The Mysterious Fluid

by Paul Vibert

  The Mysterious Fluid

  by

  Paul Vibert

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  “There are unforeseeable things,” wrote Pierre Versins in his Encyclopédie de l’utopie et de la science-fiction (1972), in his article on Paul Vibert. “You open a book and paf! there is an unexpected amazement, a richness, that nothing—neither the title, nor the author, nor the appearance—gave any grounds to expect.” He goes on to list the fantastic ideas broached in the items contained in the book in question, Pour lire en automobile, nouvelles fantastiques [For Reading in an Automobile; fantastic short stories] (1901), with considerable approval, but does not seem to have taken his research any further. He cites the year of Vibert’s birth (1851) but not that of his death (1918), and only mentions one of the several further collections that Vibert issued in the same series of books, merely to record that he has not seen it. He asserts, mistakenly, that all the items in Pour lire en automobile were originally published in a obscure periodical called L’Ouest républicain between 1895 and 1899—although the author admittedly does not give him much help in that respect, offering no detailed credits and mingling numerous items clearly written in 1900 and 1901 with earlier pieces in a somewhat hectic fashion.

  Versins was undoubtedly right to identify Pour lire en automobile—here translated in its entirety as The Mysterious Fluid (that being one of its four subheadings)—as a book that contains, among other things, some significant contributions to the early development of French speculative fiction, but was also entirely justified in being somewhat confused by it. It is a deeply eccentric work by a man who seems always to have worn his eccentricities flamboyantly and provocatively, alongside his deeply-felt convictions—and seems, in that respect, to have been consciously and conscientiously carrying forward a tradition initiated by his father. Versins inevitably and quite rightly, likens the items assembled in Pour lire en automobile to the work of the popular humorous journalist Alphonse Allais,1 but Allais was always a complacent absurdist, playing everything for laughs in an essentially amiable and risk-free manner. Vibert’s range is considerably greater, and the satirical aspect of his work often takes on a much sharper edge; his fascinations were considerably more intense as well as more various.

  Allais, in company with his sometime associates Charles Cros and Gabriel de Lautrec,2 took a consistent interest in contemporary scientific controversies and discoveries, which is off-handedly reflected in his published work, but Vibert seems to have developed a real bee in his bonnet with regard to “the mysterious fluid” (electricity) and the possible consequences of its development. Although all the items dealing with that subject reproduced in Pour lire en automobile are blatantly farcical, their remarkable repetitiveness—which becomes a trifle tedious in the relevant section—betrays a strange fascination. One of the advantages of farce as a medium is that it liberates the imagination and conscience from restraint, and allows thoughts and expressions that might otherwise be censored to find gaudy depiction, and one cannot help suspecting that Vibert took his theory that electricity was “the unique motive force of the universe” quite seriously, choosing to express it in a farcical manner as a manner of shielding it from criticism. It is certainly the case that the scathing sarcasm in some of the other items in the collection—most notably the fake legend accounting (falsely) for the nomenclature of the Grotte des dames in “How People Die in the Colonies” and the supposed letter from a survivor of electrocution in “How People Die in America”—is as determinedly malicious as it is admirably intemperate.

  There are several reasons why Pierre Versins had to stumble across Paul Vibert by accident. By 1972, Vibert and his father were forgotten men, although Versins’ advocacy did result in Pour lire en automobile being reprinted in 1981 by Slatkine, and the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website has at least laid the groundwork for the resurrection of their work by making some of it available on line. It did not help that some of the ideas they tried so hard to promote—including the notion that electricity is the unique motive force of the universe—turned out to be false, but many other promoters of mistaken ideas have survived more visibly, mostly because they were better at what they did, but also because they did not put so many people’s backs up. The fact that Vibert was less polite than Alphonse Allais might seem a recommendation today, but it did not when he was alive or recently dead, and he was never good enough to mount any serious competition to Alfred Jarry as a satirist, proto-surrealist or pataphysicist. The best of his work does, however, reward reading—and when Vibert set out to collect the cream of his periodical publications in book form, Pour lire en automobile was his initial selection.

  In spite of the prompting of Versins’ enthusiasm, few historians of proto-science fiction have paid any attention to Vibert, perhaps because his work does not much resemble conventional fiction. It was all written for newspapers, to very strict word limits, and although he occasionally produced short serials—the one translated here as “The Submarine World” seems to have been his most sustained attempt to write something more like a story than a mere anecdote, and might well have been initially envisaged as a novel—he restricted himself almost entirely to the fictional formats that can easily be crammed into a thousand words; those items that are not straightforwardly anecdotal are almost all conversation-pieces, and many of the speculative pieces seem more closely akin to non-fiction than fiction.

  Early writers interested in speculative endeavors had, of course, discovered that any attempt to import scientific argument and extrapolation into fictional frameworks caused problems of length, because of the sheer quantity of explanation required. Given that newspapers were such a vital part of the literary marketplace—having expanded much more broadly and rapidly in France than anywhere else in the world, because of the early advent there of widespread literacy—writers of speculative fiction had acute marketing problems, compounded by the reluctance of feuilleton novel-lovers to stray too far into such esoteric realms. The development of anecdotes, conversation-pieces and character studies as fictional devices was a natural response to this predicament.

  The use of formats uneasily suspended between fiction and non-fiction was commonplace among the popularizers of science of the 1860s, including Camille Flammarion, Henri de Parville3 and S. Henry Berthoud—Berthoud’s “fantaisies scientifiques” would be an obvious ancestor of Vibert’s work were they not so earnest—and had also been taken up in the 1870s by such humorists as Eugène Mouton.4 It was, however, Alphonse Allais and Alfred Jarry who popularized the practice of condensing speculative themes into very short and wildly flippant formats, thus routinizing farce as a medium for calculatedly-unserious scientific speculation. Vibert undoubtedly took his cue from them, probably adding a tangible supplement to their influence on later writers in a similar vein, most notably Gaston de Pawlowski5. This entire tradition now seems something of a sideline to the history of the roman scientifique, but it is not without importance and certainly not without interest.

  As Versins points out, Paul Vibert’s forenames were officially registered as Edmond-Célestin-Paul, but he preferred to sign himself Paul Théodore Vibert, and it is under that designation that he is catalogued in the Bibliothèque Nationale. His father, Théodore Vibert (1825-1885)—not to be confused with the printer of the same name (1816-1850)—was educated in law and practiced as an advocate in Paris, but, like many lawyers of the time, also had literary ambitions. Whether or not he was successful in that career, he must have had a considerable private income, because he was able to maintain a country residence in Verneuil-sur-Seine as well as a house in the Boul
evard de Montparnasse—the latter in close proximity to the residence of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve—and he seems always to have felt free to indulge his whims.

  According to one of Paul Vibert’s numerous brief memoirs, his father invited numerous literary men to Verneuil, in an attempt to develop that residence as a center of literary society; Alfred de Musset visited, as did Charles Nodier’s daughter, although the other names Paul cites have now lapsed into relative obscurity. Paul also records that his father “virtually retired” from the bar at a relatively young age in order to concentrate on his literary endeavors—further evidence that he had independent means and no need to earn a living. At any rate, Paul recalled being brought up “in an exclusively intellectual atmosphere” and seems to have been drawn into his father’s literary endeavors, as well as his political agitations, at an early age. Théodore was a fervent Republican, which presumably did not help him thrive under the Second Empire, although he was doubtless deeply distressed by the way that Empire eventually came to an end in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The helpful suggestions that he occasionally addressed by letter thereafter to Adolphe Thiers—the Third Republic’s first President—might not have been as welcome as he hoped, but he was doubtless recognized in the last decade of his life as a man who had made a contribution to the great cause in darker times.

  Théodore Vibert’s first publication was the novel Edmond Reille (1856), an epistolary melodrama with philosophical pretensions, very obviously affiliated to the Romantic Movement. He followed it up with several volumes of poetry, most significantly Les Quatre morts, poésies [The Four Dead Men, poems] (1864), Rimes d’un vrai libre-penseur [Rhymes of a Genuine Freethinker] (1876) and Rimes plébeïennes [Plebeian Rhymes] (1881), and one further novel of a similar stripe to his first. He thought the earlier fraction of this work sufficient significant to offer himself as a candidate for the Academy in 1877, with the support of another obscure poet, Arsène Thevenot,6 and reacted badly to his rejection, publishing Les Quarante, ou la grandeur et décadence de l’Académie Française [The Forty, or the Grandeur and Decadence of the Academy] (1879), whose comments on the forty current members of the Academy were supplemented by further examples of his own poetry, a bibliography of works by himself and his son, and a list of all the favorable reviews those works had obtained. He also charged one of the Academy’s members, Victorien Sardou, with plagiarism, on rather dodgy grounds. Thevenot went on to publish a study of the works of Vibert senior and junior in 1881, and they reciprocated by publishing an equally complimentary study of his work

  Théodore’s sense of unjust neglect and his resentment against his literary contemporaries are further reflected in the non-fiction book that was to become his most significant work, at least in terms of modern citation: La Race sémitique [The Semitic Race] (1883). The text begins, rather oddly, as a scathing attack on a historical novel by Marius Fontane, which had attributed a longer history to humankind than the one contained in Biblical chronology (as famously calculated by Archbishop James Ussher), but soon branches out into a general attack on all religious traditions and scientific works alleging that the human story must go back far beyond the supposed date of Noah’s flood. Having dismissed everyone else’s evidence—whether historical, geological, paleontological or archaeological—in a cavalier fashion, as false or corrupt, Théodore builds his own case based on a curious linguistic argument supposedly proving that Greek, Sanskrit and all other languages are, in fact, derivatives of Hebrew.

  This project, far outgrowing its apparent origin as an intemperate book review, eventually became a projected four-volume Histoire universelle [History of the World], but only two volumes were published during Théodore’s lifetime; Paul published a third, confusingly entitled La Race chamitique [The Hamitic Race—i.e. the black race supposedly descended from Ham], posthumously in 1916, but the fourth was never completed. Although the fundamental argument of the history is based on Biblical chronology, Théodore was a committed atheist, and brought his son up the same way. In that respect, at least, he was a “genuine freethinker,” although he might more accurately be described as an “independent thinker.” Paul presumably discovered later in life that his father had been wrong about many things, and that Théodore’s mulish defense of anything in which he happened to believe, carried forward with all the rhetorical skill and dedicated partiality expectable in a skilled advocate, was a trifle absurd in itself, but that did not prevent Paul from remaining a staunch defender of the man who had carefully nurtured his own talents and ambitions.

  Paul Vibert’s first book was La Démocratie impériale (1874), one of numerous works that he was later to categorize in bibliographies of his work as “social propaganda.” His next publications were, however, poetry; he published three sets of Dizaine de sonnets [Ten Sonnets] in 1875, 1878 and 1879, then the longer Sonnets parisiens [Parisian Sonnets] in 1880. He published Le Péché de la baronne, idylles normandes [The Sin of the Baroness; Norman idylls] in 1885, which he placed under the heading Romans [Fiction] in his bibliographies, and a collection of reprinted Poésies, contes et nouvelles [Poetry, Tales and Short Stories], appeared in 1889, but he appears to have given up on his literary ambitions by then. All his publications in the 1890s, and most of those thereafter, were non-fiction; those he did not categorize as “social propaganda” were classified in his bibliographies as works on “political economics,” although they include such essays as L’Électricité à la portée des gens du monde [Electricity within the range of ordinary people] (1895).

  Like many men of his era whose literary ambitions were frustrated, Paul Vibert eventually settled for a career in journalism, but he seems to have spent a good deal of time traveling, presumably financing his expeditions with his own money, and his colleagues probably regarded him as an amateur dabbler rather than a dedicated professional throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, although he does seem to have worked very assiduously. He visited both North and South America, and published an account of La République d’Haïti in 1895, but most of his observations and conclusions were decanted into articles for periodicals. His public profile was, however, dramatically raised when he became embroiled in the Dreyfus affair, as one of the unfortunate captain’s staunchest defenders. He became closely associated with Georges Clemenceau’s campaigning newspaper L’Aurore, which published Émile Zola’s famous article headlined “J’Accuse.”

  When the most strident of Dreyfus’ attackers, Édouard Drumont—the obnoxious founder of the Anti-Semitic League, who had earlier called or the expulsion of all Jews from France—set out to boost his virulent influence by standing as a candidate for the Chambre des deputés in Algiers in the spring of 1898, Vibert set off for Algiers to stand for election and campaign against him. Drumont not only won the election to the French parliament, but also succeeded in getting his equally-repulsive sidekick Max Régis elected as mayor of Algiers (with eventually disastrous consequences), but Vibert returned to Paris a hero of sorts, defeated but valiant.

  In 1899, he signed the preface of a book vilifying Drumont and all he stood for, entitled L’Anti-Pape Drumont-démon, whose authorship was credited to “Montmartre l’Ermite”—almost certainly Vibert himself, although the Bibliothèque Nationale refrains from cataloguing it under his name. It was at that point in time that his journalistic career went into overdrive, and for the next decade, articles and books poured from his pen in amazing quantity.

  Many of the books Vibert published in this period were collections of reprints of newspaper articles, loosely organized according to subject-matter. The first was a serious of Silhouettes contemporaines [Contemporary Sketches] (1900), but the most interesting, from a modern viewpoint, are the elements of a series launched with Pour lire en automobile in the following year. In that collection he deliberately grouped together the majority of his fantastic and scientifically-inspired pieces, those evidently being his first priority. Although his preface to the book is as assertively tongue-in-cheek as the items reprinted
therein, there is probably no reason to doubt his assertion that he had conceived the ambition to write fantastic stories in the various veins of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Poe and Jules Verne back in the 1860s, but had never quite got around to it until he was finally encouraged by a friendly newspaper-editor to re-launch himself as a rival to Alphonse Allais—which gave him the opportunity to make up the deficit somewhat, albeit in a calculatedly clownish fashion. There is also no reason to doubt the allegation made in one of the items in the book that he often gave public lectures at La Bodinière—the exhibition hall of the Théâtre d’Application in the Rue St. Lazare—in the mid-1890s, and that one of the topics that went down well with the audience was interplanetary communication, with the citation of such fictional precedents as Cyrano de Bergerac and Poe; his interest in such subjects was evidently longstanding.

  The other books in the Pour lire sequence are Pour lire en bateau-mouche, nouvelles surprenantes [For Reading in a Motor-Boat; surprising short stories] (1905), Pour lire en ballon, nouvelles sentimentales [For Reading in a Balloon; sentimental short stories] (1907), Pour lire en traîneau, nouvelles entraînantes [For Reading in a Sleigh; stirring short stories] (1908), Pour lire en sous-marin, nouvelles énivrantes [For Reading in a Submarine; intoxicating short stories] (1914) and Pour lire en aéroplane [For Reading in an Airplane] (1915), although the last-named is not really part of the series, being entirely non-fictional and ostensibly offering “bird’s eye views” of various parts of France. The contents of the third volume, as partially listed—unfortunately in garbled form—in Google Books, reveal that it continues several themes broached in the first, including animal intelligence, and has items on such philosophical topics as the nature of life and spontaneous generation, as well as material on neurasthenia and other forms of mental illness. The only volume fully available on line at the time of writing, however—the fourth in the series—consists almost entirely of nostalgic pieces about Paris and its inhabitants. The last two items were his final books, appearing after a five-year gap in his production, perhaps occasioned by ill-health.