Science fiction, French -- Translations into English
Barbicane & Co. The president of a gunning club. And really what had
gunners to do in such an operation? You will see. Is it necessary to
present formally Impey Barbicane, President of the Gun Club, of Baltimore,
and Capt. Nicholl, and J. T. Maston, and Tom Hunter with the wooden legs,
and the lively Bilsby, and Col. Bloomsberry, and the other associates? No,
if these strange persons were twenty years older than at the time when the
attention of the world was upon them they had always remained the same,
always as much incomplete personally, but equally noisy, equally
courageous, equally confusing when it was a question of some extraordinary
adventure. Time did not make an impression on these gunners; it respected
them as it respects cannons no longer in use, but which decorate museums
and arsenals. If the Gun Club had 1,833 members in it when it was founded,
names rather than persons, for most of them had lost an arm or leg, if
30,575 corresponding members were proud to owe allegiance to the Club,
these figures had not decreased. On the contrary, and even thanks to the
incredible attempt which they had made to establish direct communication
between earth and moon, its celebrity had grown in an enormous proportion.
No one can ever forget the report on this subject which was made by this
Club and which deserves a few words of mention here.
A few years after the civil war certain members of the Gun Club, tired of
their idleness, proposed to send a projectile to the moon by means of a
Columbiad monster. A cannon 900 feet long, nine feet broad at the bore,
had been especially made at Moon City and had then been charged with
400,000 pounds of gun-cotton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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