The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul

by Albert Robida

  35 I have left mixte in French for the same reason that artistes, which occurs later in the sentence, is conventionally left in French rather than translated into English—i.e., because it is simply not done to talk about opera without adopting a tone of cosmopolitan snobbery.

  36 Robida gives this title in English, although I have taken the liberty of adding the terminal “s” in conformity with conventional English usage.

  37 The French goût du panache has a rather elastic meaning, panache (literally “plume”) sarcastically implying unwarranted arrogance, mild drunkenness and/or delusions of grandeur. I have transcribed the word directly in the following paragraph, although its English usage does not usually carry these sly insinuations, and have rendered the phrase more economically as “taste for finery” later in the chapter.

  38 The French montagnard, here translated as “highland,” has a double meaning in French because the term montagnards came to be applied to the extremists of the Revolutionary parliament—including the chief perpetrators of the Terror—who occupied the highest-placed seats in the assembly.

  39 In Spain, an authority-figure—almost invariably a military man—who refuses to obey the law, is said to be issuing a pronunciamento.

  40 The text gives the ship’s name in French (La Jeune Australie), but as it must have been appropriated locally it seems reasonable to employ an English version.

  41 All these titles are given in English in the text; I have left them unaltered, even though Devorous is a very unlikely name for an English naval vessel.

  42 Kirsch may seem an odd choice, given that it is usually distilled in Germany from black Morello cherries, and is highly unlikely to have been available by the cartload in Melbourne in the 1870s. It is entirely possible that Robida has no other reason for using the name than its flagrant absurdity, but it may be significant that the crushed cherry-stones give kirsch a bitter almond flavour supposed to resemble that of cyanide; Robida might be attempting subtly to emphasize the poisonous nature of the draught.

  43 On this first appearance the surname is rendered Blackeley, but the more plausible spelling is employed the next time it is used.

  44 Robida inserts a footnote here, which translates as: “The rumor abroad in Melbourne at that time was that he had been sold by an English corporal to a famous German musician, who keeps him chained up in a cave and forces him to compose music for his operas, wearing him down by the most undignified treatment.” Robida presumably belonged to the majority of Frenchmen—whose vociferousness was exceeded only by that of its opposing minority—unimpressed by the works of Richard Wagner.

  45 The French term for which rattlesnake is the English equivalent is serpent à sonnettes, sonnette usually referring to a bell rather than a rattle, so the suggestion of Farandoul’s rumor is that he will be supplying the parliamentary assemblies with bells rather than rattles, although the absurdity is hardly diminished by that substitution. As usual, Robida is utterly careless of matters of natural history; one would not go to Brazil to hunt rattlesnakes, and the creatures Farandoul actually traps are anacondas: sucuruyu, which he spells soucourouyou, is a contemporary rendering of sucuri, the native term for the anaconda (the etymology of the more usual name is enigmatic), while boicinonga presumably derives from the Latin name of the family to which such snakes belong, the Boinae.

  46 The Prix de Rome was an annual scholarship established in 1663 open to students of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture; it was notoriously hard to win—Louis David is said to have contemplated suicide after failing for the third time. It was abolished in 1868.

  47 Verne devotes a chapter in Le Tour du monde en 80 jours to Phileas Fogg’s sojourn in Salt Lake City, and dutifully includes a brief history of Mormonism, which is remarkable for its sympathy.

  48 Brigham Young had died in 1877, and one cannot libel the dead—which is perhaps as well, given the unflattering portrait Robida goes on to paint of the patriarch, about whom he and his readers would have known next to nothing except for the widely-publicized and seemingly-scandalous fact that he had 55 wives.

  49 This whole incident is an absurdly exaggerated combination of two adventures experienced by Phileas Fogg while crossing the USA by railroad in Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, the first being his determination to fight a duel with Colonel Stamp Proctor in the final carriage (although Indians attack before the first shot is fired) and the second being the rather implausible leap made by the locomotive to clear the gap left by the fallen bridge at Medicine Bow.

  50 Six years after this little comedy appeared, the American writer Douglas Frazar published Perseverance Island; or, the Robinson Crusoe of the 19th Century, which attempted in all seriousness to present a very similar scenario as a hymn of praise to the glory and utility of science. Frazar’s castaway is not quite naked and has a few more useful objects (though not, significantly, a pen-knife), but his accomplishments—including the eventual construction of an iron foundry, a steamboat and a flying machine—are equally miraculous. It seems unlikely that Frazar could have read Saturnin Farandoul, so the coincidence is rather remarkable.

  51 Verne’s Phileas Fogg was, in literal terms, a member of the Reform Club. In metaphorical terms, however, he was definitely a member of the Eccentric Club.

  52 This reference is unclear—Paraguay has no coast, so the travelers are presumably approaching Buenos Aires by river; “las caravellas” [the caravels] usually refers to the three ships in which Christopher Columbus made the first transatlantic crossing, but cannot do so in this case.

  53 Papagayo and Cayman City are both imaginary (the actual capital of Nicaragua was and is Managua), emphasizing the fact that the fictitious “Nicaragua” is actually standing in, for diplomatic reasons, for another set of Disunited States whose bloody and technologically-sophisticated Civil War was still relatively fresh in memory in 1879.

  54 The reader will already have taken note of Robida’s low opinion of the press, especially its role in celebrating and stirring up conflict; his anticipation that reporters would one day be routinely “embedded” in combat units is one of many direly prophetic notes sounded by this blackly comic account of the utterly pointless but horribly destructive Nicaraguan war. Although I have refrained from such substitutions as “tank” for “armored locomotive,” I have adopted occasional modern terms, such as “land-mine,” where Robida’s improvised terminology and the descriptions of the relevant materiel seemed sufficiently exact.

  55 There is an untranslatable pun here; the word râtelier [rack] whose literally-intended meaning I have translated as “a set of false teeth,” also refers to a way of making a living, so the clause could also be interpreted as meaning that the unfortunate editor found himself a new job.

  56 Vervain (verveine in French, verbena in Latin) is a highly unlikely asphyxiant, no matter how concentrated it might be, but it was very popular among Parisian women at the time (and is still marketed in the form of herbal tea) as an alleged relaxant. It is possible that Robida was basing the joke simply on its pungent and pervasive odor; on the other hand, his description of the symptoms caused by the incident in London is reminiscent the symptoms of violent allergic rhinitis, so it also possible that he was allergic to it and found its widespread popularity something of a personal ordeal

  57 I have translated enfants perdus literally, although the equivalent phrase is not used in English to refer to soldiers on a suicide mission; it is by no means standard usage in France and seems to have been improvised by Robida.

  58 When Robida wrote this, the term “vacuum cleaner” had not yet entered into common parlance; the day when such machines would become common household appliances was still in the future, so the notion of applying them as weapons of war might not have seemed quite so absurd to his readers as it may well do to modern readers, in whom familiarity has bred contempt.

  59 A gabion is a large basket or sack filled with earth or sand, used in the building of improvised fortifications.

 
60 Although Louis Pasteur had recently popularized the germ theory of disease in France, it was still widely believed that epidemics were caused by airborne “miasmas,” so this biological weapon is imaginatively more akin to a poison gas.

  61 Phileas presumably did not have in mind—although Robida undoubtedly does—the fact that the luckless heroine of Samuel Richardson’s novel spends a hundred pages dying ignominiously after having been raped by the conscienceless Lovelace.

  62 The reference is to Géricault’s famous painting of The Raft of the “Medusa,” which depicts the desperate survivors of a shipwreck. Verne’s grim account of the survivors of the wreck of Le “Chancellor” was partly inspired by the painting, and this passage was almost certainly written with that novel in mind.

  63 Capédédious is one of the less popular items in the rich French vocabulary of euphemistic exclamations, being a rather unnecessary substitute for “Thank God!” It appears to have been invented, purely for literary purposes, by Alexandre Dumas in Les Trois mousquetaires.

  64 Gondokoro was a trading-post in the Sudan established at the supposed limit of the Nile’s navigability. The tribe called Niam-Niams by Robida and other contemporary writers—Verne uses the term in Cinq semaines en ballon—is nowadays known as the Azande, having been made famous by one of the classics of anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937). They did not practice cannibalism.

  65 This name is a rather tortured pun. Gommer, whose literal meaning is “to gum,” also means to erase, rub out or, at slight stretch, annihilate—the last of which meanings would make it equivalent to the French annihiler. Saint-Gommer is therefore roughly equivalent to “St.-Annihile,” a deliberately-botched gallicization of the English name Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley had mounted a famous and extensively publicized search for the lost English missionary David Livingstone, finally finding him in 1871, before going on to circumnavigate Lake Victoria-Nyanaza and explore Lakes Albert-Nyanza and Tanganyika in the mid-1870s—his expedition being financed by various newspapers, which made much of his dispatches—shortly before Robida penned his mock-epic. Robida’s illustration to this passage depicts the searcher in the pith helmet that Stanley helped make famous as a component of the typical garb of the African explorer.

  66 These entirely imaginary Makalolos have no connection with the actual Makalolo tribe of southern Africa, of whom Robida had presumably never heard.

  67 I have toyed slightly with this doggerel in order to conserve the rhyme-scheme. The term “jujube” is used in French not only to mean a fruit-flavored pastille, as in English, but also a soothing lozenge made up by a pharmacist, so the song’s superficial reference is to something closely akin to the British “cough candy,” which bears some resemblance to a hard fudge. Any doubles entendres it might contain are best left to the reader’s imagination. The songs cited appear to be imaginary, although the second title has been used on a much more recent lyric, but Rothomago by Adolphe d’Emmery, Charles Clairville and Albert Monnier, which premièred at the Théâtre Impérial du Cirque in 1862, was a famously spectacular fantasy play about a magic watch.

  68 Odalisques were actually at the bottom of the harem hierarchy, being servants of the wives and concubines; Robida appears to have been unaware of this.

  69 Vatel was the Prince of Condé’s maître d’hôtel in the mid-17th century, whose tragic suicide—occasioned because a particular dish had been delayed while his master was entertaining Louis XIV—was recorded and immortalized by Madame de Sévigné.

  70 The Brébant was (and still is) an upmarket Paris hotel.

  71 Unseemly.

  72 As with “Croknuff,” I have refrained from revising the highly improbable spelling of this family’s surname and have also retained “Rosemonde” rather than changing it to “Rosamund.” Nor have I interfered with the subsequent occasional abbreviation of the surname by the eccentric omission of the prefix “Mac,” but I have unified the orthography of the full name for the sake of consistency, replacing the formulation Robida uses in this passage (which does not capitalize the first K) with the one he substitutes when he mingles the full version of the name with the abbreviated one. The latter version is sometimes equipped with one or two hyphens in the original text, making five versions in all.

  73 A Marabout is a Muslim ascetic, often one living as a hermit; inevitably, such individuals acquired a reputation among travelers as magicians

  74 This is an exaggeration, although thousands of mummies—mostly birds and reptiles—were, indeed, found in the actual caves of Samoun. The find was widely publicized in France because the first part of an episodic Tour du Monde by M. A. Georges, published in 1860, described a visit “aux grottes de Samoun ou des crocodiles.” Georges’ work was one of Jules Verne’s sources, as Robida was obviously aware.

  75 This word is almost certainly misrendered; it seems to have been copied (incorrectly) from a passage in the first volume of a Géographie Militaire by Colonel Gustave-Léon Niox, published in 1876, which was obviously one of the reference books consulted by Robida.

  76 Arnaute is the French spelling of a word borrowed from Turkish, arnaut; its literal meaning in “Albanian,” but the French encountered it in the context of Ottoman Empire mercenaries and their version—used in colonial Algeria—had a broader reference to various sorts of militiamen.

  77 Kif is a mixture of tobacco and cannabis—here, apparently, taken instead of, or in addition to, afternoon tea.

  78 The reference to a moon is puzzling, the Earth’s Moon being far away by now; Robida might, however, be remembering that in Verne’s Hector Servadac the comet that carried various Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards and Russians—including, we now discover, Farandoul and his companions—away from various parts of the Mediterranean shore had previously captured an asteroid, Nerina, which served as its moon.

  79 In France, the constellation Ursa Major is popularly known as la Grande Ourse [the Great She-Bear].

  80 In fact, if Verne’s account of Servadac’s adventure can be trusted—and most of the details given here are in conformity with it—there was one female on the comet, albeit a very young one: a girl named Nina. Robida has also omitted any mention of the Jew Isaac Hakkabut, one of Verne’s less fortunate stereotypes.

  81 In Verne’s version, the comet reaches its aphelion 220 million leagues from the Sun, well short of the orbit of Saturn, having taken a year to get that far. In Robida’s version, its already mind-boggling velocity seems to have been increased by at least two further orders of magnitude; given the scant attention he pays to the law of gravity and its likely effects on the weight of the spacefarers, however, there is nothing particularly surprising in this.

  82 The description “nez à la Roxelane” was often used in 19th century French literature with reference to turned-up noses; it presumably derived from a portrait of the redoubtable wife of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent.

  83 As this notion bears not the slightest resemblance to the theory of evolution by natural selection, Désolant presumably had not read Darwin either; he appears to be assuming a Lamarckian theory of evolution, in which adaptation to the environment is achieved by the inheritance of actively-acquired characteristics. Robida is, of course, writing in his usual purely farcical spirit, but the terminology of Désolant’s argument does leave open the possibility that he might have had Hippolyte Taine’s recently-published account of literary evolution in mind. Taine had tried to explain the evolution of literature in pseudo-Lamarckian terms of “race, milieu et moment” [heredity, environment and history]—an argument easily adaptable to an explanation of the emergence of scientific romance (complete with alien extraterrestrials) in the 19th century.

  84 Reports of the reverence afforded to white elephants in various parts of south-east Asia had been published in the West since the 17th century, but had been given a recent boost shortly before Robida penned his novel by the accession of Thibaw Min—who heaped his own animal w
ith jewels after the fashion of the one depicted here—to the throne of Burma in 1878. Thibaw’s white elephant did not bring him luck; he was deposed by the British in 1884 and the animal was bought by the American showman Phineas T. Barnum. Barnum suffered a greater catastrophe; Thibaw’s elephant arrived painted red and blue, and turned out to be more grey than white when washed; one of his rivals immediately took the opportunity to upstage him by parading a whitewashed elephant that looked more convincing than the real thing. Robida’s use of the motif anticipated Mark Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), and Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s “La Légende de l’éléphant blanc” (1886; tr. in the Black Coat Press collection The Scaffold and other Cruel Tales), which might well have taken some inspiration from Saturnin Farandoul.

  85 I have retained Robida’s spelling here rather than substituting the more familiar Jagganath (an avatar of Krishna). The reference is to the “chariot” used in the Ratha Yatra ceremony at the Jagganath temple in Puri. The myth that fanatical devotees lay down in the chariot’s path to allow it to pass over them originated in a famous 14th century fake travelogue recounting the imaginary journey to the East of “Sir John Mandeville,” which originated in France and survived in even more copies than the model it was intended to parody, Marco Polo’s account of his travels. The anecdote was revived by 19th century Christian missionaries for use as slanderous propaganda, when it gave rise to the English term “juggernaut” and became a popular item of modern legend. The name given to the fictional pagoda, Chattiram, is a generic term meaning “pilgrim’s rest.”

  86 I have retained Robida’s spelling rather than substitute the modern Bundelkhand; in Verne’s L’Ile mystérieuse, Captain Nemo reveals that he is really Prince Dakkar of Bundelkund, and that is why he hates the British so much.

  87 As with some of Robida’s other borrowing from contemporary travelogues, this one never made it into common parlance and was rarely sighted after its first use; he obtained it from Louis Rousselet’s L’Inde des rajas (1875), his principal source for this part of the narrative. Rousselet was primarily a photographer, and it is presumably in his honor that Farandoul adopts that guise for part of his journey.