Arrival in the Stars Read online

  Arrival in the Stars

  and Other stories

  by

  Jean Rameau

  Translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  Nerehitchahihohihoum! Zi! Zi! 10

  Gnu! 18

  For Virtue 24

  The Dilettantism of Crime 37

  The Phantom House 43

  To Be Deceived 52

  Between Friends 59

  A Son of Two Fathers 64

  A Woman’s Heart 70

  The Living Statue 75

  One Does Not Trifle With Honor 80

  ARRIVAL IN THE STARS 86

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 231

  Introduction

  L’Arrivée aux étoiles (Essai vers l’au-delà) by Jean Rameau, here translated as “Arrival in the Stars,” was first published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1922. The shorter stories accompanying the novel in the present volume are all taken from the author’s first short story collection, Fantasmagories, histoires rapides [Phantasmagorias: Rapid Tales] (1887), published by Paul Ollendorff.1

  “Jean Rameau” was the pseudonym of Laurent Labaigt (1859-1942), who was the son of a farmer, and was born in the village of Gaas in the department of the Landes, in the south-western corner of France. He retained a very strong affection for the Basque region, as is very evident in L’Arrivée aux étoiles. He studied at the Collège de Dax and was employed for a while in a pharmacy in Mont-de-Marsan before moving to Paris in 1880 in order to follow his literary vocation, considering himself a “spiritual son of Victor Hugo,” even though he always represented himself in the city as primarily and essentially a “peasant.” His choice of pseudonym led to his sometimes being confused with the similarly-named Jean Rameau (1852-1931), a master bellringer, shoemaker and writer of songs; the latter was visited at his home in Berry in 1911 by the English poet Percy Allen, who might not have realized beforehand that he was not the author of the poetry collections bearing that signature, but published an enthusiastic account of him in any case.

  Like most of the writers of his era, Laurent Labaigt’s first ambition was to be a poet. He won a poetry competition organized by Le Figaro, and his first two books were the poetry collections Poèmes fantasques [Odd Poems] (1883) and La Vie et la mort [Life and Death] (1886). When he moved to Paris and became “Jean Rameau,” he immediately joined Émile Goudeau’s literary club the Hydropathes and subsequently became a regular at the Chat Noir. It was in that period that he wrote the stories collected in Fantasmagories, which represent one of the more exaggerated developments of the conte cruel genre favored by many of the clients of the café. His tales are extreme both stylistically and thematically, combining the cynicism and irony definitive of the subgenre with grotesque black comedy. Although his work has obvious affinities with that of such luminaries of the Chat Noir as Jean Richepin and Alphonse Allais, both of whom he would have seen performing there frequently, it has a distinct element of southern bombast in it that makes it distinct.

  As is often the case with writers who participated in the literary explosion of the Parisian fin-de-siècle, Rameau’s poetry generally made use of a great deal of fantastic imagery, and embodied a world-view that exhibits an exceedingly strong affection and quasi-pantheistic reverence for nature, a tendency particularly evident in such collections as La Chanson des étoiles [The Song of the Stars] (1888), Nature (1891) and Les Féeries [Enchantments] (1897). His novels, on the other hand, made use of such language in a purely figurative sense, and tended more to the Naturalistic school of Émile Zola than to the Symbolist school that was often falsely regarded as its rival during the 1890s. His first novel Le Satyre [The Satyr] (1887) is steeped in fervent contemporary “decadence” but is entirely naturalistic, as is Possédée d’amour (1890; tr. as Possessed of Love), whose title, more accurately understood than it was by its English translator, might stand as a description of many of his works, which routinely feature characters “possessed by amour” whose affliction inevitably leads them into extravagance and difficulty, although the novels the author produced in profusion were soon conscientiously adapted to popular taste, becoming a trifle bland in the process.

  Throughout the 1890s Rameau wrote copiously, usually publishing two novels a year and numerous short stories in periodicals, the great majority of which remained uncollected, as was not unusual for prolific writers of short fiction; his later work in that vein seems to consist mostly of vignettes of rural life. In 1900 he returned with his wife and only son to live in his native region, at Pourtaou in the commune of Cauneille, where he had bought a farmhouse in 1898, when he reached the height of his fame in Paris. His productivity slowed down after 1907, and his gradually waning literary career was then drastically interrupted by the Great War; his son was killed at Verdun. He spent the rest of his life at Pourtaou, tending in his later years to representing himself as an eccentric and solitary recluse, although he was actually famous in the region and considered to be one of its most notable residents, and his wife did not die until 1935.

  At Pourtaou, Rameau diversified from literary work into various other artistic endeavors, including painting, sculpture and—most especially—photography. He apparently maintained an extensive posthumous correspondence with his son, writing to inform him of all the modifications he made to his house, which he gradually transformed into an elaborate and ornately-decorated villa in the Italian style. It was there that he eventually died, although his literary productivity petered out some ten years before then, unsurprisingly, given that he was well into his eighties when he died. He had built himself a monumental tomb, the Gloriette, at the top of a hill, which became famous, although it has now fallen into disrepair; he was not actually buried inside it as he had intended, but at the foot of the hill.

  L’Arrivée aux étoiles is a product of the aftermath of the Great War, as its brief preface declares forthrightly, and it deals directly with one of the widespread psychological effects of the war: a resurgence of interest in spiritualism occasioned by the deep need felt by many people to believe that the loved ones who had been slaughtered during the conflict were not entirely lost. Rameau had always combined a strong interest in the fantastic with a hard-headed rationalism, and his interest in spiritualism prior to the war had been conditioned by the conviction that it was essentially a species of intriguing fakery, a conviction expressed in some detail in his novel Les Chevaliers de l’au-delà [Knights of the Beyond] (1905). The loss of his son in the war, however, planted seeds of doubt regarding his former cynicism, and L’Arrivée aux étoiles is essentially an exploration of those doubts, and an attempt to work through them in a hypothetical fictional case-study. It is a deeply personal novel, although its quasi-autobiographical elements are carefully transfigured in order to accommodate the plot and, in particular, its imaginary heroine.

  The novel is haunted by a curious kind of ambiguity, dramatically sharpened by the epoch and circumstances of its production. It gives the impression of trying with all its might to be credulous, while laboring under the long-established burden of the author’s habit of treating all such ideas with relentless skepticism and sarcasm. Like almost all of Rameau’s novels it is a study of “possession” by an amour that leads its victims into a dangerous impasse, but it takes that particular torment further than any of the other examples in his work, and thus has to seek a more extreme “solution” in terms of its plot and the philosophical conclusions that it is eager to draw therefrom. As a work produced and framed in deadly earnest, it contrasts strongly with the breezy black comedy of the stories sampled from Fantasmagories, produced in a very dif
ferent frame of mind, but the acuity of that contrast not only helps to illustrate the philosophical tension under which the author was working but also illuminates certain common threads of conviction and fascination that even that Great War had not contrived to sever.

  Rameau was in his sixties when he wrote L’Arrivée aux étoiles—older than the protagonist of the novel, although the beard he always wore appears from contemporary photographs to have been less spectacular—whereas he had written his “rapid tales” in his twenties, and the best years of his adult life had elapsed in the interim, so a modification of his psychological and philosophical outlook would have been only natural in any case. His exuberance would have mellowed, and so, in all likelihood, would his cynicism. He could not, however, have traveled so far internally without the poison that the war injected into his soul. He fought that toxicity with all the psychological weaponry with which his literary art supplied him, as many of his peers did, and L’Arrivée aux étoiles is one of the battles he fought in the process, as he sought to raise himself from the deep depression into which the war and his son’s death had cast him.

  Rameau is primarily remembered today as a poet, and those of his novels to which some value is still attributed generally attract it by virtue of their celebrations of the landscape and culture of the Basque region. It is, however, arguable that he never did anything again as spectacular as Fantasmagories, and that the works therein were simply too original and too flamboyant to attract the critical attention they deserved, and still warrant, as crucial contributions to the development of the fin-de-siècle conte cruel.

  Although L’Arrivée aux étoiles contains something of the regional interest that still attracts some attention to his work, it is also of interest as an extended conte philosophique seriously addressing the question of life after death as it was conceived at the time by scientifically-enthused psychic researchers, and as it bears upon human psychology under stress. The juxtaposition of the first set of texts with the short novel is undoubtedly a trifle odd, but there was a time in his career when the author was a great enthusiast for oddity and eccentric juxtapositions, and he would surely have approved.

  The translation of L’Arrivée aux étoiles was made from the London Library’s copy of the Plon edition. The translations of the short stories were made from the copy of the second Ollendorff edition of Fantasmagories reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.

  Brian Stableford

  Nerehitchahihohihoum! Zi! Zi!

  1

  Atchoum! Atchihoum! Aratchihohuhoum!

  The sneezing of the poet Phidias Dupont graduated thus, rhythmically sonorous, in the copious cold in the head that had transformed his olfactory apparatus into cathedral gargoyles, for twenty-four hours.

  The poet sensed naiads in his nose.

  Atchoum! Atchihoum! Aratchihohuhoum!

  “Why!” he remarked, suddenly. “That’s a verse of the new school. Exactly eleven syllables...and how symbolic!

  Aratchihohuhoum!

  Soon, however, after a delirious aratchihohuhoum:

  “Eh! What if it were that?

  That meant the new voluptuousness, the ineffable sensation of future amour, for which Phidias Dupont had been searching for a long time.

  Explanations:

  2

  Nature, thought Phidias Dupont, opposes herself to the reproduction of sufficiently perfected species. A herring, a primitive and rudimentary being, can give the light of day to a million herrings. A man of genius does not reproduce, or hardly at all. Woman, who is the summit of creation, suffers in order to give birth more than any other terrestrial mother. One already senses there the resistance of Nature, which refuses to bring modifications to what she has produced of the most intelligent. A day will come when, the human species being perfected, Nature will judge that any attempt at amelioration is futile and when, having exhausted all her creative forces in the embellishment of one species, she will strike the majority of human mothers with sterility.

  On that day, how will the last humans, the supreme geniuses of our race, make love to one another?

  There will doubtless no longer be the vulgar and henceforth useless amour of ancient times. Beings as refined would find such trivial sensations, in which so many gross and inartistic species indulge, repugnant.

  It will therefore be necessary for Amour, the supersublime Amour of the ultimate times, to choose less banal means, and a seat less profane.

  Firstly, what will be that seat?

  There lay the problem.

  3

  Now, after a vertiginous Aratchihohuhoum! That he had just emitted, Phidias Dupont no longer hesitated. The new revelation had been made to him.

  That divine seat was the nose.

  4

  What an enjoyment, in fact, is that procured by a savant sternutation in the delicate nostrils of an initiate! What amorous hiccup, what spasm of sensual voluptuousness is worth as much as that inappreciable second of dazzlement, that fugitive instant of bliss, in which it seems that the entire being dissolves, deliquesces, evaporates and is elevated to paradise in a sensation of replete felicity?

  O elect nostrils, pink nostrils with tender and passionate mucus, you alone will understand the beautiful humanitarian dream of Phidias Dupont.

  5

  Certainly, the poet’s nose was an elect nose.

  Delicate and slender in stature, colored with fashionable nuances, constituted of supple cartilages, endowed with delicate lobes that palpitated with the slightest breath like the two wings of a quivering turtle-dove, it blossomed in the middle of the face, splendid and sweet to behold, like a marvelous flower of amour.

  “It’s me who ought to be the initiator of that new voluptuousness!” Phidias said to himself. “It’s me who will be the Messiah of that religion!”

  He set to work.

  6

  After two years of what he called “nasiculture” he achieved the possession of miraculous nostrils that procured him frenzied enjoyments. It was no longer Aratchihohuhoum! That he launched in the sternutatory spasm but Nerehitchahihohihoum! zi! zi!: an Edenic sigh that he emitted with tremulous lips, a bewildered heart and white eyes; a sigh of the soul falling into languor, and during which his entire body quivered voluptuously, as if beneath a cataract of stars.

  Phidias thought: I’m ready now to evangelize the masses.

  He commenced.

  7

  The Word was poorly welcomed by the governing classes. Phidias Dupont found himself threatened with Bicêtre, the modern Golgotha.

  Oh, the happy times, those when persecutions came to make the advertisement of new philosophies! What is Géraudel himself by comparison with Nero?2

  Phidias only found one apostle: his valet de chambre, an insignificant negro with an extraordinary nose, which one divined to be predestined.

  “It’s necessary to give an example to the populace,” Phidias said to his negro. “I shall marry.”

  “But...”

  “Oh, in accordance with the new rites, of course.”

  8

  Phidias discovered a chaste young woman of sixteen, Eva, whose hand he obtained. Oh, the sweet virgin! She was very dainty, with her nose of dreams, which was velveted internally by a blonde down. Blonde! Almost curly!

  And Phidias blushed before that candid nose, which the young woman displayed ingenuously, all pink and stark naked, with the innocence of beautiful marble statues that do not know what they are exhibiting.

  Before making his choice, Phidias had seen, of course the troubling noses of marriageable young women: delicate, delicate noses…enormous, enormous noses...sensuously red, shamefully picturesque or viciously trogoniferous noses…!

  But none of them had produced an effect on him as sovereign and as irresistible as the one he had felt before Eva’s nose…

  Oh, that thunderbolt nose!

  9

  And the evening of the marriage, Eva’s mother having wept superabundantly on her d
aughter’s neck, and the latter having been prepared by tender maternal revelations of all sorts of mysterious and terrifying things, Phidias, whose heart was beating as if to burst, took his white bride by the hand.

  The moon was rising over the horizon. The nightingale...etc…etc…

  “Eva,” stammered Phidias, solemnly, Madame your mother has doubtless talked to you about...”

  “Yes, Phidias!” stammered Eva.

  And her nose turned pink.

  Phidias could no longer retain himself. He took his virginal other half in his arms, drew her toward two soft seats that were facing one another near the window, before the great starry sky; then, having opened a laurier-rosewood box he revealed two little odorous wands of a rare and heady species. The upper extremity of those wands was ovoid, and discreetly granular. The base was surrounded by precious gems.

  The first cock crowed in the bright night.

  “Oh, Eva!” sighed Phidias

  And, offering one of the wands to his spouse, he presented his inflamed nostrils; trembling with emotion, sought with his other wand the palpitating nostrils of his bride, and then...

  Let us draw a veil.

  10

  Nerehitchahihohihoum! zi! zi!

  That was still heard in the nuptial chamber when the skylark sang.

  11

  And a fortnight later, Phidias Dupont, the happiest of men—according to the rite of the future—was walking pensively toward his dwelling, his heart filled with singing thoughts.

  That, then, is the formula of the future amour! And it’s me who will have the glory of inaugurating it! Vision of hope! Sublime transformations! Where are the anguishes, the troubles, the innumerable woes provoked by the ancient amour? Disappeared with it! All dispersed!