The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  The scientific conference discovered nothing therein, in sum, that surpassed in an abnormal and disquieting manner the habitual hypothetical divagations of the philosophers of the day. They even judged that the author of The Supreme Progress gave evidence of a noble solicitude with regard to his contemporaries in advising them as soon as possible of the purely ethereal situation that the extreme future had in store for them.

  The gentleman reporter emphasized, nevertheless, the gravity of a certain observation of which he had made a particular note. It was the matter of the example that the Thinker was considering offering to his contemporaries by effectuating as soon as possible his assumption to the enviable fluidity.

  The learned assembly judged this pretension to be too subversive, at least in the present state of our mores, which only tolerate assumptionist operations in religious intimacy, and it was deemed that the tonic quality of a few hydrotherapeutic refreshments would combat these tendencies to evaporation in an opportune manner—on which note the Director rang his bell to summon the attendants and ordered the inflexible distribution of a number of irremissibly icy showers. Unfortunately, however, it was too late to take measures of urgent prophylaxis.

  The Institution suddenly resounded with tragic murmurs. Employees surged forth, pale and trembling. The Thinker, they said, had taken advantage of a momentary negligence on the part of the watchers. Taking his wife with him, he had just precipitated their physical and moral duality into the Sanitary Establishment’s enormous gas-generator. After a few seconds, the cremation had been, according to all appearances, complete. The unfortunate household had been transformed, several hundred billion centuries too soon, into the indescribable essential breath that, once the time in question has elapsed, will become the ultimate contexture of anthropomorphism.

  As soon as he heard this, one of the most distinguished members of the Council—the gentleman visitor himself, moving so rapidly as to fuse the black of his frock-coat and the white of his cravat into a single shade—lit the nearest candelabrum, in order to assess the value of the human gas, in terms of its output of light.

  Notes

  1 Two collection of Villiers’ genre stories, The Scaffold (ISBN 9781932983012) and The Vampire Soul (ISBN 9781932983029) are available from Black Coat Press.

  2 Available in a Black Coat Press edition (ISBN 9781935543887).

  3 Pawlowski’s Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension is available in a Black Coat Press edition (ISBN 9781935543375).

  4 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System in two volumes (ISBN 9781935543818 and 9781935543825).

  5 Both available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Vampires of Mars (ISBN 9781934543306).

  6 Captain Danrit’s Undersea Odyssey is available in a Black Coat Press edition (ISBN 9781935558811).

  7 Purpurin is an orange-red dye obtained from madder root.

  8 The names cited are those of three significant pioneers of meteorology: Luke Howard (1772-1864), Gustav Schübler (1787-1834) and Ludwig Friedrich Kamtz (1801-1867).

  9 Standing desks with adjustable legs known as “tables à la tronchin” were first developed in the early 1800s; it is not entirely clear whether the Tronchin for whom the desks were named was the encyclopedist of that name who was acquainted, albeit somewhat turbulently, with Voltaire and Diderot.

  10 This description of “mouth-to-mouth resuscitation” was far ahead of its time. Standard practice at the time in dealing with victims pulled from water who had stopped breathing involved supplementing the warming of the body coupled with various usually-futile manipulations such as body-rolling and tongue-pulling. It was not until the 1950s that the method here recommended by Sardou became popular.

  11 In French, la foudre [lightning] is a feminine noun.

  12 The famous “somnambule” Alexis Didier (1826-1886), usually known by his first name alone, and his “magnetizer” Jean-Bon Marcillet, were a famous double act between 1842 and 1855, performing at séances all over Europe; they once had a famous confrontation with the great stage magician Robert-Houdin, who attempted to expose them as frauds.

  13 Actually, this Latin assertion regarding the insensibility of plants was initially associated with Pope Gregory the Great.

  14 The Venus fly-trap.

  15 Giovani Borelli (1608-1679), better known as the “father of biomechanics” (the study of animal movement), was the first microscopist to study the opening and closing of plant stomata. Sébastien Vaillant (1669-1722) worked for many years at the Jardin des Plantes, and published a notable discourse on flowers in 1718. Jean de Gorter (1689-1762), a follower of Herman Boerhaave, actually contended, along with the British anatomist Francis Glisson, that there was a vital force operating in both animals and plants independently of the soul and nervous system, which was responsible for movement.

  16 Jean Lups (1667-1732) was actually a Dutch arms dealer who supplied weapons to Russia, but he was named as “Jean Lups of Moscow” in a history of medicine published in 1815; the reference in question was slavishly copied by several other 19th-century reference books, one of which Saintine must have seen. The “Comte del Covolo”, however, seems to have only one significant mention, in Gall and Spurzheim’s monumental work on the anatomy of the brain (1810-19), which founded the science of phrenology.

  17 Charles Bonnet (1720-1793) published a book in 1754 which did indeed credit plants with sensibility and powers of discernment. Michel Adanson (1727-1806) was not an Englishman but a Frenchman of Scottish descent who produced a system of classification markedly different from that of Linnaeus, which lost out in competition with the latter.

  18 René Desfontaines (1750-1833) worked at the Jardin des Plantes before becoming director of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle. He was one of the founders of the Institut, parent of the Académie des Sciences.

  19 Moxa (mugwort) was and is extensively used in connection with acupuncture to warm the skin before insertion of the needles.

  20 De l’âme des plantes, de leur naissance, de leur nourriture et de leur progrez [sic] (1682) is signed “N. Dedu [sic], docteur en medicine de la Faculté de Montpellier”, hence the narrator’s slightly dismissive remark. Dedu must have been a botanist of some reputation, however, because he also co-authored a book on plant anatomy with the much more famous Nehemiah Grew and Robert Boyle in 1685. Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) were among the rationalist philosophers who pioneered the Enlightenment.

  21 This name produces no relevant hits on Google and no name bearing any similarity to it appears in any readily-available list of Shinto deities.

  22 Silphium was in such great demand in the ancient world that it was driven to extinction, perhaps due to overgrazing by cattle to whose meat it was supposed to impart a special virtue. It is generally thought to have been a kind of giant fennel.

  23 The best-known member of the genus Persea is the avocado.

  24 It is not obvious which species of flowering cactus is cited here.

  25 Aristolochia is the birthwort genus; Gustavia superba is also known as the Heaven lotus; Victoria regia (or regina) was the name originally given by John Lindley in 1837 to the water lily nowadays known as Victoria amazonica; Nelumbium speciosum is the “sacred lotus.”

  26 Tigridia pavonia is the most commonly-cultivated species of “tiger flower;” Strelizias are sometimes known as “bird-of-paradise flowers.”

  27 “Balsamines” was one of the common names given to flowers of the genus Impatiens, also known as jewelweeds and touch-me-nots. The one most familiar in Britain is the Busy Lizzie.

  28 The first stanza of the famous Latin poem that begins with this line, from which Saintine presumably derived the inspiration for this story, may be roughly translated as: “Pale, wandering little soul/Guest and companion of my body/Where are you going now/Pallid, rigid and naked/Forsaking the jokes we used to share…?”

  29 Bernard Carcel pa
tented a new kind of oil lamp in 1800, which used a clockwork-driven pump to bring oil to the wick.

  30 The crushing defeat of the Austrian army at Solferino, ten days after Prussia had belatedly mobilized against France in support of the Austrians, was the military high point of the Second Empire; Saintine could not know, when he wrote the story, that the vital stimulus it provided to the unification of Germany under Prussian domination would pave the way for the revenge of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which smashed and humiliated the Empire in question. Love, of course, often has similar eventual results on an individual level.

  31 The lymphatic temperament, associated with one of the four humors of ancient medicine, is better known as the sanguine; it is associated with sociability and compassion, among other traits.

  32 I have translated “aux oignons d’Égypte” literally, although the phrase in question (from Exodus 16:3) only appears in French Bibles, not English ones. The Hebrews, while wandering in the desert with Moses, are said to have regretted leaving Egypt, where they had had enough to eat: the French version of the phrase was adopted metaphorically for reference to nostalgia. The King James version has “flesh pots” instead of onions, reflecting a marked cultural difference in patterns of regret.

  33 This anticipation of cinema—though not its holographic aspect—might have been inspired by a scientist Cros met at Camille Flammarion’s salon, Étienne-Jules Marey, who shared his interest in photographic technology; Marey developed a “chronophotographic gun” in 1882 for analyzing movement by means of multiple exposures, and might have mentioned the possibility to Cros some time before bringing the project to fruition.

  34 This was written five years before Cros submitted his design for such an apparatus to the Académie des Sciences. It is interesting that Cros subsequently refers to phonographies [phonographs] although he called his own apparatus a paléophone.

  35 What Frédéric Chopin and Alfred de Musset have in common is that they were the most famous lovers of George Sand, whose feverish romantic novels were thought to have had a considerable influence on the attitudes of young women; she wrote at least one acrostic encoding Musset’s name. The composer to whom Chopin refers is Louis-Henri Rosellen (1811-1876).

  36 You do not know all our dreams of fever

  Indomitable, in which the fie that burns our lip

  Renders life impossible in these mocking drawing-rooms.

  Thanks to your glances, however (I am drunk on them,

  Drunk on profound azure), I am returning to life,

  Naïve, loving the woods. If we were elsewhere,

  It would be necessary to forget honor, family, fatherland,

  And think that I am all of that, my dear.

  37 This appears to be a deliberate misspelling of the name of Étienne-Jules Marey, the pioneering cardiologist whom Cros met at Camille Flammarion’s salon, who also shared his interest in photographic technology.

  38 The humanist Churchman Jan Everaerts (1511-1536) wrote in Latin, signing himself Johannes Secundus, which became Jean Second in French. He was famous for the erotic content of his poetry, which was collected in French translation under the title Le Livre des Baisers.

  39 Jules Grévy was the President of the French Republic in March 1886, having not long begun his ill-fated second term (his resignation was forced in December 1887).

  40 I have had to be a trifle inexact in rendering the meaning of these lines, in order to preserve the rhyme-scheme, which seemed necessary in the interest of the parody—all the more so in the next sequence of improvised verse.

  41 Jacques Cujas (1520-1595) was a famous expert in Roman law; his most oft-quoted dictum was Nihil hoc ad edictum praetoris, whose approximate significance is “That is irrelevant from a legal viewpoint.”

  42 Cros inserts a footnote: “We cannot put any credence in the infamous slanders that have been put about regarding this region.”

  43 Early French anthropologists subdivided what the English called the Stone Age into three divisions: the era of pierre éclatée [chipped stone], the era of pierre taillée [carved stone] and the era of pierre polie [polished stone], although the first two were never clearly distinct and were eventually merged into the paléolithique [Paleolithic] while the third became the néolithique [Neolithic]. The chronological order of the two eras is reversed here, in the interests of euphemistic reference.

  44 Cros: “The phthwfg is equivalent to a length of 37,000 meters of iridium at seven degrees below zero.”

  45 This now-obsolete argot term combines two words, moule [mussel] and singe [monkey], that are both used abusively to signify something similar to the English “fathead;” it is relevant to note, however, that the fissure presumably resembles the narrow opening of a feeding mollusc, which is cited analogically in the slang of other languages, notably the Australian euphemism “spearing the bearded clam”.

  46 Cros: “This forename, common on the Planet, is an exact translation of ‘Alfred’.”

  47 Cros: “The original lunar text has ‘a fourth-floor landing’—an obvious typographical error.”

  48 The lias is a group of strata identified in Britain, extending from the late Triassic to the early Jurassic.

  49 This reference is enigmatic, although it might be a mangled version of the Krasnoselsky district of St. Petersburg. The museum in which the Mirosaurus would have been installed is presumably the Kuntzkamera.

  50 When this story was written, the terms “virus” and “bacillus” were considered interchangeable, no fundamental distinction yet being possible between different types of “microbe.”

  51 Kolbacks were the spiked helmets popularized by Prussian uhlans.

  52 Gambrinus was a legendary king of Medieval Flanders credited with the invention of brewing beer. His name is still preserved in the names of various brewing companies, but its origins and etymology remain murky.

  53 M. Brunel is not referring to practitioners of the occult art or religion known in English as spiritualism, who were more usually known in France as “spiritistes,” but to the philosophical opponents of materialism who had been designated by that term long before the Fox sisters and a host of other imitative “mediums” got up to their shenanigans in the mid-19th century.

  54 In the French version quoted by Mullem (“philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir”) this dictum is associated with Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais include an elaborate meditation on its implications. Montaigne credits it to the Roman orator Cicero, who did indeed formulate it as an axiom, but Cicero was himself reflecting on an argument allegedly put forward by Socrates, as quoted by Plato, regarding his puzzling insistence on meekly accepting the death sentence passed on him by the Athenian state.

  55 Mullem renders this phrase in English, playing on the well-known Anglo-American dictum that “Time is money.”

  56 This neologism, which I have transcribed directly into English, is derived from the same Latin root as “lethal” and means “death-producing.”

  57 As with much of the wordplay in this speech, this item does not quite translate into English; the phrase that I have transcribed directly carries two distinct meanings, dependent on whether one construes “cardiac affection” as “fondness” or “heart disease.” I have refrained from footnoting several similar instances, because it would become tedious; all I can do is inform the reader, regretfully, that the original version of this entire passage is a trifle wittier than its English equivalent.

  58 There is, alas, no English equivalent (so far as I know) of this arcane technical term, let alone one that preserves its essential pun. Its literal meaning is, of course, “let’s die.” In three-handed whist, one player has to be partnered by a “dummy” hand, so what the players are doing is switching round so that someone else has that dubious privilege.

  59 Given that English has found it necessary to import the phrase laissez faire [let be, or let alone] in the sphere of economics, for lack of an adequate expression of its own, it seemed appropriate to leave t
his entire phrase in the original; the nearest English equivalent, which does not have the same elegant dash, would be “let live and let die.”

  60 Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814).

  61 Mullem gives the name of this periodical in English, to confirm the various other clues he offers to the effect that the story is set in England. I have, however, refrained from altering the name of the doctor to the infinitely more plausible “Gibson.”

  62 Strictly speaking, autoplasty is the repair of lesions by means of tissue-grafts taken from elsewhere on the same body (the only sort of grafting that had been successfully exemplified in Mullem’s day); as will quickly be seen, however, Gipson’s supposed expertise lies in transplant surgery of far more extravagant kinds.

  63 There and then.

  64 Rudolph Virchhow (1821-1902) popularized the dictum Omnis cellula e cellula [every cell originates from another], which was actually coined by François Raspail, after adopting the dogma in 1858.

  65 Georges Ville claimed to have demonstrated this hypothesis experimentally in 1853; it had first been proposed much earlier, by Joseph Priestley among others. This sentence implies that the story was written in 1893 or thereabouts, which is consistent with the earlier implication that Virchow was still alive at the time of writing.

  66 This notion was popularized in France by Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907), who synthesized numerous hydrocarbons and anticipated a glorious future for such techniques in Chimie organique fondée sur la synthèse (1860). The idea crops up routinely in French scientific romance, having been anticipated prior to Berthelot’s popularization by Charles Nodier in a Utopian satire published in 1833 and translated as “perfectibility” in the Black Coat Press anthology The Germans on Venus.

  67 This interpolation makes little sense in English, where women can be describes as “thinkers” as easily as men—although custom does militate against it somewhat—but in French a female “penseur” would be a “penseuse;” Mullem is rightly pointing out that the language had never found much use for the latter term. That situation is, of course, no less regrettable nowadays than it was when Mullem made his observation, and Mullem—as readers of this story will soon observe—did absolutely nothing to oppose or alter it, despite his sarcasm.