The Mysterious Fluid Read online

  One Sunday, when the joyful and densely-packed crowd entirely covered the Place du Trône, Alfred was in the process of performing with his mahout in front of the spectators, dancing an up-tempo polka, when he suddenly stopped. He took three steps back, braced himself forcefully, and, displacing a few planks with his rear end, found himself in the plaza, in the midst of the crowd, whose members stampeded, howling with fear, as the animal came straight toward them.

  Knocking over everything in his path, the beast went down the Faubourg Saint-Antoine at top speed, followed by all the menagerie staff, who were saying: “He’s gone off in search of Aglaea, for sure.”

  Arriving at the location of the Colonne de Juillet, Alfred saw the huge elephant of stone and plaster and prepared to hurl himself upon it—but, recognizing his error, he turned round, murmuring internally, a long time before the song: “For he’s made of stone, of stone…” And he continued his mad race along the sequence of great boulevards: Beaumarchais, Filles-du-Calvaire, etc.

  Two minutes later, he was in the Boulevard du Crime, where all the theaters in Paris seem to be holding a meeting. The event had taken on enormous proportions, however; a hundred thousand people were following Alfred at a distance, exciting him further with their racket. National Guardsmen, mounted and on foot, had been sent to alert the Prefect of Police, the King, his august family and the Place Vendôme, who were in mortal dread.

  Finally, in haste, at the corner of the Boulevard Poissonnière and the Boulevard Montmartre, the generalissimo of the National Guard himself ordered half a dozen citadines—the omnibuses of the day—to be overturned, along with two gondoles, a Batignollaise and three écossaises, if I’m correctly informed, as well as a certain number of cabriolets, to form an improvised barricade.

  It was just in time. Ten minutes later, Alfred—still in search of Aglaea, raced forward, trunk forward and tail raised, with a provocative little white tuft, and fiery eyes! Confronted by the unexpected obstacle, however, he unleashed a formidable trumpeting, which caused the dormant brass instruments of the Opéra in the Rue Le Pelletier to resonate—and his little eyes became bloodshot.

  After a momentary hesitation, alone in the middle of the deserted boulevard—the crowd was far behind him and the National Guardsmen were massed on the other side of the barricade, weapons in hand—Alfred began furiously uprooting all the trees and gaslights in the boulevard with his trunk, along with the oil-lamps hanging from poles outside the houses, and hurling them pell-mell at the barricade, which seemed to grow proportionately. In the blink of an eye, for a hundred meters around, the boulevard was laid bare, as bald as the skull of the late Siraudin.17

  Proudly raising his head, his trunk stabbing the sky, trumpeting with such violence that the windows in the quarter shattered into smithereens, he saw a beauty of the day—a little darling—in the forecourt of a fashionable restaurant. He bounded forward and, stretched out his trunk, seized her round the waist and launched her furiously at the barricade.

  White foam was beginning to fleck the edges of his trunk, and a horrible clamor suddenly went up throughout the heart of Paris, only comparable to that raised during the Deluge.

  “He’s rabid! He’s rabid! Alfred is rabid!”

  And the cry reverberated from one echo to the next, beyond the future fortifications, throwing all of France into terror, while the Chappe telegraph18 waved its long arms everywhere, from Montmartre to Belleville to Monthléry, demanding the immediate dispatch of artillery from every province, all the way to Marseilles.

  Meanwhile, the firemen were arriving—quite impotent, poor fellows! The situation was becoming increasingly grave. Paris was breathless, and a million voices were moaning: “Alfred is rabid! Alfred is rabid!”

  And the situation was, in fact, grave, for hydrophobia multiplied the pachyderm’s strength ten- or a hundred-fold.

  After having darted a circular glance around him, establishing that he had made the boulevard a desert, Alfred had launched himself at the barricade, caused it to collapse and passed over it in a single bund.

  Paris was doomed, and I would require the pen of a Victor Hugo to describe the anguish that gripped a million hearts at that moment within the capital and its suburbs, not to mention Robinson and the Lilas. Even Paul de Kock19 had no further desire to make his co-citizens laugh.

  It was a supreme and solemn moment—a moment ineradicable from the soul of a race!

  The director of the menagerie remembered that Aglaea had bitten Alfred lightly on the trunk. There was no doubt about it: Aglaea had died of rabies!

  Alfred was rabid! The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris had sent a telegram to Rome asking the Pope to bless France.

  It was, however, the governor of the Invalides who saved the situation; hastily, with his fittest men—which is to say, the least invalid20—had set up his cannons in a battery in the Place de la Concorde, lined up in front of the Rue Royale.

  When Alfred, handsome and terrible in his horror, with foam dripping from his mouth and blood in his eyes, emerged opposite the Église de la Madeleine, he hesitated for a second—the time of a lightning-flash—and threw himself recklessly into the Rue Royale.

  The old governor of the Invalides uttered a cry of victory, which made his silver nose fall off. He waited five seconds—five centuries! The sun itself seemed to pause to contemplate the scene, and the fountains in the Place de la Concorde spontaneously stilled their crystalline song…

  When the elephant reached the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré, the old governor of the Invalides shouted: “Fire!”—and a frightful discharge of grapeshot scythed Alfred, cutting him in two, causing the steps of the Madeleine to explode into shards through the closed gates.

  Paris was saved, but it counted thirty-seven dead, crushed in the crowd, and nine hundred and eighty-one wounded. As for the darling hurled at the barricade, she got away with a broken leg.

  It was from that day on that, in anticipation of another rabid elephant, the Prefect of the Seine had the trees surrounded by protective iron grilles. Bureaucracy never surrenders its rights!

  People who fall ill are legion, numbered in thousands, and that is why I have undertaken to tell you this true and terrifying history of an already distant epoch today.

  Mammonth and Behemoth

  How I saw a living mammoth. Curious experiments.

  I had come to dinner one evening at the home of a young attaché in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, Prince D***, and we were chatting in a desultory fashion in the abandoned and ecstatic pose of boa-constrictors digesting their meal, when, after a pause during which we had watched the bluer wisps of or cigar-smoke rise up, he spoke to me, suddenly but slowly, as if to make sure I understood what he was saying.

  “There’s a legend here, you know, which says that the Mammonth—which is mistakenly called the Mammoth, without the N21—is simply the contemporary, or rather the same animal, as the famous Behemoth of scripture.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you also know that layers and mountains of the bones and tusks—fossilized ivory—of these animals have been found on the innumerable islands that extend into the Arctic Ocean like a long chaplet, along the coast of Siberia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Finally, you’re not unaware that a certain number of Mammonths have even been found intact, in the ice, with their fur and their impressive manes, reminiscent of those of majestic lions—irrefutable witnesses of those remote times?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And perhaps you know that one day, at the great banquet held for the entire European scientific community by the Imperial Geographical Society of Tobolsk, it was possible to serve excellent Mammonth fillet-steaks, perfectly conserved, fresh and exquisite, which might have been twenty, thirty or forty thousand years old, perhaps more.”

  “I was there.”

  Prince D*** looked at me, suddenly interested in his own words, on finding that he had listener already initiated into all these mysteries
. It was in an earnest tone that he went on: You’ve eaten one, but have you seen a living one?”

  “That’s madness!”

  “Madness, you say! Well, I have a living one, very much alive, at home on my country estate—except that, as the Emperor would certainly want it, no one knows that I possess such a treasure.

  “And it’s forty thousand years old?”

  “No, it’s only three years old, and if you’ll promise to be discreet, we can take the express tomorrow—it’s only a day’s journey from here—and I’ll let you see it.”

  I looked at the Prince, convinced that he was mad. He was very calm, though, and smiling, enjoying my amazement and bewilderment.

  “You’re wondering whether I have a spider in the ceiling, as you say in France, eh?” Suddenly gripping my hands affectionately, he added: “No, my friend, I only have a living Mammonth, very much alive, in my stables.”

  “A male?” I asked, with an involuntary hint of mockery.

  “No, a female.”

  The Prince’s features then contracted so violently with pain that I thought I had offended him, and offered him all my apologies.

  “It’s not that—no, no, you’ll understand in two days, when we get to my country house.”

  We left the next day, and two days later, overwhelmed with emotion, ready to faint in confrontation with that sudden evocation of the earliest days of terrestrial fauna, I was contemplating with my own eyes and touching with my fingers the fantastic rump of the Mammonth.

  I thought I was dreaming; I could no longer pronounce a single word. The Prince patiently enjoyed my nervousness.

  Finally, when I was able to speak, I said: “Indeed, one can see by the coat alone that it’s a female; the fur is beautiful and thick, but the mane isn’t as imposing as those I’ve seen in your Natural History Museum, which belonged to males.

  “Evidently,” he said, bitterly.

  “But tell me, please, how you come to have this fabulous beast in your home.”

  “It’s quite simple, and I’ll explain it to you in a few words. Have you heard mention of artificial fertilization? There’s a physician who specializes in it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, about twelve years ago, a Mammonth was found in a perfect state of conservation. I took the frozen fecund material—you understand—and melted it in a basin over a little fire, and by virtue of ordinary procedures that there is no need to go into, I put a female elephant that I had ordered by for that purpose from India, on the off chance, in an interesting condition. You can see that the spermatozoa returned to life after thousands of years—an admirable operation, chemical rather than vital—and after nine years, my female elephant delivered into the world the young Mammonth that you have before your eyes. Unfortunately, this one is also female, and when she dies, probably in a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, or more, it will be over; I will not have been able to resuscitate and perpetuate the species entirely.”22

  Prince D***’s eyes moistened with tears as he told me that.

  “But why not recommence the operation that succeeded so well the first time?”

  “I tried to conserve the material taken from the parts of the Mammonth, but it did not take long to decay, in spite of my precautions, and since, in spite of the millions I have spent financing searches, no one has been able to find a single intact Mammonth in the ice. Save for a chance impossible even to anticipate, I’ve lost all hope. And who knows, even if the condition were met, whether a second attempt would succeed?”

  I left the Prince plunged in his reflections—and that’s how I was able to see, twenty years ago, in the depths of Russia, a living Mammonth of flesh and bone. It is very probable, though, that it will never be possible to produce another specimen, nor to revive and recreate the species—and that, it must be admitted, is exactly what caused the despair of Prince D***, attaché to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Empire of all the Russias.

  Author’s Note: Like the majority of the stories comprising this volume, this story was published in the press several years ago, and since then, almost every day, events have occurred that prove me right and confirm my theories.

  In this respect, once and for all, I quote the Aurore of May 23, 1901:

  “The Russian Academy of Science has taken responsibility for bringing to St. Petersburg a mammoth that has been found in a state of perfect conservation in Siberia.

  “Measures have been taken to prevent the decomposition of the flesh, especially the internal organs, as well as the vegetables contained in the mammal’s stomach.

  “The body of the mammoth was discovered in the canton of Kolymsk, three thousand versts from Sredny-Kolymsk, after a landslide that occurred on the bank of the Beresovaya, a tributary of the Kolyma. Participants in the expedition include Messieurs O. Herz, fulfilling the functions of the principal zoologist of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and E. Pfitzmeyer, chief curator at the same Academy’s Museum.”23

  Followed by this, from July 12 of the same year:

  “We have reported that an extraordinary mammoth has recently been found in Siberia. The Petersburg Academy had received a telegram from the leader of the mission charged with transporting it, sent from Yakutsk, announcing that the expedition arrived in that town on 14 June, that it will travel up the river Aldan by steamboat and will then travel three thousand versts overland to reach Kolymsk, where it expects to arrive in two and a half months.

  “The mammoth in question is a unique specimen of its kind; the hair, skin and flesh are conserved entirely, and there are residues of undigested nourishment in its stomach.”

  No need for comment, is there?

  Animal Longevity

  Fish and birds. Surprising memory.

  A curious scientific inquiry.

  Some time ago, the majority of well-informed newspapers published the following surprising information:

  “The longevity of pike.

  “Extraordinary as it may seem, this fact in confirmed by a scientist.

  “According to him, one of the pike that can be seen in the Imperial Aquarium of St. Petersburg was born toward the end of the fifteenth century and is in relatively good health in spite of being four hundred years old and in captivity.

  “The professor adds that the fact is not as improbable as one might be inclined to believe, and that various other fish in the same aquarium are several hundred years old.”

  Struck by the truly mysterious and exciting nature of this dispatch, I immediately got in contact with the illustrious Petersburgian scientist, who desires to remain anonymous out of modesty, and took the liberty of sending him a program for an entire series of scientific experiments that I implored him to carry out, asking him to keep me up to date with the results obtained.

  With a sagacity and flair that exceeds the range of the most renowned artillerymen by a hundred yards, the illustrious scientist consented to follow my instructions to the letter, and the results have far surpassed his hopes and mine, as may be judged from the following letter, which he has just done me the honor of addressing to me:

  Monsieur, and honored colleague,

  On receiving your instructions I immediately realized that I was dealing with a distinguished naturalist (thank you) and, your instructions being, for me, the stroke of genius that lit my lantern (sic), I hastened to execute scrupulously the program that you wanted me to follow, and which was to prove so fecund, since it has permitted me to establish in a definitive manner the longevity and memory of fish and birds—brothers in nature, since they each swim in a fluid of different density.

  I began by seeking information as to the location where the venerable pike that has lived for more than four centuries was captured; it did not take long to discover that it had been caught in a lake not far from the capital.

  With the permission of the authorities, I returned it with a thousand precautions to its ancestral lake, and as the water therein is very clear, I followed its initial maneuvers with
poignant excitement and a little boat.

  At first it was a little out of its element—which is understandable after such long captivity. Soon, though, I saw it dart like an arrow beneath the surface to find another pike as large as itself, and they both delivered themselves immediately to unequivocal manifestations of joy and leaps that proved to me that they recognized one another.

  Immediately, with a much-improved apparatus of my own invention, I captured the four-hundred-year-old pike from the aquarium again, and the other. After an attentive examination I realized that the latter was a female and bore a particular mark on its head, just as the pike from the aquarium bears a slight mark on its tail—and, by virtue of a very curious phenomenon, the majority of the young pike that are presently in the lake posses the two revealing signs, albeit considerably attenuated. Go on, then—after that, deny the power of atavism across the centuries. There was no longer any possible doubt; those two venerable representatives of the pike species really were the father and mother of all the pike in the lake today, and the aquarium pike had spontaneously recognized the companion of his youth, which he had loved four centuries ago, the mother of his children. O prodigy of animal memory!

  But that was not all that I obtained from the truly marvelous aspect of my experiments. Still in conformity with your instructions, I replaced my pike in the lake, this time keeping its female companion captive.

  As on the first occasion, when it was put in the water, I follow it in my boat. Slowly, it traversed the entire lake, but suddenly, as it was passing the lock-keeper’s house, it stopped, leapt out of the water several times and began uttering little cries of joy—which is very rare in fish—while a parrot that was in a cage outside the lock-keeper’s house began flapping its wings gaily, crying out several times in the old Russian manner: “Cuckoo! There he is!”