Lamekis

by Charles de Fieux

  Although these benefits are great, they are nothing compared with what it can do for the fair sex. All women, no matter what their social status or virtue, whether they be young or old, married, widowed or virgins, are promised that if they read this Part of the book and what follows with a mind free of all prejudices on May 9 at three in the morning all their desires will come true before the end of the year. By reading this book, an ugly girl will become beautiful, a blonde will become a bedazzling brunette and a brunette will become a blinding blonde. It is impossible for me here to list all the goods that can come from a careful reading, but my guarantee is as positive and certain as it is true that the notes adorning this work are taken from our best authors and without them this work would be missing something essential. Can anything be more valuable? I will let the learned decide.

  Preface to Part 5

  Let’s be reasonable, dear reader. I’ve got you hooked and I’m delighted. In what spirit are you going to read my book? If you truly do me justice, I will be as happy as the Grand Turk. That’s because my goal has been to entertain you and I will surely entertain you, whatever your bias may be. The last four parts are not ridiculous, I have to admit, and that should be enough for you to like them. Between us I will confess that they please me immensely. But don’t say a word about it. They will spread it around that I am conceited and truthfully that is not true. Just know that here is one of my most sensible works. It is lively, interesting, nice, funny, critical and has all the seductive qualities of novelty. It is a well, an abyss of treasures. Hope, dear reader, with me that I live long enough to produce many more works like this and above all do not forget to give me the praise I well deserve. Do not stop publishing my talent, my grace and my inspired inventions. Do not let an ignorant, jealous gang say anything bitter against me without going unpunished for it. Like a new Don Quixote, defend me at the crossroads as the nicest, most entertaining author. And don’t forget to tell about all the good things I have done for you. My fertile imagination will find ways to be thankful. My heart is an ocean of gratitude—just dive in and you will be soaked in gratitude and generosity. To see me, to love me and to want to please me is really all the same thing. God knows it, as well as everyone who knows me. I am the wildest monk in Paris, I’ll brag, and there’s nothing to say.

  Since I am the most considerate of all men and the most thoughtful, I have worked this fifth part so that you, dear reader, will not forget too much from the previous ones due to the lapse of time. You are going to be comfortable and gobble up all the sweet pages I have prepared for you. You are so lucky. Everyone else should be jealous!

  I was going to say thank you here to a beautiful Dame who was kind enough to give a detailed portrait of me in her work called La Princesse Laponoise{*} where I am called Chevalier Frisquer. She depicted me with all my talents in a brilliant court. But I am waiting for the results and the role I must play in the second part of the same work, which I’ve been told about. Her brilliant and enchanting pen is going to spread gracefully the natural good qualities. I will make up my mind after reading the work so that my thanks will be equal to its praises and so that I in turn can do justice to her who so rightfully sang them. I am always infinitely grateful to those who want to show me as I am. I have so much to gain from being famous that I suffer with pleasure and without blushing when they say all the good things about me that I deserve. The only fear I have is that they will not say enough. My modesty (one of my strongest points) hides so many things that I am sometimes ashamed of giving it too much power. I lose too much from it, really, and that cannot be excused.

  Preface to Part 8

  I am too grateful to the kindness that the public has honored me with not to give them an exact account of the state of my productions. If it were only up to me, this would have been done long ago. Jealous as I am of my words, I have tried to do this.

  I printed the last four parts La Païanne and the last four parts of Lamekis in Holland and I am just now printing the next of Mentor à la mode and Mémoires posthumes and several other works. I hope that some of these writings will appear before the end of the year. I will, of course, neglect nothing in the future to make myself worthy of the kind affection with which my first works were received and I am not embarrassed to say that I owe it more to the public’s indulgence than to my own ability.

  It seems to me that the first maxim of an honest man is to be blameless and never hedge the truth.

  I will take this opportunity, if I may, to thank the German author who set and printed the first four parts of La Païanne, which came out in my name. They tell me it was in Herstal, a few leagues away from Liege. If he had had the kindness to warn me, I would have sent the outline of the work and I would have been the first to help him, if he thought me capable. I have a special respect for this nation and generally for all foreigners. I hope I don’t have to prove it on every occasion.

  Since I am putting this Preface in Lamekis, I naturally have to say something about this work as well. If I had not started out so seriously, I would have much good to say about it, but the serious entails the truth and it is a real bore for self-esteem. The best thing I can do for myself is to wait for the public’s opinion. If I were in its place, I would not pretend to say that either the author is crazy or he is very likely going to be soon. If this confession is not honorable, at least it is clever. There are many things they attribute to madness but it is a different story for those who call themselves reasonable and want to be so in spite of all common sense. We give them no quarter and truthfully we are right.

  Afterword

  At 650 pages and with numerous interwoven plots, Lamekis, ou Les Voyages extraordinaires d’un Égyptien dans la terre intérieure; avec la découverte de l’Île des Sylphides, by Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy, is a forgotten but rather unusual and even original novel. Set in the distant past, the characters move from ancient Egypt through a number of fantastic countries in a series of adventures reminiscent of Lucian’s True History or, more probably, Galland’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights (1704-17).

  The very complicated narrative follows very generally the adventures of Lamekis and consists of a number of different plots and subplots set in a mythical past, which may be reduced to five basic narratives. The novel begins with the title character’s father and his adventures as a high priest in Egypt. We are then introduced to the intertwined stories of two exiles from the neighboring North African kingdoms of Abdalles and Amphicleocles—Princess Nasildaë and Prince Motacoa—who have been banished to the underground world and who befriend Lamekis after the death of his parents.297 The third narrative follows Lamekis to the now joined kingdoms of Abdalles and Amphicleocles and tell of his terrible jealousy; while the fourth describes Lamekis’s exile, including his celestial voyage to the Island of the Sylphs. A fifth and concluding narrative relates his return to Abdalles and Amphicleocles. The novel also includes an account of its composition, beginning with a preface in which Mouhy explains that he was told this story by a mysterious Armenian.

  At the same time, there are a number of elements in Lamekis that destabilize traditional narrative by introducing imaginative and fantastic elements into the actual narration of the story. Halfway through the novel, there is a lengthy scene in which the author is visited by various characters from the novel, who now complain to him about his inaccuracies. They are followed by the philosopher Dehahal—a character from the Island of the Sylphs who had tried unsuccessfully to convince Lamekis to undergo a ritual of purification, and who again urges de Mouhy to undergo this same initiation. After he declines, the author awakes in his bed clutching a mysterious manuscript that defies all attempts at translation until, six months later, his pen—on its own—starts to translate the conclusion to Lamekis.

  In a more comic mode, there are also numerous depictions of strange and exotic customs that take the reader from the fantastic to a kind of delirium of textual play and vivid imaginings. As a manifestation of the ki
ng’s grandeur, for instance, no one is allowed to look at him, nor speak to him, nor even breathe in his presence. (This leads to a number of amusing and ridiculous situations, although the interdiction against breathing in the king’s presence is softened by the practice of putting a finger in one’s mouth.) Given these restrictions, communications are rather complicated, although various stratagems have been devised to deal with this situation. At one crucial moment, the king takes off his left shoe and hands it to the eldest of his councilors. This signifies that he is to be carried at once to the temple. There the king acknowledges the gravity of the situation by dropping a brass ball, which signals that his subjects are allowed to breathe and indeed to look at him. This is such an exceptional event that most of his subjects have never seen their king before; that opportunity comes once in a lifetime, when the king is installed. Moreover, the king is provided with a number of brass balls with specific instructions inscribed on them, which he throws to various ministers according to the situation.

  These examples are only a small sample of the ludicrous ceremonies in the novel, which seem to lack any purpose other than the exercise of the author’s imaginative abilities. These weird rituals and observances are certainly not a model of some better way of doing things (as such descriptions would be read in the utopian novel), and any satirical purpose is overwhelmed by the bizarre description. Other types of fantastic customs include ritual punishments (of which the most terrible is to be tickled to death by the priestesses) and outlandish royal games, such as the Bil-gou-router,298 in which the king and a chosen few lie with their heads in a circle into which a large rat is placed. The winner is decided when the rat hides in someone’s mouth.

  In terms of the frequent classification of Lamekis as an underground novel, three episodes in particular may explain Charles Georges Thomas Garnier’s original designation, although none of them goes beyond the depiction of caverns and subterranean temples. The first involves Lamekis’s father, the high priest of a secretive, monotheistic religion in Egypt. When the Queen demands to be initiated into its mysteries, he disguises her as a man, and they descend into a city hidden beneath the temple. But there is little description of this underground city, and this setting is quickly abandoned.

  The second underground setting is the most interesting, for its depiction of a race of giant and intelligent worm creatures. This is the story of Motacoa, who, in a ritual probably taken from Sinbad’s fourth voyage, is lowered with his mother into a bottomless pit and left for dead. Here, in an underground cave world, a number of adventures befall them as they battle various fantastic underground creatures.

  Finally, the third subterranean episode is similar to the first: in Paris, when the author begins to think of abandoning the novel, he is visited by a large black dog that one night leads him through the Paris catacombs to an underground temple; there on the walls, in a series of murals, is the story of Lamekis. Again, this does not really constitute a subterranean world.

  While Lamekis should not really be classified as a novel set in a subterranean world, the imagination that the author demonstrates goes beyond the fantastic inventions of any of his predecessors, and it merits inclusion here, even if it is only remotely connected to our concerns. Nonetheless, this is the most extreme case of mistakenly labeling a novel as subterranean. It probably happened when Garnier, wanting to include the novel in his 1789 collection Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques, because of its many fantastic elements, had to find a category in which to put it, and then chose the “Voyages to the Underground” section since it did not fit in anywhere else.

  Here is how Garnier describes this category in the introduction to volume 19 (actually the introduction to Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Underground Travels): “After having taken our readers to the seven planets and having traveled the Heavens with them, we are now going to take them into the bowels of the Earth where they will again be pleasantly surprised to discover a new world, as well as the kinds of beings who live there.”

  At the beginning of volume 20, Garnier introduces Lamekis as follows: “Again we are taking the reader to the inside of the Earth. But this is not a new world that we are visiting, but only the retreat of the wise, where the faithful devotees of Serapis, in order to celebrate the mysteries of their religion, sought to find a place hidden from prying eyes. Nonetheless extraordinary things happen in this secret part of our globe, and the fertile imagination of the author is given free rein in the various adventures which take place there.”

  Once this decision was made, later readers such as Camille Flammarion and Régis Messac simply continued to call it a subterranean work. In this case, however, because the novel has never been reprinted since its appearance in Garnier’s collection, it was not easily accessible, and later critics continued to repeat this description without really knowing what was in the novel.

  Peter Fittting

  Notes

  1 A jesuit, the Abbé Desfontaines (1685-1745) can be regarded as the founder of a new approach to literary criticism in France at the time, relying on aesthetic and moral judgments as opposed to mere story summaries.

  2 The first part was published in Paris in 1735 by Dupuis; the second part came out the following year. Parts 3 and 4 came out in 1737 in Paris, but were published by Poilly. The final four parts, 5-8, were all published in 1738 in The Hague, Netherlands, by Neaulme. In 1788, Lamekis was reprinted in Volumes 20-21 of Charles Georges Thomas Garnier’s ground-breaking imprint, Voyages imaginaires, songes et visions et romans cabalistiques, Amsterdam—the reprint did not include de Mouhy’s prefaces to parts 3, 5 and 8 from the original edition, which are included here in the Appendix. No other editions of Lamekis have been published since then. In this first English edition, the spelling and names have been normalized and section titles given to facilitate reading.

  3 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as Enemy Force, ISBN 9781935558491.

  4 The Leopard was highly venerated. It had traveled with the bull Apis and kept him from danger. It was held in a Catacomb and fed on the bodies of criminals.

  5 This mysterious feast took place on the 1st of Cubai, i.e. May.

  6 The belly of the statue contained the key to the underground.

  7 When the underground was built, Larmis, the first minister of the god, chose three of the most beautiful girls in the capital in the name of Serapis. They held a general assembly and honored the prize so much that the girls continually argued over who should be favored.

  8 Pure or without stain.

  9 The month of March.

  10 At the bottom of which was the sacred leopard.

  11 When a bull died they embalmed his entrails and his whole skin was carefully preserved to be used only by the ministers of the divinity.

  12 The author is mistaken. The High Priest had the same honor when he was sanctified.

  13 In the 35th article of the Bosoë law, it is said that the priests of Serapis who guard the underground will carry a bull’s foot instead of weapons.

  14 Called Bursoan. The Egyptians used it when they went into battle.

  15 In spite of much research, what they said has never been discovered.

  16 According to a famous author this gallery was covered in hieroglyphs that told the story of Serapis. They say that after an earthquake in Egypt in 1504, out of this buried chamber, as we will see, came a surprising number of bas-reliefs, many of which were carried away to different courts in Europe. Among these was a statue of a high priest with a finger touching his lips and a book in his hand with a cover inscribed with Coroïca or the law.

  17 They still have this book in Tauris, [Tabriz], and they claim that Thamas Koulikan, [Nader Shah], owns it.

  18 Buraïkos or the burning. This place was so holy that for the priests to be allowed to guard the fire they had to be chosen by the god himself. The fire was kept burning with nothing but human bones, which they made combustible by sprinkling them with human skin oil.

 
19 The first law was Kroustia or Sitao, i.e. perpetual silence or death.

  20 The most remote underground chamber.

  21 Luroë or the last secret, according to the rites of Semiramis, opened a very narrow marble staircase at the bottom of which was the chamber of Vestasia. There was a mysterious room inside where, after going so far just to enter, it was necessary to give real proof of the difference of sexes. The High Priest was apparently prohibited from entering with Semiramis, which, as simple as it seemed, according to the same rites, was the cause of the ruin of the famous temple of Serapis, which will be talked about until the end of days. I am not knowledgeable enough to describe this temple or the variety of mysteries. I leave it to the scholars to enrich us of these treasures.

  22 Here is a lacuna of several pages in the manuscript. I could describe the place, but I have too much respect for antiquity. As well described as the room might be, it would always be an obvious addition. I would rather be faithful than prolific.

  23 He is no longer.

  24 Snow, snow.

  25 The name of the dog, which means mighty in strength.

  26 Polite gesture in this land, like shaking hands here.

  27 The native’s name, meaning son of sorrow.

  28 Come here!

  29 In this country they only used the finger to point at the divinity and the king; they used the elbow for ordinary things.

  30 Look, look.