The terrible plague brought us all, ignorant and knowledgeable alike, back to the “subjection without understanding” that likens human and terrestrial discipline to the strictest military discipline. That was what Professor Sidoine, a brown-haired giant, stolid and hirsute, expressed very aptly:
“My dear Ailette, I’d like nothing better than to work, with you and our colleagues in the Aristotle Foundation, to combat this frightful disease. It is, however, still necessary for me observe a case with my own eyes—for after all, it might be a myth, or a illusion on the part of our eminent comrade Polyplast 17,117, or a communal hallucination propagated by the press and the wireless.
“Remember, in fact, that a little more than three centuries ago, one of our most illustrious predecessors, Professor Charcot—who flourished, its true, on the crumbling soil and in the unsteady light of democracy—described and named a non-existent disease, hysteria, of which no specimen has ever been seen since, in three hundred years. I have in my library, however, works—which have become rare after a long period of oblivion—in which women are observed twisted into all sorts of attitudes by that implausible and improbable malady. Professor Charcot was certainly neither a visionary nor a liar. He believed that he had seen what he described. He had projected a phantom, a mirage.”
Thus put on the spot, I reiterated the account of the grandfather and the little girl, the testimony of the persons present, the new cases reported in the newspapers. I added that I had not put into it any kind of authorial or journalistic distortion; that it was possible that I had participated in a mass hallucination, of the sort created by the famous and imaginary trick of the fakir who caused a rope to stand up and then climbs it; I proposed that we wait, that we allow ourselves to be guided by events—advice which, although being only timidity, generally passes for wisdom.
We separated on those good resolutions—but I was certain that we would come together again before long, and that the malicious demon of aphanasia would not rest there.
Indeed, forty-eight hours after Sidoine’s exceedingly reasonable observations, as if by a sort of irony, it was at the Aristotle Foundation itself that a further disappearance by Napus occurred, in circumstances that would not have left St. Thomas himself any room for doubt.
One of the luminaries of our establishment, who had contributed a great deal, fifteen years before to the since-overtaken theory of cyton, was Madame Grégeois, the divorcee of the late Professor Grégeois precisely because of their disagreements on the subject of the magnetic centers of the cell. The husband claimed that they were two in number, the wife that they were three, neither having anticipated the fourth center discovered by the lovely Tastepain. Madame Grégeois was ugly, shrewish, peremptory and interfering, and had been decorated with every possible award of every nation of the inhabited earth, which formed an impressive multicolored display on her semi-masculine costume at official receptions. She detested Tastepain, of course, not only because of the cyton but also because of her charming physique.
Now, the supreme council of the Aristotle Foundation having met urgently, we—a few Polyplasts, Professor Ailette, Grégeois-la-Grège,5 as we called her in jest, and half a dozen other leading lights—were in Sidoine’s laboratory. The harpy was in the process of expounding her opinion on the probable origin of the Napus, which was attributable, according to her, to the spots of Jupiter acting of their own accord on sunspots and rendering them cytocidal, fatal to human cells. Suddenly, the little dry click that had remained in my ears since the old man of the Champs-Élysées was heard, and nothing more remained of Grégeois-la-Grège than the memory of her slanders, her ugliness and her genius.
The professors went as pale as effigies of fresh plaster. We Polyplasts, of harder composite formation, had difficulty holding back the convulsive laughter I mentioned before. Ailette was already twitching his goatee under the triple bony projections of his cheekbones and forehead, commencing the funeral oration of our vanished colleague. The habit he had of making speeches over graves and commemorative monuments caused him to dive right in, listing in his wooden voice the merits and achievements of the unfortunate Grégeois, thus returned to the impalpable ether after having sustained the cause of the triple magnetic center of the cell all her life. He even went so far as to classify the annihilated—“our great annihilated”—among the scientific martyrs of the twenty-third century, which was exaggerated. A pickpocket, a doorman or an ambulant seller of chestnuts or dates could just as easily be subject to the Napus as the King of France or the President of the Britannic Republic.
I ought to add, in order to maintain the historical veridity that is the greatest attraction of memoirs, that the disappearance of that Megaera of the laboratory caused general delight at the Foundation. Mouillemouillard, whom she harassed and even slapped on occasion, if he had mislaid a retort, trembled with joy. He never ceased repeating: “What a blessing, Lord Jesus, what a stroke of luck, damn it!” As for Henriette Tastepain, she could hardly believe in such good fortune, and it was necessary to show her, through a doorway, the grave and contorted face of Ailette the speech-maker to convince her of the napusification of her enemy.
The news media and technical press generally lag behind, the former by ten years and the latter by ten months, with regard to the true status and scientific value of personalities who die, with or without leaving mortal remains. Thus, fifty years after the microbial doctrine had been abandoned by the institutes, the Academicians and even the Universities of America and France—the two nations most attached to their scientific fetishes—and the great dailies contained to entertain their readers with the bacilli of typhoid, tuberculosis and syphilis, and other phantoms and fancies of a similar stripe. For a week, the concept of cyton and its derivatives alimented the necrology of the “excellent Grégeois,” universally missed and mourned, especially in the glorious establishment where she and her illustrious husband “had brought it to the perfection in which it is seen today.”
These well-informed publications were sure that the study of the new plague would be taken to the extreme by the scientific personnel of the foundation, and that it would be mastered before long. It was decided that a national subscription would be opened for the erection of a statue to the Grégeois household, so perfectly disunited, in the central courtyard of the dwelling that they had made to resound, for many years, with the din of their learned conjugal disputes.
In the following week, however, ten cases of Napus were duly observed in Paris and its suburbs, five in Lyon, twenty in Marseilles, seventeen in Lille and three in Nancy. It was thought that rural areas might be spared, until three aphanasias of classic form appeared in Nièvre, five in Brittany, and twenty-two—a frightful figure—in Auvergne, around Clermont-Ferrand and Brioude. At the same time, England, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Sweden appeared to be afflicted even more rudely, with figures whose mounting progression sent shivers down the back. The little dry click, the announcer of the disappearance, was perceived everywhere. Some witnesses of the fatal phenomenon thought they had perceived a smell of burning, similar to the one our distant ancestors attributed to the arrival and departure of the Devil.
Once the initial moment of stupor—and, for us Polyplasts, of merriment—had passed, a great activity was manifest in all the institutes, academies, universities and scientific foundations in the world, in the form of correspondence, communications, discussions and controversies regarding the origin of the unprecedented plague. Human intelligence, much more restricted than is generally affirmed, even in the most elevated and penetrating minds, has a tendency to imagine, for such a phenomenon, some unique cause, and only admits a multiplicity of cases with difficulty. The explanation of the damned Grégeois by reference to the Jovian spots left the world along with its enunciator, but the following theses were successively envisaged:
Firstly, the liberation of an unknown force, which enthusiasts for the defunct cyton did not fail to suppose to be the issue of the human cell itself, in certain atmospheric and meteorological conditions as yet unsuspected. Professor Ailette