The Mirror of Present Events Read online

  The Mirror of Present Events

  and Other French Scientific Romances

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  François-Félix Nogaret: The Mirror of Present Events, Or, Beauty to the Highest Bidder

  Jean Rameau : Future Mores

  Jean Rameau: The Transportation of Forces

  Jean Rameau: A Poisoning in the Twenty-First Century

  Jean Rameau: Future Art

  Jean Rameau: The Mannequin-Man

  Jean Rameau: Electric Life

  Régis Vombal: The Immortal

  Georges de La Fouchardière: The Galloping Machine

  E. M. Laumann and Henri Lanos: Aerobagne 32

  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.

  The first item translated in the present anthology, Le Miroir des événemens actuels ou la Belle au plus offrant by François-Félix Nogaret, here translated as “The Mirror of Present Events; or, Beauty to the Highest Bidder” was first published in 1790—a year after the Revolution that is “mirrored” therein with extraordinary eccentricity—has recently acquired a certain celebrity because of an essay and book by Julia V. Douthwaite, whose prize-winning article “The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret’s Automaton Tale of 1790” (2009, with Daniel Richter) made the claim, repeated in The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France (2012) that it contains a character called Frankenstein. In fact, it does not—the character in Nogaret’s story is called Frankestein—but the false allegation has been widely repeated on the world wide web, even making it into Nogaret’s Wikipedia entry, although the British Library website’s item on the text scrupulously points out the error, evidently having been composed by someone who actually bothered to consult the text.

  Nogaret’s novella was reprinted in 1800 in his collection L’Antipode de Marmontel ou Nouvelles fictions, Ruses d’amour et Espiègleries de l’Aristénète français, [The Opposite of Marmontel, or, New Fictions, Amorous Ruses and Mischiefs by the French Aristanaetus], under the title “Aglaonice, ou La Belle au concours” [Aglaonice; or The Beauty up for Competition] that subtitle having appeared as the title of the story in the actual text of the earlier volume, in contrast to the title page As the title of the later volume observes, Nogaret had originally begun writing fiction under the by-line “l’Aristenète français,” an appellation that demonstrated his extreme fondness for esoteric Classical references, Aristanaetus being the name apocryphally attached to two volumes of epistolatory mock-moralistic erotic tales published long after the death of the actual Aristanaetus of Niceaea in the fourth century A.D.

  The name was chosen because Nogaret’s tales are in the same slightly salacious vein, although the satirical aspects of their mock-moralistic pose are inevitably as Voltairean as they are Rabelaisian. They generated a certain amount of critical complaint in their day, and L’Antipode de Marmontel includes a few items cast in the form of letters from Nogaret in reply to his detractors, one of which objects strongly to comparison being made between himself and “the author of Justine” (the Marquis de Sade) on the grounds that, whereas the author of Justine obviously hates women, he, Nogaret, adores them. That claim seems to have been backed up, if rumor can be trusted, by the colorful libertine life he led, over an unusually long period, between his birth in 1740 and his death in 1831. He was active for most of his adult life as a civil servant, under governments of very different complexion, probably aided in various transitions by his status as a leading Freemason.

  Nogaret was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution—the title page of Le Miroir des événemens actuels gives its date of publication as “En l’an de notre salut 1790, et le deuxième de la Liberté [the year of our salvation…and the second of liberty]—and he initially kept the pension he was awarded therein during the early years of the Empire, but he was eventually rendered destitute in 1807 after getting on the wrong side of Joseph Fouché, and was forced to make a living from his pen thereafter. Although he was never taken seriously by his contemporaries as a scholar because he was so witty, flippant and sarcastic, he was obviously an extraordinarily well-read and intelligent individual.

  Le Miroir des événemens actuels is a remarkable work in several ways, and although it must have been a rather difficult text in 1790, as it is today, it is well worth the trouble of attempting to appreciate its intricacies and perversities. In essence, it is an irreverent political allegory in which France is represented by the Syracusan beauty Aglaonice, who, following the unfortunate death of the inventor Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse by the Romans, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most effective innovative homage to the great man’s mechanical genius. A series of suitors present themselves, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than the last. Thus, in the subtext of the story, made explicit in the final chapter, Lutèce [Paris] offers herself consecutively to a series of political ideologies before discovering an ideal of sorts. It was typical of the author that he did not hesitate to reprint the story even after the Terror had destroyed the hopes of the happy ending, in which the text looks forward, above all else, to an end to massacres.

  From the viewpoint of the present anthology and its context, the principal interest of the story is not so much its peculiar political allegorizing as its ingenuity in depicting the inventors and their inventions, which include a remarkable flying machine as well as two automata. Although not entirely innovative—the author includes a tongue-in-cheek list of precedents for the flying machine, and the first of the two automata has the same title as one of the devices constructed between 1737 and 1742 by the prolific maker of automata Jacques de Vaucanson—they are nevertheless marked improvements on their models, and they inevitably embody a great enthusiasm for technological progress and its potential social rewards. The automaton that eventually wins the prize is strikingly symbolic in that way as well as in its disguised political implication.

  The next item in the anthology is a set of six humorous stories taken from a collection entitled Fantasmagories: Histoires rapides [Phantasmagorias: Fast-paced stories] (1887), which carry forward a rich tradition of humorous speculative fiction begun by Pierre Véron and extended by Eugène Mouton. The collection appeared under the by-line Jean Rameau, the pseudonym of Laurent Labaigt (1858-1942), which had previously appeared on a volume of Poèmes fantastiques (1883), also featured on the novel Le Satyre (1887), and was subsequently to appear on many other novels, poems and short stories, mostly of an erotic tendency, more than a few of them fantastic. The present stories adopt a typically irreverent attitude to future possibilities, but are remarkable because of their frenetic minimalistic style, which aspires to a certain futurism in itself.

  “L’Immortel,” which appeared in the popular magazine Nos Loisirs in two parts in 1908 under the by-line Régis Vombal, is a far more extravagant story, somewhat crudely composed, as one might expect in a rather downmarket periodical. The by-line does not seem to appear anywhere else, and nothing is known as to the identity of the person behind the pseudonym. It is not implausible, given the awkwardness of its composition, that it was his only publication; if so, it was a remarkable one, in terms of the relentless development of its ironically lurid theme, and its final image is undeniably
striking. Although it does not deviate from the essential perversity of the long literary tradition that insists on representing immortality as an exceedingly mixed blessing, it develops that notion with an unusually jovial zest, which makes it worthy of attention in spite of its flaws.

  Le Machine à galoper by Georges de la Fouchardière (1874-1946), here translated as “The Galloping Machine,” first appeared as a feuilleton in Paris-Sport and was reprinted in book form under that title by Albin Michel in 1910; it was reprinted in 1919 as L’Affaire Peau-de-Balle. The novella is in the same humorous vein as Jean Rameau’s phantasmagorias, although its central theme is more reminiscent of Nogaret’s story. Its humor and satire are both updated, relying on slightly off-color jokes and making abundant use of the extensive resources of double entendre supplied by contemporary argot. Racing newspapers were not known for their use of feuilleton fiction, but La Fouchardière was admirably qualified to adapt fiction to that milieu, and did so with considerable brio, its deliberately poor taste calculated to appeal to an audience nor renowned for literary interests. The story also fits neatly into the rich tradition of narratives featuring automata in a maliciously satirical fashion.

  The short novel that concludes the anthology, “L’Aérobagne 32,” is one of a series of futuristic fantasies featured in the popular periodical Lectures Pour Tous in the decade following the end of the Great War. Two early examples by Raoul Bigot are featured in the anthology On the Brink of the World’s End (2016)1, and Bigot went on to collaborate with one of the authors of “L’Aérobagne 32,” E. M. Laumann, on another short novel, L’Étrange matière, in 1921 and on the novelette “Le Visage dans la glace” [The Face in the Mirror] in 1922. Another author featured in On the Brink of the World’s End, “Colonel Royet,” also contributed a fantastic serial to the periodical in 1926 under his other pseudonym, Max Colroy. Laumann’s collaborator on “L’Aérobagne 32,” the illustrator Henri Lanos, was also a contributor to Nos Loisirs, in which he published a novella in collaboration with Jules Perrin, “Un Monde sur le monde” (1910)2. The impression of a community and continuity of interests might be extended further, with regard to the present collection, by the observation that E. M. Laumann and “Jean Rameau” were both regulars at the Hydropathe meetings at Le Chat Noir in the 1880s—Laumann helped to decorate the café—and were probably acquainted.

  “E. M. Laumann,” who appears to have been baptized Charles-Ernest Laumann (1863-1928), was one of numerous writers whose literary ambitions began in the Hydropathe era, under the influence of that community, but who eventually lapsed into the production of commercial popular fiction, and retained therefrom a strong interest in speculative material, as promoted at Le Chat Noir in performances by Charles Cros and Alphonse Allais, among others. Laumann wrote a great deal in collaboration, another occasional contributor to roman scientifique with whom he worked being René Jeanne. He appears to have made a living primarily as a journalist, although he participated in a scientific mission to Senegal in 1890 and also worked as a set-designer in theaters—probably including the Grand-Guignol, for which he adapted several stories into short plays—before adapting his skills in that métier to work in the cinema. Much of his fiction was pseudonymous, and its full extent probably remains unknown.

  Laumann was presumably the principal author of the text of “L’Aérobagne 32,” which was reprinted as a book in 1923, although Henri Lanos (1859-1929), a prolific producer of futuristic illustrations in the tradition of Albert Robida, presumably provided ideas for the narrative as well as the illustrations. The story is typical of the melodramatic adventure fiction in which Laumann specialized during the 1920s, being primarily distinguished by the graphic image of the eponymous airborne prison-hulk—a striking, if dubiously economical, suggestion for future penal reform. The plot is blatantly preposterous, clearly designed specifically to accommodate and elaborate that central image, and it suffers from the commonplace feuilleton fault of an exceedingly hurried ending—presumably produced as the copy-deadline loomed—but the story provides an interesting illustration of the impact made on the French imagination by the Great War, and the entanglement of attitudes to contemporary technological development with attitudes to the continuing threat of German political ambitions.

  Although it does not hold up a mirror to contemporary events in the same way as Francois-Félix Nogaret’s novella—indeed, it is difficult to imagine any greater stylistic dissimilarity—“L’Aérobagne 32” does reflect contemporary concerns in an equally dramatic fashion, with a conscientious bizarrerie that makes use in much the same fashion of emblematic technological artifacts. In both works, symbolic flying machines meet a similar dire fate, but in both works, too, the march of scientific and social progress continues its heroically relentless forward surge.

  The translation of Le miroir des événemens actuels was made from the copy of the 1790 edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque nationale’s gallica website. The translations from Fantasmagories were made from the gallica version of the second edition of the 1887 Ollendorff volume. The translation of “L’Immortel” was made from the version reproduced in the “Introuvables” section of Jean-Luc Boutel’s invaluable website Sur l’autre face du monde. The translation of Le Machine à galloper was made from the London Library’s copy of the 1919 Albin Michel reprint, entitled L’Affaire Peau-de-Balle. The translation of “L’Aérobagne 32” was made from the gallica copies of the relevant issues of Lectures Pour Tous.

  Brian Stableford

  François-Félix Nogaret: The Mirror of Present Events, Or, Beauty to the Highest Bidder

  (1790)

  If you only want to amuse yourselves, read me. If you want to enlighten people and serve them, skip to the final footnote to this work, read it and follow the advice that I give you. Thus, the blue penitents, the gray penitents, the white penitents, the green penitents and all the masks of that species will have less to fear.

  To my Friend M. Lecheveau

  Clerk in the Département des Boulets3

  Be the patron of the lovely Orphan of whom there is question in this little erotico-politico-patriotic story, which happened in the year 4400 of the Julian period, or the vulgar year 3790, give or take a year,4 which you can verify very easily. You are so modest that you will be very surprised to find yourself the object of a dedication, as if you lacked the entitlement to pretend to such an honor, but I know you have more than one. For a long time you have acquitted, with as much zeal as intelligence, the retail committed to your care, and yet I do not see you figuring in the red book. You are no more inscribed in the green book, although you have been very honorable at all times; apparently, the order is a treasure. Finally, your name is not even found in the provincial ledgers for annual retributions, by virtue of services rendered…or to be rendered. An obliging pen-pusher, without having an entire part in the Proscenium, where you nevertheless figure as one of the principal actors, if you have received, here and there, a few petty trifles, which honesty could not refuse the recognition, you have rapidly rid yourself of them by offering them to your guests. We call that the tax-gatherer’s crumbs. Large morsels would have made you blush... You can clearly see, therefore, my old comrade, that, honor always having served you as a guide, it is only just that I should prefer you to so many others I have known.

  I have resembled you in my time; I have gloried in it; but in addition, I have told the truth bluntly. My little family has suffered in consequence; my superiors have taken me for an Ammonite and the god Moloch has swallowed my children. On my table, at that time, was displayed the touching letter, the golden letter of the worthy pastor of Sormery,5 well framed under Bohemian glass, in the guise of a prayer or canon, containing the sacramental words that edify me and the same time as they invite me to sobriety. My philosophy is accommodated thereto, and patriotism is honored to serve you the dinner of Democritus in the vessel of Tuberon.6

  Your friend,

  Félix Nogaret

  Fortunate are the people who
sleep when they do not have bad dreams! While the Camus, the Lameths, the Menous and the Goupils stroll in dreams in the midst of beauties placed by Montesquieu in the bouquets of Gnide, or on the flowery banks of limpid streams that wind through those beautiful places, the de Sezes, the Cazalès, the Maurys and Mirabeau the killer have rendezvous on the bank of the Styx with Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone. Those latter marriages are lit by the torch of the Erinyes, so the children of one and the other are as different as black and white.

  I, whom am invalid before my time, for having made my paradise, do not travel when I sleep with either Montesquieu or Machiavelli. My imagination, less active than in times past, no longer offers me any but dusty books, a table, and paper, with a hundred stupidities and all the intelligence of the world in a cornet; it is up to me to take one or the other. A sad condition!

  No matter. You have seen lately that Solon has not disdained to appear to me. I was in bed then. It was a pleasure for him to find me at work this time. “It’s going well now,” he said to me—and then he maintained a bleak silence...

  I, who had scarcely begun to put my thoughts into a beautiful oratory style, in accordance with the advice of the divine revenant, was slightly surprised to see that he was not saying anything to me. I looked him in the eyes; I waited impatiently for some of those sweet speeches to emerge from his mouth that inflates our self-esteem, but my excessive politeness, the result of an old habit of a subordinate courtier, had made me do something stupid, which he was holding against me.

  “You appear to me,” I said to him, “to have something on your mind...”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said. “Where have you got the idea that I was something less than a philosopher? What is this ridiculous address in which I find myself seriously or flippantly called Monseigneur? Monseigneur, me! Are you mad? Cato, who wasn’t laughing, thought that the letter was for Sardanapalus. Can a man chosen by his fellows to enable them to enjoy the advantages of equality be ambitious for a title destructive of the services that he renders to them? Is there one more flattering for him than that of benefactor of humankind, or servant of the fatherland? Do you not know, then, that Minos, who gave the law to Crete, would have blushed to hear himself called Milord? Lycurgus made that observation to us and said, speaking of himself, that, having lost an eye for the good cause, he would rather have heard himself described as a disreputable villain.”7