13 Mauritius.
14 A drink made from port, citrus fruit and sugar.
15 The title employed by Napoléon I’s son after 1814.
16 Renard’s chapter-title is “Malheur moins cinq,” which relies on a pun linking the heur in malheur [misfortune] to heure [hour], “moins cinq” being the usual way of indicating “five [minutes] to” a particular hour.
17 Eugène Lami (1800-1890).
18 Given the rather extensive interval of time between 1890 and 1929, when the story it set—and 1933, when it was published—it is possible that this sentence was left over from an earlier draft of this section of the story, perhaps made before the Great War, when 1890 still seemed to be part of “our own era.”
19 Renard’s narrative voice inserts a footnote here: “Fieschi’s name was added later by the painter Lami. Initially, he wrote ‘Gérard’ the name under which Fieschi had just been arrested and which was only recognized to be false subsequently. The same remark, of course, pertains to what follows…” The Italian name Guiseppe was often rendered as Joseph by Frenchmen. The account of the other establishments visible from César’s window takes some liberties with history and geography. Philippe Curtius (1737-94), a Swiss physician who gave up his profession in favour of his hobby as a sculptor in wax, set up a Caverne des Grands Voleurs—the original “Chamber of Horrors”—in the Boulevard du Temple in 1782 but left his collection to his protégée, Madame Tussaud, who came within minutes of being guillotined during the Revolution and removed most of it to London long before 1835. “Madame Saqui” (Marguerite-Antoinette Lalanne, 1786-1866) was a famous tightrope-walker whose theater is cited as an item of local color in novels by Paul Féval, but not in connection with marionettes.
20 Le Serment d’Amour, an engraving by Jean Mathieu (1749-1815) of a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), was one of the early best-sellers of a burgeoning late-18th century market in multiple reproductions of famous art-works. Numerous copies still survive in private hands as well as galleries; do-it-yourself versions like Grandmother Estelle’s are probably rarer.
21 Valentin Conrart (1603-1675) left behind 42 manuscript volumes, and a set of memoirs, but published very little, which led the critic Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux) to coin the phrase: “I shall imitate the prudent silence of Conrart.” Conrart’s house was the birthplace of the Academie Française, whose first permanent secretary he became.
22 The Musée Grévin at 10 Boulevard Montmarte, founded in 1882 and named after its first artistic director, Alfred Grévin, is a wax museum—the Parisian equivalent of London’s Madame Tussaud’s.
23 In French, tuile [tile] is used metaphorically to mean a stroke of misfortune. The pun is untranslatable.
24 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), the statesman and hobbyist playwright, best known as the author of the original versions of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro.
25 Les Ancêtres de la Commune: l’attentat Fieschi (1877) was a follow-up to Du Camp’s successful book on the Commune, although his own memory of the event—he had only been 13 years old at the time—cannot have been much help. Du Camp is nowadays remembered primarily as a pioneer of photography, and as the “friend” who advised Gustave Flaubert to burn Les Tentations de Saint-Antoine.
26 Louis-Philippe’s three eldest sons (he had five in all): Ferdinand-Philippe (1810-1842), Louis-Charles-Philippe (1814-1896) and François (1818-1900).
27 The boys are clearly not mute in the sense that they are physically incapable of speech, but it was rare in the 1920s for the deaf to be taught to use the voices they had, for lack of any established method of so doing, so they usually remained silent and were thus considered voiceless. The representation of the boys’ feat might well seem more alien to the modern reader than that of the marvels of luminite.
28 Carabosse was a “bad fairy” who bestowed malicious gifts. She made her first appearance in a story by Madame d’Aulnoy, but the name was then borrowed for application to the initially-nameless bad fairy in recycled versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” and the name became most familiar in connection with Tchaikovsky’s ballet; it is the costume of that character that is being evoked here.
29 Renard has “de la race et ‘de la branche.’” “Race” does not mean quite the same thing in French as it does in English, pertaining more narrowly to family, and specifically, to that element of family specified by the word’s etymology—the ultimate meaning of “race” being “root.” The wordplay is more brutal in English, but retains the double meaning well enough.
30 Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) were the two most celebrated French painters of pastel portraits.
31 Bastille Day.
32 Gaston Doumergue (1863-1937), President of the Republic from 1924-31.
33 I have left the title Marche de Moïse [Moses’ March] in French because of the context. The music in question was added to a revised version of Gioachino Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto [Moses in Egypt] in 1819, a year after the opera’s first performance, and soon became a military favorite.
34 Zouaves, turcos and spahis were various kinds of French colonial soldiers; agas were, in this particular context, Algerian chiefs with whom the French colonial authorities had to deal, and bachagas were the latter’s subordinates, who acted as diplomatic intermediates.
35 When Luc says “Je me sauve,” he is using a conventional formula to express an obligatory refusal of a potential invitation to stay for lunch, but I have given a crudely literal translation [I’m saved] because Charles’ retort and Luc’s next remark both refer to the double meaning, just as Charles’ final adieu does not merely counter Luc’s au revoir/“until the next time” with a conclusive “goodbye forever” but carries a specific implication that the scoundrel must now fulfil the obligation to God incurred by his sworn oath.
36 The figure of 32 is derived from the notorious Mémoires of Françis-Eugène Vidocq, published in 1828, whose author gave a highly fanciful and almost entirely fictitious account of his career as a police agent and founder of the unit that eventually became the Sûreté—the equivalent of the English C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Division)—whose staff gradually increased under his supervision to reach that number. In fact, Vidocq’s unit consisted entirely of ex-convicts recruited as informers, who were widely suspected of using their police activities as a cover for their own criminal activities, on which basis Vidocq was fired. Cartoux would not have been a misfit therein; his title of “inspector” signifies that he operated in plain clothes, not that he held a superior rank.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of
a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World; Nemoville
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2010 by Gilles Francescano.
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-935558-19-4. First Printing. June 2010. 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.
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