Small towns, which were emptied to the profit of congested Paris or a few great industrial centers, feel the life-blood returning to them now, and are beginning to recover their own life; the deserted countryside is being repopulated, and agriculture, our good old nursing mother, is recovering her arms.
One no longer hears talk of the bitter and ferocious struggle for life, the idea of which has generated sorrow since its inception and ravaged all advanced minds towards the end of the ancient era. Strife still exists, naturally; life is perhaps inconceivable without strife—do we not see a struggle for existence even among mollusks clinging to a rocky promontory?—but one is not always talking about it; one does not have the notion obsessing and tormenting the mind. Moreover, thanks to the new mode of life, the majority of anxieties that the notion brought with it are no longer features of existence in the present march of time, so joyous and novel, towards youth and the morning!
We have mentioned that with the return of active life, Monsieur Laforcade, the grandfather, has become a post-master again. Our friends, the famous Doctor Montarcy and the illustrious Academician Palluel, are very young now. One is beginning to study his ABC with a tutor in his native town, in a tranquil corner of Saintonge. The other plays with his top or runs through the woods with other vigorous urchins, enjoying himself, while his father, a country doctor, gallops over the roads for ten leagues around his village.
Messire Houquetot de Mont-Héricourt, Marquis de Chastelandry, whom we left in the debtor’s prison at Clichy, emerged therefrom a long time ago. Having become again a lieutenant in the Company of Musketeers of His Majesty Louis XVIII, he dazzles the salons of the noble faubourg and those of the Chaussée d’Antin with his luxury, and fills the chronicle of Paris with a thousand adventures and a thousand follies…
CHAPTER XXII
Last News
As for the other characters in the story, all of them have long since been replaced by their fathers or grandfathers. Listen! Soon the last blast of the cannon of Waterloo will sound, opening the difficult period. The past is on the march…
Thus goes the world. Beyond each epoch another reappears; beyond each generation, another marks time, and makes its entrance when its hour sounds—or, rather, re-sounds—on the Clock of the Centuries, which the Great Clockmaker has re-set and regulated in a fashion so very different from before.
Come back to the world, centuries already spent!
THE END
Notes
1 Available from Black Coat Press.
2 Robida includes a footnote to say that the room was so called because of the oval window, known as a bull’s-eye (oeil-de-boeuf), above the rear door.
3 Robida inserts two footnotes in this paragraph, the first to explain that the petit lever was when the King actually got out of bed, and that that it was a great honor to be admitted to his presence at that time [a grand lever followed, when he emerged fully-dressed from his apartments to display himself to the world], the other to explain that the Lord Chamberlain served the King while he dined in his room and introduced those to be admitted. I have omitted those of Robida’s subsequent footnotes that are references to previous issues of the magazine in which the story was serialized, and those which labor the obvious.
4 Robida inserts a footnote to define pulvérin as an exceptionally fine gunpowder placed in the pans of muskets or flintlocks to communicate the fire to the charge set in the interior of the barrel. [According to Webster’s, the English word “pulverin” means something quite different, so I have conserved the French term.]
5 Madame de Grigan, who was Madame de Sévigné’s daughter, was the addressee of the letters on which the latter’s posthumous celebrity was founded.
6 Monomotapa was an African country in the region now occupied by Mozambique.
7 Before the era of gas-lighting the French word gaz was only used in a sense equivalent to that of the English word “gauze.”
8 The quoted phrase is Boileau’s most famous reference to Louis XIV.
9 The nuances of the French word chauffeur are not readily communicated to its English equivalent. Although its most common literal reference, in 1902, was to the people who operated steam locomotives—drivers and stokers—it had a rich assortment of potential metaphorical overtones, sometimes referring ironically (as it does here) to the entrepreneurs who “drive” and “stoke” market economies. In a similar spirit, the word “house”—which Robida gives in English—seems to be intended to invoke the idea of gambling as well as, or rather than, residence.
10 Literally, Kill-the-Worm; the expression is used metaphorically to refer to individuals who drink hard liquor in the morning, so the nearest English equivalent would probably be Hair-of-the-Dog.
11 The names of the various fictitious establishments listed here are intended to emphasize Robida’s sarcastic contention that trades unions and other socialist institutions are firmly rooted in drinking dens—where such organizations tended to hold their meetings in the late 19th century, for want of other venues. Prunet’s Amer Collectiviste [Bitters Collective, or Collectivist Bitterness] encapsulates the gist of the argument. The others are roughly translatable, respectively, as The Socialist Plum, The Green Hope, The Great Eve, The Youth Collective, The Future and The Great Bar of Class Warfare.
12 It is as well to remember that Robida was writing at the end of an era in which the measurement of time had been gradually globalized and standardized by a series of committees and conferences, beginning with the International Geographical Conference in Brussels in 1876. The necessities of railway timetabling had killed off the old customs of local time, and the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1884 introduced the modern system of time-zones. The practicalities of the new system were still problematic in 1902; it was not until 1910 that the Eiffel Tower was used to transmit a wireless signal that allowed all the clocks in France to be readily calibrated to Paris time.
13 In fairness to the British royal family, it ought to be pointed out that the oldest of Queen Victoria’s sons, who succeeded to the throne in January 1901 as Edward VII, although no stranger to affairs with actresses, had been born in 1841; there could not, therefore, have been any English prince who might have been supposed to be an octogenarian at the time when the story is set.
14 Robida renders this phrase in English; it would not be appropriate to substituted the more familiar “struggle for existence” here because the passage is parodying Malthusian economic theory rather than Spencerian evolutionary theory, with which the latter phrase is primarily associated. Robida does, however, use the English phrase again in Chapter XXI, and there adds an explanatory French translation which employs the French word “existence,” which I have transposed directly, thus giving both forms of the phrase.
15 Grandfather Laforcade was not, of course, the sort of post-master who organized the distribution of postage stamps but an owner and supervisor of scheduled stage-coaches—diligences—transmitting passengers and parcels.
16 The sequence of names begun here is an ironic retrograde procession through some of the great survivors of French political history. Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) eventually became president of the Republic in 1871, after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war. His perennial rival, François Guizot (1787-1874), had first served as a minister under Louis-Philippe, after the 1830 Revolution, and came badly unstuck during the revolution of 1848. Joseph, Comte de Villèle (1775-1854), was the chief of the ultra-royalists during the Restoration, prior to the 1830 Revolution, which his policies helped to precipitate. Maximilian de Béthune, Duc de Sully (1559-1641), belonged to a much earlier and more settled era, being a close friend and key advisor of King Henri IV, who cemented the power of the French monarchy and secured its fortunes as a nation state.
17 The name of this fictitious theater—modeled on the name of the actual Ambigu-Comique—is approximately translatable as “Comic Relief.”
18 This arithmetical mistake is presumably intended to emphasi
ze that, no matter what else might have been inverted in the New Era, cashiers have continued to err in their own favor rather than that of their clients.
19 The reference is to two of the leading members of the “neo-classical” school of landscape painting, Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1758-1846) and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819). The former is referred to as “the most Bidauldian of Bidaulds” because his elder brother was also a notable landscape painter, of a slightly different stripe, and his father had also achieved a certain celebrity. Robida spells the name Bidault, which is an acceptable alternative, but I have substituted the spelling used in contemporary reference books for the sake of clarity.
20 Arnaud Berquin (1747-1791) was an egregiously condescending writer for children; this derivative of his name became a pejorative byword for offensively dreary prose. Jean-Christophe Schmid (1768-1854), nicknamed the Canon, whose name is coupled with Berquin’s a few lines further on, continued that insipid tradition of children’s fiction in his native Bavaria.
21 I have left the improvised word pourcentage as it is, italicizing it as Robida does; the pun is somewhat transformed by the different meanings of the French pour [for] and the English “pour,” but remains a pun of sorts.
22 The reader will observe that the full version of Berthe’s name has apparently changed since the first time the divorce petition was excerpted in the text, as has the name of her lawyer. This is doubtless one of the tiny flaws in the scheme of things that crept in when the clock of time was set in retrograde motion.
23 The original of this passage is, naturally enough, written in mock-Medieval language, but there is no point in trying to render the translation into mock-Chaucerian English.
24 I have transcribed this pun (droguet/drogue) directly into English, although the word “drugget,” meaning a type of cloth made from mixed yarns, is unfortunately somewhat obsolete.
25 The girl from the Palais-Royal is not a princess but a whore, the streets surrounding the edifice in question having become Paris’s most notorious “red light district” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Caveau to which Jeanne Verdure’s descendant is subsequently said to belong was a singing club, the not-so-subtle implication of the whole description being that the reader is free to doubt his heterosexuality.
26 A turn of the thumb.
27 Jacques Hébert was known as “Père Duchêne” because that was the title of the celebrated radical periodical he published.
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
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
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
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; To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
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
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
English adaptation and afterword Copyright 2008 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2008 by Yoz.
http://yozartwork.com/
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-934543-13-9. First Printing. November 2008. 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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