
"And one day the wonderful thing happened. One day the shaft of rays struck the layer of substance on the screen where and where alone the spontaneous work of chemical decomposition and immediate reconstitution could be performed. On that day, thanks to Noël Dorgerouxand thanks to luck, as we must confess, for Noël Dorgeroux was pursuing an entirely different series of experiments on that particular day, the Venusians established the connection between the two planets. The greatest fact in the history of the world was accomplished.
"There is evidence even that the Venusians knew of Noël Dorgeroux's earlier experiments, that they realized their importance, that they interested themselves in his labours and that they followed the events of his life, for it is now many years since they took the pictures showing how his son Dominique was killed in the war. But I will not recapitulate in detail each of the films displayed at Meudon. This is a work which anybody can now perform in the light of the theory which I am setting forth. But we must consider attentively the process by which the Venusians tried to give those films a sort of uniformity. It has been rightly said that the sign of the Three Eyes is a trade-mark, like the mark of any of our great cinematograph-producers, a trade-mark also very strikingly proves the superhuman resources possessed by the Venusians, since they succeed in giving to those Three Eyes, which have no relation to our human eyes, not only the expression of our eyes but something much more impressive, the expression of the eyes of the person destined to be the principal character in the film.
"But why was this particular mark chosen? Why eyes and why three? At the stage which we have now reached, need we answer this question? The Venusians themselves have furnished the reply by showing us that apparently absurd film in which Shapes assuredly lived and moved in our sight in accordance with the lines and principle of Venusian life. Were we not the breathless spectators of a picture taken among them and from them? Did we not behold, to make a companion picture to the death of Louis XVI, an incident representing the martyrdom of some great personage whom the executioners tore to pieces with theirthreehands, severing from his body a sort of shapeless head provided withthreeeyes?
"Three Hands! Three Eyes! Dare I, on the strength of this fragile basis, go beyond what we saw and declare that the Venusian possesses the complete symmetry of the triangle, just as man, with his two eyes, his two ears and his two arms, possesses bilateral symmetry? Shall I try to explain his method of progressing by successive distentions and of moving vertically alongverticalstreets, in towns builtperpendicularly? Shall I have the courage to state, as I believe, thathe is provided with organs which give him a magnetic sense, a sense of space, an electric sense and so on, organs numbered by threes? No. These are details with which the Venusian scientists will supply us on the day when it pleases them to enter into correspondence with us.
"And, believe me, they will not fail to do so. All their efforts for centuries past have been directed towards this object. 'Let us talk,' they will say to us soon as they must have said to Noël Dorgeroux and as they no doubt succeeded in doing with him. It must have been a stirring conversation, from which the great seer derived such power and certainty that it is to him that I will refer, before concluding, in order to add to the discussion the two positive proofs which he himself tried to write at the foot of the screen during the few seconds of his death-struggle, a twofold declaration made by the man, who in departing this life,knew:
"'B-ray. . . . B E R G E . . .'
"When thus expressing his supreme belief in the B-rays, Noël Dorgeroux no longer indicated that unknown radiation which he had once imagined to explain the phenomena of the screen and which would have consisted of the materialization of pictures born within and projected by ourselves. More far-seeing, better-informed asthe result of his experiments, abandoning moreover his attempt to connect the new facts with the action of the solar heat which he had so often utilized, he plainly indicated those rays of gravitation of whose existence he had learnt through my pamphlet and also perhaps through his communications with the Venusians, those rays which are habitually employed by them in the same manner as that in which the light-rays are employed by the humblest photographer.
"And the five letters B E R G E are not the first two syllables of the word Bergeronnette. That was the fatal error of which Bérangère Massignac was the victim. They form the wordBerger, complete all but the last letter. At the moment of his death, in his already overshadowed brain, Noël Dorgeroux, in order to name Venus, could find no other expression thanl'Etoile du Berger, the Shepherd's Star; and his enfeebled hand was able to write only the first few letters. The proof therefore is absolute.The man who knewhad time to tell the essential part of what he knew:by means of the rays of gravitation, the Shepherd's Star sends its living messages to the earth.
"If we accept the successive deductions stated in this preliminary essay, which I trust will one day prove to be in a manner a replicaof the report stolen from Noël Dorgeroux, there still remain any number of points concerning which we possess not a single element of truth. What is the form of the recording- and projecting-apparatus employed by the Venusians? By what prodigious machinery do they obtain a perfect fixity in the projections between two stars each animated with such complicated movements in space (at present we know of seventeen in the earth alone)? And, to consider only what is close at hand, what is the nature of the screen employed for the Meudon projections? What is that dark-grey substance with which it is coated? How is that substance composed? How is it able to reconstruct the pictures? These are so many questions which our scientific attainments are incapable of solving. But at least we have no right to pronounce them insoluble; and I will go farther and declare that it is our duty to study them by all the means which the public authorities are bound to place at our disposal. This M. Massignac is said to have disappeared from sight. Let the opportunity be seized, let the Meudon Amphitheatre be declared national property! It is out of the question that an individual should, to the detriment of all mankind, remain the sole possessor of such tremendous secrets and have it in his power, if he please and in obedience to amere whim, to destroy them for all time. The thing cannot be allowed. Before many days have elapsed we must enter into unbroken relations with the inhabitants of Venus. They will tell us the age-old history of our past, reveal to us the great problems which they have elucidated and assist us to benefit by the conquests of a civilization beside which our own as yet seems nothing but confusion, ignorance, the lisping of babes and the stammering of savages. . . ."
We have but to read the newspapers of the period, to realize that the excitement caused by the Meudon pictures reached its culminating point as the result of Benjamin Prévotelle's essay. I have four of those newspapers, dated the following day, on my table as I write. Not one of them contains throughout its eight pages a single line that does not refer to what at once became known as the Splendid Theory.
For the rest, the chorus of approval and enthusiasm was general, or very nearly so. There were barely a few cries of vehement protest uttered by experts who felt exasperated by the boldness of the essay even more than by the gaps occurring in it. The great mass of the public saw in all this not a theory but a fact and accepted it as such with the faith of true believers confronted with the divine truth. Every one contributed his own proof as yet one more stone added to the edifice. The objections, however strong they might be—and they were set forthwithout compromise—seemed temporary and capable of being removed by closer study and a more careful confirmation of the phenomena.
And it is with this conclusion, Benjamin Prévotelle's own conclusion, that all the articles, all the interviews and all the letters that appeared end. The measures recommended by Benjamin Prévotelle were loudly called for. Action must be taken without delay and a series of experiments must be made in the Meudon amphitheatre.
Amid this effervescence, the kidnapping of Massignac went for little. The man Massignac had disappeared? There was nothing to enable one to tell who had carried him off or where he was confined? Very well. It made very little difference. As Benjamin Prévotelle said, the opportunity was too good to miss. The doors of the Yard had been sealed on the first morning. What were we waiting for? Why not begin the experiments at once?
As for me, I did not breathe a word of my Bougival adventure, in the constant fear of implicating Bérangère, who was directly involved in it. All the same, I returned to the banks of the Seine. My rough and ready enquiries showed that Massignac and Velmot had lived on the island during a part of the winter in the company of a small boy who, when they wereaway, looked after the house which one of them had hired under a false name. I explored the island and the house. No one was living there now. I found a few pieces of furniture, a few household implements, nothing more.
On the fourth day, a provisional committee, appointedad hoc, met in the Yard about the middle of the afternoon. As the sky was cloudy, they contented themselves with examining the carboys discovered in the basement of the walls and, after lowering the curtain, with cutting off strips of the dark-grey substance at different points of the screen along the edges.
The analysis revealed absolutely nothing out of the way. They found an amalgam of organic materials and acids which it would be tedious to enumerate and which, however employed, supplied not the smallest explanation of the very tiniest phenomena. But, on the sixth day, the sky became clear and the committee returned, together with a number of official persons and mere sightseers who had succeeded in joining them.
The wait in front of the screen was fruitless and just a little ridiculous. All those people looking out for something that did not happen, standing with wide-open eyes and distorted faces, in front of a wall that had nothing on it, worean air of solemnity which was delightfully comical.
An hour was spent in anxious expectation. The wall remained impassive.
The disappointment was all the greater inasmuch as the public had been waiting for this test as the expected climax of this most sensational tragedy. Were we to give up all hope of knowing the truth and to admit that Noël Dorgeroux's formula alone was capable of producing the pictures? I, for one, was convinced of it. In addition to the substances removed, there was a solution, compounded by Massignac from Noël Dorgeroux's formula, which solution he kept carefully, as my uncle used to do, in blue phials or bottles and which was spread over the screen before each exhibition in order to give it the mysterious power of evoking the images.
A thorough search was instituted, but no phials, no blue bottles came to light.
There was no doubt about it: people were beginning to regret the disappearance, perhaps the death of the man Massignac. Was the great secret to be lost at the very moment when Benjamin Prévotelle's theory had proved its incomparable importance?
Well, on the morning of the eleventh day after the date of Benjamin Prévotelle's essay, that isto say, the 27th of May, the newspapers printed a note signed by Théodore Massignac in which he announced that, in the late afternoon of that same day, the third exhibition in the Yard would take place under his own direction.
He actually appeared at about twelve o'clock in the morning. The doors were closed and guarded by four detectives and he was unable to obtain admission. But at three o'clock an official from the Prefecture of Police arrived, armed with full powers of negotiation.
Massignac laid down his conditions. He was once more to become the absolute master of the Yard, which was to be surrounded by detectives and closed between the performances to everybody except himself. None of the spectators was to carry a camera or any other instrument.
Everything was conceded; everything was overlooked, in order to continue the interrupted series of miraculous exhibitions and to resume the communications with Venus. This capitulation on the part of the authorities before the audacity of a man whose crime was known to them showed that Benjamin Prévotelle's theory was adopted in government circles.
The fact is—and there was no one who failed to see it—that those in power were giving way in the hope of presently turning the tables and,by some subterfuge, laying hands on the screen at the moment when it was in working-order. Massignac felt this so clearly that, when the doors opened, he had the effrontery to distribute a circular couched in the following terms:
WARNING"The audience is hereby warned that any attack on the management will have as its immediate consequence the destruction of the screen and the irreparable loss of Noël Dorgeroux's secret."
WARNING
"The audience is hereby warned that any attack on the management will have as its immediate consequence the destruction of the screen and the irreparable loss of Noël Dorgeroux's secret."
For my part, as I had had no proof of Massignac's death, I was not surprised at his return. But the alteration in his features and attitude astounded me. He looked ten years older; his figure was bent; and the everlasting smile, which used to be his natural expression, no longer lit up his face, which had become emaciated, yellow and anxious.
He caught sight of me and drew me to one side:
"I say, that scoundrel has played the very devil with me! First he beat me black and blue, down in a cellar. Next he lowered me into the water to make me talk. I was ten days in bed before I got over it! . . . By Jingo, it's not hisfault if I'm not there now, the villain! . . . However, he's had his share too . . . and he caught it worse than I did, at least I hope so. The hand that struck him was steady enough and showed no sign of trembling."
I did not ask him what hand he meant or how the tragedy had ended in the darkness. There was only one thing that mattered:
"Massignac, have you read Benjamin Prévotelle's report?"
"Yes."
"Does it agree with the facts? Does it agree with my uncle's account, the one which you've read?"
He shrugged his shoulders:
"What business is that of yours? What business is it of anybody's? Do I keep the pictures to myself? You know I don't. On the contrary, I'm trying to show them to everybody and honestly to earn the money which they pay me. What more do they want?"
"They want to protect a discovery . . ."
"Never! Never!" he exclaimed, angrily. "Tell them to shut up and stop all that nonsense! I've bought Noël Dorgeroux's secret, yes, bought and paid for it. Very well, I mean to keep it for myself, for myself alone, against everybody and in spite of any threat. I shan'ttalk now any more than I did when Velmot had me in his grip and I was on the point of croaking. I tell you, Victorien Beaugrand, Noël Dorgeroux's secret will perish at my death. If I die, it dies: I've taken my oath on it."
When Théodore Massignac, a few minutes later, moved towards his seat, he no longer wore his former air of a lion-tamer entering a cage, but rather the aspect of a hunted animal which is startled by the least sound and trembles at the approach of the man with the whip. But the chuckers-out were there, wearing their ushers' chains and looking as fierce and aggressive as ever. Their wages had been doubled, I was told.
There was no need for the precaution. The danger that threatened Massignac did not come from the crowd, which preserved a religious silence, as though it were preparing to celebrate some solemn ritual. Massignac was received with neither applause nor invective. The spectators waited gravely for what was about to happen, though no one guessed thatthatwas on the point of happening. Those seated on the upper tiers, of whom I was one, often turned their heads upwards. In the clear sky, shimmering with gold, shone Venus, the Evening Star.
What a moment! For the first time in the world's history men felt certain that they were being contemplated by eyes which were not human eyes and watched by minds which differed from their own minds. For the first time they were connected in a tangible fashion with that beyond, formerly peopled by their dreams and their hopes alone, from which the friendly gaze of their new brothers now fell upon them. These were not legends and phantoms projected into the empty heavens by our thirsting souls, but living beings who were addressing us in the living and natural language of the pictures, until the hour, now near at hand, when we should talk together like friends who had lost and found one another.
Their eyes, their Three Eyes, were infinitely gentle that day, filled with a tenderness which seemed born of love and which thrilled us with an equal tenderness, with the same love. What were they presaging, those women's eyes, those eyes of many women that quivered before us so attractively and with such smiles and such delightful promise? Of what happy and charming scenes of our past were we to be the astonished witnesses?
I watched my neighbours. All, like myself, were leaning towards the screen. The sight affected their faces before it occurred. I noticed the pallor of two young men beside me. A woman whose face was hidden from my eyes by a thick mourning-veil sat with her handkerchief in her hand, ready to shed tears.
The first scene represented a landscape, full of glaring light, which appeared to be an Italian landscape, with a dusty road along which cavalry-men, wearing the uniform of the revolutionary armies, were galloping around a travelling-carriage drawn by four horses. Then, immediately afterwards, we saw in a shady garden, at the end of an avenue of dark cypresses, a house with closed shutters standing on a flower-decked terrace.
The carriage stopped at the foot of the terrace and drove off again after setting down an officer who ran up to the door and knocked at it with the pommel of his sword.
The door was opened almost at once. A tall young woman rushed out of the house, with her arms outstretched towards the officer. But, at the moment when they were about to embrace, they both took a few steps backwards, as though to delay their happiness and in so doing to taste its delights more fully.
Then the screen showed us the woman's face; and words cannot depict the expression of joy and headlong love that turned this face, which was neither very beautiful nor very young, into something more alive with youth and beauty than anything in this world.
After that, the lovers flung themselves into each others' arms, as though their lives, too long separated, were striving to make but one. Their lips united.
We saw nothing more of the French officer and his Italian lover. A new picture followed, less bright but equally clear, the picture of a long, battlemented rampart, marked with a series of round, machicolated towers. Below and in the centre, among the ruins of a bastion, were trees growing in a semicircle around an ancient oak-tree.
Gradually, from the shade of the trees, there stepped into the sunlight a quite young girl, clad in the pointed head-dress of the fifteenth century and a full-skirted gown trailing along the ground. She stopped with her hands open and raised on high. She saw something that we were unable to see. She wore a bewitching smile. Her eyes were half-closed; and her slender figure seemed to sway as she waited.
What she was awaiting was the arrival of ayoung page, who came to her and kissed her lips while she flung herself on his shoulder.
This enamoured couple certainly moved us, as the first couple had done, by reason of the passion and the languor that possessed them, but even more by reason of the thought that they were an actual couple, living, before our eyes and at the present day, their real life of long ago. Our sensations were no longer such as we experienced at the earlier exhibitions. They had then been full of hesitation and ignorance. We now knew. In this late period of the world's existence, we were beholding the life of human beings of the fifteenth century. They were not repeating for our entertainment actions which had been performed before. They were performing them for the first occasion in time and space. It was their first kiss of love.
This, the feeling that one is seeingthis, is a feeling which surpasses everything that can be imagined! To see a fifteenth-century page and damsel kissing each other on the lips!
To see, as we saw immediately afterwards, a Greek hill! To see the Acropolis standing against its sky of two thousand years ago, with its houses and gardens, its palm-trees, its lanes, its vestibules and temples, the Parthenon, not in ruins, but in all its splendour and perfection!A host of statues surround it. Men and women climb its stairways. And these men and women are Athenians of the time of Pericles or Demosthenes!
They come and go in all directions. They talk together. Then they drift away. A little empty street runs down between two white walls. A group passes and moves away, leaving behind it a man and woman who stop suddenly, glance around them and kiss each other fervently. And we see, underneath the veil in which the woman's forehead is shrouded, two great, black eyes whose lids flutter like wings, eyes which open, close, laugh and weep.
Thus we go back through the ages and we understand that those who, gazing down upon the earth, have taken these successive pictures wish, in displaying them to us, to show us the act, for-ever youthful and eternally renewed, of that universal love of which they proclaim themselves, like us, to be the slaves and the zealous worshippers. They too are governed and exalted by the same law, though perhaps not expressed in them by the intoxication of a like caress. The same impulse sweeps them along. But do they know the adorable union of the lips?
Other couples passed. Other periods were reviewed. Other civilizations appeared to us.We saw the kiss of an Egyptian peasant and a young girl; and that exchanged high up in a hanging garden of Babylon between a princess and a priest; and that which transfigured to such a degree as to make them almost human two unspeakable beings squatting at the door of a prehistoric cave; and more kisses and yet more.
They were brief visions, some of which were indistinct and faded, like the colours of an ancient fresco, but yet searching and potent, because of the meaning which they assumed, full at the same time of poetry and brutal reality, of violence and serene loveliness.
And always the woman's eyes were the centre, the purpose, as it were the justification of the pictures. Oh, the smiles and the tears, the gladness and the despair and the exquisite rapture of all those eyes! How our friends up aloft must also have felt all the charm of them, thus to dedicate them to us! How they must have felt and perhaps regretted all the difference between those eyes of ecstasy and enchantment and their own eyes, so gloomy and void of all expression! There was such sweetness in those women's eyes, such grace, such ingenuousness, such adorable perfidy, such distress and such seductiveness, such triumphant joy, such gratefulhumility . . . and such love, when they offered their submissive lips to the man!
I was unable to see the end of those pictures. There was a movement round about me in the midst of the crowd, which was beside itself with painful excitement; and I found myself next to a woman in mourning, whose face was hidden beneath her veils.
She thrust these aside. I recognized Bérangère. She raised her passionate eyes to mine, flung her arms round my neck and gave me her lips, while she stammered words of love. And in this way I learnt, without any need of explanation, that Massignac's insinuations against his daughter were false, that she was the terror-stricken victim of the two scoundrels and that she had never ceased to love me.
The exhibition of the following day was preceded by two important pieces of news which appeared in the evening papers. A group of financiers had offered Théodore Massignac the sum of ten million francs in consideration of Noël Dorgeroux's secret and the right to work the amphitheatre. Théodore Massignac was to give them his answer next day.
But, at the last moment, a telegram from the south of France announced that the maid-of-all-work who had nursed Massignac in his house at Toulouse, a few weeks before, now declared that her master's illness was feigned and that Massignac had left the house on several occasions, each time carefully concealing his absence from all the neighbours. Now one of these absences synchronized with the murder of Noël Dorgeroux. The woman's accusation therefore obliged the authorities to reopen an enquiry which had already elicited so much presumptive evidence of Théodore Massignac's guilt.
The upshot of these two pieces of news was that my uncle Dorgeroux's secret depended on chance, that it would be saved by an immediate purchase or lost for ever by Massignac's arrest. This alternative added still further to the anxious curiosity of the spectators, many of whom correctly believed that they were witnessing the last of the Meudon exhibitions. They discussed the articles in the papers and the proofs or objections accumulated for or against the theory. They said that Prévotelle, to whom Massignac was refusing admission to the amphitheatre, was preparing a whole series of experiments with the intention of proving the absolute accuracy of his theory, the simplest of which experiments consisted in erecting a scaffolding outside the Yard and setting up an intervening obstacle to intercept the rays that passed from Venus to the screen.
I myself who, since the previous day, had thought of nothing but Bérangère, whom I had pursued in vain through the crowd amid which she had succeeded in escaping me, I myself was smitten with the fever and that day abandoned the attempt to discover upon the close-packed tiers of seats the mysterious girl whom I had held to me all quivering, happy to abandon herself for a few moments to a kiss on which shebestowed all the fervour of her incomprehensible soul. I forgot her. The screen alone counted, to my mind. The problem of my life was swallowed up in the great riddle which those solemn minutes in the history of mankind set before us.
They began, after the most sorrowful and heart-rending look that had yet animated the miraculous Three Eyes, they began with that singular phantasmagoria of creatures which Benjamin Prévotelle proposed that we should regard as the inhabitants of Venus and which, for that matter, it was impossible that we should not so regard. I will not try to define them with greater precision nor to describe the setting in which they moved. One's confusion in the presence of those grotesque Shapes, those absurd movements and those startling landscapes was so great that one had hardly time to receive very exact impressions or to deduce the slightest theory from them. All that I can say is that we were the observers, as on the first occasion, of a manifestation of public order. There were numbers of spectators and a connected sequence of actions tending towards a clearly-defined end, which seemed to us to be of the same nature as the first execution. Everything, in fact—the grouping of certain Shapes in the middle of an empty space and around a motionless Shape, theactions performed, the cutting up of that isolated Shape—suggested that there was an execution in progress, the taking of a life. In any case, we were perfectly well aware, through the corresponding instance, that its real significance resided only in the second part of the film. Since nearly all the pictures were twofold, impressing us by antithesis or analogy, we must wait awhile to catch the general idea which directed this projection.
This soon became apparent; and the mere narrative of what we saw showed how right my uncle Dorgeroux's prophecy was when he said:
"Men will come here as pilgrims and will fall upon their knees and weep like children!"
A winding road, rough with cobbles and cut into steps, climbs a steep, arid, shadowless hill under a burning sun. We almost seem to see the eddies rising, like a scorching breath, from the parched soil.
A mob of excited people is scaling the abrupt slope. On their backs hang tattered robes; their aspect is that of the beggars or artisans of an eastern populace.
The road disappears and appears again at a higher level, where we see that this mob is preceding and following a company consisting of soldiers clad like the Roman legionaires. Thereare sixty or eighty of them, perhaps. They are marching slowly, in a ragged body, carrying their spears over their shoulders, while some are swinging their helmets in their hands. Now and again one stops to drink.
From time to time we become aware that these soldiers are serving as escort to a central group, consisting of a few officers and of civilians clad in long robes, like priests, and, a little apart from them, four women, the lower half of whose faces is hidden by a long veil. Then, suddenly at a turn in the road, where the group has become slightly disorganized, we see a heavy cross outspread, jolting its way upwards. A man is underneath, as it were crushed by the intolerable burden which he is condemned to bear to the place of martyrdom. He stumbles at each step, makes an effort, stands up again, falls again, drags himself yet a little farther, crawling, clutching at the stones on the road, and then moves no more. A blow from a staff, administered by one of the soldiers, makes no difference. His strength is exhausted.
At that moment, a man comes down the stony path. He is stopped and ordered to carry the cross. He cannot and quickly makes his escape. But, as the soldiers with their spears turn back towards the man lying on the ground, behold,three of the women intervene and offer to carry the burden. One of them takes the end, the two others take the two arms and thus they climb the rugged hill, while the fourth woman raises the condemned man and supports his hesitating steps.
At two further points we are able to follow the painful ascent of him who is going to his death. And on each occasion his face is shown by itself upon the screen. We do not recognize it. It is unlike the face which we expected to see, according to the usual representations. But how much more fully satisfied the profound conception which it evokes in us by its actual presence!
It isHe: we cannot for a moment doubt it.Helives before us.Heis suffering.Heis about to die before us.Heis about to die. Each of us would fain avert the menace of that horrible death; and each of us prays with all his might for some peaceful vision in which we may see Him surrounded by His Disciples and His gentle womenfolk. The soldiers, as they reach the place of torture, assume a harsher aspect. The priests with ritual gestures curse the stones amid which the tree is to be raised and retire, with hanging heads.
Here comes the cross, with the women bending under it. The condemned man follows them. There are two of them now supporting Him. He stops. Nothing can save Him now. When we see Him again, after a short interruption of the picture, the cross is set up and the agony has begun.
I do not believe that any assembly of men was ever thrilled by a more violent and noble emotion than that which held us in its grip at this hour, which, let it be clearly understood, was the very hour at which the world's destiny was settled for centuries and centuries. We were not guessing at it through legends and distorted narratives. We did not have to reconstruct it after uncertain documents or to conceive it according to our own feelings and imagination. It was there, that unparalleled hour. It lived before us, in a setting devoid of grandeur, a setting which seemed to us very lowly, very poverty-stricken. The bulk of the sightseers had departed. A dozen soldiers were dicing on a flat stone and drinking. Four women were standing in the shadow of a man crucified whose feet they bathed with their tears. At the summit of two other hillocks hard by, two figures were writhing on their crosses. That was all.
But what a meaning we read into this gloomy spectacle! What a frightful tragedy was enacted before our eyes! The beating of our hearts wrung with love and distress was the very beating of that Sacred Heart. Those weary eyes looked down upon the same things that we beheld, the same dry soil, the same savage faces of the soldiers, the same countenances of the grief-stricken women.
When a last vision showed us His rigid and emaciated body and His sweet ravaged head in which the dilated eyes seemed to us abnormally large, the whole crowd rose to its feet, men and women fell upon their knees and, in a profound silence that quivered with prayer, all arms were despairingly outstretched towards the dying God.
Such scenes cannot be understood by those who did not witness them. You will no more find their living presentment in the pages in which I describe them than I can find it in the newspapers of the time. The latter pile up adjectives, exclamations and apostrophes which give no idea of what the vivid reality was. On the other hand, all the articles lay stress upon the essential truth which emerges from the two films of that day and, very rightly, declare that the second explains and completes the first. Yonder also, among our distant brethren, a God was deliveredto the horrors of martyrdom; and, by connecting the two events, they intended to convey to us that, like ourselves, they possessed a religious belief and ideal aspirations. In the same way, they had shown us by the death of one of their rulers and the death of one of our kings that they had known the same political upheavals. In the same way, they had shown us by visions of lovers that, like us, they yielded to the power of love. Therefore, the same stages of civilizations, the same efforts of belief, the same instincts, the same sentiments existed in both worlds.
How could messages so positive, so stimulating have failed to increase our longing to know more about it all and to communicate more closely? How could we do other than think of the questions which it was possible to put and of the problems which would be elucidated, problems of the future and the past, problems of civilization, problems of destiny?
But the same uncertainty lingered in us, keener than the day before. What would become of Noël Dorgeroux's secret? The position was this: Massignac accepted the ten millions which he was offered, but on condition that he was paid the money immediately after the performance and that he received a safe-conduct for America.Now, although the enquiries instituted at Toulouse confirmed the accusations brought against him by the maid-of-all-work, it was stated that the compact was on the point of being concluded, so greatly did the importance of Noël Dorgeroux's secret outweigh all ordinary consideration of justice and punishment. Finding itself confronted with a state of things which could not be prolonged, the government was yielding, though constraining Massignac to sell the secret under penalty of immediate arrest and posting all around him men who were instructed to lay him by the heels at the first sign of any trickery. When the iron curtain fell, twelve policemen took the place of the usual attendants.
And then began an exhibition to which special circumstances imparted so great a gravity and which was in itself so poignant and so implacable.
As on the other occasions, we did not at first grasp the significance which the scenes projected on the screen were intended to convey. These scenes passed before our eyes as swiftly as the love-scenes displayed two days before.
There was not the initial vision of the Three Eyes. We plunged straight into reality. In the middle of a garden sat a woman, young still and beautiful, dressed in the fashion of 1830. Shewas working at a tapestry stretched on a frame and from time to time raised her eyes to cast a fond look at a little girl playing by her side. The mother and child smiled at each other. The child left her sand-pies and came and kissed her mother.
For a few minutes there was merely this placid picture of human life.
Then, a dozen paces behind the mother, a tall, close-trimmed screen of foliage is gently thrust aside and, with a series of imperceptible movements, a man comes out of the shadow, a man, like the woman, young and well-dressed.
His face is hard, his jaws are set. He has a knife in his hand.
He takes three or four steps forward. The woman does not hear him, the little girl cannot see him. He comes still farther forward, with infinite precautions, so that the gravel may not creak under his feet nor any branch touch him.
He stands over the woman. His face displays a terrible cruelty and an inflexible will. The woman's face is still smiling and happy.
Slowly his arm is raised above that smile, above that happiness. Then it descends, with equal slowness; and suddenly, beneath the left shoulder, it strikes a sharp blow at the heart.
There is not a sound; that is certain. Atmost, a sigh, like the one sigh emitted, in the awful silence, by the crowd in the Yard.
The man has withdrawn his weapon. He listens for a moment, bends over the lifeless body that has huddled into the chair, feels the hand and then steals back with measured steps to the screen of foliage, which closes behind him.
The child has not ceased playing. She continues to laugh and talk.
The picture fades away.
The next shows us two men walking along a deserted path, beside which flows a narrow river. They are talking without animation; they might be discussing the weather.
When they turn round and retrace their steps, we see that one of the two men, the one who hitherto had been hidden behind his companion, carries a revolver.
They both stop and continue to talk quietly. But the face of the armed man becomes distorted and assumes the same criminal expression which we beheld in the first murderer. And suddenly he makes a movement of attack and fires; the other falls; and the first flings himself upon him and snatches a pocket-book from him.
There were four more murders, none of whichhad as its perpetrator or its victim any one who was known to us. They were so many sensational incidents, very short, restricted to the essential factors; the peaceful representation of a scene in daily life and the sudden explosion of crime in all its bestial horror.
The sight was dreadful, especially because of the expression of confidence and serenity maintained by the victim, while we, in the audience, saw the phantom of death rise over him. The waiting for the blow which we were unable to avert left us breathless and terrified.
And one last picture of a man appeared to us. A stifled exclamation rose from the crowd. It was Noël Dorgeroux.
The exclamation of the crowd proved to me that, at the sight of the great old man, who was known to all by his portraits and by the posters exhibited at the doors of the Yard, the same thought had instantaneously struck us all. We understood from the first. After the series of criminal pictures, we knew the meaning of Noël Dorgeroux's appearance on the screen and knew the inexorable climax of the story which we were being told. There had been six victims. My uncle would be the seventh. We were going to witness his death and to see the face of the murderer.
All this was planned with the most disconcerting skill and with a logic whose implacable rigour wrung our very souls. We were as though imprisoned in a horribly painful track which we were bound to follow to the end, notwithstanding the unspeakable violence of our sensations. I sometimes ask myself, in all sincerity, whether the series of miraculous visionscould have been continued much longer, so far did the nervous tension which they demanded exceed our human strength.
A succession of pictures showed us several episodes of which the first dated back to a period when Noël Dorgeroux certainly had not discovered the great secret, for his son was still alive. It was the time of the war. Dominique, in uniform, was embracing the old fellow, who was weeping and trying to hold him back; and, when Dominique went, Noël Dorgeroux watched him go with all the distress of a father who is not to see his son again.
Next we have him again, once more in the Yard, which is encumbered with its sheds and workshops, as it used to be. Bérangère, quite a child, is running to and fro. She is thirteen or fourteen at most.
We now follow their existence in pictures which tell us with what hourly attention my uncle Dorgeroux's labours were watchedfrom up yonder. He became old and bent. The little one grew up, which did not deter her from playing and running about.
On the day when we are to see her as I had found her in the previous summer, we see at the same time Noël Dorgeroux standing on a ladder and daubing the wall with a long brush whichhe keeps dipping into a can. He steps back and looks with a questioning gaze at the wall where the screen is marked out. There is nothing. Nevertheless something vague and confused must already have throbbed in the heart of the substance, because he seems to be waiting and seeking. . . .
A click; and everything is changed. The amphitheatre arises, unfinished in parts, as it was on the Sunday in March when I discovered my uncle's dead body. The new wall is there, surrounded by its canopy. My uncle has opened the recess contained in the basement and is arranging his carboys.
But, now, beyond the amphitheatre, which grows smaller for an instant, we see the trees in the woods and the undulations of the adjoining meadow; and a man comes up on that side and moves towards the path which skirts the fence. I for my part recognize his figure. It is the man with whom I was to struggle, half an hour later, in the wood through which he had just come. It is the murderer. He is wrapped in a rain-coat whose upturned collar touches the lowered brim of his hat. He walks uneasily. He goes up to the lamp-post, looks around him, climbs up slowly and makes his way into the Yard. He follows the road which Imyself took that day after him and thrusts forward his head as I did.
Noël Dorgeroux is standing before the screen. He has closed the recess and jotted down some notes in a book. The victim suspects nothing.
Then the man throws off his wrap and his hat. He turns his face in our direction. It is Massignac.
The crowd was so much expecting to find that it was he that there was no demonstration of surprise. Besides, the pictures on this day were of a nature that left no room for alien thoughts or impressions. The consequences which might ensue from the public proof of Massignac's guilt were not apparent to us. We were not living through the minutes which were elapsingin the pastbut through those which were elapsingin the present; and until the last moment we thought only of knowingwhether Noël Dorgeroux, whom we knew to be dead, was going to be murdered.
The scene did not last long. In reality my uncle was not conscious for a second of the danger that threatened him; and, contrary to what was elicited at the enquiry, there was no trace of that struggle of which the signs appeared to have been discovered. This struggle occurredafterwards, when my uncle had been struck downand was lying on the ground, motionless. It took place between a murderer seized with insensate fury and the corpse which he seemed bent uponkilling anew.
And in fact it was this act of savage brutality that let loose the rage of the crowd. Held back until then by a sort of unreasoning hope and petrified, in its terror, at the sight of the loathsome act accomplished on the screen, it was stirred with anger and hatred against the living and visible murderer whose existence suddenly provoked it beyond endurance. It experienced a sense of revolt and a need for immediate justice which no considerations were able to stay. It underwent an immediate change of attitude. It withdrew itself abruptly from any sort of memory or evocation of the past, to fling itself into the reality of the present and to play its part in the necessary action. And, obeying an unanimous impulse, pouring helter-skelter down the tiers and flowing like a torrent through every gangway, it rushed to the assault of the iron cage in which Massignac was sheltering.
I cannot describe exactly the manner in which things took place. Massignac, who attempted to take flight at the first moment of the accusation, found in front of him the twelve policemen, who next turned against the crowd when it came dashing against the rails of the high grille. But what resistance were those twelve men able to offer? The grille fell. The police were borne down in the crush. In a flash I saw Massignac braced against the wall and taking aim with two revolvers held in his outstretched hands. A number of shots rang out. Some of the aggressors dropped. Then Massignac, taking advantage of the hesitation which kept back the others, stooped swiftly towards the electric battery in the foundation. He pressed a button. Right at the top of the wall, the canopy overhanging the two pillars opened like a sluice and sent forth streams of a bluish liquid, which seethed and bubbled in a cascade over the whole surface of the screen.
I then remembered Massignac's terrible prophecy:
"If I die, it means the death of Noël Dorgeroux's secret. We shall perish together."
In the anguish of peril, at the very bottom of the abyss, he had conceived the abominable idea and had the courage to carry out his threat. My uncle's work was utterly destroyed.
Nevertheless I darted forward, as though I could still avert the disaster by saving the scoundrel's life. But the crowd had seized upon its prey and was passing it from hand to hand, likea howling pack worrying and rending the animal which it had hunted down.
I succeeded in shouldering my way through with the aid of two policemen and then only because Massignac's body had ended by falling into the hands of a band of less infuriated assailants, who were embarrassed by the sight of the dying man. They formed themselves into a group to protect his death-struggles and one of them even, raising his voice above the din, called to me:
"Quick, quick!" he said, when I came near. "He is speaking your name."
At the first glance at the mass of bleeding flesh that lay on one of the tiers, between two rows of seats, I perceived that there was no hope and that it was a miracle that this corpse was still breathing. Still it was uttering my name. I caught the syllables as I stooped over the face mauled beyond recognition and, speaking slowly and distinctly, I said:
"It's I, Massignac, it's Victorien Beaugrand. What have you to say to me?"
He managed to lift his eyelids, looked at me with a dim eye which closed again immediately and stammered:
"A letter . . . a letter . . . sewn in the lining. . . ."
I felt the rags of cloth which remained of his jacket. Massignac had done well to sew up the letter, for all the other papers had left his pocket. I at once read my name on the envelope.
"Open it . . . open it," he said, in a whisper.
I tore open the envelope. There were only a few lines scribbled in a large hand across the sheet of paper, a few lines of which I took the time to read only the first, which said:
"Bérangère knows the formula."
"Bérangère!" I exclaimed. "But where is she? Do you know?"
I at once understood the imprudence of which I had been guilty in thus mentioning the girl's name aloud; and, bending lower down, I put my ear to Massignac's mouth to catch his last words.
He repeated the name of Bérangère time after time, in the effort to pronounce the answer which I asked for and which his memory perhaps refused to supply. His lips moved convulsively and he stammered forth some hoarse sounds which were more like a death-rattle but which yet enabled me to distinguish the words:
"Bérangère. . . . Château . . . Château de Pré-Bony. . . ."
However great the tension of the mind may be when concentrated on an idea which entirely absorbs it, we remain more or less subject tothe thousand sensations that assail us. Thus, at the very moment when I rose and, in a whisper, repeated, "Château de Pré-Bony . . . de Pré-Bony," the vague impression that another had heard the address which Massignac had given began to take shape and consistency within me. Nay more, I perceived,when it was too late, that this other man, thanks to his position at my side, must have been able to read as I had read, the opening words of Théodore Massignac's letter. And that other man's able make-up suddenly dropped away before my eyes to reveal the pallid features of the man Velmot.
I turned my head. The man had just made his way out of the band of onlookers who stood gathered round us and was slipping through the shifting masses of the crowd. I called out. I shouted his name. I dragged detectives in his wake. It was too late.
And so the man Velmot, the implacable enemy who had not hesitated to torture Massignac in order to extract my uncle Dorgeroux's formula from him, knew that Bérangère was acquainted with the formula! And he had at the same time learnt, what he doubtless did not know before, where Bérangère was concealed.
The Château de Pré-Bony! Where was thiscountry-house? In what corner of France had Bérangère taken refuge after the murder of her god-father? It could not be very far from Paris, seeing that she had once asked for my assistance and that, two days ago, she had come to the Yard. But, whatever the distance, how was I to find it? There were a thousand country-houses within a radius of twenty-five miles from Paris.
"And yet," I said to myself, "the solution of the tragedy lies there, in that country-house. All is not lost and all may still be saved, but I have to get there. Though, the miraculous screen is destroyed, Massignac has given me the means of reconstructing it, but I have to get there. And I have to get there by day break, or Velmot will have Bérangère at his mercy."
I spent the whole evening in enquiries. I consulted maps, gazetteers, directories. I asked everywhere; I telephoned. No one was able to supply the least hint as to the whereabouts of the Château de Pré-Bony.
It was not until the morning, after an agitated night, that a more methodical scrutiny of recent events gave me the idea of beginning my investigations in the actual district where I knew that Bérangère had stayed. I hired a motor-car and had myself driven towards Bougival. I had nogreat hope. But my fear lest Velmot should discover Bérangère's retreat before I did caused me such intense suffering that I never ceased repeating to myself:
"That's it. . . . I'm on the right track. . . . I'm certain to find Bérangère; and the villain shall not touch a hair of her head."
My love for the girl suddenly became purged of all the doubts and suspicions that had poisoned it. For the rest, I did not trouble about these details and troubled myself neither to explain her conduct nor to establish the least proof for or against her. Even if her kiss had not already wiped out every disagreeable recollection, the danger which she was incurring was enough to restore all my faith in her and all my affection.
My first enquiries at Ville d'Avray, Marnes and Vaucresson told me nothing. The Château de Pré-Bony was unknown. At La Cello-Saint-Cloud I encountered a fresh check. But here, in an inn, I seemed to recover, thanks to the accident of a casual question, the traces of the man Velmot: a tall, white-faced gentleman, I was told, who often motored along the Bougival road and who had been seen prowling outside the village that very morning.
I questioned my informant more closely. Itreally was Velmot. He had four hours' start of me.And he knew where to go! And he was in love with Bérangère!Four hours' start, for that clever and daring scoundrel, who was staking his all on this last throw of the die! Who could stop him? What scruples had he? To seize upon Bérangère, to hold her in his power, to compel her to speak: all this was now mere child's play.And he was in love with Bérangère!
I remember striking the inn-table with my fist and exclaiming, angrily:
"No, no, it's not possible! . . . The house in question is bound to be somewhere near here! . . . They must show me the way!"
Thenceforward I did not experience a moment's hesitation. On the one hand, I was not mistaken in coming to this district. On the other hand, I knew that Velmot, having heard what Massignac said and knowing the country by having lived in it, had begun his campaign at dawn.