This disc, driven at high speed within the tube, like a bullet in its barrel, drew with it the first car of the train. But how was this car attached to the disc inside the tube, since this disc would have no communication with the exterior? By electromagnetic force.

In fact, the first car carried between its wheels magnets set on either side of the tube, as close as possible without actually touching it. These magnets operated through the walls of the tube on the soft-iron disc, which, sliding forward, drew the train after it, the compressed air being unable to escape through any outlet. [Author's Note:  if an electromagnet can bear a weight of 1, 000 kilograms on contact, its power of attraction is still that of 100 kilograms over a distance of five millimeters.]

When a train was to stop, a station employee opened a valve; air escaped and the disc remained motionless. As soon as the valve was closed, the air pushed on, and the train resumed its immediately rapid progress.

Thus by means of a system at once so simple and so easy to maintain—no smoke, no steam, no collision, and the passengers' freedom to ascend all the ramps—it seemed that these roadways must have existed since time immemorial.

Young Dufrénoy bought his ticket at the Grenelle station and ten minutes later got off at the Madeleine; he walked down the steps to the boulevard and made for the Rue Impériale, which had been constructed on the axis of the Opera down to the Gardens of the Tuileries. Crowds filled the streets; night was beginning to fall, and the luxury shops projected far out onto the sidewalks the brilliant patches of their electric light; streetlamps operated by the Way System—sending a positive electric charge through a thread of mercury- spread an incomparable radiance; they were connected by means of underground wires; at one and the same moment, the hundred thousand streetlamps of Paris came on. Nonetheless a few old-fashioned shops remained faithful to the old means of hydrocarburated gas; the exploitation of new coal pits permitted its current sale at ten centimes per cubic meter; but the Company made considerable profits, especially by distributing it as a mechanical agent.

In fact, of the countless carriages which clogged the boulevards, a great majority were horseless; they were invisibly powered by a motor which operated by gas combustion. This was the Lenoir[5] machine applied to locomotion.

Invented in 1859, this machine had the initial advantage of doing away with boiler, firebox, and fuel; a little lighting gas, mixed with the air introduced under the piston and lit by an electric spark, produced the movement; gas hydrants, set up at the various carriage parking places, supplied the necessary hydrogen; new improvements had made it possible to get rid of the water formerly used to chill the machine's cylinder. The machine, then, was simple and maneuverable; up on his seat, the driver operated a steering wheel; a brake pedal, located under his foot, permitted an instant modification of the vehicle's speed.

The carriages, with the power of several horses, did not cost, per day, one eighth the price of a horse; the expense of the gas, carefully monitored, permitted calculation of the work done by each carriage, and the Company could no longer be deceived, as in the past, by its coachmen.

These gas cabs were responsible for a tremendous consumption of hydrogen, as were those enormous trucks loaded with stones and paving materials, which deployed some twenty to thirty horsepower. This Lenoir System had the further advantage of costing nothing when it was not in use, a saving impossible to realize with steam machines, which devour their fuel even when they are not in motion.

These swift means of transport operated in streets less clogged than in the past, for a ruling of the Ministry of Police forbade any cart, dray, or wagon to pass through the streets after ten in the morning, except for certain special routes.

These various improvements were certainly suited to this feverish century, during which the pressure of business permitted no rest and no delay.

What would one of our ancestors have said upon seeing these boulevards lit as brightly as by the sun, these thousand carriages circulating noiselessly on the silent asphalt of the streets, these stores as sumptuous as palaces, from which the light spread in brilliant patches, these avenues as broad as squares, these squares as wide as plains, these enormous hotels, which provided comfortable lodging for twenty thousand travelers, these wonderfully light viaducts, these long, elegant galleries, these bridges flung from street to street, and finally these glittering trains, which seemed to furrow the air with fantastic speed?

No doubt he would have been astonished; but the men of 1960 were no longer lost in admiration of such marvels; they exploited them quite calmly, without being any the happier, for, from their hurried gait, their peremptory manner, their American "dash, " it was apparent that the demon of wealth impelled them onward without mercy or relief.

Chapter III:     An Eminently Practical Family

At length the young man reached the house of his uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, banker and director of the Catacomb Company of Paris.

It was in a magnificent mansion on the Rue Impériale that this important person resided, an enormous structure in wonderfully bad taste, sporting a multitude of plate-glass windows, a veritable barracks transformed into a private residence, not so much imposing as ponderous. The ground floor and outbuildings were occupied by offices.

"So this is where the rest of my life is going to be spent, " Michel mused as he walked in. "Must I abandon all hope at the door?" And he was overcome by an almost invincible longing to run away, but managed to control himself; he pressed the electric button of the carriage entrance, and the doors, operated by a hidden spring, noiselessly opened and closed behind him.

A huge courtyard led to the offices, arranged in a circle under a ground-glass ceiling; at the rear was a large garage, where several gas cabs awaited the master's orders.

Michel made for the elevator, a narrow chamber with a narrow tufted banquette around the walls; a servant in orange livery was on duty day and night. "Monsieur Boutardin, " Michel announced.

"Monsieur Boutardin has just begun his dinner, " replied the footman.

"Be so good as to tell him his nephew, Monsieur Dufrénoy, is here. "

The footman touched a metal button set into the woodwork, and the elevator rose imperceptibly to the first floor, where the dining room was located. The servant announced Michel Dufrénoy.

Monsieur Boutardin, Madame Boutardin, and their son were seated around the table and met the young man's appearance with a profound silence; his place was set for him, the meal had just begun; at a sign from his uncle, Michel joined the banquet. No one spoke a word to him. Apparently his disaster was known to all. He could not eat a mouthful.

There was a funereal air about this meal; the servants performed their tasks in perfect silence; the various dishes ascended noiselessly in chutes set in the walls; they were opulent with a touch of avarice, and seemed to nourish the diners with a certain reluctance, a certain regret. In this absurdly gilded, mournful room, everyone chewed rapidly and without conviction. The point, of course, was not to be fed but to have earned the material on which to feed. Michel perceived the nuance, and choked on it. At dessert, his uncle spoke for the first time: "Tomorrow, sir, first thing in the morning, I should like a word with you. " Michel bowed without speaking; an orange-liveried servant led him to his room; the young man went to bed; the hexagonal ceiling reminded him of a host of geometrical theorems; he dreamed, in spite of himself, of right-angle triangles whose hypotenuse had been... reduced. "What a family!" he murmured to himself in the depths of his troubled sleep.

Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin was the natural product of this age of industrial development; he had sprouted in a greenhouse, rather than among the elements; a practical man in every particular, he did nothing which was not of some utilitarian function, orienting his merest ideas to use, with an excessive craving to be useful, which turned into a truly ideal egotism, joining the useful to the disagreeable, as Horace might have said; his vanity was apparent in his words and even more in his gestures, and he would not have allowed his shadow to precede him; he expressed himself in grams and centimeters, and at all times carried a cane marked off in metrical divisions, which afforded him a wide knowledge of the things of this world; he utterly scorned the arts, and artists even more, though he was quite prepared to suggest that he knew such creatures; for him, painting stopped with a tinted drawing, and drawing with a diagram, sculpture with a plaster cast, music with the whistle of locomotives, and literature with stock market quotations.

This man, raised in mechanics, accounted for life by gears and transmissions; he moved quite regularly, with the least possible friction, like a piston in a perfectly reamed cylinder; he transmitted his uniform movements to his wife, to his son, to his employees and his servants, all veritable tool machines, from which he, the motor force, derived the maximum possible profit.

A base nature, in short, incapable of a good impulse, or, for that matter, of a bad one; he was neither wicked nor good, insignificant, often ill lubricated, noisy, horribly vulgar.

He had made an enormous fortune, if such activity can be called making. The industrial impulse of the century impelled him; hence he showed a certain gratitude toward industry, which he worshiped as a goddess; he was the first to adopt, for his household, the spun-metal garments which first appeared around 1934. Such textiles, moreover, were as soft to the touch as cashmere, though scarcely of much warmth; but in winter, with a good lining, they sufficed; and when such everlasting garments happened to rust, they were simply filed down and repainted in the colors of the moment.

The banker's social position was as follows: Director of the Catacomb Company of Paris and of the Driving Force in the Home.

The enterprises of this company consisted in warehousing the air in those huge underground vaults so long unused; here it was stored under a pressure of forty to fifty atmospheres, a constant force which conduits led to the factories and mills, wherever a mechanical action became necessary. This compressed air served, as we have seen, to power the trains on the elevated railways of the boulevards. Eighteen hundred fifty-three windmills, constructed on the Plain of Montrouge, compressed the air by means of pumps within these enormous reservoirs.

This conception, certainly a highly practical one which came down to the employment of natural forces, was readily anticipated by the banker Boutardin; he became the Director of this important company while remaining a member of fifteen or twenty supervisory boards, vice president of the Society of Tow Locomotives, administrative director of the Amalgamated Asphalt Agencies, et cetera, et cetera.

Some forty years ago he had married Mademoiselle Athénaïs Dufrénoy, Michel's aunt; she was certainly the worthy and cantankerous companion of a banker—homely, stout, having all the qualities of a bookkeeper and a cashier, nothing of a woman; she was expert in double entry, and would had invented a triple version if need be; a true administratrix, the female of any and every administrator.

Did she love Monsieur Boutardin, and was she loved by him in return? Yes, insofar as these businesslike hearts could love; a comparison will complete the portrait of the pair: she was the locomotive and he the engineer; he kept her in good condition, oiled and polished her, and thus she had rolled forward for a good half century, with about as much sense and imagination as a Crampton[6] Motor.

Unnecessary to add that she never derailed.

As for their son, multiply his mother by his father, and you have Athanase Boutardin for a coefficient, chief associate of the banking house Casmodage and Co., an agreeable boy who took after his father for high spirits, and after his mother for elegance. It was impossible to pass a witty remark in his presence; it seemed to miss him altogether, and his brows frowned over his vacant eyes. He had won the first banking prize in the grand competition. It might be said that he not only made money work but wore it out; he smelled of usury; he was planning to marry some dreadful creature whose dowry would energetically make up for her ugliness. At twenty, he already wore aluminum- framed spectacles. His narrow and deep-rutted mind impelled him to tease his clerks by touches of the whip.