Martyrs of Science
and Other Victims of
Devilry and Destiny
by
S. Henry Berthoud
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
MISANTHROPIC TALES 27
PRESTIGE 27
THE PAINTER GHIGI 40
THE DAY AFTER THE WEDDING 47
THERIAKI 53
NOCTURNAL TERROR 57
ALICE 62
FOLKLORE AND FAKELORE 71
THE DEVIL’S CHESS GAME 73
THE MOUTH OF HELL 81
THE DEVIL’S SONATA 86
THE SABBAT BOW 93
THE ANTIQUE RING 100
THE LADY OF THE COLD KISSES 107
THE BARN IN MONTECOUVEZ 116
THE WEDDING AT CAVRON-SAINT-MARTIN 121
THE SIRE WITH THE BROKEN ARMOR 126
THE FARMER’S SUPPER 133
SAINT MATHIAS THE HERMIT 136
MARTYRS OF SCIENCE 150
A HEAVENWARD VOYAGE 150
THE MASTER OF THE WEATHER 164
THE MADMAN 185
THE CAULDRON OF BICÊTRE 208
THE SECOND SUN 256
SCIENTIFIC FANTASIES 288
THE STAR-EATERS 288
LUMINOUS FLOWERS 295
WHICH SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE AFRAID OF NIGHTMARES 303
THE STORY OF A TREE IN THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES 312
THE DIABOLICAL COAL-MERCHANT 321
A HAUNTED ROOM 335
A SCIENTIST’S CRUELTIES 345
STORIES FOR CHILDREN 353
HEIDENLOCH CASTLE 353
THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF PARIS 381
THE YEAR 2865 412
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 437
Introduction
Samuel-Henri Berthoud, who anglicized the spelling of his familiar name as an affectation when he elected to sign his literary works “S. Henry Berthoud,” was born on 19 January 1804 in Cambrai, in Flanders in north-western France. He was the son of a printer and bookseller who also had the first name of Samuel, that being traditional in the family. Samuel-Henri was educated at Douai, as the beneficiary of a bursary. It is unclear how far that education extended, but there is no evidence that he ever obtained any advanced qualifications. Although he later adopted the representation “Dr. Sam” in some of the fiction he wrote specifically for children, that too was an affectation; he probably had no right to any such title.
It is, alas, necessary to use the word “probably” a lot in the course of any attempt to reconstruct the story of Berthoud’s life and career, which was scantily documented while he was alive, and almost completely ignored thereafter. Very few studies of the French Romantic Movement mention his contribution to it, or even his presence within it, and he would probably have gone entirely unmentioned in that context had it not been known that he was an early acquaintance of Honoré de Balzac and that he is mentioned in passing in a story by Théophile Gautier. He is described as a popularizer of science in an entry devoted to him in Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972), where a complimentary description is offered of two of the stories in his children’s book L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans [Humankind over Five Thousand Years] (1865), and mention is also made of an earlier story, “Voyage au ciel” (1841; tr. herein as “A Heavenward Voyage”).
Versins’ hint was presumably responsible for Francis Valery taking advantage of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s website gallica to locate “Voyage au ciel.” Valery’s expertise and judgment immediately allowed him to recognize the significance of the story as an item of “proto-science fiction,” and he subsequently reprinted and publicized it, but he does not seem to have been moved to make further investigation of the four-volume set of Fantasies scientifiques de Sam [Sam’s Scientific Fantasies] (1861-62), in which “Voyage au ciel” is reprinted, although he might have concluded, if he did take a brief look, that they were not very interesting, as very few of the other inclusions contain any speculative content.
Without the indexing facility provided by gallica and the similar facility offered by Google Books, it would be impossible to research Berthoud in any methodical fashion, and that would have been the situation for more than a century after his death, when it would have been nearly impossible to gather any information about him or assemble even a partial collection of his works. The record remains extremely patchy even today, but the combination of those two sources does allow ready consultation of a small fraction of his output in volume form and the location of a few fugitive secondary references. It also permits access to a tiny fraction of his unreprinted contributions to periodicals, although the vast majority of the publications to which he contributed remain unavailable as yet. In consequence, attempting to piece together a general overview of the author’s career and productions is am matter of trying to deduce the general appearance of a picture from a handful of jigsaw pieces. Even so, the narrative that can be pieced together from the fragments in question is an interesting one, in spite of its uncertainties.
Berthoud obtained his first publication in 1822, when his father published his Premiers essais poétiques for him, and his talent was independently endorsed in 1823, when he won a competition organized by the Societé d’Émulation de Cambrai, the literary society of his home town, with a poem entitled “Le Fugitif” [The Fugitive]. His father printed a pamphlet version of that for him too. He published at least one other item in the Societé d’Émulation’s annual bulletin: a story entitled “Le Fou” [The Madman] (1829), a fanciful historical romance in which Michel de Montaigne and Peter Paul Rubens lend a helping hand to Torquato Tasso after discovering him in dire straits. Many years later, he wrote another story with the same title—the latter is the one translated herein a “The Madman”—which has a very different cast and is set in a different era, but which shares something of the same method, building a fanciful and fervent romance around a small nucleus of historical fact.
By 1929, Berthoud was the permanent secretary of the Societé d’Émulation de Cambrai, and he was also editing a periodical founded the previous year by his father, the Gazette de Cambrai, where more of his early publications probably appeared. He had probably been working for his father since leaving school, in the family business. Whenever his formal education had been suspended, however, it certainly did not prevent him from thinking of himself as a scholar. His first passion was natural history, but he was also interested in literature, music, history and local folklore. In literary terms he was undoubtedly an adherent of the Romantic Movement from the very beginning, taking in German and English influences as well as French ones. Ernst Hoffmann is featured as a character in some of his historical romances and he was undoubtedly an admirer of Lord Byron, probably to the extent of adopting some affectations of dandyism—but not the “satanism” that made such a deep impression on many French Romantics, as Berthoud never compromised the devout Catholicism that had doubtless made a deep imprint on him while he was at Douai.
Berthoud moved to Paris in 1830, in which year “Prestige” was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He appears to have met Balzac in that year, and undoubtedly became part of the curious community of would-be writers so graphically described by the latter writer in Illusions perdues (1837-43; tr. as Lost Illusions). Exactly where Berthoud fitted into the spectrum of types identified by Balzac’s novel is unclear, except for the fact that he was one of those who “sold out” by falling prey to the temptations of journalism, perhaps compromising his original ideals and ambitions in the process. Before then, however, he must hav
e written the bulk of the items in his first collection, Contes misanthropiques [Misanthropic Tales] (1831), whose contents leave no doubt about the fact that, whatever illusions he might have bought to Paris regarding literary life and the prospects of finding success therein, he had none at all about life in general and the roles played therein by love, marriage, fickleness and recklessness.
It is difficult to determine exactly when Berthoud first met other leading members of the Parisian Romantic Movement; although he was certainly acquainted with Jules Janin and Petrus Borel by 1833, he might not have known them in 1831, but whether there was any communication between the three or not, Berthoud’s Contes Misanthropiques have very strong thematic, methodical and philosophical links with the many short stories that Janin began collecting in 1832 and those that Borel collected in Champavert: contes immoraux (1833; tr. as Champavert: Immoral Tales) and. Although Berthoud’s work lacks the fire and ferocity of Borel’s and the slick dexterity of Janin’s best work, there is no doubt that it is Berthoud who was the true originator of the rich tradition of what eventually came to be known as contes cruels. Indeed, the brevity and relative laconism of Berthoud’s work in that vein makes his stories even more closely analogous to the works produced in the heyday of the tradition by such writers as Octave Mirbeau, Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, Guy de Maupassant and Edmond Haraucourt than the more high-profile foundation-stones provides by Janin, Borel and the writer who gave the genre its most popular label, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
Had it not been virtually impossible to find for such a long time (and it is still unavailable on gallica as I write, although Google Books offers a full view), Contes misanthropiques would surely have been recognized as a crucial contribution to the conte cruel tradition. Its fall into oblivion was doubtless aided by the fact that Berthoud never produced another volume like it, although the present sampler will hopefully make it very obvious that he never fully overcame the extreme and studied disillusionment that fueled those early stories, and that it continued to influence all of his works—even the children’s stories in which he evidently made great efforts to conceal it. In particular, it colors his scientific journalism and his “scientific fantasies” in a distinctive fashion, which distances his work in that vein considerably from that of such fellow pioneers of the popularization of science as Camille Flammarion and Henri de Parville.
That element of disillusionment gave almost all of Berthoud’s work a downbeat inclination that cannot have helped his popularity, and probably contributed to his eventual oblivion. There is no way of knowing how much it affected his personality in social intercourse, but the fact that he was so rarely mentioned in memoirs by all the people who undoubtedly knew him at least slightly might be revealing. He apparently intended to call his first novel Bah! but was overruled by the publisher, who imposed the title La Soeur de lait du vicaire [The Curate’s Foster-Sister] (1832). The title of Le Régent de rhétorique, moeurs flamandes [The Regent of Rhetoric; Flemish Mores] (1833) restored an element of sarcasm, and Le Cheveu du diable [The Devil’s Hair] (1833) and Mater dolorosa [Mother of Tears] (1834) also offered a clear implication of their downbeat inclinations.
Le Cheveu du diable has no fantastic content, although it does include mention of the folktale reference from which the title is borrowed in an introduction. Mater dolorosa, which describes the trials and tribulations of a writer and artist who leaves Cambrai to settle in Paris, also includes a mock folktale supposedly written by its hero, as well as a historical romance starring Ernst Hoffman and Carl-Maria Weber, but it is impossible to assess the extent to which the frame narrative mirrors Berthoud’s own tribulations. All four of those early novels attempt naturalistic representations of provincial life, seen from a quasi-sociological viewpoint, and have strong affinities with Balzac’s work in a similar vein.
By the time Mater dolorosa appeared, Berthoud had completed publication of the work that won him his first real success, the three volumes of Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre [Chronicles and Supernatural Traditions of Flanders] (1831-34). The collection does include some genuine items of folklore, only slightly modified in giving them literary form, but it also contains a considerable number of works that do not even bother to mimic the form of folktales, simply being items of modern supernatural fiction based on the kinds of materials found in folktales, and at least some of those that do mimic folktales are original compositions—“fakelore” rather than “folklore.”
Such mixtures are not unusual in collections of that sort, but Berthoud is further removed from being an authentic folklorist than the most prominent Romantic contributors to the field, including the brothers Grimm in Germany, Robert Hunt in England and Anatole Le Braz in France; the French successor with whom he had most in common was probably Julie Lavergne. In a single-volume reprint of the collection published as Légendes et traditions surnaturelles de Flandres (1862), Berthoud added the novella Asrael et Neptha, originally published separately in 1832, to the series—a move serving to re-emphasize the fact that its contents are far more readily considered as literary works that draw some inspiration from Flanders folklore than attempts to record the folklore in question in anything resembling its “original” anecdotal form.
As with the Contes misanthropiques, Berthoud never made any concerted attempt to write more supernatural fiction in the same vein as the Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre, but as with the former volume, its legacy left an indelible legacy on his future work, where folklore and fakelore continued to occupy a situation “in the wings,” always available for recruitment, at least for the purposes of comparison and subsidiary reference. Just as the present sampler illustrates the lingering effects of the author’s deep disillusionment, so it represents his continual tendency to cite the Devil’s dealings with humble folk for other literary purposes than straightforward recycling and orthodox transfiguration.
Berthoud’s literary production slowed markedly after 1834, at least so far as the production of books was concerned, but that was largely because he found employment as an editor, probably aided by his experience on the Gazette de Cambrai, under the auspices of Émile de Girardin. Girardin, a writer who eventually carved out a more significant career as a politician, founded several important periodicals, with a particular emphasis on popular education. His first periodical, La Mode, was supposedly a women’s magazine with an emphasis on fashion, although Berthoud’s contributions to it included “La Bague antique” (1831), the item of mock-folklore here translated as “The Antique Ring.” More typical of Girardin’s projects were the enormously successful Journal des connaissances utiles (founded 1831), published under the banner of La Societé nationale pour l’émancipation intellectuelle, of which he was the secretary, and the Almanach de France (founded 1834), and he made a highly significant contribution to the popular daily press with La Presse (founded 1836), which helped to found the tradition of popular feuilleton fiction that brought about a revolution in French popular fiction in the 1840s.
Berthoud probably contributed to all these projects, although exact data is scarce, and was probably a member of the Societé nationale pour l’émancipation intellectuelle; his commitment to the cause of mass education played a major role in shaping the remainder of his literary and journalistic output. The only one of Girardin’s periodicals of which a significant number of issues is currently reproduced on gallica is, however, the illustrated Musée des Familles, founded in 1833, of which Berthoud was hired as its first editor; it was a pioneering “family magazine” on which Jules Hetzel was later to model his endeavors in the same line, which made a highly significant contribution to the founding and shaping of the tradition of French children’s literature—many of whose early classics were produced on request by key members of the Romantic Movement.
In 1833 as “children’s literature,” in the sense of books and magazines designed for children to read by themselves, hardly existed; it was still assumed that children would provid
e an audience for adults readers, and even the Journal des Enfants founded in that year with Jules Janin as editor, was aimed at parents rather than the supposed “end consumers.” The Musée de Familles was by no means designed with child listeners exclusively, or even primarily, in mind, but the whole point of it was to construct an all-inclusive audience, addressing content to children, women and poor people as well as to the adult males who had previously constituted the core of the audience for periodicals, thus adding significant impetus to the crusade for universal literacy—which was proceeding more rapidly in France in the 1830s than any other nation. Berthoud did, however, produce a three-volume series of studies of La France historique, industrielle et pittoresque [Historic France, Industrial and Picturesque] (1835-37) aimed more specifically, if indirectly, at children, and he went on to contribute several volumes to a more general collection of didactic works entitled Petits livres de M. le curé [The Parish Priest’s Little Books] in the late 1840s.
It was in connection with the crusade for universal literacy, and in trying to cater to it with his editorial policy, that Berthoud apparently first became intensely interested in the popularization of science, as something that would probably interest children and would be good for them to know. It was in the Musée des Familles that his career found the fundamental orientation that it would maintain for the rest of his life. Berthoud also edited the Musée’s short-lived companion, the Mercure de France—one of several periodicals to bear that name—in 1835-36.
As an editor, Berthoud, like Janin in the Journal des Enfants, actively helped to further the careers of several members of the Romantic Movement; he published work by Balzac, Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas, and although they were not in need of his assistance, he also published Théophile Gautier and George Sand, who must have been grateful for it at the time. Although very little information is presently recoverable about Berthoud’s social life, he probably became a regular at the famous salon hosted by another of his leading contributors, Émile de Girardin’s wife Delphine, a notable writer in her own right and the daughter of Sophie Gay, a significant precursor of French Romanticism and important commentator on the growth of the movement.
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