Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions Read online

  Journey to the Isles of Atlantis

  and Other Fanciful Excursions

  Translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  Anonymous: Paris In 5839 (A Dream) 13

  Julie Lavergne: The Clockmaker of Nuremberg 18

  Gaston Derys: The Inventor 50

  Louis Lemercier de Neuville: King Beta 57

  Gustave Guitton: The Humans of the Year 3000 147

  Pierre Grasset: The Discovery of the Earth in 2009 289

  Pierre Billaume and Pierre Hégine: Journey to the Isles of Atlantis 305

  Part One 305

  Part Two 378

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 439

  Introduction

  This is the sixteenth volume in a series of Black Coat press anthologies translating antique items of roman scientifique that are too short to warrant publication as separate volumes; like most of the other volumes it includes stories ranging in length from brief vignettes to long novellas, and spans much of the history of the genre, to the extent that the history in question has now fallen into the public domain and is thus available for translation without inconvenience.

  The first item in the present collection, “Paris en 5839 (Songe),” translated as “Paris in 5839: A Dream,” originally appeared in the 17 August 1822 issue of the political newspaper Le Miroir. Together with another satirical article in the 28 August issue, entitled “Spectacles ambulans” [traveling shows], which targeted religion, it was cited as an offense against the King (Louis XVIII) in a criminal prosecution of the proprietor of the Miroir, François-Toussaint Michelot, who was assumed to be the author of both articles. Michelot was fined a thousand francs and sentenced to three months in prison. Protests issued against the unreasonably punitive sentence claimed that Michelot was not, in fact, the author of the articles. The excellent Jean-Luc Buard, who rediscovered the item and researched contemporary reports of the prosecution with the utmost care, suggests—very plausibly—that the actual author of the piece was probably the liberal journalist Félix Bodin (1795-1837), who was associated with the Miroir and who went on to wrote a historically significant work advocating the inauguration of a new literary Le Roman de l’Avenir (1834; tr. as The Novel of the Future).1

  Buard’s scrupulously detailed and very convincing argument is given in full in the booklet Anonyme [Félix Bodin]: Paris en 5839 (Songe) ou la Science-fiction condamnée par un tribunal en 1822, published by Fabrice Mundzik’s Les Cahiers archéobibliographiques in 2016. Further details of Félix Bodin’s colorful literary and political career, and his crucial contribution to the prospectus for the development of futuristic fiction can be found in the introduction to the Black Coat press edition of The Novel of the Future.

  Bodin was personally acquainted with several other writers associated with the Romantic Movement who made pioneering attempts to write futuristic fiction, including Charles Nodier and X. B. Saintine, whose significant endeavors in that cause have also been published in translation by Black Coat Press. The specific theme of the article—absurdly mistaken conclusions drawn by archeologists excavating the ruins of Paris in the far future—was taken up by the Romantic writer Joseph Méry in “Les Ruines de Paris” (1844; tr, as “The Ruins of Paris”2)—and subsequently became the theme of a rich subgenre. The prosecution of the Miroir article, and the grounds on which it as pursued, illustrate the extent to which futuristic speculation was a dangerous activity at the time, as it had been in France for many years, both before and after the Revolution.

  The second item in the anthology, “L’Horloger de Nuremberg,” translated as “The Clockmaker of Nuremberg,” was originally published in Julie Lavergne’s collection of contes, Les Jours de cristal (1882). Julie Lavergne (1823-1886) produced several collections of such tales, many of them based in the folklore and legends of Normandy, from which her family hailed, although she spent most of her life in Paris. Her published correspondence is a significant document of her era, remarkable for her stoical refusal to rebel against the social conventions that imprisoned her, even though she suffered considerably from their restriction; she not only refrained from espousing feminist ideas, but remained a staunch Catholic and monarchist in a era when such support was swimming against the literal and political tide. Her fiction provides little propaganda for those causes, however, and its tacit rhetoric often seems to weigh in the opposite direction, giving her work a curious flavor of tragic stoicism. Her other collections include Contes français (1848), Fleurs de France (1880) and Légendes de Fontainebleau (1880).

  “L’Horloger de Nuremberg” is one of numerous items of antique roman scientifique considering the possibility of technologically-acquired human flight, following in the footsteps of Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne’s La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français (1781; tr. as The Discovery of the Austral Continent by a Flying Man).3 Many such stories belong to Bodin’s hypothetical genre of futuristic fiction, as is only appropriate in an era when it seemed that such a technological conquest might, indeed, be imminent, but Lavergne’s is set in the legendary past, that being the locus of all her fantastic fiction. It features a clockmaker, those being the artisans who take the lead in many nineteenth-century accounts of innovative mechanisms, the métier in question seeming to many observers to be the acme of mechanical ingenuity and delicacy; such fanciful tales form an interesting subgenre in their own right.

  Lavergne’s story is interesting in its refusal to construe the story it tells as a parable or apologue, narrating it is a straightforward tragedy, with a hint of irony but no explicit moral. That temptation was rarely avoided by many of the contributors to the subgenre in question, many of whom were attracted to it precisely because of the opportunity to formulate such a parable or apologue. That is very obviously true of the third item in the collection, Gaston Derys’s “L’Inventeur” (tr. as “The Inventor”), which first appeared in the November 1902 issue of the Revue hebdomadaire. That timing is particularly interesting in retrospect, because it was on the very eve of the realization of the invention in question, the age of aviation beginning and making very rapid progress during the following decade.

  We are now in a position to make an accurate assessment of the extent to which the story’s anticipations have been endorsed and falsified by the era in question, which adds an extra dimension of ironic interest to the gloomy prophecies that it summarizes so succinctly and flamboyantly. Its author, Gaston Derys (1875-1945), then at the beginning of his literary career, lived long enough to see how his anticipations worked out, although his exact death date is unrecorded, so we can only guess as to whether he heard the news of the atom bomb dropped by airplane over Hiroshima, and whether it reminded him of his own brief prophecy of the destructive consequences of the conquest of the air. His other literary works, most of which are downmarket romances, include the offbeat detective stories Ressuscitée [Resuscitated] (1926, in collaboration with Jeanne Landre) and L’Ombre jalouse [The Jealous Shade] (1926), both of which feature fake revenants.

  The fourth item in the collection, Le Roi Béta, conte de fées et d’enchanteurs où il n’y a ni enchanteurs ni fées, (tr. as “King Beta,” the subtitle translates as “ a tale of fays and enchanters, in which there are neither enchanters nor fays”) by Louis Lemercier de Neuville, which was published as an illustrated book by Combet et Cie in 1905, only three years later than “L’Inventeur,” is very obviously a product of the era of rapid technolo
gical invention in which the age of aviation was launched. It names its archetypal inventor Vatenlair [i.e. Goes through the Air], although it equips him with an imperfectly dirigible airship, in order that he can go astray in flight and end up in the fictitious kingdom ruled by the eponymous monarch, where modern science is unknown and people still believe in the power of enchanters. The story, an inspirational text aimed at younger readers, is one of many trumpeting the triumphs of modern science and technological progress, and their vast superiority over ancient superstition, although it is not without a certain uneasy ambivalence, reflected in its conclusion.

  Louis Lemercier de Neuville (1830-1918) was much older than Gaston Derys and was famous before the latter was even born. Initially a prolific journalist, who founded several periodicals, beginning with the sarcastically-titled La Muselière, journal de la décadence intellectuelle [The Muzzle, the Newspaper of Intellectual Decadence] in 1855—a provocative move at a time when Napoléon III’s censors were even busier and more repressive than Louis XVIII’s—he reached the peak of his fame after he founded a mobile puppet theater in 1860, in which he staged satirical plays, mostly caricaturing the celebrities of the day. It proved extremely popular throughout the subsequent half-century, and the bulk of his enormously prolific publication considered of scripts that he wrote for production therein and short comedies written to be performed by human actors. Le Roi Béta, a rare excursion into consecutive prose, was by no means his swan song, being followed by numerous pamphlets, but it was his most substantial work, and provided his endeavors with a capstone of sorts.

  The conquest of the air and the social change consequent to that technological development also plays a large part in Ce que seront les hommes de l’an 3000 by Gustave Guitton (1859-1918), here translated as “Humans in the Year 3000,” which was first published by Jules Tallandier in 1907 (the date of 1921 cited in some bibliographies is incorrect). The volume in question carried a dedication “To the English novelist H. G. Wells, a pessimistic prophet.” The purpose of the text, very obviously, is to oppose the supposed pessimism of the writer in question, and the pessimism of writers like Gaston Derys, by means of an optimistic account of the human future. The story’s fundamental philosophy has a good deal in common with that of Le roi Béta, although it is far more ambitious in its imaginative reach, in which is resembles an earlier utopian fantasy written with young readers in mind, Dans mille ans by Émile Calvet (tr. as In a Thousand Years),4 serialized in the Musée des Familles in 1883 and reprinted in book form the following year. It also borrows extensively from a series of images of life in the twentieth century produced by the humorist Albert Robida, most significantly La Vie électrique (1892; tr. as Electric Life),5 which similarly pays great attention to the possible social transformations that air travel might permit, especially its impact on the architecture of the future.

  Like Émile Calvet’s novel, Ce que seront les hommes de l’an 3000 was certainly written with teenage readers in mind, but it was not published by Tallandier as a children’s book, and does not seem to have reached its intended audience, or, indeed, any substantial audience at all, reflecting the perennial difficulties experienced by the author in trying to establish himself as a significant writer of roman scientifique. The preliminary pages of the Tallandier volume announce L’Homme qui fait de l’or [The Man Who Made Gold] as “en préparation,” but it never appeared. Guitton had previously written three romances in the genre in collaboration with Gustave Le Rouge, Le Conspiration des milliardaires (3 vols., 1899-1900; tr. in four volumes as The Dominion of the World, Black Coat Press, 2012),6 La Princesse des airs [The Princess of the Skies] (1902) and Le Sous-marin “Jules Verne” [The Submarine Jules Verne] (1902), but the present story appears to have been his only other venture therein to reach print. It was followed in 1908 by the third item in a planned tetralogy, Les Quatre ages de la femme [The Four Ages of Woman], but that series was never completed, and Guitton does not appear to have published anything new during the last ten years of his life, although his bibliography is complicated by retitled versions of his earlier works. Many of the author’s publications appear to have been fugitive; the list of previous publications in Ce que seront les hommes de l’an 3000 includes four titles that are not in the Bibliothèque Nationale, of which no trace can be found elsewhere, and which probably do not exist.

  The ideas developed by Albert Robida regarding the possible architectural consequences of the future vulgarization of air travel, modestly developed by Guitton, are taken to a remarkable extreme in “La Découverte de la Terre en 2009” (tr. as “The Discovery of the Earth in 2009” by Pierre Grasset, which appeared in the 15 December 1909 issue of La Nouvelle Revue—the “Christmas issue,” in which it had become traditional for Parisian periodicals to publish stories of a more fanciful stripe than those providing their standard fare. In the previous year, Robida had contributed a brief account of “L’Aviation en 1950” (tr. as Aviation in 1950”)7 to the Christmas issue of Les Annales politiques et littéraires, and that might have prompted Grasset to produce his far more extravagant account, which extends, with a succinct elegance, to surreal allegory, demonstrating the extent to which such fantasies had been gripped by melodramatic inflation in the few years that had elapsed since the production of Gaston Derys’s apologue.

  Voyage aux îles Atlantides (tr. as “Journey to the Isles of Atlantis”) belongs to an interesting series of French novels featuring Plato’s fictitious island of Atlantis, many of which employ that vanished civilization as a satirical reflection of contemporary France, especially Paris. It does not have the vaulting imaginative ambition of Hippolyte Mettais’ Paris avant the déluge (1866; tr. as Paris Before the Deluge),8 or Han Ryner’s Les Pacifiques (1914; tr, as “The Pacifists”),9 which followed it into print a few months later, although obviously written some years before. The engagingly light humor of the first part of the Bilaume/Hégine novel makes it seem a far more frivolous work than most other Atlantidean satires, although it is not without a definite sarcastic bite. That first part is so buoyantly entertaining, in fact, that it makes one regret deeply that the second part fails to live up to it. There are hardly any traceable references to either of the two names to whom the text is attributes, except in connection with the present volume, but certain peculiarities in the text—explained at the relevant points in the footnotes—suggest that the author of the first part might have died suddenly, at a young age, leaving the unfinished work to be patched up for publication by a friend, perhaps some years after its composition. If so, that task was surely worth doing in order to rescue the incomplete text, and the added text, although inferior, is not without interest, especially in its more fantastic embellishments.

  The translation of “Paris en 5839 (Songe)” was made from the versions contained in the 2016 booklet cited, published by Les Cahiers archéobibliographiques. The translation of “L’Horloger de Nuremberg” was made from the version reproduced on the Bibliem website at biblisem.net. The translations of “L’Inventeur,” Le Roi Béta and Voyage aux îles Atlantides were made from the versions reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website, the first in the relevant issue of the Revue hebdomadaire. The translation of Ce que seront les hommes de l’an 3000 was made from a copy of the Tallandier edition.

  Brian Stableford

  Anonymous: Paris In 5839 (A Dream)

  (perhaps by Félix Bodin)

  (1822)

  I was reading a book by a celebrated archeologist; I meditated on those ancient ruins so well described, I calculated the epochs, annotated the dates and admired the vast and useful erudition of which every page of my book bore the imprint; I took pleasure in the savant dissertations and the doubts whose chimerical reality seemed to me to be so forcefully demonstrated; I savored all the suppositions, provided that they had something seductive or specious; I was absorbed by a host of confused ideas...

  I fell asleep.

  Suddenly I found myself on a ship manned by men of Nor
th America who, driven by a love of science and a good north-westerly wind, were heading for the coast of Europe. It was 5839. For a long time, that part of the world, once the most civilized, the richest in population and industry, had been covered in debris, sad witnesses of its past grandeur. America, by contrast, had inherited European splendor, and civilization had taken refuge in a land fortunate in commerce, agriculture and liberty.

  How had Europe ended? That is what I do not know. Was it because of luxury or despotism, ignorance or laxity, superstition or incredulity? None of my traveling companions was able to tell me. At any rate, Europe had ceased to be. A great revolution had destroyed it; it only subsisted any longer in the memories of a few learned men; and what were those memories? Faded images and deceptive traditions! Time had leveled everything, the centuries were equal in renown, the ruins were mute. Europe was a desert, and a horrible desert; only, the scattered tents of a few nomad hordes broke the monotony of that frightful solitude and attested to the impotence of the soil as well as the absence of any sociability. There was no longer anything anywhere but an organized chaos.

  It was toward the coasts of France that the pilot directed the ship that was carrying us. We arrived near the ancient cape whose sinuous indentations had formed the superb bay of the finest military port the French had ever had. Only the name of Brest had survived the ages; it was still inscribed in sufficiently legible characters on a large stone, a last vestige of the fine warehouse constructed under King Louis XIV, who had been called the Great, as if that were veritable grandeur.

  I learned that we were bound for the ruins of Paris, which were the destination of our voyage.

  From the frontiers of Armorica to the sterile banks of the Seine we found nothing on our route but arid mountains, impenetrable forests and valleys bristling with wild vegetation. We passed over without perceiving it the ancient city of Rennes, so celebrated in the eighteenth century for its public prosecutors. We camped on the hill where the city of courtiers had stood; nothing any longer remained of Versailles but the memory, conserved by a scholar in our caravan, of the famous “bull’s eye,” the gymnasium of the “red heels.”10