The ordinary helpers of the rich, the clerks, employees, brokers, and agents, preserved an unshaken fidelity. The surviving clerks of the Bank that had been blown up, made their way along the ruined streets through the midst of smoking houses to hand in their bills of exchange, and several were swallowed up in the flames while endeavouring to present their receipts.
Nevertheless, any illusion concerning the state of affairs was impossible. The enemy was master of the town. Instead of silence the noise of explosions was now continuous and produced an insurmountable feeling of horror. The lighting apparatus having been destroyed, the city was plunged in darkness all through the night, and appalling crimes were committed. The populous districts alone, having suffered the least, still preserved measures of protection. The were paraded by patrols of volunteers who shot the robbers, and at every street corner one stumbled over a body lying in a pool of blood, the hands bound behind the back, a handkerchief over the face, and a placard pinned upon the breast.
It became impossible to clear away the ruins or to bury the dead. Soon the stench from the corpses became intolerable. Epidemics raged and caused innumerable deaths, while they also rendered the survivors feeble and listless. Famine carried off almost all who were left. A hundred and one days after the first outrage, whilst six army corps with field artillery and siege artillery were marching, at night, into the poorest quarter of the city, Caroline and Clair, holding each other’s hands, were watching from the roof a lofty house, the only one still left standing, but now surrounded by smoke and flame, joyous songs ascended from the street, where the crowd was dancing in delirium.
“To-morrow it will be ended,” said the man, “and it will be better.”
The young woman, her hair loosened and her face shining with the reflection of the flames, gazed with a pious joy at the circle of fire that was growing closer around them.
“It will be better,” said she also.
And throwing herself into the destroyer’s arms she pressed a passionate kiss upon his lips.
§4
THE other towns of the federation also suffered from disturbances and outbreaks, and then order was restored. Reforms were introduced into institutions and great changes took place in habits and customs, but the country never recovered the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity. Commerce and industry dwindled away, and civilization abandoned those countries which for so long it bad preferred to all others. They became insalubrious and sterile; the territory that had supported so many millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort St. Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.
Days flowed by like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city; shepherds led their flocks upon them; labourers turned up the soil with their ploughs; gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their cabins were covered with old vines and roses, A goat-skin clothed their tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows her lover through woods or among the browsing goats while the pine trees whisper together and the water utters its murmuring sound. The master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs; he planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and he poured out wine for his neighbours saying:
“Drink! The flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.”
Then in the course of ages the wealth of the villages and the corn that filled the fields were pillaged by barbarian invaders. The country changed its masters several times. The conquerors built castles upon the hills; cultivation increased; mills, forges, tanneries, and looms were established; roads were opened through the woods and over the marshes; the river was covered with boats. The hamlets became large villages and joining together formed a town which protected itself by deep trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State, it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts and it converted them into grass-covered walks.
It grew very rich and large beyond measure. The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people; they kept on making them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in the giant town.
ANATOLE FRANCE (1844-1924), French critic, essayist and novelist (whose real name was Jacques Anatole Thibault), was born in Paris on the 16th of April 1844. His father was a bookseller, one of the last of the booksellers, if we are to believe the Goncourts, into whose establishment men came, not merely to order and buy, but to dip, and turn over pages and discuss. As a child he used to listen to the nightly talks on literary subjects which took place in his father’s shop. Nurtured in an atmosphere so essentially bookish, he turned naturally to literature. In 1868 his first work appeared, a study of Alfred de Vigny, followed in 1873 by a volume of verse, Les Poemes dores, dedicated to Leconte de Lisle, and, as such a dedication suggests, an outcome of the “Parnassian” movement; and yet another volume of verse appeared in 1876, Les Noces corinthiennes. But the poems in these volumes, though unmistakably the work of a man of great literary skill and cultured taste, are scarcely the poems of a man with whom verse is the highest form of expression.
He was to find his richest vein in prose. He himself, avowing his preference for a simple, or seemingly simple, style as compared with the artistic style, vaunted by the Goncourts—a style compounded of neologisms and “rare" epithets, and startling forms of expression—observes: “A simple style is like white light. It is complex, but not to outward seeming. In language, a beautiful and desirable simplicity is but an appearance, and results only from the good order and sovereign economy of the various parts of speech.” And thus one may say of his own style that its beautiful translucency was the result of many qualities—felicity, grace, the harmonious grouping of words, a perfect measure. Anatole France is a sceptic. The essence of his philosophy, if a spirit so light, evanescent, elusive, can be said to have a philosophy, was doubt. He was a doubter in religion, metaphysics, morals, politics, aesthetics, science—a most genial and kindly doubter, and not at all without doubts even as to his own negative conclusions. Sometimes his doubts were expressed in his own person—as in the Jardin d’epicure (1894) from which the above extracts are taken, or Le Livre de mon ami (1885), which may be accepted, perhaps, as partly autobiographical; sometimes, as in La Rotisserie de la reine Pedauque (1893) and Les Opinions de M. Jerome Coignard (1893), or L’Orme du mail (1897), Le Mannequin d’osier (1897), L’Anneau d’amethyste (1899), and M. Bergeret à Paris (1901), he entrusted the expression of his opinions, dramatically, to some fictitious character—the abbe Coignard, for instance, projecting, as it were, from the 18th century some very effective criticisms on the popular political theories of contemporary France—or the M. Bergeret of the four last-named novels, which were published with the collective title of Histoire contemporaine. This series dealt with some modern problems, and particularly, in L’Anneau d’amethyste and M. Bergeret à Paris, with the humours and follies of the anti-Dreyfusards. All this made a piquant combination. Neither should reference be omitted to his Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), crowned by the Institute, nor to works more distinctly of fancy, such as Balthasar (1889), the story of one of the Magi or Thaïs (1890), the story of an actress and courtesan of Alexandria, whom a hermit converts, but with the loss of his own soul. His ironic comedy, Crainquebille (Renaissance theatre, 1903), was founded on his novel (1902) of the same year. His later work included his anti-clerical Vie de Jeanne d'Arc (1908); his pungent satire L'Île des Pingouins (1908); and a volume of stories, Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue (1909).
Lightly as he
bore his erudition, it was very real and extensive, and was notably shown in his utilization of modern archaeological and historical research in his fiction (as in the stories in Sur une pierre blanche). As a critic he was graceful and appreciative. Academic in the best sense, he found a place in the French Academy, taking the seat vacated by Lesseps, and was received into that body on the 24th of December 1896. In the affaire Dreyfus he sided with M. Zola.
FRANK C. PAPÉ (1878 - 1972), was an English artist and book illustrator. His earliest illustrations are found in books for children from around 1908, including The Odyssey and The Pilgrim's Progress. He obtained notice with the illustrations he produced in the 1920s for a number of the books of James Branch Cabell. His success with these and other titles led to the Bodley Head commissioning illustrations by Papé for the books of Anatole France, including The Revolt of the Angels (1924) and Penguin Island (1925). Papé was also sought after as a designer of bookplates.
During the 1930s Papé’s career faltered and little book work of his is recorded after this period, although he apparently supplied illustrations to a Chicago children’s magazine in the 1940s.
A number of Papé’s original drawings, together with some of his correspondence, is preserved at Stanford University in California.
The Conquest of Space Book Series
Ron Miller
About twenty years ago I came up with a bright idea for a book. It was going to be a visual chronology of every spaceship ever conceived, starting in the third century BC. This eventually wound up being a monster called The Dream Machines (Krieger: 1993), with 250,000 words and more than 3000 illustrations. In the course of researching this thing, I found myself more and more having to locate copies of scarce books and novels. Some of these I could find in libraries or private collections, but others were available only through antiquarian booksellers (if I could find them at all). All too often, this would mean an investment of many hundreds of dollars—money I simply couldn’t afford to invest in the project. This was frustrating, since I didn’t really need to own the book, I just needed the information it contained...and I couldn’t see spending, say, $500 for the privilege of looking at a single paragraph.
I knew that other researchers have had the same problem. There were ordinary readers, too, who were looking for good reading copies of obscure books but, like me, were unwilling or unable to pay hundreds of dollars solely for the chance to read a book.
A few years ago I decided to address this problem. Of course, by that time, at least one aspect had been solved by online archives like gutenberg.org. The text of thousands of obscure and rare titles were now freely available. Still. . . this wasn’t quite the same thing as owning a book and for someone who might want a little more than the bare text, it wasn’t enough. There were also some of the necessary limitations imposed by etexts, such as their inability to handle italics, foreign characters and other typographical problems. Often missing, too, were any illustrations that may have accompanied the original book.
So I decided to set out to create a library of reprints. They would feature handsome new covers, a carefully edited text, attractive design, illustrations (where appropriate) and footnotes, appendices, etc. whenever possible. Books that bridged the gap between etexts and the original editions, books that would be easy to read, good to look at and an attractive addition to any book collector’s shelf. In addition, I tried to emphasize books that were not easy—or were even impossible—to find online. The books would also focus on a very particular theme (or two, as it turned out). The main collection consists of early books and novels that deal with space travel or rocketry. One of my motives in this activity was to illustrate how far back the concept of space travel went, to say nothing of how prescient many early writers were in anticipating everything from solar sails and rocket-powered spacecraft to spacesuits and nuclear propulsion.
I am of course, limited myself to books that are in the public domain. However, this worked out fine for me since my main interest is in books published prior to the 1930s.
II The Dreamers
Until the invention of the astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei in 1610, the heavens were thought to be no great distance from the Earth, and the Sun and the Moon were thought to be the only material bodies with which we shared the universe. Some few of the early Greek philosopher-scientists speculated on the relative distances of the sun, Moon and planets, such as Anaximander in -600. Pythagoras and Aristotle both theorized that the Moon might be spherical. But these and others were all based on quantitative measurements—little thought, if any, was given to what the Moon was. When the question was considered however, speculation knew few limits. Anaximander thought that the Moon might be a kind of fiery chariot wheel and Anaxagoras suggested that it was an incandescent solid (albeit with “plains, mountains and ravines”). But by the time Plutarch was writing, foundation for the thousand-year-long Dark Ages was being laid. During that bleak millennium the Earth was clearly the center of the universe, there were no other worlds than this one and the Moon was a perfect, pristine sphere since Providence would be incapable of creating anything less than ideal. If the Moon showed spots, these were nothing but the reflection of our own imperfect world in the Moon’s mirrorlike surface. Change and decay were limited to the Earth; the heavens were immutable and eternal. To question any of this was dangerous heresy.
Galileo’s revelation changed all of that forever. With his first observations he immediately realized that the Moon was not a pristine disk or sphere, but rather a world as imperfect as our own, with mountains, valleys, plains and hundreds of odd, circular ring mountains and craters.
The Church forced Galileo to recant his discoveries and his interpretations of them, but the damage had already been done. When human beings looked skyward they no longer saw abstract points of light. They saw the infinite possibilities of new worlds.
At the time of Galileo’s discovery of new worlds in the sky, there were new worlds being discovered right here on Earth. Scarcely more than a century earlier, the continents of North and South America had been discovered lying unsuspected and unknown on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, John and Sebastian Cabot had explored the coasts of North America for Great Britain, while the Portugese and Spanish were laying the groundwork for a vast empire in the southern continent. Between 1519 and 1522, Magellan and Del Cano made their epic voyage around the now undoubtedly spherical Earth. By the time of Galileo, hundreds of ships and thousands of explorers, colonists, soldiers, priests and adventurers had made the journey to these amazingly fertile, rich and strange new lands. Now they learned that an Italian scientist had found that not only did our own Earth harbor unsuspected worlds, but that the sky was full of them, too.
How frustrating it must have been! The new worlds of the Americas, which could not even be seen and which existed for the vast majority of Europeans only in the form of traveler’s tales and evocative if imaginative charts, nevertheless could be visited by anyone possessing the funds or courage. But now here were whole new Earths—Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon—which could be seen by anyone and even mapped; whole new planets with unimaginable continents and riches . . . yet there was no way to touch them! They were like a banana dangling just beyond the reach of a monkey.
It is little wonder that Galileo’s discoveries could not be suppressed. Their publication was quickly followed by a spate of space travel stories: Somnium, The Man in the Moone, Voyage to the Moon, A Voyage to the World of Cartesius, Iter Lunaire*, John Daniel*, Micromegas, A Voyage to the Moon and countless others. (*included in this collection.) There were poems, songs, stage plays and sermons, all inspired by the possibility of traveling to the new worlds in the sky. If it were not presently possible to reach them in reality, it could at least be done by proxy.
Bishop Wilkins had no personal doubts that these voyages would eventually be made. He wrote in his Discovery of a New World (1638),
“You will say there can be no sailing t
hither [to the Moon] . . . We have not now any Drake, or Columbus, to undertake this voyage, or any Daedalus to invent a conveyance through the air. I answer, though we have not, yet why may not succeeding times raise up some spirits as eminent for new attempts, and strange inventions, as any that were before them? . . . I do seriously, and upon good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying-chariot . . .”
Galileo’s discoveries, and the discoveries of other great astronomers soon afterwards (the rings of Saturn, Saturn’s great Moon Titan, the dusky markings on Mars and even a new planet, Uranus), had a another profound effect on the evolution of the spaceship, in addition to inspiring the need for such a machine. Since the Moon and planets were now known to be real worlds, it was no longer possible to employ them as merely metaphorical symbols. It was one thing to speak of visiting a vast mirrored disk suspended in the heavens, a disk that, so far as anyone knew, had no real physical existence. Now that the Moon was known to be a real place, transportation there could not be shrugged off onto some vaguely described magic. If one were to write seriously about traveling to the Moon or planets, then the method of getting to them had to have at least the ring of plausibility.
Even Bishop Francis Godwin with his fantastic Moon-bound swans was compelled to add such materialistic and realistic details as the construction of the birds’ harnesses and the framework that bound them together. He even computed their top speed. Cyrano de Bergerac, although writing a burlesque, felt constrained to limit himself to pseudoscientific methods of spaceflight. Though he was striving for strictly comic effects, it is important to note that none of his methods depended upon magic or the supernatural. He took a great deal of care in describing the fantastic devices he used in his attempts to travel to the Sun and Moon, even managing to stumble, however accidentally, upon the use of rockets.
Penguin Island Page 27