Dieudonat
by
Edmond Haraucourt
Translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
DIEUDONAT 17
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 315
Introduction
Dieudonat, roman by Edmond Haraucourt (1856-1941), here translated as Dieudonat, was first published in book form by Ernest Flammarion in 1912. It was reprinted in an illustrated edition by Arthème Fayard in 1932. An earlier version of the story was, however, initially published as a series of fourteen “contes” in Le Journal in 1906, beginning with “L’Enfant doué” on 31 May and concluding with “Dans la rue” on 1 November. Much of Haraucourt’s work for Le Journal, his principal market for fiction after the turn of the century, was first published in that fashion, including the stories that were eventually combined to make up the classic prehistoric fantasy Daâh, le premier homme (1914; tr. as Daah: The First Human1 and several of the novelettes translated in the collection Illusions of Immortality (2012)2, but Dieudonat, like Daâh, was very extensively expanded and revised for publication.
Because it was published as a series of contes rather than as a feuilleton serial, the episodes of the first version of the story of Dieudonat had more flexibility in length than the episodes of a serial confined by the feuilleton, and they could be produced at a much more leisurely pace, at intervals of between one and three weeks. They were, however, still made up as the author went along rather than being planned in advance as an ensemble. The most important precedent for that mode of publication in Le Journal had been set by Jean Lorrain, who had a contract to deliver weekly content to the paper between 1900 and his death in 1906, and who mingled articles, short stories and episodic long stories as the mood took him. When those materials were reprinted in book form, however, they did not undergo any revision, save for minor copy-editing. Haraucourt’s policy was very different, involving considerable supplementation and reorganization, in order to develop and extrapolate the ideas explored in his fiction—much of which consists of Voltairean contes philosophiques of considerable intellectual ambition—as well as repairing inconsistencies and supplying esthetic enhancements.
Haraucourt’s favorite book when he was a child, at a time of his life when books were exceedingly precious to him, was Don Quixote, and Dieudonat is, in a sense, “his Don Quixote.” It is, in consequence, a very personal novel as well as a novel very much of its time; it is Don Quixote recast as a kind of modern Candide, addressing the problem of theodicy frankly, seriously and satirically, on the assumption that there are some true words best spoken in jest. Like many of Voltaire’s own contes philosophiques it elects to continue and transfigure the rich French tradition of contes merveilleux, by endowing its hero with a supernatural gift similar to the one whose possible consequences had recently been explored, in a superficial manner, in H. G. Wells’ cautionary tale “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” (1898; Fr. tr. in Le Mercure de France, 1899).
The result of this complex combination is that, whereas Don Quixote was a satirical tragicomedy geared to generate relatively amicable laughter and pity, Dieudonat, at least in its final version, is a ferocious black comedy that almost prohibits laughing at its own jokes, and which eventually turns to unremittingly bleak tragedy, for which the explanatory excuse provided in the epilogue might well seem cold comfort to many readers. The extended apologue and the elaborate moral drawn therefrom are, however, ingenious and compelling, entitling the novel to be considered as one of the great twentieth-century additions to the traditions of contes merveilleux, alongside the near-contemporary La Révolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels) by Anatole France, who was Haraucourt’s companion in daily excursions for a while, when both became passionate cyclists during the early years of that hobby’s fashionability.
The introduction to Illusions of Immortality contains a detailed account of Haraucourt’s unusual life and career, some of which it is useful to repeat here in order that the idiosyncratic intellectual perspective of Dieudonat can be more fully understood. When the author set out to write his Mémoires des jours et des gens (which he never finished, but whose existing text was published posthumously in 1946) he began with the ironic proclamation that he owed his existence to the Catholic Church. His mother was one of seven children of a family surnamed Biet, and was the only one not to be sent into Holy Orders, not because she was insufficiently pious, but because her parents needed someone to do the housework and look after the younger children. While the rest of the Biet children were sent to the Far East as missionaries, where most of them died, Edmond’s mother remained behind, but when her own mother died, her father had difficulty adjusting to celibate life, and turned to the Church for help.
The Church not only volunteered to supply Monsieur Biet with a new wife, but also offered to provide his daughter—who would thus be made redundant as his housekeeper—with a husband. Edmond’s mother was then introduced to a complete stranger on the day of her betrothal, the banns having already been posted, and was married within three weeks. Haraucourt was thus brought up in an improvised household which was, to begin with, very poor and exceedingly devout. His mother, however, had not forgiven the Church for taking away her six siblings, and she refused to send Edmond to the seminary in which the Church offered him a free education. She also refused to send him to the local community school, as his father wanted, and insisted—although it involved considerable financial sacrifice—that he go to a lycée in order that he could learn Latin and Greek, thus being prepared for entry into a profession without being simultaneously indoctrinated and groomed for Holy Orders.
A precocious child who began writing poetry at five years of age, Haraucourt became a dedicated book-lover, in the only way that a child in a devout and poor household could be. Having access to very few books other than the Bible, he treasured the few to which he did contrive to gain access enormously, and he reports in his memoirs that from the age of six to eleven he lived in the near-exclusive company of just one book: Don Quixote, which he describes in his memoirs as “the secular Bible of the Occidental world,” arguing that Quixote and Sancho Panza are, in combination, the perfect symbols of the divided self, containing between them an entire account of human being.
For the rest of his life, Haraucourt seems to have compartmentalized himself in a similar fashion, creating such a sharp distinction between his Quixotic art and his hedonistic everyday life that no one who knew him could ever understand how such a cheerful bon viveur and relentless womanizer could possible write books that seemed so deeply pessimistic and embittered. In his memoir, he explains that, while he had always been grateful for his personal good fortune and fully appreciative of the joys available to him—whose indulgence he did not stint, when he could afford them—far from preventing him from observing the miseries and mistakes of others, the awareness of his own blessings had only made him more acutely aware of their rarity, prompting him bitterly to lament the misfortunes of the majority of humankind. The 1912 version of Dieudonat concludes with one such heartfelt lament, extrapolated to considerable length.
Haraucourt reports in his memoir that he attended a different lycée almost every year because his father, a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, was transferred at regular intervals to various far-flung provinces. His final year of school was spent at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris, and soon after completing his diplomas he assembled his first collection of poetry, modeled on Victor Hugo’s Légende des siècles and Charles Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes barbares, but focusing more narrowly on the subject that most occupied his thoughts and endeavors at the time; it was
entitled La Légende des sexes. Haraucourt asserts that the collection went everywhere with him for the next few years, and continued to follow him for the rest of his life, but between 1876, when he completed it at the age of twenty, and the day when it finally crept into print, he had considerable difficulty in placing individual poems in periodicals.
He had a vague notion of preparing for a career in law, and worked in a notary’s office for a while, but he could not settle there, and tried the civil service—an attempt not helped at all by a brief stint working directly for his censorious father. After various other brief employments, and a few intervals when he occasionally had to sleep rough, he obtained a position as secretary to the Prefect of Corsica, spending a year on the island in 1879 before returning to France for his compulsory term of military service. On his release he stayed in Paris, where he fell in with members of a political group carrying forward the radical ideas of Léon Gambetta, and became the editor of their campaign newsletter. At the farewell dinner of the group—whose candidate had been defeated in the elections of 1881—that the idea was broached of using the group’s printing press to run off a few copies of La Légende des sexes for private distribution. The copy of the text in the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue, bearing the signature “Le Sire de Chambley” is dated 1883 and the place of publication is given (probably fictitiously) as Brussels, but if Haraucourt’s memory is accurate, that might be one of several pirated editions that appeared because he neglected to register copyright in the work.
Haraucourt then found work as an electrician in a theater, managing the lights—a job that apparently led to a split with the Biet family, who heard that he had been seen hanging out with actors and decided that the black sheep had finally strayed too far; his tyrannical grandfather demanded that his mother cut off all communication with him. His parents disappear from his memoir thereafter, but it is hard to believe that they really never saw him again, and he certainly continued to communicate with his uncle, Félix Biet, with whom he seems to have maintained a friendly correspondence while the latter was the Bishop of Tibet, and with whom he remained on good terms when the latter returned to Paris.
An extraordinary stroke of luck transformed the poet’s fortunes in 1882 when the editor of La Jeune France, Albert Allinet, was moved by the submission of some of his poems to burst into laughter at their apparent absurdity while Leconte de Lisle happened to be in the office. The great man asked to see the poems, did not laugh—perhaps recognizing his own influence—sternly instructed the editor to publish them, and then sent Haraucourt an invitation to his salon, where he introduced him to some of the other grand old men of French letters, including Théodore de Banville and Ernest Renan. The three of them appear to have decided—apparently on a whim—to take Haraucourt under their wing, and to promote him as a promising young poet. Banville published a glowing essay on his work in Gil Blas, and within a matter of weeks he had been invited to numerous other salons, including dinner at Alphonse Daudet’s house, where he met Georges Charpentier, who took him to dinner at Sarah Bernhardt’s the following evening.
Almost instantaneously, Haraucourt became so famous within the limited circle of the Parisian literary community—without yet having published anything substantial—that when Rodolphe Salis decided to save his ailing cabaret, Le Chat Noir, by promoting it as the capital’s leading literary café, Haraucourt was one of the two young writers—the other was Maurice Rollinat—that he invited to the planning meeting, along with Emile Goudeau, whom Salis invited to re-form his literary club the Hydropathes, with the café as a base. Haraucourt was drafted to the editorial staff of the periodical Le Chat Noir, to which he also became a regular contributor, and he joined the café’s cast of regular performers of songs. He was also introduced to Victor Hugo, a few months before the latter’s death, and became one of his coffin-bearers.
In spite of the critical acclaim won in select circles by La Légende des sexes, the book remained virtually invisible in the marketplace, and Haraucourt settled into a clerical job at the Ministry of Commerce, where he was able to do his assigned work rapidly enough to allow him abundant time to write; he composed poems, plays and prose fiction in his office before going off to spend his evenings in Le Chat Noir or at various salons. Félix Biet tried to save him from his “life of debauchery” by arranging for him to go into retreat in a monastery for a while, but Haraucourt loftily informed the prior that, although he considered himself to be a good Christian, he had never felt the slightest need or inclination to believe in the divinity of Christ, and he simply used his cell as another quiet place to write—but the experience doubtless provided some inspiration for the peculiar monastic phase added to Dieudonat’s career in the 1912 version of the story.
In 1885 Haraucourt published his second poetry collection, L’me nue [The Naked Soul], and in 1887 published his first novel, the quirky satirical love story Amis [Lovers]. His first play was written for Sarah Bernhardt, whose coterie of male admirers he had joined with enthusiasm; it was a Passion in which she was supposed to play the Virgin Mary, but it became embroiled in controversy and the first scheduled performance had to be moved and drastically reduced in scope; some years passed before it saw production in a theater and publication, in 1890. He fared better with a musical comedy based on Shakespeare, Shylock (published 1889) with music by Gabriel Fauré, but his next play, Don Juan de Mañara, languished unproduced and unpublished for some while, again surfacing in 1890. The critical reception of his “novel in verse,” Seul [Alone] (1890) was more muted than that of L’me nue, and he might have felt by that time that a backlash against his initial welcome was beginning to take form.
The first, and one of the most striking, of Haraucourt’s contes philosophiques was “Immortalité” (1888; tr. as “Immortality”), a posthumous fantasy that reflects his doubts regarding his ability to live up to the reputation he had acquired in advance of any real achievement, but which extends into a meditation on the value of life in Paradise and the challenge of discovering a purpose in life. It extrapolates the philosophical issues inherent in its initial hypothesis much further than is typical of the subgenre to which it belonged, in a fashion that became typical of Haraucourt’s prose work, and which permitted both Dieudonat and Daâh to become highly unusual and remarkable works. Its more immediate successors similarly showing a liking for tackling big themes with bravado, included L’Antéchrist (1893 as a booklet; tr. as “The Antichrist”) and “La Fin du Monde” (1893; tr. as “The End of the World”), which were included with it in his first collection L’Effort (1894), an elaborately decorated book with colored or monochrome illustrations on every page. Unfortunately, L’Effort was not a commercial success, and there was a hiatus in his publications thereafter; it was not until he began working on a regular basis for Le Journal after 1900 that he resumed publishing prose in a relatively steady fashion.
In that interim, however, Haraucourt had another stroke of luck. In 1894 someone he met by chance in a café while out cycling suggested that he might be an ideal candidate for a vacancy as a curator of the sculpture collection in the Musée du Trocadero. He applied for the post, and got it, at last discovering a job in which he could take a real interest, and in whose exercise he could be content. He spent the rest of his working life as a museum curator, transferring to the Musée de Cluny in 1903. Although he had had no interest in archeology prior to 1894, except insofar as it bore upon his love of Classical art, he took to it like a duck to water. The amenable job and his marriage in 1896 did not change his fundamental pessimism, but do seem to have helped to mellow it somewhat in the thematic collection that he considered to be his poetic masterpiece, Les Ages. L’Espoir du Monde [The Ages. The Hope of the World] (1899)—a much closer analogue of La Légende des siècles than La Légende des sexes—and in the more commercial work that he did for Le Journal, to which he remained a regular contributor for two decades.
Much of the work he did for the newspaper consisted of short domestic melo
dramas and contes cruels. He reprinted some of his early pieces, along with a previously-unpublished novella in Les Naufragés [Castaways] (1902), and a further batch in La Peur [Fear] (1907), both of which volumes reflect the miseries of the human condition in a series of depictions of small-scale tragedies and disasters, often involving an element of physical horror, narrated in a rather laconic manner. Five stories from the former collection and three from the latter were combined with three further items from Le Journal in a new collection, also confusingly entitled La Peur (1914), but the Great War followed hot on the heels of that collection and he published nothing similar thereafter, much of his work for the paper never being reprinted.
The contes with which Haraucourt supplied Le Journal became increasingly ambitious over time, including a remarkable trio of futuristic contes philosophiques that were split up into several parts: “Le Gorilloïde” (1904; tr. as “The Gorilloid”), “Cinq mille ans, ou La Traversée de Paris (1904; tr. as “A Trip to Paris”) and “La Découverte du docteur Auguérand” (1910; tr. as “Doctor Augérand’s Discovery”) The story series featuring Dieudonat and Daâh are not futuristic, but they are both fantastic, and can be seen as making up a distinctive sequence in company with the futuristic fantasies, all of the stories embracing a similarly sardonic world-view, with variations of tone. Alongside his work for Le Journal, Haraucourt published a few longer prose pieces, including the novel Les Benoît (1904) and a book containing two short novels, Trumaille et Pélisson (1908), all of which were blackly ironic tales of luckless humans implacably crushed by cruel fate and the hostility of their fellows.
Haraucourt offered himself as a candidate for the Académie in 1909, in competition with Henri de Régnier, whom he had met during his first evening at Leconte de Lisle’s salon, and Jean Richepin, whom he knew well from the early days of Le Chat Noir, but he lost the election to Richepin; Régnier simply waited for another seat to fall vacant, and was accepted at the second attempt, but Haraucourt never tried again. Perhaps he saw the failure to attain the “immortality” that election at the Académie was proverbially said to offer as a judgment on his career, and perhaps, having published his own judgment on the value of immortality long ago in “L’Immortalité,” he felt that it really did not matter, but it must have been at around that time that he set out to rewrite and amplify Dieudonat, which, among other things, examines the question of its hero’s qualification for entry into Paradise with earnest ironic wit.
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