Micromegas (Phalen)/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
Voyage of an inhabitant of the Sirius star to the planet Saturn.
On one of the planets that orbits the star named Sirius there lived a
spirited young man, who I had the honor of meeting on the last voyage
he made to our little ant hill. He was called Micromegas[1], a
fitting name for anyone so great. He was eight leagues tall, or
24,000 geometric paces of five feet each.
[1] From micros, small, and from megas, large. B.
Certain geometers[2], always of use to the public, will immediately
take up their pens, and will find that since Mr. Micromegas,
inhabitant of the country of Sirius, is 24,000 paces tall, which is
equivalent to 20,000 feet, and since we citizens of the earth are
hardly five feet tall, and our sphere 9,000 leagues around; they will
find, I say, that it is absolutely necessary that the sphere that
produced him was 21,600,000 times greater in circumference than our
little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler or more orderly. The
sovereign states of Germany or Italy, which one can traverse in a
half hour, compared to the empires of Turkey, Moscow, or China, are
only feeble reflections of the prodigious differences that nature has
placed in all beings.
[2] This is how the text reads in the first editions. Others, in
place of "geometers," put "algebraists." B.
His excellency's size being as great as I have said, all our
sculptors and all our painters will agree without protest that his
belt would have been 50,000 feet around, which gives him very good
proportions.[3] His nose taking up one third of his attractive
face, and his attractive face taking up one seventh of his attractive
body, it must be admitted that the nose of the Sirian is 6,333 feet
plus a fraction; which is manifest.
[3] I restore this sentence in accordance with the first editions.
B.
As for his mind, it is one of the most cultivated that we have. He
knows many things. He invented some of them. He was not even 250
years old when he studied, as is customary, at the most celebrated[4]
colleges of his planet, where he managed to figure out by pure
willpower more than 50 of Euclid's propositions. That makes 18 more
than Blaise Pascal, who, after having figured out 32 while screwing
around, according to his sister's reports, later became a fairly
mediocre geometer[5] and a very bad metaphysician. Towards his 450th
year, near the end of his infancy, he dissected many small insects no
more than 100 feet in diameter, which would evade ordinary
microscopes. He wrote a very curious book about this, and it gave him
some income. The mufti of his country, an extremely ignorant
worrywart, found some suspicious, rash[6], disagreeable, and
heretical propositions in the book, smelled heresy, and pursued it
vigorously; it was a matter of finding out whether the substantial
form of the fleas of Sirius were of the same nature as those of the
snails. Micromegas gave a spirited defense; he brought in some women
to testify in his favor; the trial lasted 220 years. Finally the
mufti had the book condemned by jurisconsults who had not read it,
and the author was ordered not to appear in court for 800 years[7].
[4] In place of "the most celebrated" that one finds in the first
edition, subsequent editions read "some jesuit." B.
[5] Pascal became a very great geometer, not in the same class as those that contributed to the progress of science with great discoveries, like Descartes, Newton, but certainly ranked among the geometers, whose works display a genius of the first order. K.
[6] The edition that I believe to be original reads: "rash, smelling heresy." The present text is dated 1756. B.
[7] Mr. Voltaire had been persecuted by the theatin Boyer for having stated in his Letters on the English that our souls develop at the same time as our organs, just like the souls of animals. K.
He was thereby dealt the minor affliction of being banished from a
court that consisted of nothing but harassment and pettiness. He
wrote an amusing song at the expense of the mufti, which the latter
hardly noticed; and he took to voyaging from planet to planet in
order to develop his heart and mind[8], as the saying goes. Those
that travel only by stage coach or sedan will probably be surprised
learn of the carriage of this vessel; for we, on our little pile of
mud, can only conceive of that to which we are accustomed. Our
voyager was very familiar with the laws of gravity and with all the
other attractive and repulsive forces. He utilized them so well that,
whether with the help of a ray of sunlight or some comet, he jumped
from globe to globe like a bird vaulting itself from branch to
branch. He quickly spanned the Milky Way, and I am obliged to report
that he never saw, throughout the stars it is made up of, the
beautiful empyrean sky that the vicar Derham[9] boasts of having seen
at the other end of his telescope. I do not claim that Mr. Derham has
poor eyesight, God forbid! But Micromegas was on site, which makes
him a reliable witness, and I do not want to contradict anyone.
Micromegas, after having toured around, arrived at the planet Saturn.
As accustomed as he was to seeing new things, he could not, upon
seeing the smallness of the planet and its inhabitants, stop himself
from smiling with the superiority that occasionally escapes the
wisest of us. For in the end Saturn is hardly nine times bigger than
Earth, and the citizens of this country are dwarfs, no more than a
thousand fathoms tall, or somewhere around there. He and his men
poked fun at them at first, like Italian musicians laughing at the
music of Lully when he comes to France. But, as the Sirian had a good
heart, he understood very quickly that a thinking being is not
necessarily ridiculous just because he is only 6,000 feet tall. He
got to know the Saturnians after their shock wore off. He built a
strong friendship with the secretary of the academy of Saturn, a
spirited man who had not invented anything, to tell the truth, but
who understood the inventions of others very well, and who wrote some
passable verses and carried out some complicated calculations. I will
report here, for the reader's satisfaction, a singular conversation
that Micromegas had with the secretary one day.
[8] See my note, page 110. B. [this note, in Zadig, says: "This
line is mostly written at the expense of Rollin, who often employs
these expressions in his Treatise on Studies. Voltaire returns
to it often: see, in the present volume, chapter I of Micromegas,
and in volume XXXIV, chapter XI of The Man of Forty Crowns,
chapter IX of The White Bull and volume XI, the second verse of
song VIII of The Young Virgin. B."]
[9] English savant, author of Astro-Theology, and several other works that seek to prove the existence of God through detailing the wonders of nature: unfortunately he and his imitators are often mistaken in their explanation of these wonders; they rave about the wisdom that is revealed in a phenomenon, but one soon discovers that the phenomenon is completely different than they supposed; so it is only their own fabrications that give them this impression of wisdom. This fault, common to all works of its type, discredited them. One knows too far in advance that the author will end up admiring whatever he has chosen to discuss.