Notes

1 Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian account of L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771), the only future-set novel with whom Bodin’s readers could be assumed to be familiar, begins with a dedicatory epistle to the year 2440, which is extremely scathing about that year’s past, especially the sector composing the 18th century’s present. Bodin’s blithe parody helps to distance his own work from Mercier’s in both outlook and tone.

2 Bodin inserts a footnote here: “A bizarre epoch, in which one sees optimistic old men and disenchanted young people.”

3 Bodin adds a footnote: “A part of this preface was published in a literary miscellany at the beginning of 1831.”

4 Bodin inserts a footnote: “Pliny (book vii) says that it is generally recognized that the human species cannot compare in numbers, stature or force with what it was before. That is only the physiological aspect of the question, but there is no lack of passages in which the moral aspect is judged by the pessimism of old men, as in the case of Horace.” Bodin gives French translations of most of his Latin quotes, but evidently thinks this one too familiar to require that service; it translates as: “What do the ravages of time not injure? Our parents’ age, worse than our grandparents’, has brought forth us, [who are] less worthy, and we are destined soon to yield offspring more wicked still.”

5 “Seed-germs” is an admittedly-clumsy rendering of germes, but may help to emphasize the observation that the idea of what are now called genes did not begin with Father Gregor [Mendel].

6 The word “spiritualism” had yet to acquire its modern meaning in the 1830s; “spiritualist” refers primarily to a belief in the existence of an imperishable human soul, but also, and importantly embraces various “idealist” philosophies that challenged all sorts of materialism, which were extremely popular in 18th century Germany and closely related to German Romanticism. By contrast, “physiologists” were committed to theories that regarded mental phenomena as a by-product of physical processes in the brain and the soul as a myth. The fact that Bodin lists the dichotomy between spiritualists and physiologists ahead of all the others reflects his own keen interest in it.

7 The phrase I have translated as “airy-fairy” is dans le vague, which is usually used in the phrase regarder dans le vague, meaning to stare into space; it would, of course, give a misleading impression to invoke the word “space” in the present context.

8 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) obtained a great popular success with his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes [Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds] (1686), which made the then-controversial theory of Copernicanism into the subject of a series of light and witty—but argumentatively cogent and cleverly inventive—didactic dialogues in an informal setting.

9 Bodin is poking fun at the standard method of Gothic novels/romans noirs, whose authors routinely tried to enhance the plausibility of their fantastic tales by attributing them to some imaginary ancient manuscript or mysteriously venerable teller—a method which cannot reasonably be adapted to romances of the future, although that did not prevent several subsequent scientific romancers from making the attempt. The particular attribution that he employs might suggest to a modern connoisseur that he was familiar with the most obvious contender to have beaten him to the punch in the production of a future-set novel, the anonymously-issued The Mummy! A Tale of the 22nd Century (1827)—actually by Jane Webb, later Mrs. Loudon—but he is actually referring to a notable Roman family whose most notable member was Lucius Mummius, a consul of the 2nd century B.C. who completed the Roman conquest of Greece

10 Bodin inserts a footnote here: “This is true. I have held a copy of this curious book, which is printed in English and Italian, in my own hands. I frankly confess that it seems to me to be a rather tedious farrago of nonsense.” Unfortunately, he does not include a specific reference. The author’s suggestion that the somnambule in question might have been able to shed some light on the origins of the Paris obelisk reflects contemporary doubts—which were wholly justified—as to the historicity of the legendary Pharaoh Sesostris, in whose reign it was reputed to have been fabricated.

11 Johannes Heidenberg (1462-1516), commonly known as Trithemius, became abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Sponheim in 1483, where he began a distinguished scholarly career—which led (almost inevitably, in those days) to a reputation as a magician being retrospectively foisted upon him; the same fate befell his two most famous pupils, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. His most famous work, Steganographia, a partly-encrypted account of methods of secret communication, became a key text in the development of practical and theoretical cryptography, but Bodin was presumably more familiar with his Annales Hirsaugiensis (1509-1514), reputedly the first humanist history, and might well have claimed, with his tongue in his cheek, that this reference was intended to draw a comparison with the reputable historian rather than the disreputable occultist.

12 Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a Protestant moral philosopher who frequently attacked the follies of superstition.

13 Politée, like many of the names in the novel, is symbolic. The Old French politie is equivalent to the Latin politia and the English “polity,” but the modern politesse signifies politeness and good breeding. Mirzala—which Bodin defines later on—might have been borrowed from Alaric Alexander Watts’ prose-poem “Mirzala” in Poems and Sketches (1823).

14 Bodin inserts a footnote: “Given the progressive depreciation of money by the increase in its circulation, these six millions only represent three and a half in the French valuation of the beginning of the 19th century.”

15 Bodin inserts a footnote: “The somnambulists, or rather the magnetic somniloquists [somniloques] of the 18th century were sometimes called by the name by which they were known in antiquity.”

16 Philirène translates as “peace-lover.”

17 Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was the foremost propagandist for and popularizer of the philosophy of progress. He was permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences and served in the Convention, but was imprisoned during the Terror and took poison to avoid the guillotine.

18 “Reading rooms” is a slightly awkward translation of “cabinets de lecture;” when books were still so expensive as to be beyond the budget of the average household and literacy was not yet universal, poor people could still obtain access to their contents by subscribing to such institutions, from which books could be borrowed, or to which they could go to read them. Bodin would naturally assume, in 1834, that many of his readers would have gained access to his text in this way, so the narrative voice appears to be speaking for the author at this point. It is not impossible, however, that Bodin had failed to anticipate that books would be much cheaper in the late 20th century.

19 The rather anodyne “alight” is a poor substitute for Bodin’s invented désaérer; unfortunately, that French word was subsequently re-coined to mean de-aerate—i.e. to removed the air from a liquid, rather than to descend from an airship—and the decline of airships in our 20th century removed the necessity for any parallel coinage.

20 These are obviously the Amazons to whom Bodin makes later reference, but he does not appear to have thought of appropriating that term at this point stage in the story.

21 Télémaque [Telemachus], by the Abbé de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715)—usually known simply by the latter part of his surname—was a didactic prose sequel to the Odyssey, whose action begins with Telemachus being shipwrecked on Calypso’s isle. It was the most frequently-reprinted French novel of the 18th century; Bodin’s decription of Poonah’s cave is obviously derived from the description of Calypso’s cave given in its opening pages.

22 I have translated Bodin’s rather free French translation of this misquotation, which originates from the report of a committee appointed to investigate animal magnetism in 1833. The actual quote from De Natura Deorum is “Opinium enim commenta delet dies, naturae judicia confirmat,” which is usually translated as “Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded in reality.”

23 This quotation is slightly truncated; it is usually rendered as paulo majora canamus [Let us sing of greater things].

24 This attribution is misrepresented in almost every respect; Jean-Baptiste Nicolet (1728-1796) was a theatre-director of the 18th century famed for putting on spectacular shows, and the saying with which his name is associated is “de plus en plus fort comme chez Nicolet” [more and more powerful, as at Nicolet’s].

25 Bodin inserts a footnote: “It is unnecessary to make further observations regarding rates of exchange. There is no longer any question of translating sums in dollars or pounds sterling, since the French monetary system was adopted by the Universal Congress.”

26 The French word local (literally, premises; in argot, a bedroom) does not have the same slang implications as the English term “local,” which is narrowly applied to public houses, but there is enough similarity of implication to sustain the direct transcription, and it would be pushing vulgarity too far to substitute “knocking shop.”

27 The italicized word I have translated as “excessive refinement,” quintessencier, means “to extract the essence [from something]” and does not always carry the implication that such a practice is injurious. The German idealist philosophers who are mischievously bracketed with enthusiasts for chaste and platonic love might be regarded as quintessenciers in a non-pejorative sense, but Bodin evidently means to insult them, so it seems appropriate to reproduce the implication, albeit a little more brutally than he does.

28 “Pandiculation”—the word is identical in French and English—means stretching, and is more usually applied to stretching one’s limbs on awakening than to flexing one’s jaw, although it will serve in either case.

29 Bodin gives both italicized expressions in English, although it is not obvious why he should choose to do so. (There were, after all, both French and English choirs present on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which seems to be the kind of assembly he has in mind in this flight of fancy.)

30 Charles Irénée Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), not to be confused with the more famous writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was a pioneer of economic and social science and a would-be political reformer who was expelled from the Académie Française for holding subversive opinions. He is credited with introducing the word bienfaisance [benevolence] into the French language, but his reputation was unjustly harmed when Jean-Jacques Rousseau took the trouble to condemn him as an impractical Utopian. The quoted work sets out an ambitious prospectus for a federal Europe.

31 The title of this presumably-pornographic text, which might or might not be fictitious, translates as “A Discourse on Cod-fishing in the 19th century Bedroom.”

32 Bodin italicizes and capitalizes the French word hirondelle [swallow] here, as if it were the name of the vessel, but he subsequently reverts to uncapitalized roman type; as he has previously used the term generically, I have unified its usage in that manner.

33 “In the middle of things.”

34 Eupistos is presumably intended to be decoded as “good [and] faithful,” but it might be worth noting that the Greek pistos can also signify “easily convinced.”

35 This manifestly deliberate variation of the Benthamite utilitarian principle that one should always aim to secure “the greatest good of the greatest number” serves to make the point that Eupistos’ diehard optimism, though not unlike Bentham’s, is not identical to it.

36 Jacob Isaac Ruysdaël (c1628-1682) was a Dutch landscape painter famed for his fidelity to nature and his rich colors.

37 The quotation is from L’amour médécin (1665).

38 Bodin inserts a note here—the only one that he explicitly signs as an “Author’s Note,” thus tacitly attributing all the rest to the narrative voice: “It appears that such is the future of magnetism; the future of homeopathy—which ought to be no less bright, according to every appearance—has not yet become manifest.”

39 Eudoxie is translatable as “good opinion.”

40 Adamastor is the phantom of the Cape of Storms (nowadays known as the Cape of Good Hope) in Luiz de Camoëns’ Lusiad (1572), which appears to the epic’s hero, Vasco da Gama, and foretells the dire fates that will befall less fortunate expeditions to the Indies.

41 Lucius Cornelius Sulla (c138BC-78BC) was a general who became dictator of Rome in 82BC after capturing the city in a civil war against his former commander Marius; after arranging the murders of all his enemies he then instituted various liberalizing constitutional reforms before abdicating in 79BC.

42 The Latin term vates, attributed to prophets and soothsayers in general, had fallen into disuse before Virgil revived it; it subsequently became associated with Druidism, although the nature of the connection between the Latin word and its Gaulish equivalent is unclear.

43 Bodin adds a note: “This is gratifying, when one recalls that the route had not even been built in the year of grace 1834.”

44 This maxim is from one of the fables of the Roman fabulist Phaedrus, active in the 1st century A.D.

45 Aëtos means “eagle;” it is significant that Napoleon was also frequently compared to an eagle.

46 Bodin adds a footnote to explain that the italicized phrase—fleur de rosier in French—“is the meaning of Mirzala’s pretty name.”

47 Bodin inserts a note: “It might be necessary to tell our female readers that this is the translation of the name Philirène.” Nowadays, of course, it might be necessary to tell our male readers too, so I have already done so—although I used slightly stronger language, of which Bodin and his skeptical non-hero might not have approved.

48 This phrase—whose literal meaning is “exact middle”—is used to describe a method of pragmatic procedure, which seeks to calculate an evenly-balanced compromise between opposed two extremes. It had a particular significance with respect to the Parliament in which Bodin served, whose philosophy was dominated by that principle, and his antipathy to its applications undoubtedly contributed to this sarcastic adaptation of its meaning.

49 Actually, the single stone called Long Meg—which qualifies as a cromlech—is not inside but outside the circle of her 67 “daughters,” some 17 paces to the south.

50 Bodin inserts a footnote in English: “Scotland’s Queen’s pillar.” The more usual designation in English is “the Queen of Scots’ Pillar.” The formation in question, created by the fusion of a stalactite and a stalagmite, is in Poole’s Hole near Buxton, but Bodin is mistaken in equating Poole’s Hole with the Elden Hole, which is a couple of miles away; it is, however, the Elden Hole that contains the allegedly bottomless pit described in the text.

51 Bodin inserts a note: “It must nevertheless be admitted that there exists in the Koran a text according to which it is promised that wives faithful to their husbands will remain at the age of 16 for all eternity, and also that they will have other husbands than those they had on Earth.”

52 Agathodême decodes as “the good people”—presumably Bodin’s collective conceptualization of capitalists. The elevation of capitalism as a moral ideal was unusual at the time; Ayn Rand, the chief 20th century advocate of that philosophical position, also wrote a “Romantic Manifesto” for literature, of which Bodin would probably not have approved, but she was a futuristic novelist too, of which he surely would.

53 Bodin initially gives this name as Calocrator, but subsequently uses an initial K, which I have substituted here for the sake of uniformity; the latter is more faithful to its Greek derivation, although Kalokrator might be reckoned even more faithful. Its significance is “noble authority.”

54 Epidaurus, which existed only in ruins in our 20th century, although it has presumably been rebuilt in Bodin’s, was the site of a famous temple of Aesculapius, to which the sick once flocked from all over ancient Greece to hear its oracles.

55 The lines are from King John, where they are normally attributed to “Philip the Bastard;” he is speaking to his mother, Lady Faulconbridge, by means of whose surname he is identified in this presumably-bowdlerized version.

56 The lines are from Le mariage de Figaro.

57 Bodin inserts a note here: “To represent these names as they are pronounced in Constantinople and Greece, it would be necessary to write Vassiliki Sévasti.” The point he is making is that the Emperors from which Madame Charlotte is claiming descent are Byzantine.

58 In our 20th century, the former khanate of Bukharia was divided between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan when the Soviet Union was formed.

59 La Thébaïde, ou les frères ennemis (1664) was the first of Racine’s tragedies; it tells the story of the conflict between the two sons of the Theban King Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices. Bragança or Braganza was the name of the ruling family of Portugal, whose scion headed the revolution that separated Portugal from Spain in 1640; the reference to that circumstance as if there were a tragedy based on it is metaphorical.

60 Zenobia was the wife of Odenathus, the ruler of the kingdom of Palmyra, also known as Tadmor, in the 3rd century A.D. She shared his throne until he died in 271, then became regent for her son, but her armies were swiftly defeated by those of the Roman emperor Aurelian; her capital city fell the following year and she was taken to Rome as a prisoner.

61 Evergete is derived from a Greek word meaning “benefactor;” the nickname was given to one of the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt.

62 Actually, verses 7 and 8.

63 Cossack troops rode through the streets of Paris in triumph following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815—an incident whose memory was still raw in 1834, to which Bodin might conceivably have been a witness.

64 Jacques Callot (1592-1635) was an artist famous for his caricaturish sketches and engravings, whose grotesquely exaggerated habits of representation are nowadays familiarized as the stereotypical method of cartoonists, but which seemed strange and sinister to his contemporaries.

65 The Shia Muslims, whose heartland in our 20th century is now known as Iran, reject the first of the three caliphs and consider Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, as his rightful successor; in consequence, they reject the body of tradition known as the Sunna, from which their rival sectarians take their name.

66 “Let him accept it who can.”

67 Charles Fourier (1772-1837) adopted a kind of utopian socialism that he attempted to systematize in a mock-Newtonian fashion, in which the adequate satisfaction of the 23 human passions would be satisfied by the organization of society into “phalansteries” of 1620 individuals whose shifting social roles would be carefully regulated. His works were notable not merely for the astonishing detail of their hypothetical constructions, but for their wryly flamboyant flights of fancy, whose extravagant wit Bodin surely appreciated, even though he must have disapproved of Fourier’s Rousseauesque tendencies; the one most frequently remembered today is the suggestion that oceanic salt water might one day be technologically replaced by lemonade, although his cosmogonic account of copulating planets is far more grandiose. Le nouveau monde industriel (1829) had the advantage over his earlier works of being relatively sober and concise.

68 Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), became a leading figure of the Restoration period, when he published extensively in periodicals. In the final year of his life he published two books, Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles and Le nouveau Christianisme, which enjoyed a spectacular posthumous vogue. The two books synthesized anti-egalitarian ideas regarding the future development of society with an eccentrically licentious Christian mysticism; their admirers founded a utopian community at Ménilmontant, whose contrived religion anticipated the advent of a female messiah. In 1832, the community was brought before a tribunal on charges of immorality, and the trial became one of the great sensations of the year. Remarkably, the great champion of positivism, Auguste Comte, had once served as Saint-Simon’s secretary.

69 “Sweet idleness.”

70 Iule, or Iulus, is the new name that Virgil’s Aeneas gives to his son Ascanius in order to symbolize his alleged association with the family of Julius Caesar. It is Ascanius (or, in fact, Cupid disguised as Ascanius), rather than his father, with whom Dido initially falls in love in the Aeneid.

71 This item of popular critical wordplay—chaussée du cothurne—does not translate well, as it revolves around a double-meaning of the word cothurne (buskin/tragedy), but the basis of the expression is a contrast that likens tragedy to an overshoe and comedy to a sock.

72 Heinrich Zschokke (1771-1848) was a prolific writer whose collected works fill 40 volumes. He believed himself to be gifted with Mesmer’s power of “animal magnetism” and wrote extensively about it. There are secondary references to a story of his known in English as “Hortensia,” which might be the one to which Bodin is referring, but I have not been able to identify the original.

73 Presumably the French critic and dramatist François-Benoît Hoffmann (1760-1828).

74 The Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was the originator of the theory that the human body is possessed of a therapeutically-manipulable “magnetic fluid;” he began to popularize his ideas in France in the 1770s, so successfully that the government set up an investigative committee whose members included Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin (then in Paris on a diplomatic mission), which reported in 1784 that it could find no evidence of any such fluid; in response to its criticisms, Mesmer revised his theory and his therapy, abandoning magnets for the technique of entrancement, nowadays called hypnotism. Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751-1825), was the most notable of Mesmer’s disciples and the one who developed his therapies into the form in which Bodin became familiar with them; it was his Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l’homme dans l’état de somnambulisme naturel et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l’acte magnétique (1811) that resulted in the centralization of the term “somnambulism” alongside “animal magnetism,” eventually displacing it, even though the latter was perpetuated by his contemporary Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze (1753-1835). It is interesting that Bodin makes no mention of the third major contributor to the contemporary debate, the physician Alexandre Bertrand (1789-1831), who ran a series of articles on the subject in the Globe, one of the periodicals to which Bodin contributed, and published a treatise on somnambulism in 1820; Bertrand was, in Bodin’s terms, a “spiritualist” who conceived the somnambulistic state as one of extase [ecstasy], while Bodin was, at heart, a “physiologist”—although Fabio Mummio, the fictitious source of the future narrative, appears to have taken a keen interest in “ectastics.” After 1830 the Globe became a significant organ of Saint-Simonian mysticism—of which Bodin disapproved—while Bertrand became a key inspiration for some of Bodin’s more prestigious literary rivals; Charles Nodier adapted Bertrand’s ideas in an article on “De quelques phénomènes de sommeil” (1831) and Honoré de Balzac drew on them in his novella “Louis Lambert” (1832).

75 Before being elected as a député in his father’s old (primarily rural) constituency, Bodin stood for election in the city of Saumur and lost; his opponent might well have poked fun at his belief in magnetism, with a more telling effect on the electors than was achieved in a different setting. 

76 Jacques Necker was the finance minister who attempted to bring about sweeping economic reforms in 1777, and again 1788, but did not succeed in ameliorating the circumstances of the lower classes sufficiently to prevent the Revolution of 1789. He was also the father of Madame de Staël. 

77 Bodin inserts a footnote, presumably drawn from the original article: “Magnetic somnambulism is the development of a sixth sense, the sense sometimes revealed in presentiments, sympathies and many other phenomena of ordinary life; it is, if you wish, natural instinct stimulated to such a degree that it perceive things that our senses refuse us in a waking state. We do not know why or how the faculty developed in this way; somnambulists cannot give us an account of the nature of their perception, their vision. The people who take the trouble to observe the fact, however, cannot deny it. I have seen many instances of it in the home of Doctor Chapelain, that ardent magnetic experimenter who has sacrificed his entire career to the progress of the science, and who, having taken that route, effects astonishing cures.” Pierre-Jean Chapelain was also the mesmerist practitioner that Honoré de Balzac consulted.

78 Bodin gives this book’s title and subtitle in French, as the Bibliographie Universelle does, although it was never translated; the transcription is incorrect in one detail—1718 should read 1728. The author was Samuel Madden. The book was not suppressed by any legal authority; Madden is thought to have destroyed most of the printed copies himself.

79 Mary de la Riviere Manley (1663-1724) lost her reputation after being tricked into a bigamous marriage and wrote several sets of satirical memoirs, including a vengeful account of New Atalantis (1709), in which various prominent individuals are blithely slandered. As Bodin has deduced, this title is misquoted; it actually refers to the 8th century, not the 18th; the satire poses as the memoirs of Charlemagne’s secretary.

80 The Century of Inventions (1655) by Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester (1601-1667), is not really futuristic, although it does deal with hypothetical as well as actual inventions, and is notable for its description of the principle of the steam engine.

81 Pierre-Marc-Gaston, Duc de Levis (1755-1830), published Les voyages de Kang-Hi, ou Nouvelles letters chinoises in 1810; it includes extracts from newspapers from the year 1910.

82 Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” (1823) was soon supplemented by an identically-titled parody by Thomas Hood, published in 1826—the same year in which Mary Shelley published a long futuristic novel with that title, of whose existence Bodin appears to be ignorant—although he would probably have considered it an “apocalypse” rather than a “novel,” and would certainly have thought it lacking in melodramatic action; even so, it provides one of the several significant contradictions to his claim to being the first person to come up with the idea of writing a novel set in the future.

83 Habent sua fata libelli [Books have their destiny] is an aphorism credited to Terence. The text to which Bodin is referring is Le dernier homme by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, a prose work first published in 1805; although it is a religious fantasy in the sense that it represents a sketchy fulfilment of the prophesies of Revelation, it also devotes some attention to the technological and social progress that had overtaken the world, and then passed into near-oblivion, before the crisis that eventually puts an end to the world. Grainville had, however, originally conceived it as an epic poem rather than a prose work, and its substance was recast in that form, with certain variations, by Auguste-François Creuzé de Lesser in 1831—another work that obviously escaped Bodin’s attention.

84 Nodier wrote a glowing introduction to a new edition of Le dernier homme issued in 1811, but Bodin does not appear to have seen that edition and presumably obtained Nodier’s recommendation in person at about the time he wrote Eveline, when he might conceivably have attended the famous “cénacle” that Nodier hosted, at least for a short while.

85 No one would, indeed, especially bearing in mind that Nodier had published a satirical futuristic short story—or a fragment of a futuristic novel—entitled “Hurlubleu, Grand Mantifafa d’Hurlubière, ou La perfectibilité” in the August 1833 issue of the Revue de Paris. It is possible that Bodin wrote Le roman de l’avenir before that date, but it is also possible that it was the appearance of Nodier’s piece (which has a conservative ideological slant very different from his own) that stimulated Bodin to stop “sleeping on” his idea and get down to work, and caused him to be so insistent that he had got the prospectus for his own work into print in 1831. Nodier’s short story will be included in an anthology of proto science fiction stories entitled The Germans on Venus forthcoming from Black Coat Press.

86 Philarète Chasles (1798-1873) went on to become a noted critic and bibliographer.

87 Algernon Sydney (1622-1683) fought in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War and later served in Parliament; he fled the country after the Restoration but returned to England in 1677, before being arrested on a trumped-up charge, convicted of treason and beheaded.

88 Cesare Bonesano Beccaria (1738-1794) wrote a famous treatise Dei delitti e delle pene [On Crimes and Punishments] (1764; revised 1781).

89 Mael Maedoc, alias Saint Malachy (1094-1148), was a pioneer of Gregorian Reform in Ireland; the apocryphal Prophecies of Saint Malachy were compiled and published by Dom Arnold de Wyon in 1595, reflective of a European resurgence of mystical apocalyptic fervour that gave birth to such legends as the story of Faust and the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and rejuvenated others, including the myth of the Wandering Jew. The phrases referring to all the popes up to Clement VIII were, therefore, retrospective rather than anticipatory.

90 In fact, there were not as many Popes as Bodin estimated before the end of the 20th century, and Benedict XVI, elected in 2005, is only the 11th of the 12 supposedly remaining when he wrote this note. According to this schedule, therefore, the world will end during the reign of the next Pope—which is, I suppose, as good a note as any on which to sign off this translation.

91 The corresponding Popes are: Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.