by Paul Vibert
Most of the “stories” contained in Pour lire en automobile require no further comment (although many of them do require a certain amount of explanatory footnoting), but it is worth making a few further points in advance with respect to their literary background.
There is one very obvious debt in one of the stories relevant to the history of scientific romance that Vibert is curiously reluctant to acknowledge. Just as he never mentions Alphonse Allais, he never mentions Allais’ friend Charles Cros, although he must have been aware that the method of communicating with the inhabitants of Mars for which he takes the credit in the opening item in his section on “The Mysterious Fluid” was initially described by Cros in an article reprinted as a pamphlet in 1869. Although the topic became hot again in 1900, for reasons touched on in Vibert’s footnotes to his own piece, it had never really gone away in the interim, and Cros’s suggestions, properly credited in several proto-sf works of the period, were still being discussed in connection with the theme. Even the eccentric supplement about the long-range photography of a young Martian woman is oddly reminiscent of Cros’s first proto-sf story, “An Interastral Drama” (1872) which was reprinted in Le Chat Noir in 1886.
Another author that Vibert does not mention, but who might well have been a significant precursor of his work, is Albert Robida,7 whose pacifism he shares, although his own brief piece on war in the future, “The Art of Killing People,” is a pale shadow of Robida’s speculations on that subject. Robida, of course, took the opposite tack to Allais in solving the problem of how to incorporate speculative elements into his work, mostly writing long novels rather than anecdotal pieces, although his works often string together series of absurd anecdotal incidents in a fashion not dissimilar to Vibert’s composite exercises. Vibert also shares with Robida an abiding fascination with the Expositions Universelles [Great Exhibitions] held in Paris in 1889 and 1900, and, in particular, with the changing face of Paris as celebrated in those exhibitions—with the extensive aid, in the latter case, of Robida’s illustrative models.
Two further items in the present collection had previously trailed extensively by others writers of proto-sf. The fundamental motif of “Divine Prescience,” first popularized by Camille Flammarion in the 1860s, had been employed in stories by Eugène Mouton and Louis Mullem,8 among others. The idea of chemical nutrition, featured in “The Chemical Life of the Future” had been popularized by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot and previously developed in fiction by Charles Nodier and Jules Lermina,9 among others. The most straightforward reproduction of an earlier work is, however, the plot of “The Monster Telescope.” The notion that tiny creatures—a mouse and a number of insects—caught in the view-field of a telescope might be mistaken for huge inhabitants on another world was previously the basis of Samuel Butler’s satirical poem “The Elephant in the Moon,” written circa 1676 but not published until 1759. It is, however, possible that Vibert might not have known that, and that he came up with the idea independently.
One significant writer of proto-sf that Vibert must have known personally is Louis Mullem, who also worked for L’Aurore and became one of Georges Clemenceau’s closest political allies after an initial period of rivalry. As the stories by Mullem reprinted in The Supreme Progress show, Vibert and Mullem did have certain speculative ideas in common, especially related to the fluid nature of the soul, but Mullem’s stories were almost certainly written before Vibert’s prolific phase began and were only published, posthumously, after it had finished, so the probability of any direct influence in either direction is extremely slim, and entirely dependent on the possibility of the ideas being broached in conversation. Indeed, the great majority of all these connections and similarities mainly serve to demonstrate the extent to which these ideas were “in the air” during the relevant period, and the extent to which, in spite of its manifest eccentricities, Vibert’s work slots very neatly, and interestingly, into the developmental pattern of the roman scientifique genre at the end of the 19th century.
The following translation is taken from the 1981 Slatkine reprint of Pour lire en automobile, which is a photographic reproduction of the first edition published by Berger-Levrault in 1901. The original contains numerous typos, misspelled names and errors in punctuation, and sometimes gives the impression that text has been accidentally omitted or garbled; I have done my best to get through these difficulties, usually correcting misspelled names without comment, although I have probably allowed some to survive unwittingly. The author’s abundant use of puns caused inevitable difficulties in translation, but I have tried to limit my footnotes to the most significant examples. Inevitably, some of the flavor of the original has been lost, but I hope that enough survives in English to render the reading experience pleasurable.
Brian Stableford
Preface
This has no pretention to being a preface, properly speaking, but simply a small notelet—and if I add a qualification to a word that has no need of it, already being a diminutive in the Italian manner, it is because I want to emphasize its unimportance.
Many years ago—let us say, if you wish, before the war,10 that fateful date—I thought of writing a number of fantastic stories, all (or very nearly) resting on some scientific premise, thus continuing, pleasantly—for me, at least—the tradition of Hoffmann, Edgar Poe and sometimes even the more modern Jules Verne.
Since then, the years have gone by, the need for scientific precision has made itself felt more imperiously with every passing day, the quotidian occupations and preoccupations of the life of a journalist have enveloped me—bogged me down, I was going to say—a little more each day, and I scarcely had time to scatter a few occasional chronicles approximately corresponding to the plan originally conceived.
Two or three years ago, however, a Breton periodical, the Ouest Républicain, which had heard talk of the odious and imbecilic fashion in which I had been pursued by EIGHT HUNDRED AND NINE Breton priests, and the even more ridiculous and monstrous fashion in which I had been condemned for telling the truth, offered me hospitality, by inviting me precisely, and very amiably, via the intermediary of its editor-in-chief, my excellent colleague Adolphe Henry, finally to bring the project so long-cherished—I do not say ripe, for it might better be described as over-ripe—to completion.
I was still hesitating somewhat, increasingly absorbed by the multiple travails of my journalistic life, writing a little everywhere, always embattled, when an altogether unexpected external circumstance convinced me to pursue the realization, partial if not integral, of my old project. There was a place—more than one, if I am not mistaken—vacant in the general history and philosophy section of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and I decided to offer myself as a candidate. Having published at least twenty volumes in my life and having written the equivalent of more than two hundred in the press, I confess that I modestly believed myself qualified.
Naturally, I made the traditional, if not obligatory, visits; the majority of the members of the learned assembly received me with the amiable but coldly sphinx-like courtesy that is intended to frighten timid souls, but some, less self-controlled, could not hide their surprise.
“But Monsieur, you’re no philosopher. A historian, perhaps, but no philosopher at all.”
I confess that, in my turn, I could not hide my profound amazement.
“What, no ten-centime philosopher! (I don’t say two sous out of respect for the metric system, which is one of the glories of my homeland.) But that’s all I am, and it seems to me, my dear future colleague, that we’re the victims of the most abominable of misunderstandings.
“Come on, let’s explain ourselves better. Everyone knows that in the Middle Ages, Theology held philosophy in humiliating servitude—ancilla theologiae—and that it was only much later, with the encyclopedists, if you wish, that it finally succeeded if freeing itself completely. But everyone also knows that pure philosophy, that of the school, is soon bound to disappear forever, with Cousin, Jouf
froy and Royer-Collard,11 its last representatives—unless one has both the naivety and audacity to consider oneself a philosopher because one spends one’s time raking over the schools of yesteryear, writing pretty rhetorical essays on Kant, Hegel or Descartes.
“Does that mean that philosophy has disappeared with them? Not at all; only that, the outdated formulae having had their day and modern chemists, electrical theorists, naturalists, botanists, sociologists, as well as economists—scientists of every sort—having arrived, with the experimental method as their means and the discovery of the truth and the application of justice as their goal, are the only real philosophers of modern times, before whom the members of the crowd ought to take off their hats respectfully, because it is by virtue of their endeavors that every great democracy must hope to reach an ideal of relative happiness in the future….
“Thus, from that viewpoint, I confess that, with my work on economic and colonial affairs, I had the great naivety if believing myself an arch-philosopher.”
“Well, Monsieur, that’s your error; here, on the other side of the water, we regret to inform you that we still hold to the old formulae of eclecticism.”
As I have always been full of deference—in my youth by virtue of generosity, and now by virtue of egotism—for old age, being almost in the antechamber of the respectable body, and not being stubborn by nature, I emerged from my visits firmly resolved to obtemperate with the aforementioned advice (as the famous colonel12 said), and that is why I finally decided to write the present volume, which is, this time, entirely philosophical—at least, I hope so.
Perhaps it will be found to be a little too scientific; that is because I have not been able entirely to dispose of the man of old: a touch of the fantastic is the indispensable condiment of the present era, and if the salt is not always Attic,13 that is simply because I was born in the heart of Paris, on the Butte-aux-Moulins, between Molière’s house and the Opéra, and not in the shadow of the Acropolis.
These explanations being given with the sole aim of passing conclusively for a serious philosopher, according to the consecrated formulae, and to obtain my pardon, I ought to say why these stories have almost all been reduced to the compendious form of simple chronicles. I repeat that it is that my crude trade as a journalist, conducting an ardent battle of ideas for justice and liberty from one day to the next in twenty newspapers, that leaves me little time lovingly to sculpt long stories in the manner of the author of Contes Fantastiques.14 Then again, I thought that in our era, when everything is hurried, active, ardent and urgent, it is perhaps best to write short stories in order to be widely read and to popularize one’s ideas, one’s philosophical system.
“What? So you have a philosophical system!”
“Certainly, and this is it, in brief: to arrive at justice and liberty, by virtue of generosity and tolerance, with the integral application of Human Rights and the great principles of the Revolution, which ought to be the honor of the Republic, the glory of France, the very patrimony of humankind in its entirety, reconciled in peace and in universal labor…”
“Utopia, people will say.”
“That’s possible, but in the matter of human perfectibility, so dear to my father, I want to die with my generous illusions—which, it seems to me, always ought to soothe the placid demise of a philosopher…for let’s not forget that I’m a philosopher, at present.
“Finally (why should I not admit it?) I also wanted to leave something of myself, akin to a sincerely affectionate visiting-card—not the last, if possible—to my relatives and old friends. On that point, to translate the whole of my thought, I cannot do better than to recall here these eloquent and dolorous passages of Guy de Maupassant, which my excellent friend and colleague Pol Neveux15 evoked so aptly in May of last year, in Rouen, if my memory can be trusted:
“‘In his appetite for oblivion, Maupassant went as far as to deny his own effort. I found these lines in an unpublished letter: ‘I am incapable of loving my art truly. I judge it too harshly, I analyze it too thoroughly. I know how relative the value of ideas, words and the most powerful intelligence is. I cannot help being scornful of thought, so feeble as it is, and form, so incomplete as it is. I have a genuine sense, in a sharp, incurable fashion, of human impotence and a scorn for efforts that can only lead to poor results…
“‘If I were ever able to talk to a person rather than to a barrier, I might perhaps let out all the unexplored, repressed, inconsolable thoughts that I sense in the depths of my being. I feel them inflating and poisoning me, as bile does to the bilious. But if I can spit them out one day, perhaps they will evaporate, and I shall no longer find anything within me but a light and joyful heart—who knows? Thought becomes an abominable torment when the entire brain is nothing but a wound. I have so many bruises in my head that my ideas cannot stir without making me want to shout: Why? Why? Dumas would say that I have a bad stomach. I think it’s more that I have a poor shameful and prideful heart, a human heart, that old human heart at which people laugh, but which becomes emotional and also makes one’s head ache. I have a Latin soul, which is exceedingly worn-out. Then again, there are days when I don’t think like that, but I suffer all the same, because I belong to the family of the flayed. But that, I don’t say and I don’t show—I even think that I hide it very well. I am undoubtedly thought to be one of the most indifferent men in the world. I’m a skeptic, which isn’t the same thing—a skeptic, because I see clearly. And my eyes say to my heart: Hide yourself away, old chap, you’re grotesque. And it hides itself away…’”
He was also afraid of death:
“He would soon die in his turn. He would disappear, and it would be over…how frightful! Other people would live, laugh, love one another…. Isn’t it strange that one can laugh, amuse oneself and be joyful under the eternal certainty of death!
“No one ever comes back. Millions and billions of near-identical people will be born, with eyes, a nose, a mouth, a skull, with thoughts inside, without the person who had lain down in this bed reappearing. It was finished for him, finished forever. A life! A few days, then nothing more! And yet everyone has a furious and unrealizable desire for eternity within him; everyone is a sort of universe-within-the-universe and everyone is soon annihilated completely in the compost-heap of new seed-germs. Plants, animals, humans, stars worlds—everything is animate, and then dies, in order to be transformed. And no individual, human or planet, ever comes back again!”
Thus he expressed himself, tragically, in Bel Ami. It is the eternal story of all men of letters, of all thinkers, who always have the desire to survive—and I don’t think that I can make my own confession with such a persuasive and poignant sincerity…
One more thing. It is for the public, as indulgent as it is benevolent, to determine the fate of this volume and subsequent ones. If there is a fine welcome reserved for it, I warn the public that there are four more of them ready, similar and equipollent, as the amiable colonel would say, without prejudice to what may come after.
If, therefore, these stories amuse you—as the song says—we can begin again…sorry, continue them…which certainly proves that their fate and mine depend on your verdict, and I would like to think, dear readers, that you will take pity, for once, on a poor devil of a philosopher—doubtless the last, in the official sense, if he has succeeded in retaining the secret of it—who is, above all, always full of good will!
Paul Vibert.
LIFE
The Rabid Elephant
In the reign of Louis-Philippe. Along the Boulevard du Crime. A bloody adventure.
The great white elephant of the Indies
Fell, broke its leg, and died.
It was buried near the Madeleine
With imposing ceremony.
Only the captain of the firemen
Retreating to a corner,
Wept into his helmet.
When the ceremony was over
The captain of the firemen
Made a speech and
said:
“The great white elephant of the Indies
“Fell, etc…”
It is extraordinary how quickly everything is forgotten. Thus, the perfectly true story that I am about to tell you today unfolded in the early years of the reign of Louis-Philippe, in the very heart of Paris, in the open air of the boulevards, and yet no one today has any memory it, except perhaps for a handful of long-lived individuals who were once resident in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, or that part of the Marais bordering the old boulevards.
It was during the festival held every year in the Place du Trône, at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the benevolent gaze of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, if I’m not mistaken—the festival popularly known as the Gingerbread Fair.
On one side of the immense circle formed by the plaza stood a long series of vehicles forming a sort of internal gallery. It was a famous menagerie belonging to some ancestor of Pezon16 whose name I have forgotten. The incontestable ornament of this interesting family of ferocious beasts was an enormous and superb white elephant, as white as the King of Siam’s—which indicated that he was very old, for the hair of pachyderms turns white, exactly like that of humans. As he was sober and philosophical, however, he had conserved all its strength.
Several years before, a pretty little spaniel bitch had served as his companion, and they had loved one another tenderly. One day, the little dog had disappeared, without anyone being able to find her. The menagerie’s owner thought no more about it, after having mourned appropriately for a week with his dear proboscidian—which was, as I said, the glory of the menagerie, and was named Alfred, although no one had ever known why. Alfred, however, had conserved a great depth of melancholy since the disappearance of the little dog, which answered to the affectionate name of Aglaea. It was evident that the old philosopher had taken a blow to the heart.