Ahasuerus
Page 31
THE VOID
Who, then, will guard you in your desert?
ETERNITY
ME!
THE VOID
And if not me, who will wear your crown in your stead?
ETERNITY
ME!
Here ends the mystery of Ahasuerus.
Pray for the man who wrote it.
Notes
1 tr. as “Hébal’s Vision” and included in Investigations of the Future, Black Coat Press, ISBN 9781612271064.
2 Available in a Black Coat Press edition, ISBN 9781612272054.
3 tr. as The Wandering Jew’s Daughter, Black Coat Press, ISBN 9781932983302.
4 The inclusion of Pythagoras and Marcus Tullius (Cicero) with the saints serves to emphasize the eclectic quality of the heavenly company that the Eternal Father likes to keep while preparing for his post-apocalyptic new world, whose planning and population are more elaborately described in the account of “The Fourth Day.”
5 The reference is probably to Berthe d’Avenay rather than Berthe de Blangy or Berthe de Bingen, but it make little or no difference. I have not Anglicized the name because “Saint Bertha” is often used to refer to the Kentish Saint Aldeberge, who is surely not the person intended.
6 This was the name given to the giant bird that carries Vishnu, the god responsible for maintaining cosmic order, in the French translation of the Bhagavad-gita published in 1787. Most English translations refer to it as the Garuda bird, garuda being Sanskrit for eagle.
7 The horse Séméhé is an invention of Quinet’s; its addition to the legend of the Wandering Jew seems distinctly anomalous, and the logic of its inclusion is as obscure as the name’s etymology.
8 The Macar fish is another derivative of Indian folklore.
9 The bridge of Tchinevad above the gulf of Hell separates the earth from the heavens in the Zend-Avesta, the central scriptural text of the Zoroastrian religion; souls are judged when they pass over it.
10 This terms has slightly different meanings in Hindu theology, where it can refer to any deity, and the Zend-Avestra, where it refers to evil spirits, akin to the Arabic djinn to which reference is also made in this section of the text.
11 The river where Alexander won a crucial battle against the forces of Darius’ Persian Empire in 334 B.C., beginning his world-conquering exploits.
12 There was no Roman emperor of this name, although there was a sixth-century jurist who helped to codify Roman law in the reign of the Eastern emperor Justinian. The last emperor of the Western Empire, when Rome fell to the barbarians in 476, was Romulus Augustus.
13 The French word fée is usually translated into English as “fairy,” although its derivation from féerie [enchantment] implies that it can be applied to human users of magic as well as supernatural beings; its use here evidently to a kind of supernatural being, but its coupling with gnome and gnomide (a gnomide is a female gnome) deliberately mingles Gallic and Teutonic terminology, neither being appropriate to Huns; the Arabic djinn [djinni] is subsequently included in the set to further emphasize its syncretic quality. Here and elsewhere I have translated fée as “fay” in order to preserve its ambiguity and its conscious impropriety.
14 Initially king of Austrasia in the early seventh century, Dagobert I eventually became king of all the Franks, his realm stretching from the regions now constituting Germany and the Low Countries to Burgundy. A popular song about him “Le Bon roi Dagobert” [Good King Dagobert], which also features his chief counsellor, Eligius (subsequently caonized), was satirized in a lyric that was employed in the Revolution of 1789 as an expression of ant-monarchist sentiment.
15 Soucis [marigolds] also means “worries” and veuves [scabious] also means “widows,” so this phrase has a highly pertinent double meaning.
16 One of Quinet’s most notable articles for the Revue des Deux Mondes was a study of 12th century verse romances, in which this version of the name of the legendary king Arthur occasionally crops up. It was later adapted by Ernest Chausson for the title of his opera Le roi Arthus.
17 “Fleur d’épine” [thorn-flower] is the title of a well-known French traditional ballad, in which the female singer claims it for her name, thus identifying herself as a femme fatale, though not necessarily (as here) a fée. Morgande is a variant of Morgan le Fay.
18 Aspiole was a literary synonym for fée popular with the Romantics, used by both Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier.
19 This reference is ambiguous, but probably refers to St. Paul; that might seem hardly consistent with Mob’s dips into Protestantism and positivism, but she is a model of inconsistency throughout this dialogue, in which the author is clearly identifying with his character and Mob is standing in for his father, his mother and all the other conflicting voices that attempted to guide him in life.
20 Probably the Danish King Sigifrid mentioned in the Frankish Annals as having sent an emissary to Charlemagne.
21 Quinet is obviously using “revil” as an alternative name for Odin, but it appears o be an extremely esoteric substitution.
22 Clingsor is an evil magician mentioned in some versions of the grail legend as one of Perceval’s adversaries.
23 This Berthe is Bertrada of Laon, Charlemagne’s mother.
24 This reference suggests that the particular Pope Gregory referenced here is Gregory VII, formerly Hildebrand of Soana, who was pope from 1073-1085
25 Surely Robert II, nicknamed le Pieux [the Pious] or le Sage [the Wise], King of the Franks from 996-1031, rather than Robert I, king of West Francia from 922-3.
26 The royal monastery of Brou in Quinet’s home town of Bourg-en-Bresse, is a Gothic masterpiece, commissioned by Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy, to house the tomb of her husband Philibert II, Duke of Savoy from 1497-1504.
27 The “little town of Charles the Bold” is Charolles, from which Quinet’s family originated. The Elvire to which the poet refers is presumably the childhood sweetheart of Alphonse de Lamartine, who hailed from nearby Maçon, and whom he remembered very fondly in his verses, as lachrymose poets tend to do,
28 The younger son of Louis XVI, who survived the death of his older brother before the Revolution and the execution of his patents, but died in 1795 at the age of ten (although myths of his survival gave rise to numerous pretenders). Royalists continued to recognize him as Louis XVII, so the Bourbon king of the Restoration became Louis XVIII.
29 Henri d’Artois, Duc de Bordeaux, better known by his alternative title of Comte de Chambord, was briefly proclaimed as king by some Royalists in August 1830, when he was still short of his tenth birthday; long after Ahasvérus was published he remained a pretender to the throne, and very nearly got it back after 1870, allegedly failing to reach an agreement with the Third Republic because he refused to let the tricolour remain the French flag.
30 Napoléon Bonaparte junior, the son of Napoléon I and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, known to Bonapartists as Napoléon II, nicknamed “L’Aiglon” [the Eaglet] and known subsequent to Waterloo as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt (1811-1832).
31 An esoteric term referring to an ancient Greek region or tribe, which Quinet had previously resurrected in his book about modern Greece; he used again in future works, although no one else followed his example.
32 The patron saint of Paris, who allegedly saved the city from the Huns by means of a “prayer marathon” in 451, and subsequently pleaded for the people of the city when it fell to the Franks.
33 The Battle of Bouvines, in 1214, established French sovereignty over Brittany and Normandy. Azincourt is the French spelling of the place (known in English as Agincourt) where the battle of 1415 took place in which the English king Henry V won a crucial victory in the Hundred Years War.
34 Jeanne d’Arc stayed in Vaucouleurs for several months seeking permission to visit the court of Charles VII before going on to play her own part in the Hundred Years War, which became a powerful national myth, elaborately developed in Jules Michelet’s History of Fr
ance, in which an entire volume is dedicated to her.
35 These two references are puzzling; Thomas Aquinas was Albertus Magnus’ pupil, not his tutor, and had no connection with Heidelberg, and no one names Sylvio or Silvio was prominently associated with his biography.
36 It was for love of the ferryman Phaon, according to Menippus, the Sappho jumped off the Leucadian cliffs; the story is nowadays discredited and Sappho has a very different reputation, but Quinet would have credited it, as did the painter Jacques-Louis David, who produced a famous image of the couple in 1809, which is now in the Hermitage.
37 Bertha of Holland (1055-1093), the first wife of Philip I, who suddenly had three children after nine barren years, given rise to some speculation about their parentage, and was subsequently repudiated by the king and imprisoned, dying soon afterwards.
38 A legendary member of a famous noble family, also known as la Dame de Fayel; the relevant tale, summarized in her speech here, formed the basis of a 1777 tragedy by Pierre de Belloy and an 1826 opera by Donizetti, although Quinet, an expert on twelfth-century romance, would been familiar with the original Breton version, Le Chastelain de Couci.
39 Charlotte Aissé (1694-1733) was the daughter of a Circassian chief captured by the Turks and sold to the French Ambasador to Constantinople, who brought her to Paris, where she allegedly rejected the future Louis XV’s regent, Philip II, Duc d’Orléans but formed a romantic liaison with one of his courtiers, by whom she bore a child. Her letters to her friend Madame Cadandrini were edited for publication by Voltaire—Quinet’s first literary hero—and became an important historical source of Regency gossip.
40 Teresa, Contessa di Guiccioli, was Lord Byron’s mistress from 1819-22 while he was in Ravenna writing the first part of Don Juan, and subsequently wrote an account of his life there. She was nineteen when they met, married to a man twenty years her senior; Byron apparently lived in fear that the latter would hire assassins to kill him. He eventually left her behind when he went off to join the fight for Greek independence; whether he would have gone back to her had he not been killed remains a matter of speculation.
41 And, presumably, all the other tragic heroines of English, French and German literature. Mignon, from Goethe’s Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6; tr. as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), became particularly famous in France as a subject for popular prints and engravings; she was also the subject of a French comic opera by Ambroise Thomas (1866). Julie is from Friedrich Schiller’s Sturm und Drang classic Kabale und Liebe (1784; tr. as Intrigue and Love). Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787) and René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) were both regarded, rightly, as classics by the French Romantics.
42 “Let them praise thy great and terrible name, for it is holy.”
43 Markos Botsaris (1788-1823) was a hero of the Greek War of Independence, a leader of the insurgents who adopted the term klepht—which had formerly meant “brigand”—as a badge of pride.
44 Ugolino della Gherardesca (1220-1289), whose posthumous fame was greatly boosted by his prominent role in Dante’s Inferno, where he is depicted gnawing on any enemy’s skull.
45 This opinion has been endorsed, perhaps correctly, by most of the commentators on the text, even though it is voiced by a God whose Last Judgment has just been reversed, and in spite of the fact that a substantial fraction of the rest of the human race might, if offered a vote, have opted to stay in God’s paradisal new city. Perhaps it is worth considering the hypothesis that Ahasuerus is not symbolic of all men at all, but only of those highly exceptional men committed to the idea of progress: to the idea of an infinite march into an unknown future, with no further assistance from the idea of an Eternal Father. If so, the Eternal Father’s decision to pull the plug on his planned new city, leaving Ahasuerus to play the role of Messiah as well as that of a new Adam, leading humankind into a God-free future, might be interpreted by the faithful as rather unfair.
46 The reference is to the episode described in Luke 24:13-30.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life
23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
92 Louis Boussenard. Monsieur Synthesis
39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
89. Alphonse Brown. The Conquest of the Air
98. Emile Calvet. In A Thousand Years
40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
81 Félicien Champsaur. Ouha, King of the Apes
91. Félicien Champsaur. The Pharaoh’s Wife
03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis
97. Michel Corday. The Eternal Flame
67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey
17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men
49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence
10 Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
08 Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
01 Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
51 Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
31 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
70 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega & The Shadowmen
88 Judith Gautier. Isoline and the Serpent-Flower
57 Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
24 Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
55 Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
30 Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
90 Fernand Kolney. Love in 5000 Years
87 Louis-Guillaume de La Follie. The Unpretentious Philosopher
50 André Laurie. Spiridon
52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
82 Alain Le Drimeur. The Future City
27-28 Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
07 Jules Lermina. Mysteryville
25 Jules Lermina. Panic in Paris
32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius
66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers
15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
73 Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot
74 Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat
75 Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies
76 Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious
96. André Lichtenberger. The Centaurs
99. André Lichtenberger. The Children of the Crab
72 Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes
78 Joseph Méry. The Tower of Destiny
77 Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865
83 Louise Michel. The Human Microbes
84 Louise Michel. The New World
93. Tony Moilin. Paris in the Year 2000
11 José Moselli. Illa’s End
38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
04 Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
79 Pierre Pelot. The Child Who Walked On The Sky
85 Ernest Perochon. The Frenetic People
100. Edgar Quinet. Ahasuerus
60 Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
33 Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril
34 Maurice Renard. Doctor Lerne
35 Maurice Renard. The Doctored Man
36 Maurice Renard. A Man Among the Microbes
37 Maurice Renard. The Master of Light
41 Jean Richepin. The Wing
12
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries
62 Albert Robida. Chalet in the Sky
69 Albert Robida. The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul
95 Albert Robida. The Electric Life
46 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Givreuse Enigma
45 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Mysterious Force
43 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Navigators of Space
48 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Vamireh
44 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The World of the Variants
47 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Young Vampire
71 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River
24 Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
09 Han Ryner. The Superhumans
20 Brian Stableford. The Germans on Venus
19 Brian Stableford. News from the Moon
63 Brian Stableford. The Supreme Progress
64 Brian Stableford. The World Above the World
65 Brian Stableford. Nemoville
80 Brian Stableford. Investigations of the Future
42 Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
13 Kurt Steiner. Ortog
18 Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
58 C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
53 Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion (w/Octave Joncquel)
16 Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic; (w/André Blandin)
59 Théo Varlet. Timeslip Troopers
86 Théo Varlet. The Golden Rock
94 Théo Varlet. The Castaways of Eros
54 Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
English adaptation and introduction Copyright 2013 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2013 Daniele Serra.
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ISBN 978-1-61227-214-6. First Printing. September 2013. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.