In A Thousand Years
Page 31
On the other hand, Mademoiselle Dorothée Desiflard, a young woman endowed with all the charms and all the qualities, had already flatly refused four successive suitors in the space of a year, and was being written off as a very finicky heiress, when an incident clarified a double mystery that no one had suspected.
In the course of a brilliant soirée given by the notary, the young woman, having observed that Gédéon was dancing for the fourth time with a middle-aged widow, was seized by a violent crisis, which was attributed to the heat of the apartment. The young advocate immediately gave such signs of anxiety that Maître Desiflard, while running to his daughter, who was carried out of the room, could not help murmuring, with satisfaction: “I’ll soon be able to rest easy, then; the office will be in good hands.”
The young woman rapidly recovered her senses.
“This little indisposition caused our excellent head clerk a singular alarm,” her father said to her, abruptly.
“It’s very kind of him to be concerned about me,” the young demoiselle replied, dryly.
“The parties are perfectly in accord!” exclaimed the notary, laughing. “I’ll get busy with the contract.”
A month later, a brilliant crowd attended the young couple’s wedding ball.
For that solemn occasion, Antius had donned the brilliant commander’s cravat that he had received from the Minister of Public Education, and Terrier had added to his signature the title of Member of the Académie des Sciences.
“Well, my lad,” the doctor asked the newly-married man, “what are you going to make of my first grand-nephew—a doctor or a notary?”
“Or a physicist?” added the professor.
“No, Messieurs,” replied Maître Gédéon Cahusac, “a geographer…it’s written!”
Notes
1 tr. as Electric Life, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-182-8.
2 Louis XIV met the Doge of Genoa, Francesco Maria Lercaro, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 15 May 1685, when the latter came to confirm his capitulation after a French fleet had bombarded the city for ten days in order to force the abandonment of a commission to build warships for Spain. The Doge was reported to be very impressed by Versailles, but the irony of his widely-quoted remarks to that effect is understandable.
3 Given that the narrative voice informed us in chapter one that today is the thirteenth, a smidgen of unreliability seems to have crept in somewhere.
4 “While drinking”—or, more familiarly, “while drunk.”
5 Jean Bourbouze, a laboratory assistant at the Sorbonne, achieved brief notoriety during the siege of Paris in 1870, when he suggested that the problem of getting information in and out of Paris might be solved by passing an electric current along the Seine and measuring its modifications at a distance using a galvanometer. According to Henri de Parville, who reported the experiment, he demonstrated that the method could work by transmitting such a message between the Pont d’Iena and the Pont d’Austerlitz. He deposited at least one sealed letter with the Académie in order to register priority in a subsequent invention, but it does not seem ever to have been opened.
6 An institution originally founded by the Catholic Church as a means of helping the poor, which, by 1880, had become the most significant pawnbroker in Paris, very popular among the young men of the Latin Quarter.
7 Tawai Ponamou, or Te Wai Ponamu, is the Maori name for New Zealand’s South Island.
8 This passage loses its alliterative symmetry in translation; in the original the term paragrèle [hailshield] is contrasted with paratonnerre [lightning-conductor], paravent [windbreak] and parapluie [umbrella].
9 François-Élie Roudaire (1836-1885) was commissioned to map the French colony of Algeria in the late 1860s, employing what were then new surveying methods. Finding a good deal of land below sea level, associated with the inland lakes known as chotts he became convinced a huge salty depression extending toward the Gulf of Gabès in eastern Tunisia was the dried-up bed of a sea once described by Herodotus as the Bay of Triton. He proposed that the area be reconnected to the sea by a canal. The idea was taken up by Ferdinand de Lesseps after the completion of his Suez Canal project; a joint-stock company was formed to organize the project. Preliminary surveys were carried out between 1876 and 1878, but the Ministry of Public Works withdrew its support in July 1882. In 1883, while Dans mille ans was being serialized, Roudaire and de Lesseps undertook a further survey. The readers of the Musée des familles would have been very familiar with the idea and the progress of the project, although it subsequently died with Roudaire.
10 The reference is to one of Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorisms.
11 The idea of digging a ship canal between Paris and Rouen—a frequent feature of French futuristic fiction in the 19th century—had first been mooted in the days of Henri IV, but it was taken seriously during the post-Napoléonic Restoration, when work almost began, only to fall victim to the July Revolution of 1830, after which investment was switched to railways. In 1881 an engineer named Bouquet de la Grye drew up a scheme for a canal to Le Havre, costing sixty million dollars, with which the readers of the Musée des Familles would have been familiar, although the Rouen canal always seemed the likelier prospect.
12 “On Roman domestic cookery”
13 The Dutch master Adriaen van Osttade (1610-1685) became famous for his paintings of rustic indoors scenes of everyday life.
14 Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696).
15 Hippalus of Alexandria was a fictitious navigator—not an astronomer—who allegedly discovered the monsoon wind system of the Indian Ocean, thus opening up trade with the spice islands. Strabo’s Geography tentatively gives the credit to Eudoxus of Cyzicus instead, but that story is probably apocryphal too.
16 Like Hippalus, Flavio Gioja was a fictitious character invented as the hypothetical pioneer of the naval compass, but it was in use long before 1300 and was largely irrelevant to the discovery of the Americas.
17 Salomon de Caus did publish a description of a steam-driven pump in 1615, but it was not original, and François Arago’s attribution of the invention of the steam engine to him in consequence was grossly exaggerated. Given that the citation completes a hat-trick, it is tempting to think that Calvet might be aware that Antius is talking through his hat, but it is not obvious that his readers would have got the joke, if so.
18 Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821): “All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner; he is the horror and the bond of human association.”
19 Approximately: “The ruination will find him unafraid.”
20 A character is a French humorous ballad, which has an English version by William Makepeeace Thackeray. The possessors of the seigneurie of Yvetot, a small town near Rouen, were given the title of roi in 534 by Clotaire I, so “le roi d’Yvetot” is a person of great pretention but meager means; hence the simple cotton bonnet in which the one in the ballad goes to bed.
21 The French coupable [culpable] can also be construed as “cuttable,” hence the allegedly-unintended pun.
22 The chemist Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) developed a process for the extraction of aluminium.
23 Patents issued for new inventions in 19th century France required the recipients citing them to include the formula in question to emphasize that the granting of a government patent was no guarantee that the device in question would actually fulfill its intended purpose. A bassinoire is a warming-pan used to heat up a cold bed. A very similar but rather risqué version of the same joke is used in Alfred Bonnardot’s “Archéopolis” (1857; tr. as “Archeopolis”), one of a sequence of classic stories in which future archeologists digging in the ruins of Paris make amusing errors of interpretation.
24 This joke too can be found in one of the classic “ruins of Paris” stories, in this case Alfred Franklin’s Les Ruines de Paris en 4875 (1875; tr. as “The Ruins of Paris in 4875”, included in Investigations of the Future, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-612
27-106-4), demonstrating that Calvet was well aware of the literary tradition in which he was working. In Franklin’s story the joke is left unexplained, the reader being required to deduce the true nature of all the discovered artifacts on the basis of the clues provided, but Calvet presumably disapproved of that obliquity.
25 The literal meaning of bizet refers to a breed of sheep—hence its use in argot with reference to Frenchmen doing their obligatory term of national service.
26 A famous cartoon by Henri Daumier published in Les Bons Bourgeois in 1846 has a snatch of dialogue as a caption in which one assures the other that the sea serpent’s existence is obviously possible, since its sighting has been reported in the Constitutionnel (a famously conservative newspaper). “The Constitutionnel’s sea-serpent” thus became mocking shorthand for any improbable news item.
27 Owen Jones, the architect of the Crystal Palace constructed in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and subsequently rebuilt on Sydenham Hill—where it was still standing in 1883—proposed building a similar “people’s palace” in Muswell Hill. The idea of such “people’s palaces” remained in the air throughout the Victorian Era; although none was built in London one was eventually constructed in Glasgow in the 1890s, although only a part of the building took the form of a huge glazed conservatory. Calvet obviously liked the idea.
28 Frédéric Sauvage (1786-1857), the inventor of the marine propeller, demonstrated in 1832 that it was more efficient than paddle-wheels as a means of driving steamships, but was cold-shouldered by the French navy and went bankrupt when he tried to develop the invention himself, ending up in a debtor’s prison.
29 Philippe le Bon, or Lebon, who industrialized the extraction of lighting gas from wood, fared even worse than Sauvage, being murdered in 1804 in mysterious circumstances.
30 Émile Littré’s Reprise du Dictionnarire de medicine, de chirurgie, etc. (1855) was actually an updating of an earlier work by Pierre-Hubert Nysten, on which Littré collaborated with Charles-Philippe Robin, but he had produced definitive translations on the works of Hippocrates and various other relevant scholars. Littré is now far more famous for his monumental Dictionnaire de la langue française (1863-73)
31 “He is worthy to enter.”
32 The Centre Hospitalier National d’Ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts is the principal institution for the study of ophthalmology in Paris, descendant from a hospital for the blind; it was in the process of transition in the 1880s. Even Gédeon cannot possibly believe the old wives’ tale that shrill sounds can induce blindness, and is merely using it to express his (and presumably Calvert’s) distaste for music.
33 Monsieur (or Baron) de Crac is a character featured in several French comic operas, based on the character of Baron Münchhausen, as popularized by Rudolf Eric Raspe.
34 A kind of steam locomotive patented by Thomas Crampton in 1846 and widely employed during the subsequent railway boom; they were particularly popular in France, where “prendre le Crampton” came to mean catching an express train. One specimen is still preserved in the Cité du Train, the French Railway Museum at Mulhouse—perhaps the same one that the time-travelers find in 2880.
35 Eugène Labiche’s vaudeville La Cagnotte [The Kitty—as in a card game] was premiered at the theater in question in 1864
36 The numerous books attributed to the fifteenth-century alchemist Basilius Valentinus are almost certainly apocryphal, the earliest ones actually dating from the early seventeenth century. They include a volume on chemical experiments, one on antimony, one on azote (nitrogen) and one on metallurgical medicine.
37 Charles Cros first outline this scheme in a lecture delivered at Camille Flammarion’s salon in May 1869; the paper was subsequently published in the periodical Cosmos, and then as a pamphlet. It is frequently featured in 19th century French futuristic fiction.
38 William Crookes’ “Crookes tube,” first developed in 1869, was an electric discharge tube in which “cathode rays”—subsequently revealed to be streams of electrons—were produced. The phenomenon of fluorescence had already been produced in “Geissler tubes” in 1857, which were only partially evacuated, and in which an electric current flowing through the tube caused various gases to glow (as in a neon light); they were mass-produced in the 1880s as playthings. Calvet had no way of knowing that the term “radiant matter” would acquire a new meaning in the late 1890s with the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel. He would presumably have mentioned Abel Niepce Saint-Victor’s “pre-discovery” of that phenomenon in 1857 had he known about it, but hardly anyone did.
39 The mathematician Antoine Deparcieux published a classic Essai sur les probabilities de la durée de la vie humaine, calculating life expectancies on the basis of empirical data, in 1746, and an augmented version in 1760. His data was subsequently used by others for the calculation of annuities in the insurance industry.
40 “Like father, like son.”
41 Balochard is an argot term applied to a cheerfully simple-minded individual lacking in practicality.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life
23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
92 Louis Boussenard. Monsieur Synthesis
39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
89. Alphonse Brown. The Conquest of the Air
98. Emile Calvet. In A Thousand Years
40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
81 Félicien Champsaur. Ouha, King of the Apes
91. Félicien Champsaur. The Pharaoh’s Wife
03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis
97. Michel Corday. The Eternal Flame
67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey
17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men
49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence
10 Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
08 Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
01 Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
51 Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
31 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
70 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega & The Shadowmen
88 Judith Gautier. Isoline and the Serpent-Flower
57 Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
24 Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
55 Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
30 Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
90 Fernand Kolney. Love in 5000 Years
87 Louis-Guillaume de La Follie. The Unpretentious Philosopher
50 André Laurie. Spiridon
52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
82 Alain Le Drimeur. The Future City
27-28 Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
07 Jules Lermina. Mysteryville
25 Jules Lermina. Panic in Paris
32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius
66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers
15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
73 Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot
74 Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat
75 Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies
76 Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious
96. André Lichtenberger. The Centaurs
99. André Lichtenberger. The Children of the Crab
72 Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes
78 Joseph M
éry. The Tower of Destiny
77 Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865
83 Louise Michel. The Human Microbes
84 Louise Michel. The New World
93. Tony Moilin. Paris in the Year 2000
11 José Moselli. Illa’s End
38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
04 Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
79 Pierre Pelot. The Child Who Walked On The Sky
85 Ernest Perochon. The Frenetic People
100. Edgar Quinet. Ahasuerus
60 Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
33 Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril
34 Maurice Renard. Doctor Lerne
35 Maurice Renard. The Doctored Man
36 Maurice Renard. A Man Among the Microbes
37 Maurice Renard. The Master of Light
41 Jean Richepin. The Wing
12 Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries
62 Albert Robida. Chalet in the Sky
69 Albert Robida. The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul
95 Albert Robida. The Electric Life
46 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Givreuse Enigma
45 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Mysterious Force
43 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Navigators of Space
48 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Vamireh
44 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The World of the Variants
47 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Young Vampire
71 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River
24 Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
09 Han Ryner. The Superhumans
20 Brian Stableford. The Germans on Venus
19 Brian Stableford. News from the Moon
63 Brian Stableford. The Supreme Progress
64 Brian Stableford. The World Above the World
65 Brian Stableford. Nemoville
80 Brian Stableford. Investigations of the Future
42 Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
13 Kurt Steiner. Ortog