The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul

by Albert Robida

  The most serious difficulty, in the early stages, was the state of relations—frosty at least, if not outrightly hostile—manifest between the conquered populations and the conquering monkeys. No relationship was forged between bimanes and quadrumanes; the latter, being good and carefree fellows, were quite ready to fraternize, but bimane haughtiness always kept them at a distance. The only exceptions were a few mining districts on the Ballarat coast and Alberton in Colonel Escoubico’s division. At Alberton, the Colonel hosted soirées and balls, seducing everyone with his liveliness and good humor. In his salons, notable bimanes—the women of high society, millionaire farmers and rich arms-dealers—mingled with the quadrumane officers of Wa-Wo-Wa’s corps, who had become excellent dancers under the tutelage of the Spaniard Escoubico. At Ballarat, the good relations had had poorer results, the well-received monkeys having been drawn into the miners’ drinking-dens, to the great detriment of their natural sobriety.

  The Australian press soon began to complicate these difficulties. In the early days, it had kept a prudent silence, limiting itself to recording the decrees of the Farandoulian government without comment. After the first three months of the occupation, however, the papers recovered their courage and launched a petty but lively war of words against the Governor of Melbourne, which never let up. As the monkeys did not read the papers, this could not stir up any trouble in the army, but these scarcely-veiled excitations of hatred and contempt for the government maintained a dangerous agitation among the bimanes.

  The council, worried by this development, decided to take drastic action. One morning, the following decree was published:

  FARANDOULIAN EMPIRE

  The Governor of Melbourne,

  Because the entire press, encouraged by impunity, delivers new attacks every day against the paternal government of H. M. Saturnin I;

  And because the quadrumanes of the army are attacked daily by the bimane papers, cruel outrages being perpetrated against their dignity without their being able to reply, since they are not yet able to read;

  It is decided that:

  All the newspapers are suppressed.

  Mr. Dick Broken is hereby charged with the creation of an official gazette for the publication of governmental acts.

  General Mandibul.

  It was high time. The harm that the press had done to the new empire could not be countered right away. The systematic campaign of false news and slyly aggressive articles it had employed, at the instigation of the agents of England, soon bore unfortunate fruit.

  The European powers neglected to respond to the letters sent by Saturnin I to notify other sovereigns of his accession to the throne. Monaco alone replied—coldly, it is true, but politely, her geographical situation compelling her to pay the greatest possible respect to a maritime power like Australia. The blackest calumnies were circulating in Europe regarding the new empire and her glorious founders; it was rumored that the monkeys, far from being the armed protectors of a nation of workers and tradesmen, were, to the contrary, abominable tyrants. It was even said that Farandoul was absolutely determined to provide bimane wives for all his soldiers, who were rumored to number 150,000—which would reduce 150,000 unhappy women to live under the yoke of brutal monkeys while their bimane ex-husbands became sad wanderers in the remote depths of the Australian deserts.

  There is no need for us to protest against such infamous calumnies. To the contrary, the quadrumane “yoke” was exceedingly light within the Farandoulian nation. Far from seeking to contrive a fusion of the bimane and quadrumane races by mixed marriages, Farandoul stubbornly refused to give the Breton Colonel Trabadec permission to espouse a young and pretty quadrumane, the daughter of Colonel Wa-Wo-Wa. Anyway, it will be enough, to definitively disprove the fanciful rumors that were running through Europe, to say that one of Farandoul’s first priorities, after the conquest, had been to bring the families of his warriors to Australia as quickly as the organization of the Farandoulian navy would allow. He had not had time, nor ships enough, to bring in excess of 200,000 quadrumanes of all ages from the distant isles of Oceania immediately, but in the end—thanks to Bora-Bora’s fleet, merchant vessels and others seized in the ports—they had arrived. The world was informed of this at once, but the strangest rumors continued to circulate.

  Curiously, a few individuals saw in Australia’s new situation a colossal opportunity to do business. The biggest matrimonial agency in New York set out to organize an expedition to Australia. Within a month, every newspaper in the United States carried a huge advertisement conceived as follows:

  MARRIAGE! MARRIAGE!! MARRIAGE!!!

  Notice to spinsters of all ages of an army to marry.

  Exceptional opportunity. Magnificent situations offered to ladies. An immense selection of young bachelors, many superior officers among them,

  Imminent departure by any possible ship.

  Enroll immediately. Send photographs.

  The agency quickly assembled a formidable number of hopefuls. The photographs were artfully filed, and the women were notified to be ready to depart at a moment’s notice. One morning, at his mansion in Melbourne, Farandoul received a score of stout albums, magnificently bound, containing more than 3000 photographs.

  At first, he could not imagine why they had been sent, but a letter enlightened him; the agency was offering him wives for the officers of his army, subject to a small fee for each introduction, and announcing the imminent arrival of a first shipment by way of a sample.

  Farandoul, infuriated by the indelicacy of the people who engaged in such a business, replied that he would shoot any representative of the agency who set foot in Farandoulia.

  He was no less annoyed when, at about the same time, another matrimonial agency—this one French—decided on its own authority to find a wife for him. This French agency had inserted the following notice among the small ads in Le Figaro:

  RICH MARRIAGE

  Good opportunity for princess,

  or young person of high nobility.

  A monarch to marry.

  This advertisement, as one can well imagine, had fervently excited the Saint-Germain district, and a number of likely candidates had been put forward. A dozen examples selected from the collection had been forwarded to Farandoul by telegraph, who had refused them all, at the risk of causing a great many tears to flow. The pure memory of Mysora filled his heart.

  Mandibul, to avoid any further annoyance to his friend and sovereign, had a photograph taken of the least naturally-favored of all the monkeys in the army, and sent it secretly to Paris as that of the marriageable monarch. Saint-German shuddered in horror; a few despairing young women took refuge in convents, although one timid spinster of 33 years and 11 months, a descendant of a family that went back at least as far as King Dagobert,32 refused to withdraw her candidature on a point of principle.

  Strict orders were given in Melbourne in anticipation of the arrival of the first shipment from the American agency. When the Yankee ship, carrying 400 spinsters, presented itself at Port Philip, entry to the port was sternly refused and it had to go back to sea incontinently.33 It was learned some time afterwards that the representative of the agency, to recover some few of his expenses, had steered towards the isles of Fiji, where he had succeeded in placing his 400 ladies at a discount price with a small tribe of savages afflicted with a superabundance of bachelors.

  Thus ended the campaign indiscreetly launched against Farandoulia by the matrimonial agencies.

  IX.

  Saturnin Farandoul was able to continue his work in peace. All his time and attention was devoted to the army, which required to be organized and thoroughly trained in order to rise to its task. Farandoul established an immense instruction camp on the shore at Port Philip, overlooking Melbourne Bay. This camp, protected by a line of entrenchments, was connected to a series of constructions which Farandoul had put in place for the bay’s defense. The monkeys shifted the earth with considerable ardor and intelligence and became, unde
r Mandibul’s direction, excellent military engineers.

  At the extremity of the bay, a little fort raised above Rocas Point completed the system of defense.

  Farandoul had another object of preoccupation. Alone among all the armies of the world, the quadrumane army had no cavalry! It was a serious oversight, which might have disastrous consequences in certain situations. After serious deliberation, the council decided that it might be wise to utilize kangaroos for this purpose in preference to horses, towards which the monkeys had a certain antipathy. The agility of monkeys and kangaroos being in perfect accord, this new experiment ought to yield excellent results.

  The camp at Port Philip soon displayed great animation; every morning, under the lofty surveillance of the Generals, the troops were drilled for several hours in the handling of their weapons. The afternoon was given over to the battalion school. Twice a week they played war games. All the regiments moved off, executing collective movements and mounting charges in front of the bimanes of Melbourne, who flocked to see them. Brightly-clad staff-officers mounted on kangaroos ran through the front lines at the gallop carrying orders to the bimane generals. Saturnin I, mounted on horseback at the center of a sparkling general staff, towered over the assembly. The ladies of Melbourne paid particular attention to the hero’s five foster-brothers, gathering around them like a guard of honor.

  Similar maneuvers were undertaken in the four other military divisions, to maintain the high morale of the troops and give them the necessary instruction.

  The example of Colonel Escoubico, the commandant of the town of Alberton, had been followed by other leaders. Brass bands and corps of excellent musicians were formed in every brigade, under the direction of bimane conductors hired at considerable expense. Escoubico’s band, organized in the Spanish style, comprised 14 monkeys in the little ivory-topped caps of students, mostly playing guitars, tambourines and castanets. The other musical corps were armed with stout copper instruments which resounded terribly in military marches. Military music was played in the garrisons every afternoon beneath the windows of the commanding general; one could hear all the latest works 34 from Europe brilliantly executed, and equally brilliant pieces born of the musical inspiration of the quadrumanes.

  Farandoulia had its own maestro, a Javanese langur named Coco, whose character was exceedingly disagreeable by nature, although endowed with qualities of verve and originality unknown among bimane musicians. The maestro had a masterpiece in preparation for Melbourne’s Grand Theater: a grand opera mixte 35—which is to say, intended to be played by both bimane and quadrumane artistes. Its title was The Romeo of the Zoological Gardens.36

  The opera’s subject, one is given to understand, was the story of a monkey in love with the daughter of the Director of a zoo; this quadrumane Romeo languished in a captivity whose misery the maiden alleviated by her delicate attentions. Love was born in two hearts. The barbarous father having refused his consent, there was a monkey revolt, a ballet, an elopement, a reconciliation with the bimanes and a grand ballet mixte. The most remarkable elements, according to those who first heard them, were a choir of captive monkeys, a song of war and a duo mixte between the daughter of the Director, a bimane artiste, and Romeo, a monkey artiste. Our friend Dick Broken had written the words for this magisterial work, as well as those of a patriotic song mixte, whose couplets were to be sung by bimanes and the refrains by quadrumanes.

  To return to our military musicians, who had delighted the bimane population at first, we must confess that after a few months they were playing their concerts to empty houses. The pretty blonde-haired misses had disappeared, doubtless regretfully but probably in obedience to secret orders sent from London.

  The sky became overcast; little by little, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.

  Certain indications allowed Farandoul to sense that a storm was about to break over Australian soil. There were vague rumors of an English intervention. The European consuls were showing a certain ill-will, and foreign agents had been reported to be active in the large population centers. A secret campaign by England was making itself felt; perfidious Albion was employing an indirect means of attack typical of her tortuous politics.

  It was, above all, the quadrumane army on which the English agents were working—that honest and pure army, which Great Britain did her utmost to corrupt by provoking indiscipline therein and developing within its ranks a taste for the finer things in life.37 By all means possible, perfidious Albion attempted to tarnish the quadrumanes’ virtues and inculcate in them the vices of bimanes. Her weapon of preference was whisky; strong spirits were soon flowing like rivers, and the monkeys were losing the habit of temperance.

  Although the Generals kept a careful watch over their troops and dealt severely with the guilty ones, the evil took hold so strongly that discipline was seriously compromised. The quadrumane leaders themselves, in the drawing-rooms that opened to them as if in response to a password, were not always able to refuse the champagne that was offered to them. At the same time, clever spies caused pride and ambition to creep into the hearts of the quadrumane Generals by means of base flatteries and shameful kowtowing to their panache—and, in the end, awakened jealousy in the quadrumanes, directed against Farandoul’s bimane companions and Farandoul himself.

  The attention of England eventually came to focus on one of the quadrumane leaders: Colonel Makako, General Mandibul’s chief of staff—who was, as we have said, a sort of feudal gentleman, infatuated with the nobility and antiquity of his race. Long used to the submissiveness of his family’s monkey vassals, he believed that he had the right to give everyone orders, and yielded very reluctantly to the discipline introduced into the army by Farandoul.

  The agents of perfidious Albion having quickly discovered the hateful and jealous tendency of his character, Colonel Makako was almost immediately surrounded, flattered and outwitted by them. In the drawing-rooms of Melbourne, the prettiest women in the pay of England watered him with champagne and flattery. They affected to ridicule Saturnin in front of him, to diminish his merits while simultaneously exalting those of “the irresistible Makako.” Colonel Makako smiled, and responded to these interested discourses with approving grunts in the rustic and not-very-gracious language of the highland monkeys 38 of Borneo.

  In the space of a few months, Colonel Makako had become entirely hostile to Farandoul, and above all to General Mandibul, whose orders he received with anger and ill-will. Like a General prepared for pronunciamentos,39 he was only waiting for an opportunity to raise the flag of rebellion, along with partisans he counted on within the general staff, found among those who had been corrupted by a taste for finery, hatred for discipline or the abuse of strong liquor.

  This is how things stood on one fine morning, after 15 months of occupation, when news spread through Melbourne that an English fleet had been encountered at sea by two Farandoulian ships, only one of which had been able to escape, thanks to the skill of her quadrumane crew. It was true enough, and while the rumor spread through Melbourne, Farandoul gave the final orders for a rapid consolidation of the army.

  The English fleet had been sighted off Point Campbell. One of the Farandoulian vessels had escaped, as we have said; the other, whose line of retreat was cut off, had engaged the enemy in violent combat. This heroic ship was the Young Australia,40 a sloop with a dozen cannon, commanded by Captain Jonathan Butterfield, a bimane of American origin recruited to the quadrumane cause.

  Five large English frigates, the Devastation, the Warrior, the Terror, the Devorous and the Carnivorous 41 attacked the little Young Australia, deluging her with fire and steel. Jonathan Butterfield, standing fast on his quarterdeck, sailed dead ahead towards the monstrous armor-plated English ships; his courageous crew, comprising only 60 or so monkeys and a few bimane engineers, displayed a heroism worthy of classical antiquity.

  The enemy’s fireballs having started a fire between the sloop’s decks, the quadrumanes fastened her to the Carnivorous wit
h grappling-hooks, without deigning to respond to the English signals. The blazing fire made rapid progress, but the monkeys had already quit the sloop and were playing havoc on the bridge of the Carnivorous. When the Young Australia finally blew up, carrying a part of the English frigate with her, the last monkeys who had taken refuge in the topsails of the Carnivorous were still defending themselves.

  Two days after the battle, the English fleet was in sight of Port Philip, and the rapidly-deployed Farandoulian army occupied all the coastal defenses. A state of siege having been declared, a proclamation urged the population to remain calm, the Farandoulian army being sufficient to ensure the security of the province.

  Unfortunately, grave symptoms of insubordination had manifested themselves within the army. Some regiments were grumbling, others were demanding additional distributions of liquid rations. Colonel Makako’s corps was the most conspicuous of all for its bad attitude and its whining.

  General Mandibul, who had remained in Melbourne to maintain order, was astonished by the sloppiness of Makako’s service as chief of staff, while Makako visited the drawing-rooms of Melbourne with increasing frequency.

  On the evening of the brilliant naval battle of Point Campbell, a grand soirée was given in his honor by an old bimane civil servant; Makako and a few of his officers were received there with a veritable ovation, which enraptured their vanity.

  One of those femmes fatales for whom historians are, alas, always seeking at the bottom of every great catastrophe, entered the lists in order to tip the balance definitively in favor of England. Lady Arabella Cardigan, an English spy of the most ravishing beauty, made her entrance on the scene. She was newly arrived from Europe with precise ministerial instructions, and her lovely eyes had a devastating effect on the quadrumane general staff, already weakened by the repeated efforts of English agents. Her beauty caused every head to turn as she crossed the room in a regal manner to embrace the host.