act was their amazement and their ecstasy! They expected a
tomb; they opened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable
galleries of art they could possibly see, in _salons_ more beautiful
than those of Versailles, in enchanted palaces, in which all extremes of
climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where
innumerable lamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness,
shed unceasingly through the blue depths their daylight that knew no
night. Assuredly the sight was far from what it has since become; we
need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological
condition of our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed to the perpetual
and insufferable discomforts and inconveniences of life on the surface
of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm, at a moment, when
only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by means of
the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their
troubles, and of all their apprehensions at the same time! Have you
noticed in the retrospective museum that quaint bit of apparatus of our
fathers, which is called an umbrella? Look at it and reflect on the
heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use
of this ridiculous piece of furniture. Imagine yourself obliged to
protect yourselves against those gigantic downpours which would
unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or four days
running. Think likewise of sailors caught in a whirling cyclone, of the
victims of sunstroke, of the 20,000 Indians annually devoured by tigers
or killed by the bite of venomous serpents; think of those struck by
lightning. I do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects, of
the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the
blood, the sweat, and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus,
plague, and cholera. In truth, if our change of condition has demanded
some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declare that the balance of
advantage is immensely greater. What in comparison with this
unparalleled revolution is the most renowned of the petty revolutions of
the past which to-day are treated so lightly, and rightly so, by our
historians. One wonders how the first inhabitants of these underground
dwellings could, even for a moment, regret the sun, a mode of lighting
that bristled with so many inconveniences. The sun was a capricious
luminary which went out and was relit