Having arrived by this route at the hypothesis of simultaneous and instantaneous creation, I must admit that I felt my embarrassment increase. I confess that I could not get my head around the idea of a hippopotamus emerging from the ground like a mushroom, any more than the idea that a cheese-mite might become a hippopotamus by force of ambition; they were two absolutely equal absurdities.
On the other hand, the study of nature shows us that, without a single exception, no living creature exists, or ever has existed, that did not emerge from a pre-existent father and a mother similar to it. Now, if all life originates from a mother fertilized by a father, how could a violation of the essential law of life ever have served as the origin and point of departure of the appearance of living creatures on the planet?
Naturally, I was brought back to Genesis.
Here I must make a declaration. I declare, therefore, that I hold all ancient traditions as true on principle. I firmly believe that none of them, fundamentally, can be a lie—firstly, because every time it has been possible to verify them, they have been recognized as exact; and secondly, because, in view of the mental poverty of men in general, and the first men in particular, I cannot imagine how they could have invented false facts, nor what interest they could have had in deceiving themselves with regard to their own memories.
What requires interpretation in ancient traditions is their form; in that respect, yes, it is necessary to take account of the time when the traditions were laid down and the much later time when they were collected in writing. The manner of conceiving ideas and the fashion of expressing them differed considerably from our present conceptions and language, and it is for want of taking this into account that people are so hasty, where matters of traditions are concerned, to declare them all false.
I, however, who never throw in the sponge, have meditated and reasoned, and by dint of thinking hard, like Newton, I believe that I have finally found a plausible hypothesis to explain the origin of life.
The origin of life is Noah’s Ark.
As is usually the case with all great discoveries, it was by way of long detours and paths unfamiliar to myself and other men that I found myself one day, quite unexpectedly, confronting the unanticipated solution to this great problem.
So long as, in my researches and my reflections, I had not got past the fifth chapter of Genesis—holding as true, in conformity with my principle, everything I saw written there—I could see nothing but the hippopotamus sprouting like a mushroom, and that mushroom-hippopotamus appeared to me to be increasingly hard for my intellect to swallow. When I arrived at chapters six, seven and eight, however, after having ploughed through the most inextricable thickets of the most colossal difficulties that my reason had ever been able to surmount, I arrived at an unexpected result—and I cling to my hypothesis, which nothing will make me release, because it is new, original, seductive and entirely adequate to put a stop to the headache of the origin of life. For this hypothesis has the decisive advantage of projecting the givens of the problem back beyond the present limits of the world and, in consequence, of relieving us of the problem forever.
You know how God, irritated by the increasing corruption of human beings repented of having made them and, full of anguish, said from the bottom of his heart: “I shall exterminate them all, men and animals alike, from everything that crawls on the Earth to the birds in the sky, for I regret that I ever made them.” But Noah, descendant of Seth, found grace before him, and God ordered him to make an ark from pieces of planed wood, divided into little compartments, coated within and without with bitumen, 300 cubits long, 50 broad and 30 high, with a one-cubit roof, three decks, a window at one end and a door at the other.
The Lord then instructed Noah to take two individuals of every species of animal, male and female, in order that they might live with him, along with everything that could be eaten, to serve as nourishment for him and all the animals.
When Noah had carried out these orders, God told him to go into the ark with his family and to take seven males and seven females of all the pure animals, and two couples of all the impure animals, and likewise with the birds of the sky.
For 40 days the deluge spread over the Earth, and the waters covered it for 150 days, after which God, having remembered Noah and all the animals that were with him in the ark, caused a wind to blow over the Earth, and the waters began to diminish.
After ten months, the summits of mountains began to emerge. Forty days later, Noah opened the window and released a raven, which did not return until the waters had dried up. Seven days after the raven, Noah released a dove, which came back without having found anywhere to perch. Seven days after that, he released the dove again, which came back bearing in its beak an olive branch, the leaves of which were entirely green. Finally, released a third time, it did not come back again.
A year had gone by. The Earth was nearly dry. Noah waited another 27 days, and then God spoke to him, telling him to come out of the ark with his entire family and all the animals, to go forth upon the Earth, to increase and multiply.
I do not know whether everyone else has done as I did, but I must say that, until that moment, it had never occurred to me to look at this sort from a scientific viewpoint. For me, Noah’s ark had always remained one of those little chocolate-brown boats surmounted by a pink house with a red roof, filled with little wooden people and animals. But when I had re-read those chapters, with a view to searching for the solution to the problem that I was seeking to resolve, I saw looming up before my reason the most gigantic objections that had ever been equipped to confound a poor human brain.
Unable to resolve these problems, I had, so to speak, to turn them around by supposing, that the story of the ark was merely symbolic. Beneath this symbol, however, there is a genuine fact: that of the initial population of the globe. The population was achieved at a single stroke, and the living creatures, collected on a ship that had floated on an agitated fluid, had sailed for a certain period of time and had finished up landing on the Earth, where Noah disembarked his assembly.
Well, personally, I found in that a complete explanation of the origin of life. This is why:
Life cannot have begun at the time of the Earth’s cooling, because any formation of organic matter would have been impossible during the igneous period.
Species cannot have formed by sequential transformation and improvement, because no living being can be produced except by two parents anterior to and similar to itself. For the same reason, they could not have emerged fully-formed on the surface of the globe. They must, therefore, have come from elsewhere, and arrived fully-formed.
Noah’s ark is the symbolic account of a great event. It informs us that in a particular era—I shall not attempt to calculate it—in that immense ocean of space in which the planets and stars float, two worlds collided.
One of these worlds was the Earth; the other was one of those aeroliths like those we see from time to time falling to the surface, the substance of which contains minerals and organic carbon compounds similar to those found on Earth.
How that collision happened, and how the passengers from the aerial world were able to resist the shock of arrival, I shall have to reserve for future research; but sufficient unto the day the evil thereof, and it seems to me that I have earned the right to take a short breather and wipe the sweat from my brow.53
The corollary consequences of this discovery will certainly not escape the sagacity of our readers; they are that it is necessary to relocate everything in Genesis that precedes the Deluge to another world: the terrestrial paradise is transferred to another planet.
And when one sees the sad state in which our satellite presently exists, it is very difficult to avoid the certainty that the Moon, a world so cracked and eroded that it is reduced to the condition of pumice-stone, is the accursed world on which God, in his justified wrath, caused the destruction of the degenerate race of the sons of Cain—an impious race which, after all, was not embarrassed to ass
ociate with giants.
And have you seen any giants on Earth?
If there is one thing that holds true down here, it is that NOTHING IS LOST, NOTHING IS CREATED. The truth is that life, neither more nor less than the world, never began and will never end; it can only be displaced—or, to put it better, moved, since movement is the same thing.
We are too trivial a thing in the midst of infinity ever to understand how the parts of the universe might be connected to one another; but the sole fact of the existence of this world in which everything is linked suffices to demonstrate that they are connected, since they are all absorbed and confounded in the absolute unity and infinity of universal life.
Between two equally inadmissible hypotheses regarding the origin of living creatures, I cannot choose, and beyond those two hypotheses, I take the only third term that is conceivable—and if, in order to propose a solution to you, I have chosen a slightly playful form, I have done so by design, wishing to honey-coat the rim of the cup that I have offered you, from which, perhaps, to drink the truth….
P.S. A propos of this mediation on the origin of life, I have received the following letter, which confirms my theory of the origin of living creatures in a manner as striking as it is unexpected:
Paris, 3 February 1877
Monsieur,
Noah’s ark is obviously a symbol. The arguments you put forward to demonstrate that are sound, especially from the picturesque viewpoint that you have adopted. But there are others more persuasive from the technical point of view.
The impact of two celestial bodies, to which you allude, is not a hypothesis, it is a matter that one may regard as proven by science and transferred into the domain of accomplished facts. But the Moon is entirely out of the question. If a collision had taken place between the Earth and the Moon, the conditions of our globe’s movement would have been so altered that we would be far from our present state. I shall take up this question again shortly.
Twenty-five years ago, a mining engineer resident in Toulouse54 published a brochure in which he gave very plausible reasons for the existence of a former satellite of the Earth, annular in form, analogous to Saturn’s ring. For reasons that it is necessary to seek in the increasing density of the terrestrial globe following its cooling, and in consequence of the augmentation of its mass and its attractive force, the equilibrium of the ring was upset, and the satellite fell upon the Earth. It can still be seen on the surface of the globe, for it has formed the highest terrestrial mountain chains, all disposed on the same meridian.
The collision of these two celestial bodies caused the globe to experience a frightful commotion and must have engendered a cataclysm at its surface and within a considerable depth of its crust, of which it is difficult form an idea: from that came the universal Deluge; Mount Ararat is merely a fragment of our former satellite.
Let us return to the Moon.
The Moon, a once-fluid body, has seen the disappearance, in consequence of its progressive cooling, first of the water that covered parts of its surface, then of its atmosphere. In future (when? relative to infinity, no one can say) the moon will disintegrate and fragment. Some of its fragments will fall on the terrestrial globe, augmenting its mass; the conditions of this globe’s equilibrium in space will be significantly changed; its orbit, already almost circular, will become entirely so and will draw nearer to the Sun. In addition to the cataclysm produced on Earth by the impact of the lunar fragments, the terrestrial globe will become suddenly and utterly uninhabitable due to the excess of solar heat. It will be the end of the world.
Reserve the Moon, therefore, for that final eventuality.
Accept, I beg you Monsieur, the expression of my respectful sentiments.
IGNOTUS.55
Jules Lermina: Quiet House
(1885)
Jules Lermina (1839-1915) embarked upon a career in journalism in 1859, having previously tried out various clerical positions following an early marriage at the age of 18. He became a radical socialist, founding the political periodical Le Corsaire in 1867, which led to his being imprisoned. He was released in response to protest—from Victor Hugo, among others—but promptly repeated his crime, founding a new journal called Satan, and was imprisoned again, thus initiating a template subsequently followed by Louis Ulbach.
When the Second Empire gave way to the Republic in 1871, Lermina was released again, and then—having presumably learned his lesson, and perhaps taking some inspiration from Ulbach—launched a successful career as a prolific writer of popular fiction. Although his political beliefs are explicitly manifest in some of his novels—especially To-Ho le tueur d’or (1905; tr. as To-Ho the Goldslayer), in which a noble savage who is one of Tarzan’s more significant literary precursors declares war on the symbolic foundation of capitalism—and are always lurking in the background, most of his fiction consists of crowd-pleasing entertainment in the great tradition of French feuilleton fiction. He clearly considered himself a direct descendant of Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas and did his best to extrapolate their heritage; he wrote a Suesque Mystères de New York under the pseudonym William Cobb and produced two sequels to Le Comte de Monte Cristo.
Jules Clarétie, who wrote an introduction to Lermina’s first collection of fantastic tales, Histoires incroyables [Incredible Stories] (1885), records that he and his friend had both been strongly influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, the presiding geniuses of the 19th century French fantastique, and that they had both become increasingly interested in the sinister mysteries and marvels of human psychology. Lermina’s work tends, however, to exploit the humorous aspects of the grotesque and arabesque to a greater extent than the horrific, and he was certainly strongly infected by what Poe called “the imp of the perverse.” “Maison tranquille,” here translated as “Quiet House”—which ought to be its title even in the French version—is the only scientific romance in Histoires incroyables, but two more appeared in a second volume entitled Nouvelles histories incroyables (1888) and Lermina had already produced a lurid pseudoscientic romance about “magnetism” in La Comtesse Mercadet (1884).
Although his increasing interest in occult science drew most of his later fantastic fiction back towards the supernatural, Lermina went on to write several more scientific romances, of which his contributions to the Vernian Journal des Voyages are perhaps the most significant; in addition to To-Ho le tueur d’or, these included the nouvelles “L’Arbre anthrophage” [The Man-Eating Tree] (1878; reprinted in Nouvelles histoires incroyables), about a man-eating tree, and “Mystère-Ville” [Mysteryville] (1904 as by William Cobb), which describes a technologically-advanced breakaway civilization founded in the Far East by French protestant refugees. His last novel of this sort, L’Effrayante Aventure [The Frightful Adventure] (1910), describes, in a typically flamboyant fashion, an extraordinary catastrophe provoked in Paris by the crash of an advanced flying machine. The two last-named items will hopefully be featured in future volumes from Black Coat Press.
Clarétie says that Lermina began writing fantastic fiction for Diogène in 1859, so the present story might have been written long before it was reprinted in Histoires incroyables, but it seems more likely that its inspiration owes something to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future [The Future Eve], which had begun serialization in Le Gaulois in 1880 before a different version (similarly abandoned while still incomplete) was launched in a rival newspaper, L’Etoile Française. The complete version of Villiers’ novel did not appear until 1886, a year after Histoires incroyables, but the newspaper versions had made its theme perfectly clear. Lermina’s story also has also echoes, further emphasized by its American setting, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which similarly belongs to a rich tradition of overblown and allegorically-weighted femme fatale stories descended from Hoffmann’s classic “Der Sandmann” [The Sandman]. Lermina’s farcical parody is pure and simple mockery, but he who mocks allegories cannot escape allegorical implication, and th
ere is a sense in which Quiet House cannot help but stand for a world in the process of disturbance by scientific enterprise, which thus becomes inhospitable to noble dreamers and transcendental moralists of the sort that Villiers and Hawthorne—and their protagonists—believed themselves to be.56
I
In truth, was it really a house? Four walls, almost black in color, pierced by four decorated rectangular holes that passed for windows, a brown door with sturdy powerful hinges and large nails, dark and dismal throughout, reminiscent of the face of a slave who has just been whipped.
Stones have a resignation of their own; these had the appearance of hardly being able to tolerate their fate. No shouting voices had ever enlivened them, no song had ever made them laugh. They had atrophied in their immobility, and were leaning against one another heavily, as if to help one another to bear the weight of the silence. The mass was world-weary. It did not even have the resources to frighten passers-by.
Quiet House57 did not frighten anyone: a banal mausoleum, square in design and benign in appearance; a yawn in stone—that was all. People passed back and forth in front of that curiosity, as inanimate as a sphinx, without even turning their heads.
It was situated on the very edge of the city, beyond Hoboken, near the Elysian Fields, whose trees had the dull color of cemetery plantations. Why had the house been placed there, like a lost outpost? No one came to it and no one came from it—which implied that it was uninhabited.
The house had grounds of a sort attached, surrounded by walls that were too high for curious eyes to attempt any indiscretion. In reality, no one dreamed of committing such a sin. The habitation was isolated, so there were no neighbors interested in investigating its mystery, even if it had been worth the bother. The road to which it displayed its grey façade had little traffic, and it would have been rather surprising to see anyone walking there after sunset.
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