and accepted by the frivolous and by scientists?”
I told him what I knew. Père Estève did not know the origin of the word “Napus.” He laughed wholeheartedly on learning it, and made the remark that once again, an innocent child had been the first witness of the prodigy. “For it is indeed a prodigy, which might lead to extraordinary changes. I can’t remember any similar upheaval of ideas or habits. But tell me, my boy, what impression you felt before that extraordinary annihilation, comparable to the extinction of a fire?”
I was obliged to confess that the impression had been primarily comical, and that the majority of Polyplasts had reacted and were reacting to the Napus in the same way. The issue of successive interbreedings, and destined, in the ideas of the legislators, to propagate the ideas of peace and humanism through our shaky societies of the twenty-third century, our reaction had been the inverse of the one expected of us. The complexity of our temperaments had given one of them—the national—sway over the others, and reinforced the warrior instinct. Under the cover of pure science, we were dreaming of domination and battles, and that psychological inclination combined with the economic and industrial inclination that pushes ever harder for the intensive manufacture of improved arms, gases, heavy artillery, electrical weapons, and so on.
While I was speaking, Père Estève shook his head, doubtless ruminating the words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.…”
2. Joseph Görres (1776-1848) was a leading member of the German Romantic Movement whose activities as a journalist made him a leading critic of Napoléon, who thought his Der Rheinische Merkur a particularly significant ideological enemy. He also became a significant Catholic mystic, publishing a five-volume account of Christliche Mystik between 1836 and 1842.
3. The prophetic quatrains published by Nostradamus in 1555 and divided into ten “centuries” were greatly elaborated after his death, although most fakes did at least observe the four-line format that is neglected here. In the same way, the most famous set of prophecies credited—falsely—to a twelfth-century monk were attributed to the Irish Saint Malachy, not to a “Moldavian” (Moldavia had not yet come into existence at that time), so Daudet appears to be deliberately playing up the falsity of the entire prophetic tradition.
4. Various characters of this name featured in French literature trace their origin back to one of the stock figures of the Théâtre du Guignol de Lyon, a marionette theater related ancestrally to the Italian commedia dell’arte and in terms of its descendants to British “Punch and Judy” shows. The word “sarsifie,” approximately equivalent to the English slang term “sauce” [pugnacious impertinence] was invented to describe the particular character of his irreverence.
5. Grégeois-la-Grège translates as “raw Greek fire.”
6. Élie Metchnikoff was a leading researcher at the Institut Pasteur, who received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his studies of the immune system and the activity of phagocytes. The scornfully sarcastic reference is presumably to his commercial promotion of an ointment of calomel (mercury chloride) as a prophylactic against syphilis. The use of mercury to treat syphilis—which, if it ever worked at all, was severely undermined in its utility by horrid side-effects—fell into disuse after the discovery of better antibacterial treatments, eventually capped by antibiotics.
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