The Clock of the Centuries

by Albert Robida

  Robida’s keen interest in exotic inventions was also reflected in an exchange of pseudonymous letters on that subject published in 1896 in La Caricature, in which Robida signed himself Théodule Assenbrouck of the Académie des Sciences de Flyssemugue, while Henri Mifrot (alias Henriot) signed himself Omer Garo, and Georges Colomb (alias Christophe) signed himself Polyxène Billentoque. The variety of opinions and arguments reflected in the argument probably added fuel to the increasing ambiguity of Robida’s own attitude. By this time, he was also attempting to establish himself as a conventional novelist as well as a writer of texts in support of caricaturish illustrations. Le mystère de la Rue Carême-Prenant (1897) appeared with no illustrations at all, and succeeded a little too well in its determination to be unadventurous.

  Robida’s imaginative illustrations became more various after the turn of the century, when he made significant early contributions to the development of bandes dessinées in the Vernian periodical Journal des Voyages, including series devoted to Les fleurs carnivores [Carnivorous Flowers] and La redécouverte d’Amerique [The Rediscovery of Amrica]. The same expansion of interest was manifested in his longer prose works, such as the Swiftian satire L’île des centaures [The Isle of the Centaurs] (1912). Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was one of the few established classics for which he produced a new set of illustrations comparable to those Doré had produced for such imaginative epics as Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy. Robida returned to contemplation of the year 1950, however, following the outbreak of World War I, and continued his episodic series of contemplations with a novella-length serial in the children’s periodical Mon Journal, “Un potache en 1950” [A Student in 1950], which ran from September 8 to December 22, 1917. The young hero of the story, Gustave Turbille, is the son of a wealthy industrialist who is eager to go into business on his own account as a sponsor of new technologies; inventions and discoveries flow thick and fast, but many of them quickly reveal unforeseen flaws or precipitate minor catastrophes, with the eventual result that Gustave has second thoughts about his vocation. Although it is a conscientiously light-hearted work, written with the youth of its intended audience in mind, it does seem to be underlain by a greater unease than the earlier elements of the series.

  The mild unease of “Un potache en 1950” was soon complemented by a much more strident work for adults, whose rhetoric is far more vitriolic than the darker passages of L’horloge des siècles. If Robida had been compelled to remain diplomatic while the Great War was still being fought and censorship in force, he was fully prepared to say what he really thought once it had ended. L’ingénieur Von Satanas [Von Satanas—i.e., the son of Satan—the Engineer] (1919) is a hectic anti-war polemic tracking the effects of hypothetical technological inventions in the aftermath of the war, which must have been written in haste if it had not been on the shelf for some time; it appeared a mere four months after the armistice. In the story, humankind is subjected to an extravagant series of violent indignities by technological diabolism before eventually being put out of its misery by the invention of a “doomsday weapon” that obliterates civilization.

  Robida adopted a more distanced satirical viewpoint in the Biblical fantasy Voyages et aventures de la famille Noé dans l’Arche [The Voyages and Adventures of Noah’s Family in the Ark] (1922), which harks back to the last time that the Supreme Clockmaker allegedly called time on the human race, and wonders exactly how Noah fed his family while the Ark was afloat, given the necessity of preserving the greater part of his livestock cargo. Un chalet dans les airs [A Cabin in the Sky] (1925), on the other hand, published a year before his death, is the bleakest of all his futuristic fantasies, featuring a tour of relatively distant future world that has been comprehensively blighted and devastated. It is framed as a comedy, but its humor is almost bit as black and bitter as that in L’ingénieur Von Satanas.

  If Un chalet dans les airs represents the final phase of Robida’s pessimism and conservatism, as Le Vingtième siècle had represented the initial high point of his optimism and liberalism, then L’horloge des siècles can be seen as a kind of fulcrum, in which his attitude teetered and his mood see-sawed uneasily from the dourly sardonic beginning to more sprightly passages before eventually swooping back into an angry gloom from which he had difficulty extracting himself again. There is one particularly telling moment when he seems to have caved in, at least momentarily, to the corrosive pressure of an argument that he had previously been deploying in a conscientiously non-serious fashion. That break comes in Chapter XVII—which introduces two new characters who have reappeared in the backward-moving world “ahead of time” in Monsieur Le Coq de la Bénardière and his wife—and, more specifically, in the last paragraph of that chapter, where the humor abruptly gives way to a moment of understated poignancy. The husband, who had died in 1788, and is blithely enthusiastic to find out what the society of the mid-19th century is like, cannot understand why his wife, who died in 1815, is so depressed that she cannot even bring herself to reply to his questions regarding the fortunes of his children and friends following his own demise. The dark implication of that uncharacteristically quiet moment not only colors the remainder of the text but was carried forward into all Robida’s subsequent reflections of the march of time, and all his future examinations of the blithe assumption that change is intrinsically progressive.

  “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” will inevitably seem to the modern reader to be a primitive story, even if one discounts the fact that it was written for children and forgives its feeble conclusion on that account. At the time it was written, however, literary time travel was in its infancy and no one had yet figured out a narrative frame for such fictions that did not relegate them to the status of dreams or delusions. If Robida had made the effort of wondering exactly what kind of technology Célestin Marjolet had employed to bring Louis XIV and his Court into the year 1890, he might have anticipated H. G. Wells’ invention of the time machine—a literary device of very considerable utility, although Wells only used it the once. If he had carried the story forward far enough to fish up representative specimens of much earlier eras, he would have been forced to broaden his perspectives in several new directions, and if he had gone even further, realizing Marjolet’s initially proposal to bring about a “recommencement” of the entire world—markedly different, one assumes, from the perverse recommencement achieved in L’horloge des siècles—he might have achieved something even more adventurous. Alas, he was not ready to do any of those things, especially in a children’s story; nor was anyone else, at the time. Modest as the story is, however, it did help lay the groundwork for more ambitious 20th century exercises in literary time-twisting, and Robida did eventually follow it up himself in a more robust fashion.

  L’horloge des siècles was not the first fantasy of reversed time, but it was the most ambitious at the time it was published. Most stories of time moving backwards tend to reverse its flow merely in respect of a particular individual, who grows younger while the rest of the world proceeds in its normal course, as in Eden Phillpotts’ A Deal with the Devil (1900) or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922). An image of that sort had been accompanied by more general speculations about time in “The Lieutenant’s Daughter” (1847) by “Zeta” (J. A. Froude), but the notion of a general reversal of time briefly broached therein is not fully developed in the narrative.

  Another significant predecessor of Robida’s work, although he surely never read it, was Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Clock That Went Backward” (1881); as in Froude’s story, though, the tale’s brief philosophical speculations about the possibility that cause and effect might work in the opposite direction to the order of their subjective perception is completely undeveloped in a rather weak and tentative narrative describing a simple timeslip. A more robust extrapolation of a philosophical argument had, however, been introduced into French speculative fiction by Camille Flammarion in Lumen (1866-69; in Récits de l’infini [Space Stori
es] 1872; separate book edition 1887), in a passage dramatizing the supposition that time would appear to run backwards to an observer approaching the Earth at a velocity greater than the speed of light.

  Among the reversed events described by Flammarion is the battle of Waterloo, the author observing that the battle makes a much more edifying spectacle from that viewpoint, as the slaughtered dead and atrociously wounded are healed and fully restored to health. Given that Robida probably had read Lumen, this passage might have provided the inspirational seed for his own observations about the salutary effects of time-reversal, but a more immediate inspiration might have been provided by contemporary experiments in cinema by the former stage-magician Georges Méliès, who delighted in using such camera-tricks as running film-sequences backwards. Robida’s reversion is, however, much more elastic than any straightforward sequence-reversal, and although the partiality of the reversal does not make much sense, it certainly lends itself more readily to speculative elaboration.

  Although many more accounts of time reversal were published in between 1902 and 1967, when Dick’s Counter-Clock World and Brian W. Aldiss’s An Age (a.k.a. Cryptozoic) were published, it is arguable that none of them were quite as adventurous in their speculative range and verve as L’horloge des siècles, however tentative, vague and confused the latter might have been, and no matter what advantages its rivals may have enjoyed in terms of literary sophistication. For this reason, Robida’s time-twisting fantasies are well worthy of translation into English, even at this long distance from their time of origin.

  The following translation of “Jadis chez aujourd’hui” was made from the chapbook edition issued in 2000 by Apex. Although that edition is a facsimile, Apex editor Jean-Pierre Moumon states that it has been reproduced from an early 20th century reprint in Le Petit Français Illustré, which differs in certain respects from the 1890 original, presumably having been adapted to fit a slightly different page size. I have not been able to compare it with the original, so I do not know how extensive the alterations were, but I presume that they were trivial. The translation itself presented few problems, although translating humorous texts is always dogged by the problem that puns and other items of wordplay often do not translate. This difficulty was considerably more awkward in respect of L’horloge des siècles, from whose text many items of wordplay have unfortunately been lost or lamed in translation. The following version was made from the Grama edition of 1994, but I have compared that text to the London Library’s copy of the first edition, and the two seem to be identical.

  Brian Stableford

  YESTERDAY NOW

  I. Terrible projects of an unappreciated scientist.

  My friend Célestin Marjolet was a very clever man, a great scientist, but he could not manage to get the public to take him seriously. There were several reasons for that. First of all, he did not wear spectacles, he had all his hair and he was 35 years old.

  Now, I ask you, what kind of scientist can a man of 35 be, who is neither myopic nor bald? Then again, he was not even American—and to cap it all, he had published a volume of verse when he was young. In brief, he was a scientist of an impossible and inadmissible kind!

  And yet, Célestin Marjolet was a veritable wellspring of science: an extremely deep artesian well, from which surprising and amazing ideas sprang forth. For lack of money, though, Célestin, forsaking experiments that cost too much, had dedicated himself to certain new researches that only required the outlay of considerable mental effort, and the expenditure of magnetic fluid and will-power. Célestin Marjolet launched himself into the supernatural, searching quite simply for a means of making the past reappear, of reawakening the sleeping centuries—in a word, of beginning the world anew.

  He aspired to give new life to those primitive animals that had terrified the first inhabitants of the globe, whose fantastic forms had been reconstituted by the scientist Cuvier. He wanted to reanimate the Egyptian mummies, to bring Roman warriors out of their tombs, along with the Gauls, Visigoths and Saracens swallowed up by our soil over the centuries.

  When the Exposition was advertised, he thought that the moment had come to reveal himself with a masterstroke, and asked for the concession of a pavilion on the Champ de Mars. There was talk of reconstructing workshop scenes in exhibitions of the history of Labor, with simple mannequins dressed as characters…. what was the point of that? Personally, the astonishing Marjolet proposed to expose the people of past centuries in the prime of life—Gauls of the time of Vercingetorix, Franks in war attire, veritable knights and actual burgers of the Middle Ages, surrounded by objects and furniture of the period, a few tradesmen acting and working according to the fashions of yesteryear, specially resuscitated for the occasion—to the eyes of the modern public, including a few historical individuals familiar to everyone, whom it would be very interesting and instructive to know in their true aspect. To contemplate Bayard and Duguesclin in the flesh and bone, really to make the acquaintance of King Dagobert and many others… how astonishing for the visitors to the Exposition!

  But the requested pavilion was not granted to him. Marjolet and his alleged discoveries were disdained: a complete lack of success. Marjolet would not participate in the great sensation of the Exposition! He became furious—and such was his wrath against the present time that Marjolet swore to play the fine prank of abolishing it!

  One fine evening, Célestin revealed his idea of recommencement to us, and got violently carried away when we dared to raise objections. “You’re telling me that it’s impossible because you’re donkeys, minds closed to progress!” he cried. “But it’s perfectly possible, as you shall see. Just wait a few days.”

  Needless to say, a loud burst of laughter greeted this declaration.

  “Give me my back my lost teeth and my vanished hair,” said one of Célestin’s uncles, “and I’ll call it quits.”

  But Célestin Marjolet had recovered his scientist’s calm of mind. He simply added: “Wait a few days, and you’ll be convinced. I’ll content myself, by way of a small trial, with going back a century or two, and then I’ll start on the great recommencement!”

  II. In which Célestin Marjolet begins

  to make good his promise.

  One day last June, all of us who had dined with Célestin Marjolet on the day when he made his declaration received the following note:

  Go to the Sun King’s antechamber at the Palace of Versailles tomorrow morning, and WAITTT!!!!

  That cool and reserved man had put three Ts in “wait” and four exclamation marks at the end of his note. It was an indication of great emotion. We were intrigued, and we were all at the rendezvous well before the appointed hour.

  At ten o’clock precisely, preceded by the guide, we went into the Palace of Versailles and moved slowly through the ground-floor galleries, astonished not to see our friend.

  We arrived in the large halls on the first floor; the guide continued his explanations. “This is the Bull’s-Eye Room, where the courtiers waited for the Sun King to get up.” 2

  The guide suddenly stopped in amazement. In the Bull’s-Eye Room, a man in a strange uniform was barring his way with a leveled halberd.

  “What are you doing here, if you please?” exclaimed the guide.

  “No one may pass!” said the man with the halberd, in a thunderous voice.

  “That’s a bit rich,” complained the guide. “You want to stop me passing—me, the official tourist guide.”

  The halberd remained leveled. The furious guide was about to raise his voice when the half-open door behind the man with the halberd suddenly gave passage to a newcomer. The latter, dressed in the manner of the 17th century and wearing a large periwig, had a very imposing manner. He demanded silence with a gesture. “What is all this noise, gentlemen,” he said, “in His Majesty’s antechamber?”

  “But…” the guide attempted to say.

  Two other people of aristocratic appearance, wearing the costume of lords of the time of Louis XIV ha
d emerged quietly from the royal chamber.

  “Who the Devil are these people?” grumbled the bewildered guide, “And how did they get in here when I locked the doors myself yesterday evening?”

  Our astonishment was not yet complete. Both panels of the door suddenly opened; the man with the halberd rapped three times on the tiled floor and cried out in a Stentorian voice: “Gentlemen, the King!”

  “The petit lever is over,” one of the bewigged gentlemen said to us, hurriedly. “The King grants audience while the table is being set for breakfast. If you have a petition for His Majesty, you may give it to Monsieur the Lord Chamberlain.”3

  Were we hearing things? Were we seeing things? Was it possible? These gentlemen in splendid costumes, all covered in lace and ribbons, those gold-edged sashes, those periwigs, in our own era, in 1889? Mirage, illusion, madness! And yet, when we went slowly and respectfully into the King’s bedroom, we were convinced that our ears and eyes were not mistaken.

  Everyone knows the room, with its sculpted paneling overloaded with gilt, divided in two by a balustrade. It was full of people of noble and majestic appearance; great lords magnificently dressed, superb and sparkling, surrounding—at a respectful distance—an individual even more superb and sparkling than them. That individual was… the Sun King himself!

  It was impossible to doubt it; we were perfectly familiar with his portrait. It was Louis XIV! And among the great lords grouped around him, we vaguely recognized faces that we had seen in paintings or illustrated histories of France. Finally, behind the balustrade, the Bed of State that the guides had shown us on previous visits to the Palace of Versailles was crumpled; valets de chambre were busy remaking it.