Locus Solus

On this Thursday in early April, a small group of intimates docilely follows the master, Martial Canterel, along the paths of Locus Solus, his vast Montmorency estate—a tranquil retreat where the bachelor savant pursues his research far from the tumult of Paris. Canterel is tall and dark-haired, with an open countenance and keen eyes shining with wondrous intelligence; his warm voice lends each explanation the allure of a prodigious confidence. The group ascends a steep path, and already, halfway up the slope, a first curiosity gives them pause: standing in a stone niche, a smiling child statue fashioned from dried, solidified blackish earth reaches out its arms in offering—it is the Semen-contra Federal, a fetish once erected in Timbuktu under King Forukko using the topsoil of all allied tribes, in the palm of which a mysterious plant had formerly sprouted, curing Queen Duhl-Séroul's madness. Beneath the niche, three colored high reliefs tell yet another tale, that of the Breton princess Hello, of her father Kourmelen hiding the ancestral crown—melted into an ingot—within the green marble bowels of Morne-Vert, of the one-eyed jester Le Quillec clad in pink, of the celestial sign inscribed in cloud-letters at dusk—D'ORES—and of the triumphant reconquest of the throne. Every object exhibited in the park is just so: a technical apparatus or a relic whose mere presence summons, through Canterel's inexhaustible voice, an entire narrative, profound and ramified, slotting into another tale like a doll within a doll.

They reach a vast, open esplanade. There stands a sort of paving instrument, a metallic paving-beetle suspended from a small, pale yellow aerostat, while on the ground hundreds of human teeth—white, brown, yellow, blue, black, bloody roots, fillings, gold restorations—compose an unfinished tableau through the mere alternation of their hues: a slumbering reiter in a gloomy crypt, sprawled at the edge of an underground pond, a torch planted in the earth, a closed old book beside him, and rising from his sleeping brain, by way of a dream, eleven terrified young men fleeing an airborne globe of water, with a white dove darting toward them. The paving-beetle lifts itself into the air, carried by the wind, guided by nine chronometers regulated to the thousandth of a second, and flies off to pluck a distant tooth using two specially alloyed metal disks that exert an irresistible magnetism on dental calculus, before depositing it in its exact place within the mosaic. For Canterel has pushed the art of weather prediction to the absolute limits of the possible, having programmed every flight, every landing, every extraction, and every placement ten days in advance, based on the direction and force of every breath of wind, and the opacity of every cloud passing before the sun. The image composed by this machine is that of a Scandinavian tale the reiter Aag, buried alive in a crypt by a furious baron, read by the light of a torch before falling asleep—and Christel, the very woman he had attempted to abduct, has come to deliver him via a secret passage, just as the dove of the tale came to save its persecutors.

Further along the esplanade, a giant diamond—two meters high, three meters wide, faceted—casts almost unbearable flashes of light. In reality, it is an immense vessel filled with a scintillating water, aqua-micans, whose special oxygenation allows terrestrial beings to breathe within it. At its center, the dancer Faustine, clad in a flesh-colored leotard, strikes sculptural poses, and every hair of her flowing blonde tresses, encased in a slender aqueous sheath, vibrates under the friction of the fluid currents, producing a tone determined by its length, such that the movements of her head generate scales, arpeggios, and a wondrous music spanning three octaves. A hairless cat, Khóng-dễk-lèn, swims blithely in the tank and, after swallowing a red pill that transforms its body into a living battery, buries its face in a metal cone and goes on to delicately touch the brain of Danton—for what hangs at the end of a thread there, to the right, is all that remains of the great orator's head: the intact brain, the network of muscles and nerves, maintained in shape by a thin, invisible armature. Upon contact with the cone, the fibers execute a staggering gymnastics, the lip muscles in particular twitching with frenzied agility, and Canterel, who has learned to read these movements, translates on the fly the fragments of patriotic speeches surging pell-mell from the vaults of memory. Seven sea horses, each pierced with a colored seton, are submerged in the aqua-micans; they knead solidified Sauternes wine into a golden sphere resembling a small sun, harnessing themselves to it to run a race around a column shaft, while seven Cartesian divers—Vyrlas saving Alexander the Great, Pilate branded on the forehead with a seal of flame, Atlas kicking Capricorn, Voltaire murmuring his Dubito—rise and fall endlessly within the dazzling water.

But the heart of the park, its longest and most terrible passage, awaits the visitors further on: an immense, open-air glass cage, divided into eight compartments, where individuals appear to be living. Each endlessly performs the same scene, the same gesture, with the precision of an automaton and a devastating intensity. A man in convict garb incessantly leans over a child, lifting him in his arms; a woman in a black dress pounds her fists against an invisible wall; an old man traces and retraces the same signs on a slate. Canterel explains: they are dead. He has invented resurrectine, a substance which, injected into a fresh corpse along with another preparation called vitalium, reanimates the tissues and forces the body to tirelessly reenact the most significant episode of its existence—the moment of highest intensity, of pain or joy, inscribed in the flesh like a groove in wax. Each tableau thus provides the occasion for a tale that Canterel unfurls in its most minute ramifications: the history of the man, the circumstances that led him to this crucial instant, the secondary characters, the places, the objects, the coincidences, the misunderstandings. The narratives succeed one another, nest, and proliferate, each engendering sub-narratives that branch off in turn, and the reader plunges into a forest of nested stories whose edges are no longer visible, each dead person replaying their defining moment like a scratched record where the scratch itself is the key to an entire life.

The tour continues. They discover an aquatic paving apparatus, a strange clock, and other marvels whose mechanisms Canterel systematically reveals with infinite patience and maniacal precision; every technical explanation is doubled by a human story, and every human story branches into other tales. The entire park is a cabinet of curiosities where the most extravagant science serves as a pretext for the most unbridled storytelling, where every machine is a narrative snare, and every narrative is an engine for producing wonder and strangeness. Having completed the full circuit of the estate, the guests return to the villa to dine, and the narrator says nothing of this dinner, nothing of what happens afterward, as if the real world no longer held any importance once one had crossed through Locus Solus—as if the only thing that mattered was what had occurred in the park: these impossible machines, these dead reenacting their lives, this tooth mosaic composed by the wind, this head of Danton whose lips still move, these sea horses harnessed to a little sun of solidified Sauternes, and Canterel's inexhaustible voice, which explains everything and explains nothing, because the explanation itself is the marvel.