The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  The Xenobiotic Invasion

  by

  Théo Varlet

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  La Grande Panne [The Great Breakdown or, in this case, The Great Shutdown] by Théo Varlet, here translated as The Xenobiotic Invasion, was first published by Les Editions des Portiques in 1930, and reprinted in 1936 by Publications de l’Amitié par le livre. It was the second scientific romance that Varlet wrote from scratch, although he had written three earlier volumes based on first drafts by other writers, which he had been hired to revise. Like Le Roc d’or [The Golden Rock] (1927), La Grande Panne takes its initial inspiration from the author’s fascination with astronomy—he was a keen amateur observer—and, more specifically, with cosmobiological speculations about the distribution of life in the universe. His primary literary endeavors had always been poetic, and from the late 1920s onwards, cosmobiological themes acquired a considerable prominence in his work, in such collections as Paralipomena (1926), Ad Astra (1929) and Florilège de poésie cosmique [An Anthology of Cosmic Poetry] (1937).

  Léon-Louis-Etienne-Théodore Varlet was born in 1878 in Lille. His father was a lawyer, but the family was unusually well-off, by virtue of having property and business interests in Russia, and he grew up with a private income, feeling that there was no particular need for him to make a living. He decided, instead—following in the footsteps of many other fashionably disenchanted sons of the bourgeoisie—to dedicate himself to a literary vocation. He published poetry and criticism in a wide range of literary periodicals and, like almost every other person of similar inclination, founded a couple himself—L’Essor and Les Bandeaux d’or—in collaboration with various friends. His first collection of poetry, Heures et rêves [Hours and Dreams], appeared in 1898. He was also an inveterate traveler, and spent a decade roaming Europe by train and bicycle before marrying in 1909 and settling in Cassis in the south of France, not far from Marseilles. He continued to travel on vacation, however, and visited Paris on a regular basis, where he maintained numerous friendships and placed work in various periodicals—although the fact that so much of his work appeared in provincial periodicals, in his native north as well as his adoptive Midi, impeded the growth of his reputation somewhat.

  Although he arrived on the literary scene too late to participate in the Decadent Movement, the work of Charles Baudelaire was the most obvious influences on Varlet’s early poetry, and served as a role-model in other ways. Varlet cultivated a quasi-Baudelairean reputation as a resolutely determined non-conformist, making a particular point of attempting to follow up Baudelaire’s “research” in the use of drugs to attain “artificial paradises;” he reported extensively on his own experiments with hashish, opium and—most dangerously—ether. In Au paradis du haschisch; suite à Baudelaire (1930), he catalogued more than 100 such experiments conducted between 1908 and 1914, including illusory out-of-body experiences that took him into remote regions of outer space and illusions of existing in another person’s body. He caused some slight scandal in Cassis by virtue of his dedication to naturism—practiced in the secluded coves that figure prominently in the work of the protagonist of La Grande Panne—and his careful cultivation of an all-over suntan, and also courted controversy with his determined pacifism. He was acquainted with several of the Symbolist writers who continued experimenting with “decadent style” in the early 20th century, and contributed to memorial volumes dedicated to Pierre Louÿs and Henri de Régnier.

  Varlet published three further collections of poetry during the first phase of his career and one collection of short stories, Le Dernier Satyre [The Last Satyr] (1905), but the advent of the Great War in 1914 proved to be a crucial and damaging interruption, as it did for virtually every writer in France. As a pacifist, he was not required to bear arms, but nor was he allowed to remain idle. In 1917, the Russian Revolution destroyed the family fortune, which had provided his living expenses while he made very little money as a writer, and when the war eventually ended, he was confronted by the necessity of making a living from his pen. His primary source of income from 1920 onwards was literary translation, mostly from English. He made a particular specialism of the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, but he also translated several volumes of Rudyard Kipling’s later work and was the French translator of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and J. K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

  Varlet supplemented this income as best he could with journalism, but seems always to have had difficulty in finding publishers in Paris. For some years, his principal publisher was Edgar Malfère, based in Amiens, who issued his second short story collection, La Bella Venere [the Italian title is the name of a boat] (1920) in his “Bibliothèque du Hérisson” [Hedgehog Library] and then commissioned him to recast a number of poorly-written but highly imaginative scientific romances handed to him by a local author, Octave Joncquel. The first appeared as Les Titans du ciel [Titans of the Heavens] in 1921, and its sequel, L’Agonie de la Terre [The Earth’s Death-Throes] followed in 1922, but the arrangement then broke down when Joncquel sued Malfère for unpaid royalties, the publisher apparently having diverted the lion’s share of the proceeds from the second book to Varlet because only one scene from Joncquel’s original text had survived into the published version. The lawsuit failed, and the rest of Joncquel’s allegedly-prolific oeuvre was lost to history; the two published items, collectively making up L’Épopée martienne,1 suggest that the loss is a cause for some regret on the part of lovers of imaginative fiction.

  Malfère published another collaboration whose final draft was presumably Varlet’s—a timeslip romance co-signed by André Blandin, La Belle Valence [Valencia the Beautiful] (1923)—and he recycled Varlet’s short fiction in Le Dernier Satyre in 1922, as well as publishing the poetry collection Aux libres jardins [In the Free Gardens] (1922) and Varlet’s first solo novel, Le Démon dans l’âme [The Demon in the Soul] (1923). It seems highly probable, however, that none of these books made much money, and they cannot have contributed much to the soothing of the author’s financial woes. When he reverted to the production of scientific romance in the Vernian Le roc d’or, he was probably trying to produce something a little more commercial, and the same is true of La Grande Panne, but a sequel to the latter novel, Aurore Lescure, pilote d’astronef [Aurore Lescure, Starship Pilot], failed to sell during his lifetime and was published posthumously in 1943, when it sank without trace in the midst of World War II.

  Varlet did not live to see the outbreak of that war, dying in Cassis in 1938 after being plagued by sciatica for some years. He was in such dire straits by 1936 that his friends formed an organization, Les Amis de Théo Varlet, to raise funds for his support, issuing appeals for assistance in numerous French and English periodicals and publishing a regular Bulletin from 1936-39; it is possible that the 1936 reprint of La Grande Panne and his final poetry collection—which appeared from the same publisher—were, in essence, charitable gestures.

  Although Varlet’s poetry continued to enjoy a certain reputation, and his experiments with drugs retained some notoriety, his prose fell into obscurity until it began to attract attention from fans of the American genre of science fiction, imported into France on a large scale during the post-World War II “coca-colonization” of Europe. Le Roc d’or was reprinted as an sf novel, and the Amiens-based firm Encrage reissued the three collaborative novels in a handsome omnibus edition compiled by Alfu and Joseph Altairac, Oeuvres Romanesques I (1996), advertised as the first volume of a projected series, although no others have appeared as yet. The volume includes a number of essays on the Martian Epic, and Varlet’s work in general, and consti
tutes a fitting tribute to his endeavors as a genre pioneer.

  Although the association might have been accidental to begin with, Varlet certainly took to scientific romance with a will, and evidently had a considerable knowledge of French scientific romance; one of his acquaintances in Paris was J.-H. Rosny Aîné, whose work in the genre he admired greatly. La Grande Panne shows the influence of Rosny’s classic disaster story La Force mystérieuse (1913)2 and probably also drew some inspiration from Henri Allorge’s award-winning Le Grand Cataclysme (1922)3. It does not, however, merely recycle ideas from those earlier novels, but extrapolates them with considerable care, verve and polish. Although it probably did not have much direct influence on later works of scientific romance, it does have interesting affinities with the British school of “ambiguous disaster stories” pioneered by Gerald Heard’s “The Great Fog” (1944) and H. de Vere Stacpoole’s The Story of my Village (1947). At any rate, it fully deserves to be reckoned a classic of the French genre; it remains eminently readable today.

  This translation is taken from the second edition of the novel, issued in 1936 by Publications de l’Amitié par le livre, and includes the preface added to that second edition.

  Brian Stableford

  Preface

  (to the Second Edition)

  The present novel, La Grande Panne, appeared for the first time from Les Éditions des Portiques in October 1930. A year later, in October 1931, a short story signed Rowley Hilliard, “Death from the Stars,” whose initial idea is singularly reminiscent of that of La Grande Panne, appeared in an American magazine, Wonder Stories. Two scientists, Julius Humboldt and George Dixon, discover a mysterious powder in a meteorite. That mysterious powder is an elementary life-form. It grows at the expense of terrestrial life. Vegetation is consumed, its foliage blackened. Humans initially experience itching, then burns. Dixon dies after atrocious suffering. Humboldt realizes the danger, but is affected himself, to the extent that he can scarcely move. He finds the strength to douse Dixon’s corpse in kerosene, however, along with his bed, cottage and garden, and the entire contaminated zone; then he locks himself in and sets fire to it. His suicide is attributed to madness.

  This short story enjoyed considerable success; readers demanded a sequel. Mr. Hilliard gave them satisfaction, and the second story appeared a few months later in the same magazine. Although they were very evidently inspired by my novel, the two stories have a typical Yankee crudity, and both incline toward the macabre.

  Given the present state of American legislation, I would have very little chance of obtaining any pecuniary compensation for this act of “piracy.” As the master J. H. Rosny Aîné did with respect to his novel La Force Mystérieuse,4 however, I thought I ought to establish my priority here, by reporting these facts in a preface to this new edition of La Grande Panne. I thank my worthy collaborator in anticipation Régis Messac,5 novelist, translator and historian of the literature of the scientific imagination, who was kind enough to draw my attention to this plagiarism.

  Théo Varlet

  P.S. A novel entitled Les Naufragés d’Éros, forming a sequel to La Grande Panne, will appear imminently from a publisher who remains to be found.6

  THE XENOBIOTIC INVASION

  I. In the Ruins of Tauroëntum

  There is no doubt that if, on returning from that excursion, I had climbed into Géo’s car and not Dr. Alburtin’s, my entire life would have been changed, and probably the future of the world too.

  That is why the conversation that I, Géo, his sister Luce, their mother and the doctor had that afternoon—October 15—before the ruins of Tauroëntum and the azure of the Mediterranean, began the adventure for me.

  First, though, let me introduce myself: Gaston-Adolphe Delvart, born in Lille, aged 27, a respectably talented painter—if I can believe the opinion of my friends and, especially, the prices that dealers and collectors pay for my canvases. I am no prouder of them for that, however, for some daubs executed by jokers devoid of any merit attain much higher sums per square decimeter—but at least I earn a living and am conscious of making true art, which is already not that common.

  But let’s pass on; my art is only indirectly concerned with the present story. It is more relevant to remark that I was, at the time of which I speak, a bachelor, flirting superficially with Mademoiselle Luce de Ricourt, the sister of my friend Géo, a former school-friend turned engineer, of whom I had lost sight and rediscovered a fortnight before in Cassis, where I had come to take a vacation, to paint and to deliver myself to the pleasures of the baths and moderate nudism.

  Luce de Ricourt, 24 years of age, her hair an ardent shade of red, who puts me in mind of Titian’s Danae in the Museum of Naples, has an esthetic attraction for me, impeded by an evident and undeniable moral incompatibility. An authentic Baronne, but penniless, she is as modern as possible and regrets not having been born American. Money is the most important thing in life, she affirms. She has sworn to attain wealth, knows the influential businessman Rosenkrantz, and indulges in fruitful operations on the Bourse—which does not prevent her from having a fairly considerable, but purely utilitarian, artistic flair. She holds my canvases in esteem, and has confidence in a future rise in their market value, but she is openly scornful of my lack of shrewdness, which holds back that elevation.

  “Tonton,” she says to me, repeatedly—for she has made that gracious diminutive of my forename, and addresses me as “tu” although she used to tear out my hair for fun ten years ago—“you’re not up to date. You might consider yourself young, but you’re as fossilized as my noble mother, with your antediluvian prejudices.”

  Or: “Poor old chap! How the two of us would quarrel, if ever I took it into my head to marry you!”

  That’s certainly my opinion. But there’s no chance, fortunately; being in no hurry to marry, she mocks sentimentality, regrets being unable to follow Professor Morton’s courses in New York in order to become an accomplished “vamp,” and will only ever marry a “money-making man”—an American, at least at heart, like her. With me she’s content to flirt, and take advantage of the times when I allow myself to be half-taken in order, to buy—or force me to sell, as her mother puts it—my best canvases at a discount price; they are, she believes, gilt-edged investments. And that opinion flatters my self-respect sufficiently for me to pardon the maneuver, which borders on sentimental fraud.

  Even her brother jokes, on occasion: “Oh, Lucy, you have no sense of morality!”

  Géo has one, or thinks he has—the moral sensibility of the second quarter of the 20th century. He does not disdain the small profits, commissions, percentages and discounts he obtains by virtue of his position as an engineer in the factories of the important aircraft-manufacturer Hérault-Feltrie, at Saint-Denis. His passion is automobiles. He has recently equipped his car with a new device that he calls a “turbo-compressor” and he is exceedingly pleased with it.

  “With that gizmo in my vulgar little Renault, I can match any branded rattletrap. The other day, coming from Paris with Mama and Luce on the road between Arles and Miramas, in the Crau—a straight stretch of 30 kilometers on the level—I caught up with a big Hispano that was cruising at 50. They let me get to ten meters behind them, but just as I was about to overtake them they pressed the accelerator. Pfft!—up to 80. Me, I opened up my turbo—vroom! Like an aircraft engine. A blast of the horn, and I passed them at 140. My fellows sat there flabbergasted.”

  At the memory of this exploit of her son’s, which still gives her goose-pimples retrospectively, Madame de Ricourt murmurs: “The horror of it! 140! You could have killed all three of us, Géo!”

  Madame de Ricourt, who is Luce at 50, has a chestnut-colored complexion. Plump and puffed up, she straps herself up and strangles herself to “make herself young.” By virtue of the snobbery of believing that she is “up to date,” she plasters herself with make-up and smokes cigarettes, but makes her outdatedness obvious at every moment.

  These remarks are being ex
changed near the ruins of Tauroëntum, which are on the edge of the beach at Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer. In an excavation there, one can see the remains of a scarcely-recognizable mosaic and three enormous earthenware jars, like some that can still be found in the homes of Provençal peasants: the vestiges of a Gallo-Roman villa. They have left me rather cold, and the Ricourts too. Dr. Alburtin, who took the initiative in bringing us here, is apologetic; by way of compensation, he invites us to take tea at the little hostelry on the beach, where our two cars are parked: the turbo in which I came from Cassis with Géo and his sister, and Alburtin’s roadster, to which Madame de Ricourt gave preference “because the doctor drives like a sage”—which is to say that he never exceeds 60.

  I would have thought Dr. Tancrède Alburtin a very pleasant fellow were it not his mania for engaging you in long conversations by clapping you on the shoulder and leaving his hand stuck there in an affectionate and exasperating fashion. The tall quadragenarian, broad in the face, with blond hair and a fair complexion, went to war as a military surgeon. Far from bragging about it and posing as a hero, he makes his exploits into amiable tall stories—but relates them all the same. We became friends two years earlier, during my first sojourn in Cassis, where he practices medicine while directing a radiotherapy clinic that he neglects slightly in order to devote himself to his personal research. He’s a convinced scientist, and also has a hobbyist interest in the curiosities of the region.

  The failure of his Tauroëntum is forgotten before tea and cake. The enthusiastic eulogy Géo has offered to his turbo has steered the conversation toward the speed of present and future transport. Luce evokes her memories of a trip in an aircraft: London to Paris in an hour and a half: 260 kilometers an hour.