VI. The misfortunes of a shoal of herrings. Provisions for 27,397 years, including leap years. A point of procedure. The unfounded claims of the solicitor Codgett. The brilliant defense of the shoal of herrings.
VII. Codgett swallowed. An evening’s dancing. A herring-quake. How the shoal of herrings entered into all-out rebellion and went to scratch itself on the icebergs.
VIII. Some extracts from The Red Herring. Disasters and poetry. The lighthouse reef. Impact and disintegration.
IX. Thirty castaways in a lighthouse! Lack of food and comforts. Farandoul’s foster father arrested as a nihilist. Olga Borogdoloff’s horses.
X. The lighthouse re-provisioned. The last herrings. How, after many trials, our heroes finally found tranquility in the heart of the Pomotou Archipelago. A Fortunate Isle.
Notes
1 Pomotou is an alternative name for the Tuamotu Archipelago, a group of islands south of the Marquesas which became a French Protectorate. Their longitude extends from about 140 degrees west to 150 degrees west (Robida was presumably using Paris as a baseline rather than Greenwich, but it makes little difference). Tuamotu lies about 15 degrees south of the equator; 10 degrees north, where Robida locates his castaway, is in the middle of a vast tract of open sea.
2 Robida’s illustrations depict these creatures with the long prehensile tails typical of New World monkeys, and it soon transpires within the text that their possession of such tails is crucial to the development of the story. I have therefore thought it appropriate to translate singes as “monkeys” rather than “apes.” Robida’s knowledge of primate taxonomy is, however, understandably primitive; a subsequent passage is insistent that the reader is being introduced to “a family of orang-outangs,” and another declares that their species is intermediate between orang-utans and chimpanzees. I have retained these terms within my translation even though they make no sense in the context of modern primatology (neither of the species cited is equipped with a tail).
At the time the story was written, the orang-utan was still a semi-legendary creature in Europe, whose reputation was partly based on unreliable traveler’s tales and partly on the equally-unreliable ruminations of early evolutionist anthropologists, who had not yet reached agreement as to how many species of human beings there were, or how the concept of species related to that of race, or whether—and, if so, where—orang-utans and other great apes ought to figure in this classification. Such issues had been even less clear at the time when Léon Gozlan wrote Les Emotions de Polydore Marasquin, which is obviously one of the key sources of Robida’s inspiration. In that novel, Gozlan deliberately confuses distinctions between men and monkeys, which had already been considerably declarified by the advent of evolutionary theory, for satirical purposes.
As a postscript to this point, I have translated guenon as “she-monkey” because that is clearly what Robida means by it; he is not implying that Farandoul’s adoptive parents belong to one of the species that the English language now terms guenons.
3 Praxiteles, a famous Athenian sculptor active in the 4th century B.C., was reputedly responsible for several fine statues held in the Louvre and familiar to all cultured Parisians.
4 Many of the names improvised by Robida for French characters involve humorous misappropriations of common French words, most of which are too obvious, even to an English reader, to require annotation. The hero’s name is more complex. Farandoula is an Occitan word (Occitan being the ancient language of Provence—the Langue d’Oc) referring to a lively kind of dance, known in both French and English as a farandole. The first two elements of the Christian name, which declare him to be fortunate and gracious, are unsurprising, but coupling them with Saturnin sets a puzzle before the reader.
The French adjective saturnien, derived from the planet, has the same metaphorical meaning (gloomy) as the English saturnine, but Saturnin Farandoul is by no means gloomy, and saturnin has a different meaning: pertaining to [the metal] lead. It is not impossible that Robida had the geological Période Saturnienne in mind when he coined his globe-trotting hero’s name, that being the era in which the continents acquired their modern form. It is far more probable, however, that he really does mean to imply “pertaining to lead,” lead being the material from which bullets are made. Robida—whose La guerre au Vingtième Siècle consists of a spectacular series of illustrations representing the technological transformation of warfare as a gaudily sarcastic black comedy—was a pacifist darkly fascinated by the mechanization of mass murder, and was thus obliged to regard Saturnin Farandoul’s eventual influence on the population of the idyllic Isle of Monkeys (which, as the text observes, is still in its Golden Age at this point in the story) as problematic, if not actively evil. Farandoul’s conversion of the peaceful monkeys into an army of conquest surely qualifies as a metaphorical malaise saturnin (lead poisoning).
Despite his frivolous tone, Robida clearly intends to imply that Saturnin Farandoul is somewhat symbolic of his entire race, whose pretension to be humane rather than merely human is not to be taken too seriously. The implication of the story, although the author refrains from spelling it out as an explicit moral, is, in effect, that man is merely a “monkey king,” so corrupted and perverted by civilization that he has contrived to forget that at bottom (so to speak) he is merely an incompetent example of primatekind.
5 Honfleur is a port on the estuary of the Seine, opposite Le Havre. It was the focus of frequent heavy fighting during the Hundred Years’ War, when it was captured and recaptured several times over. I have left Tonnerre d’Honfleur! (“Honfleur’s thunder!”) untranslated as a matter of policy, continued in respect of the oaths featured in the next chapter.
6 La Belle Léocadie means “the beautiful Leocadia,” The name Léocadie was not uncommon in the 19th century, especially for girls born on the feast-day of Saint Leocadia of Toledo, one of the virgin martyrs that the early Church’s legend-mongers manufactured in such awesome profusion.
7 The Sunda Islands—Les îles de la Sonde in French—constitute the archipelago whose largest elements are Sumatra and Java, now part of Indonesia.
8 The original machine infernale was a nail-bomb mounted on a cart, which was supposed to explode as a carriage carrying Napoléon Bonaparte (who was then the First Consul) passed by on the way to the Opera; the timing being slightly amiss, it only killed a number of innocent bystanders. The term “infernal machine” was applied thereafter to all kinds of life-threatening booby-trap, especially those involving explosives. The references to Farandoul’s fashioning of the boar into a bomb-distributing mitraille (grape-shot) would also have reminded Robida’s readers of Napoleon, whose rise to fame began when he dispersed a Parisian mob with a celebrated “whiff of grape-shot.” As observed in the introduction, Robida never mentions Napoléon’s name in the course of the narrative, but comparisons become irresistible when Farandoul eventually becomes a General and an Emperor.
9 The (fictitious) story of Saint Barbara—Sainte-Barbe in French—as preserved for the delectation of pious Frenchmen in Voragine’s classic Golden Legend, claims that her father imprisoned her in a tower to preserve her virginity and then had her condemned to death when she became a Christian. He was subsequently struck by lightning, for which reason his daughter became the patron saint of those in danger of being abruptly struck dead, including miners and victims of artillery fire.
10 Ventre is translatable as belly or (as in the previous chapter) guts, but the literal meaning of phoque (seal) is irrelevant in this particular phrase, where the word is employed purely for its euphemistic phonetic implication. To translate the phrase would, in consequence, obliterate its intended effect.
11 Bigre has no literal meaning, being everywhere employed in exactly the same spirit as the final term in Ventre de phoque! Bagasse is a colloquial term for a sugar cane, here employed for its phallic symbolism. When modern English speakers who utter obscenities in inappropriate circumstances excuse themselves by saying “Pardon my French!” they u
sually have no idea how the convention originated, but anyone with a little imagination can see how the two most common English obscenities might be regarded, mischievously, as mispronunciations of phoque and bigre—and the third as a mispronunciation of conte (tale)—each of them substituting a guttural Anglo-Saxon version of the vowel “u” for more refined French vowel sounds. (Ever since the Norman conquest of 1066, Englishmen descended from Anglo-Saxon stock have regarded French, somewhat resentfully, as an essentially aristocratic language.)
12 The word I have translated here as “boiling flood” is bouillon, which I translated as “stew” in the chapter heading. The word has several other meanings, including—in such phrases as avaler un bouillon and boire un bouillon—one very similar to that signified by the English expression “to land in the soup,” i.e., to come to grief. The puns continue to pile up as Mandibul “seethes” and the crew find themselves “in hot water.” Taken in association with earlier references to “turtle soup” (a phrase rendered, as is customary in France, in mock-English), there is a curiously convoluted irony in the sad fate of the “heroic tortoises,” which is itself part of a flamboyantly absurd pattern in Farandoul’s exploitative relationship with the animal world.
13 Auguste Denayrousse was an associate of the French pioneer of diving-suit design Benoit Rouquayrol; their work attracted little attention until Jules Verne popularized it in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, where Robida undoubtedly found the name.
14 The device that Robida intends to indicate by the phrase téléphone de poche—which I have translated literally as “pocket telephone”—is probably a mechanical one, not much more sophisticated than a children’s toy linking two tin cans by means of a cord. The first telephone had been patented in 1876, three years before the publication of Robida’s novel, but it had not yet been adapted for mobile use, and wireless telegraphy had still to be invented. Captain Nemo was, however, way ahead of his time, and may have developed methods of communicating with his divers that did not require cumbersome cables, so it is conceivable that this passage really is as prophetic as it seems.
15 Le for intérieur, here translated literally as “inner tribunal,” is commonly employed in French as a metaphorical synonym for conscience, but the text has already established that the whale is devoid of conscience, and that its internal trial is essentially dyspeptic.
16 A French league is four kilometers, so 40 leagues an hour is exactly 100 miles an hour—an incredible velocity for a swimming whale, especially with a three-master in tow.
17 The text has au pôle sud, but it must mean the magnetic pole, which is located in the sea off the Adélie coast; there is now a French base on that coast, named after the Antarctic explorer Jules Dumont-d’Urville (1790-1842) who first touched upon it.
18 The assonant pairing of soufflant et souffrant cannot be reproduced in English.
19 I have resisted the temptation to further Anglicize this name by amending its spelling to “Valentine Crocknough.” I have retained the appellation “Mr. Croknuff” where Robida has “M. (for Monsieur) Croknuff,” although it seems slightly awkward, because the occasions when Robida elects to abandon the honorific have a certain narrative significance, implying that the name is being used contemptuously.
20 The word “torpedo” originally signified a kind of mine. In 1797, Robert Fulton, an American living in Paris, had volunteered to build a submarine vessel for the French to use against the English; he constructed a vessel called the Nautilus in 1800, inventing a “torpedo” for use therewith that consisted of a mine that the vessel was supposed to tow into position (it was never successfully used). The name was subsequently borrowed by Robert Whitehead for a self-propelled mine that he called an “automobile torpedo,” and it was that application of the word that eventually became associated with the principal assault weapon employed by actual submarines in the early 20th century.
21 Quadrumanes are those mammals in which the feet are formed rather like hands—including all primates except man. Robida subsequently invents the word bimanes—which will similarly do as well in English as in French—for application to humans, in order to promote the idea that quadrumanes and bimanes are different but equal contingents of primatekind.
22 Pieuvres is used here rather than the more familiar poulpes, but both words are applied indiscriminately by the French to octopodes and squids; a more detailed reference in the next chapter specifies that one of the creatures in question has eight limbs, so “octopodes” is clearly the preferable translation.
23 The Spanish city of Saragossa was besieged by the French army in 1808-09, offering unexpectedly heroic resistance after Madrid capitulated to Napoleon in December 1808. The future Duke of Wellington landed at Lisbon in 1809 to begin the campaign which eventually put an end to Napoleon’s Empire, so the timing of the siege was highly significant, although Saragossa itself was of no particular military importance.
24 Missolonghi, where Byron died, suffered a long siege by Ibrahim, the son of Mohammed Ali of Egypt, during the Greek war of liberation, before it fell in 1826.
25 Paul et Virginie (1788) by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is one of the classic French tragic romances. Having been brought up together on the Ile de France (Mauritius), the eponymous couple are separated when Virginie is sent away to be educated in France. She steadfastly refuses to marry anyone except Paul, although her relatives in France think him far below her social status. The ship which eventually carries Virginie back to the Ile de France is wrecked as it approaches the shore; modesty compels her to refuse the help of a lustful sailor and she is drowned. Paul dies of grief shortly afterwards. Robida apparently agrees with those cynical readers who thought the tale a trifle overwrought; Jules Verne, of course, rarely permitted his explorers and scientists any romantic distraction from the serious business of discovery.
26 Robida forgets to mention here the rather important fact that Colonel Makako is Mandibul’s second-in-command, although he includes Makako in the sequence of biographies that follows. Tapa-Tapa, the other quadrumane co-signatory of Saturnin I’s initial decrees, is also absent from the list of appointments, although he is similarly included in the biographies—unlike Makako, however, he has no further role to play in the story.
27 Siak and Achem (or Achin), were two of the old Sultanates of Sumatra. Achem, situated in the northern part of the island, became a Dutch dependency in 1873 following a violent conflict. Siak, on the east coast, was similarly gathered into the Dutch fold, although the sultan retained some power until 1946. Palembang, mentioned later in the paragraph, remains an important city in the south of the island to this day.
28 The text has semnopithéque; the genus Semnopithecus seems to be identical to the modern genus Presbytis, which consists of the langur monkeys.
29 Grand air, which I have conserved from the original text, usually means “open air” in French; the wordplay is untranslatable.
30 Auray is a port on the southern coast of Brittany (Saint-Malo being on the north coast). It was a center of Vendean resistance to the Revolution of 1789; the notorious Breton general Georges Cadoudal—who appointed himself Napoleon’s would-be nemesis, involving himself in several assassination plots, including the affair of la machine infernale—was born near Auray and would also have sworn by Notre-Dame-d’Auray. Saturnin Farandoul obviously commanded broader loyalty at this point in his imperial adventure than his august predecessor was ever able to contrive.
31 The other four must be Europe, Asia, Africa and America; the title of Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne presumably includes the formulation “5 or 6” because there was some controversy, even before Ferdinand de Lesseps started work on the Panama Canal (in 1881), as to whether America ought to be regarded as two continents rather than one.
32 Dagobert I (c. 600-639) became King of the Franks in 628; he extended the Frankish empire to the Pyrene
es, codified their laws and founded the Abbey of St. Denis, who eventually became the patron saint of France. He was thus a King of France long before Charlemagne, let alone the Valois or the Bourbons who had ennobled most of the aristocratic families from whom the suburbanites of Saint-Germain would have claimed descent. The incident of the advertisement may have been suggested to Robida by the career of Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, who set off from France in the late 1850s to claim Auracania and Patagonia for his fatherland. He declared himself King Orélie I in November 1860, having recruited a few native Americans to his cause, but was captured and expatriated by Chilean colonists in 1862. He tried to raise money to “reclaim” his throne, but had to return to South America with no more than a few thousand francs; having run out of cash he returned to France again in 1871 and founded a newspaper, in which he advertised his need for a consort as well as pursuing more elaborate begging tactics. Such pretenders were not uncommon in 19th century France, Napoléon I having deposed many of the former petty kings of Europe and redistributed their thrones to his relatives and cronies. Napoléon III, to whom de Tounens would have had to appeal in the first instance, was neither so powerful nor so casual—and by 1871, following the French humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, such projects became even more manifestly absurd.
33 The adverb I have translated as “incontinently” is incontinent, whose double meaning in French is more feebly echoed in English. Although English cannot reproduce the full force of Robida’s double entendre, it seemed appropriate to retain it rather than use one of the more usual adverbal translations of incontinent, such as “forthwith” or “straight away.”
34 Nouveautés, here translated as “latest works,” also means “fancy goods” in a commercial context, so there is an element of derision in Robida’s choice of that word.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 67
