A Man Among the Microbes

  The Scientific Marvel Fiction

  of the French H.-G. Wells

  A MAN AMONG

  THE MICROBES

  by

  Maurice Renard

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  This is the second 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 novel Un Hommme 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 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 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.

  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.

  Un Homme chez les microbes, here translated as A Man Among the Microbes, was the novel with which Renard intended to follow up Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (tr. as Doctor Lerne), making further inroads into what he considered to be the undeveloped imaginative terrain of “scientific marvel fiction.” Although the version translated here was published in 1928, advertising itself as the “fifth edition” in order to give some hint of the tribulations preceding that publication, the “prehistory” of the work can be vaguely sketched out from a series of hints, including the one dropped in the prologue to the published version, in which it is revealed that “Doctor Prologus” has been working on his masterpiece for 20 years, having started on July 30, 1907 and concluded his final revision on October 28, 1927 (although, if the implications of the prologue can be taken at face value, he still had to type out a fair copy for the publisher, and only started that work on November 6).

  Evidence of a less oblique character is provided by the number of occasions on which Renard advertised the imminent appearance of the book during that interval. It is mentioned in the prologue of Le Péril bleu (tr. as The Blue Peril), in a list that includes all of his previously-completed scientific marvel stories, and then began to be advertised in lists of works “en préparation” [in preparation] or “à paraitre” [forthcoming], including books issued by Louis Michaud and Edition Française Illustrée. In the spring of 1923, he was interviewed by the Belgian writer Jean Ray and optimistically informed him that the book, “awaited for nearly ten years,” would be published in October of that year—the back-reference presumably being to the planned Louis Michaud edition that never actually appeared.

  Adding all of these hints together facilitates the deduction that the four “editions” preceding the first printed version were probably produced in 1907-08, 1913, 1919 and 1923, with the published version being completed in 1927. Renard—unusually, among writers of the day—was known to be an inveterate reviser who was never content with one draft of his works and rarely with two, and the intricacy with which he links up the multitudinous and disparate details of his longer works reaps the benefit of this assiduity, so it is entirely conceivable that he wrote the second draft of Un Homme chez les microbes purely and simply because he was dissatisfied with the first—having taken time off in the interim to produce Le Péril bleu—but the others were certainly written with a view to publication, presumably with increasing desperation as he tried to find a version that a publisher might find acceptable.

  At least some of the difficulty that Renard had in publishing the novel must have been to do with its startling originality. When it was written—although not by the time it was published—it was the first “microcosmic romance” to feature a voyage into the subatomic microcosm. The fifth version is able to make fleeting use of an analogy based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom first proposed in 1911, which likened an atom to a tiny solar system, in which electrons orbit a central nucleus much as planets orbit a star, and the first-published literary development of that notion, R. A. Kennedy’s The Triuneverse, had duly appeared in 1912. By 1928, the latter had been followed up by Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (1919), which—although it stubbornly clung the obsolete model of the atom itself—eventually became the parent of a curious subgenre of atomic solar system stories in the American pulp magazines. Renard, however, did not have the benefit of that analogy when he first elected to send his hero on a microcosmic odyssey, and drew his inspiration from much earlier sources—to which he conscientiously gives credit in the printed text.

  A second difficulty that Renard must have faced while persuading a publisher to take the work was the sarcastic spirit in which the novel was written. All of his early scientific marvel fiction mingles black comedy and melodrama, but in very different proportions; in general, the longer the work, the greater the preponderance of melodrama tends to be, but Un Homme chez les microbes is a striking exception to that rule, offering much greater preponderance to comedy even in its mock-melodramatic passages. While both Le Docteur Lerne and Le Péril bleu bear strong resemblances to currently popular forms of fiction, Un Homme chez les microbes harks back to much older models that were widely considered—at least by commercial publishers—to be obsolete. Although it does have an obvious “Wellsian” aspect—while Le Docteur Lerne is Renard’s Island of Doctor Moreau and Le Péril bleu is akin to chimerical cross of The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, Un Homme chez les microbes is patterned on The First Men in the Moon—it is much more obviously framed as a Voltairean conte philosophique, and the single previous work to which it owes far more inspiration than any other, as acknowledged within the text, is Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752).

  It would be inappropriate to give too much away in advance, so I shall leave a more detailed commentary on Renard’s extrapolation of ideas contained in Voltaire’s satire to an afterword, but the particular combination of imaginative extravagance, logical reasoning, acidic humor and social satire resulting from that extrapolation was a combination that undoubtedly seemed bizarre to the publishers who balked at the earlier versions of the novel; they presumably deemed that it would pose too great a challenge to readers whose obvious preferences tended towards thrillers, mysteries and love stories with happy endings. It is probably no coincidence that Le Péril bleu very carefully includes all three of those elements, albeit in a conspicuously wry fashion, and that Renard never wrote another novel that attempted to draw as high a proportion of its narrative energy from novelty and irony, and as low a proportion from earnest melodrama and suspense, as Un Homme chez les microbes.

  When Renard w
as invited to contribute a piece about Un Homme chez les microbes to a series of articles in La Rumeur on the topic of “Pourquoi j’ai écrit…” [Why I wrote], he made no mention of the trials he had undergone in order to get the book into print, or even that it had taken him 20 years to do so. In fact, he contented himself with four tersely disingenuous sentences:

  “I was in need of relaxation, of an outburst of laughter. So, naturally, I was led to treat, among the ideas I had in reserve, the one that lent itself most to gaiety and fantasy—in a word, to a “blague.” I have never amused myself so much as by voyaging thus among the microbes. I hope that the reader will find it no more difficult than I did.”

  The word in quotes, which I have left untranslated, can refer to a joke, a mistake or a hoax. All three shades of meaning were presumably intended in this instance. Modern readers, of course, will find no particular difficulty in appreciating the novelty and bizarrerie of Renard’s story, and are much better placed to appreciate the brilliance that must have gone into the original version. As to how the present version differs from that original, we can only speculate—but the likelihood is that it would have been considerably longer, filling in at least some of the lacunae noted en passant in the present version. The publisher obviously did not regret those cuts, but Renard almost certainly did.

  Between the publication of Le Docteur Lerne and Le Péril bleu, Renard published his second collection of short stories, Le Voyage Immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières, here reproduced in its entirety. Like his first collection, Fantômes et Fantoches, it consists of stories that are quite various in content and tone, although they are all “singulières” [strange] in one way or another. The preface to the collection, however, advertises the fact that they have been arranged in such a way as to illustrate a spectrum of strangeness extending from a pole at which the logical development of the strangeness is at its maximum to one at which the role of logic is minimal. It is for that reason that I have translated all the stories, including those which have no “scientific marvel” content at all.

  As with Un Homme chez les microbes, it might spoil the reader’s enjoyment of the stories if I were to discuss any of their contents in detail in advance, so I shall leave the few specific comments I would like to make to an afterword, and confine myself here to more general observations. The first story in the collection, “Le Voyage immobile,” here translated as “The Motionless Voyage,” has been translated into English before, for a pamphlet published by Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who founded American pulp “scientifiction” and later renamed it “science fiction” in the 1920s. That version is entitled The Flight of the Aerofix; it is considerably abridged, most notably by the omission of the last few pages of the story, and that major omission, although not entirely unjustified, means that the abridged version is not a true representation of Renard’s intentions.

  “La Singular destinée de Bouvancourt,” here translated as “The Singular Fate of Bouvancourt,” is a contribution to a subgenre that John Clute calls “Edisonades”—tales of brilliant scientists whose inventions usually do not work quite as anticipated—numerous examples of which had already been produced in Britain and America, often reacting, as this one does, to the surprising discovery of X-rays. When Jean Ray interviewed Renard in 1923, he bewailed the fact that Renard had killed off “the illustrious Bouvancourt” instead of preserving him for continued use, rather than limiting him to a single sequel (translated on volume four of the series), but there is only so much that can be done with radiations alternative to X-rays, and Renard obviously thought, after two such ventures, that he had done enough.

  “Le Rendez-vous” is here translated straightforwardly as “The Rendezvous,” although the unnecessary hyphen in the French title is significant, deliberately emphasizing the literal meaning of the portmanteau word in a way that does not translate; the second component of the imported double meaning might be rendered as “Come Hither.” The story advertises itself as a homage to Edgar Allan Poe, and deftly combines the imagery of two of Poe’s best-known stories, attempting the difficult task of winding up horrific dramatic tension to a pitch that might surpass the master’s own endeavors. Renard was by no means the first writer to make such an attempt, and must have been familiar with similar pastiches written by French writers such as Jean Lorrain and Marcel Schwob, but he probably had not read the American and English pastiches by such writers as Robert W. Chambers and M. P. Shiel; those included in the latter’s Shapes in the Fire are the most exaggerated. Renard’s story can compete with the best of those predecessors in terms of its content, although Shiel easily outshines him in stylistic bizarrerie.

  “La Mort et la coquillage,” here translated as “Death and the Seashell,” is the slightest story in the collection, anticipating the skill in crafting ultra-short stories that Renard was to hone to a kind of perfection later in his career. Its primary interest is its preliminary deployment of a theme to which Renard returned twice more, in a more substantial fashion. The first of those revisitations was “Parthénope ou l’escale imprévue,” here translated as “Parthenope; or, The Unforeseen Port of Call,” which was evidently one of Renard’s favorite stories, since he reissued it in three later collections—a status it fully deserves, given its complexity and the dexterous manner in which it appeals to both ends of the spectrum that it is helping to illustrate. The second revisitation was “La Cantatrice,” a translation of which—as “The Cantatrice”—is included in volume four of the series, in order to complete the set.

  “Le Statue ensoleillée,” here translated as “The Sunlit Statue” (“The Insolated Statue” would be more accurate, but too esoteric), and “Une Légende chrétienne d’Aktéon,” here translated as “A Christian Legend of Akteon,” similarly have no relevance at all to the overall theme of the series; like “Parthénope ou l’escale imprévue,” they belong to a category that Renard described as “Contes à la plume d’oie” [Goose-quill tales], meaning that they are deliberately old-fashioned, in their remote settings if not their outlook. The provide a neat illustration of the fact that Renard’s initial literary affiliation, before he became infatuated with scientific marvel fiction, was to the Symbolist Movement that had evolved from the fin-de-siècle Decadent Movement, many of whose writers delighted in redeploying Classical materials in a fashion that showed them in a new, and usually more cynical, light.

  The version of Un Homme chez les microbes from which this translation was made is that contained in Maurice Renard: Romans et Contes Fantastiques, an omnibus published by Robert Laffont in 1990. The translation of Le Voyage Immobile suivi d’autres histoires singulières was made from the 1919 reprint issued by L’Edition Française Illustrée.

  Brian Stableford

  A MAN AMONG THE MICROBES

  SCHERZO

  To Georges de la Fouchardière.1

  It is by means of fiction that men everywhere

  are rendered attentive to the truth.

  Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

  Micromegas…

  Voltaire

  (Micromégas, Chs. I-VII)

  Messer Lodoviso, dove mal avete pigliato tante cognlionere?2

  Cardinal Ippolito d’Este to Ariosto

  Cinematographic (why not?) Prologue

  The room is decorated in the colors of moonlight: blue and silver. It has the scent of a florist’s shop. The armchairs welcome you with an amorous solicitude, so unparalleled is their flexibility. Everyone, my dear, is making a great fuss, given the prices charged by places that encourage smoking and call for the maximum state of undress. Finally, maddeningly beautiful young ladies are taking care of you, with distracted expressions; they’re the usherettes.

  But three strokes have sounded, so traditionally that it surprises and amuses you. Three strokes, it is true, of no one knows what, no one knows where. If it were a bell you might say: “The Angelus?” No one dreams of doing so, of course. Besides, the orchestra—which is invisible, in the Bayreuth style—sudde
nly unleashes one of those dissonances whose ambiguity leaves you aghast. And at exactly the same time—zing!—the lights are dimmed.

  Another chord (if one might call it that)—zong!—and semi-darkness.

  Darkness? No, there is the screen: a rectangular moon, a parallelogram of empty light. But it is now furnished and inhabited. Mons Prologus is stirring there.3

  (And off we go: the orchestra launches into a fantastic scherzo, a great reinforcement of mocking bassoons, muffled percussion and equivocal saxophones.)

  Mons Prologus, the ancient character of drama and farce—it is definitely him. As long there have been actors, he has worn the toga, the smock, and all sort of masks. Today, he sports a frock-coat, made up as a bizarre old scientist; and he calls himself “Doctor Prologus.”

  In his hexagonal study, whose walls are covered from top to bottom with books, books and yet more books, Doctor Prologus is working. Two rotating bookshelves stand within arm’s reach, one to left and the other to the right, and there is a third behind them; that one he can reach by making his mahogany chair pivot.

  The table is also hexagonal, and also pivots. Laden with open books, boxes of cards and scattered notes, it whirls freely under the impulsion of the scientist, thus presenting him comfortably with the book, the card or the note that he desires to consult. Tricks of that sort were already known in the Middle Ages.

  Doctor Prologus radiates cheerfulness, and there must surely be a powerful reason for that cheerfulness, for he has the look—oh, how he has the look!—of a very intelligent man.

  That cheerfulness does, indeed, have a reason.

  For 20 years, our man—have I mentioned that he bears a strong resemblance to Renan and Pasteur?—has been writing, unremittingly, one of those works that bring perpetual honor to their author, his fatherland and humankind. Title: The Physiology of the Senses. Now, observe this: Doctor Prologus is currently writing the last page of his conclusion. What a day! What an hour!