Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne

Author:Jules Verne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-31T07:00:00+00:00

"This will be our dessert, " said Uncle Huguenin, gesturing toward the crowded shelves.

"It gives me an appetite all over again, " Michel replied. "Let's dig in. "

Uncle and nephew, each as young as the other, began rummaging among the shelves, in twenty places at once, though Monsieur Huguenin lost no time in restoring some order to this pillage.

"Come over here, " he said to Michel, "and let's begin at the beginning; we're not going to read today, we'll just look and talk. This is a review, rather than a battle. Think of yourself as Napoleon in the Tuileries courtyard, and not on the field of Austerlitz. Put your hands behind your back. We're going to pass through the ranks. "

"I'm following you, Uncle. "

"My boy, remember that the finest army in the world is about to parade before your eyes; there is no other nation which can offer such a sight, and which has won such brilliant victories over barbarism. "

"The Grand Army of Letters. "

"There on that first shelf, uniformed in their fine morocco bindings, stand our old sixteenth-century veterans, Amyot[30], Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Mathurin Régnier[31]; they're staunch at their positions, and you can still detect their original influence in the fine French language they established. But it must be admitted that they fought harder for ideas than for form. Here's a general close by who fought with great valor, though he mainly perfected the weapons of his day. "

"Malherbe!"

"Himself. As he says somewhere, the picklocks of Port-au-Foin were his masters; he gleaned their metaphors, their eminently Gallic expressions, he cleaned them, polished them, and out of them made that splendid language spoken so handsomely in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. "

"Ah!" said Michel, pointing to a single volume proudly and simply bound, "now there's a great captain. "

"Yes, my boy, like Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon: indeed Bonaparte would have made Corneille a prince!

The old warrior has astonishingly multiplied, for his classical editions are countless; this is the fifty-first and last of his complete works, dating from 1873; since then, Corneille has never been reprinted. "

"You must have gone to a great deal of trouble, Uncle, to have obtained all these works!"

"On the contrary—everyone was getting rid of them! Look, here's the forty-ninth edition of the complete works of Racine, the hundred fiftieth of Moliére, the fortieth of Pascal, the two hundred third of La Fontaine, the last actually, and they date from over a hundred years ago and already constitute the delight of bibliophiles! These geniuses have served their time, and now they're relegated to the rank of archaeological specimens. "

"And in fact, " replied the young man, "they speak a language no longer understood in this day and age. "

"That's quite true, my boy! The fine French tongue has been lost; the language illustrious foreigners like Leibniz, Frederick the Great, Ancillon[32], Humboldt, and Heine chose as the interpreter of their ideas—that wonderful language Goethe regretted never having written, that elegant idiom which nearly became Greek

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