The Human Arrow

by Félicien Champsaur

  Most of Champsaur’s early fiction, the bulk of which is collected in Entrée de Clowns [Clowns’ Entrance] (1886) was fantastic in a frankly farcical vein, and he always retained a strong sense of humor, whose exercise assisted readers and critics who did not want to take him seriously. His first venture into speculative fiction was in that vein: a short story initially entitled “La Légende du singe”, which appeared in La Jeune France in 1878. It was subsequently reprinted in a small volume entitled Les Deux singes [The Two Monkeys] (1885), under the title “Le Premier homme,” along with a companion-piece, “Le Dernier homme,” for which I have been unable to trace any prior publication; the two stories were illustrated in that edition, the former by Henri de Montaut and the latter by Albert Robida. Both items were reprinted again in Entrée de Clowns. As they are so short, I have translated them here as prefatory material to the main event, as “The First Human” and “The Last Human,” partly by way of illustrating how far Champsaur had traveled by 1917, in terms of his literary method, and partly to demonstrate his early affinity with other Hydropathe dabblers in scientific romance such as Cros, Allais and Gabriel de Lautrec.

  Champsaur does not appear to have taken much interest in science until he developed an interest in the potential of aviation—although it is possible that the “Dr. Karolus” who briefly contributed a science column to Le Panurge was Champsaur, who wrote most of the periodical’s other columns under various pseudonyms—but he certainly retained an interest in the literary potential of exotic primates, for they feature prominently in two of his full length novels, Ouha, roi des singes [Ouha, King of the Apes] (1922), which might well have taken some inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, and the allegedly-distasteful Nora, le guénon devenue femme [Nora, the She-Ape Become a Woman] (1929), which is described in the only secondary source I have been able to locate as a racist parody of the success of Josephine Baker, presumably in the worst possible taste.

  Although there are marginal fantastic elements in several of Champsaur’s other works, the three that qualify as wholeheartedly fantastic are the peculiar erotic fantasy Homo deus, le satyre invisible [Homo Deus, the Invisible Satyr] (1923), the Egypt-set La Pharaonne, roman occulte [Pharaoh’s Wife; an Occult Novel] (1929) and Le Crucifié [The Crucified] (1930), a novel about the life of Jesus, replete with miracles. After Les Ailes de l’homme, however, he does not seem to have attempted any further works of futuristic fiction; although the title of Etats-Unis du monde [United States of the World] (1930) is suggestive, the work does not appear in any bibliographies of speculative fiction, and the only secondary indication of its content I can locate identifies it, very briefly, as a novel about the Great War. Perhaps he felt that he had had his fingers burned once and did not want to risk it again, but it seems more likely that no other scientific or technological advance ever appealed to his imagination as potential subject matter in the way that the wonders of the early days of aviation had.

  Following his death in 1934 Champsaur seems to have been fallen into neglect with surprising rapidity, although there are two substantial studies of his work and second-hand copies of his most popular works are easy to find, simply because so many were printed. His name still crops up frequently, however, on the fringes of many biographies of the notable writers and artists of the fin-de-siècle—including the sculptor Auguste Rodin, of whose work he was an enthusiastic champion and who remained one of his closest friends. None of his works has been translated into English until now; those that were not considered too risqué during his lifetime were presumably considered too eccentric—but it is his eccentricities, experiments and innovations that nowadays recommend him for possible reappraisal, at least by lovers and students of imaginative fiction. I hope to be able to translate more of his work in the future.

  This translation of The Human Arrow is mostly taken from the version of the 1927 edition of Les Ailes de l’homme reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. The translation of the text dropped from the 1917 edition has been made from a copy of the Renaissance du livre edition. Both texts contains numerous identical trivial errors that presumably resulted from hurried typesetting, in addition to the more serious error in the timing of the climax of the original text, which might have been accidentally incorporated into the narrative by the author when he revised his original text for publication in 1917. The translations of the two shorter stories are made from a 1927 reprint by La Nouvelle Revue Critique of Entrée de Clowns, issued shortly before the new edition of Les Ailes de l’homme, and similarly reproduced on gallica.

  Brian Stableford

  THE FIRST HUMAN

  It is the Jewish quarter in Leipzig. What extraordinary types! Cornelius Schweiger of Darmstasdt has discomposed a substance thought to be elementary until now: azote. His discovery is unknown—not knowing Greek, he has never discovered the technical names of the elements. The other, Isaac Gombrich, an Israelite of the ghetto, has transformed oil into diamond.

  In that regard, Isaac had a funny habit. When the oil had turned into diamond, he amused himself by setting fire to the pieces. He experienced, said his biographer, Herzénus Klingel, an intense voluptuousness in seeing those substances, which represented millions of consciousnesses, vanish into carbon dioxide.

  For seven days, Isaac Gombrich was absent. He was correcting the proofs of the twelfth volume of his great work, A Treatise on Transcendental Crystallography. But Isaac had a preoccupation that was tormenting him—an obsession so great that at the bottom of the third column of page 1063 in the eleventh volume, he had overlooked a misprint in the third paragraph of his article on the triclinohedric system.7

  Cornelius Schweiger was hiding something from him. Since turning 59, at the March equinox or thereabouts, he seemed to have developed a love of anatomy. He often came home with femurs, tibias, skulls, red-tinted vertebrae or iliac bones beneath the folds of his worn and acid-stained overcoat. Once, through his round gold-rimmed spectacles, Isaac Gombrich had even seen him take a little white hand—doubtless a woman’s or child’s—out of his armpit.

  What could he be doing with them? No trace of these human remains ever remained in the laboratory.

  Whatever the case might be, Cornelius Schweiger is going back and forth amid a disorderly aggregation of kilns, alembics, test-tubes, piles named after Bunsen and coils after a certain Ruhmkorff, decanting, dreaming, talking to himself, making mixtures and compounds. He is obliged to make use of apparatus invented by the ignorant. Being much cleverer, he has found a solvent for the human body: a liquid as colorless and odorless as water—aqua communis, in Latin. He has prepared 1042 pints of it, plus a fraction.

  Cornelius Schweiger is sad, however. This substance dissolves horn, this one flesh, that one calcium phosphate. He has mixed all these substances, has added new ones, and resolved one of the great problems, perhaps the greatest of all. Catacombs, redundant; cemeteries, redundant; incineration, redundant! Man—in which I include women—would be dissolved, liquefied.

  Does he deserve so much?

  Cornelius Schweiger had suffered a great deal at one time. Why should he not keep his secret to himself? He is a genius, like Archimedes, Gutenberg and Fulton, and he can do anything. The vat is there, and he could end it all, taking the formula with him.

  Then, unaccustomed ideas pass through the old scientist’s head. For the first time, he senses the charm of life and the sweetness of things. The sky is pale blue, the leaves were quivering.

  Cornelius Schweiger recalls that he is a musician. He takes several flasks of hydrogen and contrives a strange chemical harmonica, a kind of organ automatically playing the tunes he loves. He sets the apparatus up in a corner of the laboratory, then goes to the barred window to contemplate nature.

  The great intelligent All is slumbering, tranquil under the immutable law. Cornelius Schweiger looks out for a few minutes. Nearby, the chemical harmonica had commenced its mysterious music, murmuring and singing the German popular song Weber’s
Last Thought.8

  Cornelius Schweiger stands there listening. His entire being is overwhelmed by an immense tenderness, and the sanguine globules beat more forcefully in his temples. The vat is still there. He goes back to it. An atheist is about to die.

  The music continued, plaintively. It was weeping, infinitely caressing The scientist was still listening. Meanwhile, he dissolved, like a lump of sugar in a glass of water. He did not feel himself melting. A lump of sugar is unaware that it is melting. The flesh was disappearing in sheets, being hollowed out by holes, the bones softening.

  Finally, the last note of the aforementioned tune resounded.

  There was then a brief interlude. Cornelius Schweiger no longer had more than a vague notion of existence. He could still hear, though. The harmonica played a tune that he, Cornelius Schweiger, had composed himself, to which he had given the title “Pan.”

  At first it was a smooth and soft melody, something like a hymeneal song, a susurrus of kisses. Then the melody became grave and poignant; it had appeals, cries and ager, and the great voice of seas and winds as perceptible within it.

  But he could no longer hear anything. Life had fled his diminished body. Suddenly, there was nothing more in the liquid, still transparent, than little floating granules. Cornelius Schweiger had dissolved. The hydrogen flames went out at the same time, one by one, and the harmonics finished its hymn.

  Click click! The laboratory door creaks and opens slowly. It is Isaac Gombrich. He is laughing at himself. He has corrected the proofs of his twelfth volume and read a study by the eminent Karl Stranzer on transcendental crystallography and Isaac Giombrich. He is the master, and it has been recognized.

  But where is Cornelius Schweiger, then? The rabbi Joseph Manus was asking for news of him just now.

  What has happened? What is that vat for? It’s full of a slightly viscous liquid. What can it be? No odor.

  Isaac Gombrich dips his finger into it; immediately, the finger dissolves. There is no mystery for a German scientist. He plunges his hand in; the hand dissolves, like the finger. The old crystallographer is suddenly gripped by the desire of the unknown. He puts his whole arm into the liquid; the arm dissolves.

  What has Cornelius Schweiger done? Might the doctor have discovered something he could not explain? Isaac Gombrich has studied everything, fathomed everything; he knows causes and effects; he will understand this one.

  He rolls up his trousers, in order not to get them wet, gets into the vat and—with the hand and arm that remain to him—supports himself on the rim. The legs and lower parts—you know the ones I mean!—of Isaac Gombrich dissolve. He is hallucinating. There is no pain, however.

  His torso, sustained by the hand gripping the zinc of the vat, remains in the air, and his eyes, behind his spectacles, are fixed upon the surface of the liquid. They are searching. No solution.

  He finally understands. He has glimpsed the secret. A loud cry escapes his violet mouth, his hand unclenches, and the torso falls. After a few seconds, there is no longer anything in the vat but a yellowish liquid.

  Two months go by. The publisher Samuel Hartmann has not received the thirteenth volume of that famous work, A Treatise on Transcendental Crystallography. On the other hand, Friedrich Rumdorff, the celebrated adversary of Cornelius Schweiger, is waiting in vain for a response to his recent objection to the unity of universal matter. (Friedrich Rumdorff was not in favor of the reduction of elementary substances into a single one, but, by way of compensation, he was in favor of the great German union.) So, hearing no further mention of Cornelius Schweiger, he went one day to make inquiries of Samuel Hartmann.

  They went to the two scientists’ house, in the poorer part of the quarter, in Methuselahstrasse. No reply. The two scientists were not there. Samuel Hartmann and Friedrich Rumdorff went into the laboratory.

  No layman had ever been into it. Dust everywhere: on the flasks, the test-tubes, the cupules and the wooden doors of the cupboard. In the middle of the laboratory was the vat, now resplendent.

  The entire interior was covered in red and blue dots. They were nothing but dazzling crystals. Dangling from one of them was a pair of rounded spectacles with gold rims.

  Friedrich Rumdorff resembles a question mark. His head leaning over his torso, he sends Samuel Hartmann away with a gesture, and becomes pensive.

  He is illustrious too, presently the most celebrated of all German scientists, since Cornelius Schweiger is no more. He takes one of the crystals and subjects it to a thousand reagents. Wasted effort. He leafs through folio volumes, works, searches—and searches.

  Finally as eleven o’clock in the evening—Madame Rumdorff’s time—draws near, he grasps the truth, or very nearly. Cornelius Schweiger and Isaac Gombrich are there, in the vat; the solvent has evaporated and the two scientists have been transformed into strange crystals.

  How have the two scientists been liquefied and crystallized?

  He—Friedrich Rumdorff, professor at the University of Leipzig—does not know.

  But let it not be said that the science of a professor can be defeated. What he pursued for such a long time, Cornelius Schweiger has found. So be it! He will respond to one great achievement with another, more sublime; he will reconstitute Cornelius Schweiger and Isaac Gombrich, and ask them for the formula of the solvent.

  For nine months, from the Annunciation to Christmas, he remains shut up in the laboratory, with Madame Rumdorff to assist him. He calculates, makes and remakes experiments. On Christmas Day, when Samuel Hartmann returns, the work is complete, but imperfect.

  In the course of his operations, Friedrich Rumdorff had made an error in an equation; he had added things up wrongly, and had only been able to grasp the negative soul of each of the two scientists; the positive soul had escaped him.

  Cornelius Schweiger and Isaac Gombrich had each become the first human: an ape.

  THE LAST HUMAN

  It is a fact that Charles Bergheim, of Stephenson & Co., Stellar Publicity, after dining at a tavern with his blonde girl-friend Alice Penthièvre had demonstrated a remarkable enthusiasm, at the exhibition of Incoherent Arts, for a shocking drawing by Mademoiselle Valtesse representing two coherent lizards.

  That adorable composition, in which two amorous little animals were about to confide in one another tenderly, gives evidence of a patient and continuous study of nature on the part of the witty red-haired woman who is its author.

  Nearby, Dinah Samuel, on the arm of a young man, was reproaching the lounge-lizard for not having sufficiently hospitable paws and the lizard for lacking coherence. (On examination.) Bergheim, on the other hand, was not criticizing. His eyes full of perverse flames, he loudly declared, contrary to the opinion of Penthièvre, that Mademoiselle Valtesse was charming and delightful,9 her drawing marvelous.

  Since then, Alice had been sulking.

  That same evening, they had taken the train to a château, an Angevin bachelor establishment where a jolly hunt for game every sort had been organized—for they had only gone to the crazy exhibition to amuse themselves while waiting for the departure time.

  Alice had not addressed four words to him. She was slumped in a corner of the compartment while he had huddled in the opposite corner. The lamp up above gazed at them like the moon.

  Bergheim gave some thought to an idea he was working on: the illumination of Paris by a formidable source of electric light at the top of a lighthouse, a competitor with the Sun, a tower of stone and iron erected in the center of the city. He read two pages of a new novel and went to sleep.

  As he did not have a tranquil conscience with respect to Penthièvre—for, so far as affairs were concerned, he had not felt any remorse for a long time—his slumber was full of dreams.

  He dreamed that, instead of being on an express train, they were back at home in the Avenue de Messine. His girl-friend, still pouting, had locked her bedroom door. Anyway, he liked solitude just as much. He installed himself in the drawing-room, on a soft divan. At the back o
f the room, under a palm-tree, a parrot was asleep in its cage.

  At about two o’clock, Bergheim suddenly opened his eyes and sat up on his elbow. He heard a great tumult and saw, through the windows, that it was as if the atmosphere was on fire. What could be the cause of such an anomaly? Was there an earthquake, in which Paris would collapse? Were the sewers finally in revolt?

  He looked outside.

  A current lashed his face, as if he had put his head out of the window of a fast-moving carriage. A crazed population was running around the boulevard, in great confusion. Everyone seemed to be devoting himself to his normal occupation, however, but with an activity overexcited to the thirtieth power. There were cries that were almost savage; Bergheim thought he was in the Bourse.

  Without further anxiety, he reflected that it was only a dream, and that there was no point disturbing himself—needlessly, in any case—if there really had been an earthquake. He lay down on his divan again and, draped in a Japanese silk sheet embroidered with silver and gold monsters, he said to himself:

  “Before me, the end of the world.”10

  What had happened during the night was quite simple. A comet, arriving from infinite space, without any warning, with a velocity of several million leagues a minute, having deviated from its orbit in consequence of a celestial cataclysm, had traversed the solar system. Its immeasurable tail—a wake of oxygen, hardly anything at all—encountering our atmosphere, had run prodigiously around the world. The drawing-room in the Avenue de Messine where Bergheim was lying down had been, by a freak of chance, the center of that monstrous whirlwind; the financier and his parrot had been the only ones spared.