The Eternal Flame
and Other Stories
by
Michel Corday
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
THE ETERNAL FLAME 9
PINK SKY 111
WINGS OF FLAME 218
Introduction
La Flamme éternelle by Michel Corday, here translated as “The Eternal Flame,” was originally published in Paris in 1931 by Ernest Flammarion. Its sequel, Ciel Rose, here translated as “Pink Sky,” was issued by the same publisher in 1933. The story making up the collection, “Les Ailes de Flamme,” here translated as “Wings of Flame,” belongs to a much earlier period of the author’s career, having appeared in the September 1909 issue of the periodical Je Sais Tout.
In addition to the two novellas included in the present volume, Corday wrote two other significant items of speculative fiction. The novelette “Le Mysterieuse Dajan-Phinn” was first published in the April and May 1908 issues of Je Sais Tout and translated into English as “The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn” in the Black Coat Press anthology The World Above the World.1 The novel Le Lynx, one of two novels the Corday wrote in collaboration with André Couvreur—a much more prolific writer of speculative fiction—was published by Lafitte et Cie in 1911; an English translation was published in America by Dillingham in 1913 as The Inner Man. Corday’s satire En Tricogne, un an chez les Tricons, roman très contemporain [In Tricogne, a Year among the Tricons: An Exceedingly Contemporary Novel] (1926) also has an inevitable fantastic element.
According to the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue, Michel Corday was born in 1869, although other sources record the date as 1870. He was educated at the Collège Chaptal and the École Polytechnique. He recorded few other details about himself in his entry in Qui êtes-vous?, the short-lived French version of Who’s Who, except for a selective list of his books, the fact that he was an Officer of the Légion d’honneur, and that he was fond of motoring and canoeing. His experiences during the Great War, while he was working in Paris as a civil servant—which he recorded in a diary subsequently published in three volumes in the early 1930s—caused him to become an ardent propagandist for pacifism thereafter; Ciel rose is his most striking fictional development of that passionate concern.
Corday is best known today because he edited the final collection of works left unpublished at his death by his friend Anatole France, Pages inédites d’Anatole France [Unpublished Pages by Anatole France] (1925), and also wrote a memoir of the author, Anatole France, d’après ses confidences et ses souvenirs [Anatole France, according to his Confidences and his Memories] (1927). The latter helped pave the way for him to achieve considerable success thereafter with two further biographically-based works, La Vie amoureuse de Diderot [Diderot’s Love Life] (1928), focusing on the private life of the great Encyclopedist, and Charlotte Corday (1929), about his most famous namesake, the assassin who stabbed the Revolutionary leader Marat in his bath. Prior to that late success, however, he had enjoyed a long career when he was known as a writer of light popular fiction, mostly in a sentimental vein, of which “Les Ailes de Flamme” would be a typical example were it not for the uncommonly baroque nature of its melodramatic component.
Corday’s first novel was Le Cancer [Cancer] (1894), written when the diagnosis was still relatively young and the mere word first began to engender a quasi-superstitious terror, thus afflicting the luckless protagonist with the status of a modern leper. Intérieurs d’officiers [Officers’ Home Lives] (1894) set a pattern that was to become more typical of his endeavors, however, and was followed by Femmes d’officiers [Officers’ Wives] (1895), Jeunes mariés [Young Couples] (1896) and Coeurs de soldats [Soldiers’ Hearts] (1897).
1897 was a particularly prolific year, in which he also published the autobiographical Confessions d’un enfant du siège [Confessions of a Child of the Siege (i.e. the 1870 Siege of Paris)] (1897), dedicated to Jules Verne, which credits Verne with changing the consciousness of a generation, Misères secrètes [Secret Miseries] (1897) and the one-act play La Croix (published 1897). Mon petit mari, Ma petite femme (1899) was probably his most successful novel, and in the early years of the 20th century, before the Great War, he became a regular contributor to the new generation of middlebrow magazines that sprang up in that period, including Touche à Tout, which serialized several of his novels and numerous shorter pieces, as well as Je Sais Tout. He continued to publish steadily after the war until his death in 1937, but his fiction never recovered the large audience it had previously had, and his non-fiction was much more successful, critically as well as commercially.
Although his interest in science per se was limited, Corday was inevitably interested in the manner in which technological developments had transformed the nature of warfare, and the consequent augmentation of the threat of future conflicts. Ciel rose is one of numerous novels produced in the interbellum period elaborating that sense of threat, although it differs from most of the others in refusing to develop its scenario as a horror story, preferring instead to develop, in far more intimate detail, a rare narrative strategy previously employed by Gustave Guitton and Gustave Le Rouge in their first part-work endeavor, launched with La Conspiration des milliardaires (1899) and translated into English in four volumes as The Dominion of the World.2
La Flamme éternelle is even more unusual, in being one of the few novels about scientific discovery to focus on the economic implications of discovery, including publicity, capitalization and the contest of vested interests. It was a pioneering work in its development of those themes, especially with regard to the harnessing of atomic energy, and is also original in the manner in which it poses the question of the ultimate objectives of scientific and social progress. Its linkage with Ciel rose helps to round out the latter argument, and enables the two novellas to form a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts.
Although that whole invites comparison with slightly earlier accounts of the threat of future war that are far more elaborate such as Ernest Perochon’s Les Hommes frénétiques (1925)3 and Léon Daudet’s La Napus, fléau de l’an 2227 (1927)4, it offers a striking contrast with them in attempting to oppose their dour cynicism and pessimistic resignation. The opposition in question is certainly deliberate; it seems likely that Corday was familiar with both those earlier works, and was reacting against them, thus making a significant and distinctive contribution to the whole nexus of thought.
The following translations of La Flamme éternelle and Ciel Rose were taken from copies of the Flammarion editions. The translation of “Les Ailes de Flamme” was taken from the version of the relevant volume of Je Sais Tout reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
Brian Stableford
THE ETERNAL FLAME
“Never has such a vast hope been
given to the world... The Earth will
no longer die... Nor the human race...
Its genius will burn like an eternal flame.”
I
“No trouble at home? Your wife? Your kids? No? Oh, that’s good. You had me worried, you know. When I arrived that the paper I was told that you’d telephoned, that you wanted to see me here, today, at four o’clock. I thought...”
“Good old Laronce…just like you, immediately imagining catastrophes. No, no. Don’t worry. No trouble. On the contrary.”
On the flowery terrace of Bellevue, in front of the Center for Studies in Physics, the young scientist François Thibault patted his friend, the journalist Laronce, on the shoulder to calm him down.
In the sumptuous June sunlight, the contrast between the two men seemed comical. T
all and solidly built, his face forceful and tender beneath the unkempt hedge of his bushy chestnut-brown hair, François Thibault was the image of placid and cheerful strength. Laronce had a puny build, red hair and a tormented expression. He was forever picking at his ragged beard or readjusting his old-fashioned pince-nez with three fingers.
“So,” said the journalist, “why did you call me?”
“To show you my discovery. It’s finished. No one has seen it. You’ll be the first.”
“Oh! Your wife must know...”
“Of course! Naturally, she knows—and my bosses know too. But it’s a first, even so!”
“Well, what is it? I know that for seven years you’ve been working on matter, on the atom, but that’s all. You’ve never wanted to tell me anymore.”
“That’s true. I owe you an apology, old chap. It was me that I didn’t trust. I wasn’t sure of success.”
“So, the invention…?”
“I’ll show it to you right away.
He plucked a rose from one of the bushes on the terrace and preceded Laronce into the main building of the Center. The two men passed rapidly through a white-walled vestibule as vast and sonorous as a chapel, where a monumental global map of the world stood on a pedestal.
The laboratory where François Thibault worked overlooked the terrace via tall bay windows similar to those of an orangery. The walls were lined with display cabinets in which glassware, measuring instruments and bottles of chemical products gleamed.
On a small table, brightly illuminated by a window, there was a kind of microscope. François Thibault detached a rose petal and, after rubbing it slightly, placed it on a slide. He carefully positioned the slide and turned a knob. Immediately, an electric motor fixed to the ground next to the table began to hum.
Laronce started. “What’s happening? What does that signify?”
Smiling, the young inventor said in an unemotional voice: “The rose petal is dissociating. The energy that it’s releasing will animate the motor for days. Just think—the dissociation of a gram of matter furnishes as much energy as the combustion of three hundred thousand kilos of coal!”
“I don’t understand,” Laronce confessed, bitterly.
“You must have heard mention of the dissociation of matter?”
“Like everyone else—which is to say that I don’t know anything about it.”
“Would you like me to try to give you’re a rapid lesson? It wouldn’t annoy you?”
“Agreed. Just a second—with your permission?” Laronce took a notepad and pencil from his pocket and sat down at the long table that occupied the middle of the laboratory. “I wouldn’t be sorry to put together the elements of an article to appear when the time is ripe. I’m listening—but don’t forget that you’re talking to the public.”
“Yes. Well, this is it. It’s necessary to think of space—all space—as a kind of fluid: animate, quivering and vital, traversed by vibrant waves, radiations, like light, electricity and many others that are being discovered every day. In brief, the universe is energy. Sometimes, that energy becomes concentrated, agglomerates, and condenses into matter. Thus, a nebula appears; it becomes a giant star, then a star; a world is born—and in that world, every atom is a whirlpool of energy in stable equilibrium.”
The journalist stopped writing and raised his head. “Pardon me, but how can that energy, with which you’re populating space, become something weighty—matter?”
“You can explain it to your readers by analogy. Can’t an electric current, which is energy that is invisible, give rise to a spark, which has form and color? Doesn’t lightning sometimes accumulate into a ball of fire?”
“Let’s admit that. So what?”
“Then you can imagine how, by virtue of an inverse process, the atom can restore the energy that’s concentrated within in, like a lightly-wound spiral spring unwinding. Having come from space, the energy returns to space. It’s been known for a long time that so-called radioactive substances emit parcels of the energy of which they’re a temporarily condensed form, but all substances can dissociate. By provoking that dissociation by an easy and reliable method, therefore, one could procure unlimited energy, effortlessly, inexpensively and endlessly.”
“And you’ve found this method?”
“Yes—but thanks to many pioneers, whose work I’ve merely carried forward. A discovery is always a conclusion. All those who are trying to reach the same goal make up a ladder, like gymnasts in a human pyramid; the only who arrives at the top is supported by all the others.”
Laronce was pensive. He murmured, in a sigh: “Extraordinary...”
“Then again, I was lucky, and helped by a memory. Do you remember the story of Archimedes setting fire, from the ramparts of Syracuse, to the Roman ships blockading the city with his ardent mirrors? That solar ardor concentrated at the focus of a curved mirror or lens—what a beam of light! The sun doesn’t only emit calorific radiation. It emits others, like cathode rays. To be sure, they’re not as easy to concentrate at a focal point, but it can be done. And matter dissociates at their focal point in the same way that matter at the focal point of ardent rays catches fire.
“Of course, I had to render that dissociation progressive, in order to remain in control of it. Take note too that I’d be able to use a pebble as easily as a rose petal. Anything will do—but vegetable matter seems to me to be preferable, because it represents an inexhaustible substance. Finally, I employ the liberated energy in the form of electricity because the present world is electrically equipped.”
Laronce scribbled rapid notes on the paper. Nothing was visible but his red hair, in short frizzy curls, so well-nourished with pomade that it looked like varnished mahogany. Without raising his head he said: “And then? The results?”
François Thibault smiled softly, and in a simple and proud tone he said: “I think this profusion of energy will change the conditions of life completely.” Then, becoming gradually more excited, he went on: “Think about it. It’s the end of coal, oil, all the combustibles whose extraction is so difficult, so perilous and so barbaric, and of which the Earth only contains limited quantities—reserves that will be rapidly exhausted. It’s the end of hydroelectric power, which depends on bad weather and demands titanic earthworks. Energy—infinite energy—for nothing! It will permit all hopes, it will permit all daring. I glimpse repercussions so profound, so far-reaching…if I told you...”
He was interrupted by the entrance of his wife. Petite and brunette, simultaneously slim and plump, Marianne Thibault had large dark eyes, a fresh and natural mouth, and restrained gestures. They lived in a small detached house near the Center where François worked, so she often came to the laboratory. She knew that Laronce would be there that day.
“Bonjour, Laronce,” she said, offering him her hand. “Has François brought you up to date?”
The journalist had risen to his feet. François was familiar with his comrade’s anxious personality, but he was astonished to see his expression so troubled. His forehead was furrowed by deep wrinkles: a strange manner of celebrating the great event.
“Yes, I’ve heard the bad news,” Laronce replied, hoarsely.
“What do you mean?” the young woman asked.
“Knowing about his invention, you’re going to let him spread it around?”
“Of course.”
“But don’t you see that it will get him into terrible trouble, and that, what’s more, it will come to nothing?”
“Why?”
“You haven’t thought about the formidable adversaries who are going to bar the way? But he’s just named them himself. The coal magnates and the hydroelectric men, and most of all the oil men—all those terrible antagonists, ready to do anything: in brief, all the merchants of energy.” He turned to François. “It’s necessary to add to the list the manufacturers of explosives, munitions, war materials in general—for they’ll be frustrated. In fact, your invention will doubtless permit the realization of electr
ical war: war by comparison with which chemical warfare and microbial warfare will merely be innocent trifles, petty jigs; war in which the planet can be systematically blasted with lightning—war, in short, that will render all other means of attack futile and vain.”
“Certainly,” François agreed, forcefully. “War the mere dread of which, the mere threat of which, will in fact lead to the suppression of war. That’s how I conceive it.”
“Yes. Well, those people won’t permit your discovery to see the light of day. They’ll begin by stifling it, by denying it.”
With a strong and supple hand, François caressed the cast-iron casing of the enormous motor that was still purring. Tranquilly, he said: “It can’t be denied, since it exists.”
These forebodings did not trouble him very much. Obviously, the journalist was exaggerating. Since the distant times when they had been neighbors, as children, in their home town, Francois had been familiar with Laronce’s two-sided character, both envious and devoted; his friendship was suggesting a fear that delighted his jealousy.
The young inventor had to admit, however, that although he had devoted himself to his discovery for a long time, often thinking about the benefits that it might bring, he had not thought sufficiently about the means of delivering it to the world. He would have to begin a new apprenticeship—and when he had called Laronce, he had strongly suspected that his comrade would point out all the difficulties to him.
“Your invention will be suppressed,” the latter went on, furiously. “The newspapers won’t talk about it. Oh, you don’t know about the conspiracy of silence. It was born with the big press, the one that manufactures opinion. The conspiracy of silence is the most formidable weapon ever discovered. If one wants to prevent a project from bearing fruit, one keeps quiet about it. That’s sufficient. It dies. You see, old chap, all the great wealthy corporations are connected, whether they like it or not; they all share the same fear of an upheaval. All their coffers are bound together, like the bricks in a wall—and what a wall! If one of them is threatened, the others defend it, instinctively. You’re going to threaten the interests of the oil men, the coal producers, the armaments manufacturers? They’ll sound the rallying cry, and the entire horde will be in league against you. And as the big press is in their hands, your fate is certain. A simple order: shh! And you’re erased from the world.”
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