Ever Smaller
Page 19
Three days later, the scientific world became excited about the experiments. Physicists and members of the Institut sought us out to beg us to repeat our spiritualist séances in front of them.
We accepted, and set a date for two days hence. Two days later, we set out to repeat our experiments.
The audience was numerous, composed of the capital’s most important scientists. They loudly made manifest their scant belief in the reality of the phenomena we were about to present to them. I even heard one of them say to his neighbor: “My dear mathematician. I’ll wager that they’re more charlatans.”
“Yes,” the other replied. “Spiritualism and hypnotism are nothing but a farce. Nothing is true except mathematics.”
Wait a minute, I said to myself. We’ll be laughing soon enough. Your mathematical nose will be out of joint when you’ve seen my experiments!
Yes, I would be glad to confound the skepticism of all those scientists and show them realities that they could neither explain nor deny.
The room having been plunged into darkness, I moistened my domestic’s hands.
Surprise! Pierre did not become luminous. Nor could Pierre be photographed in the dark. I was obliged to make several attempts, but never got any result.
I was absolutely stunned. Pierre had completely digested the green liquor. He was no longer a medium. Our fiasco was complete. All the scientists went away, delighted by our misadventure.
The next day, the newspapers announced that the experiments in spiritualism of Messieurs Varlet and Ranbel had failed completely in front of the scientific commission, and that the spiritualists had once again been convicted of charlatanry.
As for me, I raised no protest against what the newspapers said, for I deserved that punishment. At the end of the day, I had tried to trick the scientists, and in the final count, it had been me who had been tricked. I consoled myself by thinking that our experiments might one day have a better outcome, and that justice would be rendered to me.
“Yes,” I said to my excellent friend Varlet, who had been more deeply affected by the misadventure than me, “a substance will probably be discovered that will emit chemical rays in the dark. Those chemical rays, capable of making an impression on silver bromide gel in a photographic apparatus in darkness, will permit us to reproduce the phenomena we obtained with Narayanha’s magic picture. On the day when that discovery is made, we will no longer believe in spirits, but in a further progress in science.”
Notes
1 A chibouk is a long-stemmed tobacco pipe, more commonly associated with Turkey than Arabia.
2 The phrase I have translated here as “black box” is chambre noire. In the earlier Le Spirite malgré lui, Bleunard uses that term to refer to a specially-equipped room in which photographs are developed, so I have translated it as “dark-room” in “The Reluctant Spiritualist, ” but here he is using it to refer to the photographic apparatus itself, which we would call a camera. Although “black box” has acquired new connotations in the interim, it seemed more apt to use that phrase than substitute the anachronistic “camera.”
3 Capillarity is the property by which water rises up in narrow tubes, drawn by surface tension. The attribution of the effects exhibited by dust particles to the same phenomenon is mistaken, but the phenomenon of “Brownian motion”—named after Robert Brown, who observed the phenomenon in water-borne pollen grains in 1827, but first recorded by Lucretius—was still awaiting a full explanation when Bleunard wrote this story (one was eventually provided by Albert Einstein), and he plumped for the wrong hypothesis. His subsequent observations about the effects of surface tension on tiny individuals are, however, much more apt.
4 Edmond About’s humorous fantasy L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (1862).
5 “Eelworms” is an accurate translation of the term that Bleunard uses (anguillules); it refers to a class of very tiny nematode worms. It is probable, however, that it is being misapplied, and that at least some of the creatures observed under 19th century microscopes that were interpreted as minuscule worms were, in fact, large bacteria.
6 I have transcribed Bleunard’s flagellifères directly; although Webster’s only licenses the adjectival form flagelliferous. English scientific terminology apparently got by without a collective term for all flagellate protozoa; the narrower group to which Phacus belongs is usually termed euglenoids.
7 The moneron was actually a hypothetical construct, invented by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 to provide an “elementary living organism” that might have arisen spontaneously from the urschleim [primeval slime] and become the ancestor of all earthly life in the days. It was supposedly similar to an amoeba but lacking a nucleus—effectively, a body of “pure protoplasm.” Once microscopists went looking for monera, they were soon “discovered;” the English evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley thought that he had found one in 1868, but quickly recanted when he discovered that he had made a mistake. Monera were eventually dropped from the official record, when better microscopes revealed the complexity of bacterial life, thus inserting a new stratum into evolutionary theory, more fundamental than the protozoan.
8 Presumably the marine biologist Richard Greeff (1825-1895). The accuracy of this entire paragraph leaves something to be desired.
9 This revelation, long anticipated by abundant clues distributed within the story, will not come as a surprise to the reader. The reader might well, however, be disappointed to discover that the author is in such a tearing hurry to finish his story that he has cut his explanation brutally short, not bothering to elucidate the question of Thilda’s exact role in the earlier experiments, or her absence from the later ones—or, for that matter, why she and her uncle have been mounting the altogether unnecessary pretence of passing her off as his wife.
10 Spirituelle [spiritual] can also mean “witty” or “clever,” so the original sentence carries more implications than the translation.
11 “Zut!” is, of course, a French expletive, nowadays reckoned mild but considered slightly indecent at the time when the story was written, and not really fit for mixed company.
12 Ira Erastus Davenport (1839-1911) and his brother William Henry Davenport (1841-1877), initially performing with their younger sister Elizabeth, became the most famous and controversial séance-performers in the USA, and also toured Europe. Relentlessly attacked by stage magicians as charlatans, while being hailed by convinced spiritualists as the greatest mediums of all time, they are now given ironic credit for inventing many of the tricks now standard in the repertoire of stage magic, including various sorts of trick cabinets in which objects can be made to appear and disappear.
13 Oxyhydric light was a kind of gaslight tried out as street-lighting in Paris but soon abandoned; it is famous in the history of scientific romance as the device by means of which Jules Verne’s “Le Docteur Ox” proposed to lit up a whole town. Wolff flasks are named after Ludwig Wolff (1857-1919).
14 Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) became the first president of the Third Republic after crushing the Paris Commune in 1871.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic<
br />
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Helgvor of the Blue River; The Givreuse Enigma; The Mysterious Force; The Navigators of Space; Vamireh; The World of the Variants; The Young Vampire
Marcel Rouff. Journey to the Inverted World
Han Ryner. The Superhumans
Brian Stableford (anthologist) The Germans on Venus; News from the Moon; The Supreme Progress; The World Above the World
Jacques Spitz. The Eye of Purgatory
Kurt Steiner. Ortog
Eugène Thébault. Radio-Terror
C.-F. Tiphaigne de La Roche. Amilec
Théo Varlet. The Xenobiotic Invasion
Paul Vibert. The Mysterious Fluid
English adaptation and introduction Copyright 2011 by Brian Stableford.
Cover illustration Copyright 2011 by Jean-Félix Lyon.
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ISBN 978-1-61227-014-2. First Printing. June 2011. 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.