Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  It would not have been impossible for Renard to publish anything during the war years, but it would have been extremely difficult, even if he could have obtained permission from his superior officers. Most of what was allowed to reach print during the war years, including pretentious literary work, was required to have some morale-boosting potential, and that was not easy to accomplish in the context of speculative fiction—Renard probably read J. H. Rosny aîné’s L’Enigme de Givreuse (1917), whose speculative narrative is gratuitously interrupted by an entirely irrelevant but laboriously extended sequence in which one of the protagonists sinks a German U-boat. Although the version of Un Homme chez les microbes that was eventually published incorporates some material that reflects the legacy of the war, that material could not be credited, by any stretch of the imagination, with the slightest morale-building potential. Indeed, Renard’s subsequent reflections on the war, as expressed in his fiction, strongly suggest that, in spite of his dyed-in-the-wool patriotism, he was too embittered and disillusioned ever to have been interested in writing facile propaganda.

  Renard’s prospects, once life in France began to return to normal after the war’s end and he returned to full-time literary work, were enhanced by the publication of new editions of Le Docteur Lerne, Le Voyage immobile and Le Péril bleu by L’Edition Française Illustrée, the first two in 1919 and the third in 1920. In addition, Le Péril bleu, which Renard had tried unsuccessfully to serialize in 1911, was reprinted as a feuilleton serial in advance of the new book edition, in L’Intransigéant, in 1919. All three of the reprinted books advertised new works “en preparation,” including both Un Homme chez les microbes and Les Mains d’Orlac; the new edition of Le Péril bleu added two more titles to the list, both explicitly advertised as novels: Le Maître de la lumière and L’Homme truqué. These works might still have been in the planning stage, but the likelihood is that he had begun work on both of them, and might even have finished a version of at least one of them.

  These publication plans, like those Renard had made immediately before the war, went sadly awry. L’Intransigeant did follow up its serialization of Le Péril bleu with a feuilleton version of Les Mains d’Orlac (May-July 1920), which was reprinted in book form by Nilson in 1921, but only one of the three scientific romances named, L’Homme truqué (tr. as “The Doctored Man”) made a relatively prompt appearance, and that was in a seemingly-truncated form. It appeared as a novella in the March 1921 issue of Je Sais Tout and was subsequently reprinted as the title-piece of a collection issued by Georges Crès in the same year. When Jean Ray interviewed Renard in 1923, the latter told him that Un Homme chez les microbes, presumably by then in its fourth version, was scheduled for publication in October of that year, but it did not materialize. Le Maître de la lumiére (tr. as The Master of Light) did not see the light of day until L’Intransigeant serialized a recently-rewritten novel of that title in 1933, and that was only reprinted in book form posthumously, in 1947.

  The reasons for this second derailment of Renard’s publishing plans were undoubtedly complicated, and are now difficult to determine, but some insight into his own feelings and calculations can be obtained from two further essays he wrote about the new genre in which his ambitions had formerly been concentrated. In “Depuis Sinbad” (tr. in volume four of this series as “Since Sinbad”), which he wrote at Jean Ray’s request following the 1923 interview for publication in L’Ami des livres, he reidentified the genre as “romans et contes parascientifiques” [parascientific fiction] and declared, resentfully, that it was already an endangered species, both Wells and Rosny having virtually given up on it, in despair of finding a sympathetic audience. In “Le Roman d’hypothèse” (tr. in volume four as “Hypothetical Fiction”), published in A.B.C. in 1928, he invented yet another new label and showed himself even more bitterly resentful, declaring that the French were innately unsympathetic to such endeavors, and that the English-language audience (America included) was little better, leaving any possibility of a fruitful future in the sole care of the German audience. By that time, of course, his own ambitions in that regard had been dead and buried for some time, and the belated publication of a version of Un Homme chez les microbes that was probably severely abridged, and could no longer be regarded as the masterpiece of imaginative fiction that he had originally conceived it to be, was probably meager comfort—which was, presumably why he had it advertised as the “fifth edition,” in commemoration of the earlier publication attempts he had presumably made in 1908-9, 1913, 1919 and 1923.

  One highly significant factor in the extirpation of Renard’s ambitions, and those of scientific marvel/parascientific/ hypothetical fiction in general, was that the brief fashionability of Wellsian scientific romance—which had already been somewhat on the wane before the Great War, as publishers realized that many readers found it too alien for easy reading—was virtually wiped out by the conflict. The experience of war concentrated minds very forcefully on the vicissitudes of the immediate and the material, at the expense of the imaginative and the hypothetical, and its legacy lasted for at least a decade afterwards in both France and England. Although British scientific romance made a slow recovery, enjoying a new flicker of energetic endeavor and modest commercial success after 1930, its French equivalent remained somewhat longer in the doldrums.

  Ironically, as Renard observed, it was in Germany, the European nation worst affected by the war, that utter despair with present circumstances boosted exaggerated hope for future possibilities based on new technologies, and the fortunes of propagandistic fiction associated with those hopes. Hindsight now allows us to see, however, that Renard was quite wrong about America, where the seeds of a revolution had already been sown in 1928, and where the term “science fiction” was to be invented a year later (replacing the earlier “scientifiction”), eventually to take root so firmly that, when France was flooded with American cultural products after World War II, it was the borrowed American label that was eventually to catch on where all of Renard’s suggestions had conspicuously failed.

  A more specific legacy of the war, associated with the extraordinarily rapid advancement of technologies of destruction, had considerably darkened attitudes to technological innovation. Before the war, the development of the automobile and the advent of winged aircraft had seemed to many observers—including Renard—to be a marvelous adventure, extending the range of human capability in a positive fashion, but the development of aircraft as fighters and bombers, and the development of automobiles into tanks, not to mention the military deployment of high explosives and poison gases, set the march of science in a very different light. To many people, technological “progress” now seemed to be an inherently destructive and potentially apocalyptic process, and a kind of fiction whose very definition, in Renard’s version, was the extrapolation of “scientific marvels” inevitably suffered the toxic effects of that antipathy. Indeed, such marvels—like other marvels before them—took on a distinct suspicion of diabolism, which was rapidly dramatized in the months following the war’s end by the publication of Albert Robida’s bloodcurdling account of L’Ingénieur Von Satanas (1919). Renard had already taken the trouble to dismiss Robida from his conceptualization of scientific marvel fiction—along with Jules Verne—but that hardly mattered; the 1920s in war-battered France were inevitably inhospitable to scientific marvel fiction, and implacably hostile to Renard’s attempt to pick up his literary ambitions at the point at which he had put them into cold storage.

  Before the war, Renard had been financially well-placed to weather rejection, although he was clearly upset by his failure to find a publisher for Un Homme chez les microbes; afterwards, he simply could not afford to do that anymore, and his continuing failure to produce a publishable version of that novel was costly in a literal as well as a spiritual sense. The fact that Le Maître de la lumière was in the same genre as Un Homme chez les microbes, but similarly did not sell, even though it was probably planned in a melodramatic mode much mor
e similar to Le Péril bleu, clearly had a profound influence on his future plans. Effectively, he had given up on scientific marvel fiction completely by the end of 1921. The versions of Un Homme chez les microbes and Le Maître de la lumière that eventually appeared had obviously been recently rewritten, but they were essentially rescue attempts, desperately recycling work already done, and the latter was so far removed from his initial conceptualization of the genre that he would not have admitted it in 1909 as a relevant enterprise.

  Renard did include a handful of stories with speculative content among the horror stories and contes cruels that he began to turn out in some profusion for periodicals in the 1920s, but there was not a spark of originality in any of them; the purest of them are content to recapitulate themes he had investigated before. His poignant account of “L’Homme qui voulait être invisible” (1923; tr. as “The Man Who Wanted to be Invisible”), which is perhaps the best story he wrote in the second phase of his career, is a calculatedly nostalgic piece that can be read as a kind of fond farewell to his earlier passion. His name did appear on one more previously-unadvertised novel in the genre—Le singe, serialized in L’Intransigeant in 1924, reprinted by Crès in 1925 and translated into English as Blind Circle—but that was probably a revision commissioned by the newspaper’s literary editor of a work originally penned by the writer with whom he shared its by-line, Albert Jean. The relative success of Le singe—which is a thriller that uses a scientific marvel, rather awkwardly, as a deus ex machina—by comparison with his own much-superior scientific marvel novels, might well have caused Renard more bitterness than pleasure.

  Fortunately for him, Renard’s disillusionment with his post-war prospects as a writer of scientific marvel fiction was countered by the commercial and critical success of his mystery novel Les Mains d’Orlac, which remains his most famous work. That too has a scientific marvel component, in that it deals with the grafting of a new pair of hands on to the wrists of an injured concert pianist, but the device is used simply as a premise to set up a highly ingenious and magnificently paranoid thriller. The novel was translated into English as The Hands of Orlac and filmed twice, the first time in Germany in 1925—a movie that became one of the key works of German expressionist cinema—and the second time in the USA, as Mad Love, in 1935. That success opened up a new literary career path to Renard, which he followed determinedly, if perhaps not entirely gladly.

  Even within its own context, however, the success of Les Mains d’Orlac might have seemed to be something of a double-edged sword. The novel is an archetype of a previously-fugitive subgenre of mystery stories, in which seemingly-inexplicable events of a horrific nature are eventually provided with a surprising but triumphantly rational explanation. Its success inevitably created a context of demand that urged Renard to produce more work capable of reproducing the same impact, but the downside of that particular subgenre is that the trick is almost impossible to repeat once an expectation has been established; its occasional formularization, as in the American “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s and the animated TV series Scooby-Doo, readily demonstrates that it quickly comes to seem tedious and silly once its consumers know how the formula works. Renard could not simply do more of the same, and he had to bring all his very considerable ingenuity to bear on the construction of crime stories that retained a similar offbeat gloss while not re-treading the same ground. It is not entirely surprising that he never quite duplicated its impact, and that his crime novels, like his short horror stories, became increasingly weary as they gradually slid in the direction of insipid formularization. He remained a highly-skilled literary craftsman, but there is an evident sense—graphically illustrated by the eventually-published version of Le Maître de la lumière—in which, no matter how cleverly he crafted his works, his heart was not really in them.

  It is arguable that the most significant achievement of Renard’s craftsmanship, between 1922 and 1936, was his mastery of a literary form that is deceptively difficult: the ultra-short story. While a good deal of fiction was still published in newspapers, there was a considerable demand for short pieces in the range between 750 and 1,500 words: a range that permits very little in the way of ideative development, although it is hospitable to various kinds of “twists in the tail”, including those characteristic of contes cruels. Renard became an expert in the construction of that sort of story, almost all his works of that nature falling into the grey area where crime fiction and horror fiction overlap. Although the first version of L’Invitation à la peur (Cres, 1926), which followed up the collection of three novellas titled for L’Homme truqué, features longer stories, his subsequent collections of original material, Le Carnaval du mystère (Cres, 1929) and Celui qui n’a pas tué (Cres, 1932) mostly consist of these ultra-short stories, and he published many more that were not collected in book form, including a long series begun in 1936 for Le Matin, collectively entitled (unoriginally) “Les Mille et un matins.” Although he used speculative motifs in some of these stories—including a handful reprinted in volume four of this series—they mostly serve to illustrate the difficulty of so doing, and they are all imbued with a curious nostalgia, which presumably reflects his wistful awareness of what he might have been able to do with the ideas, if only he had been given the opportunity.

  Renard married again following his divorce, although little mention is made in available sources about that second marriage. He died after undergoing a surgical operation at Rochefort on November 18, 1939, without having seen the advent of French “science-fiction” and the belated growth of the audience that would eventually recognize him as the great pioneer he had aspired to be, establishing at least two of his scientific marvel novels as classic precursors of that field of enterprise.

  The translation of “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont” included herein was made from a collection published in Brussels by Gramma in 1994, in which it is the title story. The translation of Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu was initially made from the version contained in the omnibus Maurice Renard: Romans et Contes Fantastiques, published by Robert Laffont in 1990, but the second draft was made in consultation with the 1919 edition issued by L’Édition Française Illustrée, which facilitated the correction of several typos contained in the Laffont version. The translation of “Du Roman merveilleux-scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progrès” was made from the version reprinted in the Laffont omnibus.

  Brian Stableford

  MONSIEUR DUPONT’S VACATION

  For Henry Davray1

  Preface

  Make no mistake—in writing this account I am not attempting any sort of scientific work. I’m a very simple man: a tradesman, Victor Dupont, of Brown & Co., makers of sewing-machines and bicycles, whose shop is on the Boulevard de Sebastopol and whose workshop is in Levallois-Perret. Chance has made me the sole witness of events worthy of interest—in my opinion—and I shall describe them as best I can.

  I say this in order to avoid my modest notions being treated by superior minds as pretentious superficialities, and by ordinary people as inaccessible esoterica. In all probability, the former will deplore my ignorance; a scientist would be able to recount more closely observed facts in more exact terms. The latter, on the contrary, being badly educated or partisans of easy reading, will doubtless regret my scientific interests and the employment of the few technical terms they have allowed me to retain.

  To the former, I say: “I am what I am, and have not had the leisure to spend years rendering myself erudite in order to write the history of half a year, which will doubtless be my one and only literary work.” To the others, I shall simply observe that one cannot describe unusual objects in commonplace language, and that I did not choose those to which I have to refer.

  I.

  On the morning of March 25, 1900 I got dressed in my little bachelor apartment on the third floor, above our retail outlet in the Boulevard de Sebastopol. In accordance with a habit of 20 years standing, I intended to spend Sunday outdoors, wi
th my associate, Brown.

  Brown is English. His name is highly esteemed in the judgment of society, and his person is similarly esteemed as the head of a business enterprise. While I occupy myself with commerce, properly speaking, Brown specializes in the direction of the workshops. Without him, I admit, the business would go rapidly downhill, for I have a horror of sewing-machines and bicycles, although forced to live amid such devices—but Brown keeps me going and I always put his advice into practice, for I find it to be fundamentally very sound. He gives me advice for every circumstance; I also owe it to his influence that I take a little exercise every week and that I am writing these lines today. Privately, he might hold me in some slight disdain. When we go out into the suburbs, he reproaches me for being a poet, although I do not think I merit that label. I love Nature, that’s all—but he sees nothing in the sinuous contours of hills but graphic lines and fantastic diagrams. To turn the metaphor around, he is the inverse of a poet, and so, because I resemble him as little as possible, that is what he calls me.

  His apartment is next door to mine. Like me, Brown is a bachelor.

  That morning, I was in no hurry to get dressed, because I had something to tell my neighbor that he did not expect, and I was wondering how he would take the news. Finally, I was ready to do it; it was necessary.