to a piece of the sole of a foot shriveled into three lobes, somewhat reminiscent of a human doll. We asked for specimens, but the coolies on land and sea refused to handle them, claiming that one could catch the Napus by contact with them.
That etymological persistence of the term “Napus” through languages very distant from one another demonstrates the degree of terror and mental anxiety attached to the plague, such that people clung superstitiously to its initial denomination. The Chinese ideogram created with that intention, which the Japanese copied, represented it by a grid composed of three vertical strokes on the right. Introduced to a manuscript or a prayer-wheel, it was equivalent to the doubt arising from the sudden extinction of the personality, without one knowing into which part of the invisible the Dragon has carried it and hidden it. Commercial travelers in the Far East let it be known that the Sons of Heaven, to protect themselves, were chewing the sole-shaped residues, after having crushed them into a sort of disgusting powder.
That means was no more ridiculous or arbitrary than Ailette’s brew, but the members of the Aristotle Foundation were thrown into great perplexity by the fact that there now existed two forms of the Napus, one total, the other with a residue or relic. Electromagneto-radiant installations being less numerous in China and Asia than in Europe and America, Sidoine’s theory acquired a certain prestige thereby, which did not take long to complicate affairs.
With the blissful or artificial optimism characteristic of the ignorant, the most widely-circulated newspapers, which are the ones that provide the most inaccurate news—for the masses abhor truth as nature abhors a vacuum—had started out by declaring that the disease would not be generalized. On the contrary, it would become a rarity, or, at least, a temporary accident, due to obscure causes, and would disappear one day just as it had arrived. Far from taking that course, however, the Napus soon appeared as a new and unexpected catastrophe, firmly-established, which, threatening bodies to the extent of annihilating them, resounded in all the domains of the intellect.
It is true that ordinary death, death “with remains,” lies in wait for everyone from birth onwards, and all poets, preachers, and philosophers have embroidered beautiful and sometimes grandiose variations on that theme—but the threat of the new death, the death without remains, appeared to be something more redoubtable and more atrocious, in that it disturbed entrenched habits and extended depopulation even to the cemeteries. It was called the “blank epidemic,” and also the “empty epidemic.” In all the dailies, the necrological section was doubled in size, and necrology, properly speaking, became napusology. For example, one could read in the Vingt-troisième Siècle, in Le Figaro, and in Action Française—which had become, by force of circumstance, the official newspaper of the monarchy—news of this sort:
The Disease (with a capital D, because after two months one did not even say Napus any longer) has claimed another victim in the person of Monsieur d’Estampille, former Undersecretary of State for Finance, who disappeared yesterday at five p.m. at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de Rohan, in his fifty-fifth year. God has his soul! The commemorative service will be held at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule next Tuesday at ten a.m.
Or:
We record with regret the decease by the Disease of Mademoiselle Mahaufret (Élodie), disappeared in her property at Étampes, Les Clochettes, on Saturday the 14th at 3 p.m. God has her soul! The religious service will be held, etc.…
Or even:
It is with veritable dolor that we learn of the total disappearance of Professor Chestenèfre (Adhémar), which occurred during his lecture at the École de Médecine on Thursday last, in the large amphitheater at five p.m. The laic Astonishment will be held tomorrow, Saturday, in the courtyard of the Écoles in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at noon. No flowers or wreaths.
The ceremony of “laic Astonishment” consisted of a sort of punch of honor dedicated to the memory of the deceased, in the course of which each member of the audience raised his eyes to the President of the Astonished and made the sign of the amazement caused by the sudden annihilation. I had the opportunity to be present at the Astonishment of that brute Chentenèfre, one of the last representatives of the scientific materialism of yore, in company with my cousin Polyplast 17,178, and I cannot describe the state of hilarity into which that baroque ceremony plunged us.
Some people boldly declared that, of the two faces of Death, they preferred the neater one, the one that boldly gave the lie to the celebrated axiom that “nothing is destroyed, nothing is created”—but the majority stubbornly refrained, out of superstition even from pronouncing the word “Napus,” and changed the subject if the topic arose in conversation.
The Disease, which had begun by striking old men or adults, went on from there quite rapidly to adolescents, notably of the female sex, and then to children, even nurslings, which suddenly disappeared from their mothers’ arms, leaving the breast bare. It seemed that the plague was thus re-climbing the slope of life from bottom to top. It was also remarked that it preferentially attacked perfectly healthy individuals, although that was not an absolute rule. Lunatics, ataxics, the tubercular and the syphilitic were in the front line in the statistics of hospitals and the private clientele.
As a member of the Aristotle Foundation I easily acquired from the municipal council the placement of a marble plaque at the location of the first case of the Napus officially recorded, with the date 3 May 2227. It was a historic and scientific souvenir of the first order. When it came to the inauguration of the plaque the following July, however, there was a superstitious retreat. I solicited, successively, the Ministries, the Constitutional Bodies, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie Française and the Académie de Médecine, but in vain. Everyone found a pretext to refuse me his collaboration, and I foresaw the moment when I would have to conduct the ceremony on my own, with the groundskeeper and the man with the lifting-tackle. At the last moment, however, a few highly-placed individuals, fearful of ridicule, changed their minds, including an immortal by the name of Bachelard, who had written a small treatise on the metaphysical significance of “the Disease.” A podium had been set up on the very place where the little girl had pronounced the famous phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” I had ordered a brass band, which was to play one of those military marches of which we Polyplasts are so fond.
Then something implausible happened: at the moment when Bachelard, dressed in green like a giant frog, unfolded his notes and opened his mouth to begin his speech, a dry click was heard…and the Academician disappeared.
“Impossible to show more tact,” said the lovely Tastepain, who had lost a fiancé the same way a few months earlier. The discovery of a fifth magnetic center in the cell had rapidly consoled her.
I like Catholic Theology a lot. It is the only science that does not vary and its centuries-old subtlety puts to shame the sketchiness of the other research to which our intelligence has devoted itself. The rumor went around that the appearance of the Disease, which no mystic had foreseen, disconcerted the austere and religious scientists who had saved—once again—humanism and civilization two hundred years before. Not trusting the rumor-mongers, who are the dust, and then the mud, of life in society, I resolved to clarify the matter.
I went to see Père Estève in his convent at Richefort in the Cévennes. The great Benedictine received me with his customary generosity and affability. He knew nothing about the Napus except what he had read in the newspapers. None of his monks had disappeared—but had such an event occurred, it would not have caused him any more emotion than a death with remains.
“Death, my dear boy, is still death, and if Providence has decided that this new form of cessation of life should exist, it’s evidently for our greater good.”
“But Father, one can be surprised by the Napus outside of a state of contrition.”
“It’s
