Rouletabille at Krupp's Read online

  Now, on the café terraces, around neatly-aligned tables, placid groups of people were taking aperitifs in the mildness of the evening, after the day’s labors. That’s pleasing, Rouletabille thought, really pleasing! And, as Clemenceau says, the Boche are at Noyon!7

  Abruptly, he recalled that he had not come to Paris to waste his time in vague philosophical reflections. He hastened his pace toward the newspaper offices, and soon crossed the threshold of L’Époque’s great hall.

  “Rouletabille! Rouletabille!” With what joy he was still welcomed in that old building, where he had none but comrades! Alas, some had already fallen on the battlefields, and the list of heroic victims was getting longer in the golden book proudly displayed in the hall, in the shadow of Mercié’s famous statue, Gloria Victis!8

  Those of an age at which infirmity had retained them in the editorial offices came out to kiss Rouletabille’s cheeks or shake his hand. They found him bearing up superbly beneath his muddy carapace. It was quite apt for them to think that “the war had done him good!”

  An old servant, however, with a breast bedecked with medals, was already informing the young man that “the boss” was asking for him. The reporter was immediately introduced into the office of the editor-in-chief.

  It was not without a certain emotion that Rouletabille went into that room, in which he would certainly learn the perhaps-redoubtable reason for which he had undertaken such an unexpected journey.

  The doors had closed again. The boss was alone.

  The man had always had a great amity for Rouletabille, whom he considered as something akin to a son of the household. Ordinarily, when he saw him again after a long absence or some sensation reportage, he welcomed him joyfully. Why, then, was he silent this time? What was wrong? What had happened? What did this solemnity, to which Rouletabille was not accustomed, signify?

  The reported briefly examined his conscience. “Boss, you’re frightening me!”

  “This isn’t the right time to be frightened of anyone or anything, my friend, and when I’ve told you why you’ve been ordered to come, you’ll share my opinion!”

  “You’re going to ask me to do something terrible?”

  “Yes.”

  “Speak, Monsieur—I’m listening.”

  At that moment, the telephone rang, and the director unhooked the apparatus set on his desk.

  “Hello? Hello? Oh, very good—it’s you, Monsieur le Ministre... Yes, he’s here!... In good health, indeed!... No, I haven’t said anything to him yet... All he knows is that there’s a ninety-nine per cent chance of not coming back from the mission... What did he say? Nothing, of course... Of course he’ll accept!... Do I still think so? Of course I think so! He’s the only one who can get us out of it... Hello? Hello? It’s still on for this evening? Good, good!... Eh? Cromer has arrived from London? Well, what did he say? Hello?... Eh?... Frightful!... Good, good!... Prefect!... Yes, that’s much better!... Until this evening!”

  The editor hung up the telephone. “You realized that we were talking about you!”

  “Which Minister was it?” Rouletabille asked.

  “You’ll find out this evening—we’re meeting him at half past ten.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Ministry of the Interior, where certain other very important people will also be gathering.”

  “Oh—that means it’s a real cabinet meeting.”

  “Yes, Rouletabille, a real cabinet meeting, but a meeting so secret that it has to remain unknown to all those who aren’t taking part in it—a meeting at which you’ll learn what’s expected of you, my young friend. In the meantime...”

  “In the meantime, I’ll go take a bath,” Rouletabille declared, utterly delighted with the extraordinary complexion of events.

  “Go take a bath and come back clean and ready to go. We need all your strength, Rouletabille, all your courage and all your intelligence.”

  The young man was already at the door, but the voice of his chief had suddenly taken on such a singular weight in pronouncing the last words that he turned round. He saw that the boss was becoming increasing emotional.

  “Oh! I’ve never seen you in such a state, Boss. You’re usually so calm! My God, what can this be about?”

  The editor took his hands then, leaned toward the reporter and looked into his eyes. “It’s quite simply a matter of saving Paris, my young friend. Do you hear, Rouletabille? Saving Paris! Now, until this evening, at half past ten...”

  Chapter II

  The Secret Cabinet Meeting

  The reporter disappeared, escaping down a service stairway. He wanted to be alone; he needed to think.

  All in all, he could hardly contain his joy. Since the beginning of the war, he had, like so many others, done his duty obscurely, risking his life a hundred times over in the anonymous needs of national defense, which was certainly full of grandeur, although he would have liked something—let us say the word that was in the back of the reporter’s mind—“more amusing.” How many times had he not wished that someone might call on his gifts of initiative and invention, in order to carry out some exceptionally difficult mission to which he could have given his entire soul, his entire imagination!

  Well, today he had his wish. He had been summoned in order to save Paris! The most important people in the State were looking to Corporal Rouletabille to save Paris! Quite simply!

  But what did it mean, though: save Paris?

  Those two words were exciting him, dazzling him, although he could not comprehend what form such prodigious adventure might take. He knew full well, having returned from the trenches that the others could no longer get through—and everyone else knew that too—and even if they were able to get through, that he could not possibly stop them all on his own! And yet, it followed from the conversation he had just had with his boss that it was him who was going to save Paris—that they were counting on him to save Paris! How, then?

  “Some hope!” he said, aloud, on the boulevard that he was in the process of crossing, in order to jump into a cab that would take him to the bath-house...

  An hour later, when he came out from there, after some furious hygienic exercise and a solid massage, he found himself much calmer, quite self-composed, ready for any eventuality, all set for any adventure. He dined in a modest restaurant in the Champs-Élysées, in the shade of an arbor, alone with his thoughts and the impatience that he was having difficulty suppressing. He would have liked to show the “very important people” a Rouletabille of marble, whom nothing could disturb.

  At ten o’clock he went through the gate of the Place Beauvau. He was immediately shown into the office of the minister’s chief aide; the editor of L’Époque was already there.

  “They’re briefing the Minister,” the Boss said to him as he shook his hand—and they both stood there, face to face, in silence.

  Suddenly, a door opened. An usher showed “the Messieurs” into the Minister’s office. A “very important person” was there, whom Rouletabille recognized. Polite formalities were exchanged.

  “How goes it with the troops!”

  “Fine.”

  “Sit down then, please.

  Another “very important person” arrived, and was introduced to Rouletabille.

  “Delighted to meet you, young man. Your editor has told us that impossible things can be asked of you. We shall see...”

  Rouletabille did not have time to reply. A third VIP made his entrance. It was the one to whom the editor of L’Époque had spoken on the telephone as soon as Rouletabille had arrived.

  “Well, have you seen Cromer?” everyone asked.

  “Cromer,” replied the latest arrival, “ought to be upstairs. I told him to meet us at half past ten. What he’s revealed is frightful!”

  Another door opened, and the head of the Sûreté Générale was announced. “Messieurs,” he said, “all my people are here. If you’d care to come up, I’m at your disposal.”

  So it was to the Sûreté Général
e that they were going; they had not wanted to hold the extraordinary meeting in the Ministry itself, but in a more discreet and secluded place.

  Through internal stairways and corridors, whose labyrinth Rouletabille knew well, they went to the office of the head of the Sûreté Générale. In the little vestibule preceding the office, a clean-shaven man of Anglo-Saxon appearance, with an energetic expression, was standing with his arms folded, while in the depths of an armchair, an honorable old lady in a black bonnet was displaying a face full of anguish imprinted with infinite sadness. The VIPs bowed to her.

  One of them went to the man. “Would you please come in with us, Mr. Cromer.”

  The old lady had not moved. She remained alone in the vestibule, with the usher, who closed his chief’s office door on the others.

  In the office, they all sat down.

  We have employed a necessary discretion in designating the “very important people” who had been assembled there by the head of the Sûreté Générale, and in order to denote their individuality we shall employ the same terms that Rouletabille used when he had to recall in his notes the role that each one played in the mysterious session.

  Firstly, there was the one that everyone addressed as “Monsieur le Président,” and sometimes as “Monsieur le Premier,” an expression that is used to address the Prime Minister, the President of the Council and also the President of the Parisian Court of Appeal.9

  The second VIP—the one who had introduced Mr. Cromer—was distinguished by an enormous pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which set veritable portholes over his clean-shaven face every time he had to read a piece of paper or found it interesting to study the features of his interlocutor. Rouletabille, in referring to him, called him “Horn-rimmed Glasses.”10

  Finally, the third one never stopped smoking enormous cigars, of which he had a profuse supply in a briefcase as large as a small valise. A long time ago, Rouletabille had already nicknamed him “the Tobacconist.”11

  As he went in, the reporter had slipped into a dark corner from which he could see everything, where he hoped to be forgotten.

  “Should we send for Nourry?” asked the head of the Sûreté Générale, to begin with.

  Horn-rimmed Glasses, bringing some papers out of his morocco portfolio, said: “No, not yet. First I’m going to read you this letter from Fulbert, which the Invention Service has discovered.”

  “You’ll admit, my dear friend, that it’s quite incredible that the Service could receive such an item!” said the one they called the President.

  “The staff of the Service will tell you,” Horn-rimmed Glasses replied, “that they receive a hundred of the same sort every month. What’s more, they’re of all kinds. They ended up finding Fulbert’s missive among those that had been rejected as having been written by lunatics!”

  With the exception of Rouletabille, everyone there uttered an exclamation, especial the editor of L’Époque.

  “But Fulbert isn’t just anyone!” he said. “His work on the curative virtues of radium were beginning to cause a sensation a few months before the war broke out.”

  “Bah! Let’s not exaggerate,” replied Horn-rimmed Glasses. “Let’s remember that at that time, the scientific establishment was already beginning to treat Fulbert as a poet and a dreamer. And since you remember the claim he made that all the afflictions of humankind would one day be curable with his radium, imagine the astonishment of the staff of the Inventions on receiving a letter in which the same inventor affirmed that he had found a way of destroying ‘in five seconds,’ a considerable fraction of that same humankind. Judge for yourselves; I’ll read

  “To Monsieur etc. etc. I have the honor of informing you that I can put at the disposal of the Office of Inventions the plans for an infernal machine capable of destroying a city the size of Berlin in a few minutes, without leaving our own frontiers. Please believe me, Monsieur le Ministre. Your devoted servant, Théodore Fulbert.”

  Chapter III

  The Tribulations of an Inventor

  “Well, you’ll admit,” said Horn-rimmed Glasses, replacing the singular letter in his portfolio, “that it’s quite excusable, after reading such a document, to think that it might emanate from a cracked brain. What do you expect? It might well have been signed Théodore Fulbert, but the tranquil simplicity with which the scientist, who has always been reputed to be rather eccentric, announces to us that he will place himself at our disposal for the destruction of Berlin, would have inclined the least prejudiced individual to offer dire prognostications regarding the imminent future of such a fine intelligence...”

  It was then that Mr. Cromer’s voice was heard or the first time. That individual spoke French with a very pronounced English accent. He expressed himself with difficulty, but forcefully, and once he had found the term he needed, he launched it at his interlocutor with a brutality that seemed designed to annihilate any trace of dispute or argument.

  “Pardon me, Your Excellencies—it’s necessary to know that Théodore Fulbert did not even receive any reply. Indeed, that’s not saying enough—in my opinion. the poor old scientist has been treated by you like a young man undertaking his first experiments in physics. In my opinion, your inventors are very good, but always regarded as quite mad. Yes, I say so! There are certainly research establishments like the Collège de France and the Museum, but outside of that establishment nothing at all. No! And outside the Pasteur Institute for biological studies, nothing at all for other inventions. No! But in Germany, there is one institute for general research very well endowed with large sums of money, in which the emperor takes a great interest. Yes! In America, in England, generous billionaires have created research institutions—and all your inventors are going to England or America, like Carrel,12 a Frenchman at the American Rockefeller Institute—and they also went, before the war, to enrich Germany, because patents there are guaranteed by the German government. Yes!”

  Beneath this flood of curt phrases, everyone had initially bowed their heads, but, the President having made a gesture of impatience, Horn-rimmed Glasses ventured to interrupt the terrible Mr. Cromer.

  “I think it’s a little late for us to spend time on these criticisms, perhaps justified...”

  “Yes, I’m criticizing. I beg your pardon. That’s why I’ve come. In France, in Paris, as I say, inventors are like children abandoned on the road of science. Théodore Fulbert wrote that to me, and then I read his letter to my Institution personally! I replied! And then he came—and I saw, when I listened to him, how serious and terrible what he was saying was!”

  The President interrupted the Englishman again. “Let’s proceed in order. Before going to find Mr. Cromer, didn’t he communicate with the editor of L’Époque?”

  “That’s right,” he latter immediately replied, “and for myself, I did what Mr. Cromer did—I asked Fulbert to come to see me, and I questioned him, and found that everything he had to say was less ridiculous than terrible, as Mr. Cromer says—so terrible that I invited him to dinner that same evening with General D***.”

  “General D*** is at Salonika,”13 Horn-rimmed Glasses put in. “I had an opportunity to see him a few days before his departure, He didn’t say anything to me about Fulbert...”

  “He’d probably forgotten already,” said the editor of L’Époque.

  “Fulbert hadn’t made much of an impression on him, then?” asked the Tobacconist.

  “All the details of that dinner remain quite clear in my mind,” replied the editor of L’Époque.”

  “Please be so kind as to acquaint us with them, Monsieur!” said the President.

  “Well, that evening, over the soup, Fulbert—without revealing his secret, naturally—told us about the formidable power of his device, and I recall that he hadn’t been talking for five minutes when General D*** exclaimed: ‘But this is a Jules Verne story you’re telling us, my dear scientist. I read it when I was at school, it’s called Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum!14 Hang on, this is the subject, w
hich I remember quite clearly: a Boche of those days had built a prodigious cannon that projected a colossal projectile, capable of annihilating everything in a matter of minutes, at a city built in America by Frenchmen!’

  “In order to say that, General D*** had adopted a tone so utterly sarcastic that I thought I ought to intervene. ‘My dear general,’ I interjected, ‘we’re living in a era in which all the imaginations of Jules Verne, on land, in the air and under the sea, are being realized so well and so completely that it’s unnecessary to be astonished by this one entering the domain of reality like all the rest.’

  “When I said that, Fulbert, who was sitting across from us, fixed the general and myself with an expression of immeasurable scorn. ‘Imaginative as Jules Verne was,’ he exclaimed, ‘he never dared to dream of what present-day science is capable of materializing. In my own case, it’s not a matter of a shell but a torpedo15—and a torpedo that no cannon in the world could contain and no charge of any known explosive could propel very far! My torpedo is bigger than the Titanic! Bigger than the Titanic, do you hear? It’s three hundred meters long. It’s capable of a speed of four hundred kilometers an hour. Nothing can stop it! It ruins everything, burns everything and annihilates everything within a radius of several leagues. Nothing can prevail against it once it is launched. Nothing is capable of preventing it from hitting its target squarely, or of exploding at a determined time in a determined location. Its name is Titania.’

  “I don’t know whether you have ever seen Théodore Fulbert,” the editor of L’Époque continued. “He has eyes of a child-like brightness and purity, the face of a small inspired angel, within an untidy frame of white tresses, which twist like flames around his phenomenal forehead—and the whole constitutes a curious mixture that’s astonishing and disturbing.