Singular Amours Read online

  Singular Amours

  by

  Edmond Thiaudière

  Translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  THE AMERICAN SCULPTOR 10

  DOCTOR MELANSKI 27

  THE MUTE WOMAN OF THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES 101

  MRS. LITTLE 175

  PART ONE: IN SPAIN 180

  PART TWO: IN ITALY 226

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 284

  Introduction

  The collection of novellas Trois amours singulières by Edmond Thiaudière was originally published in Paris by La Librairie Illustrée in 1886; I cannot find any evidence of prior publication of any of the novellas contained therein, although the internal evidence of the texts suggests that one of them was written in the 1870s. The additional story added to the contents of the collection herein, “Le Statuaire américain,” was presumably published in another periodical before being reprinted in Semaine Littéraire volume 168 no. 1 (1867) as a supplement to that collection’s edition of Paul Féval’s Annette Laïs. It was subsequently reprinted in the author’s collection Les Contes d’un éleveur de chimères [Tales of a Breeder of Chimeras] (1902), an exceedingly scarce text, which, according to a review in the 5 December issue of La Presse, also contains three other closely-related “scientific fantasies,” entitled “L’Enlaidisseur” [The Uglifier], “Changement de Corps” [A Change of Body]—indicated in another review in Le Penseur as a head-transplant story—and “L’Évaporé” [The Evaporated].

  Edmond Thiaudière (1837-1930) is not one of the better-known contributors to the tradition of roman scientifique that developed rapidly in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but he made two other significant contributions to it in addition to Trois amours singulières. In the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, he wrote the longest and most flamboyantly imaginative of several swift French responses to that conflict imitating the narrative strategy of George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) in taking the form of a satirical account of future warfare. La Dernière bataille, épopée prophétique de l’an 1909 [The Last Battle: A Prophetic Epic of the Year 1909] (1873), which pretended to be a translation from the German of Die Letzte Schlacht by “Friedrich Stampf” (and is listed by some bibliographers under that fictitious name).

  The author adopts a more radical satirical strategy than the other chroniclers of imaginary future wars of the early 1870s, as well as a more ambitious chronological reach. The story looks forward to the early twentieth century, when Europe is under the joint rule of Tsar Nicolas of Russia and the German Emperor Wilhelm III; the plot describes how war is precipitated when the daughter of the French king, Louis-Philippe III, refuses an offer of marriage from the Tsarevitch, and millions of people are killed before the slaughter prompts a general socialist revolution. It makes the author’s pacifist political philosophy very clear—a philosophy that only intensified with time, especially in the wake of the Great War of 1914-18, and he was still campaigning vigorously on its behalf when he died, in his nineties.

  Thiaudière followed up his pioneering future war story with the pamphlet Voyages de Lord Humour: En Bubaterbro ou pays des jolis boeufs [The Voyages of Lord Humour: In Bubaterbro; or, The Land of Lovely Cattle] (1874), which was in turn followed by the full-length novel Voyages de Lord Humour; le pays des retrogrades: île de Servat-Abus [The Voyages of Lord Humor: The Land of the Retrogades, the Island of Servat-Abus] (1876), featuring a narrator who is declared to be a direct descendent, via his mother, of the great voyager Lemuel Gulliver. Both stories are political satires, the latter including a scathing depiction of the history of France from the pre-Revolutionary Era to the fall of the Second Empire, as mirrored in the land of the worthy but none-too-bright cynocephali—dog-headed humans—whose empire is covertly manipulated by the wily fox-headed vulpiminois, a minority whose members are over-represented in politics, finance and the Church. A further report of Lord Humour’s adventures in the isles of Foederia was promised but never materialized.

  Edmond Thiaudière’s father was a physician, as his grandfather great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had been in the past, but he elected to break with family tradition in order to study law at the University of Poitiers. After qualifying for his licenciate in 1858, however, he opted instead for a career as a man of letters, contributing to numerous periodicals and publishing his first novel, Un Prêtre en famille [A Priest in the Family] in 1864. His mordant humor and radical views were already evident in such works as L’Apprentissage de la vie, avec un dédicace à la Mort [The Apprenticeship of Life, with a Dedication to Death] (1861 as by Edmond Thy), the poetry collection Sauvagerie [Savagery] and Le Désaveu du Christ, poème [The Disavowal of Christ, a Poem] (1869), before the war of 1870-71 sharpened his satirical wit even further.

  Thiaudière would presumably have continued the adventures of Lord Humour had the first novel had more success in the marketplace, but his interests were also deflected in 1876, when he was a co-founder, and became the editor-in-chief, of the Revue des idées nouvelles: Bulletin du progrès dans la philosophie, les sciences, les lettres, les arts, l’industrie, le commerce et l’agriculture [Review of New Ideas: A Bulletin of Progress in Philosophy. the Sciences, Letters, the Arts, Industry, Commerce and Industry] which was one of several periodicals whose advent was occasioned by a boom in the popularization of knowledge that had begun in the previous decade, and which had already boosted the careers of such writers as Camille Flammarion, Henri de Parville and Jules Verne, while allowing the pioneering S. Henry Berthoud a late renewal of celebrity.

  The Revue des idées nouvelles, as its subtitle indicated, cast its net very wide during the three years that it continued publication, but while he was its editor Thiaudière developed his particular interest in psychology, which was to become a central prop of much of his subsequent fiction, and he carefully nurtured a philosophy of pessimism akin to that of Arthur Schopenhauer, which he subsequently developed in a long series of essays published as pamphlets, under the general tile Notes d’un pessimiste [Notes of a Pessimist], beginning with La Proie du Néant [The Prey of Nothingness] (1886) and eventually concluding with La Vanité de Tout [The Vanity of Everything] (1928)—advertised, somewhat optimistically, as the first of a new subseries.

  Trois amours singulières is the most substantial fruit of the author’s interest in psychological science, and represents a significant contribution to the evolving subgenre of “case study” fiction, in which such English-language writers as William Gilbert and Oliver Wendell Holmes produced important pioneering examples, the former in Shirley Hall Asylum (1863) and Doctor Austin’s Guests (1866) and the later in Elsie Venner (1859) and The Guardian Angel (1867). The Alsatian writer who was then signing himself Jules Hosch—he later changed the spelling of his surname to Jules Hoche in order to stress his allegiance to France—produced one of the most remarkable French contributions in Folles amours [Crazy Amours] (1878; three stories tr. in The Maker of Men and His Formula)1, and another notable French contributor to it was the neurophysiologist Charles Richet, writing as Charles Ephèyre, in Soeur Marthe (1889; expanded 1890; short version tr. as “Sister Marthe” in On the Brink of the World’s End and Other French Scientific Romances).2

  It is perhaps not surprising that the French contributions to the subgenre tend to concentrate, to a far greater extent that the English-language examples, on the psychology of amour, and Thiaudière’s contributions are no exception. Nor is it surprising that the French examples take a particular interest in what Thiaudière calls “singular amours,” exploring unusual instances of passion,
in the hope that the peculiarities of the fundamental phenomenon might be brought out more clearly by the contemplation of its extremes. The three examples offered in the collection provide an interesting spectrum. “Le Docteur Melanski” (“Doctor Melanski”) offers a fascinating account of a psychological haunting; “La Muette des Champs-Élysées” (The Mute Woman of the Champs-Élysées”) is a study of obsessions couched as a mystery story; and “Mistress Little” (“Mrs. Little”) is a remarkable narrative of psychological dependency. The last-named story is also affiliated to another rich subgenre of roman scientifique, which it is perhaps better not to specify in advance, although its eventual revelation within the narrative will certainly not surprise the reader, in the way that it does the extraordinarily slow-witted teller of the story-within-the-story.

  In all three novellas the author functions as a primary narrative voice, albeit only briefly in the third, and is sufficiently active within the stories to make his philosophical pessimism evident as a significant mordant aspect of his commentary. The second and third stories also have a subsidiary narrative voice, possessed of its own quirks, which adds a further layer of filtration to the stories they have to tell. That results in a particularly complex layering in “La Muette des Champs-Élysées,” where the dialogues between the primary and secondary narrators bracket a third first-person narrative, which explains the mystery but also adds another psychological viewpoint in sharp contrast to its observers. Although the resultant narrative is inevitably tangled, it is also commendably enterprising, and although the subject-matter of the story has to be reckoned modest by comparison with that of the more exotic fantasies that bracket it, it represents an interesting narrative experiment in its own right.

  By comparison with the three novellas, “Le Statuaire américain” (“The American Sculptor”) is undoubtedly trivial, and readily admits the fact in its throwaway last line as well as its blithe tone, but beneath the surface of frivolous comedy it does raise some interesting questions as to what people might and ought to want if they it were possible to remodel their bodies and personalities, and those of others. It is little wonder that the author was led to extrapolate its central fancy further, and it is a great pity that no copy of Contes d’un éleveur de chimères is currently available in order to permit examination of those further explorations.

  The translations of the three stories from Trois amours singulières were made from the copy of the 1886 edition reproduce on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. The translation of “Le Statuaire américain” was made from the copy of Semaine Littéraire volume 168 no. 1 reproduced on the Internet Archive Digital Library at archive.org.

  Brian Stableford

  THE AMERICAN SCULPTOR

  Paris is a singular city. False miracles make an enormous racket there, while true miracles remain absolutely unknown.

  Thus, the Davenports’ cupboard, Talrich’s talking head and the torpedo-child occupied public attention for months, but no one at all thinks of recounting the marvels accomplished by Mr. Bread.3

  In truth, the latter avoids renown with as much care as others seek it, which is rare in a compatriot of Barnum.

  Personally, I owe my acquaintance with Mr. Bread and his corrections of nature to the greatest of hazards.

  The other day, I was going up the Rue Blanche at about one o’clock. The ascent of the Rue Blanche is a very difficult thing, but it becomes a little less so when one has ahead of one a well-dressed young woman walking with grace. That sometimes happens.

  This time I had before me a young woman with a very advantageous figure and beautiful blonde hair, the latter flowing over the former and seemingly authentic, and desirable legs. From what I could see, only the shoulders left something to be desired As elevated in their attachment to the arm as in their attachment to the neck, they did not have an appropriate curve, and I said to myself: It’s a pity that it isn’t in the power of any human to give them the slope that the sovereign artist has adopted in designing human shoulders. Oh, if they were only in stone, I believe that, with the aid of a chisel, even though I’m not a sculptor, I’d be able to lift them as much as they need to be lifted; but even the author of the Venus of the Capitol could do nothing. He couldn’t displace those bones or those muscles.

  I was carrying out that petty reasoning internally when I was overtaken by a strange tall gentleman who approached the lady in the gravest and most polite fashion, and asked her whether she would like to rearrange her shoulders.

  The lady looked at him with a fearful expression and begged him to go on his way.

  He persisted: “You’re mistaken, Madam; you are a beautiful person; it is only your shoulders that spoil you. A brief session would suffice to lower them for you.”

  In the meantime, the lady shrugged them and went into number 78.

  “Do you understand that?” he asked, turning to me. “I offer that lady something that she ought to accept with enthusiasm…of course, she imagines that I’m making fun of her.”

  “I fear so,” I said.

  “That’s the only excuse for treating me like that.,” he went on, “but a man who has straightened up women who were entirely hunchbacked, his own wife among others, can incline with all the more reason two or three lines of the shoulders of a woman who has a very good figure otherwise.”

  “You’re an orthopedist?” I said, examining the bizarre individual, whose poorly-fitted wig allowed the skin of his scalp to show in places and whose long side-whiskers resembled the bristles of a wild boar, while his broken nose and little colorless eyes, mobile and distorted, gave him the appearance of a caricature.

  “Orthopedist! Not at all—not, at least, as it is usually understood. I’m a sculptor, but for a long time I haven’t worked in clay, stone or marble. I model human bodies themselves, or rather, remodel them, when Nature has modeled them poorly.”

  “Oh! Really?” He’s a poor lunatic, I thought. He doesn’t seem malevolent. It’s necessary not to offend him. “And what instrument do you use?” I added.

  “No instrument! I only have to move my hands over someone’s body, with a premeditated design; it immediately takes on the forms that it pleases me to imprint on it. It’s a very personal gift, for until now, I haven’t been able to take any pupils.”

  “So,” I replied, striving to remain as serious as possible, “when it pleases you to change a man into a woman, and vice versa, that’s the easiest thing in the world for you?”

  “Oh, that, no,” he said. “My power doesn’t go that far. It’s limited to refashioning the skeletal system and the carnal fabric over the bones, the sex, age and animal quantity remain the same. I can’t make an individual pass from one sex to the other, rejuvenate him or take away any of the constituent molecules, but if someone gives me a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza, I’ll undertake to extract two well-proportioned men by the development of one in breadth and the other in height. Do you grasp my meaning?”

  “Perfectly, Monsieur,” I said, astounded to see a madman reasoning with such precision.

  “You, for example,” Mr. Bread continued, “have a face that’s a trifle long...”

  “Alas, Monsieur, I agree.”

  “Well, I’d only require a few seconds to shorten it…here, like this...”

  And at the same time, before I could react, he put one of his hands to my chin and the other to my forehead, and pressed rapidly—without, moreover, causing me the slightest pain.

  In the movement, my hat had fallen off; he hastened to pick it up and hand it to me, with exquisite politeness.

  I was furious, however, that the lunatic had manhandled my face like that, and I thought that the expression of his folly had surpassed the limit.

  “I beg you to stop,” I exclaimed.

  “I certainly don’t want to leave you in that state,” he replied, very calmly. “It’s necessary for me to finish what I started. You only have the sketch as yet of the new face I intend for you, and when I say sketch, I’m very hone
st, for in struggling, you caused my hands to slip in such a fashion that, involuntarily, I’ve compressed your face too much between the forehead and the chin.”

  “No matter,” I said, with a pitying smile; I’m content with the sketch, imperfect as it may be. Adieu, Monsieur.”

  He held me back by the sleeve.

  “It’s impossible,” he protested, “for me to leave you with a face like that. You’re horrible.”

  “That’s fine by me....”

  “I see; you’re reluctant to look at it. Would you like me to accompany you home?”

  Who is this animal? I thought. Is he mad? Is he a crook? Is he something else?

  “I want you to leave me alone this instant,” I said, energetically.

  “So much the worse for you,” he said, “but here’s my name and address. I’m convinced that you won’t take long to come to see me.”

  I took his card mechanically, and went home as fast as possible.

  My concierge, who was near the stairway, in the process of waxing my boots, stopped me in the corridor by saying: “Who do you want, Monsieur?”

  “Ah! So, Père Sauvage, you’re mocking people? You don’t know me now?”

  “I know your voice, your hazelnut-colored overcoat, your silver ring with a black stone, your thick yellow cane and the boots you have on your feet, which I waxed yesterday, but never in my life have I seen you with such a head.”

  “It’s certain, Père Sauvage, that my features must be a trifle upset. I encountered a madman just now who took all the trouble in the world to knead me.”

  “What? Features a trifle upset? That’s to say that they’re no longer your own—that you have someone else’s face.”