The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  Henri Austruy

  The Petitpaon Era

  and Other stories

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  THE LAND OF HUMANIA 9

  THE PETITPAON ERA 53

  MIELLUNE 218

  THE REPUBLICAN JUNGLE 270

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 300

  Introduction

  This is the second of three volumes of translations of the fantastic fiction of Henri Austruy; the first is The Eupantophone and Other Stories, which contains, in addition to the title story, “The Tavern,” “The Statue” and “The Castle,” and the third is The Olotelepan and Other Stories, which contains, in addition to the title story, “A Samsara” and “Master Flaver’s Revelation.” The introduction to the first volume contains a full account of Austruy’s literary career, and the few details of his biography that are presently accessible.

  L’Ère “Petitpaon” ou La Paix universelle, here translated as “The Petitpaon Era; or, World Peace,” was originally published by Louis Michaud in an undated edition released in 1906. (The Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue mistakenly gives the date as 1908, but it was reviewed in the Mercure de France in 1906 and the advertisements at the back of the book are all for 1906 titles.) It was Austruy’s second novel, following L’Eupantophone (tr. in L’Eupantophone and Other Stories), which Ernest Flammarion had published a year earlier, following its serialization in 1904 in the Nouvelle Revue. “Le Pays d’Humanie,” here translated as “The Land of Humania” was published in three parts in the Nouvelle Revue in September-October 1902. “Miellune” was published in three parts in the same publication in August-September 1908. “La Jungle républicaine,” here translated as “The Republican Jungle,” appeared there in three parts in November-December 1919, under the pseudonym “Diogene Anonymus.”

  “Le Pays d’Humanie” is the neatest and most effective of Austruy’s Symbolist allegories, and brought that earnest phase of his career to an end; all of his subsequent works were satirical comedies, albeit of a rather black hue. L’Ère “Petitpaon” is perhaps the blackest of them all in its concluding section, reflecting an anger in its fierce sarcasm that faded away thereafter, perhaps expended and perhaps suppressed for reasons of diplomacy. The novel evidently set out to be controversial, and to give offense in certain quarters, and might have succeeded rather too well for the author’s career prospects.

  The preliminary material in the Michaud volume lists another book as “en préparation,” entitled Les Joies de la Vie et de la Mort, but it never appeared, and Austruy never published anything else thereafter outside the pages of the Nouvelle Revue, He was the editorial secretary of that publication from 1901 to 1913, when he took over as editor-in-chief—and presumably its owner—for the remainder of the periodical’s life, and, it appears, his own. Both disappeared within weeks of the German occupation of Paris in August 1940. Given that Austruy’s regular articles on foreign affairs in its pages had been uncompromisingly harsh in their treatment of Adolf Hitler ever since the Nazis took control of the German government, Austruy’s name must have been close to the top of the Gestapo’s hit list of potential targets for suppression and reprisal.

  From the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, L’Ère “Petitpaon” seems harmless enough in its assault on the supposedly-evil triple alliance of Capital, Catholicism and the military establishment, especially in view of the fact that its treatment of the far left tendency in the French parliament is also rather scathing. It undoubtedly ruffled feathers at the time of its publication, however, although not in the productive fashion of generating loud publicity and increased sales. The book appears to have been largely ignored, in fact; the only review preserved on gallica is a very brief notice in the Mercure de France, once the chief organ of the Symbolist Movement, which carefully refrains from stressing its satirical aspects. By virtue of its pacifism as well as its humor, the novel invites comparison with the fantasies of Albert Robida, but its illustrations—by Lobel Riche—are considerably more mundane than Robida’s, who would certainly have made a great deal more of the two perverse battles fought in the course of the plot, the second replaying Waterloo on a much grander and ultimately more tragic scale. Its prose, however, it can easily stand comparison with Robida, and so can its wit; although the greater savagery of its sarcasm would not have been to everyone’s taste at the time, that aspect of the work has worn well.

  The satire in L’Ère “Petitpaon” has some striking touches of grotesquerie, but that was an aspect of Austruy’s work that was still in development at the time, and it comes out much more forcefully in “Miellune,” which moves from a relatively staid commencement to extremes of surreal bizarrerie that are quite remarkable. Austruy must have been well aware of the directions in which some his contemporary ex-Symbolists were moving, and presumably observed the proto-surrealist elements in the work of Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire with some interest. He does not appear to have had much sympathy as an editor for that kind of work, and was far less hospitable to the work of Symbolists and ex-Symbolists than his predecessors as editor-in-chief of the Nouvelle Revue had been—perhaps ungratefully, given that it was presumably his Symbolist credentials that first attracted the attention of P.-B. Gheusi, who bought “La Statue” and “Le Château” before hiring him as editorial secretary—but as an author he retained a strong attachment to the grotesque, and “Miellune” is one of the two works, the other being “La Révélation de Maître Flaver,” in which he gave it fullest rein.

  “La Jungle républicaine” is also an exercise in the theater of the absurd, but the fact that it is brought back from an imaginary location to the world of Parisian politics forbids it to go to the extreme of “Miellune”—and, indeed, even to go to the political extreme achieved by the futuristic L’Ère “Petitpaon,” the whole point of the story being to poke fun at the apparent inability of the contemporary system of government to contrive any significant change at all. The theme of the story, involving anxiety in the face of possible ecocatastrophe caused by soil erosion, has helped it retain a certain relevance into the twenty-first century, although its anticipatory acumen is not tested by any attempt to map social change in response to the challenge.

  In between the publication of “Miellune” and “La Jungle républicaine” the Great War was fought; Austruy, born in 1871, was too old to be mobilized, and he spent the war at the helm of La Nouvelle Revue, helping as best he could to maintain morale with his regular editorial feature on “Paris during the War.”

  The actual war must have made the black comedy of “Petitpaon warfare” described in L’Ère “Petitpaon” seem far milder than it had in 1906, and perhaps considerably less amusing, but no less pertinent. It is entirely possible that Austruy had decided to give up writing fiction in the years before the war, perhaps wounded by the fate of his second novel and his inability to follow it up, and it might well have required a new beginning for French society to prompt him to make a new beginning himself.

  Austruy never became prolific as a fiction writer, his non-fiction and his editorial work evidently taking up almost the whole of his time and energy, but his subsequent endeavors, although limited in their circulation, nevertheless justified his efforts abundantly, all of his post-war work being quietly remarkable.

  It is arguable that he never did anything else quite as remarkable in its bizarrerie as “Miellune,” but the imaginative work he put into that exceedingly strange story certainly did not go to waste. He was never as cruel again in his treatment of Churchmen as he was in “Le Pays d’Humanie” and L’Ère “Petitpaon,” but
that was probably because he saw no need to repeat himself, and felt that there was no point in flogging a horse that was dying anyway. Indeed, insofar as the allegorical component of his work is concerned, the works contained in this volume do provide, between them, a summation of sorts, while laying the foundations for subsequent endeavors of a different but no less interesting kind.

  The translation of L’Ère “Petitpaon” included herein was made from a copy of the Louis Michaud edition. The translations of the three shorter stories were made from the relevant volumes of the Nouvelle Revue reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.

  Brian Stableford

  THE LAND OF HUMANIA

  In a time not marked by any event worthy of the attention of chroniclers, a young man and a young woman left Panbiole, the capital of the celebrated land of Humania, now vanished from the map of the world.

  In the bosom of the spring night the breeze, precursor of the dawn, became excited, and the two travelers, passing the scattered houses of the extreme outskirts, went on to the road that climbed a steep slope toward the east, all the way to the distant horizon where then sun quit the earth in order to scale the high vault of the blue sky.

  At the hasty pace of pursued runaways, the young man and the young woman were marching side by side, and yet it seemed as if the woman was pulling along her companion, whom she held by the hand.

  The crowns of the trees were agitated by long frissons and the belated shadows, still prisoners of the dense foliage, escaped one by one into the light, which now poured down the slope like a torrent.

  Doubtless inconvenienced by the dazzle of the fluid avalanche, the young man bowed his head, which he sometimes tried to turn away, while his companion, her eyes intoxicated by the unfurled waves, marched with her head high, drawing to her lips the hand tenderly squeezed in her own.

  Under the caress, the man straightened his drooping shoulders, and his stride became bolder. Soon, however, as if vanquished by fatigue, he made a gesture of irremediable distress to his guide, whose high-heeled boots were sounding resolutely on the roadway.

  Then the woman, slowing her pace slightly, darted a backward glance over the man’s shoulder toward the city asleep at the foot of the steep hill, and, in a hesitant voice trembling with the fear of a response that might not be the desired response, said: “My Aiglor are you leaving some regret down there?”

  The man shivered; he seized the hand that the woman extended toward the city still buried in darkness as if it were an unexpected aid; his breast heaved violently and, lowering his eyelids, which crushed large tears beneath their lashes, he said in a faint voice: “Féliah, omnipotent queen of my heart, you know that marching in your footsteps is my sole hope, but forgive me…while bathing in the tenderness of your gaze, my eyes have lost all strength, and the cruel sun is wounding them terribly!”

  “Oh, don’t blaspheme the triumphal sun, whose noble light has passed through my eyes…my eyes, which were your joy, are frightening you now...”

  “My dear…dear…to flee Humania…to quit Panbiole… to die…but to follow you always, my eyes sunk in the radiance of your tender, infinite pupils!”

  “My lover, don’t veil with mourning the memories of the bright morning of our love. Oh, if you could know all my jealousy of that horrible city, which retains something of you in its shadow!”

  “Féliah! I swear to you upon our love that only the most indifferent of my thoughts remain down there! Féliah, my soul is entirely yours, I swear to you on my adoration of your beauty!”

  “Thank you, my Aiglor. Oh, thank you for our love…forgive me for the funereal idea that causes me anguish. I have in a horror in my heart at thought of abandoning a little of you, of you who belong to me...”

  “Yes, Féliah, all my soul is exhaled into your soul, and my entire body has fainted in the delirium of your body; the victorious sensations of your caresses have abolished my being in your being. I am no longer anything but a shadow attached forever to the splendor of your desires…but suffer, oh, suffer that my gaze should look down on Panbiole one more time, in order to carry away from that city you hate all our joy of being loved there! It’s a caprice Féliah...”

  “Aiglor, your caprice is dearer to me than my will; let us both look back at the dense darkness that our dawn will dazzle with its fires in a few minutes. On those friendly rays, let us flee the supreme reflections that the shadow of life has left in our eyes…our eyes, in which the light ought to give rise henceforth only to the eternal image of our love!”

  The young woman sits down on a large bank of grass; she draws the young man to her, who sets himself at her knees; their lips meet in a long kiss; the woman’s bosom rises and fall in a violent rhythmic movement that animates the fabric of her silver mesh corsage. The man seems paralyzed in the grip of the arms cast around his neck. Slowly, their lips separate; Feliah’s fingers are now caressing her lover’s head, which rests on her knees, and both of them gaze silently before them at the city, one of whose steeples progressively raises its rosy silhouette against the gray wall of the sky.

  “Look at the steeple of our church,” murmurs Féliah.

  “Yes…the steeple,” Aiglor repeats, mechanically.

  Suddenly, he removes the two hands placed on his temples and, getting up with a violent effort, asks in a contracted voice: “My house—where’s my house?”

  “Your house, Aiglor. Oh, for a long time yet it will be plunged in darkness; the towers and steeples of all the churches will emerge before that, and the high roofs of princely dwellings; the white mosaic terrace of my palace will appear before that, and only when the entire city is bathed in light will the humble thatch of your house form a bump in the ground, like a wreck blackening the clear mirror of the sea!”

  Motionless, Aiglor makes no reply. He turns to Féliah, but an invincible force draws his eyes in the direction of Panbiole again. The pink shadow of the steeple whitens gradually, while the confused forms around become gradually more distinct.

  As if to himself, having forgotten his companion, Aiglor says: “Poor house! You were very dear to me, though; your thatch sheltered people who loved me...my mother…my father…my brothers and sisters…oh, all the good things that I have left behind…!”

  Féliah has risen to her feet; she goes to her lover, whose words she has overheard, and in a tender voice, scarcely marked with indulgent reproach, she interrupts him.

  “Why are you talking about your mother, your father, your brothers and your sisters? Am I not your entire universe? Have I too not left, for you, a father of whom I was proud, a mother whose only joy I was? For you, have I not left a palace, a palace that the greatest people in Panbiole envied me? Is not the abandonment of my wealth worth as much as that of your poverty?”

  Aiglor extends supplicant hands toward the young woman and, as his thoughts stray, words emerge from his mouth at hazard. “Why leave Panbiole, Féliah? Why flee that life, rich in all good things of which one dreams?”

  Féliah takes her lover’s hands in hers; with a kiss she stops on his lips the regrets that are ready to expand, and while dragging him to the grassy bank she speaks to him softly.

  “Perfidious good things, Aiglor! Good things that would be the certain murderers of our love! Oh, my lover, do you believe, then, that in that city down there it’s permissible for a woman who lives in a palace to love a man whose head reposes beneath a modest roof?”

  Hands enlaced, the two lovers, huddled together, are sitting on the grassy bank; Aiglor listens in profound delight to the harmonious voice that is whispering the infinity of their tenderness in his ear.

  “We are in love, my Aiglor; is that not the only concern of our two beings? Are our hearts bound by other bonds than our love? Are our eyes made of another light than the sunshine of our joy? Aiglor, hatred is always on the lookout for love, as shadow is always on the lookout for light. Look at the sun chasing the last of the darkness away; its victorious rays will soar, for a few hours
, from the height of the glorious sky; but this evening, darkness will resume the battle, and, vanquished in its turn, the resplendent star, having bloodied its agony, will fall asleep in the impenetrable shroud of night. Aiglor, I’m shivering…I’m trembling...I can see, hidden in the folds of shadow, men who are lying in ambush for our love, like snakes lurking in the dry grass.

  Aiglor stands up abruptly; his wide open eyes are lost in the vertigo of the sunlight and his voice rings like that of a herald of victory: “Féliah, love is a holy thing and all powers break against it. Féliah, we will crush the venomous snakes under our heels!”

  For a few moments, he remains in that heroic pose, in which he seems to be defying the world. Féliah contemplates him at length, in a sort of tender admiration. Then, in her turn, she gets up and, coming to lean on her lover’s bosom, murmurs words in a voice so low that Aiglor is obliged to tilt his head in order to hear them: “Aiglor, has the thought never occurred to you that other lips than yours might press my lips? Have you ever thought that other arms might embrace me?”

  Brutally, as if to drive away a pressing danger, Aiglor seizes the young woman—but she, suspended from her lover’s neck, soothes his sudden anxiety seductively: “Let your heart be reassured, my Aiglor…of all my person, men have only brushed my fingertips, abandoned as if to domestic animals that it is necessary to retain in one’s power.”

  Slowly, Aiglor kisses his mistress’ eyes; gently, he lets her slide to the ground, and she smiles at him while he turns his gaze, full of haughty indifference, in the direction of Panbiole, which is brightening rapidly. Suddenly, his eye pauses, and fixes attentively on a white patch that grows amid the tangle of steeples and towers; his right hand points it out to his companion, whose waist he sustains with his left arm.