The Begum's Millions. Jules Verne
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city and presenting it to the world as a practical illustration of what all cities ought to be?” (Yes! yes! — thunderous applause.)
The members of the association, in an ecstasy of contagious enthusiasm, shake each other’s hands, crowd around Dr. Sarrasin, raise him up, carry him in triumph about the room.
“Gentlemen,” continued the doctor when he had succeeded in returning to his place, “we will invite all the people of the world to this city which each of us can already visualize in our imagination, which may be a reality in a few months, this city of health and well-being; we will share its layout and the details of its design in all languages; we will invite to live there all honest families whom poverty and lack of employment might have driven from overpopulated lands. Also those — you will not be surprised at my thinking of them during these times — who have been forced into cruel exile due to foreign conquest will find a good use for their skills with us and an application for their intelligence, while bringing us a moral richness that would be a thousandfold more precious than gold and diamond mines. We will have large schools for our youth, who will be raised according to wise principles capable of developing all their faculties, moral, physical, and intellectual, thus preparing healthy generations for the future!”
It is impossible to describe the enthusiastic tumult which followed this talk. The applause, the hurrays, the “hip! hips!” continued for more than a quarter of an hour.
Dr. Sarrasin had barely managed to sit back down when Lord Glandover leaned over him again and murmured into his ear, with a wink.
“Sounds like a fine investment! You’re no doubt counting on the revenue from the rents and town taxes, right? It’s a sure thing provided it is well launched and sponsored by some well-known names! Why, all the convalescents and invalids will wish to live there at once! I hope you’ll hold a nice lot in reserve for me, won’t you?”
The poor doctor, annoyed by this stubborn insistence on giving a covetous motive to all his actions, was going to reply to His Lordship when he heard the vice president call for a vote of thanks by acclamation for the author of this philanthropic proposal which had just been submitted to the assembly.
“It would be,” he said, “the eternal honor of the Brighton Conference that such a sublime idea had been born here — an idea that required no less to conceive it than the highest intelligence joined to the greatest heart and to an unprecedented generosity. And yet, now that the idea has been suggested, it seems astounding that it has never before been put into practice! How many billions have been spent on insane wars,4 how much capital dissipated in ridiculous speculations that could have been consecrated to such an attempt!”
In conclusion, the speaker proposed that, in just homage to its founder, the city should be named “Sarrasina.”
His motion was approved by acclamation, but a second vote was necessary at the request of Dr. Sarrasin himself.
“No,” he said, “my name has no relevance here. Let us be careful not to deck out the future city with any of these appellations which, under pretext of deriving from Greek or Latin, bestow a pedantic effect to the thing or person who bears it. It shall be the City of Well-Being,5 but I ask that its name be that of my country, and that we call it France-Ville!”
They could not refuse the doctor the satisfaction that he was due.
France-Ville was henceforth founded, at least in words; and soon — thanks to the minutes of the meeting which were to close the sessions — it would exist on paper as well. They passed immediately to a discussion of the project’s general articles.
But we will now leave the association with this practical business, so different from the usual concerns reserved for these meetings, in order to follow, step by step, the fate of the aforementioned article published in the Daily Telegraph along one of its innumerable itineraries.
From the evening of the 29th of October, this notice, textually reproduced by the English journals, began to circulate through all the districts of the United Kingdom. It appeared especially in the Hull Gazette, at the top of page two in a copy of that modest journal that the Queen Mary, a three-masted ship loaded with coal, brought on November 1st to Rotterdam.
Immediately clipped out by the diligent scissors of the editor-in-chief and sole secretary of the Netherlands’ Echo and translated into the language of Cuyp and Potter, the article arrived on November 2nd on the wings of steam to the Bremen Chronicle. There, with no change in content, it was given new garb, and it was not long before it was published in German. One must wonder why the Teutonic journalist, after having written at the top of the translation: Eine übergrosse Erbschaft (A Colossal Inheritance), had no qualms about resorting to a shabby subterfuge which took advantage of the credulity of his readers by adding in parentheses: “From our Special Correspondent in Brighton”?
Whatever the case, becoming thus Germanized by right of annexation, the anecdote reached the editor’s desk of the imposing North Gazette, who gave it a place in the second column of page three but suppressed the title, which seemed too charlatan-like for such a serious person.
On the evening of November 3rd, after having passed through these successive transformations, it finally entered into the thick hands of a hefty Saxon manservant in the office–living room–dining room of Professor Schultze of the University of Iéna.6
As highly ranked as was such a fellow in the hierarchy of beings, he did not seem like very much at first glance. He was a fairly tall man of forty-five or forty-six years; his squared shoulders indicated a robust constitution; his forehead was bare, and the little hair he had kept on the back of his head and temples resembled light flax. His eyes were blue, that vague blue that never betrays one’s thoughts. No gleam escaped from them, and yet they made you feel uncomfortable as soon as they fastened upon you. Professor Schultze’s mouth was big, equipped with a double row of formidable teeth which never lose their prey, enclosed between thin lips whose principal purpose seemed to be counting the words that passed through them. His appearance was obviously disturbing and off-putting for others, a state of affairs which visibly satisfied the professor.
At the noise that his servant made, he raised his eyes to the fireplace, looked for the time of day on a lovely Barbedienne clock, singularly out of place in the midst of the common furnishings that surrounded it, and he said in a voice that was more stiff than stuffy:
“6:55! My mail arrives at 6:30, at the latest. Today you’re twenty-five minutes late bringing it up. The next time that it is not on my table at 6:30, you will leave my service at 8:00.”
“Does Monsieur wish to dine now?” asked the servant before withdrawing.
“It’s 6:55, and I dine at 7:00. You’ve known that for the three weeks that you have been in my employment. Keep in mind that I do not change my schedule, and never repeat an order.”7
The professor set his newspaper on the edge of the table and continued working on an article that was to appear two days later in the periodical Annalen für Physiologie (Annals for Physiology). There would be no indiscretion in revealing that this article had for its title:
Why Are All Frenchmen Stricken in Different Degrees with Hereditary Degeneration?8
While the professor pursued his task, the dinner composed of a large plate of sausages and sauerkraut, flanked by a gigantic stein of beer, had been discreetly served on a round table by the corner of the fireplace. The professor set down his pen to eat his supper, which he savored more than one might expect of a man so serious.9 Then he rang for his coffee, lit a great porcelain pipe, and returned to his work.
It was near midnight when the professor signed the last sheet, and immediately passed into his bedroom to take a well-deserved rest. It was not until he was in bed that he finally opened his newspaper and began to read it before going to sleep. At that very moment when sleep seemed near, the attention of the professor was attracted by a foreign name, that of Langévol, in the article relating to a colossal inheritance. He sought to recall what memory this name might