1 Respectively ISBN 9781932983890, 9781934543566, 9781935558828 and 9781612270029.

2 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as The Great Cataclysm, ISBN 9781612270265.

3 “All the way” is, admittedly, a rather anodyne translation of au bout du fossé, whose French use is mostly confined to the cautionary aphorism au bout du fosse, la culbute [roughly, “at the end of the ditch, the ignominious fall”].

4  ISBN 9781612270234.

5  For more about Captain Danrit, see the introduction to his novel, Undersea Odyssey, published by Black Coat Press, ISBN 9781935558811.

6 tr. as “The Secret of the Scaffold” in the Black Coat Press collection The Scaffold, ISBN 9781932983012.

7  Translated in the eponymous Black Coat Press collection, ISBN 9781612270203.

8 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as The People of the Pole, ISBN 9781934543399.

9 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as Doctor Lerne, ISBN 9781935558156.

10 translated as “The Master of the Three States” in the Black Coat Press collection The Age of Lead, ISBN 9781935558422.

11 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as Journey to the Inverted World, ISBN 9781612270395.

12 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as Illa’s End, ISBN 9781612270319.

13 translated in a Black Coat Press edition as The Extaordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 volumes), ISBN 9781934543818 and 9781934543825.

14 This is a slightly enigmatic reference. Cul-de-singe [literally, monkey’s bum] has several possible referents, being a slang term for a medlar and a bearskin hat; it presumably refers to the shape of the carriage here described, unusually (in the interests of wordplay) as an Obligéante [obliging]. Martin’s varnish, so called because it was patented in 1744 by Simon Étienne Martin, was manufactured by adding gold or bronze powder to green varnish, giving it a metallic sheen.

15 Palestrina’s musical version of Psalm 137 [By the Waters of Babylon…] (1584)

16 This is a joke; as subsequently suggested, Les Invalides is on the left bank, and the ruins to which the tourist is referring are presumably those on the site of the Élysée Palace.

17 Franz-Josef Gall’s system attempting to analyze mental traits and abilities by means of bumps in the skull supposedly corresponding to abundances of brain tissue was only belatedly called “phrenology.”

18 There is an untranslatable pun here; emplâtre [sticking-plaster] is also employed colloquially to refer to a slap on the head or, in English parlance, “a clip round the ear.”

19 The original text has “twenty-first,” but as the story continues with the beginning of the twenty-first century, I have assumed that to be a misprint.

20 This word appears to be improvised, presumably from guingois [lopsided].

21 A tuilerie is actually a tile factory—a label perhaps not entirely appropriate to the palace in question or the gardens that survived it.

22 Bonnardot adds a Greek tag here, which consists of the Greek napea (the name of a wood nymph) and leon (lion).

23 Jean Goujon (1510-c1566) designed the Fontaine des Innocents in the old cemetery and participated in the decoration of the Louvre while it was a palace, some fragments of his work surviving there when it became a museum.

24 Henri II was a conspicuously weak king; although not quite as incompetent as Henri III (who did not come to the throne until Goujon was dead) he was dominated by various advisers, latterly his wife Catherine de Medici, who orchestrated the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre after his death, during the intermediate reign of Charles IX.

25 Breveté mean “patented”. S.G.D.G.—Sans garantie de government [Not guaranteed by the government]—was a precautionary formula added to all French patents of the era in question, to emphasize that the issuing of a patent did not constitute an official guarantee that device in question would actually work.

26 A clysoir was a flexible tube fitted with a cannula, used for introducing liquids into body-cavities; if the author were thinking in terms of enemas he would probably have used the word clystère [clyster], so it is more likely that he means to imply a vaginal douche employed for contraceptive purposes. In primitive versions of the device, the liquids were simply poured into an elevated funnel at the far end of the tube, but the mechanically-minded 19th century inevitably produced patented versions fitted with pumps, which were presumably much in demand in busy Parisian brothels.

27 The name Grégoire, observed on a bronze item in this context, would probably have belonged to the sculptor Jean-Louis Grégoire, that of Crépin to Crépin David, a designed and makes of musical instruments.

28 Following the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870 and the suppression of the Commune in 1871 the provisional government entered into negotiations with the Comte de Paris, the grandson of Louis-Philippe, who would have ruled as the constitutional monarch Henri V had he not refused to allow the tricolor to remain the flag of France, thus sabotaging the deal and leaving the Third Republic to provide its own head of state.

29 i.e., the saber the protagonist had worn while serving in the garde mobile of 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

30 In 1870 Provins was the heart of an agricultural region known for its roses; it is about 80 kilometers from the center of Paris.

31 In the new calendar briefly introduced after the 1789 Revolution, the traditional seven-day week was replaced by a series of ten-day periods, known as décades, here translated as decads.

32 The first of these lines comes from a children’s dancing song, Le Pied qui remue.

33 The author inserts a footnote: “Literary probity obliges me to note that I borrowed some grotesque consequences of the egalitarian principle from a humorous article in an English periodical, the Cornhill Magazine.” The reference is presumably to “A Vision of Communism: A Grotesque” in the September 1873 issue of the Cornhill, pp. 300-310; the piece is unsigned but is credited by indices to Bertha Thomas.

34 Adolphe Thiers, who took charge of the provisional government after the fall of the Second Empire, had been a liberal and a reformist since the reign of Louis-Philippe, and disappointed many of his supporters by the ruthlessness with which he put an end to the Commune and punished the Communards.

35 There is no historical warrant for this allegation regarding the pharaoh Amasis II (Amasis I was not of humble origin); the reference presumably relates to Henri Millot’s fanciful play Amasis, ou Une revolution d’autrefois (1832).

36 Duc Judicaël of Bretagne was the second person to reign under that title, from 876-888.

37 The pun is, indeed, rather weak; the French bienfait, here translated as “kindness,” although it can also mean “advantage,” is a portmanteau term; if its two components are separated, bien fait means “well built” or (as I shall shortly translate it, when Joseph’s double meaning becomes manifest) “upstanding.”

38 The concluding words of a line from Horace’s Ars poetica, which translates approximately as “all approval goes to the man who can combine utility and attractiveness.”

39 Trissotin and Vadius are characters in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes [The Intellectual Women] (1672), pretentious posers adopted by the eponymous ladies, who know no better.

40 [Like] an open book

41 Brown uses the taxonomic terminology of his own time, which has been frequently updated since, so some of the Latin names he uses to designate particular families and species are no longer in use. I have retained his versions, but have used English common names rather than translating his French common names, where appropriate.

42 Jean-Pierre Megnin’s book Faune des tombes [The Fauna of Graves] (1887) was the founding text of forensic entomology; he took his initial inspiration from Paul Brouardel, one of the founding fathers of French forensic medicine.

43 A ligne was a measurement used in France prior to the introduction of the metric system; it was equal to a twelfth of a pouce (the French inch)—a little under two millimetres.

44 Probably Chemin des bois (1867).

45 La Fontaine actually adapted his version of the fable of the Ant and the Cicada (usually known in English as “The Ant and the Grasshopper”) from Aesop.

46 A weak shot, devoid of force. The quote is from Virgil’s Aeneid, where it refers to a dart launched by the aged Priam at Pyrrhus.

47 Antoine Solier probably picked this trick up from his fellow entomologist Étienne Boyer de Fonscolombe rather than a pharmacist of the same name.

48 Prosopopeia is a manner of speech that represents the supposed words of an absent individual—especially one who is dead.

49 François-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878), who became as famous for his radical politics as for his chemical and physiological expertise, appeared for the defence in a famous murder trial in 1839, when a man named Louis Mercier was charged with poisoning his mentally-handicapped son with arsenic. The assembled forensic evidence appears to have been contradictory in the extreme, but Raspail’s attempts were in vain, and Mercier was convicted.

50 The author inserts a footnote at this point giving the reference: Paul Loye, Revue scientifique, 1888, 2nd series, p.66.

51 Albert Lapparent (1839-1908) helped draw up the geological map of France, which Eginhard is interpreting in a slightly flippant fashion, as well as writing numerous books on the subject.

52 “Foreign Club” is rendered in English in the original.

53 A common, untranslatable pun: voler means both to fly and to steal, so Eginhard is not literally flying here, but only being stolen by the passionate Carmencita.

54 The person the author has in mind is almost certainly J. Émile Labadie, who published Étude sur Paris-port-de-mer in 1886 and engaged in a long battle with the government regarding the practicality of his plan to render the Seine navigable by oceangoing merchant ships all the way to Paris. He was not alone, however; Prosper Germain’s Paris-port-de-mer (1912) listed 24 such proposals made since the 18th century. Nor has the idea ever died, a similar proposal was submitted to the President of the Republic as recently as 2009 by Antoine Grumbach.

55 “Battered by the waves, but unsinking.” The city’s emblem is a ship, presumably reflecting the fact that the shape of its original site, the Île de la Cité, is somewhat reminiscent of a ship floating on the Seine.

56 Hovas are natives of Madagascar, where filanzanes—light chairs suspended by ropes between two long poles supported on the shoulders of four bearers—were once used as a standard means of transport.

57 Adalbert Krüger did indeed send such a telegram (on 30 July 1894), but it is unclear why Le Temps would have obtained the news that way rather than from Henri Perrotin’s own press release. Perrotin, the first director of Nice observatory, spent a good deal of time from 1892 onwards searching for bright spots on the surface of Mars, and was by no means shy of seeking publicity for his “discoveries”—or those of his assistant, Stéphane Javelle. Krüger’s telegram is, however, cited in John Munro’s “A Message from Mars,” published in Cassell’s Magazine in 1895 (which became the first chapter of A Trip to Venus, 1897); Paulon—who was obviously able to read English—might have borrowed it from there rather than from a more immediate source.

58 Mars (1895)—the first of Lowell’s three books on the planet that became his abiding obsession.

59 Gaëtane de Montreuil was the pseudonym of the journalist and poet Georgina Bélanger (1867-1951).

60 The motto inscribed on the Nautilus translates as “mobile in a mobile element.”

61 These words are extracted from a Latin version of what God says to Adam in Genesis after discovering his sin; an approximate literal translation is “dying, you will die,” but the King James Bible puts it so much better: “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”

62 The music that Charles Gounod provided for the singing of the Pater noster.

63 In fact, the Biblical Rachel—the mother of Joseph—had no daughter; it was Rachel herself who was said not to want consolation in a passage from St. Mathew’s gospel, which refers to her (symbolically) weeping for her children following Herod’s massacre of the innocents.

64 My poetic talents were unequal to the task of reproducing the rhyme-scheme and eccentric scansion of this song without distorting the meaning of the words out of all recognition, so I have been content to translate the meaning of each line literally.

65 With the exception of proper names, Mille does not attempt to display an “eye-dialect” demonstrating the changes to which he refers, so his story—the dialogue as well as the narrative—is a kind of translation. He was undoubtedly aware of the oft-quoted observation that, following the Norman conquest of England, the names given to cuts of meat in English were derived from the French (beef, mutton, pork) because it was the aristocrats who ate meat, while the names give to the animals, raised by the conquered population on their behalf, were derived from the Anglo-Saxon (ox, sheep, pig). He does not, however, attempt to synthesize the new Russian- or Chinese-derives terms that his fallen Frenchmen use to describe items that no longer “belong” to them, thus undermining his argument somewhat.

66 Moselli indulges in wordplay here, as more than one French writer of speculative fiction did, apparently spontaneously, improvising the term alunissage by analogy with atterrisage [landing], but I cannot retain it in English.