On the Brink of the World's End Read online

  On the Brink of the World’s End

  and Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Jacques-Antoine Dulaure: My Poor Uncle’s Return

  Joseph Méry: Future Paris

  Charles Epheyre: Sister Marthe

  Jules Hoche: Future Paris

  Raoul Bigot: The Iron That Died

  Raoul Bigot: Nounlegos

  Colonel Royet: On the Brink of the World’s End

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION

  Introduction

  This volume continues a series of Black Coat Press anthologies of French roman scientifique whose ensemble provides a cross-section of short stories, novellas and short novels illustrating the evolution of that genre from the 18th century to the period between the two world wars.

  Le Retour de mon pauvre oncle, ou Relation de son voyage dans la lune, here translated as “My Poor Uncle’s Return: The Story of his Voyage to the Moon.” was first published as an anonymous booklet in 1784. It was the first work of fiction by the architect and topographer Jacques-Antoine Dulaure (1755-1835), who had previously published Pogonologie, ou histoire philosophique de la barbe [Pogonology: A Philosophical History of Beards] (1780) and remained the only one, although he went on to become a prolific writer of non-fiction, including many works of the city of Paris, its monuments and “curiosities,” and a provocative work on Des Divinités génératices, ou du culte du Phallus chez les anciens et les modernes [Generative Divinities; or, The Cult of the Phallus among the Ancients and Moderns] (1808). He was also a prolific theater critic. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the 1789 Revolution, a prominent Jacobin appointed to the Convention Nationale in 1792, who abandoned politics following Bonaparte’s coup, after shouting a farewell “Down with the dictator!” as he left the Chambre. He lost his entire fortune in the early 1800s owing to the bankruptcy of the notary with whom it was deposited, and obtained an administrative position in spite of his opposition to the Emperor, but lost it when the Restoration was effected, and had to live on the produce of his pen thereafter.

  There, is of course, little hint of that colorful future to be found in his brief and amiable lunar romance, which is of minor interest in terms of its description of life on the Moon, because it belongs to the well-established tradition of satirical literary works treating the Moon as a Earth-clone in order to poke fun at contemporary human foibles, but is much more interesting and historically significant as a rapid reaction to the development of aerostatics in the wake of the Montgolfier brothers pioneering public demonstration in June 1783. Balloons were to become a key feature of fanciful French fiction for the next hundred years, but Dulaure was the first to seize upon their potential as an imaginative stretching device. He does not take the idea at all seriously—although the protagonist makes his return flight for the Moon in a balloon, he reaches it in the first place, absurdly, by becoming a balloon himself, filling his own body with hydrogen—but Dulaure makes the central character of his amiable farce a “physicist,” and his story pays continual homage to the manner in which aerostatics had suddenly made physics an exceedingly fashionable science.

  “Paris Futur” by Joseph Méry, here translated as “Future Paris,” first published in 1854 and reprinted several times in rapid succession, both in periodicals and as a pamphlet, was one of a series of fictionalized essays kicked of two years previously by a similarly-titled piece by Méry’s friend Théophile Gautier. That earlier item and two of the subsequent ones can be found in an earlier anthology in the present series, Investigations of the Future (2012).1 Méry’s version picks up one of the themes mentioned in passing by Gautier—weather control—and develops it much more elaborately, featuring a speculative technology that was to become a regular motif in French speculative fiction, greatly encouraged by the fact that a more modest version was tried out in practice over a long period of time, with results sufficiently unclear for no one to be entirely sure, even today, whether or not it has any tangible effect.

  “Soeur Marthe” by “Charles Epheyre”—the pseudonym of the Nobel prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet (1850-1935)—here translated as “Sister Marthe,” offers a complete contrast, in being an overwrought melodrama first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1889, although it carries forward other themes from Théophile Gautier’s work, in this instance from his exotic erotic fantasies. It was written when Richet was the general secretary of the Société de Pyschologie Physiologique [Society of Physiological Psychology], whose president was Jean Charcot, and had a strong interest in the experimental work being carried out at that time in the analytical and therapeutic possibilities of hypnotism.

  Although “Soeur Marthe” is by no means the only fictional account of an extraordinary “case study” in “magnetism,” there is no other written by a man who was closely involved in such research with a sternly scientific perspective. Although the story it tells is essentially a lurid erotic fantasy, whose closest literary analogues are Gautier’s tales of fraught relationships between hapless young men and demanding supernatural women, it nevertheless retains a secure anchorage in scientific skepticism and is possessed of a philosophical ruthlessness that contrasts strongly with Gautier’s sentimentality. Indeed, although the narrative voice scrupulously refrains from making any such suggestion, the story carefully excludes any solid objective evidence that the key events of the story are anything but a delusion on the part of its narrator.

  Perhaps oddly, there are passages in “Soeur Marthe” that seem remarkably clipped, and there is a temptation to wonder whether the story as printed might have been cut down from a longer text—a suspicion encouraged by the fact that Anatole France, whose novel Thaïs was serialized in the Revue des Deux Mondes immediately after the appearance there of “Soeur Marthe,” complained bitterly about the deep cuts made to his text by the editor. Indeed, a much fuller version of Epheyre’s story was subsequently published as a novel by Paul Ollendorf in 1890, and it was also adapted by Octave Houdaille as the libretto for an opera, the music being provided by Frédéric Le Rey, which was produced at the Variétés in 1898. Epheyre’s other contributions to roman scientifique include “Le Mirosaurus” (1885) and, “Le Microbe de Professeur Bakermann” (1890), both translated—as “The Mirosaurus” and “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe”—in The Supreme Progress and Other Scientific Romances (2011).2

  “Paris futur” by Jules Hoche, also translated here as “Future Paris” was a much later contribution to the same series as Méry’s piece, first published in 1895, by which time the sequence had become elaborately entangled with a sequence featuring satirical descriptions of the future ruins of Paris, with the result that near-future contributions often tended to the apocalyptic, or at least the disastrous. This particular contribution is as cheerfully farcical as Dulaure’s lunar fantasy, and much slighter, but it remains an interesting minor item by a prolific journalist who had first dabbled in speculative fiction when his name was still Jules Hosch, and went on to produce one of the outstanding works of Wellsian roman scientifique in Le Faiseur d’hommes et sa formule (1905).3

  “Le Fer qui meurt” by Raoul Bigot, here translated as “The Iron that Died” was originally published in the 15 December 1918 issue of the popular magazine Lectures Pour Tous, only a month after the armistice that brought the Great War to a close. It had obviously been written while the war was still raging, and clearly belongs to the glut of propagandistic speculative fiction that began production in 1917, evidently with the active encouragement of George Cle
menceau. On publication, therefore, it became something of a curious anomaly: an accidental “alternative history.” It was by no means the only story of the period to meet that fate, to which all speculative fictions dealing with contemporary events are exceedingly vulnerable, but it is one of the most extravagant. It is also notable for introducing a motif that had the distinction of being taken up subsequently by writers in all three of the nations that developed a robust tradition of speculative fiction, in France by S. S. Held in Le Mort du fer (1931; tr. as “The Death of Iron”), and the U.S.A. by David H. Keller in “The Metal Doom” (1932) and in England by “Wayland Smith” (Victor Bayley) in The Machine Stops (1936), thus permitting an intriguing comparison of cultural attitudes.

  Raoul Bigot went on to publish a two longer works of speculative fiction in Lectures Pour Tous, one of them in collaboration with E. M. Laumann. “Le Fer qui meurt” was rapidly followed by “Nounlegos” (1919) a novella that offers an unusually detailed account of a literal kind of “mind-reading,” applying the hypothetical technology to the melodramatic unraveling of an audacious and exceptionally well-planned crime. Although the story is a relatively crude item of downmarket “pulp fiction,” those two features give it a particular thematic interest as well as a certain baroque charm, and it is a significant, if decidedly eccentric, contribution to the subgenre of “police procedural” fiction. Its depiction of the eponymous character is a stereotypical addition to a long series of fictional analyses of the supposed psychology of scientific genius.

  The final item in the anthology, the short novel À deux doigts de la fin du monde by “Colonel Royet”—who also wrote as Max Colroy, although that was probably not, as some sources suggest, his real name—here translated as “On the Brink of the World’s End,” was published in 1928 by Ferenczi as a “roman inédit” [previously-unpublished novel] although it appears to have been designed for publication as a feuilleton, and might well have been written some years before its publication. The Royet signature initially appeared in tandem with that of Paul d’Ivoi on feuilletons produced prior to the Great War, which he presumably helped the more experienced author to keep going during problematic periods, and then reappeared during the war on jingoistic propaganda pieces before continuing to feature thereafter on various garish thrillers as well as a twenty-part future war epic, La Guerre est déclarée [War is Declared] issued by Tallandier in 1931. Little seems to be known about the person behind the name, which might or might not have been borrowed from Colonel Hippolyte Royet of the National Guard, who played a significant role in the suppression of the Lyon insurgency of 1834.

  Like “Nounlegos,” À deux doigts de la fin du monde belongs to the pulpish phase of the evolution of roman scientifique, but it warrants particular attention within that arena by virtue of the manner in which it stretches its melodrama to an unusual extreme, and also because of the feverishly colorful fashion in which it deploys the popular notion of the “mad scientist” as a threat to the relative stability of the world. The scientific background of the story is extremely dubious—a frequent feature of popular thrillers of the period—but the nettle is grasped in with an unusually firm hand that adds to the story’s vivacity.

  The translation of Le Retour de mon pauvre oncle was made from the copy of the 1784 Lejay edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. The translations of the two “Paris futur” stories were made from the Kindle edition of the ArcheoSF anthology Paris futurs (2014). The translation of “Soeur Marthe” was made from the gallica copy of the relevant volume of the Revue des Deux Mondes. The translations of the two Raoul Bigot stories were made from the gallica copies of the relevant issues of Lectures Pour Tous and the translation of À deux doigts de la fin du monde from the gallica reproduction of the 1928 Ferenczi volume.

  Brian Stableford

  * * *

  1 Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-106-4.

  2 Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-82-8

  3 tr. as The Maker of Men and His Formula, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-426-3.

  Jacques-Antoine Dulaure: My Poor Uncle’s Return: The Story of his Voyage to the Moon

  (1784)

  Preface

  My poor uncle, as all Europe knows, having had lunch after quarreling violently with one of his friends, a fellow physicist, was afflicted by a colic so violent that my sister and I were greatly alarmed. Thinking that an enema might relieve him, troubled as I was, I prepared a syringe and fitted it to my uncle’s posterior, but instead of an emollient liquid it was inflammable air that I introduced into his bowels. Suddenly, I saw my dear uncle rose up from his bed by degrees, fly up to the ceiling, make two or three circuits of it, and then escape through the window, I tried to catch hold of his feet, but his shoe came off in my hand, and, stripped of his trousers, he flew majestically up to the clouds. I was still gazing when my eyes could no longer perceive him.

  After an absence of three months, that poor uncle has returned. The tender interest that Parisians, his compatriots, have taken in that marvelous event, the works they have produced in order to represent all its circumstances and to eternalize the memory of it, have forced my gratitude to publish this narration.4

  I. My Departure from the Earth

  Unfortunately, my window was open; my remedy of inflammable gas caused me, involuntarily, to pass through it, and I was soon carried into the highest atmospheric region. Neither the memory of the adventure of the late Icarus, nor that of another idiot who broke his legs on the way, nor the danger of my perilous voyage, caused me any anxiety. Physicists, as everyone knows, are never afraid; on the contrary, the disposition of my body leaving my face turned toward the Earth, I contemplated in security the most magnificent scene that Nature has ever offered to mortal eyes.

  A sweet sensation spread through all my limbs; the air was so pure and so calm, and I was floating in a profound peace, that I thought I was breathing in wellbeing.

  It’s necessary to climb very high to find this wellbeing, I thought then. Until cabals, luxury and antisocial behavior have been banished from the earth, humans will no longer encounter it there, and it requires nothing less than an enema of inflammable air to be able to enjoy it.

  For want of a writing-desk and a thermometer, I was unable to calculate the various heights at which I found myself. That is a pity, because I would have been able to provide results of a very rigorous precision.

  Pride follows us everywhere; I felt singularly flattered to see myself so rapidly elevated above all other men; like so many highly-placed individuals, I gloried in my elevation, even though it was only the work of an enema.5

  During those reflections, which still reeked of the ground, the surface of the Earth gradually disappeared from my eyes and I saw the rotundity of the globe. It was then that I began to tremble; the danger presented itself with all that it had of the most frightening. Privately cursing Physicists and inflammable gas, I abandoned myself entirely to the disturbance that was agitating me. Imagine a Parisian, who has never in his travels lost sight of the towers of Notre-Dame, and who sees himself lifted into the immensities of the skies, and you will be able to estimate my state of mind.

  I doubtless found myself in the region of scientific vapors,6 for I was suddenly plunged into such a great lethargy that the tail of a comet, which singed one of my coat-tails as it passed by, could not succeed in waking me. That is what deprived me of observation during the rest of the journey, to my great displeasure and the great prejudice of the Sciences. My observations would have been bound to clarify many astronomical verities, which are so sublime in their obscurity that the eyes of the vulgar cannot penetrate them.

  II. My Awakening

  In traversing the air that contains the exhalations of all the brains of the Orators, Eulogists, Calculators and Plagiarists of the Earth, I had respired such a strong dose of soporific that my fall was absolutely insensible to me. Hazard, as you shall see, favored that final accident of my voyage.7

 
; Several pockets of inflammable air that escaped from my body at the same place that they had been introduced into it, doubtless eventually subjugated the ascensional force to gravitation. It was dark; I found myself in the air above a small town, and I was about to land on the cobblestones of a street when, luckily, some poor devil who was changing residence secretly—and doing so very quietly in order not to trouble the slumber of his landlord, who liked to sleep—threw a mattress out of the window. I found myself directly above it at the moment when it was thrown, and followed it down, without the commotion extracting me from my lethargy.

  I stayed there until someone came to place me in a small cart where, amid old furniture, I was transported out of the town. The darkness of the night, and the precipitation that always accompanies changes of residence of that sort, prevented me from being perceived.

  Far from thinking then that I was such a great distance from my homeland, I believed that I was still in my bedroom; I was dreaming that I was still arguing with my Physicist, who was the most fervent anti-Attractionary seen since Newton. While my mind was working to convert that heterodox scholar, my body was traveling the roads of the Moon.

  Yes, dear reader, the Moon; nothing is more true. Without being aware of it, I had reached the Earth’s satellite.

  Today, as everyone knows, there is no longer anything difficult for Physicists. One has discovered the universal agent, another makes rain and fine weather, and yet another, much cleverer, has stolen the Mysterious Art of the Adepts, by making gold—and it is with the aid of simples that he accomplishes his Great Work.