The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  The love that unites Joson and Geneviève is strange. It justifies the description Aunt Line gave in emerging from the crypt after their private session with the relics of Sarah-la-Noire: “They had the faces of saints.”

  With a common accord, in fact, and with the joy of the elect, sure that their ecstasy will have no end, they have resolved only to be married out there in the Jerusalem of the finally-resuscitated desert.

  Yvernaux comes and goes between Kairnheûz and Paris. He is avid to contemplate their ecstasy, and avid too for the displaced state in which he immerses himself delightedly at the Brasserie des Temps-Nouveaux. Unable to give up either the mystical intoxication or the other, he does not neglect either, and divides himself equitably between them.

  His two apostles, the Comtois mage and the Scandinavia Nietzschean, find an increasing savor of genius in his divagations. They still do not know who Geneviève is. They are still trying to figure it out from the formulae with which Yvernaux salutes her with ejaculatory prayers at the beginning of his Magnificat. They have ended up admitting that she is an imaginary being, a chimera, in whom their master incarnates his most transcendental ideas. And that is why they attach a symbolic meaning to his ideas, never seeking to penetrate the simple meaning, and thus missing the extremely curious and significant revelations that the suddenly-clear and highly scientific speech of the poor fellow sometimes let slip, in the bosom of fuliginous claptrap, as they take him home, staggering, muttering and monosyllabilizing, amid hiccups of images, and with the gestures of a madman understood by the stars.

  From these rare and illuminating revelations, extracting them from the ambient darkness like gems from their matrix, it has been possible, without them being aware of it themselves and without Yvernaux being able to find fault with it, to compose a kind of diamond key, by means of which a clever mind would not be unable to open a tiny crack in the strong-box in which Geneviève enclose her secret.

  Of that key, not cunningly filched but forged with patience and imagination, we shall make a gift here to our patient readers, as a token of our gratitude

  That which is called “radioactivity,” which Dr. Gustave Le Bon attributes to the dematerialization of matter, that force whose reserves are of an infinite richness, that impulse to diffusion which is the opposite of—which is to say, according to Heraclitus, identical to—the impulse of concentration, is the force that liberates Geneviève’s alerion, which is a “miniature comet.”

  “And there are only two forces, in the All,” Yvernaux concludes. “Eros, Eris; Love, Hate; Unconscious, Conscious; Faith, Science; Heart, Reason.”

  Thus speaks the worthy Yvernaux, when one is able to collect, little by little, every number and letter in his metaphysical equations, like flowers passing by in the eddies of a torrent. And it is not him, in sum, who concludes in that fashion, but it is one for him. Similarly, we shall have the audacity to attribute to him this final summary, in which the thousand scattered facets of his thought have been, as it were, mosaicized, in such a way as to composed a single piece with only one inclusion (not counting, he would say, the exclusions).

  “Yes, heart and reason—those two enemies of which Pascal wrote: ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ Except, sometimes, all the same, they understand one another and melt into one another. That’s when the unconscious and the conscious kiss one another on the lips. And then, genius is born. And then, creation is born. And then, Being is born.”

  To which Aunt Line, if she listened to that “nonsense” to the end, would condense their import, in her own fashion, more simply, and without being any more stupid for that:

  “Because, you see, a feather is never more than a feather, and it needs at least two, amon, to make a Wing.”

  Afterword

  There is a sense in which questions deliberately left unanswered at the end of a text are, by that token, essentially unanswered, and thus beyond the grasp, if not the reach, of inquiry—but the temptation to address them remains strong nevertheless. The question of what Geneviève mans by “radioactive aviation” and how her new engine actually works is presumably unanswered because Jean Richepin simply did not know and could not come up with anything that might look like a plausible explanation; the hints given in the text are not only vague and murky but rather inconsistent. There is, however, no harm in trying to cast a little light into that obscurity with the aid of hindsight.

  The hints given in the opening sequence of the novel, relating to the abolition of weight by using the tangential effects of rapid rotation to neutralize gravitational attraction, are suggestive of some kind of antigravity device, but we hear no more of that. Some of the subsequent jargon refers to the potential exploitation of “telluric currents,” but the meaning of that phrase seems somewhat elastic; initially it seems to refer to induced currents derivative of the Earth’s magnetic field, but in the final chapter that meaning seems to broaden out to embrace physical currents at sea and in the air, and seismic “currents”—although it is possible that Richepin is implying an underlying electromagnetic causality to all those phenomena, just as he does to the psychic phenomena of telepathy and eroticism. What does seem to be clear, however, is that the alerion’s engine is triggered and controlled by some kind of radio broadcast sent from a ground-station, and that the engine is enabled by that transmission to draw power from its environment, in a fashion dependent on ambient conditions.

  The term “radioactive” inevitably suggests the unleashing of atomic power to the modern eye, and it seems probable, given that Richepin seems to have at least glanced at Gustave le Bon’s L’Évolution de la matière (1905), that he construes it the same way. It seems likely, therefore, that what the alerion is drawing from its immediate environment is the power of atomic disintegration, activated by means of the radio signals transmitted from the ground. Given the title of Gasguin’s second paper, whose specific subject is the wireless transmission of force, and given that the theory has already been tested in one application, it might be the case that the ground-station is actually transmitting the motive power (a notion used in other scientific romances of the period), but nothing in the text suggests a specific link between the alerion and that paper.

  However the alerion’s power is derived, the question of how that power is then adapted to achieve flight is also unclear. It would be presuming too much to envisage some kind of rocket, but it might be permissible, in spite of the silence of the later text with respect to what was said at the beginning, that some kind of weight-nullification is involved, removing the necessity for lift-providing wings. The general tenor of the text, in addition to its evocations of “telluric currents,” suggests that some kind of magnetic, or quasi-magnetic, propulsion might be involved, and nullification of the craft’s weight would certainly make it more easily movable by means of energy derived from the Earth’s magnetic field or other ambient natural forces.

  There is one corollary to this question that is slightly intriguing, and that is the issue of why Geneviève became frightened by the prospect of completing her research on the alerion, only being able resume work on it by courtesy of Joson’s moral support. If the internal chronology deduced from the various footnoted hints is correct, then Geneviève is unlikely to have read L’Évolution de la matière herself at that stage in the story, and therefore could not have read the wry prediction made by Le Bon—in a passage that made a significant impression on more than one French writer of speculative fiction—that the first person to solve the problem of releasing the energy locked up in atoms more rapidly than the slow natural trickle recently revealed by the discovery of radium would undoubtedly advertize that discovery by blowing himself (or herself) up. She is, however, equipped with psychic powers, and might well have been able to attain a similar prophetic anxiety on her own account.

  If the indications of the various psychic powers distributed in the plot are reliable, however—and Richepin does not seem to want us to doubt the destiny implicit in
the blood of the Hescheboix—then any such explosions will not prevent the advent of the alerion and its power-source from bringing about the revolution in human affairs whose Messiah (seemingly in a slightly more-than-merely-metaphorical sense) Geneviève-Joson is. Obviously, the New Age in question is dawning in a world parallel to our own deprived history, in which no fateful invasion of Thiérache by nomads from Central Asia ever occurred, and the alerion therefore remained undiscovered (and probably, we ought to admit, undiscoverable).

  If the possible direct relevance of the subject-matter of Gasguin’s second paper to the alerion remains unclear, there is no doubt at all about that paper’s provision of the basis for “electrical fertilization,” which is explicitly stated. It is specifically stated, too, that the effects of the broadcast power take effect via some kind of electrolytic process—which is to say, a chemical process triggered by electricity. Logically, that process must produce water, which is, by definition, what arid soils lack. If the water in question were derived from the atmosphere, the technique would be of limited use in real deserts—though not, perhaps, in the Crau—so the likelier contingency is that the reaction takes place within the soil, releasing water from some inorganic source of hydrogen and oxygen. Exactly how that might be achieved is unclear, but given that it can, in the parallel world of the novel, it seems not improbable that some similar kind of electrolysis—perhaps producing hydrogen rather than water—might be involved in the operation of the alerion. Either way, one might expect the general method to have many other transformative applications in addition to electrical fertilization, perhaps of a range greater than the alchemists of old ever dared to dream: the dawn of a New Age in no uncertain terms, and something else that the physics of our own world has forbidden to us.

  There are, of course, other questions left unanswered in the text, but they are less interesting in terms of the potential speculations they invite, and there is probably only one that warrants further comment: Did Joson kill his father? Presumably, we need not wonder whether his father really was his father, given his mother’s character and the apparent effects of heredity, in spite of what the local story-tellers hinted, so we may take it for granted that, if he had had a hand in Comte Adrian’s death, it really would have been a parricidal hand. Given that the devout Joson evidently thinks, however, while contemplating suicide, that he will only be damned if he pulls the trigger, we may surely deduce that he is not carrying any substantial burden of guilt in his conscience. The answer, therefore, is surely no—that Comte Adrian’s death really was a bizarre accident, brought about by his own carelessness. It is not obvious why the notional author takes so much trouble to imply otherwise, but he might simply be jealous of Joson’s virtue.

  We readers should, at any rate, be glad that we can be quite sure, in spite of the notional author’s snide hints, of Joson’s innocence of murder; otherwise, Geneviève and Joson’s joint endeavor, driven by their alloyed soul, would have been tainted with an original sin considerably more serious than taking a bite out of an illicitly-picked apple—and what kind of augury would that be for the dawning New Age? Who among us, after all, could take any pleasure from the suspicion that the world within the text might end up as catastrophically damned as our own shabby Hand-Me-Down Age, in which all we have in our hour of need is half a hirondelle?

  Notes

  1 Translated as “The Metaphysical Machine” in the Black Coat Press anthology News from the Moon, ISBN 978-1-932983-89-0.

  2 Translated in a Black Coat Press edition as The Human Arrow, ISBN 9781612270456.

  3 The Belgian playwright and librettist Francis de Croisset, born Franz Wiener, married Marie-Thérèse, the widow of the banking heir Maurice Bischoffsheim, in 1910.

  4 The Russian biologist Élie Metchnikoff, who joined the Pasteur Institute in 1888; he won the Nobel Prize in 1908.

  5 i.e., a native of Franche-Comté, a province in eastern France.

  6 In French, biplane is biplan, which permits the wordplay on rataplan [an onomatopoeic representation of a drum roll] and other improvised portmanteau words involving the syllable plan, which become awkward when switching languages, even though one double meaning of “plane” survives.

  7 The only bits of Yvernaux’s Greek of which I can make sense are the Heraclitean maxim Panta rei [everything flows] and the nickname o skotinos, although its usual renderings as “the Obscure” or “the Dark One” are a trifle ambiguous; I have preferred “the Gloomy One” because it fits better with his other famous nickname, “the Weeping Philosopher.”

  8 A T-shaped walking-stick or shepherd’s crook, with a slightly curved handle, is sometimes known in France as a tau (masculine gender), by analogy with the Greek letter, and the word can be applied to a person by analogy with the stick. I have retained Richepin’s To, although that Oriental syllable is nowadays more often rendered as Tao.

  9 Yvernaux is confusing two of the items of Archimedes’ fame: the Archimedean screw, which was a device for pumping water, and the philosopher’s remark about being able to move the world if he had a lever long enough, a fulcrum and a place to stand. The “error” is repeated, and is evidently deliberate.

  10 A woman who reached the age of 25 without finding a husband was long said, in France, to have coiffé Sainte-Catherine [coiffed Saint Catherine], the phrase deriving from an obsolete custom by which unmarried women made head-dresses with which to adorn statues of the saint in churches.

  11 The expression “to have an ox on one’s tongue”—meaning to be speechless—is found in the work of several Greek writers, and was probably a common expression in Athens. Sophocles uses it in Oedipus rex.

  12 Joseph Grasset (1849-1918) was one of several contemporaries of Sigmund Freud to develop an alternative theory of the unconscious. As the present text observes, he characterized the unconscious as “polygonal” (i.e., multifaceted) while supposing that the conscious mind has smoothed out its problematic angles, becoming a “circular” O self. Grasset was very interested in “psychic research,” and attempted to extrapolate the theory of the polygonal unconscious to account for the various phenomena associated with mediumistic performances—an endeavour that inevitably led to his permanent exile from the historical record of scientific psychology.

  13 The question of what Pascal actually meant by the advice “abêtissez-vous” [“brutalize yourself,” “be stupid” or perhaps “stop thinking”] remains controversial, all the more so because it was advice that he certainly did not seem to take himself.

  14 Although we now know that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, many 19th century anthropologists placed the origin of the species in Central Asia.

  15 The family name Hescheboix is suggestive of “woodcutters.” The two argot terms used to describe them are approximately similar to such English appellations as “vagabonds,” “gypsies” or “tramps,” routinely used with similar contempt.

  16 Even the non-dialect form of this argot term is absent from the dictionary, but it relationship with merlifiches, and the fact that the Latin gaude signifies delight, probably allow its meaning to be inferred. The literal significance of the hypothetical place-name is “Rotten Pasture.”

  17 I have not attempted to simulate the eye-dialect employed in the representation of this lyric, but have simply reproduced its approximate meaning. If Buire were a common noun, it would refer to an antique drinking-vessel.

  18 As with the other fictitious place names in the text, Liesse has a meaning as a common noun, roughly equivalent to “merriment.”

  19 The students of the École Polytechnique are known as X’s.

  20 This phrase does not appear to be a standard Latin expression, although the two latter terms crop up frequently in other contexts, referring to elegant mastery of other subjects than Latin.

  21 Again, this argot term is unknown to available dictionaries, but it probably derives either from a diminutive of chat [cat] or a variant of the chatouiller [to tickle]. A more intriguing possibility, however
, is that it might derive from Catalauni, a Latin name applied to a Gallic tribe from a region adjacent to Thiérache. Attila’s Huns were defeated in that region in a battle that turned the horde away from Gaul, perhaps lending some credence to the notion of an earlier invasion of a similar kind.

  22 At a later point in the text this word will be identified as a plural version of a dialect equivalent of “capharnaüm”; in literal terms, a capharnaüm was a kind of toll-booth in the Ottoman empire, but the term was used metaphorically in France as an approximate equivalent of the English “glory-hole.”

  23 This reference—echoed subsequently—recalls Aesop’s fable of the jackdaw who donned peacock’s plumage in order to show off but was undone when it came unstuck.

  24 Le Jardin des racines grecques [The Garden of Greek Roots] was a popular educational aid whose original version was compiled in the 17th century, a list of linguistic roots compiled by Claude Lancelot being integrated into verses by Louis Isaac le Maistre de Say.

  25 Golden mean

  26 Approximately, On the enlightening illustration by the obscure Heraclitus of the fact that being and nothingness are essentially the same thing.

  27 In the 19th century, the children of aristocrats were routinely handed over to wet-nurses for feeding, thus acquiring “foster-siblings” with whom they sometimes maintained unequal but close friendships.