As these items of information reached me randomly, their plausibility imposed itself on my reason; doubt entered into me, and the terror that had gripped me gave way to a disordered conflict of antagonistic ideas. I was too nervous to get a grip on myself, too young to discipline my thoughts, and I would not have entrusted anyone with the task of clarifying their tumult.
Sometimes I perceived, confusedly, the extent to which the Galvani experiment, as improved by Mourgue, had influenced me, and what tenacious obsession had amalgamated that memory with all my other thoughts—and then I lost all confidence in my lucidity.
Sometimes, on the other hand, the scene on the balcony reproduced itself on the screen of my memory with an extraordinary precision, with the enigmatic wire unrolling behind Madame Chablas. I saw her collapse again; I wondered what fluid had suddenly run out (was it electricity, or was it life?) and who had cut off that current (was it Mourgue or was it God?).
After that, a rush of arguments was precipitated within my head, toward the idea of a galvanization of Madame Chablas, and my intelligence, overwhelmed by their number, ceased functioning momentarily…just as the bubbles of gas in a battery precipitate themselves upon the negative electrode, and the battery becomes polarized.
The years now permit me to disengage the irrefutable facts that imposed themselves upon me more-or-less dully that evening: the presence of the wire; its invisibility relative to the witnesses in the courtyard; Mourgue’s conviction that no other witness was positioned on the upper floors; the coincidence of the emergence of Madame Chablas with the assembly of the pupils formed up facing the balcony; the irreducible distance—not rapidly reducible, at least—between the spectators in the courtyard and the spectacle on the balcony; the extraordinarily automatic gait of Madame Chablas; her perfume, more vehement than ever; her dead gaze, which my position had prevented me from seeing very well; the layer of make-up that could have dissimulated a sepulchral pallor; and finally, the school’s electric lighting, implying the existence of many power-points capable of feeding any kind of apparatus at a moment’s notice.
Now, had not Mourgue stayed shut up in his study for a long time, able to construct at his leisure, within human limitations, the galvanizer he had invented? Had not Mourgue, in an excitement that might have been feigned, jealously reserved to himself the duty of taking away and undressing his mother’s body?
All that formed an impressive array of charges against him, which could not be contradicted. But nothing, either, opposed the more natural version of the event. To be fair, ought it not to be remembered that Mourgue’s study was the indescribable receptacle of a host of machines? Electric wires were strewn over the floor, some of them interminable and equipped with plugs or sockets perfectly capable of catching on the hem of a skirt. And, I ask you, does a woman in distress think about anything other than her distress? Besides, as was well-known, Madame Chablas usually walked in a mechanical fashion; despair and mental torment explain perfectly adequately why that particularity should be exaggerated. Her make-up was no novelty either. Finally, what interest could Mourgue have had in hiding and delaying the official recognition of his mother’s death? That was what I could not explain, to begin with—without giving the question the importance that it merited, because I was hallucinated by the horror of my hypothesis.
The problem, in sum, remained unsolved for the child I was, as it remains unsolved for the man I am.
Was it a living person that was seen to die?
Where did Madame Chablas die? Was it on the balcony, as everyone believed? Was it in the study? Did she really take refuge there in a fit of grief? Did she emerge therefrom not as a living person, but a corpse galvanized and piloted by Professor Mourgue? Was it not rather, that same morning, in the conjugal bedroom? Had her son found her dead by Monsieur Chablas’s side, and had he carried her into the study while I went to fetch Monsieur Bernardi? In that case, which had died first: Philemon, or Baucis?
In my soul and my conscience, I have no idea. And if my mission is to pass judgment on the affair, I can only rely on the testimony of an impressionable child—that child being myself.
“Pass judgment?” you say. Does the Law, then, anticipate a punishment for such actions? They are sacrilegious, to be sure, and grotesque, but might find an excuse in scientific curiosity. And, in the final analysis, they injured no one, in a legal sense.
No one? Do you think so? Listen, then, to this fragment of dialogue, which I overheard a few days after the death of the Chablases, between Monsieur Bernardi—the law student—and Monsieur Lafont.
“There’s been mention of 120,000 francs!” said Monsieur Bernardi.
“And Mourgue gets it all?” asked Monsieur Lafont.
“Everything! An only son…he can think himself lucky to have the chance! When one thinks that, on the morning of her death, Madame Chablas hadn’t a sou!”
“How’s that?”
“Follow me carefully, Lafont. Monsieur Chablas had no other heir than his wife. Remember that Mourgue was no relation to him and that the dead man left no will. For Mourgue to profit from his stepfather’s will, it was necessary that his mother should first inherit from Monsieur Chablas, and that Mourgue should then inherit from his mother…”
“So,” said Lafont, “if Madame Chablas had died before Monsieur Chablas, the latter’s inheritance would have gone to the State? And Mourgue wouldn’t have got anything?”
“Exactly. But it would have been sufficient, in law, for Madame Chablas to have died at the same time as her husband, or for the circumstances of their decease not to have permitted it to be determined with certainty which of the two had preceded the other to the tomb.”
“Really?”
“It’s called the presumption of co-decease. Article 722 of the Civil Code states: ‘If those who die together are over 50 years old and less than 60, the male is always presumed to have survived, where there is an equality of age, or if the difference does not exceed one year.’ That’s the case.”
“Indeed,” concluded Monsieur Lafont, with a laugh. “In those conditions, Mourgue, I dare say, has had a lucky escape. A few hours earlier…”
“And the Queen of Spades would have lost a pretty penny!” Monsieur Bernardi concluded.43
That was the last echo that reached me of the doubtful and dramatic adventure, Mourgue lived to a ripe old age in easy circumstances. He was wise enough, although rich, to continue as headmaster of the Ecole Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to live there thriftily in the capacity of a professor of natural sciences—to the extent that he repeated Galvani’s experiment every year for the benefit of his pupils.
I witnessed it punctually from behind the windows until my turn came to sit on the philosophy benches. By then, though, I was rather blasé about a prodigy that I had seen so many times. The moderation of grown-ups increased its hold on me every day; Mourgue’s frog no longer intrigued me.
HYPOTHETICAL FICTION
Sometimes, when a writer assembles his words and sentences, he does not require them so much to express his thoughts as to suggest certain sentiments and sensations to the reader. In consequence, the person who reads such books in the same way that he reads the Civil Code or some informative newspaper—which is to say, remaining deaf to the mysterious appeals of the text, striving only to understand them instead of allowing himself to feel them—is like a blacksmith or a locksmith placed before the gate of a park, who only thinks of examining the grille, without perceiving the park through the bars.
Now what is true for certain kinds of style is no less true for certain kinds of composition. Thus, the person who sets out to read a hypothetical novel without reading between the lines, without glimpsing, beyond the story, certain conceptions that it is impossible to translate, or the exposure of which would necessitate the employment of a forbidding language contrary to the principles of the novel, is also only seeing the grille, neglecting the park, and will answer with reference to the lock when you talk to him about the flowers.
I have taken the trouble to clarify this point before saying what I think about the genre of fiction that is often identified as “scientific marvel fiction,” to which I now prefer the appellation “hypothetical fiction.” There would, in fact, be no point in writing it—or, at least, in publishing it—if everyone read as everyone calculates, coldly and flatly. The imagination of the writer of hypothetical fiction requires that readers are willing to “dance with him.” J.-H. Rosny Aîné’s La Force mystérieuse and La Mort de la Terre, or H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau are as many invitations to the waltz of worlds. If the reader remains passive and inert, if he does not perceive the profound rhythm of the universal jazz that is the music of the spheres, he is done for; he will not enter into the mentality of the hypothetical novel—which mentality consists, by means of a story that is ingenious and attractive in itself, of supposing that which is not, in order to acquire an idea of that which might be, of that which might perhaps happen in future or that which might exist beyond the range of our senses; and also in order to gain a better understanding of that which we know, whether by studying that which our world is not, or by adopting unusual viewpoints in order to look at it.
Between the thick shadows of the unknown and the luminous body of our knowledge, there is an extremely captivating zone, which is the zone of hypotheses: an extremely narrow region into which all the efforts of scientists and philosophers are hurled. It forms a sort of phantasmal halo. It is like the fringe of science, the feathery down of certainty. That is where the characters of hypothetical fiction operate; that is where lights are ignited which, although entirely artificial, radiate knowledge into ignorance—so to speak—and give us, if not the power itself, at least the delightful illusion of obtaining some slight understanding of the inexplicable.
That is an amusement of the intelligence, a fecund game of the mind, which is sometimes justified in an impressive manner by the reality of discoveries, and which then acquires the name of anticipation. It is reckless to call a novel that attempts to divine the future an “anticipation.” At the very most, one may say “attempted anticipation,” insofar as the prophecy is unrealized.
It is not in any case, works of that sort that seem to me to be the most interesting among hypothetical novels. Others give me more pleasure, appearing to me to satisfy more appropriately, by means of a mirage, our impatience to know, and to calm the nervous tension from which we suffer because we feel irremediably ill-equipped with physical organs to pierce the mystery that surrounds us, the encirclement of which only retreats very slowly. They are the stories which, taking a judiciously-chosen supposition as a point of departure, examine the consequences that flow therefrom, according to logic. When Rosny, in La Force mystérieuse, studies the influence of a celestial body endowed with certain properties passing close to the Earth, while, in “Les Xipéhuz,” he depicts the struggle of ancient humans against a race of creatures that dispute their supremacy, and when Wells, in The War of the Worlds, describes the invasion of our globe by the inhabitants of Mars, or, in “The New Accelerator,” reviews the consequences of all our functions being accomplished more rapidly, it can be claimed that we obtain more therefrom than a transient pleasure or an illusory satisfaction. It is, at any rate, a little better than a cigarette given to us to smoke in order to appease our hunger.
Why? Because it is always efficacious to put things in a new light, even if the light in question is artificial. Our knowledge gains substantially thereby.
We do not give sufficient thought to the fact that, in order to observe an object or a creature—a human being, for example—more clearly, it is an excellent idea to observe what that object or creature—the human being—is not. That is a negative study, which we are not accustomed to making, but which is nevertheless precious, and nonetheless striking. When, on a sheet of paper, you have shaded the whole area external to the face whose features you have set out to draw, what remains in white upon that background? The silhouette of the face, the contours obtained by a negative procedure.
Except that author should only make one single slip. From the moment when we have accepted his initial supposition—the only one that he has the right to impose upon us—he has a duty to avoid the slightest error of judgment; otherwise, the works falls to the level of fairy-tales. An inflexible logic must govern the action—a logic equal to the disciplined imagination that presides over the choice of the initial supposition. One of the grand masters of hypothetical fiction, Wells, has presented us with an invisible man who can see, which is much more inadmissible scientifically than the invisibility of a living body. I add that one sometimes has great surprises in store regarding the originality of a theme for development; in my own case, I believed one day that I had discovered an entirely new idea—that of Le Péril bleu—but perceived, to my amazement, that an eminent colleague had formulated it before me…well before! That colleague was none other than Plato. What a lesson in humility!44
In the 19th and 20th centuries hypothetical fiction has replaced the 18th century conte philosophique. “Today,” Wells has said, “utopia needs a world.” That world is the zone of which I spoke just now, and which is situated between the known and the unknown. And it is entirely natural that, in an era when science is absolutely predominant, one makes use of science to erect the framework of those novels that are conceived less for providing distraction during reading than for giving rise to dreams after they have been read. “They give the imagination a shake,” as Jacques Copeau45 has said of them. Without a doubt, if Voltaire and Swift were to reappear among us, the former would not have failed to import into Micromégas and the latter into Gulliver a series of issues descendant from the scientific knowledge that we have acquired in the century of Edison and the Curies—and, scant as our belief might be in the possibilities of metempsychosis, it is easy enough to imagine that the soul of Voltaire nowadays animates our great Rosny, and that Swift’s has passed into the body of Wells.
We know, however, that in the 18th century, the conte philosophique was exclusively a pretext for satires. Micromégas and Gulliver, which only retain a delightful inventiveness for us, both had the object of railing at certain contemporary individuals and institutions. In our time, however, if the hypothetical novel permits a Wells to express sociological opinions in the form of an apologue, many writers, by way of compensation, are able to work in the genre with no other preoccupation that causing it to exhale all the aromas of its own nature.
Does this mean that a hypothetical novel ought to be confined within the limits of the physico-chemical world? Far be it from me to think so. On the contrary, the finest works of the genre are those in which old anxieties that have always obsessed human daydreams, haunted our minds and clutched at our hearts drift like eternal effluvia. The wind of destiny blows through the laboratory door. Isn’t that so, Edgar Poe? Isn’t that so, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam? But that is not what is essential; what is essential resides in the metaphysical fog that inevitably rises within the romantic narrative.
It follows from this, necessarily, that the most enthusiastic lovers of the hypothetical novel are to be found on the far side of the Rhine. We (forgive me for that “we,” which is almost as detestable as “I”) do not understand it any better than the people of central Europe. The Latin peoples already show us much more indifference. The English consider works like The Food of the Gods or The First Men in the Moon to be secondary within the oeuvre of their Wells. As for the Americans, they are still a trifle young, and it was surely by virtue of an error that Edgar Poe as born in Baltimore more than 100 years ago.46
I apologize for not having presented this brief survey more simply. The subject is complex, and I consider that it can only be treated appropriately by employing, as I have tried to do, indirect procedures that do not attack it directly but delimit it, like the aforementioned design, from without.
One image, in order to finish with a cul-de-lampe:47 hypothetical fiction seems
to me to be perfectly symbolized, in its fantasy and its rationality, by the sculptor Jean de Bologne’s Mercury: that young and handsome god whose wings, although fantastic, do not make a monster; who flies with a powerful grace, but who still maintains—and always will maintain—a single toe in contact with the Earth of human beings.48
THE DISCOVERY
“Well, Ralph,” said the dazzling Mrs. Parker, “Tell me what this new instrument is. It looks like a photograph frame…”
It was evening in New York, after dinner, in the marvelous hall of the marble palace in which Randolph Parker, the second Edison, resides at the expense of the United States.
A surprising hall, in truth. Almost everywhere, ebonite, steel and nickel added a cold and industrial note to that sumptuous environment. Electricity triumphed amid the draperies, the complex items of furniture, the supremely comfortable chairs and all the abundance of plutocratic architecture.
This evening, a diffuse light, like that of day, illuminated the phonographs, automatic organs and the piano that played itself with the touch of a Paderewski. Various telephones were strewn about the heavy tables, overloaded with luminous glassware, There were electric lighters and parabolic heaters scattered here and there. A silvered wall awaited the projection of an invisible cinematograph. The mysterious and absurd maws of loudspeakers protruded from the corners.
Old Randolph Parker, still svelte in his smoking-jacket, was moving from one apparatus to another, incapable of remaining still for a single moment. He had taken a little pair of forceps and a screwdriver from his pocket, and he was contentedly regulating his machines, which sometimes crackled as they emitted minuscule blue sparks. Rolling his Havana cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, he approached the “instrument” that had intrigued his young wife: a sort of milky screen framed in wood, in the form that photographers call a “card-album.”
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