The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope
Page 19
What, then, of “baby” Pierre who was kidnapped by Diana Krasnoview and who was the natural son of Leo and Sylvie–as we were told in Titania? The Prophecy of Nostradamus unearthed by Lumen in La Captive du Démon predicted that, if Leo did not father a child with Sylvie, then horrible events–“rivers of blood and heaps of corpses”–would come to pass in 1929, then three years in the future. At that time, La Hire assured us that Leo was the man sent by Providence, that his victory over Zattan, his marriage to Sylvie, his fathering of a child with her and, finally, his assumption of Mathias Lumen’s role would guarantee that the dire events forecasted by Nostradamus would not come to pass.
Yet, what if Leo had ultimately failed in his preordained duty? After Les Mystères de Lyon, neither Sylvie nor Pierre (either of them) ever make a reappearance. Leo behaves as if he is single again, although he does not remarry. One is led to wonder if the couple separated, possibly because of the Nyctalope’s continued infidelities. Leo’s marriage to Sylvie obviously failed. Their baby son might have died. Leo’s C.I.D., instead of fulfilling Mathias Lumen’s role in warding off evil, all too often became Leo’s personal tool. The Prophecy was not fulfilled after all. What if the great evil that Leo failed to prevent took place not in 1929 but in 1939–when Germany annexed Poland and started World War II? The man who had vanquished Lucifer, Zattan and Gorillard never once confronted Hitler–in whom many saw the Antichrist...
After Les Mystères de Lyon, the Nyctalope seems almost to turn into a pale caricature of his earlier persona: a somewhat smug and self-satisfied bourgeois, whose adventures are minor skirmishes with the forces of evil, while appearing largely indifferent to the greater evil that is about to be unleashed over Europe.
Le Sphinx du Maroc [The Moroccan Sphinx], serialized in Le Matin in 1934, takes place that same year. It is a classic colonial espionage adventure in which Leo manages to prevent a rebellion in French Morocco, saves the beautiful Naima and thwarts the evil schemes of Helen Parsons, a.k.a. The Djinn.
The next book, La Croisière du Nyctalope [The Nyctalope’s Cruise], serialized in Le Matin in 1936, is interesting because it is an earlier adventure, taking place in June and July of 1913. Curiously, it confirms the Nyctalope’s birth year of 1877 because, several times, it states that the Nyctalope was then 35, i.e.: two years older than he was during Le Mystère des XV.
In La Croisière du Nyctalope, Leo travels to Russia to prevent the beautiful German femme fatale Wanda Stielman from stealing the fortune of the pretty Russian princess Irena Zahidof, who owns vast oil deposits near Bakou. We are told that Wanda is a former lover whom Leo thought had been shot by a firing squad à la Mata-Hari. In the conclusion of the story, La Hire states that Leo loved Irena, but couldn’t marry her because she died on July 28, 1913 from pulmonary congestion. The fact that Leo might have married Irena–if she had lived–is another indication that Xavière had died prior to this adventure.
La Croisière also mentions that Leo’s father was a high-ranking diplomat who lived in Russia with his wife and son during and after the Franco-Russian alliance of 1892. While this statement confirms the relocation of the events of L’Homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau to 1885, it now gives Leo’s father a third career! One would then logically assume that Jean (Pierre) Saint-Clair was reassigned from the French Navy to the Quai d’Orsay and moved to Russia six or seven years after the events of L’Homme. He was obviously back in France by 1897 for the events of L’Assassinat du Nyctalope. Le Mystère des XV then tells us that he died in 1900.
Le Mystère de la Croix du Sang [The Mystery of the Bloody Cross], first serialized in Le Matin in 1940, takes place in January 1939 in the Perigord region of France–there is, therefore, a five-year gap between it and Le Sphinx du Maroc. In it, the Nyctalope saves his friend, Jacques d’Hermont, from the invisible death rays of an evil occultist/scientist, Armand Logreux d’Albury, alias the Master of the Seven Lights, who resides at the nearby Castle of the Bloody Cross, and plots to murder the d’Hermont family, marry young Basilie d’Hermont, Jacques’ only daughter, and steal their fortune. In this novel, the Nyctalope is assisted by a tribe of gypsies, for whom he is the “Capo” Pedro del Campo, the same pseudonym he once used in La Captive du Démon.
L’Enfant perdu (The Lost Child) was only serialized in the magazine Actu in 1942 but never collected in book form. It tells of an adventure that the Nyctalope and Gnô Mitang experienced during the June 1940 exodus after France was invaded by the Nazis.
The novella Rien qu’une Nuit (Only One Night), published in 1944, takes place in January 1941. In it, Leo and Gnô Mitang save the young and beautiful Madeleine d’Evires from the clutches of the evil hypnotist Godfroy de Montluc. It states that the Nyctalope has his own car, adequate supplies of gasoline and all the necessary SPs and Ausweis (legal documents issued by the Vichy regime and the German occupation forces) enabling him to move at will between Occupied and Free France, as well as several other occupied countries of Europe. Further, it mentions that Leo is a regular guest at various social functions. Overall, he does not seem bothered in the least by the Nazi occupiers.
In 1954, two years before La Hire’s death, his son-in-law began to reprint a number of his works, including some of the Nyctalope’s novels in truncated and updated editions. The Mystery of XV, for example, was retitled The Secret of the XII (!) and the Nyctalope was taken out of the story entirely and replaced by the fictional “Hugues Cendras.” This new imprint, however, included two heretofore unpublished adventures.
La Sorcière Nue [The Naked Sorceress] was released in 1954. The book takes place in the Languedoc region in mid-1946 and references Maquis battles that occurred there in 1943 and 1944. In it, Alouh T’Ho, despite her solemn promise never to return to France, is back and is again up to her old tricks. She is now calling herself Aya-Li, but it is the same Alouh T’Ho. Her first encounter with Leo in Lyon 15 years before is clearly referenced. Interestingly, there is a mention of a second, unrecorded battle between her and the Nyctalope that would have taken place in Fez in Morocco, although no year is given. This time, Leo’s victory is complete and Alouh T’Ho/Aya-Li dies. The Nyctalope is again assisted by Vitto and Soca, but Gnô Mitang is gone. Leo, who seems older and wiser, falls in love with young Dinah Ranson but realizes that their age difference (despite his seeming agelessness) is too great a chasm to be bridged easily.
One cannot help but feel that La Sorcière Nue was written prior to or during World War II and the date of 1946 and the topical references inserted by La Hire’s son-in-law to make the book seem a little more relevant. Since we will never know the truth, we have chosen to take the dates at face value.
L’Enigme du Squelette [The Enigma of the Skeleton] was published in 1955. The book opens when the Nyctalope’s friend, Monsieur de Barange, is killed by a mysterious death ray that disintegrates the man’s flesh, leaving only a skeleton behind. Leo and Gnô Mitang investigate and eventually expose the murderers, the beautiful Maya de la Cruz and her manipulative father, the Count Albert de la Cruz-Tanguy. The action starts on Tuesday, June 15, which means that the story can only have taken place in 1937 or 1941. Because of the lack of topical references to the Occupation, the earlier date seems more appropriate.
One should not leave out the short-story “Marguerite,” written by the undersigned and published in Tales of the Shadowmen 2 in 2006. It is an anecdote that takes place in early 1942 when Leo, despite his collaboration with the infamous Milice, lets his sense of kindness and honor take over.
This is the story and the strange fate of the oldest French superhero of all. While Leo Saint-Clair the Nyctalope had many heroic qualities, he was also chauvinistic, sexist and racist, like many men of his times, social class and background. He claimed to respect women, but was a serial philanderer. He was all too often patronizing in his relations with non-white or non-western people–although his most trusted friend was Japanese. His undisputed devotion was to an ideal of France and its Colonial Empire that flourished before
World War I and was slipping away by the early 1940s. The pursuit of that ideal led him, in the end, to a compromise that many other Frenchmen, including his biographer, embraced and from which he emerged not unscathed.
Superheroes, more than most characters, are symbols; they embody the virtues and vices of a people and of an epoch. Just as Steve Rogers, Captain America, is the incarnation of the Stars and Stripes, Leo Saint-Clair the Nyctalope stood for the ideals of Colonial France between two world wars. He vanished at the same time as France’s Empire–deservedly so.
Jean-Marc Lofficier
Timeline
1877 (May 7) – Birth of Leon (Leo) Saint-Clair from Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair and his (otherwise unidentified) wife.
1885 (February-May) – L’Homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau. Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair serves as ensign in the French navy under Louis de Ciserat. Oxus and Fulbert use the water-breathing Hictaner to try to take over the world but are defeated by the Hictaner’s father, Charles Severac. The Hictaner marries Oxus’ daughter, Moisette.
1890? – A tornado kills the Hictaner and Moisette; Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair adopts their only daughter, Christiane. Leo is captain of his rugby team at school.
1892 – Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair is transferred to the diplomatic service and he and his family move to Russia.
1895? – Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair returns to France with his family. Leo takes his baccalauréat and studies science at the university.
1897 – L’Assassinat du Nyctalope. Sadi Khan shoots Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair, who becomes paralyzed. Leo gains his powers and an artificial heart after being shot, tortured and murdered by Communists in Lausanne. His first love, Aurora, betrays him, then commits suicide.
1900 – Death of Jean-Pierre Saint-Clair.
1901-10 – Unrecorded adventures in Central Africa and Tibet.
1905? – Leo has an affair with German spy Wanda Stielman.
1909? – Leo frees the King of Spain kidnapped by terrorists.
1910 (September-November) – Le Mystère des XV. Leo goes to Mars, takes over Oxus’ group of XV and makes peace with the Martians. He marries Xavière de Ciserat. Christiane Saint-Clair also gets married.
1912? – Death of Xavière in childbirth. Birth of Pierre (I). Leo travels to Morocco to subdue rebel tribes.
1913 (June-July) – La Croisière du Nyctalope. In Russia, Leo prevents Wanda Stielman from stealing Princess Irena Zahidof’s fortune. He would marry Irena but she dies in July.
1913? – Leo then goes on to fight a trio of villainous masterminds in China.
1914 (July)-1918 (November) – World War I. Leo earns the rank of Colonel in the French Army. He first meets Mathias Lumen and Leonid Zattan.
1919 – Leo meets singer Laurence Païli on the French Riviera. Leo’s mother dies from pneumonia.
1920 – Leo explores the Sudan.
1921 (May-June) – Lucifer. Leo and Raymond de Ciserat defeat Baron Glô von Warteck of Schwarzrock. Leo marries Laurence Païli.
1922 (June-September) – Le Roi de la Nuit. Leo travels to unknown planet Rhea and settles a war between daysiders and nightsiders. He has an affair with Véronique d’Olbans.
1923 – Leo explores Central Africa.
1924 (April) – L’Amazone du Mont Everest. Leo and Jean de Ciserat discover a hidden civilization of Amazons in Tibet. Leo returns with their Queen Mizzeia Khali.
1925? – Laurence, who had three sons with Leo, divorces him and gets custody of the children. Leo goes to Madrid where he poses as Pedro del Campo.
1926 (March-April) – La Captive du Démon. Leo battles Leonid Zattan, Prince of Issyk-Koul. Diana Ivanovna Krasnoview kills Mathias Lumen. Leo meets Gnô Mitang and Sylvie Mac Dhul, whom he marries. If Leo fulfills the terms of the Nostradamus Prophecy, he will prevent the coming of the Antichrist.
1927 (May-June) – Titania. Leo and Sylvie have a son, Pierre (II), who is kidnapped by Diana, now allied to evil engineer Korridès. Diana is killed by a gypsy girl; Korridès commits suicide.
1928 (June) – Belzebuth. Hughes Mézarek, the son of Korridès and Diana, kidnaps Sylvie and Pierre (II) and takes them through suspended animation to the year 2100. Leo and Gnô Mitang follow and defeat him.
1929? – Death of Pierre (II). Failure of the Prophecy.
1931 (March-April) – Gorillard. Leo and Gnô Mitang fight Dominique de Soto, who uses the Seven Living Buddhas’ powers to threaten the West. Creation of the C.I.D. financed by Sylvie (to avenge Pierre’s death?).
1931 (June-August) – Les Mystères de Lyon. Leo and Gnô Mitang fight the Chinese Empress Alouh T’Ho, leader of the Blood Worshippers, headquartered in Lyons. She is eventually driven back to China. Pierre (I) is 19 and studying in Germany.
1932? – Leo divorces Sylvie.
1934 – Le Sphinx du Maroc. Leo stops a rebellion in French Morocco and defeats Helen Parsons, a.k.a. The Djinn.
1935? – Leo fights Alouh T’Ho in Fez and drives her out of Morocco.
1937 (June) – L’Enigme du Squelette. Leo and Gnô Mitang solve a murder committed with a flesh-dissolving ray.
1939 (January) – Le Mystère de la Croix du Sang. Leo defeats Armand Logreux d’Albury.
1939 (September 17) – Hitler invades Poland. Start of World War II.
1940 (June) – L’Enfant Perdu. Leo and Gnô Mitang during the Exodus.
1941 (January) – Rien qu’une Nuit. Leo and Gnô Mitang save a young girl from the clutches of an evil hypnotist.
1942 (January) – “Marguerite” (by Jean-Marc Lofficier). Leo rescues a French Resistant from the Milice.
1946 (May-June) – La Sorcière Nue. Last battle between Leo and Alouh T’Ho, who now calls herself Aya-Li; Alouh T’Ho dies.
Notes
0 In order to maintain the continuity of the series, we have chosen to use the name “Leo Saint-Clair” throughout the book (note from the publisher).
1 Guiana was the name of the British colony on the northern coast of South America, now the independent nation of Guyana. The area was originally settled by the Dutch as the colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. These three colonies were captured by the British in 1796, officially ceded to the United Kingdom in 1814, and consolidated into a single colony in 1831. The colony's capital was at Georgetown (known as Stabroek prior to 1812). Guyana went on to become independent of the United Kingdom on May 26, 1966.
2 The conquest of the North Pole is traditionally credited to Anglo-American Navy engineer Robert Edwin Peary, who claimed to have reached the Pole on April 6, 1909, accompanied by African-American Matthew Henson and four Inuit men named Ootah, Seeglo, Egigingwah, and Ooqueah. However, Peary's claim remains controversial.
3 Because La Hire is writing in French, Saint-Clair translates Uberalles as Par-dessus tout rather than Above All, but as the author continues to use Uberalles in the text, there is no reason not to use the English translation here.
4 Major Frederick George Jackson (1860-1938) of the East Surrey Regiment undertook an expedition, usually referred to as the Jackson/Harmsworth Expedition, which established a base on Cape Flora in 1894 called Elmwood, where Jackson and his company played host to Nansen and his companion. The base could not be maintained after 1897, however, because no one could be found to sponsor it. Several of the expedition’s members–including Albert Armitage and Doctor Koetlitz from La Hire’s list–subsequently joined Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic, while Jackson went exploring in Africa (although he took a four year break to fight in the Great War, which he survived). La Hire obviously has a reference copy of one of the two books Jackson wrote about the expedition, and the Nyctalope is evidently modeled on men of that stripe.
5 Paul Decauville (1846-1922) was the great pioneer of light railways that could be easily erected, dismantled and transported; thousands of miles of Decauville track were built during the Great War, playing a key role in the logistics of the conflict.
6 Again Le Hire repeats his rather improbable insistence
that the Wartecks have imported Mongol blood into their “race.” Emile Zola, whose manifesto for literary Naturalism represented it as a quasi-scientific activity, devoted his long series Les Rougons-Macquarts to an ostensible analysis of the phenomena of human heredity, largely based on the investigations of Prosper Lucas’s Traité de l’hérédité naturelle (1847-50), with particular relevance to the preservation of “atavistic” bestial traits in the eponymous dysfunctional family. This analysis reached its climax in La bête humaine (1890), in which technological progress is confounded and compromised by physiological fatalities, and the final novel of the sequence, Le Docteur Pascal (1893), whose protagonist, Rougon Pascal, passes judgment on his family in the context of his 30-year study of the phenomena of heredity.
7 The French title of this chapter is La Pieuvre; I have translated it literally, but the reader ought to bear in mind that the word is also applied metaphorically to human beings, in which context it signifies something like “blood-sucker.”
8 This kind of confusion between rumors of giant squids and the actuality of humble and inoffensive octopodes was, of course, not merely routine but virtually compulsory in marine melodramas of the period.
9 The Austrian physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) went to the USA in 1884, where he became Thomas Alva Edison’s great rival as an electrical inventor, eventually selling his key patents to George Westinghouse in order to finance his research. Although his system of alternating current generation eventually displaced Edison’s direct current generators, his more grandiose ambitions–especially the broadcasting of electrical power–bore little practical fruit.
10 The German physicist Heinrich Ruhmkorff (1803-1877) was the inventor of the induction coil.