The Mirror of Present Events

by Brian Stableford

  12 Author’s note: “The knowledge of that difference of days when one might go to ask for justice was, for a time, a mysterious science, in which the Pontiffs, or ‘makers of bridges,’ makers of religions, had rendered themselves the master, and which they kept carefully hidden in order to appear necessary and oblige litigants to have recourse to them. Learned citizens ended up making fun of that charlatanism.” The untranslatable wordplay derives from the fact that pont is French for bridge.

  13 Nobility gives way to love; the quotation comes from Ovid’s Epistles.

  14 Author’s note: “This attention on the part of Cornelius was great; it does not, however, offer anything so extraordinary as to expose it to criticism. It is well-known that the Vestals walked preceded by a Lictor when they appeared in public. Agalonice also had her treasure to guard.”

  15 The term Mymecide is featured in Guillaume de Saluste du Bartras’ dictionary of arcane words, where it is defined in the 1641 English translation as “a cunning and curious carver in small works.” The etymology invented by Julia Douthwaite in her misleading account of Nogaret’s story is wrong.

  16 The particular freshwater polyp that Cornelius has in mind is presumably a hydra.

  17 Author’s note: “The solution will be found in the last chapter.”

  18 Author’s note: “Théraois-téréos-clouni-ca-law-bar-cochébas is equivalent to false prophet, speculator, pickpocket, etc., etc.” The Greek tereo can mean “observer”; Bar-Cochebas is a Latinized form of the name of Simon bar Kokhba, the leader of a Judean revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 A.D.

  19 Author’s note: “A Sicilian spring that runs through Ortygia, the quarter of Syracuse in which Cornelius was lodged.” It was named after the nymph Arethusa, the object of the lust of the river god Alpheus.

  20 Author’s note: “Hyeron II. The historians who have mentioned that King, an honest man, have all praised his good taste for the science and his love for the public good. ‘My subjects,’ he said, ‘are my children and the State is my family.’ Remarkable words! He was mourned like a father. Time has not damaged his reputation.” Hiero II ruled Syracuse from 270-215 B.C. His grandson Hieronymus, who took the throne after his death, was only fifteen at the time, and an instrument in a power-struggle between his two uncles, so the blackening of his name by historians might be a trifle unjust.

  21 Author’s note: “Praetors of the Senate of Syracuse, in the fashion of the Carthaginians.” The two were brothers educated in Carthage, who held off Marcellus’ siege of Syracuse for some time before the Carthaginian fleet sent to relieve the siege turned back and left the city to its fate.

  22 Denis is the French form of the name of the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius I (432-367 B.C.)

  23 Author’s note: “Sicily, in becoming a Roman province, conserved its ancient rights and customs. The Sicilians were not treated like the Spaniards and Carthaginians, on whom the Romans imposed a tribute as the price of victory. Quasi victoriae praemium ac poena belli. Let us say everything, for the best things only last for a time. So long as Rome was only dominant in Italy, the people were governed as confederates; the laws of each republic were followed; and Sicily, which added a great deal to the strength of Rome, of which it was the storehouse and granary, was to enjoy that privilege for a long time. As Montesquieu says, however; ‘Afterwards, that liberty, so vaunted, only existed at the center, and tyranny at the extremities.’” The quotation, from Cicero, translates loosely as “as if it were a reward for victory and a penalty of defeat.”

  24 Author’s note: “Lycaon etc. In Latin, lupus crudelis, praestantissimus; in French, cruel and powerful beast. The whole is abridged.” Lycaon was a king of Arcadia who unwisely put the omniscience of Zeus to the test and was transformed into a wolf

  25 Not the Athenian Polemarchus featured in Plato but a Spartan mentioned by Pausanias, although the word was a title rather than a name and thus appears somewhat promiscuously in Greek writings.

  26 Author’s note: “This horrible abuse has not yet been abolished; however, it is on a par with those of the chapter of Saint Claude.” The chapter of St. Claude in the Jura was the object of a rebellion by the bondsmen of six parishes in 1770 and again in 1789.

  27 Author’s note: “A learned Benedictine has rendered this probable. He is said to have read in an old manuscript that in the time of Ptolemy usage had been made of those optical substances by means of which hazard has since procured us the advantage of adapting lenses for approach magnification. I do not know why the quibbler L. Dutens casts doubt on the statement of that monk.” The reference is to Louis Dutens (1730-1812), who published his Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes [Research on the Origins of Discoveries Attributed to the Moderns] in 1766; his skepticism was justified, as Nogaret undoubtedly knew.

  28 Author’s note: “As the isle of Ortygia was surrounded by two good ports, and also had a citadel, that part of the city became very important, and was reserved for the Praetor alone.”

  29 Author’s note: “Although this is only a historiette—which is to say, a mixture of fiction and truth, I am not so very far from the truth, from the history that serves as my basis. After the capture of Syracuse by Marcellus, there really were residual wars on the part of the partisans of tyranny, and it is also true that those wars had no consequences.”

  30 Author’s note: “The tyrant who caused Syracuse to lose the liberty rendered to it by Timoleon.”

  31 The phrase Autant en emporte le vent [As the wind transports] subsequently became the French translation of the title of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind and the film based thereon. Nogaret doubtless derived it, as Mitchell did, from Isaiah 64:6: “our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” The “us” to which the Biblical verse refers are sinners.

  32 Cycnus of Liguria, who killed himself after Phaeton’s fall, was probably his lover, so “relative” is euphemistic.

  33 Author’s note: “Swans have been successfully employed for this purpose, it is said, by the Emperor Ki three thousand years before the Montgolfiers. See the Memoirs on the present state of China by Père le Comte, letter VI. A celebrated writer of our days believed it very sincerely, and I do too.” The “celebrated writer” is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who commented at length in Études de la nature (1784) on Louis Le Comte’s account in Nouveau mémoire sur l’état present de la Chine (1696), although he pointed out that other sources attributed the tale to the Emperor Tam, who reigned two thousand years after the (mythical) Kieu, or Ki.

  The version of the story in L’Antipode de Marmontel adds a supplement to this note: “The Marquis de Vargas Machuca, it is said in a Naples gazette, possesses a manuscript printed in Bergamo in 1670 containing a long treatise on a “flying ship,” which, with the aid of four copper balls, rose up to a certain height. The author explains the construction of those balls, and how the vessel can be steered with sails and oars. Another Italian writer, Bouilly, wrote the above in 1679, closely approaching Montgolfier’s idea. He thought of enabling us to swim in the air, as fish do in water ‘with the aid of a bladder that will be filled with a fluid lighter than the atmospheric air.’” The first reference is to a hypothetical design for a flying ship published by Francesco Lana de Terzi. The subsequent reference to an Italian document of 1679 is enigmatic, and Bouilly is not an Italian name, although by 1800 Nogaret would have been familiar with the French writer and Revolutionary Jean-Nicolas Bouilly.

  34 Livy claims that Marcellus referred to Archimedes as a “geometrical Briareus” while complimenting him (posthumously) on his contributions to the defense of Syracuse, Briareus being a mythical giant with fifty heads and a hundred arms.

  35 Author’s note: “This beacon, which I place at the entrance to the port of Trogile, and of which there is no other question in history, since there is only mention there of a tower, was probably constructed from the produce of the bronze statues that Timoleon had ignominiously cast down from their pedestals an
d sold at auction, after having put the tyrants figured therein on trial.

  “Let us say in passing of that illustrious avenger of liberty that he had it published to the sound of trumpets that those who wanted to come with tools had only to set to work to demolish the fortress, and had tribunals erected in their place, in order that the ramparts would never be divined of the very prisons where the citizens had lost their liberty. Let us say that in that epoch he made tyranny and tyrants disappear not only in Syracuse but throughout Sicily, and that, far from having the pride to want to rule alone thereafter, he also forbade himself the insatiable thirst for riches and the perpetuity of honors. Syracuse became his fatherland. He spent the rest of his life as a simple individual, savoring the satisfaction of seeing so many cities and so many thousands of people owe the repose and felicity they enjoyed to him. So he was always respected, and consulted like an oracle. Plutarch even said that ‘when he was old, the Syracusans introduced him into their assemblies mounted on his chariot, always as if in triumph and always to the sound of universal acclamations.’

  “Frenchmen, you know in your hearts what passed in the soul of Timoleon. It is him who, sometimes at the tribune and sometimes on the battlefield, repeats to you incessantly: Age, in manibus vestries libertatem, opem, spem futur temporis geritis.” The quotation is improvised from a passage in Quintus Curtius’ life of Alexander; the key section translates as “in your hands you now carry freedom, power and hope for the future.”

  36 Author’s note: “‘It is doubtless the right owed to the Almighty of Egypt that gave birth in Europe to the rights of intercourse that did not diminish a young woman in public opinion.’ The serfs became freedmen and all of that was abolished in France. ‘In our day, however, the merchants of Negroes still enjoy the rights of the Almighty, and a young negress is presumed to be virginal in the eyes of the black man who receives her as a wife.’ [Recherches du tribun.] Dion Cassius reports that senators opined in full Senate that Augustus had the right, at fifty-seven years of age, to lie with all the women that he wished. Montesquieu does not doubt that; Voltaire, less credulous, observes that Augustus could easily do that without authorization, but that the likes of Marcus Aurelius and the Julians dispensed with it.” The internal reference is unclear, and I have not been able to trace it.

  This is the last footnote to appear in the version of the story included in L’Antipode de Martmontel except for the misleading reference to Études de la nature (see note 36). All of the final diatribe, and the reprinted article on “massacres” are eliminated, having been deprived of their intended force in the intervening ten years.

  37 The Iarles are featured as contemporaries of the druids in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s romance L’Arcadie (1781), which is set in a mythical ancient Gaul, from which the allegorical elements of this anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic tirade are taken.

  38 Author’s reference: “Études de la Nature.” L’Arcadie was reprinted in some editions of the later work, hence this slightly misleading reference.

  39 Author’s note: “Pax vobiscum omnibus, etc., said Jesus Christ to his apostles. If peace does not reign among men, they are in consequence worse than ferocious beasts. Let us love our brothers whatever their religion is. If they are mistaken, so much the worse for them. All would have been lost if we had decreed that the Catholic religion would be the exclusive religion among us. ‘The religion of the reformed,’ said Mably, ‘is no less appropriate than that of Catholics for making citizens useful and virtuous. Both have the right to enjoy the same advantages. It is only by that conduct that the Germans succeeded in destroying fanaticism and affirming public tranquility in their homeland…. Tribunals composed of judges chosen from the two religions are sufficient there to repress certain abuses, and each party has protectors powerful enough to defend its rights and its liberty…. It would have been almost the same in France if the Estates-General, instead of being destroyed by the predecessors of Henri IV, had been solidly enough established to become a habitual and necessary mechanism of government. The closer they would have approached perfection, the more probable it is that the French would have ceased to tear themselves apart in civil wars that shed so much blood. It is natural that the people have more confidence in those assemblies, which are necessarily national maxims, than the counselors of a prince, who usually only consults shifting conveniences whose resolutions are too often the work of intrigue and mainly serve interests contrary to those of the public.’

  Let us not lose sight of the useful comparisons drawn by another philosopher of this century; comparisons that prove without exaggeration that nine million seven hundred and eighteen thousand and eight hundred people have been butchered, drowned, burned or broken on the wheel ‘for the love of God.’ Read the article on ‘Massacres’ in the Encyclopedia. But I blush at my sloth. Why do I not take the trouble to make a copy of that depiction? Let us render a service to humanity. Let us take from the archives of philosophy a document more important than the Red Book. Learned reader, you know it, but the people do not know it, and it is them that it is necessary to enlighten. The man of the people that one hires and arms himself with a pike or a rifle for a loaf of bread, does not have the means to buy sixty volumes in order to read the twenty lines that would render him milder than two hundred sermons. Tear out of my book these useful pages, and give them to him; they ought not to cost him anything. Thus, you and I will have done well.”

  The remainder of this footnote—which appears in the original text as an endnote—reproduces the said article on “Massacres.” I have removed it to an appendix in order not to disrupt the main text too greatly.

  40 “We are slaves of the law in order that we might be free.” (Cicero)

  41 An epiroge was a kind of cloak listed in many treatises on the French peerage as part of the ceremonial garb of the Greffier en Chef.

  42 At this point the text of the 1800 version deviates from the 1790 version, dropping all the text between this point and the paragraph in which Aglaonice and Bazilide express their indignation.

  43 Another name derived from L’Arcadie.

  44 The 1800 version of the text ends here.

  45 The revolutionary Nicolas Bergasse is here likened by Nogaret to the Greek Erostratus, who set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus in order that his name would become immortal in history. The Ephesians banned its pronunciation, but (evidently) failed to prevent the achievement of the ambition.

  46 John Trenchard, in Cato’s Letters; or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious (1724). The adaptation for the Encyclopédie was done by Voltaire; hence Nogaret’s final comment.

  47 Author’s note: “Let us not forget that they were in part exterminated by dogs, to which pensions were awarded from the public treasury. Let us not forget that the Spaniard converters who had Kings burned on small fires under the pretext of the salvation of their souls, were only thinking of despoiling them of their wealth.”

  48 Author’s note: “Oi. The Arians wanted to say, in speaking of the Word, om-oi-oufios: “of a substance similar to that of the father.” The Christians claimed that it was necessary to say omooufios, “of the same substance” and they staked their heads on it.

  49 This adjective is improvised from the name of the notional author of Jean-Baptiste de Junquières’ Epître du père Gribourdon, date de l’Enfer à l’auteur de la Pucelle (1756), a satirical attack on Voltaire. L’archonte éponyme [Eponymous Archonte] was the supreme magistrate in ancient Athens; the Bishop of Ypres was Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), the founder of Jansenism.

  50 An oxydizing liquid whose active component was sodium hypochlorite, used as a disinfectant and bleach.

  51 Georges Ohnet (1848-918) was a prolific novelist reputed to be an expert judge of popular taste. Paulus was the stage-name of the singer Jean Paul Habans (1845-1908), a star of the café concert circuit.

  52 Jacques Damala was the stage-name of Aristide Damalas (1855-1889), who married Sarah Bernhardt in 1881; he was an utter swine,
and no one else could understand why she was briefly infatuated with him; the spouses soon separated but never divorced.

  53 Paul-Jean Rigollot (1810-1873) was the pharmacist who invented “Rigollot paper,” a poultice made from black mustard, intended to facilitate breathing during respiratory distress.

  54 In France, yellow, rather than green, is the color emblematic of jealousy.

  55 Peau-de-Balle has more than one colloquial meaning, the most innocent of which refers to the husk of a grain, and hence, metaphorically, to the uninteresting exterior of any precious or useful content. In one specialized instance of that formula, deriving from the fact that balle can mean testicle, the expression refers to the scrotum.

  56 Were he able to speak French correctly, Joe would have said fumoir [smoking room]; a fumier is a dung-heap.

  57 In fact, it was Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804) who constructed the chess-playing automaton known as the Turk in 1770, which was subsequently exhibited by Johann Mälzel before bring exposed as a hoax. Edgar Poe wrote a story based on it after the machine was purchased by his doctor, explaining how the hoax was contrived.

  58 Paul Deschanel (1855-1922) was a prominent right-wing French statesman, very prominent in the Chambre at the time the story was written; La Fouchardière was not to know that he would go on to be elected President of the Republic and then forced to resign on mental health grounds. Georges Dufayel (1855-1916) was a retailer who popularized and vastly expanded the practice of selling goods on credit with the aid of installment plans; his vast department store was one of the landmarks of Paris when the story was written.