The Supreme Progress Read online

  The Supreme Progress

  and Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  Victorien Sardou: The Black Pearl 27

  X.B. Saintine: The Paradise of Flowers 71

  X.B. Saintine: The Great Discovery of Animules 91

  Eugène Mouton: The End of the World 99

  Charles Cros: An Interastral Drama 109

  Charles Cros: The Science of Love 117

  Charles Cros: The Newspaper of the Future 131

  Charles Cros: The Pebble That Died of Love 137

  Charles Epheyre: The Mirosaurus 139

  Charles Epheyre: Professor Bakermann’s Microbe 179

  Paul Adam: A Tale of the Future 202

  Louis Mullem: The End of a Monopoly 220

  Louis Mullem: The New Year 222

  Louis Mullem: The Invisibility of Monsieur Gridaine 226

  Louis Mullem: Club Conversation 240

  Louis Mullem: The Shadow and His Man 264

  Louis Mullem: Chemical Eternity 271

  Louis Mullem: The Supreme Progress 290

  Introduction

  This is the third in a series of anthologies of French scientific romance that I am compiling for Black Coat Press, following News from the Moon (ISBN 9781932983890, 2007) and The Germans on Venus (ISBN 9781935543566, 2009). Three of the authors showcased here—X. B. Saintine, Eugène Mouton and Louis Mullem—were previously represented in one or both of those earlier volumes, and the stories reproduced here complete the work they did that is of most relevance to the development of French scientific romance. The four stories by Charles Cros reproduced herein also represent all of his relevant work, while Paul Adam and Victorien Sardou are represented by their most relevant works. “Charles Epheyre” (the pseudonym of Charles Robert Richet) did write considerably more within and on the fringes of the genre, but the two stories included here are arguably his most important contributions to it.

  Although the contributions by Louis Mullem were all published posthumously after the turn of the century, it seems probable that they were written at much earlier dates, probably in the early 1890s; if that is so, all the stories reprinted here predate the first translation into French of work by H. G. Wells, which imported the narrative method that became typical of British scientific romance into the French literary arena. They are therefore representative of a distinct tradition whose cardinal influences included the popularizer of astronomy Camille Flammarion and the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,1 the great pioneer of satirical contes cruels with a philosophical edge—both of whom were personally acquainted with several of the authors represented her. Three of the stories—the one by Sardou and the two by Epheyre—were reprinted in the popular science periodical La Science Illustrée (1887-1905), which explicitly labeled all of the fiction it serialized as “romans scientifiques”—a phrase flexible enough to be translated as “scientific romance” or “science fiction,” as one pleases. The term was already in common use, first having been popularized in connection with the relevant work of Jules Verne, but its employment in La Science Illustrée and the range of reprinted and original material chosen to appear there under that rubric, provides clear evidence that its users were conscious of the existence of a genre and had some notion of its scope some time before the importation of the parallel British genre.

  La Science Illustrée was not the only popular science magazine to feature an episode of a feuilleton serial in every issue; one of the writers who contributed a brief roman scientifique to the magazine, Emile Gautier, established his own rival periodical, La Science Française (1890-1900) which adopted a similar policy, although he gave much greater priority to stories of future warfare than the less belligerent Louis Figuier, the former periodical’s proprietor. The popular geographical periodical Le Journal des Voyages et des Aventures de Terre et de Mer (1877-1929) also included many items of speculative fiction among its regular feuilletons, whose scope gradually broadened out from their more rigidly Vernian origins to fill a spectrum not dissimilar to that of the serials in the popular science magazines, albeit with more emphasis on the adventurous aspect and less on the scientific content of the stories.

  By the early 1890s, such periodicals as these provided regular dedicated outlets of a sort to which the likes of X. B. Saintine, Eugène Mouton and Charles Cros had not had much access, and whose more general existence might have provided them—and many others, including Villiers de l’Isle-Adam—with a greater incentive to produce romans scientifiques, although the continued difficulty of publishing more offbeat examples of such work is readily illustrated by the failure of Louis Mullem to place any of his more ambitious speculative fictions with any publisher at all. Although its existence was manifest some years before the shining examples provided by Wells, French scientific romance was always a fugitive and marginal genre—and it remained so long into the 20th century. It did, however, have a relatively elaborate history somewhat in advance of its British counterpart, and the contents of this anthology, like those of its predecessors, will hopefully help to illustrate the span and strength of that tradition as it evolved from the early 1860s to the mid-1890s.

  The first of the authors represented here, the prolific dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), became one of the leading figures of French drama in the 1860s, although he had endured considerable hardship and a string of misfortunes since the first of his plays to be produced, La Taverne des étudiants (1854) had met with a hostile reception because an absurd rumor somehow got around that he had been paid by the government to blacken the reputation of the students of Paris (a reputation that was surely black enough already). By 1857, he was literally starving in his garret, as writers are often said to do, but—as happens far more often in fiction about writers starving in their garrets than in reality—he was saved from both desolation and destitution by the assiduous attentions of a young woman, Mademoiselle de Brécourt, who had theatrical connections. He married her, and by the time she died prematurely, eight years later, he had become a great success.

  Sardou eventually combined his relentless playwriting with enthusiastic participation in Allan Kardec’s investigations of “Spiritism”—the French rival to American Spiritualism. Sardou met Camille Flammarion through Kardec, and became a regular attendee at Flammarion’s weekly salon, which routinely brought scientists and spiritualists into contact with literary men. Sardou gladly offered his services for experiments with “automatic writing” and “automatic drawing” during the early 1860s, and soon began to “receive” messages from Jupiter, apparently dictated to him by the spirits of the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Bernard Palissy, who were now supposedly resident there in the city of Julnius. His drawings depicting life on Jupiter were made into etchings and published.

  Before involving himself intently in spiritism, however, Sardou had published a short story entitled “Le Médallion” [The Locket] (1861), which adopts a much more hard-headed view of scientific investigation, and also qualifies as a significant early contribution to detective fiction, featuring a police officer who attempts to use “physiology,” in collaboration with careful logical deductions made from physical evidence, as a means of identifying criminals. Inevitably, Sardou converted the story into a three-act comedy, La Perle noire (1862), and whenever the story was subsequently reprinted—as in La Science Illustrée—it bore that title, a translation of which I have retained for the version reproduced here (which was taken from the periodical’s pages) as “The Black Pearl.” Although it is of somewhat marginal interest as a scientific romance, it is fascinating
as a study of the interpretation of evidence, and the relevance of science to criminal investigation; it is—in an admittedly weak but nevertheless significant sense—the first authentic romance of forensic science, and the ultimate ancestor of the currently-fashionable wave of such dramas in fiction and on TV.

  X. B. Saintine was the by-line used by a prolific dramatist and novelist who was born Joseph Xavier Boniface (1798-1865). Although he is largely forgotten today, two of his novels, both fictionalizations of actual occurrences, remain fairly well-known: Picciola (1836) is about a political prisoner who conserves his sanity by his investment in the fate of a flower growing in a crack between the stones of his prison, while Seul! [Alone!] (1857) purports to tell the true story of the castaway on whose experiences Daniel Defoe based the story of Robinson Crusoe.

  The fascination with strategies of psychological survival exhibited by these two novels resonates in many of Saintine’s other works, including a curious book of visionary fantasies, ostensibly (and presumably genuinely) drawn from a notebook in which the author had long compiled a record of his dreams, La Seconde vie [The Second Life] (1864). A translation of the two-part episode forming chapters IV and V of that book was included, as “Astronomical Journeys,” in The Germans on Venus; the two stories reproduced here are the others that take an obvious and straightforward inspiration from the advancement of natural philosophy.

  “The Paradise of Flowers” is interesting, not merely as an extravagant botanical fantasy reflecting a contemporary Parisian passion for the importation and display of exotic blooms from around the world, but also as a sly commentary on current disputes regarding the authenticity of the phenomena of “animal magnetism” and the broadening of those disputes into a general debate regarding the controversial authority of purely materialistic explanations of natural phenomena. The same debate provides the philosophical inspiration of “The Great Discovery of Animules,” which attempt to apply neo-atomic theory to the phenomena previously associated with the soul. As in “Astronomical Journeys,” the author’s deftly unorthodox wit provides both stories with an abundant narrative energy that attempt to compensate for the intrinsic weightiness of their subject-matter and the occasional density of their terminology.

  Eugène Mouton (1823-1905) was the son of a military officer who spent his childhood in Guadaloupe. He embarked upon a career as a lawyer, which culminated in an appointment as a prosecutor in Rodez. He began writing humorous short stories on the side, using the pseudonym Mérinos [Merino sheep or wool], making his debut in Le Figaro in 1857, and gave up his legal career ten years later to become a full-time writer. He remained best known for his humorous short fiction, much of which was fantastic in a vein somewhat akin to the “nonsense literature” produced in England by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and W. S. Gilbert, but he also wrote various non-fiction books, including one on French penal law and of the first ever guide-books for would-be authors. Partly inspired by the example of Mouton’s professionalism, his nephew by marriage, Paul Duval, went on to become one of the leading lights of the fin-de-siècle Decadent Movement as Jean Lorrain.

  Mouton produced a number of items directly inspired by reading contemporary popularizations of science, of which “La Fin du Monde” (here translated as “The End of the World”) was the first. Two others are translated in the earlier anthologies in this series: “L’Historioscope” (as “The Historioscope”) in News from the Moon) and “L’Origine de la Vie” (as “The Origin of Life”) in The Germans on Venus. The latter stories were both first published in book form in the collection Fantaisies (1883), although they had appeared in periodicals at earlier dates. “La Fin du Monde” was initially published in book form in Nouvelles et fantasies humoristiques (1872, by-lined Mérinos), but it too had probably been published previously in a periodical.

  Like Mouton’s other exploits in this vein, “The End of the World” exemplifies the perennial problem that early writers of scientific romance had in finding appropriate narrative forms for their speculative excursions, being as much an essay as a story. It also provides a graphic illustration of the license that the adoption a humorous tone gave to a laconically casual imaginative extravagance that might have seemed inappropriate in more earnest work. It is, of course, an exercise in absurdity, but it demonstrates very clearly that in 1870 or thereabouts, it was only by reaching into the utmost extremes of absurdity that a writer could have any chance of imagining the prospects that would be visible on the horizons of possibility established in the 21st century. Mouton thus became the first writer to imagine an ecocatastrophe precipitated by global warming generated by human industrial activity, and the first to imagine some potential effects of applying a sophisticated biotechnology to agricultural production. Although Mouton’s jesting exercises in scientific romance helped to lay groundwork for the more elaborate and sophisticated speculative adventures of Alphonse Allais, Alfred Jarry and Gaston de Pawlowski, only the last-named came remotely close to duplicating the imaginative reach of “The End of the World,” and even he could not match its uncanny targeting.

  Despite the thinness of his output, Charles Cros is one of the most interesting pioneers of French scientific romance, by virtue of having attempted to follow a scientific career as well as a literary one; as the four stories reproduced here represent the whole of his contribution to the genre, he—like Louis Mullem—warrants more detailed consideration in this introduction than his fellows. He was born in 1842. His father, Henri Cros (1803-1876) had shown excellent prospects as a scholar and had obtained a doctorate in law, but had scorned the bar in order to devote his attention to literature and philosophy, settling in the south of France, where he made a modest living running a small boarding-school. Charles was the youngest of four children; his siblings were Antoine (1835-1903), Henriette (1838-1924) and Henry (1840-1907). By the time Charles was born, his father had published two editions of his ostensible philosophical masterpiece, Théorie de l’Homme intellectuel et moral, in 1836 and 1838, but its lack of appreciation had extended so far as his being condemned as an unfit educator by virtue of his ardent republicanism and outspoken agnosticism, and he had been forced to abandon his boarding-school in 1839. The family was in dire straits by the time Henri Cros moved it to Paris in 1844 and tried unsuccessfully to obtain academic post.

  At the age of 18, Charles obtained a job at the Institution des Sourd-Muets; Henry joined him there in 1861, but was expelled in 1863 for dueling with one of his colleagues and Charles was suspended soon thereafter for chronic absenteeism. He began medical studies, following in Antoine’s footsteps—the latter had established a medical practice in 1857—but did not finish them, although he acted as his brother’s auxiliary during the cholera epidemic of 1865. By that time, Henry was ardently pursuing a career as sculptor, having exhibited work in the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863. Charles lived an unsettled Bohemian existence, but thought that he might make a career as an inventor, and began work on an “autographic” telegraph system—a primitive fax machine—for which he applied for a patent in 1866.

  Antoine hosted a literary salon in addition to his booming medical practice, and frequented several others, along with his younger brothers, including the one hosted by Camille Flammarion, who was then in the process of writing his Récits de l’infini, the most important of which was Lumen (1866-69). The other regular attendees included Paul Verlaine as well as Victorien Sardou. Charles had become interested in the problem of color photography—he sent a paper on the topic to the Académie des Sciences in 1867—and Flammarion took him under his wing. The friends he made at Flammarion’s salon introduced him to another, hosted by Nina de Villard, which was a very different kettle of fish.

  Nina’s lavish salon was ostentatiously avant-garde, and she delighted in hosting performances of various kinds; the star of her private shows was the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, with whom Cros became fast friends. Other writers Cros encountered there who were later to make important contributions to speculati
ve fiction included Louis Boussenard and Anatole France, but he quarreled violently with the latter over Nina’s affections and tried to strangle him in the climax of a violent quarrel. Nina’s salon was not to everyone’s taste—the Goncourt brothers described it as “l’atelier de détraquage cérébral” (the mental breakdown factory)—but that only added to its fame, and Cros was glad to become a central figure therein when he and Nina became lovers.

  Camille Flammarion, who put on a staid lecture series at his own salon, invited Cros to talk about another of his hobby-horses, the possibility of interplanetary communication using light signals, in May 1869. Cros submitted the text to the Académie des Science in July, and it was published in Victor Meunier’s Cosmos in August before being reissued as pamphlet. He began publishing poetry in the same year; he and Nina were both admitted to second showcase anthology of the Parnasse contemporain, although it did not appear until 1871, the delay in its publication being caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune.

  In December 1870, the house in which Charles was still living with his parents was hit by a shell and destroyed. Henri took the rest of the family south, to stay with his wife’s family, while Charles was taken in by Madame Mauté, Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law. Cros and Verlaine were good friends by then, but the invitation owed more to the fact that Antoine Cros had nursed both Mathilde Verlaine and Madame Mauté through bouts of smallpox. Charles busied himself with experiments in “modern alchemy,” attempting to synthesize gemstones, but acted again as his brother’s medical auxiliary during the chaos precipitated by the Commune. Once the Commune had fallen, Antoine and Charles were both denounced as Communards, but the charge failed to stick, because Antoine was held in great esteem by his prosperous clients in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Nina, however, had entertained many of the leading Communards in her salon and thought it politic to flee to Geneva.