The vocation of a museum is to be sanctuary for the past. Many museums are like stained-glass windows unlit by the sun, lifeless mausoleums.

At the Château de Pignerolle, generously put at our disposition by the city of Angers , we have tried to create a living museum with a surrealist vision, where the past, present an future are no longer contradictory concepts.

Angers is the capital of tapestery from the "Apocalipse" to the" SONG OF THE WORLD". Now it has become the high place of the history of communication and as SAINT-EXUPERY put it, "it's the key to all civilizations".

The goal of our museum is to give form throught text and image to the genesis of our own civilization.

For us the Château de Pignerolle is not only an encounter, it's also a symbol, the symbol of the Age of Enlighenment, where France illuminates the world by the dual beacons of her encyclopedists and her scholars.

The history that you are about to relieve through our Time Machine is the story of Communication from the wellsprings to the estuary, from the tam-tam to the satellite.

The ground floor is dedicated to one of the greatest inventors of all times, one of the most powerful minds in the history of mankind: LEONARDO DA VINCI. See him life-size in the setting of the clos Lucey where he finished the immortal JOCONDA whose copy comes from the Louvre. The only other reproduction, the LADY BRASSEMPOUY, awaits you further on. However in this museum all the pieces are authentic, as the antique dealers says like this 1520 credenza or those 17 th century chairs.

See Leonardo painting his own portrait through a mirror, the tragic reflections of his aged countenance:"LA SANGUINE DE TURIN". If we begin this visit with an homage to Leonardo, it is because this demi-god was the source and the nurturer of invention that advanced both pictoral representation and scientific research, the Art of Communication and the means of locomotion.

In the following room dedicated to the Abbot BREUIL, the first display yields up our first cry as a newborn and the two movements of tenderness of the child toward the mother, the mother toward the child. This cry brings us to the first cry of man, the first groping of communication. Since manking began ...

Cro-Magnon is the first link in the chain of modern civilization. He sought in the caves a shelter and a refuge, but the conquest of this environment could only have come with two inventions: the oil lamp and the pyrite lighter.

Cro-Magnon tries to advance his means of communication: the time of grunts and gestures is replaced by articulate language, of the exchange of ideas, of tools...and he commands animals.

As you enter this next room, raise your eyes to behold one of the most ancient signalling devices the tam-tam, whose earthy rhythms cadenced the sweat of war dances and festivals intermingled.The next case is given over to intinerant peddlers and the "marvellous needle" as professor NOUGIER says, he is the explorer of these mysteries and the inspiration of this room.

One hundred thousand years to prepare a miracle. The tree-dwelling quadruped walking on all fours stands erect, his footprints will leave their trace in the damp earth of the forests. Their impression will be discovered 12 000 years later. Man will walk toward the future on paths he blazes across the savannahs to meet others groups, to export flint and obsidian. The primate traces the later routes of the peddler and the messengers. The foot of Man has climbed the first step in the staircase of civilizations.

In the same exhibit a tiny line: the needle. The needle has today its original magic. All that has changed is its base material, bone to steel. Never has such a small object knows such a vast vocation, one more durable, more wide-spread. It is fundamental to cooking for it sewed the skin flasks. It's also the age of stone, of clothing, and the first rudimentary notion of confort appears: sewn skins become blankets.

In the begining was water, the mother of all life:

Man has baried deep in his subconscious the memory of the first lagoon. For thousands of years water will only be a source of pleasure or of profit for thirst or fishing. The day will come when man will bind three tree-trunks and make the first raft. The dugout will follow the raft, to descend rivers and go forth on the sea. And then about 20 000 years ago comes the needle; sewn skins on tight frameworks will serve for the maiking of kyaks and water-bottles wich will allow the conversation of food and fresh water, allowing man to explore from island to island, continent to continent.

In passing let us salute the noblest conquest of man: the horse, which has only 6 000 years of domestication but which will play a major role in communication for millennia; the only means of long-distance communication.

The third exhibit is consecrated to the birth of Art.

When so long ago, man discovers that the curve he has just drawn on the sand without thinking reproduces the horizon line of the hill before him, he is taken by surprise and wonderment.

The first artist is born !

He will find lasting "canvas" in the caves for his drawnings, essentially figurative and representing animals. But 20 000 years ago two schools begin to emerge. The first is a tendency toward rigid reproduction of the model; the second is more a cerebral exploration that will lead to abstraction and go all the way to the contemporary abstract art of KANDINSKY and MONDRIAN and to lyrical abstraction whose leading exponent is Georges MATHIEU.

However, for professor NOUGIER, the leavening of the plastic arts can be found in the core of the paleolithic almond. Look at this fruit where burst forth nearly 200 000 years ago the dionysc pleasure of aesthetic creation. Grand a thought also to the glimmering jewel whose model rests in the museum of Saint Germain.

From the bottom of the jewel-case twenty thousand years look out at you. The Lady of Brassempouy is today 23 000 years old.

Lascaux, 13 000 years before our era, is the cathedral of caverns. Lascaux is more end-point and museum than anything. Don't fail to examine the ancestor of symbolist sculpture, this Egyptian cat from the Sais era. "Sculpture" says GOETHE, "is petrified music".

The handling of tools leads to rhythm and man, who is begining to make noises, will transform noise into sound.

Thus is born the notion of music. The horns that sounded according to days, danger or migrations are the first instruments of communication with sound, distant preludes to our tocsins or our musical notations.

A woman voice: "Please come with us to the next step in our journey where you will see the birthplace of the next great adventure: writing."

It's the first time in history that man will leave lasting written traces that can communicate his cultural life to others. The Sumerian tablets that you see are the most ancient vestiges of human writing, but at 6 000 years old are relatively recent. One could be tempted to see in them an expression of a need to communicate; in reality they reflect the desire to conserve written records of material existence, specifically inventories of stoks of foodstuffs.

The first tablets transmit the columns of accounts. In the same era is born the envelope, sealed when sent, broken on reception. Look here: these alphabets are witnesses to ancient cultures from the Arab to the Sanskrit. Let us leap the centuries: we go from ideograms to Carolingian manuscripts. The monks who copied began with coded writing, then rose to calligraphy. It was the golden age of the Book of Hours, the masterwork of miniaturits and illuminators.

If you examine the copy of a double page presented here you will note that the letters are decorated with highlights of 24 carat gold.

A woman's voice: "Now please follow us into the great room dedicated to AMPERE, where first is illustrated printing."

Printing will not supplant manuscripts so much as it will complement their production and widen their diffusion. The first printed documents are modeled on the classic form of manuscripts. The invention of printing is attributed to GUTENBERG, but in fact printing was born in China, or perhaps even Korea. GUTEMBERG will do as HOMERE did 2000 years before him, as LUMIERE 500 years after: he will gather the scattered discovery of his predecessors and will find the instrument which will permit their diffusion. This instrument is the printing press, whose example presented here was perfected by a youthful American. Like the art of fire in the first ages of the world, like electricity in the first years of century printing will change the destiny of humanity. It offers a new penetration to the mind, a new dimension to culture matched with two magic words: books and newspapers.

We are in the Ampere room. Take a moment to think of this man of genius who throught out the laws of electrodynamics in three days.

Electricity marked one of the great turning-points in human history. The world comes to us from the Greek "electron" which meant yellow amber. It was seven centuries before Christ that THALES DE MILLET rubbed a cat skin with a fragment of amber and discovered static electricity. Following this discovery there is a "black hole" of 2 000 years. It will take 20 centuries to put light to it. In fact the history of electricity is only 2 000 years old. You'll see the illustration of the principal movements of its genesis in the wall cases on your left. It's emergence on the scene is in one of those literary "salons" at the homes of Mme d'ARGENSON and Mme DE LAFAYETTE where thinkers, poets and scholars meet, notably the ABBE NOLLET.

We have reconstructed the scene of the legendary Electric kiss. The partners are face to face. The woman stands upon a disk of wax which plays the role of insulator. The two lovers kiss while a servant turns the crank on the machine which causes the spark to jump between their lips. Receiving electric shocks became fashionable; electric human chains of hundreds of men and women hand in hand will be measured-up to a kilometer.

For a moment you'll hear a piece by Olivier MESSIAN, a composer from Vendée. The recording, the amplifier and the background date from1950. A short leap of thought through space and time and here you are listening to music just as someone in the mid-century would have heard it.

Let's come back to music before the age of the electric guitar. To illustrate the ambience of music we have borrowed a scene from popular imagery. The daughter of the singer turns the crank of a hurdy-gurdy , the father stands by the bowl where the rich girl throws a few coins. By the organ sits the monkey, a symbolic figure that one day PICASSO will sketch and whom APOLLINAIRE will immortalize in their sagas of the entertainers. But music has a larger and more mystical role than street festivals. For 1 000 years right up to the middle of our century men's lives were regulated by the bell and the clock, the morning bells and the bells for the dead, the alarms. The sounds of the carrillon will be carried all the way to MILLET's Angelus.

All good things, all misfortunes were translated by the talk of the bells which sounded over the villages and the farms: baptisms, communions, dying, feast days and mourning. You who hear me, knew these rhythms as a child; in your ancestral home, the grand-father clock marked out the days nights with its sonorous and compelling pendulum.

A woman's voice: "please come along to the next stop: the Charles CROS room, where all the great steps of modern communication can be seen."

The story of the wireless overshadowed the visual telegraph of CHAPPE, who invented the aerial telegraph whose bicentennial coincides with the French Revolution. In 1793 it will work for the first time to announce to Paris the victory of our armies who will crush the Austrians at Condé sur Escaut.

The wire telegraph which followed Claude CHAPPE invention is known as Morse telegraph.

Samuel MORSE the landscape painter remains the author of this alphabet based on dots and dashes. Look at the two machines on the mantel to your left. You'll see the sender and receiver of an advanced system by BAUDOT. It's the first to allow sending of up to five messages on one wire. Binary coding appears.

Accrosss from the optical telegraph; the invention of the telephone with apparatus to fire the dreams of the collector. Did you know that stereo was born at the end of the last century? Subscriptions to the opera allowed stereophonic reception at home with two ear-pieces.

An amazing chronological precision which continues to amaze: the telex, this printed telepathy which was born in 1862. In the glass case the sender-receiver is no longer a generator of signs but of letters of the alphabet. And then the ancestor of the FAX due to ABBE CASElLLI in 1856. The life-size photo in the window alcove shows its size: its the magic carpet of the modern world. Would you believe that it was invented in 1865 and that a direct line connected Paris, Lyon and Marseille, a line which knew the same fate as so many predecessors: it vanished without leaving a trace. Today's FAX which is only a few years old, and that you know so well is only a perfected resurgence of this forgotten precursor.

Woman's voice: "Let's not leave communication, it advances by leaps and bounds through the ages.

Not until the 19 th century will it find its own means of locomotion.We have asked sculptor Jacques LELUT to symbolize it in this giant work commissioned especially for our museum. It 's an homage to GUGNOT who was the first to have brought locomotion to the carriage using stean".

The theme of locomotion is laid out in the annexes of the Château. Speaking of locomotion, look at this snob from the era of the Directoire dressed as an "inc-edible"(to be noticed he didn't pronounce his "r's") who on Sundays tried to master this "draisienne", ancestor of the bicycle, to charm the ladies.

GUGNOT's machine predates the movies. I suggest you look at his contemporaries, the first camera, the Daguerrian "dark chamber", from the name of the inventor. Photography is already inspiring the construction of hiddenor spy cameras like the "photo-neck-tie" of Edmond BLOCK that you can see in this case. Photography has been proclaimed the 8th art and is also a form of communication, if only through the portraits we see of wanted criminals or missing persons, with no aspersions on the family photo album.

In 1887, Charles CROS, inventor of color photography, shows one of his discoveries to the Academy of Sciences:the Photograph. But 2 years later the American inventor EDISON builds the first phonograph on the same principles CROS had out lined. Listen to the scratchy, tinny music of the fist phonograph. A new world is moving towards cassettes, micro-grooves and CD's. The first hot-air ballon of MONGOLFIER is flying away above Paris before the astonished eyes of the crowd. Man can fly...

The old dream of ICARUS has taken the form of a sphere where air expands with heat. The notion of cinema is 300 years old. It is inscribed in the discourse on Method of the great Descartes. After him FULTON, the inventor of the submarine, projects his animated dioramas in Paris in the Panorarma Passage. At the end of the century comes the chronophotography of DEMENY which can reproduce movement, and forgotten inventors like NORMANDIN who brings his camera to the DREYFUS trial to film ZOLA.

Finally REYNAUD, the accused REYNAUD, unjustly forgotten except by a few in the know. He imagined and made up a motion-picture projection machine of which a reconstruction (by our own hands) is in front of you. There are no authentic machines in existence any more.

The LUMIERE brothers did not invent the moving picture as most people believe. They invented the system of film advance, that is to say of projection. At first their only outlet was side-shows at fairs where they were assured a "fair"-ly bright future.

At the same time, Parisians were crazy about the shadow theater of CARAN D'ACHE at the Chat Noir. The ladies of the world grew faint before these moving shadows; all they need is speech, to come in 50 years.

Look at the moving-picture projector of 1900 such venerable object. In our youth we knew wandering entertainers who would set up their projector on village squares with a pot-lunk screen bellied out by the breeze and who would shows us the silent ancestors of the Westerns.

Here is the Pathé-baby, Which had its moment of glory. It's the camcorder of the 1920's. It's impossible to leave the world of animated pictures without saluting professor BELIN, who transmitted photographic documents with the precision of goldsmith. This discovery was a treasure for reporters who went out with their suitcase and, like the heros of Jules VERNE, transmitted their pictures by telephone.

A woman's voice: "I invite you to climb the stairs where you will learn the whole story of wireless telegraphy and the birth of television."

As you may have noticed, we have had to take a few liberties with chronology. The reason is that interventions follow one another jump over each other and cross paths at an ever faster pace. This wireless originally had no works, no music. It, too transmits dots and dashes like the Morse Telegraph, and it eventually will be called Radio with the coming of the triode tube which will bring sound: human voices and music.As you climb the stairs, you will before you in the glass case the portrait of an important man, Edouard BRANLY. Before him MAXWELL had established the theory of electromagnetic waves. HERTZ had confimed this theory by his still famous experiments.BRANLY was the first to construct a pratical detector of radio waves. But the history of sciences is, like the history of Arts, a short ladder where each thimker climbs on the work of his predecessors.

Along comes a man of genius; gifter and visionary, with an amazing power of synthesis: MARCONI. MARCONI will be the catalyst for all preceding inventions. He is to physics what MOZART is to music or what RIMBAUD is to poetry. At 22 he leaves home for London where he convinces seven Irish grain milliers to form a cooperation with a capital of 100 000 pounds sterling in 1900 and to vote him three quarters of this fabulus sum.

A woman's voice; "Just a few steps and you'll arrive on one of the landings of history."

Up this time wireless has just been a series of electric sparks, like a chain of storms charged with great sparks and that one ties to cut into pieces to dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet. Try to impose words and music on the crackling of this static, when the smallest vaccum cleaner can so often complety spoil radio listening.

A woman's voice: "Follow us into the first room of this floor, dedicated to LEE DE FOREST where with great care and accuracy we have reconstructed the most representative scenes of the evolution of wireless into radio."

Before this event was the reign of the spark. Hear how the crackling, fading and interference overcome the words. LEE DE FOREST allowed the great mutation of spark into triode, the triumph of the world over static. But no man is a prophet in his own land, even in America, and LEE DE FOREST is sentenced to a week of prison for trying to exploit a worthless patent. Imagine the hundreds of billions which have been made with this memorable patent. Justice was rendered in 1925.

Before you the first transmission of the first transmission of wireless waves between the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Pantheon. It's Eugène DUCRETET, who was a maker of scientific aparatus and who is in France, the only prophet of wireless in the face the grotest coalition of indifference and stupidity. DUCRETET carries on his work in collaboration witch the minds of time, in particular POPOV. In this new century, the Eiffel Tower, object of much denigration, is threatened with demolition and it's the wireless broadcasting from its summit that will first save it from the ewplosive of the vandals. This rescue will be confirmed by Général FERRIE, and will become definitive a few years later thanks to regular wireless broadcasts from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Look to your right-see a wireless station of a great steam liner contemporary of the Titanic, which had a similar set up: no tubes; a great of sparks at the trasmitter, and receiver with a galena crystal. This is the same kind of crystal outfit we all made in our youth.

Behind you the "den" of a radio amateur of the 1920's his "radio shack". The name is seeker, on the trail of voices without faces, the soul of an explorer in the service of technology and passion. These are stations listening to the silence crakling in space with at length allowed the mastery of short waves. The scene is arranged with AUCHINSKI's gear, he who was the first ham to connect France and the U.S and to leap in one jump 4500 km on the 10 meter band. In the youth of wireless, military authorities were reserved and cautious, even hostile to radio. This reticence comes out in formula that should be engraved in the hall fame of stupidities: "of no interest since anyone can listen in to them. "But we'll hear the same sort of foolishness in 1935 about mechanized armored warfare...

Voice of MALRAUX : "Opposite the Eiffel Tower which embodies the creative genius of France, the "doughboy" of 1914 standing in his trench, who himeslf embodies this epic tradition. See how touching, this image of the grent struggle kit, puttees, haversack and canteen."

The great turnings of history are often announced by little bends in the road. The one which interests us is in Calais fall 1914, when our custom officers captured a French spy in the services of Germany who as he returns from the U.S has in his lugage four of LEE DE FOREST's vaccum tubes. The man reacts like a precursor of spy films: security services versus the High Command : call Capitain FERRIE for me-and on the phone: "Captain, I have for you transmitting gear that can change the outcome of the war." Only Captain FERRIE can understand the extent of the prophecy and the confidence. The spy enters the service of France, the tubes go into the hands of our scientists and by 1915 the triode is operational. Triode was the name of the radio tube at its origins. Then we supply our English and American allies. The Germans will not perfect their first appartus unlit 1917, three years later. It is not going too far to say that the radio tube played a decisive role in the allied victory.

A woman's voice: "Please follow us to the next stop and look carefully to your right. It is now 21 November 1921. This display shows both a coming and an event. Wireless becomes Radio, and it's not a change in words, grammar or audiences; it's an historic jumping off point. You'll hear Yvonne BROTHIER sing the Marseillaise. She is singing at 50 km from Paris, where people are listening at the Lutétia with the respect and awe you can imagine".

To understand how this miracle works, we must stop a moment in the corridor where we'll explain the workings of a wireless set.

At the end of this corridor is the apartment of the great Amiral DONITZ who made his headquaters here during World war II. From the château to the command blockouse, the nerve center of the submarine command, trough an underground passage under thick concrete, communication becomes a messenger of death. Hundreds of boats, million of men will be swallowed up until 1942. But that year a new colossal element arise which will alter destiny; a team of French technicians who went to America under the leadership of Maurice DELORAINE develops a means of instant detection of submarines. The winds of war changed with this discovery.

A woman's voice: "Our next stop is the room dedicated to Roger CARTEAU."

"Speaking to you is Guy BIREAU, the founder of the Communications Museum."

If all the alcoves of our museum have famous figures from DA VINCI to Jules VERNE, Roger CARTEAUX is the only unknown in the list. Here he relgns through memories of the heart. I owe him so much. Everything he taught he did without teaching me at all. He formed my passion, oriented my vocation. It's because he is the distant precursor of this museum that we dedicated this room to him."

We have gone from the stone age to the golden age of radios, from the first stutterings to the transistor. Look at this radio and clock combination which seems like a harbinger of space and time, sculpted by the decorative arts.

Next you'll enter the amphitheater where you'll see more than 100 radios. The set that you saw on grandmother's buffet or on you aunt's commode was taboo: no touching the magic buttons which bring in the voices on the waves. Only a few thousand privileged ones then own a radio set, more costly and less common than today's television set.

I suggest you listen to the different eras that you can mesure the evolution of the vibrations and modulations.The sensitivity of receivers is already very great. What has so greatly progressed the quality of what hear. Six radio sets will give you each an example in space of a few seconds; each sequence corresponds to a certain time. As you noticed on entering, this amphitheater bears the name of Andre CHARLIN. He was a gifted acoustical engineer and maker of exceptional hi-fi amplifiers of the 1950's like the one you heard in the Ampère room. He was honored 25 years ago by Japanese, but today the French have forgotten him somewhat. We owe him this homage.

A woman's voice : "Follow us to the back on the right, where we have displayed the living-room of a well-to do family."

This scene is in the 1930's : you'll see the mother knitting, and on her ears, the headphones of the radio which bring her a song or a concerto. To the right a fancy piece of furniture : the father's radio set. It's a Victorian rococo with a born made of tropical wood. This sumptous piece is the head-altar of family radio. THe girl playing with her doll also has a toy radio. All the things in this scene are authentic. Only the lamp on the chimney-piece dates from before the radioset. It was inherited from grandmother and carefully kept as a relic. It's the electric fairy god-mother of the early 1900's.

A woman's voice: "Back to the stairs where the first two displays will continue the evocation of the saga of radio, with the bigining of military telegraphy."

As we pass we'll salute the Vendean enginer: GIRARDEAU, the only one at the time to oppose the primacy of MARCONI who wanted a monopoly on a global scale. GIRARDEAU had created the Société Française Radioélectririque. You probably don't recognize the logo S.F.R, but you surely know C.S.F and Thomson which continued its work. GIRARDEAU was greatly aided by government contacts awarded by our old friend Captain FERRIE. The porosity of human memory has let slip the names of GIRARDEAU and FERRIE. We want to recall them here.

In the stairs which take us from military telegraphy to television studios, the last two displays are devoted to the beginnings of scanning television, the first commercially marketed television outfit of 1930 and the very beginning of television.

In the first room on the top floor are reconstructed two studios of the 1930's. One is part of the office of René BARTHELEMY. He was the father of synchronisation in television. We have reconstructed the camera and the reciever with the engineer Mr PONSIGNON, a former colleague of BARTHELEMY and Dimitri STRELKOFF. BARTHELEMY represents an important step, but this miracle of the laboraty is still lackink its cosmic dimension and it's ZWORYKIN who brings it with electronic scanning of pictures by television. Side by side you'll recognize two of the most representative figures of Frrench television : GENERAL DE GAULLE who was the first statesman to understand and use the formidable power of impact of the TV screen. The second is Georges DE CAUNES. He was a prince of communication. With him the daily news took on color and humour. He covered all subjects: politics, science, the arts. His virtues are carried on today with his son Antoine who is a host on Canal Plus.

A woman's voice: "Come, enter and dream in the imaginary world of Jules VERNE. You are in the main room of the submarine NAUTILUS."

Jules VERNE, the prophetic precursor, invented our time in his visionary book written during the second Empire : "The day of an American Reporter in 2021". As for VERNE, who can tell if technology serves imagination or whether technology gives wing to dreams. Alone in his attic in Amiens or in the cabin of his yacht the Saint-Michel, armed with a sextant, a compass and a globe, he constructed a fantastic universe : our own. All the predictions that passed in the eyes of his contemporaries as the product of delirium have become real before our eyes. One example alone will give an idea of his prophetic power. He called the launch site of the astronauts of "From the Earth to the Moon "in the very place we call today Cape Kennedy. For the re-entry and landing of his cone in the Pacific Ocean the site was only five mites from the place that Apollo landed.

"Twenty Thousand leagues Under the Sea" is like a sun rising from the depths. "LSV" Do you know why Jules VERNE called his submarine the Nautilus? It was because of the first experimental submarine dive which took place at Fromentine, between le Bois de la Chaise and the continent on the coast of Vendée. Brutus VILLEROI was Jules VERNE's teacher had called own submarine the Nautilus.

Look at the great room of Captain Nemo. It is not he who welcomes us for he is at the burial of one of his comorades in a deep abyss.

You'll recognize the legendary organ-the only sigh, the only man which mixes sky and sea; also, the command post of the Nautilus and the images as described in the Château des Carpates.

A few meters futher you'll find Nemo and friends in the burial scene under the sea with the sunken city of Athena, the undersea fire. We reread "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" four times in order to recreate this scene whose masterful creation is thanks to our friend Jacques LELUT.

A woman's voice: " we're going to leave the passageway of the Nautilus and leave the depths of the sea for the sea for the mysteries of the Comos."

Our space vehicle has landed around the year 2025 on Venus.Princess Iguana is waiting for you on board. The cosmonaut on your right is in a state of hibernation. In order not to expend too much energy, his temperature has been lowered to two degrees. In two months he will change places with his friend who pilots the vessel. Now they're ready for a journey THAT IS LIGHT-YEARS LONG. In this realm we are like Jules VERNE. For a moment it's only a projection of the imagination into space and time. In a year, in 20 years, reality will no doubt have gone beyond our predictions.The two technicians on the space-ship whom you can see are two Martians. They are blue, heavenly, disquietingly beautiful people. They are the first inhabitants of faraway planets to cooperate with the explorers who came from earth.

Weird spectacle, you say ?...

Thirty years ago a trip to the moon belonged to poets, to dreamers, to Cyrano de Bergerac. Today it's the classic of the story of human conquest, in the trail-blazing wake of ROSIER, BLERIOT, LINDBERGH. Here is the flight deck of the vessel, you may rest a moment before going down it's passage. As we leave, we can see on your left the Prince Consort, husband of Princess Iguana who will saluate you with a wish for a succesful return before the ship leaves for Jupiter. For people of all ages, two experiments are available : the first allows verifying that the speed of sound is indeed 313 meters per second. If you speak into the end of the tube, the dealy from speaking to heaving is one second.

Second experiment: sit in this seat. It will demonstrate centrifugal force, the force which causes stones to fly from slings and which governs trajectories of interplanetary voyages.

Ladies and gentlemen, for the time being our visit ends here. I say temporarily because it will persue a dual course, first within you and then as PASCAL might say "In the silence of the infinite spaces."

We began this visit with an homage to Leonardo DA VINCI, and it's with him that it will be prolonged and will become like the image of a life, something infinished between two infinities. Ten years ago the Americans sent signals out to distant galaxies, and these signals expressed in coded language the timeless message of Christ illustrated by Leonardo: "ecce homo; unknow people of heavenly races, behold Man."

A woman's voice: "Before continuing your exploration in memory and imagination, please come visit the exposition dedicated to the symbiosis of communication and locomotion. Each carried the other through the age."

Fantastic things await you.