0 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 fin