The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  But in the center of the drawing room, at least, there were only people of 1930 there, living and very congenial. Charles, who had not really had any doubt about it, saw that perfectly well when all that affectionate company resumed moving, when Madame Ortofieri started walking toward him, her hands reaching out…and when she was set aside by the irresistible surge of a swiftly-flying little divinity, mad with joy and emotion, running toward him as if borne by the zephyrs of the god of Love: Rita, the diligent enchantress who, in connivance with Colomba, had worked the magic of that assembly.

  That child! Passion had carried her away. It was, as they say, stronger than she was. And Charles, incapable of speech, received her in his bosom, where she collapsed, weeping with joy. She hugged him so forcefully that he choked.

  “Rita!” groaned Madame Ortofieri, without conviction, making praiseworthy efforts to hold back her tears. But all the relatives in the world would not have been able to prevent Charles and Rita from finally joining their lips together. They would have embraced one another under the fire of a hundred thousand gazes, in front of all of humankind, past, present and future.

  Half laughing, half weeping, Charles, in an attempt to restore gaiety, said to Bertrand: “It’s a pity no one thought of bringing the luminite! It’s a member of the family—and a plate, here and now, would find an occasion worthy of it!”

  “What do you take me for?” Bertrand Valois said, feigning indignation. “Would a playwright miss such a denouement? Look!”

  Charles turned round.

  The plate called “secondary” was there, hanging on the wall. A prodigious window, it had silently absorbed the light of the entire scene. Now it would keep, for many long years, the image of the first kiss that Charles and Rita had exchanged: the image of the tender reconciliation of the Christianis and the Ortofieris.

  And because Bertrand, the skillful scene-setter, had split it ingeniously, that plate, like a window to the past, showed the old corsair César Christiani, with his pipe in his mouth, gently caressing the yellow and green parrot on his shoulder, smiling softly at the young lovers.

  Afterword

  Although it is wrapped in a historical mystery story that is itself wrapped in a love story, the aspect of Le Maître de la lumière that remains most interesting to modern readers is the scientific marvel with the aid of which the mystery is solved and the love story brought to a conventional conclusion in the wake of the customary tribulations. It turns out, in the end, that the mystery could have been solved and the love story concluded satisfactorily, even if the scientific marvel had never existed, but the novel would certainly have been much less satisfactory without it, and the story so uncomplicated as to have been hardly worthy of being told.

  The text conscientiously explains that the idea of “luminite” was obtained by analogy with the years, or centuries required for light to pass between the stars. It does not, however, make any reference to the previous French scientific romances in which much had been made of the ability of handily-placed observers to see events that had transpired on the Earth’s surface long before.

  The first work of fiction to do that in any elaborate fashion was Camille Flammarion’s Lumen, initially published in the collection Récits de l’infini (1872), and subsequently expanded for separate publication in 1887. The most significant subsequent work inspired by that aspect of Lumen was Eugène Mouton’s comedy “L’Historioscope” (1883; tr. as “The Historioscope” in the Black Coat Press anthology News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances), which features a device akin to a telescope that is capable of picking up cosmically-refracted light preserving images of Earth’s past. It seems likely that Renard had read the former work, if not the latter, although—as the introduction to the present volume notes—he might well have come up with the notion of luminite independently, as a result of his attempts to rationalize the “mirage” to which he had subjected the characters in his own account “Le Brouillard du 26 Octobre.”

  Like most of Renard’s pioneering notions, luminite was eventually replicated—quite independently—by a subsequent science fiction writer, Bob Shaw, who termed it “slow glass.”

  A comparison of the two developments of the idea is interesting in more than one way. Shaw first introduced the notion in the deliberately understated “Light of Other Days” (1966), regarded by many people as one of the classic short stories in its genre, which assumes that the glass in question is marketed in the form of windows, to provide houses with better views than their actual situation permits, but reveals a corollary of that notion in a small mystery whose solution turns out to be a love story. Shaw then went on to write two short “sequels” exploring further applications of the technology, one of which focuses on a plate of slow glass that is the sole “witness” to a crime. In writing that story, Shaw was not only ignorant of Renard’s similar use of a similar notion, but also of a not-dissimilar use of a more straightforwardly quasi-cinematic technology in The Bell Street Murders (1931) by “Sydney Fowler” (the pseudonym under which Sydney Fowler Wright, a notable writer of British scientific romances, produced hack crime fiction).

  Shaw subsequently went on to embed all three of his slow glass short stories within the text of a novel, Other Days, Other Eyes (1972), whose main narrative describes the invention of slow glass and the gradual realization by members of the society exploiting it that it has the potential to change that society completely. In the concluding part of the novel, entire nations are “dusted” with particles of slow glass, which, in spite of their smallness, preserve images of everything that happens in their vicinity, making secrecy impossible and ensuring that all future crimes and misdemeanors can be retrospectively observed. That is, of course, exactly what Renard did not go on to do—and, indeed, could not do, within the constraints of the literary marketplace in which he was operating.

  In a mystery wrapped in a love story, packaged as a feuilleton soap opera, there was no elbow room for Renard to do anything with his own scientific marvel but use it as an instrument of his plot. He could not even indulge in the kind of philosophical rhapsody about its larger implications and possibilities that he had earlier felt able to append to Le Docteur Lerne and Le Péril bleu, but which had given him such extraordinary difficulty when he made such elaborate extrapolation central to the narrative scheme of Un Homme chez les microbes.

  Bob Shaw’s invention of slow glass was, inevitably, subject to criticism by picky science fiction fans, who did not take long to point out rationally suspect corollaries of the notion—including the inconvenience that, by storing so much energy in the form of retarded photons, slow glass might be more effective as a high explosive than in any other application, and could not plausibly maintain its integrity as a solid. Another awkward objection, which is particularly pertinent to luminite, because Renard makes such an issue out of the ability of observers to look through it at an angle, is that light rays passing through retardant glass at an oblique angle would presumably take longer to pass though it than rays striking it at a right angle, and would thus preserve an image of a more distant past. An observer looking through a retardant window would not, therefore, see an image of a single past but an image of a whole series of pasts melting into one another, with the most recent along the most direct line of slight and the most distant at the periphery of vision.

  Since Renard was so proud of having discovered a flaw in the optical logic of The Invisible Man, he would presumably have been annoyed with himself for missing the latter point—or if he had thought of it, slightly ashamed of himself for keeping quiet about it. It is conceivable, however, that luminite (unlike slow glass) might be protected from the latter criticism by virtue of the emphasis that Renard places on its laminar structure. If the retardant effect is proportional to the number of lamina that a light ray passes through, and not to the thickness of the material per se, then differently slanted rays might be able to preserve images of the same past rather than a sequence of pasts. Perhaps Renard th
ought of that too, but felt it unnecessary to add such a complication to his narrative.

  If that were the case, it would imply that the photons progress through layers of luminite in a discontinuous series of “delayed quantum jumps” rather than propagating in a manner analogous to a continuous wave—a phenomenon not entirely out of keeping with the peculiar ideas of modern theoretical physics, the imaginative extrapolation of which might lead to some intriguing cosmic possibilities. On the other hand, the notion might be an unnecessary over-sophistication of a speculative motif that writhes rather discontentedly within its own externally-imposed limitations.

  Like many feuilleton serials, especially those by Paul Féval to which Le Maître de la lumière appears to be paying homage, Renard’s novel is content to leave some narrative threats hanging loose, as well as wrapping others up with an exceedingly casual swiftness. The “cardboard baby” motif is not really taken to its full extent; Charles and Bertrand make no attempt to investigate the history of the unfortunately-named Monsieur Tripe, although one would surely have expected them to find out whether he actually ever published any of his poetry, and to make some attempt to track his descendants in the hope of finding out who abandoned his father as a baby, and why it was necessary to do so. A more interesting loose end, however, concerns the bargain that Charles offers to what is identified at that point in the text as “le monde” [the world], although it is identified elsewhere as Fate, Destiny or God: the offer to sacrifice his own life if Rita’s is spared.

  Given that there was no need to introduce that notion into the plot at all, let alone to emphasize it with teasing hints that the offer might have been heard and the bargain accepted, the fact that it is subsequently forgotten seems a trifle odd—unless we are expected to believe that the prayer subsequently offered by Rita’s rosy alter ego has somehow superseded it and cancelled it out. Is it possible that Charles’s offer is a hangover from an earlier draft of the work, which ended in a markedly different manner from the extant version? There is no doubt that the present ending—in which the sly enmity of Luc de Certeuil fades away into an unconvincingly abrupt deus ex machina and a ridiculously unsatisfactory promise to mend his ways, before Charles’s subsequent interview with the banker hurriedly melts away into saccharine schmaltz—contrasts very sharply with the conte cruel tendencies and jaundiced view of romantic love expressed in Renard’s earlier scientific marvel stories.

  If he really had written, or even planed, a version of Le Maître de la lumière before the Great War, one would not have expected the besotted Charles to meet a kinder fate than poor Fléchambeau in Un Homme chez les microbes or the wretched Robert Collin in Le Péril bleu, either of whom might have made a similar bargain with fate (and, indeed, made their own bargains on poorer terms).

  As a conscientious and chastened feuilletoniste, Renard was, of course, working under conventional obligations that had to be respected, but if the serial was, as one is free to suspect, the second—or even the third, fourth or fifth—“edition” of a text first envisaged in very different circumstances, perhaps the reference to Charles’s proffered sacrifice is a deliberate tantalizing reminder of an ending-that-might-have-been, and a consummation deliberately withheld.

  In the interests of aiming at a very different effect on the reader, that alternative climax would presumably have endeavored to reduce the petty infatuations of human beings to their true insignificance, within a cosmic scheme that could contain such marvels as luminite.

  Is that likely? On balance, probably not; but we are free, nevertheless, to think that it might have been the case—just as we are free to wonder what Maurice Renard might have achieved and become, as a virtuoso of scientific marvel fiction, had he not been so direly fettered by the crass and pusillanimous demands of the literary marketplace of his time and place, thus becoming a Prometheus bound, condemned to await an enlightenment that never did contrive to penetrate the dull grey walls, whether of mist or of slate, that surrounded him.

  Notes

  1 The four sergeants of La Rochelle, who had been soldiers stationed there, were guillotined in Paris in September 1822, having been denounced as participants in a plot to assassinate Louis XVIII. They were also alleged to be members of a Bonapartist secret society allied or affiliated to the Italian Carbonari. Their refusal to name any co-conspirators or fellow Carbonari members won them a reputation for heroism among admiring Republicans—no one seems to have considered the alternative hypothesis that there were no names to reveal, because the plot and the secret organization were illusory—and the publicity attached to their case provided an enormous, and presumably very welcome, boost to the popularity and notoriety of the Carbonari. As Renard was undoubtedly aware, the incident had a considerable influence on French popular fiction; the allegations and rumors associated with it provided Paul Féval with a significant model for the secret societies that feature so extensively in his work.

  2 The Laffont edition renders this word as “servant,” presumably following the Tallandier text, although the version of Le Péril bleu in the same omnibus follows the previous editions of that novel in rendering it as “sarvant” and the present text subsequently offers that spelling as an alternative. I thought it best to unify the spelling between the two volumes of the present set, especially in view of the awkward double meaning of “servant,” which does not have the same range in English as it does in French. Servant is used more often as an adjective than a noun in French, although its use as a noun had become more common between 1911 and 1933 because of its application to members of artillery gun-crews in the Great War.

  3 Actually, this variant of the Greek oaristis [familiar conversation] is entirely French, the variant spelling having been improvised by André Chénier in 1794 as a title for his translation of an idyll by Theocritus. The title was then adopted as a label for a subgenre of poetry comprising poems cast as intimate dialogues of an affectionate and erotic character, production of which was sparse until the formula was adopted by the Symbolists—where Renard undoubtedly came across it while he was a Symbolist fellow-traveler before the outbreak of the Great War.

  4 At this point in the text Charles takes care to specify that César is his “quadrisaïeul” [great-great-great-grandfather], but at other points the designation is conventionally shortened to “grandpère” [grandfather]—a convention I have followed, although it is not commonplace in English.

  5 Robert Surcouf (1773-1827) was a corsair captain—a French corsair being the equivalent of an English privateer rather than a mere pirate—who distinguished himself in the war against the English by capturing several ships; he was rewarded with a Barony in Napoleon’s Empire and became a rich ship-owner.

  6 The word I have translated as “bushes”—maquis—carries considerable metaphorical weight in France, beyond its literal reference to scrubland. Prendre le maquis means “to go into hiding” or to work mischief covertly, as the French resistance to German occupation did during the two world wars. Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue was the archetypal roman feuilleton, some of whose themes and methods became the foundation-stone on which Féval built his own mythology of criminality, which Renard seems to be consciously echoing here in a respectfully nostalgic fashion. Féval’s Habits Noirs series (tr. as The Blackcoats), which also uses the Boulevard du Temple as one of its key settings, often refers to “la forêt de Paris” [the Parisian jungle].

  7 This sarcastic remark refers to the famous declaration, attributed to Napoléon I, that “the word impossible is not French!”

  8 Duc Etienne-François de Choiseul (1719-1785) was Louis XV’s foreign minister from 1758-70, when he manifested considerable diplomatic skill in settling the fall-out of the Seven Years’ War and was responsible for the French acquisition of Corsica.

  9 What Bertrand says in French is “Cela se corse,” corser being a French verb signifying “to complicate”—but Corse is also the French term for Corsica, or a Corsican, so the sentence could almost be construed a
s “That’s Corsica.”

  10 This is expressed much more elegantly in French, in which the masculine noun couple refers specifically to a man and a woman, while the feminine noun couple refers to other sorts of paired individuals, especially in the context of hunting, so Renard only has to say that Claude and Péronne constitute une couple rather than un couple.

  11 The reference is presumably to the famous miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855), although the time-frame would also accommodate his son Eugène (1804-1866), best known for historical paintings and landscapes.

  12 This scrupulous but repetitive summation and the mildly sarcastic apology that precedes it were presumably inserted into the opening sentences of one of the feuilleton’s episodes in response to editorial demand, perhaps as a reaction to complaints from readers. Renard was by no means the first writer of speculative fiction to become anxious about the potential discontentment of female readers—similar remarks can be found in Félix Bodin’s Le Roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Novel of the Future)—nor was he the first feuilletonist to be forced to modify his text as he went along in response to external pressure, the latter being a problem that routinely troubled the works by Paul Féval that are consciously echoed in this one.