The Germans on Venus

by Brian Stableford

  17 Horace de Saussure (1749-1799) was a physicist and geologist who invented or improved numerous measuring devices, and was one of the first people to reach the summit of Mont Blanc.

  18 Lennox was the family name of the Dukes of Richmond, but this reference is otherwise obscure.

  19 Although this comparison can be read innocuously, it might be worth observing that the term “un saint Georges” is used in French to refer to a particular position in sexual intercourse, in which the penetratee sits astride the lap of the penetrator; the phrase is probably intended to imply that Berniquet’s sitting position was not quite as comfortable as he suggests.

  20 Hyperbation is a rhetorical term referring to a deliberate inversion of meaning. The French term that I have translated here with excessive literality is prendre pied, to which Hurlubleu is presumably objecting because Berniquet has ended up neck-deep in the mire. The other key phrase in this passage is juste milieu [exact middle], which had a very specific reference in the context of French politics before and after the July Revolution of 1830, when it was proposed—and, to some extent, implemented—as a means of arbitration to balance the opposed demands of the Royalist right and Republican left, involving the calculation and subsequent steering of an exactly-balanced middle course between the two. This extends a sketchy series of analogies in which the progressive savants’ steamboat journey and trip in the dirigible airship, both ending in disasters, represent the Revolutionary and Imperial phases in recent French history.

  21 Patagon is used in French to refer to the inhabitants of Patagonie [Patagonia], and thus invites translation as “Patagonian,” but as Nodier’s island bears no resemblance to the actual South American region of Patagonia, I have transcribed it directly.

  22 Adrien Métius (1571-1635) was the Dutch mathematician credited with the discovery (or rediscovery) of the constant pi, which expresses the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.

  23 This passage links Nodier’s imaginary island with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, as described in the first utopia (written c1609; published posthumously in 1627) to argue flamboyantly that technological progress was the key to a better life. Bacon never finished it, any more than he finished the great encyclopedia of human knowledge that he intended to produce.

  24 Tête de veau en tortue is an elaborate recipe found in the pretentious gastronomic guides popular in Nodier’s day. Its basic constituents are a calf’s head and rice, but it also requires numerous truffles and quenelles (meatballs), twenty prepared cockscombs and a crayfish. There is a certain irony in the fact that the Patagonian food scientists produce the cockscombs, crayfish and raw material for the quenelles artificially while apparently taking the truffles (by far the most expensive ingredient) for granted.

  25 Louis-Philippe, who acceded to the French throne after the July Revolution, was routinely caricatured by reference to his habit of carrying an umbrella with him when he went out.

  26 Possibly the American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), who commented in learned fashion on the rhetorical style of religious revivalism.

  27 A boustrophedon is a document in which alternate lines are written in opposite directions, those reading from right to left being constructed in mirror-writing, but Nodier appears to be using the term here simply to refer to inverted speech.

  28 I have transcribed this improvised term directly; oneiro- is a Greek preface signifying “dream.”

  29 “Skin and bones.”

  30 Secretly.

  31 An analeptic is a tonic; a hemiplegia is a partial paralysis (nowadays attributed to a haemorrhage in one hemisphere of the brain); a claudication is a limp.

  32 Brassica napus is rape, which does not have an edible root, although its seeds are a rich source of oil; the use of botanical analogies in the euphemistic representation of human genitalia and sexual activity was, however, commonplace in the 18th century—a circumstance not unconnected to Linnaeus’ decision to classify plants according to their sexual organs—so Nodier’s reference to rape’s “tap-root” is presumably not intended literally. Asperifolia means “plants with rough leaves”—another reference that is presumably metaphorical.

  33 Curtius was a legendary hero of ancient Rome; when an earthquake opened a deep fissure in the Forum he declared that the strength of Rome was embodied in the arms and courage of its citizens, and leapt into the gulf on horseback. The fissure than closed up again, as if to signify the Earth’s agreement.

  34 The Valley of Jehosaphat extends between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. In apocalyptic mythology it is where the dead will assemble for the Final Judgment.

  35 The etymology of the terms Hurlubleu and Hurlubière relate them to the verb hurler, to howl. The former suggests a condition akin to that expressed by the English phrase “howl [with laughter] until [one is] blue in the face.” Bière has two meanings, equivalent to the English “beer” and “bier,” the latter presumably being the intended one.

  36 Jean-Antoine Letronne (1787-1848), a contemporary polymath particularly distinguished in the fields of geography and archaeology.

  37 Modern textbooks give this surname as Sualem, but I have retained Ulbach’s spelling.

  38 According to legend, this was the common first line of four verses deliberately left incomplete by Virgil by way of a challenge Bathyllus, who had claimed authorship of some of the great poet’s verses; Bathyllus was, of course, unable to complete the verses. The phrase is approximately translatable as “Thus ye do, but not for yourselves.”

  39 The parody is not exactly word-for-word, as Ulbach suggests, but is obviously derived from Matthew 26:1-4.

  40 Derived from Matthew 27:1-5—except, of course, that in the gospel Judas hangs himself.

  41 Deciphering the inscription as instructed, it reads in translation: “It is only because we want to destroy the Marly machine that we have condemned it to be sold and taken apart, for to replace it would be of little consequence to us.”

  42 The Comte de Paris was Louis-Philippe’s similarly-named grandson, born in 1838.

  43 ISBN 978-1-934543-37-5.

  44 The first line of this verse, “De Paques à la Saint Michel” is a popular way of indicating the summer months in France. Subsequent references to “Monsieur Nicolet” are presumably to the author of the poem, but I can find no reference to any lunar fantasy written by a man of that name or to any contemporary work that populates the moon with giant bats; it might have been a fashionable complainte whose popularity proved brief. The term Homo verspertilio was once used in a German work by Heinrich Hoffmann, but I cannot find any French reference to it.

  45 Plato’s Homo duplex conceives humans as duplicate beings in terms of body and soul, although Plato did also speculate about sexuality in terms of the figurative division of a hypothetical hermaphrodite form. The anatomical observations of Étienne Serres (1786-1868)—in accordance with the remainder of the passage—had more to do with bodily symmetry. A similar calculated ambiguity forms the ideative basis of one of the chapters in Pawlowski’s Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, which might owe something to Saintine.

  46 The Symplegades are two rocks featured in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, which periodically smash together; that term is thus used metaphorically to refer to any course steered between two parties in imminent danger of clashing violently. I cannot find any evidence of the term being incorporated into 19th century psychology to describe a category of nightmare, but it could have been, although it is also possible that Saintine, who was obviously very interested in oneirology, might have improvised the term himself.

  47 Hecate is called “triple” here because she was thought by some writers to have three different aspects, being Selene or Luna in the Heavens, Atrtemis or Diana on Earth and Persephone or Proserpine in the Underworld; she was thus represented, on occasion, with three bodies or three heads, one of a horse, one of a dog and one of a lion’s and afforded such epithets as Tergeminus, Triformis a
nd Triceps. A supposed hymn to Hecate exists in which the three aspects of her personality are addressed as Bombo, Mormo and Gorgo, although the last of the three terms is more commonly associated with the gorgon better known as Medusa—who was also part of a set of three, according to Hesiod.

  48 Reduvidae are a family of predatory hemipteran insects more familiarly known as “assassin bugs,” which live vampirically on the ichor of other insects, and occasionally (but rarely) feed on the blood of higher animals.

  49 I have substituted “Dreyse rifles" for Robert’s “fusils à aiguilles” [needle-guns] because a literal translation would now be confusing, although the term was used in English at the time. The Dreyse rifle was so-nicknamed because of its exceptionally long firing-pin.

  50 I have translated this pun as best I can; the French bouillant, literally “boiling,” also means “hot-headed” in a metaphorical sense.

  51 The reason that Moufette’s name is “predestined” is that mouffette is the French name for the animal known in English as a skunk.

  52 A Beguinage is a community affiliated to an order of laywomen (Beguines) founded in the 13th century and devoted to charitable works, resembling a nunnery in all its essential respects, although its members do not take vows.

  53 Pierre Versins suggests, in his Encyclopédie, that Mouton might have borrowed this thesis from the Baron d’Espiard de Colonge, who had proposed it “in all seriousness” in La chute du ciel (1865). Unless the subsequent postscript really is a belated afterword, however, Mouton acknowledges his actual source therein.

  54 Mouton adds a footnote of his own to identify this individual as “M. de Boucheporn.” The reference is to Baron Bertrand de Boucheporn (1811-1857), who was, indeed, a mining engineer, but was better known as a grand theorist of natural science passionately interested in the implications of geological discoveries. He was a member of the last generation of fervent anti-evolutionists. His Etudes sur l’histoire de la terre et sur le causes des revolutions de sa surface, published posthumously in 1861—undoubtedly the book that Mouton has in mind—belonged to the catastrophist school of geology, but was unusual in attributing the transformative catastrophes that had allegedly shaped the Earth to impacts with extraterrestrial objects rather than internal events; deluges and multiple volcanic eruptions thus became secondary effects rather than primary causes.

  55 Ignotus means “unknown” in Latin.

  56 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Scaffold (ISBN 978-1-932983-01-2) and The Vampire Soul (ISBN 978-1-932983-02-9) are available in Black Coat press editions.

  57 Lermina gives this name in English, and subsequently adds a footnote to inform readers that Hoboken is in New York, although he refrains from explaining that his supplementary reference to the “Champs-Elysées,” which might have puzzled some Parisians, is to the location where the world’s first baseball game was allegedly played.

  58 Both of these South American tribes are real, described by Alexander Humboldt in his account of his travels, but the allegation that they live on earth is fanciful.

  59 The Swedish chemist Jean-Jacques Berzelius (1779-1848) devised the conventional system of symbolic notation for chemical elements and compounds and determined the chemical formulas of numerous simple compounds.

  60 Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, Charles Hatchett and Friedrich Wöhler were all chemists of note; Döbereiner observed patterns of kinship between elements that laid the foundations of the periodic table and Hatchett discovered niobium, but only Wöhler—the first person to synthesize an organic compound (by accident)—offered any “proof” that the solution to the problem in question might be “close at hand.”

  61 Lermina adds a footnote here to assert that this is the chemical formula of albumen.

  62 Lermina names the sender of this letter “Franz,” but that hardly makes a plausible pairing with “Kerry,” so I have taken the liberty of substituting a more likely final letter.

  63 I have resisted a strong temptation to edit this “letter,” which—as the reader will shortly discover—could not actually have been written, and if it had been, would not have manifested the particular state of relative ignorance that it does. Merely shifting the last few sentences into the future tense would not, however, solve the problem. It is therefore necessary for the reader to suppose that Frank has been mentally composing this missive as he walks to Quiet House, anticipating a plaint that he will never, in fact, commit to paper.

  64 The full title by which this painting is usually known—which is, of course, relevant to the story’s dispute—is The Dispute of the Blessed Sacrament.

  65 The word I have translated here as “central tube” is âme, which is used here in a specific sense to refer to the central element, or axis, of a mechanical assembly, but also retains the more general meaning of “soul” or “heart.” The resultant wordplay is sometimes carried over into knowing English references to “the soul of a machine,” but does not translate. A few weaker puns of the same stripe have, alas, been lost in this translation, which cannot retain all the sly ambiguity of the original.

  66 ISBN 978-1-934543-37-5.

  67 Although Allais spells it Érébium rather than Érèbium, the name of the imaginary element is undoubtedly derived from Érèbe [Erebus], the name given to a mythical region of subterranean darkness overlying the classical land of the dead.

  68 Allais inserts a footnote here: “Radium, in fact, only amazed simpletons. Radium emits light; all metals emit light. The only difference between radium and other metals is the low heat necessary to its incandescence. In the same way, mercury is content to melt at what we call ordinary temperature—which only serves to prove that mercury is an extreme case among metals. The story of radium is the greatest hoax of the 19th century; I shall soon demonstrate this, irrefutably, in a lecture whose memory will not soon be effaced.”

  69 Allais gives Becquerel’s forename (which is more frequently rendered as Henri) to distinguish him from his father, who was also a noted physicist. The other names cited here are also those of real contemporary scientists; Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval was a significant pioneer of electrophysiology, Gabriel Lippmann a Nobel prize-winning physicist best known for his work on the development of color photography and Max de Nansouty a well-known popularizer of science who helped compile guidebooks to the expositions of 1889 and 1900.

  70 Charles Richet (1850-1935) was best known as a physiologist, in which capacity he was appointed a professor at the Sorbonne and won a 1913 Nobel prize, but he was also a pioneer of aviation, a novelist and poet; his literary works include three scientific romances published in 1887-92, two of them under the pseudonym Charles Epheyre, which he used on much of his early work.

  71 Mas adds a footnote here giving the following reference: “L’Avion, Dr. Loisel publ., 8 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre.”

  72 Mas inserts a footnote giving the address of this organization as “4 Rue Greffule, Paris.”

  73 Camille Flammarion and the Abbé Théophile Moreux were France’s leading popularizers of astronomical science.

  74 Robert Esnault-Pelterie (1881-1957) was well-known in 1913 as a pioneer of aviation, but his endeavors as a propagandist for space travel by means of rockets were then at a very early stage; his book on the subject, L’Astronautique, was not published until 1930, following a lecture series launched in 1927.

  75 Hieron II of Syracuse was the patron of the ingenious Archimedes, to whom discovery of the principle in question, in the 5th century B.C., is generally attributed

  76 Mas’ assumption that the temperate of interplanetary space is absolute zero is mistaken, but the rate at which the temperature of the exploding gas falls is, in any case, quite irrelevant to the impulse imparted to the rocket. Panclastite was a liquid explosive made by mixing dinitrogen tetroxide with a fuel such as carbon disulfide at the appropriate moment; it was swiftly superseded during the Great War.

  77 Mas confuses mass and weight here, again mangling his argument unnecessarily, but it remains
fundamentally sound, as the deployment of rockets in modern spacecraft demonstrates.

  78 There is an untranslatable play on words here. The French manuel becomes “manual” in English, so the name Manuel—which doubles as a slang term for “Spaniard”—is only phonetically and not orthographically ambiguous.

  79 So-called because Urania is the muse of astronomy—a reference easily construed by literate Frenchmen of the era, familiar with Camille Flammarion’s best-selling scientific romance Uranie.

  80 The substitution of a leopard for the British heraldic lion is presumably deliberate. In the following sentence and elsewhere I have used “Heinrich” as a generic German name rather than the “Michel” that Mas employs.

  81 The verses attributed to this “unknown poet” are presumably the author’s, giving rise to the suspicion that Ludwig Mayer might have been the real name of the person who adopted “André Mas” as a pseudonym.

  82 Article 175 of the German penal code was a proscription of homosexuality. Phoebe is one of the less popular synonyms for the Moon, although the goddess in question had received a boost to her popularity when she was represented in Georges Méliès’ most famous silent movie, known in English as A Trip to the Moon.

  83 The aerac—Hauchet’s own invention—was earlier described as a jet plane with variable wings, but the one the travelers use on Venus seems more like a helicopter; I have, however, retained the improvised term.

  84 In fact, Venus’ orbital inclination is only slightly more than three degrees, but that was extremely difficult to determine by distant telescopic observation because the thick cloud did not permit any surface features to be seen, so Mas was free to speculate in 1913.

  85 The word I have translated as “fitting out” is “équiper;” as deployed here and in the final chapter, it might pass for an early anticipation of the notion of terraforming. Although Hauchet is probably mistaken in the supposition that there was ever an interval in Earthly evolution in which carnivores were absent—although the notion was presumably borrowed from one or more of the three books on palaeontology that Mas cites in his bibliography—and the logic of the subsequent extrapolation of that premise is decidedly dubious, the sensitivity Mas shows to evolutionary theory in his description of Venusian life is very unusual for its time, as is the striking notion of colonization as a crucial evolutionary diversion amenable to planning and control.