The Blue Peril Read online

  The Scientific Marvel Fiction

  of the French H.-G. Wells

  THE BLUE PERIL

  by

  Maurice Renard

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  This is the third volume of a set of five, which includes most of the “scientific marvel fiction” of Maurice Renard, and some related works. It comprises a translation of the novel Le Péril bleu (Louis Michaud, 1911).

  The first volume of the series, Doctor Lerne, 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 Hommme chez les microbes, the first version of which was written in 1907-8, 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 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.

  The introduction to the first of the five volumes includes a general overview of Renard’s life and career in relation to his scientific marvel fiction, which I shall not reiterate here, confining the remainder of this introduction to the specific works featured in this volume.

  Because Louis Michaud, the original publisher of Le Péril bleu—here translated as The Blue Peril—did not put dates on his publications, some confusion has arisen regarding the actual date of publication of the novel. Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’Utopie et de la Science Fiction (1972) and bibliographical lists derived therefrom give the date of publication as 1910, while the version reprinted in the Robert Laffont ominubus Maurice Renard: Romans et Contes Fantastiques and lists derived therefrom give the date of publication as 1912. There is, however, no reason to doubt the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale, which gives the date as 1911. Although the story is explicitly set in 1912, thus giving some license to the latter error, it is clearly futuristic, and although the internal evidence of the text suggests that the novel was probably written in 1909-10, the customary lag between delivery of a manuscript and publication supports the supposition that it was not actually published until the following year.

  Le Péril bleu is widely regarded by aficionados of speculative fiction as Renard’s masterpiece in that genre, and the judgment is certainly correct with regard to his published works, although Renard might not have endorsed it himself. He had intended his masterpiece to be the novel he had written immediately before it, and probably rewrote immediately after it, Un Homme chez les microbes (tr. as A Man Among the Microbes), but that novel had probably been reduced to a shadow of its former self by the time he compiled a version—the fifth—that was acceptable to a publisher, by which time its startling originality was no longer so evident. His experience in trying to adapt that text to the tastes and expectations of the contemporary audience—as construed by the editors who functioned as the gatekeepers of the literary world—might well have played a considerable part in the shaping of Le Péril bleu as a determined and ingenious compound of mystery and melodrama, augmented with a measure of comic relief. In that respect it follows the example of his first, and more successful, full-length work of scientific marvel fiction, Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (tr. as Doctor Lerne), but carefully attempts to surpass that example in each respect. If it has the disadvantage, relative to its predecessor, of sprawling over a much larger narrative space, thus failing to reproduce the earlier novel’s intensity of its focus, Le Péril bleu has the compensating advantage of contemplating far broader horizons of possibility.

  What qualifies Le Péril bleu as a masterpiece is the adventurousness of its central premise, which is not far removed from the central premise of Un Homme chez les microbes, in the sense that it lends steadfast support the notion that there might be radically alien worlds—or, at least, invaluable heterocosmic narrative spaces ripe for exploitation by secondary creators—much closer at hand than the planets orbiting other stars, or even the planets of our own Solar System. Like its predecessor/successor, and several shorter scientific marvel stories by Renard, it attempts to impress upon the reader an acute sense of the fact that our own world might not merely be stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine, at least at present.

  Because the story is a mystery full of intended surprises and melodramatic flourishes I shall postpone a detailed commentary on its innovations until an afterword, but there is no harm in observing here that the novel’s premise was not only strikingly original in its own day, but that it still provides a good deal of food for thought to the modern reader; in spite of the vast progress in the exploration of extraordinary ideas made by 20th century science fiction writers, very few have ventured into territories as exotic as the ones featured herein, and even fewer have done so with the same intellectual boldness and narrative flair. It is, in that respect, one of the classics of speculative fiction—and that respect is surely the one that matters most in the context of the genre.

  This translation was initially made from the version contained in the Laffont omnibus, but the second draft was checked against the 1920 reprint edition issued by L’Edition Française Illustrée, which facilitated the identification of a small number of typos in the Laffont version.

  Brian Stableford

  THE BLUE PERIL

  To Albert Boissière1

  “For one may say this, Madame: for birds and

  philosophers, the Earth is merely the bed of the sky,

  and men drag themselves heavily across it,

  with the forbidden azure ocean above them,

  where clouds pass as well as surges.”

  Parthenope; or, the Unforeseen Port of Call2

  Preface

  Six months ago—at 9 a.m. on Monday June 16, 1913, to be precise—I saw a young chambermaid who worked for me at that time come into my studio. As I had just started an exciting work, and as I had given orders that I was not be disturbed, the words that sprang to my lips were three or four choice blasphemies, but the girl paid no heed and continued to advance. She was carrying a lacquered tray bearing a visiting card, and her face was exultant with a triumph so striking that she appeared to be miming, with fortunate accessories, the celebrated choreography of Salome parading the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.

  I abused her benevolently. “What’s this you’re bringing? Is it the card of the Eternal Father that you’re lugging around? Give it here. Oh, my God! Impossible! Show him in! Presto! Presto!”

  I had read the name, the occupation and the address of the most illustrious of illustrious men: the man of 1912, the man of the Blue Peril!

  JEAN LE TELLIER

  Director of the Observatory

  202 Boulevard Saint-Germain

  For several seconds I contemplated the cardboard slip, evocative of so much glory, science, misfortune and courage. Very often, in the course of the terrible year 1912
, the popular press had reproduced Monsieur Le Tellier’s features, and I anticipated the appearance on the threshold of the room of a visitor at the height of his powers, with a broad smile and large bright eyes beneath a broad and clean-cut forehead, standing up to his full height and stroking his silky brown beard with his ungloved hand.

  The man who was suddenly framed in the doorway resembled my vision as an old man resembles his younger self.

  I ran to meet him. He tried to smile and contrived a grimace. He walked with a stoop, his stride uncertain, and had great difficulty carrying a voluminous portfolio. Now, alas, his black frock-coat hung loosely about his thin frame. The red rosette ornamenting his buttonhole was now neighbor to a grey beard. His eyelids remained timidly and gladly lowered. In short, all the emotions, sufferings and terrors of 1912 were now legible on his pale and exhausted forehead, tormented by dolorous wrinkles.

  We exchanged formularistic greetings. Afterwards, Monsieur Le Tellier needed to sit down. He placed his swollen portfolio on his knees, and said to me, while tapping it: “This is the work I’ve brought for you, Monsieur.”

  “Really?” I said, in an amiable tone. “And…what’s it about, Monsieur?”

  He raised his eyes to meet mine. Ah, his eyes hadn’t changed. They were the eyes that I had expected to see: large, intimidating eyes, accustomed to the spectacle of suns and moons, which were deigning to look at me…

  “I have here,” the astronomer replied, “all the documents necessary to the history of what has been called, more or less accurately, The Terrors of the year 1912.”

  “What!” I cried, overcome by surprise. “You want it…”

  “…To be you who will write that book.”

  “You do me a great honor…but in truth, Monsieur, have you considered…it’s an…enormous thing. The subject isn’t the sort of thing…”

  “Monsieur, what I’m asking you to tell is the story of a family during the Terrors of 1912. It’s the story of my family.”

  At these words, which awoke memories of such superhuman catastrophes and told me exactly what the grandiose mission was that was being offered to me, a breath of enthusiasm lifted up my entire being. “What, Monsieur! You’d consent to deliver to the crowd…in detail…the vicissitudes…intimate…poignant…”

  “It must be done,” said Monsieur Le Tellier gravely, “because it’s the only way to make the world understand everything that happened last year, and because such an informative task has to be undertaken.”

  “Quickly, Monsieur,” I cried. “Show me the document! I’m dying to get to work…”

  The papers were already on my desk. All sorts of information were to be found in the heaps—letters, newspapers, sketches, notes, legal transcripts, reviews, affidavits, photographs, telegrams, etc.—carefully arranged in chronological order, numbered from 1 to 1046 and indexed.

  Monsieur Le Tellier leafed through this chronicle, reading items one by one, bringing back for me the phantoms of doom-laden hours. They surpassed in horror and bizarrerie that which the vulgar notion of the crisis had permitted me to suspect.

  As an amateur of the unusual and a scribe of miracles, I had known and divulged the strangest of destinies. I had been acquainted with the physicist Bouvancourt, who had penetrated into the image of the world reflected in mirrors. One of my oldest friends was Monsieur de Gambertin, devoured in our own time, in the middle of Auvergne, by an antediluvian monster. I had consulted the testament of poor X***, who had been seen hurrying to an amorous rendezvous with his dead mistress. I had glimpsed the existence of Doctor Lerne, who interchanged the brains of his clients—or his victims—and thus falsified their personalities. The engineer Z*** had confided to me the task of explaining how he went around the world by remaining in the same place. I was there when Nerval, the composer, died after hearing the sirens sing in the hollow of a shell. I also possess—along with others just as fine—the memoirs of Fléchambault, the unfortunate who lived among the microbes.3 In sum, my records contain quite a few curiosities, but—and I affirm it with my heart and my soul—all of that is nothing by comparison with the events that Monsieur Le Tellier continued to enumerate, while his gnarled finger riffled through the archives of the Blue Peril.

  I must say that he had a gripping manner of story-telling, like all those who have lived their narration. Sometimes he even trembled with retrospective anguish, at the sight of certain pages that he had traced with his own vacillating hand immediately after some new incident—red hot, so to speak—and in the grip of despair.

  That day, we both forgot dinner time.

  Such are the circumstances in which I was called to write this history of the year of disgrace 1912. In order to do so, I have followed chronological order—the only one that the historian may adopt if he scorns effect, as is his duty. Every time that an item in the dossier has permitted me to do so, by virtue of its conciseness, its brevity, its accuracy and its comfortable manner of writing, I have inserted it into my story. This results in a rather disparate collection, many of whose morsels are denuded of literary style; this is regrettable—but should the slightest opportunity be missed to substitute pulsating life for the discourse of a reporter?

  In this regard, I shall doubtless be accused of abusing the liberal hospitality granted in my book to the correspondence of Monsieur Tiburce. It is of scant interest, I admit, and its part in the action is minimal, but it completes so neatly the portrait of a person whose deadly type is becoming too frequent. It shows, with considerable humor, where certain excesses may lead, and it seems to me to be natural and moral to disseminate it in the places assigned to it by chronology.

  One more word. A large number of people have the excellent habit of following the march of events and the displacement of characters on a map. To situate the phases of the Blue Peril in this manner, I recommend the General Staff maps of Nantua (no. 160) and Chambery (no. 169), or the Ministry of the Interior map of Belley (XXIII, no. 25). These topographies combine the strictest exactitude with the merit of being drawn on a scale sufficient for one to be able to stick in minuscule indicative flags or pins with colored heads. As for a street-map of Paris, any will suffice.

  Now, let us turn our eyes to the past and return mentally to the month of March 1912.

  Part One: Where? How? Who? Why?

  I. The Entrance of the Mystery

  On what date is it necessary to place the first manifestation of the Blue Peril? This is a problem that has never been resolved, but about which it is necessary to say a few words. Let us first do justice to a singularly tenacious popular belief that is rightly called “the legend of the Auvergnian woman.” No, the woman found on February 28 in a field near Riom, lying face-upwards on her back, has nothing to do with the origin of what interests us. It is truly extraordinary that such a fable is still accredited, when that woman’s murderer, arrested six months later, confessed his crime and was sentenced to 20 years hard labor by a jury at Puy-de-Dôme, as is established by items 1 and 2 in the Le Tellier dossier (a witness-statement regarding the discovery of the body and an extract from the judgment). Given that, how is it that idiots still accuse the sarvants of having committed the murder? Fear reigned during the parliamentary session and it was necessary that public attention be distracted; I see no other excuse for such an aberration.

  Let is return to the dossier. The third document is a series of five newspaper cuttings. On seeing them, readers are bound to recall the incident that forms their subject, which Monsieur Le Tellier now believes that he recognizes the initial mark of the sarvants. It is a presumption, nothing more—as will be appreciated.

  LE JOURNAL

  Under the headline: COLLISION AT SEA

  Le Havre, March 3

  The steamship Bretagne, in transit between New York and Le Havre, which was expected this evening, has made it known to its company headquarters by Marconigram that on the night of the first and second it was struck a ship that it was unable to identify, and which fled thereafter. Th
e collision occurred in the aft section to starboard. The hull is badly damaged, fortunately above the water-line. There are five dead and seven wounded. The accident will not delay the progress of the steamship significantly.

  Le Havre, March 4

  The Bretagne arrived yesterday, three hours late. There is no news of the ship that ran into it. The latter drew away with such rapidity that the Bretagne’s electric searchlights, immediately activated, were unable to discover it. It is true that the sea was rough and that rain blinded the observers and limited the field of illumination. The collision occurred while the Bretagne was lifted up by a large wave.

  (Followed by a list of the dead and wounded.)

  Le Havre, March 5

  The relevant qualified persons have no knowledge of any vessel that might have been in the vicinity of the Bretagne’s course on the date and at the time indicated by the captain of the liner. The era of piracy being past, it is therefore necessary to revert to the hypothesis of a warship on a clandestine mission. This supposition is further supported by the fact that the enormous breach in the Bretagne seems to have been made by the spur of an armored prow. Is it a matter, then, of an accident or an attack? It is important to note that the Bretagne’s lookouts did not see any navigation-lights.

  Wilhelmshaven, March 6

  The destroyer Dolch, of the German fleet, went into dry dock yesterday afternoon for repairs. It has suffered damage, on the subject of which the orders are apparently to maintain secrecy. Might there not be a connection between these mysterious repairs and the no-less-mysterious accident of the Bretagne?