“Death! Death to the fomenters of disaster!”
Another shelf of bottles collapsed, swept away by a large projectile that traced a scarlet parabola behind it, and was nothing other than the spherical head of Staroth, decapitated in advance. Soon, his short limbs, his skeletal and tormented trunk, were somersaulting in a corner, while his fusiform neck, now resembling a sectioned beetroot, withdrew into his shoulders and sprang forth again, impulsively, several times, moved by the final contractions of his death-throes, slowly drooling scarlet threads.
“Death! Death to the prostitute of Eros, the god with the rascally smile who has sown discord among us!”
A scream—a scream that the Creator of Humans recognized as emerging from am adored throat—and there was Formosa, launched by the catapult of unleashed rage, skimming everything in her flight, leaving dangling behind her, retained by its bonnet-strings, the ridiculous hat, which she had donned again.
One last time, she displayed her milky flesh, her short hair sticky with ordure, her downy abdomen, which, on bottle 4,245, was about to open up with a soft sound and a sudden flourish of green-tinted entrails.
The red gelatin of which he, the Creator of Humans, the Porphyrogenete, was the issue, now covered the woman with a brocade with indented edges, like a cock’s-comb. Shreds of her brain tissue rained down like pink exclamation marks!
Then Sagax escaped; he bounded to the lacerated cadaver of his mistress, put his arms around her, finally, in order to die with her, staining himself with the incarnadine flooding from her open veins.
Gripped and lifted in his turn, held by the ankles, his body whipped the air. For a twentieth of a second, perhaps, he was conscious that that he too had just scythed through a shelf of receptacles, and was astonished not to have felt anything but a sudden dazzle, and a forceful impact that seemed to have expelled his lucidity forever.
A vague pain, a few slight pricks at the temples, an impression of coolness in his gums subsisted…a large fly buzzing increasingly loudly in the depths of his ears…and a prism with a thousand facets, tinted blue, green and orange scintillating inside his eyes...
Stupidly, all that remained of his intelligence strove to deny the disaster and imminent death...
A brief interval followed, during which it appeared to him that strange voices were coming together within him. And, in the fashion of a flail descending rhythmically, like a enormous mallet, he floated, fell back, battering, hammering the frightful heap of human debris—shards of every sort, bloody stumps studding the ground—drawing a kind of monstrous harmony from them, a cacophony of ringing sonorities and dull notes.
Then, envisioning one last time the horrible scene with his darkening gaze, he slowly entered into a wonderment of peace and silence, into a bliss of annihilation and serenity...
He was no more.
A delirium of carnage had taken possession of the Perfected, who were slaughtering one another. Shards of glass served to slice open bellies like overripe fruits.
The immense jars had shattered; the monstrous paddles had sprung forth, and, continuing to rotate of their own accord, were crushing still-living flesh, transforming it, reddened, into the must of a press, from which a frightful and inebriating liquor was running.
Torn out and uncoiled, the wires that channeled heat intensified, tracing lines of fire on human fleeces. Like thatch struck by lightning, the natural fur ignited, and a russet mist, streaked by flashes of madder, sometimes accentuated by an abrupt streak of blood-red, a patch of carmine, covered all those roaring, possessed silhouettes.
Strangling hands knotted at random, and blue-tinted faces fell back upon breasts, and then swayed at the ends of necks twisted like wet cloths. Gorgonian heads plunged into open thoraxes, furiously biting hearts laid bare...
Soon, the blood, escaping in bounding spurts, made red patterns on the two translucent walls still standing.
Suddenly, a monstrous deflagration was perceptible, followed by another more formidable. A long frisson agitated the fearful air, soon joined by an uninterrupted shivering of the ground.
Abruptly, the pulse of the moribund planet seemed to stop, and a frightful plaint of panic terror rose from its bosom toward the sky.
In the distance, Mathesis had destroyed the machines, abolishing the source of light and life forever...
Savagely, definitive night finally raced to enshroud the globe with its cloth of anguish and mourning. Movements froze, and in the cold of stellar space that fell, suddenly, the skins of those who still remained were heard to split, and their bones were heard to shatter like dry vine-branches.
The indefectible winter arrived, with its chilly fingers and frosty kisses, finally stifling the rascality of humans and things by hugging them to its bosom of ice and stupor.
Thus was extinguished the World, the incestuous produce of Unconsciousness and Hazard.
Notes
1 This datum implies that Kolney’s baptismal name was Fernand Pochon; his wikipedia entry expands it to Pochon de Coinet. The Bibliothèque Nationale, on the other hand, does not recognize Kolney as a pseudonym.
2 In literal terms, a Bousingot is a sailor’s hat, but after the July Revolution of 1830, the term was adapted, initially by Léon Gozlan, to mean the kind of hat worn by a particular kind of young man (and, by extension, to the young men themselves) inclined to the strident expression of democratic opinions. Gérard de Nerval and his companions in the petit cénacle probably provided the primary inspiration for the coinage
3 Pére Bazouge is a character in Zola’s study of alcoholism, L’Assommoir (1877).
4 The notorious poisoner Locusta is comissioned by the Roman Emperor Nero to kill the eponymous hero of Racine’s tragedy Britannicus (1669), from which this quotation is taken.
5 People of mediocre ability.
6 The author inserts a reference here to Le Salon de Madame Truphot, Les Aubes mauvaises and L’Affranchie.
7 The Greek Porphyrogennetos and the Latin Porphyrogenitus signify “born to the purple”—an honorific adapted for reference to selected children of Byzantine emperors.
8 It is taken for granted in French fiction of the 19th century, following influential precedents set by Balzac, among others, that every prostitute, kept woman or trophy wife will have an amant de coeur [lover of the heart] as well as her financial provider(s), who often lives off her in his turn.
9 Like all the names attributed to characters in the story, this one is symbolic. It is derived from the name of the pagan god identified in the Old Testament as Bel-Phegor, but probably by a roundabout route. Remy de Gourmont had used the same name, rendered in a slightly different way, in “Péhor,” perhaps the most nightmarish of all Symbolist stories about sex, which makes much of the fact that the old pagan gods had all been transmuted into demons by Christianity, and appoints that particular one as a uniquely vicious demon of lust.
10 From the Latin formosus [beautiful]
11 The name Mathesis [science] completes a triumvirate with Sagax [perspicacity] and Thales [the father of philosophy].
12 From Astaroth, another Christian demon adapted from pagan deity mentioned in the Old Testament.
13 The identification of the aircraft as an Albatros must have been added to the 1928 edition as the manufacturer in question was not founded until 1909; it produced many of the fighters used by the Germans in the Great War.
14 The Phalanstère [Phalanstery], a large residential building designed for communal living, became a familiar aspect of French Utopian writing after its popularization in the early 19th century by Charles Fourier. The present text also employs the term Familistère [Familistery], applied to an actual construction built by Fourier’s disciple Jean-Baptiste Godin.
15 This paragraph is italicized in the original for the sake of emphasis, although its assertion does not sit well with the remainder of he narrative, in which “the victory of mind over matter” is anything but definitive, and natural species are far more abundantly and emphatic
ally featured than artificial imitations.
16 I have left the final phrase untranslated, as Mathesis presumably thinks that it is a name rather than a scabrous nickname [Polyphemus of the Public Urinals], although it is not at all clear what he understands, or expects his listeners to understand, by the term homosexuel [homosexual].
17 From the Latin carmen [song, poetry or prophesy]
18 From the Latin corregio [put right]
19 There is no such statue in the Place du Carrousel, so the author appears to be anticipating one that might be built in future.
20 This passage illustrates one of the perverse, albeit inevitable, paradoxes of the narrative. The narrative voice is allowed to take the piss out of our toilet facilities, albeit obliquely, but is obliged to remain silent on the matter of those in use in the Gem-City. In the same way, it was acceptable in chapter I for the Solar System to take a metaphorical shit, but none of the characters can ever take a literal one. They presumably do, even though they live on pills and call themselves the Parachevé [Perfected], but decency forbids them and the narrative voice from admitting it.
21 The quotation is from the comedy known in English as The Knights.
22 The Musée Dupuytren was founded by Mathieu Orfila as a result of a bequest made by the anatomist Baron Guillaume Dupuytren, following the latter’s death in 1835. The collection includes the specimens used by the 19th century anatomist Paul Broca in his investigations of the localization of brain function.
23 Presumably crafted to imply the Latin moro [delay] + sex, although the pun on the word “morose” works in both French and English, and is clearly intentional.
24 A simarre was a kind of soutane once worn by some French magistrates.
25 The reference is to the famous case of the fraudster Thérèse Humbert, who pretended to be the heir of a (no-existent) American millionaire, Robert Crawford. She obtained vast loans in the 1880s using the imaginary inheritance as collateral. She was finally exposed and jailed, not without great difficulty, in 1902; her father-in-law, a former Garde des Sceaux [justice minister], was judged to be a victim of the fraud rather than a collaborator therein.
26 i.e. “lie-inhibitor”
27 The Latin ambo signifies “two.”
28 The eponymous anti-hero of Philosophaster (1606), the only other published work by Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, gave his name to a general term applied to someone pretending to be a philosopher.
29 Perhaps a reference to André Gide, who caused controversy with a defense of pederasty in Corydon (1924). Kolney would certainly have been aware of his work prior to 1908, including L’Immoraliste (1902; tr. as The Immoralist).
30 A 16th century anecdote regarding a stray cow belonging to a peasant named Colas, which was ill-treated by a Huguenot, allegedly causing a riot, gave rise to a number of popular songs, including a well-known complainte entitled “Le Legat de la vache de Colas.”
31 “Alas, how badly this century treats the wretched Arts; young boys are already in the habit of demanding gifts….”
32 Salente is the ideal city featured in François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699; tr. as The Adventures of Telemachus).
33 Paul Robin (1837-1912) was a French Anarchist who eventually became a leader of the neo-Malthusian movement to which Kolney owed his primary commitment, but is nowadays primarily remember for his activities as an educationalist while running the Prévost Orphanage in Cempuis from 1880-1894. His method combined intellectual and practical education, and helped pioneer libertarian education and co-educationalism, but his license was eventually revoked as a result of fierce criticism from the political right.
34 The quotation is from Blaise Pascal’s posthumously-published Pensées (1669).
35 Clodoche is an argot term for a vagabond, but this reference presumable has in mind a famous troupe of fairground performers who adopted that collective name.
36 The poet Victor de Laprade (1812-1883).
37 Again, the author includes a footnote reference to Le Salon de Madame Truphot, Les Aubes mauvaises and L’Affranchie.
38 A feminine derivative of the Latin flamen [priest]
39 The name “Millerand” might have been added to the 1928 edition, since the ex-Socialist Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943) was President of the Republic from 1920-1924, but it is more probable tht onlt the title was added; prior to 1908 Millerand had been a participant in Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet at the turn of the century, sparking a fierce controversy over the propriety of socialist politicians participating in “bourgeois governments”—inevitably seen by some of his former associates as treason. A young Anarchist attempted to assassinate him in 1922.
40 Vesper and Lucine—Venus as the evening and morning—are paired in that partiular formulation in the 15th-century Scottish poet William Dunbar’s “The Goldyn Targe” [i.e., “The Golden Target”]. How Formosa knows the terms is anyone’s guess.
41 One of the Latin terms for kissing.
42 An obsolete synonym of “penis,” doubtless chosen for its rarity.
43 The idea that life, and human life in particular, is activated by an ambient radiation through which the Earth and the Solar System move, is also implicit in the manner in which the Great Cataclysm is envisaged earlier in the story. Although it is not an unduly esoteric notion, it seems likely, given that Kolney was familiar with J.-H. Rosny’s work as a precursor of Wells, that he had read “La Légende sceptique” (1889; tr. as “The Skeptical Legend” in the Black Coat Press edition of The Navigators of Space, ISBN 978-1-935558-35-4), in which the idea features prominently, along with other ideas echoed in the miraculous technology featured in the present story.
44 The author inserts a footnote: “Ought we to recall that the first edition of this work appeared in the year 1908, long before the conclusive experiments of Dr. Voronoff?” The naturalized French surgeon Serge Voronoff began grafting tissue from testicles of chimpanzees on to human testicles, with the aim of boosting or restoring their virility, in the 1920s. The horror and hilarity generated by his transplanted “monkey glands” obscured any objective assessment of his results, but it seems likely, in retrospect, that problems of rejection must have doomed them to failure.
45 Georges Clemenceau was President of the Council in 1908, and again from 1917 to 1920.
46 Sulpicia was the name of the only female poet in ancient Rome whose work has survived, by virtue of being bound with that of Tibullus is a crucial manuscript.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm
14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life
23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
89. Alphonse Brown. The Conquest of the Air
40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
81 Félicien Champsaur. Ouha, King of the Apes
91. Félicien Champsaur. The Pharaoh’s Wife
03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis
67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey
17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men
49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;
-- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence
10 Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
08 Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
01 Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
51 Charles de Fieux. Lamékis
31 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega
70 Arnould Galopin. Doctor Omega & The Shadowmen
88 Judith Gautier. Isoline and the Serpent-Flower
57 Edmond Haraucourt. Illusions of Immortality
24 Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
55 Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence
30 Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
90 Fernand Kolney. Love in 5000 Years
87 Louis-Guillaume de La Follie. The Unpretentious Philosopher
50 André Laurie. Spiridon
52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait
82 Alain Le Drimeur. The Future City
27-28 Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
07 Jules Lermina. Mysteryville
25 Jules Lermina. Panic in Paris
32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius
66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers
15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
73 Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot
74 Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat
75 Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies
76 Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious
72 Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes
78 Joseph Méry. The Tower of Destiny
77 Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865
83 Louise Michel. The Human Microbes
84 Louise Michel. The New World
11 José Moselli. Illa’s End
38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
04 Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
79 Pierre Pelot. The Child Who Walked On The Sky
85 Ernest Perochon. The Frenetic People
60 Henri de Régnier. A Surfeit of Mirrors
33 Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril
34 Maurice Renard. Doctor Lerne
Love in 5000 Years Page 23