28 Needless to say, there is no dictionary of Thiérachian patois that could assist in making sense of this verse, so I have transcribed it as written. The text spells out the gist of it, but it is worth noting that two of the vague terms of endearment it concerns are henceforth used repeatedly by Aunt Aline: amon, which is equivalent to “my love” but is also given a second meaning, spelled out when relevant, and chtiot, more usually rendered ch’tiote, which signifies something like “little darling”.
29 This appears to be a feminine form of “gallot,” which the text employs several times as a slang term for a native of Britanny.
30 Approximately: “These are souls in that child, coming out.”
31 Yvernaux probably means “giant,” construing egregoroi in the sense in which it is used in Greek versions of Genesis, in the mysterious passage referring to the nephilim.
32 The term fil de Vierge [literally, Virgin’s thread] is normally applied in France to a floating wisp of spider-silk, but the commonsensical listener—apparently the notional author, although readers might not agree that he is conspicuously blessed with common sense—evidently suspects that Yvernaux has another, more nearly literal, significance in mind, as of course he has.
33 In fact, both halves are Gaelic in origin, Kairn being a local variant of “cairn” and Heuz being the name of a particularly nasty Gaelic god, although the Breton and Welsh (Cymric) languages overlap the Gaelic tongues to a considerable extent, the supposed distinction between Celts and Gaels being largely a figment of the 19th century anthropological imagination.
34 The École Normale—the aggregation of French teacher-training schools—had gradations, the primaire being, of course, considerable lower in status than the supérieure.
35 Marie d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, was tortured in 1676 after being accused of having conspired with her lover to poison her father and two brothers for the sake of an inheritance, and was persuaded to produce such an extravagant account of her crimes that it sparked the so-called “affair of the poisons,” in which numerous other women were arrested and charged with various nefarious practices—a panic only suppressed when the “confessions” implicated several highly-placed courtiers.
36 “Pharaoh’s serpent” is an effect once popular in firework displays, produced by igniting a block of mercury thiocyanate, which expands in a long, twisting streamer.
37 The Comtesse’s Triste au Bois dormant plays on the title of Perrault’s fairy tale “La Belle au Bois dormant,” whose title is usually translated as “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” or abbreviated to “The Sleeping Beauty.” Although it is, indeed, the Beauty who is sleeping in Perrault’s version, not the Wood, I have assumed that the Comtesse is implying, as the phrase actually suggests, that it is the wood that is dormant rather than herself.
38 The significance of these dialect terms, and the play between them, can be deduced from their analogy with the French terms piège [trap] and pigeonner [swindle]. In essence, Aunt Aline fell into a trap, or deceived herself.
39 Had such a nickname been given to the young Comte in Paris it might have implied not more than that he was a Breton, but in Britanny itself, it would link him more specifically to the particular Bretons who fought against the Revolution of 1789, implying that he is old-fashioned in his views.
40 This reference is obscure; Yvernaux is probably feminizing the name of Ennius, the “father” of Latin poetry.
41 I have translated “maison americaine d’édition” [American publishing house] here, but have had to replace “édition” subsequently in order to recover Yvernaux’s pun.
42 Alterne-interne [alternate-internal] is a neater item of wordplay in French than in English; I have improvised slightly in order to reproduce the symmetry in translation, as Richepin would surely have done had the boot been on the other foot.
43 Approximately, “While you’re eating today’s black bread, the fire is burning on which your pancake will be cooked.”
44 I was only able to make the other seven lines of the ditty rhyme with the first, thus reproducing the “dancing” effect on the vowel “o,” by treating the meaning slightly freely, but have preserved the gist of it, and its potential as a veiled warning.
45 Richepin uses the English word here because its French equivalent, enivré, does not have the linguistic link to toxicity that he wants to extrapolate.
46 Oliver Lodge was actually at University College, Liverpool when he made his important modifications to Édouard Branly’s coherer in the late 1890s. He moved to the University of Birmingham in 1900, four years before he and his collaborator, Alexander Muirhead, sold their patents to Guglielmo Marconi. Lodge’s key lecture to the British Association on “Hertzian waves” and their potential use in communication was delivered in August 1894; it provided a crucial spur for Marconi and other researchers in the field, including Jagadish Chandra Bose. This passage is the most significant clue to the internal chronology of the story, implying that this scene is set in 1894, and that the climax therefore takes place in 1904-05, and the coda in 1906, or perhaps 1907.
47 The behavior of the iron filings in Branly’s coherer was eventually explained in terms of ionization by Antoine Blanc in 1904.
48 The Hungarian physicist Philippe Lénard had begun his extensive pioneering study of the behavior of cathode rays in 1888.
49 Sir Willliam Preece developed a primitive wireless telegraphy and telephony system as early as 1892, prior to the patenting of the telephone in the U.S.A., but it was never put into practical use; he subsequently—and rather selflessly—became an enthusiastic supporter of Marconi. The name of Van Beschem was bandied around at the time because of a paper on wireless telegraphy that he published in collaboration with someone named Le Royer, but has since fallen into obscurity.
50 The citation of Gustave le Bon’s name in conjunction with those of Pierre de Heen and Henri Becquerel—the discoverer of radioactivity—is significant; Richepin probably found de Heen’s relatively obscure name in Le Bon’s book, L’Évolution de la matière (1905), which attempted to extrapolate the possible consequences of the discovery in question.
51 Loufoque [lunatic] sounds as if it might be compounded out of loup [wolf] and phoque [seal]—hence the labored wordplay.
52 Approximately: “Hiding truth cooks its venom, delighting those who keep quiet; anyone but a fool knows that he should say nothing about what he knows.” (Many toxins are destroyed by cooking, which therefore renders some poisonous plants edible.)
53 Voyant que le bleu—literally, “only seeing the blue”—is used as a metaphor for being at a complete loss, so the “Thiérachian” addition merely adds fire to the metaphor.
54 In French, sentir means both “to feel,” in a general sense, and “to smell,” in a specific one. Geneviève probably starts out merely suggesting that she doesn’t feel up to the task in hand, but her ambiguous remark is subsequently extrapolated into a sequence of wordplay involving argot terms as well as commonplace ambiguities, with the result that the passage sounds rather odd, in both English and French.
55 Actually, you won’t; it’s fictitious. It must, however, have been established after 1894, when Alexandra married Tsar Nicholas II, but before 1898, when Alfred Nobel died, his will establishing the prizes named after him. This is consonant with the dating of the earlier scene as 1894.
56 Radium was discovered by Marie Curie in 1898; again, this is consonant with the internal chronology already suggested.
57 Contemplation of what Geneviève might mean by “radioactive aviation,” and why she is frightened by the idea, is best postponed to an afterword.
58 Jimson weed.
59 The reference is presumably to Henry Morton Stanley’s last expedition to the Congo, in 1876.
60 Biribi is a gambling game, but being “sent to Biribi” was a slang expression used of soldiers consigned to the disciplinary battalion in Algeria, from which Julot has presumably deserted.
61 A fourbancier i
s a jack-of-all-trades, but the word also carries an implication of sharp practice, suggesting that none of the trades in question is practiced honestly.
62 La Pantruche is now a famous Parisian restaurant but Julot is using the term as a slang term for a marionette; the reference is to the house-sparrow, of which 19th-centry Paris was home to several noisy flocks.
63 The first title is that of a famous Charlemagnian romance; the familiar versions of the two Spanish chivalric romances—whose full titles are Amadis de Gaula and Las Sergas de Esplandian [The Adventures of Esplandian]—are actually by the same author, Garcia Rodriguez de Montalvo, but the former, to which the latter is a sequel, was apparently based on a lost Portugueuse original of unknown authorship.
64 A hirondelle is a swallow, but substituting “swallow” in the supposed couplet wrecks the last vestige of its scansion. The citation is metaphorical; Julot’s reference to a dream suggests that “half of a hirondelle”—a bird possessed of only one wing—is his equivalent of “l’aile du rêve.” Unlike Julot, however, Richepin would also have been familiar with Sully Prudhomme’s poem “À l’hirondelle,” in which reference is made to the entire bird taking off on “l’aile du rêve,” so he might have a slightly different equation in mind, in which half of a hirondelle/one wing would be equal to half a dream—which would make a kind of sense in the context of the subsequent development of his story.
65 Approximately: “The bells of Avalon/have no skirts./Those of Epone/wear long ones./Brown bread, white bread, any bread/Will you go to sleep soon, my darling?/Will you go to sleep soon, darling mine?”
66 Electrum is itself an alloy, albeit a natural one, of gold and silver, sometimes known as “white gold.”
67 The most celebrated work of the 16th century poet Guillaume Du Bartas is the epic La Sepmaine [The Week], also known as La Création de la monde [The Creation of the World]. His contemporary Pierre de Ronsard headed a literary school intended to inject new blood into French literature, and is generally credited with having succeeded.
68 In fact, although astrological divination is considerable older, the twelve-part division of the ecliptic into the “Houses of the Zodiac” only seems to go back as far as Ptolemaic Egypt, from which it spread to the omen-obsessed Roman Empire, although the divisions were given the names of constellations established long before by Greek astronomers. Chinese astrology originally used twenty-eight divisions rather than twelve. It actually takes the Sun’s apparent equinoctial “location” about 2147 years to traverse a twelfth of the ecliptic, so the astronomy or the arithmetic of the people of the city seems to have been seriously at fault. It is unclear, in any case, how the people of the vanished civilization could have marked and measured the transition in question on any kind of diagram.
69 The Crau is a stony plain at ancient confluence of the Rhône and the Durance.
70 The Roman poet Horace likened a work of art devoid of unity to a woman destinit in piscem [ending in a fish’s tail]—hence the subsequent reference to sirens, in the sense equating them with mermaids.
71 The art of war and fine speech.
72 Even before the Great War, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the principal commune in the Camargue, was only “dead” outside the holiday season, when its population increased tenfold. The town’s name refers to the apocryphal legend that three Marys allegedly present when Jesus rose from the tomb—Mary Magdalen, Mary Jacobe (also known as Mary of Chopas) and Mary Salome—brought the Holy Grail by sea to the south France (with or without Joseph of Arimathea).
73 It is possible that Richepin is here stretching the meaning of the Thiérachian Amon even further, to include the Egyptian god Amon, or Amun—who almost reached the point of absorbing all the others in becoming an all-encompassing Creator, the focal point of a quasi-monotheistic religion—although Yvernaux would be far more likely to indulge in such a flight of fancy than Aunt Aline.
74 In legendary terms, Sarah-la-Noire [Black Sarah] was the black servant of Mary Jacobe, one of the three Marys who brought the Holy Grail to France; she was either adopted as a patron saint, or foisted upon, the Romani who arrived in southern France in the 15th century and consented, or were forced, to convert to Catholicism.
75 Mireille (1859) is a long poem by the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, celebrating the popular traditions of the region.
76 The word-play in the substitution the improvised “amerrissage” [a touchdown on the sea] for atterissage [landing] is unfortunately untranslatable.
77 I have transcribed the improvisations in this sentence directly, “recordman” being an attempt at English neologism, “aéroplanique” [airplanic] an attempt at French neologism, and “alérion” [alerion] an adaptation of a peculiar heraldic device, representing an eagle devoid of beak and feet, with its wings outspread.
78 Images d’Épinal were exceedingly popular cheap prints produced in that town, which featured colored pictures accompanied by captions in verse; they were part of the standard stock of itinerant colporteurs [hawkers] in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
79 I have transcribed this word directly; it may simply be a misprint for “Aerien” [by air] but is more likely to be yet another improvisation of deliberately murky import.
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 Vib
ert. The Mysterious Fluid
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The Scaffold; The Vampire Soul
English adaptation and introduction Copyright 2011 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2011 by Jean-Félix Lyon.
Visit our website at www.blackcoatpress.com
ISBN 978-1-61227-053-1. First Printing. November 2011. 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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