Samuel-Henri Berthoud, who anglicized the spelling of his familiar name as an affectation when he elected to sign his literary works “S. Henry Berthoud,” was born on 19 January 1804 in Cambrai, in Flanders in north-western France. He was the son of a printer and bookseller who also had the first name of Samuel, that being traditional in the family. Samuel-Henri was educated at Douai, as the beneficiary of a bursary. It is unclear how far that education extended, but there is no evidence that he ever obtained any advanced qualifications. Although he later adopted the representation “Dr. Sam” in some of the fiction he wrote specifically for children, that too was an affectation; he probably had no right to any such title.
It is, alas, necessary to use the word “probably” a lot in the course of any attempt to reconstruct the story of Berthoud’s life and career, which was scantily documented while he was alive, and almost completely ignored thereafter. Very few studies of the French Romantic Movement mention his contribution to it, or even his presence within it, and he would probably have gone entirely unmentioned in that context had it not been known that he was an early acquaintance of Honoré de Balzac and that he is mentioned in passing in a story by Théophile Gautier. He is described as a popularizer of science in an entry devoted to him in Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972), where a complimentary description is offered of two of the stories in his children’s book L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans [Humankind over Five Thousand Years] (1865), and mention is also made of an earlier story, “Voyage au ciel” (1841; tr. herein as “A Heavenward Voyage”).
Versins’ hint was presumably responsible for Francis Valery taking advantage of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s website gallica to locate “Voyage au ciel.” Valery’s expertise and judgment immediately allowed him to recognize the significance of the story as an item of “proto-science fiction,” and he subsequently reprinted and publicized it, but he does not seem to have been moved to make further investigation of the four-volume set of Fantasies scientifiques de Sam [Sam’s Scientific Fantasies] (1861-62), in which “Voyage au ciel” is reprinted, although he might have concluded, if he did take a brief look, that they were not very interesting, as very few of the other inclusions contain any speculative content.
Without the indexing facility provided by gallica and the similar facility offered by Google Books, it would be impossible to research Berthoud in any methodical fashion, and that would have been the situation for more than a century after his death, when it would have been nearly impossible to gather any information about him or assemble even a partial collection of his works. The record remains extremely patchy even today, but the combination of those two sources does allow ready consultation of a small fraction of his output in volume form and the location of a few fugitive secondary references. It also permits access to a tiny fraction of his unreprinted contributions to periodicals, although the vast majority of the publications to which he contributed remain unavailable as yet. In consequence, attempting to piece together a general overview of the author’s career and productions is am matter of trying to deduce the general appearance of a picture from a handful of jigsaw pieces. Even so, the narrative that can be pieced together from the fragments in question is an interesting one, in spite of its uncertainties.
Berthoud obtained his first publication in 1822, when his father published his Premiers essais poétiques for him, and his talent was independently endorsed in 1823, when he won a competition organized by the Societé d’Émulation de Cambrai, the literary society of his home town, with a poem entitled “Le Fugitif” [The Fugitive]. His father printed a pamphlet version of that for him too. He published at least one other item in the Societé d’Émulation’s annual bulletin: a story entitled “Le Fou” [The Madman] (1829), a fanciful historical romance in which Michel de Montaigne and Peter Paul Rubens lend a helping hand to Torquato Tasso after discovering him in dire straits. Many years later, he wrote another story with the same title—the latter is the one translated herein a “The Madman”—which has a very different cast and is set in a different era, but which shares something of the same method, building a fanciful and fervent romance around a small nucleus of historical fact.
By 1929, Berthoud was the permanent secretary of the Societé d’Émulation de Cambrai, and he was also editing a periodical founded the previous year by his father, the Gazette de Cambrai, where more of his early publications probably appeared. He had probably been working for his father since leaving school, in the family business. Whenever his formal education had been suspended, however, it certainly did not prevent him from thinking of himself as a scholar. His first passion was natural history, but he was also interested in literature, music, history and local folklore. In literary terms he was undoubtedly an adherent of the Romantic Movement from the very beginning, taking in German and English influences as well as French ones. Ernst Hoffmann is featured as a character in some of his historical romances and he was undoubtedly an admirer of Lord Byron, probably to the extent of adopting some affectations of dandyism—but not the “satanism” that made such a deep impression on many French Romantics, as Berthoud never compromised the devout Catholicism that had doubtless made a deep imprint on him while he was at Douai.
Berthoud moved to Paris in 1830, in which year “Prestige” was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He appears to have met Balzac in that year, and undoubtedly became part of the curious community of would-be writers so graphically described by the latter writer in Illusions perdues (1837-43; tr. as Lost Illusions). Exactly where Berthoud fitted into the spectrum of types identified by Balzac’s novel is unclear, except for the fact that he was one of those who “sold out” by falling prey to the temptations of journalism, perhaps compromising his original ideals and ambitions in the process. Before then, however, he must have written the bulk of the items in his first collection, Contes misanthropiques [Misanthropic Tales] (1831), whose contents leave no doubt about the fact that, whatever illusions he might have bought to Paris regarding literary life and the prospects of finding success therein, he had none at all about life in general and the roles played therein by love, marriage, fickleness and recklessness.
It is difficult to determine exactly when Berthoud first met other leading members of the Parisian Romantic Movement; although he was certainly acquainted with Jules Janin and Petrus Borel by 1833, he might not have known them in 1831, but whether there was any communication between the three or not, Berthoud’s Contes Misanthropiques have very strong thematic, methodical and philosophical links with the many short stories that Janin began collecting in 1832 and those that Borel collected in Champavert: contes immoraux (1833; tr. as Champavert: Immoral Tales) and. Although Berthoud’s work lacks the fire and ferocity of Borel’s and the slick dexterity of Janin’s best work, there is no doubt that it is Berthoud who was the true originator of the rich tradition of what eventually came to be known as contes cruels. Indeed, the brevity and relative laconism of Berthoud’s work in that vein makes his stories even more closely analogous to the works produced in the heyday of the tradition by such writers as Octave Mirbeau, Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, Guy de Maupassant and Edmond Haraucourt than the more high-profile foundation-stones provides by Janin, Borel and the writer who gave the genre its most popular label, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
Had it not been virtually impossible to find for such a long time (and it is still unavailable on gallica as I write, although Google Books offers a full view), Contes misanthropiques would surely have been recognized as a crucial contribution to the conte cruel tradition. Its fall into oblivion was doubtless aided by the fact that Berthoud never produced another volume like it, although the present sampler will hopefully make it very obvious that he never fully overcame the extreme and studied disillusionment that fueled those early stories, and that it continued to influence all of his works—even the children’s stories in which he evidently made great efforts to conceal it. In particular, it colors his scientific journalism and his “scientific fantasies” in a distinctive fashion, which distances his work in that vein considerably from that of such fellow pioneers of the popularization of science as Camille Flammarion and Henri de Parville.
That element of disillusionment gave almost all of Berthoud’s work a downbeat inclination that cannot have helped his popularity, and probably contributed to his eventual oblivion. There is no way of knowing how much it affected his personality in social intercourse, but the fact that he was so rarely mentioned in memoirs by all the people who undoubtedly knew him at least slightly might be revealing. He apparently intended to call his first novel Bah! but was overruled by the publisher, who imposed the title La Soeur de lait du vicaire [The Curate’s Foster-Sister] (1832). The title of Le Régent de rhétorique, moeurs flamandes [The Regent of Rhetoric; Flemish Mores] (1833) restored an element of sarcasm, and Le Cheveu du diable [The Devil’s Hair] (1833) and Mater dolorosa [Mother of Tears] (1834) also offered a clear implication of their downbeat inclinations.
Le Cheveu du diable has no fantastic content, although it does include mention of the folktale reference from which the title is borrowed in an introduction. Mater dolorosa, which describes the trials and tribulations of a writer and artist who leaves Cambrai to settle in Paris, also includes a mock folktale supposedly written by its hero, as well as a historical romance starring Ernst Hoffman and Carl-Maria Weber, but it is impossible to assess the extent to which the frame narrative mirrors Berthoud’s own tribulations. All four of those early novels attempt naturalistic representations of provincial life, seen from a quasi-sociological viewpoint, and have strong affinities with Balzac’s work in a similar vein.
By the time Mater dolorosa appeared, Berthoud had completed publication of the work that won him his first real success, the three volumes of Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre [Chronicles and Supernatural Traditions of Flanders] (1831-34). The collection does include some genuine items of folklore, only slightly modified in giving them literary form, but it also contains a considerable number of works that do not even bother to mimic the form of folktales, simply being items of modern supernatural fiction based on the kinds of materials found in folktales, and at least some of those that do mimic folktales are original compositions—“fakelore” rather than “folklore.”
Such mixtures are not unusual in collections of that sort, but Berthoud is further removed from being an authentic folklorist than the most prominent Romantic contributors to the field, including the brothers Grimm in Germany, Robert Hunt in England and Anatole Le Braz in France; the French successor with whom he had most in common was probably Julie Lavergne. In a single-volume reprint of the collection published as Légendes et traditions surnaturelles de Flandres (1862), Berthoud added the novella Asrael et Neptha, originally published separately in 1832, to the series—a move serving to re-emphasize the fact that its contents are far more readily considered as literary works that draw some inspiration from Flanders folklore than attempts to record the folklore in question in anything resembling its “original” anecdotal form.
As with the Contes misanthropiques, Berthoud never made any concerted attempt to write more supernatural fiction in the same vein as the Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre, but as with the former volume, its legacy left an indelible legacy on his future work, where folklore and fakelore continued to occupy a situation “in the wings,” always available for recruitment, at least for the purposes of comparison and subsidiary reference. Just as the present sampler illustrates the lingering effects of the author’s deep disillusionment, so it represents his continual tendency to cite the Devil’s dealings with humble folk for other literary purposes than straightforward recycling and orthodox transfiguration.
Berthoud’s literary production slowed markedly after 1834, at least so far as the production of books was concerned, but that was largely because he found employment as an editor, probably aided by his experience on the Gazette de Cambrai, under the auspices of Émile de Girardin. Girardin, a writer who eventually carved out a more significant career as a politician, founded several important periodicals, with a particular emphasis on popular education. His first periodical, La Mode, was supposedly a women’s magazine with an emphasis on fashion, although Berthoud’s contributions to it included “La Bague antique” (1831), the item of mock-folklore here translated as “The Antique Ring.” More typical of Girardin’s projects were the enormously successful Journal des connaissances utiles (founded 1831), published under the banner of La Societé nationale pour l’émancipation intellectuelle, of which he was the secretary, and the Almanach de France (founded 1834), and he made a highly significant contribution to the popular daily press with La Presse (founded 1836), which helped to found the tradition of popular feuilleton fiction that brought about a revolution in French popular fiction in the 1840s.
Berthoud probably contributed to all these projects, although exact data is scarce, and was probably a member of the Societé nationale pour l’émancipation intellectuelle; his commitment to the cause of mass education played a major role in shaping the remainder of his literary and journalistic output. The only one of Girardin’s periodicals of which a significant number of issues is currently reproduced on gallica is, however, the illustrated Musée des Familles, founded in 1833, of which Berthoud was hired as its first editor; it was a pioneering “family magazine” on which Jules Hetzel was later to model his endeavors in the same line, which made a highly significant contribution to the founding and shaping of the tradition of French children’s literature—many of whose early classics were produced on request by key members of the Romantic Movement.
In 1833 as “children’s literature,” in the sense of books and magazines designed for children to read by themselves, hardly existed; it was still assumed that children would provide an audience for adults readers, and even the Journal des Enfants founded in that year with Jules Janin as editor, was aimed at parents rather than the supposed “end consumers.” The Musée de Familles was by no means designed with child listeners exclusively, or even primarily, in mind, but the whole point of it was to construct an all-inclusive audience, addressing content to children, women and poor people as well as to the adult males who had previously constituted the core of the audience for periodicals, thus adding significant impetus to the crusade for universal literacy—which was proceeding more rapidly in France in the 1830s than any other nation. Berthoud did, however, produce a three-volume series of studies of La France historique, industrielle et pittoresque [Historic France, Industrial and Picturesque] (1835-37) aimed more specifically, if indirectly, at children, and he went on to contribute several volumes to a more general collection of didactic works entitled Petits livres de M. le curé [The Parish Priest’s Little Books] in the late 1840s.
It was in connection with the crusade for universal literacy, and in trying to cater to it with his editorial policy, that Berthoud apparently first became intensely interested in the popularization of science, as something that would probably interest children and would be good for them to know. It was in the Musée des Familles that his career found the fundamental orientation that it would maintain for the rest of his life. Berthoud also edited the Musée’s short-lived companion, the Mercure de France—one of several periodicals to bear that name—in 1835-36.
As an editor, Berthoud, like Janin in the Journal des Enfants, actively helped to further the careers of several members of the Romantic Movement; he published work by Balzac, Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas, and although they were not in need of his assistance, he also published Théophile Gautier and George Sand, who must have been grateful for it at the time. Although very little information is presently recoverable about Berthoud’s social life, he probably became a regular at the famous salon hosted by another of his leading contributors, Émile de Girardin’s wife Delphine, a notable writer in her own right and the daughter of Sophie Gay, a significant precursor of French Romanticism and important commentator on the growth of the movement.
Berthoud’s most successful book after the Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre was probably his account of the life of Pierre-Paul Rubens (1840), initially published as a supplement to the Musée des Familles, but he followed it up with a long series of novels, most of which were “domestic melodramas” slanted at the same audience as the Musée des Familles, beginning with La Bague antique (1842), a title confusingly attached to two two-volume novels (neither of which has any connection with the similarly-titled short story translated herein) and continuing with Berthe Frémicourt (1843), L’Enfant sans mère [The Motherless Child] and Le Fils du rabbin [The Rabbi’s Son] (1844), Daniel (1845) and Mémoires de ma cuisinière [My Cook’s Memoirs] (1846). He did other work alongside the series that reflected his wider interests, including La Palette d’or [The Golden Palette] (1845). The series of his publications might well have continued unabated had it not been brought to an abrupt halt by the revolution of 1848, when—as Berthoud points out in one of the mock-autobiographical stories included herein—men of letters suddenly found themselves with a lot of leisure time because the entire economy had ground to a halt.
Berthoud undoubtedly kept up his journalistic work throughout the decade prior to the 1848 Revolution, and was active as a feuilletonist too, although the evidence of that activity thus far reproduced on gallica is patchy. Several of his works were, however, reprinted in the annual omnibuses Echo des Feuilletons and the Revue des Feuilletons, some volumes of which are available on gallica. The samples include “Voyage au ciel,” originally published in Girardin’s La Presse in 1841; how extensive his contributions were to that paper it is presently impossible to tell. One publication that is partially reproduced on gallica to which Berthoud made numerous contributions, however, is the devoutly Romantic Revue Pittoresque; among the three stories he published there in 1844 were “Le Maître du temps,” here translated as “The Master of the Weather,” and “Le Fou,” here translated as “The Madman,” both of which have evident thematic links with “Voyage au ciel.”
All three stories are accounts of scientific obsession, but they are distanced somewhat from precious tales of “mad scientists” by virtue of their treatment of the theme. All three stories feature scientists who are, to begin with, not merely sane but exceptionally so—more so, in fact, than the uncomprehending neighbors whose incomprehension and diffidence routinely play a part, sometimes crucially, in driving them mad. Their eventual and seemingly inevitable annihilation by overwhelming compulsive obsession is presented as stark tragedy, akin in a more than merely metaphorical sense, to martyrdom.
There might have been other stories in that group published in other periodicals; Fantaises scientifiques de Sam, which reprinted “Voyage au ciel” and “Le Fou”—the latter in a section revealingly headed “Martyrs”—contains another possible candidate that has close thematic links with them, “Le Second soleil,” here translated as “The Second Sun,” which slots in between “Voyage au Ciel” and “Le Fou” in developmental terms; it is possible, however, that that appearance is deceptive, and that it was a later addition to the group.
The longer of the two stories that Berthoud contributed to the Revue Pittoresque in 1845 also belongs to the set, and adds further layers of complication to the basic pattern, thus becoming a very peculiar story indeed. Although it is impossible to tell, at present, whether Berthoud added any further stories to the sequence thereafter, there certainly seems to be an element of conclusion about the story in question, “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” (1845), here translated as “The Cauldron of Bicêtre,” which not only complicates and confuses the thread running through the series but almost seems to break it off deliberately and throw it away.
“Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” can easily be imagined as a pivotal work in Berthoud’s career; it is a kind of summation of his more exotic endeavors so far, being an extended conte cruel in a form that as later to become one of the standard templates of that genre, and a tale of diabolism, the force of which is only slightly diminished a frame narrative placing it in the mouth of an inmate of the lunatic asylum at Bicêtre. It is also, however, an account of fatal compulsive obsession and frustrated scientific discovery, in exactly the same fashion as its three (or perhaps four) recent predecessors.
“Voyage au ciel” and “Le Maître du temps” both feature fictitious scientists—as does “Le Second soleil”—but “Le Fou” broke that pattern by using an actual scientist as its protagonist, after the fashion of so many of Berthoud’s historical romances, although the story constructed around his name and career is a drastic distortion of the history of the real individual. “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” continues that pattern, again featuring an actual historical individual as its doomed inventor, but again playing fast and loose with actual history in a fashion that would seem extraordinarily reckless even without the supernatural element. It might conceivably have been complaints about such cavalier distortions of fact that persuaded Berthoud to take things a little easier in future; while few of his other stories featuring real individuals can be commended for their accuracy and authenticity, most are far more conscientious in treating their heroes than “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre.”
In order to avoid spoilers I shall say no more about “Le Fou” and “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” here, but I shall add afterwords to both stories to explain the actual histories of their central characters, neither of whom would have been a household name in Paris in 1844-45 and who will almost certainly be unfamiliar to modern readers. It is, however, worth making in advance the general observation that what seems to have struck Berthoud most forcibly when he began to investigate the history of science in the 1830s and 1840s was the extreme disillusionment suffered by some scientists as a result of society’s misunderstanding of their endeavors and indifference to their achievements. That, at least, seems to have the chief aspect of scientific endeavor with which he identified himself imaginatively.
The five stories that I have gathered into the “Martyrs” section of the present sampler are certainly Berthoud’s most interesting attempts to invent a form of “scientific fiction,” and are all the more interesting because they remain so distinctive—indeed, effectively unique; there is nothing else in the historical record of precursors of modern science fiction quite like them. They are interesting both because of the detail in the accounts they offer of the allegedly-typical psychology of scientists, in terms of their obsessiveness and social awkwardness—“Voyage au ciel,” in particular, contains what would now be recognized as a textbook description of Asperger’s syndrome—and because of their insistence on the hostile manner in which the scientists’ fellow men react to their eccentricities. As to why Berthoud found that kind of plight ripe for passionate identification, we can only speculate, although the attitude and depth of feeling of the Contes misanthropiques and such cynical items of fakelore as “Saint-Mathias l’ermite” (here translated as “Saint Mathias the Hermit”) probably offer a clue.
Because all his accounts of hypothetical scientific discoveries are set in the past, Berthoud had to find narrative means of obliterating them all from the historical record: a strategy that prevented him from extrapolating their possible social and intellectual consequences, and thus prevented him from inventing a kind of fiction more akin to modern science fiction. What it did enable him to do, however, by way of partial compensation, was to construct a striking account of the frustrations of genius occasioned by ambient incomprehension, and to give that account a particular dimension of tragedy. That achievement is certainly not without interest, and it is worthy of praise as well as attention.
Berthoud’s popularity and perceived importance in this phase of his career is reflected in the fact that he was appointed a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1844, but it is likely that his endeavors on behalf of the education of the masses had more responsibility for that award than his reputation among his literary peers; at the very best, he would have been ranked alongside some of the other “foot-soldiers” of Romanticism who contributed extensively to the Revue pittoresque, such as Joseph Méry, Jules Janin and Léon Gozlan, and he might well have been ranked some way beneath them because of the increasing banality of his didactic novels. In that context, the short stories he did for the Revue Pittoresque can probably be considered his most ambitious work, and might also be considered as a peak of aspiration that he did not attempt to scale again.
It is profoundly unclear, from the record provided in gallica, exactly what Berthoud was doing throughout the 1850s, although he certainly resumed regular publication once the most difficult months of the Second Republic were over. He published the Algeria-set The Zéphir d’El Arouch [The Soldier of El Arouch] (1850)—one of two books he published about that country, which he might well have visited in the mid-1840s—and La Vierge de Tasse [Tasso’s Virgin] (1851) in spite of the continued economic difficulties, and had a number of plays produced during the Second Republic, including L’Anneau de Salomon, légende hollandaise (1850 at the Théâtre des Variétés). It appears that he became a regular contributor to the newspaper Le Pays in 1849, although he subsequently transferred his primary allegiance to La Patrie, where the bulk of the non-fictional materials reprinted in the Fantaisies scientifiques probably made their original appearance.
It seems to have been in the 1850s that Berthoud settled down to work primarily as a popularizer of science and commentator on scientific progress, but he did other work as well, including a good deal of fiction for children, and might well have been active as an editor in that field, although the evidence for that is indirect. By that time, the Romantic Movement as such was a thing of the past and all of its leading contributors had moved on, although those who became and remained famous all maintained its ideals in one form or another.
Many of the leading members of the Movement had a hard time after 1951, especially those who had accepted positions in the government of the Second Republic, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, Alphonse de Lamartine (its first, provisional, President), Jules Hetzel and Eugène Sue. Many were formally exiled following Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, and not all of them consented to return when offered amnesty a few years later. Where Berthoud stood is not entirely clear—his works exhibit an almost total disregard for contemporary politics—but his long-time employer, Émile de Girardin, started out as one of Louis-Napoléon’s most enthusiastic supporters when he was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic, and then became one of his diehard opponents when he proclaimed himself emperor. Berthoud’s association with him must have been potentially problematic, and it might have been the case that Berthoud found it politic to distance himself from Girardin; at any rate, his eventual association with the conservative and imperialist La Patrie suggested that he accommodated himself comfortably within that camp. If so, that might help to explain why Jules Hetzel, when he accepted amnesty and returned from exile, does not seem to have had any dealings with Berthoud, who would otherwise have seemed an ideal contributor to, if not a collaborator with, the “family magazines” that Hetzel founded and promoted so enthusiastically in the late 1850s and 1860s.
When there was a new boom in periodical production, book production and the popularization of science in the early 1860s, however, Berthoud was more than ready to capitalize on it on his own account, and his publications in volume form became prolific again throughout the decade. With specific regard to the popularization of science, he became the editor of and leading contributor to the annual Petites chroniques de la science (1861-72) and in addition to the four volumes of Fantaisies scientifiques he published several other volumes of popularizing fiction, most notably Contes du Dr. Sam [Tales of Dr. Sam] (1862), L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans, Les Féeries de la science [The Enchantments of Science] (1866) and Les Soirées du Dr. Sam [Dr. Sam’s Evening Entertainments] (1871), all of them slanted toward juvenile readers. Les Cassette des sept amis (The Seven Friends’ Casket] (1869) is similar in structure, although its inclusions are mostly unconcerned with scientific themes. He also published a series of orthodox non-fictional popularizations, including Causeries sur les insectes [Conversations about Insects] (1862), Le Monde des insectes [The World of Insects] (1864), L’Esprit des oiseaux [The Intelligence of Birds] (1867) and Les Os d’un géant, histoire familière du globe terrestre avant les hommes [A Giant’s Bones: An Informal History of the Terrestrial Globe Before Humankind] (1868).
These works were, however, part of a veritable deluge. Having published no volumes at all in the later 1850s, and only one in 1860, he published no less than thirteen in 1861, and half a dozen more in 1862, many of which must have been written during the 1850s; which of them had appeared in periodicals and merely awaited reprinting and which had simply been stockpiled, it is difficult to tell. Few of them are readily available for consultation, but the titles suggest that most of them were children’s stories—at least ten appeared in a series of publications for children—and that others continued the series of sentimental melodramas developed in the 1840s. Those that appear to be novels include La Belle limonadière du Palais-Royal [The Beautiful Lemonade-Seller of the Palais-Royal] (1861), Étienne le Manchot [One-Armed Étienne] (1861), Histoire d’un meunier et ses enfants [The Story of a Miler and his Children] (1861), La Petite Columbelle ou Aventures d’un tisserand [Little Columbelle; or, The Adventures of a Weaver] (1861). Le phénomène vivant: histoire de la Saint-Barthélemy [The Living Phenomenon: The Story of Saint Bartholomew] (1861), Quinze ans de la vie d’une femme [Fifteen Years in a Woman’s Life] (1861), L’Enfant du mystère, un tyran en jupon [The Mystery Child: A Petticoat Tyrant] (1862) and Les Femmes vengées [The Avenged Women] (1863), while volumes of shorter works include Les Aventures d’un bossu, suivies de l’histoire du lion Daniel [The Adventures of a Hunchback and The Story of the Lion Daniel] (1861), La Fidèle servante, suivi des Aventures de Burgett [The Faithful Maidservant, and The Adventures of Burgett] (1861), Lectures des soirées d’hiver [Readings for Winter Evenings] (1862), Contes à Dodo et à Dedele [Tales for Dodo and Dedele] (1863) and Histoires pour les petits et pour les grands enfants [Stories for Little and Big Children] (1863).
In addition to these works of fiction, Berthoud also published several non-fiction works unrelated to his studies of natural history, including three works on what might loosely be termed “marriage guidance,” which suggest that he must have contributed to the specialist women’s magazines of the 1850s. “Le Château de Heidenloch,” translated herein as “Heindenloch Castle” was published in the June 1962 issue of the Journal des Demoiselles—a long-running magazine aimed primarily at teenage girls—without a by-line before being reprinted in Contes du Dr. Sam, and it is impossible to guess how many other unsigned contributions he might have made to that and other publications of a similar sort. Other works that were probably based on articles in women’s magazines include La Nouvelle et veritable Morale en action [The New and True Morality in Action] (1861), Le Nouveau jardin d’amour, précédé du Conseiller conjugal [The New Garden of Love, preceded by the Marriage Guidance Counselor] (1861) and Le Veritable tableau de l’amour conjugal d’après les écrivains le plus célèbres de l’antiquité et des temps modernes [The True Depiction of Conjugal Love, According to the Most Famous Writers of Antiquity and Modern Times] (1863).
Other areas represented in his non-fiction publications of the 1860s include an interest in the occult fringe of the history of science, represented in Le Grand Albert et ses secrets magiques et merveilleux [Albertus Magnus and His Magical and Marvelous Secrets] (1861) and further illustrated by Le Dragon rouge ou l’Art de commander au démon et aux esprits infernaux [The Red Dragon; or, The Art of Commanding Demons and Infernal Spirits] (1865), which is presumably either a reprint of or a commentary on the eponymous grimoire, from which Berthoud had quoted in some of his fakeloristic tales, including “Saint-Mathias l’ermite.” Le Baiser du diable [The Devil’s Kiss] (1861) might conceivably belong to this group, although it might as easily be a novel whose title is purely metaphorical.
This glut of book publication obtained Berthoud a second round of popularity and celebrity, and a promotion to the rank of officier in the Légion d’honneur in 1867. The brief description of his lifestyle contained in “L’An deux mille huit cent soixante-cinq” (1865; herein translated as “The Year 2865”) is confirmed by one of the few journalistic sketches available, contained in Jules Brisson and Félix Ribeyre’s Les Grands Journaux de France (1862); he really did live in a house cluttered with books and his various collections of specimens, in company with a dog named Master Flock and a pet lemur he called Mademoiselle Mine.
As in the 1840s, however, history interrupted his career yet again, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 brought further economic and political upheavals. Once again he continued his career as best he could, but he was now getting old, and he slowed down drastically; apart from reprints of earlier works, he only published a handful of books during the Third Republic, of which the most significant are La Botanique au village [Village Botany] (1874) and Histoires et romans des végétaux [Histories and Romances of Vegetable Life] (1882). By the time he died, on 26 March 1891, he was virtually forgotten, and remained so throughout the 20th century.
It is arguable that everything Berthoud did in the course of his checkered career was done better by other people—that he was, in effect, a second-rate writer of limited interest. That certainly seems to have been the prevailing view within his lifetime as well as thereafter. Even if that were true, however, it would not detract from the fact that he was a genuine pioneer, and that he did at least do several significant things before the people who then went on to improve on his efforts. In fact, though, he was a writer of considerable ability, who might have spent a great deal of his time “free-wheeling” in the comfortable production of routinized work, but whose best efforts are certainly meritorious. His Contes misanthropiques are occasionally awkward in construction, but they do have a genuine bite as well as an experimental verve. The same is true of the best of his supernatural stories, which are not necessarily shown off to their best advantage by being buried in a supposed collection of antiquarian folklore.
The most remarkable of Berthoud’s works, however, are undoubtedly his historical romances, especially those featuring real or imaginary scientists. Those that pretend to be based on fact—“drama-documentaries” in modern parlance—are more extensively fantasized that most of the similar items nowadays produced for the television medium, but it is arguable that that makes them all the more interesting, and certainly makes them more extensively “personalized.” Looking back from the viewpoint of a literary archaeologist interested in precursors of modern speculative fiction, Berthoud might seem to be a deeply frustrating case-study, as a writer who came close to inventing “science fiction” in the 1840s but failed to do so, ultimately producing only one futuristic story in the 1860s, conscientiously offered as a Mercieresque dream, more in a spirit of parodic frivolity than serious anticipation. It is, however, rather unfair to assess him in terms of what he did not do rather than what he actually did.
The items he collected in Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam now seem extremely eccentric to modern eyes educated by a very different notion of what “scientific fantasies” might be. Many are items of offbeat journalism, only lightly fictionalized, and many of those that are more solidly cast in a fictional mold are brief historical romances devoid of any scientific content, or primitive exercises in what would now be called “animal fantasy.” Those that do deal with contemporary scientific research and discovery, however, often do so from an odd and perhaps seemingly-perverse perspective. I have only reproduced a handful of them in this sampler, attempting to give a hint as to their range, but the group is hopefully varied enough to illustrate their eccentricity as well as their scope.
The collections of children’s stories Berthoud assembled after the Fantaisies scientifiques frequently recycle stories therefrom—especially the longer stories that probably predate the articles reprinted from La Patrie—but usually add new items intended to round out their themes. The latter are usually presented in a supposedly child-friendly manner, but that does not always serve of conceal the author’s cynicism, and certainly does not suppress the pioneering surges of his imagination.
In those more extravagant endeavors, Berthoud was inevitably working under the handicap of the imperfect knowledge of his era and the limitations of his own particular idols of thought. He was by no means the only writer to become interested in contemporary paleontological discoveries in the 1860s, or to attempt to find ways of dramatizing those discoveries in fictional form, but the limitations of the fossil record as a basis for fictional reconstruction are painfully obvious to the modern eye in “Le Château de Heidenloch” and we now know that Berthoud was on the losing side of the argument in sticking to Georges Cuvier’s insistence on maintaining belief in the special creation of humankind in accordance with Biblical chronology in spite of the overwhelming evidence of the Earth’s antiquity and the mounting evidence that humankind’s Stone Age must date back much further than Biblical chronology allowed. It is, however, worth remembering that modern readers only have access to the second, revised edition of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre, written in 1867 in order to take aboard the conversion of Louis Figuier, its principal source, to the latter viewpoint, and that the first version of the novel, published in 1864, had accepted the creationist account to which Berthoud adhered.
All the English versions produced as Journey to the Centre of the Earth reproduce the revised edition. It is true that the depictions of the plesiosaur and the ichthyosaur contained in Verne’s novels are far more accurate that the earlier descriptions contained in Verne’s novelette, but Verne’s description of a prehistoric human, presented (as a vision) in the second version is as wide of the mark as anything in Berthoud’s work, and Berthoud’s pioneering account of Stone Age humankind, “Les Premiers habitants de Paris” (1865; translated herein as “The First Inhabitants of Paris”), although inevitably primitive by comparison with the prehistoric fantasies produced in the 1890s by J. H. Rosny and others, nevertheless remains something of a tour de force for its time, having been produced a full decade ahead of the next significant attempt to do something similar—which was almost certainly inspired by Berthoud—in Le Monde inconnu [The Unknown World] (1876, tr. in 1879 as The Pre-Historic World) by his fellow veteran feuilletonist Élie Berthet, which was subsequently revised in 1885 as Paris avant l’histoire.
Jules Verne was a considerably better writer than Berthoud, and seems much more important to historians of science fiction because he did write a handful of genuine items of speculative fiction that extrapolate the possibilities of scientific progress far more robustly than anything Berthoud did, but it is worth remembering that Jules Hetzel did his level best to restrain, if not actually to suppress, that aspect of his star writer’s work, and that Berthoud, mostly working for editors far more conservative than Hetzel, was certainly not operating in an environment hospitable to that kind of endeavor.
It is still impossible to judge the full extent of Berthoud’s endeavors in pioneering his own varieties of “scientific fiction,” because many of the periodicals for which he worked have vanished from human ken, and it is highly unlikely that gallica will ever be able to reproduce even scattered samples of them, but the few samples that have been revived by that means indicate that he really was an interesting and accomplished writer in that context. The work in question would have been as difficult for contemporary readers to assess properly as for modern ones but their esotericism should not be allowed to detract from its achievement, which is as remarkable for its fervor as for its uniqueness.
The translations from Contes misanthropiques included in the present collection’s section of Misanthropic Tales were made from the Google Books version. Most of the translations of items from the Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de Flandre in the Folklore and Fakelore section were made from the versions reproduced on the Biblisem website at biblisem.net, because they are easier to read than the originals contained on gallica, but the items not available on Biblisem were taken directly from the gallica version of the first edition. The translation of the three stories in the Martyrs of Science section reprinted in Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam and all the stories in the Scientific Fantasies section were made from the gallica versions of that four-volume set. The translations of “Le Maître du Temps” and “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” were made from the gallica copies of the Revue Pittoresque. The translation of “Le Château de Heidenloch” in the Stories for Children section was made from the gallica version of Contes du Dr. Sam; the translations of the other two stories in that section were made from a copy of an undated Garnier edition of L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans.
Brian Stableford