The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul
Page 69
88 This Vedic creation myth is borrowed from the epic poem Mahabharata.
89 Sipan is actually the name of a region, but the larger region of which it is a part, Koko Nor, was represented as notorious bandit country in the few 19th century accounts that exist of Tibet, including one by the British traveler Thomas Hungerford Holdich.
90 Robida’s illustrations make it clear that he really does mean wheelbarrows with sails, not vehicles styled like rickshaws; the driver is positioned at the rear of the vehicle, pushing it along.
91 The Taiping rebellion broke out in 1850, when Hung Siu-tsuen’s forces captured Nanking and Shanghai and attacked Peking. It was eventually put down in 1855.
92 To reach the Gobi Desert from Hupeh would require a very long detour indeed—at least 1000 miles—but here, as elsewhere, Robida’s physical geography is a trifle inexact.
93 The actual Porcelain Tower of Nanking, built in the 15th century and occasionally nominated as one of the wonders of the modern world, had been badly damaged in the Taiping Rebellion and was subsequently destroyed in 1856. It was only nine stories high, so this imaginary substitute seems to be an even finer edifice.
94 Presumably, we have to assume that the “tigers” did have the keys to Farandoul’s and Mandibul’s chains, as the intrepid duo no longer seem to be burdened by them, although Farandoul was still impeded by his when he grabbed the swords. It is not clear whether or not the barrels needed keys in order to be removed, but if they did, the tigers obviously had them in their possession.
95 I can find no evidence that this term has the meaning that Robida attaches to it, but Tankadere was the name of a ship featured in Verne’s Le Tour du monde en 80 jours.
96 The word I have translated, literally, as “sprightly,” is pimpant, whose metaphorical meaning—as is obvious from its English transliteration—enhances the obvious suggestion that the vessel is a floating brothel.
97 In Japan a miko is a female attendant at a Shinto shrine, the word originally referring to a kind of magician roughly analogous to a Greek pythoness, but there does not seem to be any significance in Robida’s use of the term as the name of a fictitious province.
98 Before its adoption into English to refer to a plutocrat, “Tycoon” was the title by which the Shogun—the Mikado’s worldlier counterpart—was represented to foreigners.
99 A Russian log cabin
100 Obviously, her rank—stripped when he allowed the mariners to escape—had been restored to her in the interim.
101 The mysterious individual who became known as “the Persian of the Opera” during the Second Empire, eventually vanishing from public view in 1868, is said to have been a political refugee by the name of Mohammed Ismael; his literary inspiration extended far beyond this brief parody, the character being borrowed more-or-less entire by Gaston Leroux in Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (available in a Black Coat Press edition).
102 Yedda, by Philippe Gille, Arnold Mortier and L. Mérante, with music by Olivier Métra, was premièred at the Opera in 1879, while Saturnin Farandoul was being serialized.
103 The Sublime Porte was the “open court” of the Sultan, in which all of the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic affairs were conducted. Like its closed counterpart, the High Porte, the institution was known to Westerners by a title that hybridized French and English terminology.
104 Henri Giffard (1825-1882) was the first French aeronaut to attempt to make balloons dirigible by attaching steam engines to them, thus tacitly providing the inspiration for all of Farandoul’s aeronautical adventures. Giffard never contrived to make dirigible airships practicable, but he was a regular exhibitor at technological expositions. His “tethered balloon” offering excursions in the air to members of the crowds at such exhibitions made its debut in London in 1869 before appearing in Paris in 1878, when it was given an enthusiastic write-up, illustrated by numerous photographs, by Giffard’s fellow aeronaut Albert Tissandier; Tissandier’s photographs are nowadays available on the internet.
105 The Open Sea (mer libre in French) is a significant feature of the polar landscape in Verne’s Les Aventures du Capiaine Hatteras (1866), in which Verne scrupulously lists all the observations by mid-19th century explorers supporting the notion that the Arctic ice-sheet was a ring rather than a solid disk.
106 Félix Orsini and three other Italians attempted to assassinate Napoléon III on January 14, 1858, employing the crude and absurdly inefficient tactic of throwing hand-held bombs at his carriage. He failed, and was executed in consequence, but the method became strangely fashionable, especially in popular fiction, where the image of the “bomb-throwing anarchist” was elevated to the status of a cliché.
107 The reader might be wondering what happened to the other three, given that eight full-sized individuals were still present a few paragraphs ago; there is, alas, no explanation of the discrepancy. Robida seems simply to have decided that three of them were surplus to the requirements of the narrative and erased them from the story.
108 Most of these Latin words support the theory that Farandoul is about to produce reasonably well. Infelix means “unlucky,” navis means “ship” and although the literal meaning of servus is “servant,” the word was also used as a greeting, after the fashion of “your humble servant,” thus being an approximate equivalent of “hello.” On the other hand, us/lus/tus is merely a set of suffixes. Robida was probably working on the assumption that many of his readers would construe polus as “pole,” but it actually means “colt” and is most familiar to the Classically-educated as a nickname attributed by Plato to a character in one of his dialogues, a pupil of the philosopher Gorgias.
109 In the course of this paragraph and the next the text jumps from reproducing the record of Mandibul’s log to the author’s customary narrative voice; this might be carelessness on the author’s part, but it seems more probable that some text is missing. The dates also become confused, as the events described in the subsequent passage take longer than the interval specified by the log entries. As this botched transition occurs on the penultimate page of an instalment, what might have happened is that the text overran and had to be brutally cut, removing the text that operated the transition between the two narrative modes. On the other hand, this instalment is one of very few occasions on which the text ended up two or three lines short of the bottom of the final page, so the relevant omission might have been accidental.
110 Initially, this description reproduces the description of the polar island featured in Verne’s Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras.
111 Papavoine was the name of a child-murderer guillotined in Paris in 1823, whose case was primarily notable because the advocate defending him entered one of the earliest pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. There is no evidence that he played the harp, but he did have an earlier namesake who composed music for that instrument. Pierre-François Lacenaire’s lasting fame was ensured by the publication in 1836 of his sensational Mémoires, which he might even have written, although fake memoirs of famous criminals were a successful popular genre at the time. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in 1861 after a series of sensational press stories alleged that he was a serial killer who had murdered numerous servant girls over an eight year period in the vicinity of Lyons, but it is doubtful that modern standards of evidence would have allowed him to be convicted even of the single murder with which he was charged..
112 From this point on, Robida’s story diverges quite sharply from that related in Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, in which the noble but obsessive Hatteras had no wife, and ended up going harmlessly mad after recklessly climbing up to the volcanic crater in order to plant the English flag on the actual North Pole. The reader will observe that the volcanic peak has mysteriously disappeared from Robida’s island, henceforth being conspicuous by its absence.
113 Robida (or his amanuensis) initially spells this name “Codjett” but subsequently reverts to the more plausible version, which I have preferred by way of unification.
114 Robida seems to have no inkling of the actual pattern of daylight and darkness in the polar regions. It is now late spring in the northern hemisphere, so the sun ought to be perpetually above the horizon, at least in part, and ought to remain so for almost the entire duration of the subsequent adventure—far from the situation that the narrative describes.
115 Curiously enough, although the etymology of the two words is quite different, the French banc and the English shoal have exactly the same double meaning, capable of referring either to a large aggregation of fish or to a sandbank, thus providing the pun on which this flamboyantly absurd narrative move is founded.
116 Hungarian point is a kind of embroidery stitch resulting in a zigzag pattern similar to the pattern employed in some parquet floors.
117 The term I have translated as “whale” here is baleine. Subsequently, the text introduces a distinction between cachalots [sperm whales]—a term I have retained, since it is also used in English—and other whales, implying that baleine ought thereafter to be construed in its narrower sense, meaning filter-feeding baleen whales. Robida still has such whales attacking the herrings, but this is far from being the worst of his offences against actual natural history.
118 The association of the Breton Sainte-Anne-d’Auray with dancing arose because the departure of Medieval pilgrimages from her principal seat of worship were allegedly celebrated with quasi-Bacchanalian partying.
119 The opera La Favorite (1840) had music by Gaetano Donizetti and a libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaez.
120 As usual, I have made a small sacrifice of accuracy in order to conserve the rhyme-scheme and approximate the scansion of Robida’s original.
121 The reference an île fortuné [Fortunate Isle] is a deliberate reference to the paradisal Fortunate Islands or Isles of the Blessed of Greek and Celtic mythology.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life
23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis
67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey
17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men
49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence
10 Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
08 Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
01 Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
51 Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
31 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
70 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega & The Shadowmen
57 Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
24 Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
55 Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
30 Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
50 André Laurie. Spiridon
52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
27-28 Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
07 Jules Lermina. Mysteryville
25 Jules Lermina. Panic in Paris
32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius
66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers
15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot
Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat
Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies
Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious
Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes
Joseph Méry. The Tower of Destiny
Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865
11 José Moselli. Illa’s End
38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
04 Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
60 Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
33 Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril
34 Maurice Renard. Doctor Lerne
35 Maurice Renard. The Doctored Man
36 Maurice Renard. A Man Among the Microbes
37 Maurice Renard. The Master of Light
41 Jean Richepin. The Wing
12 Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries
62 Albert Robida. Chalet in the Sky
69 Albert Robida. The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul
46 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Givreuse Enigma
45 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Mysterious Force
43 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Navigators of Space
48 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Vamireh
44 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The World of the Variants
47 J.-H. Rosny Aîné. The Young Vampire
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River
24 Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
09 Han Ryner. The Superhumans
20 Brian Stableford. The Germans on Venus
19 Brian Stableford. News from the Moon
63 Brian Stableford. The Supreme Progress
64 Brian Stableford. The World Above the World
65 Brian Stableford. Nemoville
42 Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
13 Kurt Steiner. Ortog
18 Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
58 C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
53 Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion (w/Octave Joncquel)
16 Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic; (w/André Blandin)
59 Théo Varlet. Timeslip Troopers
54 Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
English adaptation, introduction and afterword Copyright 2009 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2009 by Christine Clavel.
ISBN 978-1-934543-61-0. First Printing. December 2009. Published by Black Coat Press, an imprint of Hollywood Comics.com, LLC, P.O. Box 17270, Encino, CA 91416. All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The stories and characters depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Printed in the United States of America.