Nodier and The Crumb Fairy
Charles Nodier was born April 29, 1780, in Besançon, on the Doubs River, in the Department of Doubs, in the Franche-Comté region of France, which is in the eastern part of France, near the Swiss border.1 He was the son of Suzanne Pâris and of a father officially unknown. However, in 1778, Antoine Melchior Nodier had hired Suzanne as his housekeeper, and the identity of the boy’s unknown father was no doubt obvious to the town. Antoine’s mother, Anne, did not want her well-educated lawyer son to marry a servant-girl with no education and no dowry, and the couple continued to live together for thirteen years. In 1784, Suzanne had a daughter, Elise.
On July 14, 1789, an uprising of working-class and bourgeois French stormed the Bastille in Paris and, in short order, succeeded in dethroning King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, establishing a country ruled by the Estates General, with Louis for the time remaining as the official monarch, but without power. In 1793, the king and queen were executed. In the shake-up that ran through all the levels of government, old officials were turned out and new ones needed to replace them all over France. Antoine Nodier was a fervent supporter of the Revolution and its ideals, and on March 16, 1790, he was elected Mayor of Besançon, an office he gave up the following year, August 28, 1791, when he was elected presiding magistrate of the criminal tribunal set up in the Department by the Revolution. Presumably, it was this new appointment, putting Antoine in a position of considerable prominence, that made his mother think she had better give her consent to a marriage and let him regularize his private life. On September 12, 1791, the new presiding magistrate married Suzanne, legitimizing his son and daughter. As magistrate, his duties included ordering—and attending—many executions by guillotine. Charles, witnessing many of them, developed a horror of cruelty done in the name of lofty ideals.
In The Crumb Fairy, this horror is reflected both in Michael’s nightmarishly absurd trial and (almost) execution for murder, and in the narrator’s revulsion at the tortures recommended by the—allegedly sane—doctor at the insane asylum for the treatment of the mentally ill. Finding no existing human being to sympathize with, his horror at the recommended use of “shackles, thumbscrews, straitjackets, and camisoles [long-sleeved straitjackets],” as well as “mustard baths, blisters, and cauteries,” the despairing narrator apostrophizes My Uncle Toby, the retired soldier who (literally) would not hurt a fly, from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, crying out, “O wisest of men! O Toby! who will play for me the plaintive whistle of your Lillabullero?”
The experience of the French Revolution left Nodier with a deep distrust of political idealism and of the possibility of any real improvement in human nature. Brian Stableford, in his introduction to “Perfectibility” (his translation of Nodier’s satiric science-fiction “Hurlubleu Grand Manifafa d’Hurlubière ou la Perfectibilité,” and its sequel, “Léviathan le Long, Archikan des Patagons de l’île savante”),2 commented that Nodier’s satire was “an unusually wholehearted assault on the idea of progress—or, at least, the ideal of perfectibility, which Nodier considered both dangerous and absurd” (Stableford, p. 35).
In 1795, the government by the Estates General was replaced by the Directoire, with five heads of each division of government, but the re-organized government, like the Estates General, was too unwieldy to maintain public order and defend the nation against the wars other European monarchies were waging against them. In 1799, the Directoire was overthrown by the Consulate, headed by Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul—and as Emperor, starting in 1804.
The young Nodier had mixed feelings about Napoleon. The new ruler restored order and brought military glory, but also embroiled the nation in wars of conquest and headed a tyrannical government that placed many limits on the Liberty the Revolution was supposed to have enshrined. Under Napoleon, Nodier alternated between writing praises of him and satires (and joining in feckless conspiracies to overthrow him). On investigation, the government did not take very seriously Nodier’s anti-Napoleon efforts, but imposed various restrictions on his freedom of movement, and let him know that he was being watched.
Meanwhile, the years were running on, and Nodier began to realize that he was no longer a precocious boy, but an adult who needed to make something of himself. In 1808, he married Desirée Charve.3 In 1809, Nodier found employment as a secretary and assistant to Sir Herbert Croft, an Englishman living in France. This work helped Nodier to study British literature in more depth. He was already an enthusiast of Shakespeare, and was now becoming a fan of Sir Walter Scott. In his love for British and other foreign literatures, he was heralding the French Romantic movement. The French writers of the 18th century, priding themselves on their inheritance of classical education, based on ancient Greek and Roman models, were inclined to look down on Shakespeare, and other modern writers in other countries, viewing them as insufficiently instructed in such important rules as the need for the unities of Time, Place, and Plot in drama, and the need to keep tragedy and comedy rigidly separated (all rules that the “primitive” Shakespeare regularly broke, and that Scott avoided entirely by writing novels instead of plays).
Croft eventually found that he could no longer afford to pay Nodier’s salary, and the Nodiers left him in 1810. Nodier’s family was increased in 1811 by the birth of a daughter, given the royalist name of Marie Antoinette Elisabeth Nodier.4 Two sons followed, but died in infancy, Térence (1814-1816) and Amédée (1821). Nodier bounced between jobs for some time, but, in December 1812, he fell into another post that was to be important for him in his development as a writer, when he was made the editor of the Télégraphe Officiel and librarian of the Napoleonic province of Illyria—the ancient Greek name for the territory, corresponding approximately to modern-day Slovenia. Like the other Balkan territories, Illyria had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before Napoleon, and, as a strategy for keeping these new subjects happier under French rule than they had been under Austrian, the new officials were directed to study the indigenous cultures and encourage their expression. Nodier set about studying Slovenian folklore, legends, and literature, and, while he was at it, continued studying the work of Goethe, Schiller, and the other German Romantics.
The German Romantics especially appealed to Nodier because of their belief in the importance of the non-rational, of dreams and legends, in searching for meaning in life. Jack Zipes, in his essay, “The Romantic Fairy Tale in Germany,” discusses the politics of the German fairytale writers, and much of what he finds in their work applies equally to Nodier:
The romantic fairy tale is a challenge to the folk tale and to the reader as well. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the romantic fairy tale is revolutionary. It explodes the tightly-knit composition of the more feudal-oriented folk tale to articulate the needs and tastes of a bourgeois avant-garde critical both of the archaic nature of feudal societies and of the utilitarian rationalism of the emerging bourgeoisie. The boundlessness of its form and the open problematic endings suggest possibilities for human emancipation which could be realized in worlds (utopias) where creativity and Eros are honored. What is striking about the romantic fairy tale in its inception is that the romantics play off the folk-tale symbols, motifs and themes to transcend the conservative notions of both the nobility and bourgeoisie. (Zipes, pp. 60-61.)
And Zipes lists as characteristics of the romantic tale, distinguishing it from the folktale:
The narrative is often multi-dimensional in contrast to the one-dimensional concrete perspective of the folk tale. The impossibility of bridging the gap between self and existence is stressed. This heightens the antagonistic dualities which reflect the major themes of loneliness, alienation, and fetishism. . . . It puts the unusual potential of the imagination on display. . . . The protagonist, generally a male, is displaced, becomes homeless in a world without community. . . . Rarely is there a happy end to a romantic fairy tale, and, if so, it is not envisioned on this earth but in another world. (Zipes, pp. 65-66.)
The Napoleonic province of Illyria did not last long. Napoleon was ousted and the monarchy restored under Louis XVIII in 1814, and again 1815, after Napoleon’s brief return ended at Waterloo. After less than a year in Illyria, when it was clear that Napoleon’s empire was falling back into the previous owners’ control, the French officials gave way. In September 1813, Nodier started on his way home to France. He brought with him an intangible treasure of the lore and legends—and the new Romantic writings—of several cultures. By a happy paradox, this store of foreign materials opened Nodier’s native culture to him more fully. Jean Larat, in La Tradition et l’Exotisme dans l’Œuvre de Charles Nodier (1780-1944), étude sur les origines du romantisme Français, discussed at length how the examples Nodier had found in other cultures made it easier for him to look to the French past for legends and lore that he could use in writing stories that were both Romantic—and, increasingly, fantastic—and also French.
Returning to France, Nodier found that he was able to manage to earn enough for his family to live on through his writing, and that he was also able to champion the growth of a Romantic movement in France, both by the examples he set in his own stories and by the arguments he advanced in his articles. There were “three essential ingredients that Nodier had selected and prepared for the romantic palette” (Oliver, p. 104), his passion for the Middle Ages, for Shakespeare, and for the foreign writers who were advancing Romanticism in other languages, especially English and German. Nodier encouraged younger writers, such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, offering them friendship and hospitality, and reviewing their works.
In 1824, Nodier was appointed to the position of librarian of the Arsenal Library in Paris, a post that made his personal finances more secure, and made it possible for him to offer hospitality to younger writers, holding weekly salons for story-telling and artistic discussion. He held the post of librarian at the Arsenal until his death, January 27, 1844.
In 1832, Nodier published La Fée aux Miettes (here translated as The Crumb Fairy), his “best known and best-loved tale” (Nelson, p. 88). In accord with his belief in lore and legendry as a source of story, he drew from several cultures in creating it. From France came the title character, the Crumb Fairy. The word “fairy” is itself French in origin. Other countries might have equivalent figures, such as the English “elf”—and, besides, the English enthusiastically welcomed French fairies into their own lore, as Shakespeare did, including the French King Oberon, from the 15th-century romance of Huon de Bordeaux, as a major character in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. But the French fairies became especially prominent among story-tellers such as Mme. d’Aulnoy or Charles Perrault in the Parisian salons of the last decade of the 17th century. Their stories, written down, resulted in a new genre of fiction, the conte de fées the fairytale.
In the opening of The Crumb Fairy, Nodier pointed to Perrault, the “historian” of “Puss-in-Boots,” as “a decent, pious, sincere man, who won the public’s confidence.” This phrasing is lightly ironic, as if not meant as high praise. But the irony is itself ironic, at the expense of those who might dismiss Perrault’s stories as simple stuff. In another story, “Trilby,” Nodier commented that he feared it would not reach the heights of Perrault’s work, but hoped it might go high enough to be at the level of Mme. d’Aulnoy. In the work of such writers as Perrault and d’Aulnoy, powerful, majestic, usually benevolent fairies are omnipresent, protecting such characters as Perrault’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty or d’Aulnoy’s Beauty and Beast.
By contrast, in cognate Grimm Brothers stories, Cinderella is protected by the hazel tree that grows over her dead mother’s grave and Briar Rose by the kingdom’s “Wise Women,” while in both “How Six Men Got on in the World” and “The Six Servants,” the wildly talented companions just happen to have their odd talents, instead of having been given them by the fairies.
The Crumb Fairy, at first glance, is not much like the fairies of Perrault and d’Aulnoy. She is poor, old, dwarfishly short, and dependent on the charity of the more prosperous folk around her. But this appearance turns out to be deceiving.
In addition to her French role as a fairy, the Crumb Fairy draws from the Jewish and Islamic legends of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is sad to note that Nodier, although using these legends, included a stereotypically anti-Semitic portrait of Jonathas, the moneylender. The Crumb Fairy eventually reveals herself to Michael the Carpenter as Queen Belkiss of Sheba. The name is Arabic, from the Islamic legends, although of uncertain etymology (Lassner, p. 219); it can be transliterated in various ways; Nodier spelled it Belkiss, and Balkis is common; Lassner’s study uses Bélqīs.
In both Jewish and Islamic legends, the Queen, although otherwise beautiful, had some kind of deformity. Her legs or ankles were hairy, or her feet were an ass’s hooves or a goose’s webbed-feet. Marina Warner, discussing the Queen of Sheba in From the Beast to the Blonde, sees the Queen’s nether deformities as fetishistic substitutes for female genitalia (Warner, p. 113). The Crumb Fairy has agile, elegant, little feet and legs, but has a different sort of deformity of her own, in having long, fang-like canines among her teeth. Hilda Nelson comments, “Vampires are usually adorned with long canine teeth, presumably a sign of man’s animal nature as well as sexuality. It is rather puzzling to discover that the Crumb Fairy is provided with teeth similar to those of vampires. Does this imply that she may have latent sexual and animalistic traits?” (Nelson, p. 170). But this deformity vanishes in Michael’s visions and dream-states, in which the Crumb Fairy is seen as her beautiful young self, Belkiss, the Queen of Sheba.
Nodier’s choice of Scotland for the scene of much of the action of The Crumb Fairy grew out of his love for Sir Walter Scott’s work. In 1821, like his alter-ego, the narrator of The Crumb Fairy, Nodier took advantage of the peace between France and Britain that had followed the long Napoleonic wars, to visit Scotland—not to inspect lunatic asylums, but to tour the scenes of Scott’s novels.
Pierre-Georges Castex, in his edition of Nodier’s Contes, points out that Nodier did not visit the lunatic asylum in Glasgow during his Scottish journey, but rather read about it in an article, “Lettre à M. le docteur A*** sur l’hospice des fous de Glascow [sic],” by M. le duc de Lévis, published in May 1829 in the Revue de Paris [Castex, p. 136]). He missed meeting Scott, but the journey gave him the setting immediately for a short story, “Trilby, ou le Lutin d’Argail” (here translated as “Trilby, or the Brownie of Argyle”), in 1822, and, in 1832, for The Crumb Fairy.
The specific element of British folklore that he drew on for the latter, however, was not Scottish, but Manx. Michael meets two dogs from the Isle of Man, Sir Yap Muzzleburn, the island’s bailiff, who is a Great Dane, and his equerry Blatt, a curly-haired spaniel. Although stories of supernatural Black Dogs are found all through the British Isles, Man has some particularly well known examples. Katharine Briggs, in her Encyclopedia of Fairies, notes, “The most famous of the Black Dogs of the Isle of Man was the Moddey Dhoo or ‘Mauthe Doog’ of Peel Castle, made famous by Walter Scott. In the 17th century, when the castle was garrisoned, a great, shaggy black dog used to come silently into the guard-room and stretch himself there” (Briggs, p. 301). Scott described “the spectre-hound in Man” both in “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805) and in Peveril of the Peak (1823). As a fan of Scott’s work, Nodier must have known of the Manx dogs.
Mandragores/mandrakes figure in the folklore of almost every land where they grow, because their roots look like people. From the Bible, Nodier would have known that mandragores were used as aphrodisiacs and fertility drugs (Genesis 30.14-17). Jean de La Fontaine, one of Nodier’s favorite authors, in his fable of “The Mandrake,” had the young rake bent on cuckolding the old husband tell him that a mandrake-potion brings fertility—but that the first man to have sex with a woman who has taken the potion will die of its venom. From Shakespeare, Nodier would have known that mandragora was a soporific, a “drowsy syrup” (Othello, III.iii); that mandrakes shrieked when “torn out of the earth,/ That living mortals, hearing them, run mad” (Romeo and Juliet, IV.iii); and that “the mandrake’s groan can kill” (2 Henry VI, III.ii). As he did with the other supernatural elements he used, Nodier freely altered the traditional traits. Michael’s mandragore does not shriek and madden or groan and kill: it sings a song about its singing, and the song keeps being sung in Michael’s story, a promise of hope. Instead of bringing sleep or physical love or fertility, it brings Michael peace and, presumably, a transcendent, non-physical re-union with the Crumb Fairy.
The transcendentally happy ending for Michael, seen from a more earthly perspective, is a sad, even a despairing view of the possibilities of love. Miriam S. Hamenachem, in her chapter on “La Fleur, la Musique, l’Etoile” (Hamenachem, pp. 124-146), discusses how, for Nodier, imperfect love, love that may fail and will certainly be severed eventually by death, although real, seemed less desirable than dreams of imaginary, perfect love, perhaps to be fulfilled beyond the grave. This theme runs through many of Nodier’s stories, with lovers separated by missed meetings, barriers of class, exile, or the death or non-existence of the beloved. Michael has the greatest barrier to get through to find his love, because, rather than merely dying, he has to stop having been alive and turn into a fictional character. In a device more like the surrealists who followed him decades later, than like the works of Nodier’s contemporaries, Michael escapes from the madhouse—no one knows how—and vanishes. The narrator finds a book seller in Venice who offers him a little book with “the superb adventures of the Crumb Fairy, and how Michael the carpenter was freed from his prison by the Princess Mandragore; how he wed the Queen of Sheba, and how he became emperor of the seven planets—look, here they are, with a diagram!” The narrator hurries to buy a copy and would gladly show it to us, by way of proof—except that his baggage, including the book, gets stolen. Optimistically, he hopes that at least the thieves “may get some good out of it.” Daniel, the valet, agrees: “‘I think so, too,’ said Daniel,—if they read it’.”
On the same condition, readers in this world, with easier access to Michael’s story, may have the same happy fate.
The fame of the competition in horror-writing that produced the vampire stories of Byron and Polidori and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein led Nodier to co-author a dramatization of Polidori’s “The Vampire” (1820)5 and to write a horror story, “Smarra, ou les Démons de la Nuit,” (here translated as “Smarra, or the Demons of the Night” 1821), set simultaneously in contemporary Illyria and in ancient Thessaly, the home of witches, in the folklore of ancient Greece. He drew also on Slovenian legends of vampires—although not as extensively as he liked to claim, calling the story in his 1821 preface a translation of a story by a Ragusan noble, whose pen-name was Count Maxime Odin. Actually, the writer who went in for using this pen-name was Nodier himself. (In “Love and the Grimoire,” for example, the narrator of the story is named Maxime.)
French education in the 18th century had stressed the values of reason and good taste, allowing no extremes of emotion, and the models of ancient Greek and Latin classics. Nodier rebelled against these values, feeling that they left out too much that was important in human nature, emotions that were felt rather than reasoned. He looked to dreams and nightmares as revelations of the non-rational side. In “Smarra,” he had two levels to the action of the story—Lorenzo in modern Europe has an uneasy night, full of nightmares; Lucius, in ancient Thessaly, is the protagonist of Lorenzo’s nightmares. Scenes and people shift around Lucius, in the manner of dreams. Nodier must have taken a mischievous delight in using this classical setting for his characters’ thoroughly passionate, non-rational story, reminding even the most anti-Romantic of his readers that the admired Greek and Latin exponents of good taste had their own stories of nightmarish horrors, often locating them in Thessaly.
Lucius, his head cut off by the executioner’s sword, experiences the agony of death. Nodier, in “Smarra,” aimed at reproducing the experience of actual nightmare. Nelson comments, “It is precisely the attempt to simulate a dream or, rather, a nightmare, with its inconsistencies and digressions, its incoherencies and absurdities that makes the tale so markedly different from the usual tales of vampirism and terror of the time. Indeed, Smarra is unique and considerably ahead of its time in its attempt to give the impression that it is a dream... It is because of this tale that Nodier can be considered an important initiator in attempting to record the impact of the dream on man’s psyche and, above all, on the psyche of the writer” (Nelson, p. 6).
Very different from “Smarra” in setting, tone, and technique—but equally passionate and Romantic—was a story that Nodier wrote the year after “Smarra,” “Trilby, ou le Lutin d’Argail” (here translated as “Trilby, or the Brownie of Argyle,” 1822). Like The Crumb Fairy (1832), a decade later, “Trilby” reflected the journey Nodier had made to Scotland in 1821, to view the scenes associated with Sir Walter Scott’s work. “Trilby” was to become one of the most popular of Nodier’s short fantasy stories. George du Maurier even borrowed the brownie’s name for the heroine of his novel Trilby. Although the story’s setting is Scottish, and Nodier claims—apparently incorrectly—that he took the plot from one of Scott’s novels, Oliver points out that Trilby himself is closer to Shakespeare than to anything in Scott: “Trilby, the Imp of Argyle, is more reminiscent of Lear’s Flibbertigbbet than Kenilworth, and admits more relationship to Puck than to The Black Dwarf” (Oliver, p. 136).
The French “lutin” is usually translated (as in Harraps’ New Collegiate French and English Dictionary) as a mischievous sprite, imp, elf, or goblin, and Oliver accordingly calls him an “imp.” Pierre-Georges Castex, taking seriously Nodier’s claim that the plot of the story came from the legend, found in many folklores, of the “Diable amoureux” (the Devil in love), refers to Trilby as a “démon de la rêverie”(dream-demon), and considers him as “redoubtable” a nightmare-demon as Smarra, attacking Jeannie with demonic forces more perfidious and insinuating than Smarra’s (Castex, pp. 89-90). Nelson, similarly, argues that Trilby should be considered a kind of Smarra-like demon because “both are troubling in that they reveal suppressed needs and desires,” and Trilby’s “voracious” attentions are as troubling to Jeannie as Smarra’s are to his victims (Nelson, p. 72). This view, it seems to me, makes Trilby more of a devil than the story actually warrants. Trilby’s insinuating love for Jeannie is redemptive, for both of them, rather than perfidious or voracious.
Rather than a demon of any kind, Trilby is eventually revealed within the story as the ghost of a human sinner, and Jeannie feels sure that he has been redeemed by her love. It is the pious monk Ronald, who exorcises Trilby, who functions in the story as a destructive, and even demonic force. Like the love between Michael the carpenter and his Queen of Sheba in The Crumb Fairy, the love of Jeannie and Trilby is denied fulfillment in life, but is portrayed as leading to a happy ending beyond the bounds of this world.
Taking Trilby and Smarra as the same sort of being because both are dream-spirits that stir troubling feelings seems to me to put too much stress on that similarity and too little stress on the striking dissimilarity in the kinds of feelings they stir and the way they are portrayed. Smarra is a kind of vampire, a creature out of hell. Trilby, before being revealed as the ghost of a human being, is portrayed as a helpful household spirit, puckishly mischievous, yet primarily beneficent. Nodier, in using the French word “lutin” in his story, seems to have had clearly in mind the Scottish “brownie.” (Harraps’ New Collegiate French and English Dictionary, although not listing “brownie” among the more common English words for “lutin,” gives “lutin” as the French for “brownie.”)
Trilby’s role as a household spirit who is both mischievous and helpful marks him as a typical brownie. An impish, and even a demonic side remains possible, for even brownies were not invariably considered as benevolent spirits in folklore. In James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales (1818), for instance, the Brownie is greatly feared by all the country-folk as an evil spirit. Yet Trilby’s essentially well-meaning nature is suggested by his likeness both in his small pranks and in his help with chores to Shakespeare’s Puck, who brings “good luck” and who, as Oberon is at pains to point out, is not the kind of spirit that “must consort with black-brow’d night.”
If “Trilby” was a sort of fairytale drawing on Scottish folklore, in “Trésor des Fèves et Fleur des Pois; Conte de Fées” (here translated as “Bean-Treasure and Peaseblossom; A Fairytale,” 1833), Nodier wrote a fairy tale specifically in the manner of the witty and urbane French writers of fairytales of the last decade of the 17th century, such as Perrault or Mme. d’Aulnoy. Even his phrasing is close to these models, as Castex points out (p. 469), opening with “Il était une fois” (“Once upon a time”) and closing with the assurance that Bean-Treasure and Peaseblossom lived happily ever after, because, “this is how fairytales end.” But where Perrault typically closed with a moral pointing out the qualities in the protagonists that make them deserving of their good fortune, Nodier chose instead to remind the reader gently that this sort of ending, after all, belongs to fairy tales. The elaborate, courtly etiquette Bean-Treasure and Peaseblossom use in their conversations is also like the seventeenth century fairytales.
A type of fantasy akin to the fairytale is the story set in the East, in imitation of The Arabian Nights. The collection of Scheherazade’s thousand-and-one nights had become known and loved in France with the publication of Antoine Galland’s translation, Mille et Une Nuits (1704-17), with genies taking on the role of the powerful fairies in the French conte de fées. Both “Le Songe d’Or” (here translated as “The Dream of Gold,” 1832) and “Le Génie Bonhomme” (here translated as “Goodman Genie,” 1837) make use of this Arabian mythology, although in “Goodman Genie” the Arabian Nights element is much slighter. Nodier’s “poor devil of a genie” is called a “genie” as a nickname—although the narrative leaves open the possibility that his nickname may be more than a nickname only (“People made of it what they liked. It’s none of our business,” the narrator explains.) The story’s setting, sometime “long before the revolution,” and “more than two hundred leagues from here,” sounds more like Europe than like Arabia. At more than two hundred leagues away, it is outside of France—perhaps in the Illyria Nodier remembered fondly. “The Dream of Gold” is set in a more fully realized Arabian setting, in a country with a desert, and fakirs, and a desert-dwelling bandit; it is also a more interesting story, with its overt moral worked more subtly into the action of the story.
With “L’Amour et le Grimoire” (here translated as “Love and the Grimoire,” 1832), Nodier took on the deal-with-the-devil story, snarkily upending Goethe’s Faust’s passion for his Marguerite. In parodying the well-worn trope, the story turned out not to be a fantasy, but it is, to a considerable extent, a story about fantasy and its appeal. Maxime is a comically unsuccessful Faust, who cannot manage to behave like a licentious rake—much as he longs to. As Hamenachem points out, he cannot get the devil to come and buy his soul, and far from seducing Marguerite, he altruistically takes charge of winning her for his best friend (Hamenachem, p. 207). His timidity in bad behavior is echoed in his wish to meet any devil, even one as incompetent and as easily frightened as the devil of Papefiguier Island, in Jean de La Fontaine’s fable. His failure to sell his soul or win Marguerite pokes fun at his—and, by implication, the reader’s and also Nodier’s own—longing for a life of dreams.
An additional form of fantasy in which Nodier did notable work was the scientific romance. The two best known are his stories of a far-future, “Hurlubleu, Grand Manifafa d’Hurlubière, ou, La Perfectibilité” and its sequel “Léviathan le Long, Archikan des Patagons de l’Ile Savante.” Brian Stableford’s translation of these two together, under the title of “Perfectibility,” appears in his collection of French proto-science fiction stories, The Germans on Venus (q.v.). As they are thus already easily available, Nodier’s work in this type of fantasy is here represented instead by the satiric fable of “L’Homme et la Fourmi” (here translated as “The Man and the Ant,” 1833). The category of “scientific romance” is sometimes considered as being made up entirely of stories set far away in space or ahead in time. Stories imagining the history of the pre-historic, however, demand an approach to the interaction of society and individuals, and how changes occur over time affecting both, comparable to the methods of stories imagining the history of the future or the far-away. J. O. Bailey, in Pilgrims Through Space and Time, compared the “romance of the past” to stories of the future, and commented, “The romance of the past generally . . . tell[s] . . . a story of man at some critical point in his evolution” (p. 88), giving as examples such stories as H. G. Wells’ “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897) and Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912). As Nodier was writing before the publication of Darwin’s 1856 The Origin of Species, he was, of course, not thinking in terms of evolution as such. His animals do not evolve into humans. But the idea of evolution as something that must have happened was already an increasingly common speculation in Nodier’s time, and Nodier’s picture of a world of animals changed over long time by the arrival of humans shows the influence of these speculations about some kind of evolutionary development. The naturalist Lamarck, for example, who was acquainted with Nodier, speculated that evolution might take place through the influence of traits acquired in an animal’s lifetime on the genetic makeup of the offspring.
Nodier had a much smaller supply than post-Darwin writers did of scientific information on and speculations about pre-history to use, and the setting he devised is filled out with myth. The story’s world is a single continent, ringed by the range of the Kaf mountains—the name, and the geography, coming from Islamic mythology—, not the actual Earth, but the kind of world pre-historic peoples might have supposed they had. The arrival of the Man on this world destroys the animals’ peaceful paradise and gives the Man dominion over them, not, as in the Bible, by divine right, but by the power of murder and theft. The “critical point” in this evolution has not yet occurred, but the decision of the indefatigable termite-ants to keep fighting back against the human dwellings promises eventual victory for the animals’ little champion. (Termites are no longer considered as being a sort of ant. Termites are classed as belonging to the order of Isoptera, and ants to the order of Hymenoptera. But the common French and English name for “termite” of “fourmi blanche/white ant” reflects the kind of classification Nodier would have known.)
In choosing a sort of ant as the champion, Nodier mocked human pretensions—and made use of his own interest in entomology, a hobby that had been with him since his teens. He went into it seriously enough to write his first published book on the subject, Dissertation sur l’Usage des Antennes dans les Insectes (1798), as well as a Bibliographie Entomologique (1801), which Lamarck encouraged him to publish. Nodier also made use of this interest in “Smarra,” devoting several vignettes to descriptions of bees searching for the honey stolen from them by the bee-keeper, fireflies swarming in a luminous cloud, aphids attacking roses, a moth beating its wings against the window-pane, or a spider spinning a web to trap a butterfly. His knowledge of some of the details had evidently faded a little in the years of his adulthood—”Smarra” speaks of the “five-walled palaces” the bee builds of wax, instead of the six-sided pattern that lets the cells of the honeycomb fit together without gaps—but he still took delight in the minutiae of these small lives.
Horrific, wistful, enchanting, comic, and satiric by turns, his range of fantasy is a delight to readers.
Ruth Berman