The Eternal Adam and other stories (24 page)

But the investigation, though decided upon
by the municipal council, produced no result. If the facts were clear, the
causes escaped the sagacity of the magistrates. Besides, tranquillity had been
restored in the public mind, and with tranquillity, forgetfulness of the
strange scenes of the theatre. The newspapers avoided speaking of them, and the
account of the performance which appeared in the
Quiquendone Memorial,
made no allusion to this intoxication of the entire audience.

Meanwhile, though the town resumed its
habitual phlegm, and became apparently Flemish as before, it was observable
that, at bottom, the character and temperament of the people changed little by
little. One might have truly said, with Dominique Custos, the doctor, that
‘their nerves were affected’.

Let us explain. This undoubted change only
took place under certain conditions. When the Quiquendonians passed through the
streets of the town, walked in the squares or along the Vaar, they were always
the cold and methodical people of former days. So, too, when they remained at
home, some working with their hands and others with their heads, – these doing
nothing, those thinking nothing. – their private life was silent, inert,
vegetating as before. No quarrels, no household squabbles, no acceleration in
the beating of the heart, no excitement of the brain. The mean of their
pulsations remained as it was of old, from fifty to fifty-two per minute.

But, strange and inexplicable phenomenon
though it was, which would have defied the sagacity of the most ingenious
physiologists of the day, if the inhabitants of Quiquendone did not change in
their home life, they were visibly changed in their civil life and in their
relations between man and man, to which it leads.

If they met together in some public
edifice, it did not ‘work well’, as Commissary Passauf expressed it. On change,
at the town-hall, in the amphitheatre of the academy, at the sessions of the
council, as well as at the reunions of the
savants
, a strange excitement
seized the assembled citizens. Their relations with each other became
embarrassing before they had been together an hour. In two hours the discussion
degenerated into an angry dispute. Heads became heated, and personalities were
used. Even at church, during the sermon, the faithful could not listen to Van
Stabel, the minister, in patience, and he threw himself about in the pulpit and
lectured his flock with far more than his usual severity. At last this state of
things brought about altercations more grave, alas! than that between Custos
and Schut, and if they did not require the interference of the authorities, it
was because the antagonists, after returning home, found there, with its calm,
forgetfulness of the offences offered and received.

This peculiarity could not be observed by
these minds, which were absolutely incapable of recognising what was passing in
them. One person only in the town, he whose office the council had thought of
suppressing for thirty years, Michael Passauf, had remarked that this
excitement, which was absent from private houses, quickly revealed itself in
public edifices; and he asked himself, not without a certain anxiety, what
would happen if this infection should ever develop itself in the family
mansions, and if the epidemic – this was the word he used – should extend
through the streets of the town. Then there would be no more forgetfulness of
insults, no more tranquillity, no intermission in the delirium; but a permanent
inflammation, which would inevitably bring the Quiquendonians into collision
with each other.

‘What would happen then?’ Commissary
Passauf asked himself in terror. ‘How could these furious savages be arrested?
How check these goaded temperaments? My office would be no longer a sinecure,
and the council would be obliged to double my salary – unless it should arrest
me myself, for disturbing the public peace!’

These very reasonable fears began to be
realised. The infection spread from change, the theatre, the church, the
town-hall, the academy, the market, into private houses, and that in less than
a fortnight after the terrible performance of the
Huguenots.

Its first symptoms appeared in the house of
Collaert, the banker.

That wealthy personage gave a ball, or at
least a dancing-party, to the notabilities of the town. He had issued, some
months before, a loan of 30,000 francs, three-quarters of which had been
subscribed; and to celebrate this financial success, he had opened his drawing
rooms, and given a party to his fellow-citizens.

Everybody knows that Flemish parties are
innocent and tranquil enough, the principal expense of which is usually in beer
and syrups. Some conversation on the weather, the appearance of the crops, the
fine condition of the gardens, the care of flowers, and especially of tulips; a
slow and measured dance, from time to time, perhaps a minuet; sometimes a
waltz, but one of those German waltzes which achieve a turn and a half per
minute, and during which the dancers hold each other as far apart as their arms
will permit, – such is the usual fashion of the balls attended by the
aristocratic society of Quiquendone. The polka, after being altered to four
time, had tried to become accustomed to it; but the dancers always lagged
behind the orchestra, no matter how slow the measure, and it had to be
abandoned.

These peaceable reunions, in which the
youths and maidens enjoyed an honest and moderate pleasure, had never been
attended by any outburst of ill-nature. Why, then, on this evening at Collaert
the banker’s, did the syrups seem to be transformed into heady wines, into
sparkling champagne, into heating punches? Why, towards the middle of the
evening, did a sort of mysterious intoxication take possession of the guests?
Why did the minuet become a jig? Why did the orchestra hurry with its
harmonies? Why did the candles, just as at the theatre, burn with unwonted
refulgence? What electric current invaded the banker’s drawing rooms? How
happened it that the couples held each other so closely, and clasped each
other’s hands so convulsively, that the ‘cavaliers seuls’ made themselves
conspicuous by certain extraordinary steps in that figure usually so grave, so
solemn, so majestic, so very proper?

Alas! what Oedipus could have answered
these unsolvable questions? Commissary Passauf, who was present at the party,
saw the storm coming distinctly, but he could not control it or fly from it,
and he felt a kind of intoxication entering his own brain. All his physical and
emotional faculties increased in intensity. He was seen, several times, to
throw himself upon the confectionery and devour the dishes, as if he had just
broken a long fast.

The animation of the ball was increasing
all this while. A long murmur, like a dull buzzing, escaped from all breasts.
They danced – really danced. The feet were agitated by increasing frenzy. The
faces became as purple as those of Silenus. The eyes shone like carbuncles. The
general fermentation rose to the highest pitch.

And when the orchestra thundered out the
waltz in
Der Freischütz,
– when this waltz, so German, and with a
movement so slow, was attacked with wild arms by the musicians, – ah! it was no
longer a waltz, but an insensate whirlwind, a giddy rotation, a gyration worthy
of being led by some Mephistopheles, beating the measure with a firebrand! Then
a galop, an infernal galop, which lasted an hour without anyone being able to
stop it, whirled off, in its windings, across the halls, the drawing rooms, the
antechambers, by the staircases, from the cellar to the garret of the opulent
mansion, the young men and young girls, the fathers and mothers, people of
every age, of every weight, of both sexes; Collaert, the fat banker, and Madame
Collaert, and the counsellors, and the magistrates, and the chief justice, and
Niklausse, and Madame Van Tricasse, and the Burgomaster Van Tricasse, and the
Commissary Passauf himself, who never could recall afterwards who had been his
partner on that terrible evening.

But
she
did not forget! And ever
since that day she has seen in her dreams the fiery commissary, enfolding her
in an impassioned embrace! And ‘she’ – was the amiable Tatanémance!

In which Doctor Ox
and Yg
è
ne, his assistant, say a few words

‘Well, Yg
è
ne?’

‘Well, master, all is ready. The laying of the pipes is finished.’ ‘At
last! Now, then, we are going to operate on a large scale, on the masses!’

In which it
will be seen that the epidemic invades the entire town, and what effect it
produces

During the following months the evil, in
place of subsiding, became more extended. From private houses the epidemic
spread into the streets. The town of Quiquendone was no longer to be
recognised.

A phenomenon yet stranger than those which
had already happened, now appeared; not only the animal kingdom, but the
vegetable kingdom itself, became subject to the mysterious influence.

According to the ordinary course of things,
epidemics are special in their operation. Those which attack humanity spare the
animals, and those which attack the animals spare the vegetables. A horse was
never inflicted with smallpox, nor a man with the cattle-plague, nor do sheep
suffer from the potato-rot. But here all the laws of nature seemed to be
overturned. Not only were the character, temperament, and ideas of the
townsfolk changed, but the domestic animals – dogs and cats, horses and cows,
asses and goats – suffered from this epidemic influence, as if their habitual
equilibrium had been changed. The plants themselves were infected by a similar
strange metamorphosis.

In the gardens and vegetable patches and
orchards very curious symptoms manifested themselves. Climbing plants climbed
more audaciously. Tufted plants became more tufted than ever. Shrubs became
trees. Cereals, scarcely sown, showed their little green heads, and gained, in
the same length of time, as much in inches as formerly, under the most
favourable circumstances, they had gained in fractions. Asparagus attained the
height of several feet; the artichokes swelled to the size of melons, the
melons to the size of pumpkins, the pumpkins to the size of gourds, the gourds
to the size of the belfry bell, which measured, in truth, nine feet in
diameter. The cabbages were bushes, and the mushrooms umbrellas.

The fruits did not lag behind the
vegetables. It required two persons to eat a strawberry, and four to consume a
pear. The grapes also attained the enormous proportions of those so well
depicted by Poussin in his
Return of the Envoys to the Promised Land.

It was the same with the flowers: immense violets spread the most
penetrating perfumes through the air; exaggerated roses shone with the
brightest colours; lilies formed, in a few days, impenetrable copses;
geraniums, daisies, camellias, rhododendrons, invaded the garden walks, and
stifled each other. And the tulips, – those dear liliaceous plants so dear to
the Flemish heart, – what emotion they must have caused to their zealous
cultivators! The worthy Van Bistrom nearly fell over backwards, one day, on
seeing in his garden an enormous ‘Tulipa gesneriana’, a gigantic monster, whose
cup afforded space to a nest for a whole family of robins!

The entire town flocked to see this floral
phenomenon, and renamed it the ‘Tulipa quiquendonia’.

But alas! if these plants, these fruits,
these flowers, grew visibly to the naked eye, if all the vegetables insisted on
assuming colossal proportions, if the brilliancy of their colours and perfume
intoxicated the smell and the sight, they quickly withered. The air which they
absorbed rapidly exhausted them, and they soon died, faded, and dried up.

Such was the fate of the famous tulip,
which, after several days of splendour, became emaciated, and fell lifeless.

It was soon the same with the domestic
animals, from the house-dog to the stable pig, from the canary in its cage to
the turkey of the back-court. It must be said that in ordinary times these
animals were not less phlegmatic than their masters. The dogs and cats
vegetated rather than lived. They never betrayed a wag of pleasure nor a snarl
of wrath. Their tails moved no more than if they had been made of bronze. Such
a thing as a bite or scratch from any of them had not been known from time
immemorial. As for mad dogs, they were looked upon as imaginary beasts, like
the griffins and the rest in the menagerie of the apocalypse.

But what a change had taken place in a few
months, the smallest incidents of which we are trying to reproduce! Dogs and
cats began to show teeth and claws. Several executions had taken place after
reiterated offences. A horse was seen, for the first time, to take his bit in
his teeth and rush through the streets of Quiquendone; an ox was observed to
precipitate itself, with lowered horns, upon one of his herd; an ass was seen
to turn himself over, with his legs in the air, in the Place Saint Ernuph, and
bray as ass never brayed before; a sheep, actually a sheep, defended valiantly
the cutlets within him from the butcher’s knife.

Van Tricasse, the burgomaster, was forced
to make police regulations concerning the domestic animals, as, seized with
lunacy, they rendered the streets of Quiquendone unsafe.