Sunday morning, after mass, a man whose face appeared to be imprinted with a bleak sadness was making his way through the crowd in the main square of Calais.
All the people who noticed him looked at him with expressions of profound commiseration; some of them talked to one another about the misfortunes that had overtaken him; others came up to him respectfully to shake his hand and tell him how sorry they were for his troubles.
The man who was the object of so much sympathy was about fifty years old. His talents and inventive genius had won him a reputation for ten leagues around, and although he did not possess any medical qualification no one ever addressed him by any other title than “Doctor Trinitus.”
Unfortunately, like many poor and timid inventors. Trinitus had suffered a great deal from the jealousy and bad faith of his rivals. He had almost been financially ruined in trying to realize the machines and items of apparatus that he was incessantly imagining, and the scientific academies of Paris and London had turned a deaf ear to his communications.
The last blow that had struck him had completed his misfortune. His wife Thérèse, the daughter of a rich English family, and his daughter Alice, only eighteen years old, had perished in a shipwreck on their way to collect the immense fortune of a relative who had died six months earlier in Australia.
The insouciance of the English in undertaking long voyages is well-known. Trinitus, retained in France by important work on which he had founded great hopes, had not looked upon the departure of his wife and daughter without great apprehension, but he had been obliged to give in to the pleas and tears of the former and the reckless temperament of the latter.
At any rate, the two voyagers, perhaps driven as much by curiosity as by their financial interests, had departed, under the protection of Thérèse’s cousin, Sir William Hervey, the ship’s doctor on the Richmond, which was to take them to Botany Bay. As far as Timor, where the vessel has refueled, the crossing had been very pleasant, but it seemed that a storm must have assailed the ship in the Coral Sea, for the French steamer Espérance, returning from the Marquesas Islands, had discovered the wreckage of the Richmond some time afterwards on the coast of an island in the Louisiade Archipelago.
When he heard that terrible news, Trinitus was working mysteriously in his house, situated on the edge of the sea on the road to Gravelines, a short distance from Calais. The mental impact he had sustained was so intense that, for three or four days, it was feared that he might commit suicide in a fit of despair.
For a month he had remained indoors without seeing anyone, only listening to the consolations of Nicaise, a former mariner who had become his gardener, and whom he had adopted as a confidant.
Nicaise had a nephew named Marcel, about twenty-five years old, who was hoping to make a career in the merchant marine. Marcel had long felt a keen affection for Alice, Trinitus’ daughter, but, being too poor to aspire to her hand, he had always kept the passion that was devouring him secret. On learning about the wreck of the Richmond, he had initially experienced great anguish, but had eventually found in the terrible event a generous idea that gave birth in his heart to a previously-unimagined hope.
Thus, on the Sunday when Trinitus had finally emerged from his house to go to Calais, Marcel, perceiving him in the crowd, hastened to go to him. After having told the scientist how he shared his suffering, he asked him to accord him a few minutes’ conversation.
“Would you care to accompany me back to the house?” Trinitus asked him. “You’ll be able to see your Uncle Nicaise.”
Marcel accepted the offer enthusiastically.
Once they were outside the town, the young man, moved to tears, opened his heart to the scientist. “I’ve always hidden from you,” he told him, “the affection I experienced for Alice. Our situations were too far apart for me ever to be bold enough to ask you for her hand. If, however, saved by Providence, Alive were still alive, and if I were to have the honor of bringing her back to you one day, would you, in recompense for my devotion, give her to me as a wife?”
Two large tears escaped the scientist’s eyes. “Marcel,” he said, shaking the young man’s hand, “from now on I regard you as my soon. I’ve resolved to go in search of my child and my beloved Thérèse myself. If you’re not afraid to go with me, we can leave in four days.”
“In four days! That’s impossible…the English steamer doesn’t leave London until the end of the month, and it’s only the sixteenth today.”
“We shan’t wait for the steamer.”
“But how…?”
“We’ll depart in a vessel of my own invention.…”
“A vessel of your invention? To go to Australia?”
“The steamer takes a hundred and ten days to make the journey; we’ll only take two weeks.”
“What! Two weeks! Did you say two weeks?”
“And we’ll travel underwater, like the fish.”
On hearing these last words, Marcel uttered a cry of alarm and stopped, amazed.
Trinitus, attempting to smile, looked at him calmly. “I’m not mad,” he told him. “You’ll see my nutshell, and if you don’t have any confidence in her, you can take the steamer.…”
Trinitus’ strange proposal was utterly incomprehensible to Marcel. He looked at the scientist with a bewildered expression, not knowing how to respond, and wondering whether it was really possible, rationally, to make such inventions.
So, he said to himself, under the water, in a machine constructed by this man, we’re going to go from Calais to Australia, in the middle of Oceania? The very idea is insane! We’re two madmen, the scientist and I!
While devoting himself to these reflections, however the young man continued walking alongside Trinitus.
After an hour they arrived at the house and were greeted by Nicaise. The master of the house went to fetch the keys to his laboratory.
In the meantime, Marcel stayed in the garden with his uncle. “Tell me frankly,” he said to him, “is the doctor’s mind a little deranged?”
“Get away! You’re joking. Why do you ask?”
“He wants to take me to Australia, under water, in a fortnight.…”
Bewildered, Nicaise looked his nephew in the face. “What are you saying?” he said, dazedly.
“He’s built a boat capable of doing that…come on, you must know something about it?”
“A boat, you say? Hang on!” Nicaise’s face suddenly lit up. “For ten years we’ve been working on something of which I’ve only seen the separate parts. The doctor has assembled the machine himself, in secret, keeping it hidden in the big room adjacent to his laboratory. That must be the boat!”
At that moment Trinitus emerged from the house carrying a bunch of keys and headed toward the outbuilding in which he had set up his laboratory.
“Come on,” he said to Marcel, and then added: “You too, Nicaise.…”
He opened the door of his workshop, then that of the large room into which only he had entered for ten years, and he invited Nicaise and is nephew
