Humankind only possess a small number of peep-holes to the universe: our senses, which perceive only a derisory fraction of it. We must always expect surprises, issuing from the vast unknown that we cannot contemplate, emergent from the immeasurable sector of the immensity that is as yet forbidden to us. Let us, therefore, armor ourselves with abnegation and arm ourselves with science in order to sustain the impacts and meet the challenges of the future. But without any truce, O sensitive, nervous and valiant Humankind, let a smile flourish on your innumerable mouths as that prestigious arsenal is enhanced, before which the unknown retreats further every day! And say to yourself firmly, in spite of your misfortunes and your grievances: “It was, after all, an unparalleled gift that Destiny gave to human beings, in placing them in the bosom of an infinitely admirable and various world, and affording them the joy of discovering everything for themselves, little by little, marvel by marvel, by means of strokes of genius and the rewards of toil.”
That is why it would be a bad thing if the history of the Blue Peril were to be envisaged as a delusory legend, and the photographs and plaster casts in the Arts et Métiers scorned. Even if generations to come are persuaded that they are fakes, the evidence of a hoax, and even if they refuse to believe in the Blue Peril—that it still menaces us, and that it might begin to rage again tomorrow—they ought, if they are wise, take their young people to the Conservatoire and say to them, in front of the molds and the photographs: “Look. Then think. Then imagine. That isn’t impossible.”
Then, like all fables, the fable of the sarvants—a grain of bitter philosophy rolled up as a golden pill in the sugar of an apologue—will have borne its fruit.
Monsieur Le Tellier knew that, so he wanted a popular account to be rendered of The Blue Peril.
And all is said, now.
Afterword
Le Péril bleu seems in some ways to be a more conventional work than Un Homme chez les microbes, whose first version was written immediately before it, but its reversion to something much more closely akin to a mystery/thriller format was by no means a retreat to safety. It is, in many ways, the most ambitious of all Renard’s works, and is rightly considered, at least from the viewpoint of scientific marvel fiction, to be his masterpiece. Like his other early novels, it can be seen as a calculated variation on themes previously developed by H. G. Wells, employing narrative templates that Wells had adopted himself, but the fact that it fuses two such ideas and two such templates together—those found in The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds—adds a vital extra layer of complexity to it.
The mystery presented in The Invisible Man was always heading for a relatively trivial solution, like almost all previous literary accounts of invisibility—which go back, as Renard conscientiously notes, to the tale of Gyges fabricated in Plato’s Republic and had been previously co-opted into scientific marvel fiction by C. H. Hinton in “Stella” (1895). Renard goes far beyond that, providing a solution to his mystery in which the puzzlingly invisible intruders originate from an entire invisible world. Unlike Wells’s Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds, however, they are no mere would-be colonists anxious to relocate because they have depleted their own resources and prepared to use the human-standard genocidal method in order to facilitate their task. The journey that Renard’s intruders make is every bit as difficult, in physical terms, as an interplanetary voyage—in spite of being much shorter in terms of mere distance—but it is even more difficult in conceptual terms, as illustrated by the conceptual leap that the central characters are forced to make in trying to figure out exactly what it is by which they are confronted.
The fact that Monsieur Le Tellier ends up, in one sense, looking in a mirror—as a scientist contemplating other scientists, embarked on an equally awkward mission of discovery—is, of course, sharply and ironically subverted by the discovery that the seemingly-humanoid form adopted by the disaster-struck “sarvants” is a mere matter of mimicry, and that they are very different indeed in terms of their own mysterious biology and mentality. Renard’s brief sketch of the biology of his aliens clearly has Wells’s account of the Martians in mind, but Renard’s immediate reaction to his model was not to imitate it more crudely—which was the reaction of so many other writers that The War of the Worlds has become the archetype of a vast subgenre of stories of monstrous alien invasion—but to challenge its assumptions.
Like Wells, Renard modeled his aliens on Earthly creatures that humans find innately repulsive—spiders, in his case—but he deliberately echoes Victor Hugo’s Légende des siècles in questioning that unthinking reaction. His alien arachnids are, indeed, thoroughly alien, existentially as well as physically, as a result of having the capability of linking their own neuronal apparatus to the neuronal apparatus of their fellows to former larger thinking aggregates of varying dimension and capability. Because they live in a world in which liquids cannot exist, and which is devoid of oxygen, that apparatus and its physiology has to be very different from ours—much more akin, in fact, although Renard did not have the analogy available to him, to the inorganic bodies and “brains” of computers, which are similarly networkable. Inevitably, liquid-based organic physiology, and such corollary phenomena as blood, are very difficult things for them to comprehend—but when they do so, they evidently obtain sufficient understanding to be able to engage their moral sensibilities quite rapidly, releasing all the specimens they have gathered that have not already fallen victim to their scientific inquiry. This makes them, as Renard is careful to argue explicitly, not merely morally superior to Wells’s Martians and their myriad clones, but also morally superior to us and ours.
The aliens themselves are, of course, only one facet of an entire world, which, although much closer to the Earth’s surface than Mars or the Moon, is equally inaccessible to our technology. It is interesting to note that, although Le Péril bleu has little else in common with Jean de La Hire’s unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds, Le Mystère des XV (tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Nyctalope on Mars)—which was presumably running as a serial in Le Matin when Le Péril bleu was published—it shares exactly the same fascination with new technologies of flight, and with the competition that had developed in 1909 between winged aircraft and dirigible airships, in terms of speed and maneuverability. Both novels have an acute sense of the significance of technologies of flight as a watershed in human progress—Renard explained why in the 1909 essay reprinted in volume one of this series—and both celebrate it.
While La Hire imagined such technologies as the prelude to an imminent gigantic leap that would produce viable spaceships virtually overnight, however, thus allowing the French to colonize Mars—Wells’s technologically-sophisticated vampire Martians notwithstanding—just as they had once colonized Algeria, Renard was much more acutely conscious of the small step that aerial flight really was, by comparison with the actual magnitude and probable strangeness of the universe beyond the Earth’s surface. When the politicians who are confronted with the idea of the world of the sarvants are absurdly unable to think of it in any other terms than as a target for wars of destruction or conquest, the mere impracticability of such quests pales into insignificance beside their conceptual inadequacy—an inadequacy further represented by the willingness of the world at large to put the world that remains conveniently out of sight and entirely out of mind.
Renard was slightly unfortunate, from a modern viewpoint, in that he found a justification for the notion of an invisible world in a recent pamphlet by Jean Saryer, whose pseudoscientific nature was not obvious to him, although perhaps it should have been. His quotation of Saryer’s allegation that there must be an “invisible sun” at the second focal point of Earth’s elliptical orbit inevitably makes the logical foundations of his central conceit seem unsound. From the viewpoint of the present day, though, we can see a much better justificatory strategy that was not available to him at the time. We now know that the greater part of the mass required to hold galaxies together
and to maintain the broad structure of the universe is “missing,” in the sense that it is undetectable to our conventional astronomical instruments, which rely on electromagnetic radiation as a transmitter of information. It is commonly called “dark matter,” although that does not adequate distinguish it from matter that is detectable, but does not shine in the visible spectrum; scientists, in consequence, tend to prefer the label “non-baryonic matter.” It is, in fact, invisible matter, which possesses mass, and presumably has energetic relations of its own, of which our senses know nothing, but which remains transparent to electromagnetic radiation—much like the alternative matter envisaged by Renard.
Renard thought sufficiently deeply about the possibility of invisibility to realize that there was a fatal flaw in Wells’s depiction of The Invisible Man, which he dramatized in his own story “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible” (tr. as “The Man Who Wanted to be Invisible” in volume four of the series), but he must have been pleased to realize that his own invisible aliens were immune to the criticism in question—which is that an invisible man would be unable to see, because his invisible retina could not intercept light. Being creatures composed of “alternative matter,” the sarvants are, inevitably, equipped with senses appropriate to that state of matter, doubtless relying on some sort of “alternative energy”—plus the sense of touch, which they share with us simply by virtue of being material.
It is worth noting that this notion of alternative matter is coherent with the extension of the Cartesian dualism fundamental to Le Docteur Lerne that Renard deployed in Un Homme chez les microbes, which imagines the microcosm not in terms of material “atomic solar systems” but in terms of different kinds of substance, into which ours might be alchemically transmuted as the climax of a process of “diminution” initially manifest as shrinkage. The idea that there might be worlds “adjacent” to our own—both within and without—but composed of an alternative kind of matter, was to be further developed by a small number of subsequent speculative writers, but never attracted nearly as much literary attention as the notion that there might be adjacent worlds made of the same kind of matter, but displaced in a fourth spatial dimension.
Worlds of the latter sort have the convenience—like Wells’s Mars and billions of other “Earth-clones” scattered through the galaxy—of slotting into the ready-made conquest/colonization narrative framework that Renard’s imaginary world is designed to deny and defy, thus lending themselves to conventional narrative exploitation. The whole purpose of Le Péril bleu is, by contrast, to expose not merely the ridiculous absurdity but also the wretched pusillanimity of such carbon copies of The War of the Worlds as Le Mystère des XV. It is, therefore, no wonder that variants of its central notion have been left relatively unexplored and unexploited by other writers. Coincidentally, the science fiction novel that provided the most adventurous and intriguing variant of it, A Wreath of Stars (1976), was the work of Bob Shaw, who had previously “rediscovered” the central speculative motif employed in Renard’s later novel, Le Maître de la lumière.
In his 1909 manifesto for scientific marvel fiction, Renard had observed en passant that Edgar Allan Poe had invented both detective fiction and scientific marvel fiction, but had made such a complete job of the former that he had only left room for imitators, while he had been so sketchy in the latter regard that he had left a vast unexplored wilderness for the use of “disciples.” Le Péril bleu rams that opinion home in no uncertain terms in its merciless caricature of Tiburce, whose attempts to mimic Sherlock Holmes—considered as a mere carbon copy of Auguste Dupin—are so absurd as to qualify as madness. Tiburce’s counterpart within the plot is Robert Collin, a disciple of imaginative thought, who eventually does solve the mystery—although he has literally to go out of this world to do so, without any means of coming back alive.
Unlike Dupin or Holmes, both of whom were confirmed bachelors, Tiburce and Robert are both motivated by the seemingly-hopeless love of a woman—which, in the latter case, can only lead to fatal self-sacrifice, thus continuing a fundamental pattern in Renard’s early work, in which unbridled love leads only to disaster and death. Even conventionally-bridled love had usually led to loss prior to the denouement of Le Péril bleu, but the pattern is broken there when Tiburce does find a happy ending, in a chapter titled “The Triumph of Absurdity,” while the object of Robert’s desire falls into the tender arms of the Duc d’Agnès—whose attempts to tackle the problem by building a better airplane have been just as hopelessly ineffectual as Tiburce’s crazy detective work. There was, of course, a moral in this, although Renard probably did not realize the full extent of its horrid implications at the time: in order to survive in the long term as a writer, he eventually had to abandon writing determined challenges to conventional thought in the form of scientific marvel stories, and settle down to writing blandly imitative mystery stories dealing with perfectly vulgar crimes, in which the hero would inevitably get the girl. Fortunately for posterity, he was slow in accepting that realization—unlike the vast majority of writers, who not only realize it before they start, but never have the slightest inkling of the possibility of doing otherwise.
Another frequent feature of Renard’s early work that is shown off to particular effect in Le Péril bleu is his use of specific dates. This can be an awkward tactic in futuristic fiction, partly because it can disorient readers slightly to be reading a book in 1911 that refers to events occurring in 1912 as if they were familiar history, and partly because it ensures that the book will go very rapidly “out of date,” in the sense that readers picking it up belatedly in 1913 will know that major events attributed to specific dates, which would have been universally evident if they had happened, actually did not happen. Most novels, of course, follow the policy that Renard had adopted in Le Docteur Lerne, of specifying the month in which events happen by month, but not by year, and of dealing with events on such a small scale that they could, in any case, pass unnoticed by the world at large, thus constituting episodes of “secret history.” Le Péril bleu flatly refuses any such compromise, grasping the nettle of proffering an “alternative history” rather than a secret one.
Nowadays, of course, many readers are perfectly familiar with the idea of alternative histories and have no difficulty in dealing with books that were set in the future when they were written but whose settings have now been relegated to pasts that never were. In Renard’s day, by contrast, the idea of setting a story in the future without the benefit of a preliminary expository sequence explaining that the author was about to do it was quite new. (I have searched hard, but I cannot find a single 19th century instance of a future-set story that is not equipped with a preliminary expository “essay.”) By the time Renard read The War of the Worlds—which is set in “189-,” although it did not appear in book form until 1898—it must already have been a manifest alternative history, set in a past that never was, and he must have realized immediately that leaving the last digit of the year of its setting unspecified had been quite unnecessary—but, even so, the decision to take the extra step must be counted a bold one. Indeed, even though it was published in 1911, Renard must have assumed that Le Péril bleu would be taken to be an alternative history even then, and that must be regarded as an essential aspect of its address to the reader—as is made explicit by the final remark that whether the events described in the story really happened or not makes no difference to their significance as a cautionary lesson for the human imagination.
Le Péril bleu was sufficiently widely-read to have some influence on later works of French speculative fiction, although it is perhaps unfortunate that it was not translated during the 20th century, and thus had no influence on English-language works. The influence it had, however, lay mostly in the belated encouragement of a few works deploying exotic neighboring worlds—like the invisible moon featured in Léon Groc’s La Planète de cristal (1944)—for the sake of bizarrerie. Despite its publication as a feuilleton serial in L’Intransigeant after t
he Great War, and its subsequent reprinting in book form, it did not encourage any significant revival of interest in the larger ambitions of scientific marvel fiction. It remained an unanswered knock on the part of opportunity—but it is, nevertheless, a loud and spectacular knock, which fully deserves to be recognized as a tour de force.
Notes
1 Albert Boissière (1866-1939) was a prolific writer whose career ran parallel to Renard’s, beginning with contributions to symbolist periodicals and ending with the production of popular crime fiction; he experienced similar problems with namesakes; there was another Albert Boissière (1843-1912) who was a mining engineer of some note.
2 “Parthénope ou l’escale imprévue” is a story by Renard that first appeared in Le Voyage immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières (q.v.). A translation appears in volume 2 of this series, A Man Among the Microbes and Other Stories.
3 The works referenced are, in the order listed, “La Singulière destinée de Bouvancourt” (tr. as “The Singular Fate of Bouvancourt”); “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont” (tr. as “Monsieur Dupont’s Vacation”); “Le Rendez-vous” (tr. as “The Rendezvous”); Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908; tr. as Dr. Lerne); “Le Voyage immobile” (tr. as “The Motionless Voyage”); “La Mort et le coquillage” (tr. as “Death and the Seashell); and Un homme chez les microbes (tr. as “A Man Among the Microbes”). The last-named remained unpublished until 1928; although its first version had certainly been written much earlier, evidently before Le Péril bleu—presumably in 1907-09. Apart from “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont,” which first appeared in Fantômes et Fantoches (1905, signed Vincent Saint-Vincent), the short stories cited were all collected in Le Voyage immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières (1909). Translations of all these stories appear in volumes 1 and 2 of this series, in order of their publication—although the order given above might well be more accurately reflective of the order of their composition.
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