The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  4 Renard’s narrator adds a footnote: “Seyssel de l’Ain, which is, by consequence on the right bank of the Rhône, not Seyssel de la Haute-Savoie, which faces it on the left bank.”

  5 Louis Mandrin (1724-1755) was one of France’s most famous bandit chiefs, whose name became legendary after he was captured and broken on the wheel.

  6 Albert I, who was the Prince of Monaco in 1912, became passionately interested in oceanography after a stint in the French navy, and worked on various research projects in collaboration with many of the world’s leading marine scientists. He set up an Oceanographic Institute in Monaco, incorporating an aquarium and a museum, and fitted out his yacht, the Princess Alice, with a research laboratory. Renard obviously expects his readers to know all this; later developments in the text assume that they do.

  7 Claude Perrault (1613-1688) was the architect of the Paris Observatoire. Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713-1780) designed the Panthéon.

  8 The inhabitants of the region where the story is set, Bugey, still spoke Savorêt, a dialect of Arpitan—a Franco-Provençal language overlapping both French and Occitan—at the beginning of the 20th century. On the rare occasions when Renard renders local speech in that dialect, he then adds a French translation, but I have usually translated the items directly into English, except where a particular term, like sarvants, takes on a special importance.

  9 Beffa is Italian for “mockery.”

  10 The French term vol refers to both flight and theft, so there is a good deal of casual but untranslatable wordplay in this chapter, whose French title is Les Voleurs volants.

  11 Hypatia (370-415) was a famous Alexandrian philosopher who was reputedly massacred by Christian fanatics. Nicole Etable de la Brière Lepaute (1723-1788) was an astronomer who made numerous significant observations of Halley’s Comet during one of its periodic returns and improved the calculation of solar eclipses, although she figures in most reference books merely as the wife of the royal clockmaker (a prestigious position, in view of Louis XVI’s lifelong fascination with the Clock Room at Versailles). Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), was famous in her own day as the patroness of various radical intellectuals—she provided Voltaire, in particular, with the precious refuge in which he was able to work a 14-hour day and thus become the most prolific writer ever to wield a goose-quill—but she was an accomplished physicist in her own right and Isaac Newton’s French translator; she died in childbirth. All three became feminist heroines: shining examples of female intellectual attainment tragically tainted by martyrdom in the form of male derision and existential misfortune.

  12 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “Madame Le Tellier and Monsieur Tiburce—who will appear in the story soon—have asked the author to treat them herein without benevolence. They nobly desire that nothing in the depiction of the errors they made should attenuate the lessons to be drawn therefrom. Such an attitude magnifies them more than the errors themselves have diminished them.”

  13 The Paris-born composer Augusta Holmes (1847-1903) was reputed to be the natural daughter of Alfred de Vigny, to which notoriety she added by becoming the mistress of Catulle Mendès.

  14 Firmin Gémier was the stage-name of Firmin Tonnerre (1869-1933), who created the role of Sherlock Holmes on the Parisian stage at the Théâtre Antoine in 1907.

  15 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote to explain that botasse is a dialect term for an artificial pond or, more generally, any standing water.

  16 Renard’s narrator adds a footnote to say that this sentence was crossed out by Dr. Monbardeau.

  17 Adriaen Van Ostade (1610-1685) and Jan Steen (1626-1679) were Dutch masters contemporary with Rembrandt, whose work is in much the same vein. It is an odd comparison to draw, in this instance.

  18 Nigaudinos, whose name is a derivative of nigaud [simpleton], is a character in the farcical drama Pied de mouton [literally “sheep’s foot,” but more familiar as the name of a kind of mushroom] (1806) by Alphonse Martainville and Louis-François Ribié, which became an archetype of French theatrical féerie [fantasy]. The most famous scene in the play is one in which Nigaudinos fights an absurd duel with Gusman, his rival for the affections of the heroine Leonora.

  19 The Camelots du Roy was a youth organization founded in 1908 as an auxiliary to the Monarchist movement Action Française, initially—as its name implies, a camelot being a newspaper-seller—to hawk its propaganda-sheets in city streets, although their role soon expanded far beyond that service. The organization still exists.

  20 A tarasque is a mock-up of a monstrous creature paraded through the streets at Pentecost and on St. Martha’s Day in a number of villages in the south of France, most notably Tarascon, from which it takes its name.

  21 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote here, which translates as: “On the night of May 18 and 19 1910, the end of the world was supposed to accompany the return of Halley’s comet. Is it necessary to recall the number of suicides engendered by that prediction?” The panic in question was whipped up by the newspapers in anticipation of the Earth’s passage through the comet’s tail on May 18, when journalists given to wild conjecture recklessly wondered whether the atmosphere might be poisoned by a massive infusion of cyanide gas. Edgar Allan Poe had earlier written “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), in which life on Earth is annihilated as a result of the planet’s passage through a comet’s tail, and the 1910 scare apparently inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Poison Belt (1913).

  22 Les Connaissance des temps et des mouvements célestes, first published by Jean Piccard in 1679, is the oldest astronomical ephemeris.

  23 Given that Bugey is much closer to Nice than Paris, M. Le Tellier might have thought of using the equatorial at Nice Observatory had Renard not taken care to equip the Paris Observatory with an imaginary instrument of even greater power; indeed, the idea of the gift from an American millionaire might well have been inspired by the example of the Nice Observatory, which owed its foundation in 1887 to a philanthropic donation of that sort.

  24 A popular saying in France alleges that “the word impossible is not French.” The original statement is generally attributed to Napoleon, although opinions vary as to when he is supposed to have said it, and one anecdote gives the credit to his slippery minister of police Joseph Fouché.

  25 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “As I insert this letter in its chronological setting, in spite of the promise I made to follow M. Tiburce to the conclusion of his divagations, in order to edify young readers, I experience some scruples. The apparent irrelevance and erratic quality of the missive is an affront to my sense of order and homogeneity—but I have hastily repudiated such stupid preoccupations, in view of the interest of the task to be fulfilled. I even anticipate that M. Tiburce’s errors, abruptly recalled in this fashion, without the shadow of a transition—like a trapdoor opening up over an abyss—will be all the more striking for the reader.”

  26 The pioneering impressionist Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1931) became famous as a “quick change artist,” relying as much on costume as the imitation of mannerisms to make his caricatures plausible.

  27 The Latin subito [sudden] is most commonly encountered in musical notation; the reference to the likelihood of it being used by an old Italian priest is a joke.

  28 The Lebaudy brothers, Paul and Pierre, were among the first commercial airship designers; their chief client from 1907 on was the French Ministry of War. The Ministry also commissioned Clément-Bayard, a firm of automobile manufacturers founded by Adolphe Clément, to build military airships in 1908, and the same firm was commissioned to build aeroplanes on the Demoiselle [damsel-fly] design originated by Alberto Santos-Dumont—who had been the first aviator to make a heavier-than-air flight authenticated by the Aéro-Club de France in 1906. The Libellule [dragon-fly] aircraft was originated by Santos-Dumont’s chief rival, Louis Blériot, in 1907, but crashed during testing and the design was abandoned. By the time Renard published Le Péril bleu
in 1911, Santos-Dumont had given up aviation after crashing a Demoiselle in 1910 and the Ministry of War’s airship program had suffered a dire setback when its dirigible République crashed disastrously in 1909. There is, therefore, a hint of irony about this supposedly-celebratory image.

  29 Jean Veber (1864-1928) was a political cartoonist, primarily associated with the satirical periodical Gil Blas; his grotesque caricatures sometimes caused offence—as they were, of course, intended to do.

  30 The reference is to the annual mistral.

  31 St. Lawrence’s Day is August 10; the annual Perseid meteor shower—resulting from debris left behind along its orbit by Comet Swift-Tuttle—peaks during the following week. In the Middle Ages, when the cause of the phenomenon was mysterious, it was known in Christendom as “St. Lawrence’s tears.”

  32 Henri-Joseph Harpignie (1819-1916) was a landscape painter numbered among the precursors of Impressionism. The second reference is presumably to the rather obscure Ernest Fillard (1868-1933). The surname Le Nain was a signature used indiscriminately by three brothers who shared a studio, Antoine (1588-1648), Louis (1603-1648) and Mathieu (1607-1677); like the Dutch masters cited earlier in the text, they were best-known for painting peasants, but it does not seem at all likely that Le Tellier would have even one painting by them on his walls, so I might have mistaken the reference.

  33 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote: “Item 657. Will the reader forgive us for reproducing it word for word? We dare to hope so. The incorrect form given to this primitive document by its feverish author appears to us to be sacred. We would have reproduced it in facsimile, were it not for the obligation that were are under to publish a volume at 3.50 francs (not including surcharges).”

  34 Arthur Berson and Reinard Süring broke the previous altitude record in the balloon Preussen on July 31, 1901, but nearly died in the attempt. Like Robert’s, their oxygen-supplies were only equipped with mouthpieces, not masks, and became useless when they lost consciousness; fortunately, they had already begun to descend and recovered when they reached 20,000 feet. Robert’s account of the symptoms of hypoxia are presumably derived from a publication by their collaborator, the Austrian physiologist Hermann von Schrotter. The improvised term “respirol” is considerably older in its origin; it is used to describe the hypothetical breathing apparatus employed in Henry de Graffigny and Georges le Faure’s scientific romance Aventures extraordinaire d’un savant russe (1888-96; tr. as The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist, Black Coat Press), and might well have been coined by them. The term is used nowadays as the name of a drug.

  35 In fact, by September 6, 1912, “old Lutèce” (i.e. Paris) had served as the starting-point for one of the most lavish air races of the period: the Circuit d’Europe, which involved 52 competitors and began on June 18, 1911. Renard had evidently completed his text before that event took place, or had even been advertised.

  36 The members of the multitude are quoting from Madame d’Aulnoy’s famous 17th century fairy tale, “L’Oiseau bleu;” the full line is “Oiseau bleu, couleur du temps, vole à moi promptement” [Blue bird, color of the sky, fly to me promptly].

  37 The Grand Palais was still a relatively recent monument in 1911, having been built to house the Exposition of 1900; it was a deliberate attempt to emulate the Crystal Palace constructed half a century earlier to house London’s Great Exhibition.

  38 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote: “This phrase reproduces an idea that Monsieur Le Tellier has already expressed, albeit rather differently, in Chapter X, and which might surprise the reader. What follows with clarify this temporary confusion.”

  39 Adolphe Quételet (1796-1874) is now best known as a mathematician and statistician, but he was also a professional astronomer who also used his observatory in Brussels to make meteorological observations, which he attempted to integrate into his more general interest in geophysics.

  40 Gyges was a king of Lydia famed for his wealth, whose name was borrowed by Plato for a moral fable constructed in the Republic. In the story, Gyges is a herdsman who discovers a mounted corpse wearing a golden ring in a chasm opened up by an earthquake; he removes the ring, which turns out to have the power of rendering him invisible; it gives him the means to violate King Candaules’ wife and then usurp his throne. The tale was adapted into French literature more than once after being recycled by the fabulist Jean La Fontaine; Théophile Gautier’s “Le Roi Candaule” (1844) is the most spectacular adaptation of it. Plato invented the fake legend to dramatize the question of whether a man who need not fear the consequences of his actions is likely to act morally—a question inherent in almost all literary accounts of invisibility, including H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man.

  41 The protagonist of Adalbert von Chamisso’s classic kuntzmärchen [art fairy-tale] “Peter Schlemihls Wunderbare Geschichte” (1814; tr. as “The Shadowless Man”) makes a deal with the Devil, who takes his shadow, and is subsequently shunned by his fellow men.

  42 The idea of a “Watteau gardener,” on which the stolen statue is supposedly modelled, actually derives from a popular engraving of Le Jardinière fidèle by Gabriel Huquier, who abstracted the figure in question from one of Antoine Watteau’s elaborate paintings of “fêtes galantes.”

  43 Atmospheric pressure is nowadays measured in units of force—such as kiloPascals or millibars—but in 1911 it would routinely have been rendered in units of weight per unit of surface area; the mean weight of the atmosphere above a square meter of the Earth’s surface at sea level is approximately 10,200 kilograms, and the measurement is not difficult to make, so Renard’s figure is mistaken.

  44 Nadar was the pseudonym used by the flamboyant caricaturist, photographer and pioneer of aeronautics Gaspar Félix Tournachon (1820-1910).

  45 This reference remains enigmatic; the most famous submarine inventor who was a priest was George Garrett, but his experiments date from a much earlier era.

  46 The Lutin, the Farfadet and Pluviose were French submarines; the first two were commissioned together and were stationed at Bizerta in Tunisia, off which they both sank, the Farfadet in June 1906 and the Lutin in October 1906; the Pluviose sank in the English Channel in May 1910. All the crews perished, but members of the Farfadet’s and Lutin’s crews were reportedly still alive and trapped inside their stricken vessels when the initial attempts to raise the vessels were made. Sensational press coverage of the three disasters helped to make the French public acutely aware of the dangers of submarine navigation, and added a useful dimension of dramatic plausibility to Renard’s story.

  47 The legendary veil of Isis was placed on a statue of the goddess at Memphis, and subsequently became a significant mystical symbol of barriers to enlightenment. It was repopularized in that context during the 19th century occult revival by W. Winwood Reade’s The Veil of Isis; or, The Mysteries of the Druids (1861).

  48 The hemispheres of Magdeburg were manufactured by that town’s mayor, Otto von Guericke, in order to demonstrate a new air-pump of his invention. They were made of copper, and fitted together to form a sphere 50 centimetres in diameter. When the pump created a vacuum between the hemispheres, holding them together, 30 horses were unable to pull them apart. The original demonstration was mounted in 1654, but it proved so striking that it was repeated many times over.

  49 I have retained the French form of this Greek-derived word, because it does not appear to have been adapted into English; as the text states, it refers to the particular ability that the Greek gods had of rendering themselves invisible to mortal eyes.

  50 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote here giving an incomplete reference to Saryer’s text, whose full title is Réflexions sur le second foyer de l’orbite terrestre: Essai sur l’invisible [Reflections on the second focal point of the terrestrial orbit: An Essay on the Invisible]. It was published by Chacornac in 1909, presumably just before Renard began writing the novel, and probably helped to inspire it. The hypothesis—derived from a misunderstanding of
the implications of Newton’s law of gravity—never had any appeal to the mathematically competent and it has now been effaced from the history of science, along with its author.

  51 The choice of Claude Bernard (1813-1878) to head this brief list of paragons of humankind is ironically significant; he was the physiologist famous for demanding the rigorous application of the scientific method to medical inquiry—a policy subsequently employed, fervently and with considerable success, by Louis Pasteur. It was, of course, that methodological imposition that led human scientists to begin extensive series of animal experiments involving vivisection, acting in exactly the same fashion as the sarvants.

  52 Secotine was a kind of glue manufactured—as many of the most effective glues of the period were—from fish-guts.

  53 Renard’s narrator inserts a footnote: “Formic acid. Perhaps the scientists did not give sufficient thought to that odor of formic acid. It is not the commencement of a proof tending to demonstrate that the invisible mechanized toads drew their bovine force from themselves? The extraordinary strength of the most minuscule ants is well known. A guinea-pig consubstantial with an ant could carry loads whose weight would astonish the reader. Now, a toad being the same size as a guinea-pig…” The note is superfluous, the strength of ants relative to their size having nothing to do with their secretion of formic acid.

  54 These are the opening words of the penitential prayer conventionally recited in the Latin mass for the dead; they translate as “From the depths I cry.”

  55 There is a French superstition, expressed proverbially, which goes: “Araignée du matin, chagrin; araignée du soir, espoir” [Morning spider, grief; evening spider, hope]. It means that a spider encountered in the morning is supposedly a bad omen, while one encountered in the evening is a good one.