Pharaoh’s Wife
An Occult Novel
by
Félicien Champsaur
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
La Pharaonne, roman occulte by Félicien Champsaur, here translated as Pharaoh’s Wife: An Occult Novel, was originally published in Paris in 1929 by Ferenczi et fils, illustrated by an “archaeological commentary” designed by the Italian artist Fabius Lorenzi. It is an odd book, perhaps because it appears to have been written “backwards.” If the evidence of the text can be trusted, the author must have undertaken a voyage to Egypt early in 1928, traveling up the Nile over a period of weeks, making elaborate notes of his observations for future reference. Wanting to make use of that material in a novel, he then appears to have designed a long prelude establishing the characters that would, so to speak, take his place in the story as observers of what he had seen, his notes providing the raw material for the journey that would take them toward the climax of their own story.
Not unnaturally—like Champsaur’s own expedition, presumably—the story he concocted in order to make use of his notes on Egypt was inspired by the discovery of the nearly-intact tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon in November 1922, which caused a sensation and renewed worldwide interest in Egyptian archeology and Egyptian tourism. The tomb’s burial chamber was opened in February 1923, and Carnarvon’s death not long after helped to fuel yellow press stories about a supposed “curse of the mummy’s tomb”—an idea already familiar thanks to sensational silent movies, most notably Die Angen deer Mummir Ma (1918; English version as The Eyes of the Mummy) directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Pola Negri. That notion, however, was merely an understandable extrapolation of the intrinsic fascination and essential eccentricity of the burial practices of ancient Egypt. The idea of mummification, summoned from the imagination of the ancient Egyptians to provide the foundation of a bizarre cult built around the nucleus of a curious immortality, inevitably found an echo in the imagination of the modern audience aware of the mass exhumation of mummies through the medium of press reportage.
Champsaur’s contemplation of Lord Carnarvon’s discovery was inevitably complicated by nationalistic considerations. The first wave of Egyptian archeological explorations had been carried out by French scholars in the wake of Napoléon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, and Egyptology had been a French-based science for most of the 19th century—but the French explorers who had excavated so much had failed to find the Tutankhamun tomb, the most nearly complete of all the Pharaonic tombs—which having only been robbed once in antiquity, by thieves who had been careful enough to hide their find after removing the jewelry, but apparently not careful enough to stay alive long enough to return. That had been left for the English, who became the masters of Egypt after the Great War, to discover—a circumstance bound to cause a certain faint resentment in Paris.
It had also been in France that writers associated with the Romantic Movement had made the most productive use of the romance of ancient Egypt, and, more specifically, the romance of mummification, in their writings. Théophile Gautier penned “Le Pied de Momie” (1840; tr. as “The Mummy’s Foot”) and Le Roman de la Momie (1858; tr. as The Romance of a Mummy) as well as his classic account of “Une Nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838; tr. as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”). The romance in question was, however, already tinged with irony, and a certain amount of disillusionment, the latter very evident in Joseph Méry’s “Les Explorations de Victor Hummer” (1836; tr. as “The Explorations of Victor Hummer”1), a work that has a considerable kinship with La Pharaonne.
That literary baton was also passed on, however, when the notion that mummies might retain, or at least recover, a strange form of life became a rich aliment for popular fiction produced in association with the 19th century “occult revival,” particularly in association with romances of reincarnation, which dealt with historical recurrences occasioned by reincarnation, and quests for love extended across millennia. The greatest success of the subgenre in question, H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886), only had a peripheral Egyptian element, but Haggard wrote similar novels moving ancient Egypt to center stage, as did several of his English contemporaries. Haggard’s own account of Cleopatra (1889) is a fairly straightforward historical fantasy, but Cleopatra and earlier queens of Egypt such as Nefertiti soon began to take a central role in English literary fantasies of reincarnation, both fictional and delusional. The entire apparatus was carried forward into the lurid depths of cheap popular fiction—notably by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), whose Egyptian fantasies of real or apparent reincarnation included Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918) and She Who Sleeps (1928)—and, of course, into silent movies.
The occult revival ran out of steam at the end of the century, but never faded away entirely, and received a further boost as a result of the Great War, when some of its components—most notably spiritualism—experienced a renewal of popularity born of grief and widespread disillusionment with the science and technology that had not only made the conflict of 1914-18 so bloody but promised far worse for the next clash of nations. It was in that historical context that the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb sparked a new popular interest in ancient Egypt in general and mummies in particular.
Attitudes had shifted very markedly since the 1880s, and romances of reincarnation produced in the 1920s had to partake of a new zeitgeist as well as their modern dimension having to be painted against a very different historical backcloth. Commitment of any kind of belief had become much harder, and analysis of that kind of commitment much more confused. Champsaur, who had always been a skeptic unsure of whether there was anything in which a rational man could pin his faith, and equally unsure as to what the lest worst alternative might be in the matter of making do, but had always been simultaneously entranced by the possibility of intellectual and spiritual progress, was as well-placed as anyone, if not to find any answer to the conundrums re-excited by the spectacular discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, at least to exemplify the groping in the dark that seemed to be the intellectual and imaginative plight of the post-war decade.2
To some readers, La Pharaonne must have seemed a disappointment, because of its querulous rambling as well as it interruption by a limping travelogue, and it might have come to seem that way to its author too. Champsaur obviously made the story up as he went along, as was his usual practice, and his uncertainty as to where he wanted to take it led to several significant inconsistencies as well as to numerous introductions of minor characters who were then unceremoniously abandoned and forgotten. The inevitably patchiness of the travelogue, which is a disconnected series of holiday snapshots devoid of any narrative traction save for the itinerary of the journey, is curiously reflected in the story devised to frame it, which is also a rather loose aggregation of separate images and scenes, distinct and sometimes flamboyant in themselves, but with such limited little overall coherency that the whole bears more resemblance to a literary collage than an organized narrative. That effect is not without its own artistry, however, and its sheer idiosyncrasy provides some compensation for a lack of efficient steering that it certainly not out of keeping with the zeitgeist it reflects.
In spite of its uncertainties, Champsaur’s improvised plot is possessed of a zest typical of the author’s endeavors, and the disconnection of its parts leaves room not only for the casual philosophical flights of fancy in which he loved to indulge—which are particularly abundant here—but also for some eccentric digressions. Never a writer afraid of self-indulgence, Champsaur evidently reveled in that opportunity, and the hectic confusion of his digressions has a certain unique char
m. At any rate, the various dead ends strewn around the prologue do not provide any significant delay, and the inevitable languors of the travelogue are not sufficiently extended to become truly tedious. One can easily imagine that looking at Champaur’s actual holiday snaps would be as unexciting as looking at anyone else’s, but that the wit and enthusiasm of his commentary would probably have provided adequate compensation.
In any case, Champsaur appears to have come to the conclusion of his own accord that his insertion of the travelogue into his novel had brought his plot to an inconvenient standstill, and to have become bored with the procrastination himself. Eventually, he brings his reminiscence to an abrupt halt, in order to return at a headlong rush to his story. Once resumed, even the story had nowhere to go—but that, in a sense, was the whole point of the exercise. Even if, as the narrative seems prepared to accept—albeit a trifle reluctantly—there is some reliability in occultism, and some underlying truth in the notion of serial reincarnation, so what? What further conclusion can possibly be reached or drawn, except that there are more things in Heaven and Earth that are dreamt of in flapper philosophy? And again, so what?
It is arguable, in fact, that the most intriguing element of Champsaur’s narrative scheme is not the possibility that its heroine really is, in some sense, the Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s wife, or even the psychological effects that the belief in question might have on her attempt to find a purpose in life. Champsaur obviously intended that to be the principal focus of his story when he set out, but he and the story got sidetracked along the way, as he became more intrigued by the other set of echoes of the past that he had deftly set up by way of comparison and contrast: the entirely mundane but nevertheless forceful burdens of association that weigh upon the Duke of Rutland and his amiable parasite William Shakespeare, eccentrically bonded together by the admittedly-false theory that the original William Shakespeare’s plays might really have been written by Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland.
Although initially invoked as mere comedy relief, only emerging tentatively from the wings of the romance of reincarnation, the Duke and Shakespeare are ultimately set free to hog the stage. Although remaining conscientiously farcical, their subplot gradually becomes more poignant in its tragic dimension, in spite of, and partly because of, its frank absurdity. Members of a supplementary cast they might be, in terms of the novel’s central theme, but the story acquires a more abundant life whenever Rutland and Shakespeare take the stage away from the Duchess and Ormus, and they have all its best lines, in spite of sterling competition from the likes of Charlie Chaplin and King Fuad I of Egypt, whose mere appearance in the plot is enough to cause starts of surprise.
As is inevitable with a novel published in 1929, La Pharaonne has dated considerably. We now know far more about Tutankhamun than it was possible for Champsaur and his characters to know or guess in 1929. Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus was not opened in order to expose the mummy of the king until October 1925, and the tomb had not yet been fully emptied of its contents when Champsaur visited Egypt and wrote the novel. Although Tutankhamun had not previously attracted much attention from Egyptologists, it was known that he had died young—which had inevitably gave rise to speculation that he had been murdered, perhaps by poison—and news relating to discoveries made in the tomb and by the study of its contents was filtered through that knowledge, but it was not until much later that the king’s precise age was revealed, along with his actual parentage, and many other details of his brief career were filled in.
It is therefore entirely excusable that the account of Tutankhamun’s life that Champsaur puts into Ormus’ mouth has subsequently been revealed to be false in almost every respect, and that the overall historical context provided by Adsum is similarly unsupportable. It is obvious, however, that when Champsaur first began developing those schemes he had not yet made up his mind whether the story of Tutanhkamun and the more general account of Egyptian religion offered by Ormus and Adsum were to be anything more than a line of patter developed by two charlatans, albeit charlatans who had fallen—as charlatans often do—for their own propaganda, so his blithe carelessness is understandable. In any case, there is no reason why our knowledge of the fantasy’s falsehood should undermine its interest as an aspect of the novel, either as a mere flight of fancy, or as a hypothetical psychological lever.
As a result of all the problems cited above, aficionados of supernatural fiction might find La Pharaonne a trifle half-hearted, and deem it weak in consequence, but true connoisseurs will observe that its hesitations and uncertainties allow it to address more subtle questions than any that Rider Haggard was able to reach, let alone Sax Rohmer, and to investigate them more delicately, if more than a little casually. Like almost all of Champsaur’s fiction, La Pharaonne is primarily a love story, and it reflects the author’s genuine interest in the deceptive and treacherous appeals of that emotion, and the essential perversity of its efforts toward the ideal, as well as the essential hollowness of any attempt to avoid or sacrifice its ideality. It is not his strongest story of that sort, nor even his most endearingly peculiar,3 but it is one of his more adventurous, in a spirit of open-minded exploration, and hence one of the most interesting.
This translation has been made from the version of the Ferenczi edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. The translation was unusually difficult because of the text’s eccentric way with proper names. The frank and deliberate bizarrerie of many of the names attached to minor American and English characters is further confused by variations in their rendering; I have unified them as best I could. More seriously, the names attached to places and natural species are subject to similar variation, and often seem to be erratic or erroneous—perhaps because the notes that Champsaur made while he was in Egypt routinely guessed at the spelling of words he heard spoken, with results that cannot be located in other texts, and often made different guesses on different occasions. Other mistakes in the text might well result from the typesetter’s inability to read Champsaur’s handwriting and a lack of conscientious proofreading.
At any rate, there are a great many puzzling manifestations in the French text that do not lend themselves to easy interpretation or confident correction. I have made corrections where I could, and substituted versions of some of the names that are more likely to be recognized by modern readers, but for the most part I have simply followed the policy of reproducing names as they are given in the French text, even when they are unknown to authoritative geography or natural history, only adding footnotes to a handful of the most problematic cases.
Brian Stableford
PART ONE: ORMUS’ INCANTATION
I. The Mage Ormus
After the stifling heat of summer, the month of September is perhaps the one, in New York, whose weather is the most disconcerting. In winter, the temperature sometimes descends as far as twenty degrees below zero, while in summer one is positively grilled there. In July and August the dwellings are no longer habitable, and the unfortunate citizens sleep in parks and on the roofs of their buildings. September and October finally become tolerable—the two most agreeable months of the year in Fifth Avenue, where the billionaires of a city constructed for commercial and financial establishments have their splendid town houses.
From Brooklyn Bridge, which overlooks the city from its forty-meter height, eyes considering New York by day see nothing but a mass of brick and iron buildings, in which the skyscrapers look like enormous towers—but at night, the décor changes. Among millions of electrically-lighted windows, the strings of high street-lights in the avenues, intersecting at right-angles, design an enormous sparkling chessboard of stars. Mirrored in the river, the formidable bridge, two kilometers long and twenty-six meters wide, with its eight tracks for trains and trams, two roads for automobiles and a pedestrian footpath, is brilliantly illuminated, in flowing streaks of fire endlessly repeated by the water, resembling a fairyland of light.
While everywhere else in the city is fe
verishly crowded and agitated, Fifth Avenue enjoys a relative calm, an oasis in the movement of business and unrelenting work. The façades of the big houses have a rich and monumental appearance, but that is not where there is life and movement. The real luxury and intimate life is hidden behind then; it is in the gardens that everything is disposed for the pleasure of the inhabitants. The most opulent are, in any case, not content with these splendid dwellings; on Long Island, the large isle that borders the Atlantic outside New York, there are veritable palaces whose grounds strive to outdo Versailles.
Such was the case with Diana, Duchess of Rutland, who, in addition to her magnificent house in Fifth Avenue, had a mansion on the island whose magnificence and comfort eclipsed the most beautiful properties of the Old World.
Diana Bering, the daughter of the billionaire Nathan Bering, a king of Industry, had been able to satisfy her every desire and whim since early childhood. After a very complete education she had entered social life at the age of eighteen. Diana’s colossal fortune put her beyond compare, but the daughters of plutocrats are not much sought-after by Yankees. It being usual in the United States not to provide daughters with dowries, dollar millionaires marry for love; they espouse young women who, if not poor, are at least less well-off than they are, rather than heiresses whose wealth overshadows their own. Because of that, a certain number of more fortunate young women remain spinsters, or fall back on the nobility of old Europe, where they also find a satisfaction of their vanity. It was thus that Diana Bering had become the Duchess of Rutland.
The Duke, an English gentleman, bore one of the oldest British names; there had been a Rutland in the reign of Richard II, which is to say, around 1400: Duke Aumerle of Rutland, the son of the Duke of York.4 The Duke had an illustrious name, and also debts of four million, which Nathan Bering paid in full. Once married, Diana led the life she wanted, traveling alone or with her husband. More often, she was alone; Rutland would have been considered absolutely lacking in good taste had he not let the Duchess do as she wished. The latter, for her part, scarcely paid any heed to her husband, who enjoyed the same liberty. It was, therefore, a society marriage of the best kind, and never, in the twelve years that it had been contracted, had the slightest cloud appeared in the sky of the two spouses’ bed, each of them having had the tact not to be too attached to it.
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