The Germans on Venus

by Brian Stableford

  “The psychology of woman—what a combination of words! There’s no consciousness there, only physical laws. Sensation that is not reasoned is no more interesting to study than the percussion that makes a stick of dynamite explode. What is the soul? It’s consciousness. The council of Mâcon, which has been denied but whose existence I have verified, was right at least to raise this suspicion: does a woman have a soul?

  “The day when I discovered this, the automatism of woman, I felt the most poignant anguish that a human creature can support: the illusion had become impossible to maintain. It made me weep. Now I can see, and, in the presence of a woman, I experience the curiosity of a technician inspecting the steel works of a new machine. For they don’t all resemble one another, in spite of that fact; they have different ways of being unconscious. One can still amuse oneself with that. And what’s good about it is that they sometimes conduct themselves as if they had the capacity to watch themselves act; one might think that they were reasoning. That held me up for some time. Oh yes, they reason, but—and this is the long and short of it—without knowing it, as an adding-machine reasons. That’s what constitutes their superiority in the accomplishment of the function for which they are born: love. The role of woman is to love, to perpetuate; they carry it out marvelously; nothing distracts them, except the influence of the man to whom attraction points them, necessarily, as the Sun directs a sundial. Thus, woman is an automaton. Examine your Juliette carefully, my dear chap.”

  Laube had concluded.

  Mérillon got up, his legs a trifle unsteady, and he went out slowly, as if under the dominion of a dream, having said but one word: “Goodnight.”

  When he got home, he found Juliette asleep in bed. He gazed at her anxiously.

  “Automaton!” he sniggered—then shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “After all, who knows?” But his weak head, disturbed by Laube’s strange monologue, filled up with irrationalities, and the word automaton suggested to him very clearly the image of those waxwork women that one sees in glass cases in physiological exhibitions at the Barrière du Trône, respiring with a mechanical movement of their breasts and abdomen. In the candlelight, Juliette’s face, beneath her black hair took on a very similar tint, shiny and livid. He looked at her interestedly then; she seemed worthy of attention, like a “curious and cleverly fashioned” item.

  In the respite granted to him as the hallucination gradually wore off, he decided to go to bed, but not without precaution, fearfully, starting at every contact. When she woke up, putting her arms around his neck to draw him to her, wrapping herself around her, he shivered. Then, rebelliously, he tried to release himself—and having got one of his hands free, he pinched her.

  She squealed. “Oh! That’s not nice! Swine.”

  He burst lout laughing. “Hey—an automaton that weeps!”

  Afraid in her turn, thinking that he was drunk, abruptly annoyed, she turned to the wall, saying goodnight in a dry tone.

  “Perfect! The automaton goes to sleep, the automaton sleeps. Truly, that’s curious and cleverly fashioned.” And after a further snigger, satisfied at no longer feeling so close, he fell silent.

  He got up the next morning hardly having slept, starting at every movement Juliette made, with the fear of having of a very complicated and dangerous machine next to him, like a workman sleeping a few inches away from a driving belt.

  “What’s wrong with you, Jacques?” she asked, waking up in her turn, disturbed by the night’s bizarre occurrences.

  “Nothing. Leave me alone. I’m going to work. Leave me alone, will you?”

  Used to such abruptness, especially in the morning—for Mérillon was grumpy during the early hours of the day, wont to retreat into absolute mutism—she did not persist, falling silent in her turn.

  Then, at a loose end, she opened the piano and strummed the keys. This aural distraction did not usually trouble the engraver. Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, he even said that he enjoyed it, finding work easier to the rhythm of the tinkling notes. This morning, the music threw him back into his obsession; raising his head, he watched the fingers go back and forth across the keyboard, full of curiosity, as attentive as a child before Vaucanson’s flute-player.

  “Excellent, that mechanism.” Then, louder: “Very pleasant—go on.”

  To see her eat was such a great astonishment for him that he forgot to eat himself, leaving his plate full.

  “Aren’t you hungry, then? Are you feeling ill?”

  “It’s so amusing, watching you.”

  He was no longer afraid. Curiosity replaced the initial fear; he was getting used to it. And he said: “Dear little machine, you don’t know what you’re doing. You go on and on, and you only attain the shadow of pleasure, because you’re unaware of it, your pleasure. You aren’t like me, a sentient reed, and when all the fires of sensuality overwhelm you….”

  He stopped the parody here.

  This dissection of love did not take long in coming to seem fastidious. He became disgusted with himself, limiting himself to questions, the answers to which he waited for impatiently, and received with the attention of a physician observing a rare disease. He turned the poor girl’s brain around, probed it, dissected it with a scalpel, and squeezed it as children do with an orange, in order to draw out every last one of the banalities swelling that population of cells. And during these operations, abetted by his obsession, he noted down Juliette’s words—by which means he learned her entire history, without understanding it.

  Believing it to be a profound interest of affection, she let herself go, searching the depths of her memory for recollections and the bottom of her heart for tenderness. As for him, he congratulated himself on his skill in analyzing mechanisms, murmuring internally: “What an admirable machine that woman is!” When she had nothing more to tell him, he grew bored; with no curiosity remaining, he fell prey to a depression, whose weight increased day by day.

  When he went out, it was with expressions and precautions like the eccentric of which Zimmermann gave an account, who could not see a woman without feeling sick. He kept as far away as possible from those he met, closed his eyes as they passed by, and came home in despair, with the sensation of having been persecuted by all the automata of Paris.

  Laube gave rise to an analogous impression. He had only gone to see him once since the evening when he had thrown him so badly off balance, and which still made him shiver three weeks later. One evening, when he was wandering distractedly through the streets, they found themselves face to face.

  “Why, it’s Mérillon! What have you been doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s very little for a chap like you.”

  “Nothing. Finished. I’m bored. You know Juliette—well, it was true.”

  “What? Oh…!” Laube did not dare to go on, thinking of some feminine treason—and Mérillon did, in fact, have the appearance of a rather melancholy victim of love—so he continued: “All the more reason for coming to see me. You know that I never go out in the evenings, on principle, to the homes of friends where there are women. They’re such sluts. And during the day, I philosophize.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Slowly. A new subject. I’m short of observations. And when I ask for information, people give me news items or dirty stories. They tell you some obscenity, and add: ‘Well, what do you expect? That’s feminine psychology for you!’ They simply don’t understand.”

  “It was true!” Mérillon continued, who was in no state to comprehend three sentences in succession.

  “I’ll come to see you, then. Shake you up a little! You’re alone yes?”

  “Why? No. She’s there, always there. She comes, she goes. She horrifies me.”

  “Go on!”

  “It was true. I’ve made notes, I’ve written astonishing things—yes, astonishing. You’ll have all that, I promise you. It was true. Oh, Laube, it’s all your fault. I was happy, why did you tell me that? Why not leave me my
deception? Truth, ob-ser-va-tion—I’ve had enough of them. It’ll end badly, badly, badly. Leave me alone. Why are you staring at me like that? I’m not an automaton—not me, sir!”

  He turned on his heel and disappeared into the shadows, while Laube, disconcerted, said to himself: “And that’s what a girl does to an intelligent man! Another one lost. Loving those creatures! The poor wretch! Automatism always exists in extreme passion: love, despair, etc. That’s a chapter I might have forgotten. Ah, a lucky encounter. Unless he goes mad, which will come in the third part—to follow.”

  Laube went on his way.

  Mérillon went home, his excitement diminished, prey to a state of depression that frightened Juliette. Without saying a word, he looked at her with bleak, staring, animal eyes, and—without any philosophical implication, but, on the contrary, with a profound pity—she voiced a thought that haunted her lover.

  “One might think him a machine,” she murmured. “What is he afraid of? I’ve never seen him like this. My God! How much he’s changed!”

  He wandered around the apartment for some time, rummaging in the corners as if, like some dying animal, he were looking for a place to lie down.

  The next day, as he seemed more lucid, she questioned him gently, seeking a cause for his black moods, thinking that it might be some annoyance in his work, some frustrated ambition. He listened with eyes in which sad astonishment was readable, making no reply.

  He maintained this desolate appearance for a long time, and for days on end Juliette watched him prowling around, looking like a dog begging to be fondled—but at the slightest contact, he shrank back. The repulsion that he had felt at the beginning of the crisis seemed to return, further accentuated: the instinctive movement of a visionary driving back a hideous apparition. Terror invaded his troubled eyes; he fled from Juliette, turning his head at her approach, hesitating to go to bed at night, only yielding to a nervous exhaustion—for he no longer slept.

  She trembled; he watched her from the corners of his eyes, like an enemy, with sly glances, collecting himself, ready to pounce.

  “I’m definitely dealing with a madman,” she said to herself. “My God, what should I do? What will happen? Oh, he’ll never dare to touch me. I’ve heard it said that madmen submit to the authority of people who are dear to them. Oh, that’s what he’s like!”

  Not for an instant did it cross her mind to leave, or to alert Jacques’ friends; she wanted to try to save him, at least to spare her lover the shame of a padded cell. She had the justified fear of hospitals that poor people always feel. In spite of her fear and sadness, she smiled more than she had in better days, treating him like a child, scolding him gently, trying to play with him.

  As he relaxed, unintentionally, she took heart again, in spite of the suspicion that she always saw in his dull eyes. That would pass.

  One morning, on waking up, she found him standing up, his clothing in disarray, the front of his tie hanging over his shoulder, with a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other. With his arms crossed and his head held high, he was staring at her.

  “What a get-up! What are you doing there? Come here!”

  She leapt out of bed, seized him in her arms and tried to draw him to her, intending to tame him with her caresses, for his fixed appearance was frightening.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”

  He took several steps back. She continued forwards, arms still outstretched. He recoiled further, she followed him.

  Suddenly, the expression on his face, which was bordering on ferocity, became fearful, and he fled, going to hide in the kitchen, still crying: “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”

  There, when she joined him, he assumed a defensive attitude, like a timid cornered animal. She caught up with him in a corner. Then releasing himself violently, he seized a carving-knife from the table, and with a single blow, sank it into her breast.

  She collapsed.

  At the sight of the blood spurted from the wound when the knife was withdrawn, Mérillon became excited. He brandished his weapon, from which blood was dripping, crying: “The automaton bleeds! The automaton bleeds.”

  He burst out laughing.

  “Go on, go on! Bleed, then—bleed! Bleed!”

  And he attacked her furiously, stabbing her randomly with the bloody blade.

  “Bleed, bleed, automaton!”

  He released a deep sigh, and, as if relieved, said: “The automaton’s dead!”

  Putting the carving-knife back on the table, he calmly went out of the kitchen and, without even darting a backward glance at his crime, went to sit down at his work-desk.

  The boards, the papers, the tools, everything was stained with blood, for he had red hands and his sleeves were soaked.

  He worked, hacking the wax randomly with disorderly strokes. He worked for a long time, and then he went out.

  The streets, at mid-day, were fully of people in a hurry: workers and clerks, running to hasty meals. They looked, astonished, at his bloody hands and clothes, his incoherent costume, but as he was quite calm, after glancing at him, they mostly continued on their way. Little by little, though, more attention was directed towards him. Then, seeing that he was being observed, he stopped in the middle of the road, struck a pose, and cried: “Well! Yes, I’ve killed an automaton!”

  “A madman!” they cried. “Arrest him.”

  “An automaton. A thing like this!” And he advanced towards a woman who was trotting along, with a little basket on her arm.

  The woman screamed; they threw themselves upon him.

  He was dragged to the guard-post, still shouting, to the great delight of the crowd that was escorting him: “I’ve killed an automaton!”

  They could get nothing else out of him. In the padded cell where he was locked up, he retained his obsession, and seemed very proud of having committed an act that he doubtless considered very difficult and very rare.

  Laube went to see him, without being able to make himself recognized.

  “Poor fellow, weak in the head,” the philosopher said. “That’s what transcendent philosophy can do to an imbecile! When I’ve finished my thesis, I’ll write an article on him for the Archives of Comparative Psychopathy.”

  Marcel Schwob: The Future Terror

  (1891)

  Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) came from a family with strong literary connections; his father had been at school with Gustave Flaubert, was a friend of Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville, and had once collaborated with Jules Verne when the latter was still a struggling playwright and diehard Romantic. His maternal uncle, Léon Cahun, was a successful writer of historical fiction, mostly for younger readers. Schwob established his own literary reputation within the Decadent Movement with the Poesque short stories in Coeur double [Duplicitous Heart] (1891) and the more varied Decadent tales in Le Roi au masque d’or (1892; partly translated, along with items from other collectons, as The King in the Golden Mask) before going on to greater success with the lachrymose novel Le livre de Monelle [The Book of Monelle] (1894), the collection Vies imaginaries [Imaginary Lives] (1896)—a series of imaginary biographies of medieval characters about whose actual lives little or nothing is known—and a fictionalized study of Les croisade des enfants [The Children’s Crusade] (1896), before ill-health put an end to his productivity and then his life.

  Schwob was held in the highest possible esteem by his contemporaries. Oscar Wilde dedicated “The Sphinx” to him and entrusted the task of polishing the prose of Salomé to him and Pierre Louÿs. Alfred Jarry dedicated Ubu roi to him, and consented to don mourning-dress for his funeral (having earlier caused a tremendous scandal by turning up to Stéphane Mallarmé’s funeral in a pair of yellow shoes borrowed from Rachilde). He would doubtless have gone on to spectacular further achievements had his career not been but short, and his intense interest in Medieval history might not have prevented him from undertaking further excursions into scientific romance. “La Terreur future” is the only ex
ample in Coeur double, but Le Roi au masque d’or includes a prehistoric romance in the vein popularized by J.-H. Rosny aîné. Both stories are marginal to the genre, and the particular item of automated machinery featured in this futuristic tale is incidental to the thrust of the Symbolist allegory, but it nevertheless provides an interesting example of the nightmarish imagery to which the Frankenstein syndrome can give rise.

  The organizers of the Revolution had pale faces and eyes of steel. Their vestments were black and close-fitted, their speech curt and arid. They had become this way, having once been different—for they had preached to crowds, invoking the names of love and pity. They had traveled the streets of capitals with belief in their mouths, proclaiming the union of populations and universal liberty. They had inundated dwellings with proclamations full of charity; they had announced the new religion that would conquer the world; they had gathered initiates enthusiastic for the nascent faith.

  Then, in the dusk of the night of its execution, their manner changed. They disappeared into a town hall where their secret headquarters were. Bands of shadows ran along the streets, overseen by strict inspectors. A murmur was heard, full of deathly presentiments. The environs of banks and rich houses trembled with new, subterranean life. Sudden outbursts of clattering voices were heard in distant quarters. A buzz of machines in motion, a trepidation of the ground, terrible sounds of ripping cloth; then a stifling silence, similar to the calm before a storm—and all of a sudden, the tempest was unleashed, bloody and enflamed.

  It burst in response to the signal of a flamboyant rocket launched into the black sky from the Town Hall. A general cry was released from the breasts of the rebels, and there was a surge that shook the city. Large buildings were trembling, broken from beneath; a rumble that had never been heard before passed over the Earth in a single wave. Flames rose up like bloody pitchforks along the instantly-darkened streets, with furious projections of girders, gables, slates, chimneys, iron T-beams and ashlars. Window-glass flew everywhere, multicolored by firework sprays. Jets of steam burst out of pipes, gushing out from various floors. Balconies exploded, twisted out of shape. Bed-linen reddened capriciously, like dying furnaces, behind distended windows. Everything was full of horrid light, trails of sparks, black smoke and clamor.