Doctor Lerne Read online

  The Scientific Marvel Fiction

  of the French H.-G. Wells

  DOCTOR LERNE

  Sub-God

  by

  Maurice Renard

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  This is the first volume of a set of five, which includes most of the “scientific marvel fiction” of Maurice Renard, and some related works. It includes translations of the novella “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont,” first published in Fantômes et Fantoches [Phantoms and Marionettes] (Plon, 1905), the novel Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (Mercure de France, 1908) and the essay “Du Roman merveilleux-scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progrès,” first published in the sixth issue of Le Spectateur in October 1909.

  The second volume, A Man Among the Microbes and Other Stories, includes translations of the novel Un Homme chez les microbes, the first version of which was written in 1907-08, although no version was actually published until Crès released one in 1928, and the entire contents of the collection Le Voyage Immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières (Mercure de France, 1909).

  The third volume, The Blue Peril, comprises a translation of the novel Le Péril bleu (Louis Michaud, 1911).

  The fourth volume, The Doctored Man and Other Stories, includes translations of four stories from the collection Monsieur d’Outremort et autres histoires singulières (Louis Michaud, 1913), the novella “L’Homme truqué,” first published in Je Sais Tout in March 1921, and a miscellany of later articles and short stories taken from various sources.

  The fifth volume, The Master of Light, comprises a translation of the novel Le Maître de la lumière, which first appeared as a feuilleton serial in L’Instransigeant between March 8 and May 2, 1933.

  “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont,” here translated as “Monsieur Dupont’s Vacation,” was Renard’s first venture into what he perceived as a significant nascent genre, which he initially described—in the essay reprinted herein—as “scientific marvel fiction.” Taking relevant works by H. G. Wells and “J. H. Rosny aîné” (the Belgian writer whose real name was Joseph-Henri Boëx) as his principal models, Renard became very excited about the possibilities of that genre, although he never could quite decide what the most appropriate label for it might be. In Britain the parallel genre was known as “scientific romance” and Renard had probably read a review-essay by Alfred Jarry in the October 1903 issue La Plume in which Jarry considered “romans scientifiques” as a genre, but Renard was enthusiastic to discover a more apt designation.

  As a first venture into a newly-identified genre, “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont” inevitably gives the impression of a writer feeling his way, not quite certain of the rhetorical method appropriate to bringing such novelty to an unprepared audience, but it is a fine story nevertheless—undoubtedly the best story that had so far been written about dinosaurs, which had become a topic of keen public interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century but which had seemed inaccessible to the reach of conventional narrative forms and techniques. Its combination of comedy and melodrama must have seemed strangely chimerical at the time, but modern readers are well used to such amalgams and to the ways in which they can produce a distinctive narrative energy. The story’s admirers included François Coppée, whose hearty recommendation was subsequently recalled by Charles Derennes; its influence probably played a part in prompting Derennes to try his own hand at scientific romance in Le Peuple du pôle (1907; tr. in a Black Coat Pres edition as The People of the Pole).

  The title of Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu, here translated as Doctor Lerne, Subgod, is often cited without the final term, and an internal reference in the text itself gives its title as Le Docteur Lerne. The term sous-dieu [sub-god] does not occur within the text, so it might well have been added by the publisher for the purpose of distinguishing a conspicuously adventurous text from more conventional novels titled with doctor’s names—of which there are, of course, numerous examples. The novel has been translated before, in a 1924 edition published in New York by Macaulay under the title New Bodies for Old, but that unsigned translation is severely bowdlerized. Although the Macaulay text is only some 6000 words shorter than the original, the cuts alter the relationship between the protagonist and the principal female character out of all recognition, and the removal of the second of two explicit sex scenes has the unfortunate effect of leaving a yawning gap in the plot-development. Although the early phases of the Macaulay translation are competent, the translator became rather careless in the last few chapters, thus adding to the continuity problem. This unexpurgated edition will seem like a markedly different text even to those English readers who have encountered the now-rare Macaulay edition.

  The novel is a spectacularly robust continuation of the literary manifesto tentatively exemplified in “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont” and explicitly spelled out in the essay appended to this volume. Although clearly influenced by Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, it is a strikingly original work, which succeeds in its earnest desire to be shocking in more ways than one. It was not the first story to assume that recent advancements in the technologies of “grafting” might soon realize the age-old fantasies expressed in such mythical figures as the chimera and the Minotaur—some of which were admitted into the speculative margins of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and all the bestiaries that subsequently took that work as gospel—but it was the first to grasp that nettle firmly. Rather than dealing tentatively with a single experimental instance, as previous accounts had done, the novel attempts an extensive extrapolation more extravagant in its range and ambition than anything that the new genre had so far produced, thus harking back to the vaulting ambition of an earlier period in French literature, in which—without the logical and ideative support of modern scientific ideas—Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne had produced the cosmological extravaganza contained in Les Posthumes (written c. 1788; published 1802).

  It would not be fair to the reader to go into more detail here about the manner in which the novel’s themes are developed, so I shall postpone further discussion to an afterword, but it may be appropriate to add some comments here regarding the book’s reception. Le Docteur Lerne does not seem to have sold very well in 1908, but it did receive significant critical praise from several of Renard’s fellow writers, and undoubtedly contributed to the success of the literary salon that he began to host not long afterwards. The arch-symbolist and proto-surrealist writer Guillaume Apollinaire was happy to echo its subtitle in classifying it as a pioneering specimen of the roman sub-divin [subdivine novel]. The journalist Georges de la Fourchardière, then at the beginning of a long and august career, wrote in his review that its publication represented “un événement scientifique et littéraire d’un ordre prodigieux” [a scientific and literary event of a prodigious magnitude]. Such omens anticipated the fact that the novel would eventually be hailed as one of the landmark works of French speculative fiction, and undoubtedly confirmed Renard in his personal ambition to be one of the pioneers of the genre in which he placed it, and for which he then entertained high hopes. Its publication and reception thus became one of the key events of his career, and of his life.

  Maurice Renard was born on February 28, 1875 at Châlons-sur-Marne in north-eastern France. His father, Achille Renard, was a successful lawyer and his mother, née Marie Gamahut, was the daughter of a prosperous tradesman in the city of Reims. When Maurice was two, Achille Renard was appointed Président du Tribunal in Reims.

  In 1886, Renard was sent away to the prestigious Ecole Monge in Paris, but he returned to Reims in 1892 to complete his baccalaureate. He spent his school vacations at the Château Saint-Rémy,
a sumptuous property that his parents owned in the nearby village of Hermonville, which helped inspire the château settings that feature in so many of his stories. The fact that the his family was not aristocratic by descent, although it had adopted an aristocratic lifestyle, made its members all the more zealous in assuming aristocratic values and attitudes; although Renard’s work suggests that he could not take such an ideological stance entirely seriously in later life, it also offers indubitable proof that he never abandoned it, and remained a lifelong snob, albeit a mild and good-humored one. The newspaper he favored, and which ultimately became host to some of his feuilleton serials, was the aptly-named organ of the political right wing, L’Intransigeant [The Intransigent].

  There were, however, other early influences on Renard’s world-view that were even more important than the ideologies imparted to him by his family and his education. At an early age, he discovered the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as translated by Charles Baudelaire, and was entranced by them. They helped form a powerful taste for the fantastic and the grotesque which inevitably extended to the translated works of E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Rhenish fantasies of the collaborators who signed themselves Erckmann-Chatrian. Equally inevitably, perhaps, they instilled him with a desire to become a writer himself, although that was initially tentative, the ambition being scorned by his practically-minded father. Renard’s interest in “the marvelous” was always purely literary, and it was far too analytical—both philosophically and psychologically—to retain any credulity relative to the supernatural, but it was nevertheless deep-rooted, and the fact that he eventually did submit to his literary vocation owed a great deal to that particular fascination.

  In common with many other would-be writers from a similar background, however, Renard had to fight hard against parental opposition. Like many other fathers in a similar position, Renard’s insisted that he train as a lawyer. He found his studies uncongenial, but obtained some relief from them when he began his military service in 1896, which he extended until 1899 while toying with the possibility of a career in the cavalry. In 1899, however, he returned to Paris to resume his law studies, albeit in such a desultory fashion that they soon lapsed completely, whereupon he reverted to his original plan. Having reached his majority, he had a private income adequate to support him while he attempted to fulfill his literary ambitions, and he eventually obtained his parents’ consent to that attempt.

  Renard’s first literary ventures were aimed at the theater, but he only seems to have achieved amateur production; in 1898, while he was still technically on military service, he and some friends concocted a musical shadow-play which exploited the special effects available to that kind of theater. In the next few years he published a number of literary essays—most notably one on Victor Hugo, which was read on the stage of the Comédie-Française—and published poems in a number of periodicals, most notably the symbolist revue Le Phalange. He continued to visit Hermonville often, where a part of the estate attached to the château—the Clos Saint-Vincent—had been made over to him; he apparently did much of his writing there.

  In 1903, Renard married Stéphanie-Hortense Labatie; initially they set up home in the Avenue Kléber, but as their two young children—Renard, born in 1904, and Rémi, born in 1905—grew older they found it convenient to move to a larger house. They moved to the Rue de Tournon in 1910, where they lived in reasonable luxury, with a domestic staff of 17. It was there that Renard hosted a literary salon, and he had acquired sufficient reputation by then to draw a relatively prestigious crowd; the writers in regular attendance included Colette and her husband, Willy—the former editor of La Plume—Pierre Benoît, Henri Régnier, Charles Derennes, Henri de Montherlant and, perhaps most significantly, “J. H. Rosny aîné.”

  When Plon published his first collection of stories in 1905, Fantômes et fantoches [Phantoms and Marionettes], Renard signed them Vincent Saint-Vincent, apparently anxious that he might be confused with his well-known contemporary, the novelist Jules Renard, but he reverted to his own name when he found out that his pseudonym was also shared with a real individual. The stories collected in Fantômes et fantoches were a heterogeneous mixture, mostly in familiar symbolist modes—historical exotica, Classical and contemporary fantasies—but they included two items in accordance with more recent fashions: “Le Bourreau de Dieu” [God’s Executioner], a crime story, and “Les Vacances de Monsieur Dupont.” Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu was his second book and his first novel; he dedicated it to H. G. Wells, albeit in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, perhaps not realizing when he wrote it that it was to bring his vocation into a much narrower focus, at least for a while.

  A note at the end of Le Docteur Lerne reveals that it was written between May 1906 and May 1907, and Renard seems to have begun work on his next “scientific marvel novel” almost immediately afterwards, in July 1907—but that was not such a fortunate experience, and planted a thorn in his side that irritated him continually during the next two decades. The first version of Un Homme chez les microbes was presumably finished in 1908 or 1909, but he could not find a publisher for it and had to rethink his literary strategy. The preface to his second collection of stories, Le Voyage immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières (1909; translated in A Man Among the Microbes and Other Stories), offered an account of its contents markedly different from the ringing manifesto for scientific marvel fiction contained in “Du Roman merveilleux-scientifique et de son action sur l’intelligence du progrès,” although it is doubtful that the latter—which must have been written at a later date—merely represents a progression of his ideas. Given that the manifesto set out in the essay is so obviously incarnate in Le Docteur Lerne, the more conventional account of the various “histoires singulières” [strange stories] featured in Le Voyage immobile must be regarded as a marketing exercise rather than a statement of long-term ambition. Although there is no indication within the book of the order in which the stories were written, it seems likely that the purer fantasies therein antedated the scientific marvel stories, and that Renard hoped that the mixed collection might help lay groundwork that would assist him in obtaining publication for more ambitious works of the latter sort.

  Like Le Docteur Lerne, Le Voyage immobile was published by the press attached to the Mercure de France, a bastion of the Decadent/Symbolist movement co-founded by Rémy de Gourmont and edited by Rachilde’s husband, Alfred Vallette. In 1911, when his family was securely ensconced in the Rue de Tournon and his salon was in full swing, Renard founded a revue of his own, La Vie française, which specialized in poetry, mostly of a symbolist stripe, and he continued to contribute work to similar periodicals, especially René Martin-Guelliot’s Le Spectateur.

  Although his next publication in book form was the novel Le Péril bleu (1911; tr. as The Blue Peril), the introduction to that novel refers back to several of Renard’s earlier works, including Un Homme chez les microbes, probably in a spirit of advertisement. Although it is difficult to be certain, Renard seems to have gone back to Un Homme chez les microbes after finishing Le Péril bleu, and to have completed a second version with a view to publication by Le Péril Bleu’s publisher, Louis Michaud. The novel was, in fact, advertised as “en préparation” in the preliminary matter to the next Renard book that Michaud issued: his third collection of short stories, Monsieur d’Outremort et autres histoires singulières (1913; four of its five stories are translated in The Doctored Man and Other Stories).

  Michaud presumably did intend to issue more works by Renard—Un Homme chez les microbes is only one of three works advertised as en préparation in Monsieur d’Outremort, the other two being Notre-Dame Royale and Vers silence—but none actually appeared. The probability is that Le Péril bleu had not sold as well as Michaud had hoped—Renard had also tried to get it serialized in Le Figaro but had failed—although it certainly caused something of a stir, and was eventually to be established as Renard’s second landmark contribution to the history of French speculative fiction, a master
piece even more considerable than Le Docteur Lerne. Monsieur d’Outremort undoubtedly fared no better, and presumably caused Michaud to procrastinate with respect to the publication of the second version of Un Homme chez les microbes. Mid-way through 1914, however, the delay became an indefinite postponement, thanks to the outbreak of the Great War.

  By virtue of his military previous service, Renard was immediately mobilized as a cavalry officer at the beginning of August 1914, and did not return to civilian life until January 1919; he was fortunate to survive the numerous battles in which he was involved, but four years of warfare took a heavy toll not only on him but his marriage, which might have been running into trouble even before the war broke out. Stéphanie had two more children during the war years—Cyril, born in 1915, and Daniel, born in 1917—but the latter died in infancy in 1919, and from then on the couple seem to have been virtually estranged, until they finally divorced in 1930. To complete the personal damage inflicted by the war, the invading Germans had destroyed the Château Saint-Rémy and devastated the estate attached to it, dealing a dire blow to Renard’s financial security.

  In spite of his tribulations, Renard returned to his literary work with great determination in 1919, apparently having lost none of his literary ambition, and knowing full well that he would henceforth be reliant on his writing as a vital source of income. Whether he had been able to do any writing during the war—and, if so, how much—is unclear, but he might well have had some other work in hand in addition to Un Homme chez les microbes. One of the books that Michaud had advertised, Notre-Dame Royale, was eventually published by Crès in 1933, and was thus revealed to be a historical study unconnected with the main current of Renard’s literary ambition, but no book entitled Vers silence ever appeared under his name; it seems likely that this was a novel that Renard had at least begun in 1913, but had not been able to publish—or perhaps even to complete—before the war broke out, and which he must have retitled when he returned to it in 1919 to prepare it for publication. The title is too vague to allow any confident estimate of likelihood, but it is quite possible that the work in question was the first new novel he managed to get into print after the war: the offbeat thriller Les Mains d’Orlac (tr. as The Hands of Orlac).