Notes

1 Henry Durand Davray (1873-1944) was the foreign editor of the Mercure de France and the translator of almost all of H.G. Wells’s early works—including the scientific romances—into French.

2 Renard adds a footnote here: “For reasons that will be evident in due course, the name of the domain and its chatelaine are fictitious.” Because it is being used as a place name, I have left Les Ormes untranslated; it signifies “The Elms.”

3 It is not obvious why M. Dupont is so anxious to avoid naming the setting of the story, since it would be obvious to anyone who knows anything about French geography. When another narrator refers to the events of the story in the preface to Le Péril bleu (tr. as The Blue Peril), he makes no bones about saying that they took place in Auvergne.

4 A myriameter is 10,000 meters.

5 The peasant renders “savez” [know] as “chavez” and “ça” [that] as “cha”, thus facilitating M. Dupont’s subsequent deduction. There is no point in my attempting to simulate Renard’s eye-dialect, so I have simply approximated the meaning of the peasant’s statements. This pronunciation is typical of the Auvergne district.

6 Again, the peasant renders “rien” [anything] as “ren,” licensing a further deduction.

7 The discovery of dozens of fossil iguanodons in a coal mine in Bernissart, a Belgian town close to the French border, in 1878 was one of a handful of spectacular finds that helped to inspire a late 19th century dinosaur-hunting craze; it obviously played a major role in the inspiration and shaping of Renard’s story. The abundance and orientation of the skeletons—many of which were still integrated—proved that iguanodons were bipedal herd animals, and Louis Dollo’s mounting of the best specimens helped determine the manner in which dinosaurs would henceforth be displayed and represented to the public.

8 Gambertin is taking unfair advantage of the curé’s worthy program of self-education to compare him to the protagonist of Molière’s famous farce, Le Médecin malgré lui [The Involuntary Doctor] (1666). When someone contradicts that character’s assertion that the heart is on the right side of the body, insisting that it is on the left, the charlatan brazenly replies: “Oui, cela était autrefois ainsi, mais nous avons changé tout cela” [Yes, it was once, but we’ve changed all that].

9 Jean-Louis-Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810-1892) was one of numerous devout 19th century naturalists who strove in vain to interpret contemporary discoveries in the context of his faith. The fact that this footnote is necessary while all of the other names cited remain familiar is adequate evidence of what modern learning has “done with” such individuals.

10 The myth of “mummy wheat”—which alleged that grains of wheat kept dark and dry for millennia inside pyramids were still capable of germination when revived—originated with the antiquarians who flocked to Egypt after Napoléon’s campaign. It became so popular in 19th-century France that some tricksters began selling so-called mummy wheat and hailing its subsequent germination as proof of the miracle.

11 Prior to the advent of methods of radioactive dating, it was impossible to figure out the time-scale of geological evolution; only rough estimates could be made, on the basis of arithmetical calculations not much less absurd than the one that Gambertin is carrying out, which subsequently had to be multiplied by more than an order of magnitude. Chains of calculatedly silly reasoning like the one undertaken here have a perverse aesthetics of their own, which Renard delights in extrapolating.

12 A tarasque is a mock-up of a monstrous dragon-like creature paraded through the streets at Pentecost and on St. Martha’s Day in a number of villages in the south of France—most notably Tarascon, from which it takes its name.

13 There is an untranslatable item of wordplay here; the French word for weather, temps, is the same as that for time, so what the hallucinatory needle is doing is more delicately and deliberately confused in the original than the translation can contrive

14 Renard inserts a footnote here: “We have not modified so much as a syllable of the original text of Doctor Lerne, as dictated (?) by the table to Cardaillac. There are liberties that may not be taken with respect to an unknown author, when one is already publishing without authorization. The reader will therefore be kind enough not to attribute Monsieur Vermont’s often-prudhommesque style or his sometimes-Biblical audacity to us. At any rate, he will generously forgive them, in view of the terrible trials to which the young man’s common sense must have been subjected during the confession of this memoir.” The adjective prudhommesque refers to the protagonist of Henri Monnier’s Mémoires de Joseph Prudhomme (1857), an archetype of unwonted self-satisfaction and unconscious banality.

15 The actual Broceliande was a forest that once covered much of Brittany; its modern remnant, Paimpart Forest, is near Rennes. This location ensured that its mythical equivalent became the setting for much early French chivalric romance, including many Arthurian romances. The wry reference to its extent reaching almost to Constantinople is ultimately derived from the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, whose encounter with Oberon—a god of the underworld subsequently reconfigured, in consequence of this fateful meeting, as the king of fairyland—obviously takes place in the generic forest but is alleged in the text to occur in Syria. When Oberon was re-employed by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the setting was allegedly “a wood near Athens,” but a subsequent reference makes it clear that Renard considers the generic “Shakespearean forest”—including the moving wood in Macbeth—to be a version of the mythical Broceliande.

16 The quotation is an epigram formulated by the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695).

17 Renard evidently expects his readers to know that the two images form a morally contrasted pair, Achilles’ tutor Chiron being the epitome of a virtuous centaur, while Nessus, Deïanera’s attempted rapist and the eventual murderer of Hercules by means of the poisoned shirt he subsequently gave her, is an archetype of malevolence.

18 The Macaulay translation changes MacBell’s name to Macbeth, perhaps in tacit recognition of a veiled reference to that play in the narrator’s subsequent dream. Although I have not followed suit in that instance, I have followed the earlier translator’s example in altering the spelling of the character’s Christian name to “Donovan” rather than retaining Renard’s highly unlikely “Doniphan.”

19 Charles-Albert Demoustier (1760-1891) was the author of Lettres à Emilie sur la mythologie [Letters to Emily on the subject of Mythology], which mingled verse and prose but always retained a pretentiously colorful style of expression.

20 The French name for hare’s-ear, oreille-du-lapin [rabbit’s-ear], is more apt in context, given the subsequent reference to a rabbit, but the plant known in English as rabbit-ear, Linaria vulgaris—also known as toadflax—is clearly not the one to which Renard is referring; the Latin name that the narrator cannot remember is Bupleurum rotundifolium.

21 The notion that pneumatic tires might have given way to wheels of solid steel by 1910—two years after the novel’s publication—inevitably produces even more surprise 100 years later, when the pneumatic tire is still secure in its empire of the road. Renard’s anticipation of the progressive automation of the automobile, and the elimination of wood from its make-up, is, however, far more accurate.

22 Elvire and Beatrice were the young girls appointed—unwittingly—as sources of extravagant inspiration by the poets Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321); Renard is presumably correct to argue that their selection as muses was a matter of the pretentious sublimation of sexual desires, but it was still conventional at this time to idealize the feelings in question.

23 The expression “l’heure du berger” [the shepherd’s hour] is used to signify a propitious moment for lovers; it is nowadays best-known as the title of a poem by Verlaine, which was set to music and became a popular song.

24 L’Arlésienne originated as a play by Alphonse Daudet, premièred in 1872, for which Georges Bizet wrote the incidental music. The music eventually become far more famous than the play; it was reorganized into a four-movement suite, the fourth part of which is “Carillon,” featuring the chime to which Nicolas is referring.

25 Cypris, whose literal reference is to the island of Cyprus, was sometimes used in literary diction to refer to Aphrodite, just as “a voyage to Cytherea”—the “amorous isle” to which passing reference has already been made and will be made again—was routinely used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse.

26 The reference is probably to Alfred Jarry’s Messaline (1901), a calculatedly-scandalous avant garde text published in the same year as the same author’s similarly-eroticized scientific romance Le surmâle [The Supermale].

27 Jeannot, the French equivalent of the English “Johnny,” has a wide potential range of reference, but a French reader would immediately think of the one in Voltaire’s moral fable “Jeannot et Colin,” whose circumstances enjoy a remarkable and rapid improvement, whereupon he forgets his former friends—until he suffers a rude reversal of fortune.

28 Renard inserts a footnote here, attributed to “the transcriber:” “Monsieur Vermont is reporting Dr. Lerne’s words with more grandiloquence than fidelity. The latter, so meticulous in the explanation of his slightest divagations, must certainly have perceived and mentioned the importance that attaches, in the matter of responsibility, to the verification of so insane a theory. One can hear him asking himself: ‘Are adults bound to make amends for the sins of their youth? Have they the right to refuse, on the grounds that it was someone else who committed them?’ To put it another way: Could the king of France legitimately dismiss the creditors of the Duc d’Orléans? Are old grudges valid? Should gratitude wear away over time? Etc. Monsieur Vermont tells us that he was distracted. We can see that easily enough—for he is too inexperienced in the art of writing for us to suspect him of having cut this paragraph deliberately, in order to lighten a chapter that is already too anarchic, in which he has simply reproduced the authentic confusion of life instead of distributing things in that good order whose artifice is the writer’s glory.” Sternly disregarding the sarcasm of the final sentiment, the translator of the Macaulay version not only cut the footnote but the entire paragraph to which it is attached.

29 “Now!”

30 A ganaderia is a Spanish ranch specializing in the breeding of bulls for bullfighting; a banderilla is a barbed dart employed in the sport.

31 The German biologist August Weismann (1834-1914), nowadays better known for his contributions to evolutionary theory.

32 The Italian biologist Giuseppe Boronio (1759-1811) was the first person to perform a successful skin graft (in a sheep) in 1803 but he revealed the limitations of xenotransplantation in his more adventurous experiments.

33 Paul Bert (1833-1886) was physiologist whose fame turned to notoriety when he became a radical statesman.

34 The names cited in the previous two paragraphs are all taken from published research papers. The more celebrated names include those of the neurologists Alfred Vulpian (1826-1887) and Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910)—the latter was also a pioneer of Italian scientific romance—both of whom published papers in collaboration with J. M. Philippeaux. Two other minor figures cited signed their work T. Gluck and W. G. Thompson. The most interesting reference is the one to Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) and Charles Claude Guthrie (1880-1963), who were at the beginning of their respective careers; the work cited won Carrel a Nobel prize in 1912, which many observers thought should have been shared with Guthrie, but the notoriety of Guthrie’s attempts to transplant heads probably cost him the nomination. Carrel went on to do classic experiments in tissue culture, which inspired such skeptical scientific romances as Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” (1926).

35 The physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817-1894).

36 The neuroanatomist Paul Broca (1824-1880).

37 Although this anecdote is reproduced incessantly, with slight variations, in modern books and articles dealing with xenotransplantation, it is clearly apocryphal. The incident is alleged to have been reported by the Dutch surgeon Job van Meekeren (1611-1666); some sources give the date as 1668 rather than 1670, but van Meekeren was already dead by then.

38 The term Lerne employs here is merdoie, whose literal meaning is “goose-shit,” but as that English equivalent is not used to describe a particular color it would strike a slightly discordant note, so I have employed a more literal description.

39 The Ass, a prose romance attributed (perhaps unreliably) to the Greek satirist Lucian, whose protagonist is transformed into the eponymous animal by a witch, provided the model that the Roman satirist Apuleius expanded considerably into the much better known prose romance The Golden Ass.

40 “On living animals.”

41 The quoted prophetic words, which appeared during Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5:25, gave the phrase “the writing on the wall” its conventional metaphorical meaning.

42 Lerne is presumably correcting for the one-hour time difference between France and Scotland; MacBell must, of course, have died at 6 a.m. GMT to coincide with Nelly’s death at seven, in terms of the European time-zones standardized in the late 19th century.

43 The lictors of ancient Rome were assistants to the magistrates, who served as their bodyguards and agents ensuring that their sentences were carried out.

44 Renard inserts a long footnote here, attributed, like his earlier note, to “the transcriber”— the narrative voice of the prologue. “At the first communal reading we made of Doctor Lerne, the form, and especially the style, of this note appeared to us to be in flagrant contradiction with Mademoiselle Bourdichet’s habitual language. Mediocre as it may be, that language is, in fact, less defective than this style (see chapter VII, where the difference is more obviously manifest). Gilbert immediately called attention to this disparity, claiming that it was superabundant proof of Cardaillac’s deception, which—according to him—had not been able to maintain to the end the integrity of his female character. Someone replied that he ought, for the moment, to assume Cardaillac’s good faith; in that case, the note constitutes an irrefutable document, a direct emanation of Mademoiselle Bourdichet, while the sentences attributed to her, scattered through the course of the narrative, are only quotations. They come to us, therefore, via the memory of Monsieur Vermont, who, not being a professional writer, reports the spirit rather than the letter. (See how he renders exchanges of insults with more vivacity than the long passage in Chapter VII—which is because he recalls the exchanges more clearly, because they are brief.) These remarks are sufficient to shake Gilbert’s argument. An experiment that Marlotte made destroys it completely. Having asked a few demi-mondaines to honor him with a love-letter, he was amazed to see that almost all of these young women, whose language is polished by their frequentation of well-educated men, write like serving-maids.”

45 The phrase that Renard coins is “Le roman merveilleux-scientifique.” I have translated roman as “fiction” rather than “novel” or “romance” because the category, as characterized by his examples, embraces short fiction as well. Once the adjective is sited before the noun, as is conventional in English, “scientific marvel” reads better than the crudely literal “scientific-marvelous;” I have, however, used “scientific marvelous” when the phrase is employed as a noun rather than an adjective. Renard had presumably encountered the term “roman scientifique” [scientific fiction], which had been employed by Alfred Jarry in a review-article in La Plume in 1903, but evidently felt it necessary to stress the “marvel” element in the fiction—a necessity similarly felt by the early promoters of American magazine science fiction, who employed, among others, such titles as Science Wonder Stories and Marvel Science Stories—either of which might also serve, albeit a trifle awkwardly, as a translation of Renard’s term.

46 Renard gives the title of this story as “Les Souvenirs de M. August Bedloe” [The Memories of Mr. August Bedloe], but I have substituted Poe’s own title. The allegation that Poe only wrote two “scientific marvel stories” neglects several other plausible candidates, which Renard had either not encountered, or excluded on grounds similar to those subsequently employed to filter Wells’s relevant titles.

47 Renard misrenders this title as L’Eve moderne. There have been several different English translations with various titles, including The Future Eve and Tomorrow’s Eve.

48 I have moved this list of titles from a footnote; the final title he cites is “Le Corps volé,” which I have assumed to be “The Stolen Bacillus.”

49 Renard inserts a footnote here: “Let us observe, besides, that the scientific marvelous, although not the first born, is merely one form of the logical marvelous, and not a genre distinct from it.”

50 The word I have translated as “false” is vicieux; I would far rather substitute “conjectural,” for the sake of the argument, but that would exceed the limits of permissible synonymy.

51 The reference is to the central character of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), who expressed his surprise on discovering that he had been speaking prose for 40 years “without knowing it.”

52 Although Renard is making a valid point, this blanket dismissal is surely excessive, given what the explorers in Voyage au centre de la Terre contrive to discover in the implausibly fecund bowels of the Earth, or what such space travelers as Michel Ardan and Hector Servadac are able to observe as they make use of their impracticable vehicles.

53 Again, this scathing dismissal is not entirely unwonted, but is surely overly harsh. Renard might not have approved of Robida’s pacifism, but is difficult to support the contention that his calculatedly absurd but all-too-pertinent images of technologically-enhanced warfare in Saturnin Farandoul and La Guerre au vingtième siècle are incoherent or inconsequential.

54 Renard inserts a long footnote here: “Note that the fallacy is not always where one expects to find it. Not always, for example, in the assertion of an apparently prodigious phenomenon, but sometimes in the means employed to obtain the phenomenon in question. That is the case in Wells’s ‘The New Accelerator,’ in which the objective of the discovery is to accelerate the functions of life within an individual, to the point at which surrounding events seem to him to be happening very slowly, that being merely a transposition into the domain of the artificial of what is produced naturally in critical circumstances in the course of some danger or during some accident. Everyone is familiar with the apparent slowness with which a perilous fall, or a collision between two automobiles, occurs for those who are at risk of being its victims. The fallacy of ‘The New Accelerator’ is in the fictitious invention of a pharmaceutical method designed to produce that state of accelerated life artificially, not in its affirmation, as one is tempted to believe.”

55 Sesostris was a legendary king of Egypt whose supposed exploits were loosely based on the actual achievements of Ramses II. This reference may seem slightly out of keeping with the category of fiction I have translated as “Medieval Romance” (which is, confusingly, signified in French by the same word—roman—as modern fiction) but French romances of that kind, which originated in the Middle Ages and thrived for centuries, soon expanded their subject-matter from Arthurian and Charlemagnian legendry to fantastic adventures set in pre-Christian eras, which consequentially enjoyed a greater moral license; such quasi-mythical figures as Sesostris owed their popularity to this move.