Journey to the Sun Read online

  Journey to the Sun

  by

  Pierre Boitard

  Translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  PARIS BEFORE HUMANKIND 18

  JOURNEY TO THE SUN 122

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 265

  Introduction

  “Voyage au soleil” by Pierre Boitard, here translated as “Journey to the Sun,” was first published in four parts in the Musée des Familles in the issues for December 1838, February and November 1839, and February 1840. The second, third and fourth parts do not carry that title, being content with the rubric “Étude astronomique” and chapter titles, but the narrative is continuous and it was obviously planned as a coherent project. At any rate, whatever one care to call it, the étude astronomique in question is a sequel of sorts to a work in a different scientific genre, “Paris avant l’homme,” here translated as “Paris Before Humankind,” which appeared in the same magazine in two parts in the June 1837 and November 1837 issues.

  Both of these stories were ground-breaking in terms of their subject-matter and their narrative strategy, and although both now seem very primitive in both respects, the subject-matter and narrative strategy in question having been very elaborately developed in the interim, they are works of considerable historical interest, and their exhumation is an interesting exercise in literary archeology. The second item was never reprinted, and although the author began work on a revised version of the former before his death in 1859, its subject-matter had made such vast advances in the previous twenty years that only small fragments of the original text survive in a far more elaborate text, which was posthumously published, without the final polish that the author planned to give it, as L’Univers avant l’homme [The World Before Humankind], in 1861.

  Pierre Boitard was born in 1789. His early publications were in the field of botany, his first book being Traité de la composition et de l’ornament des jardins [Treatise on the Design and Ornamentation of Gardens] (1925), and most of his later ones were concerned with the relevance of botanical knowledge to the planning and maintenance of gardens and to the planning and maintenance of agricultural endeavor. Because of his interest in botany he also became fascinated by the nascent field that would nowadays be called paleobotany: the study of extinct plants and the sequence of their development over time, by means of the fossil record. That led to a more general interest in paleontology, including the development of animal fossils over geological time, and hence to an interest in cosmogony, the history of the Earth as revealed by the geological record, and what that might imply regarding the nature and development of the entire solar system in the course of cosmic time.

  Partly because of that direction of approach, Boitard had no difficulty at all in becoming a believer in what would then have been known as “transformism”; it seemed obvious to him that plants had originated with simple forms that had, over long periods of time, developed into more complicated ones. That pattern was very obviously set out in the fossil record and relatively easy to comprehend. It was, therefore, natural enough for him to transfer the same kind of thinking to his contemplation of the record of fossil animals, where it was much more controversial.

  The development of geological studies had long made nonsense of the chronology inferred from Genesis, which suggested that the world was only six thousand years old and had been created in six days; the realization that the Earth contained a large number of rock strata laid down by successive processes of sedimentation made that account utterly incredible. Some people therefore considered geology—and science in general—to be a dire threat to religious faith, and one to be opposed at all costs. Others took the view that it made no difference to the real foundations of religious faith, but merely required the six days of creation to be construed metaphorically. Some geologists even took the trouble to divide geological time up into six periods that conserved the same number—an adjustment with which Boitard was quite happy to go along.

  There was, however, an additional and particular problem with regard to the sixth day of Genesis, which included the creation of humankind. By 1837, paleontological discoveries had begun to suggest, although the crucial evidence was still rather thin, that humans had first appeared on Earth a long time before six thousand years ago, which cast the rest of the chronology of Genesis into the same rubbish bin as the six days of creation, without there being any readily available metaphorical shift to save its essence. Worse than that; if it were accepted that animals as well as plants had developed over an exceedingly long period of time by virtue of a complex pattern of transformations, then the possibility arose that human beings were a product of that process too, and not a special and unique creation. That, for many devout believers, was a line that could not and must not be crossed.

  Some scientists saw no particular problem there either. For them, transformism simply became God’s painstaking method of creation, and the truth of transformism—even if it included the origin of human beings, supplying them with relatively recent ancestors that they had in common with the great apes—need not challenge belief in God as the creator of the world. Boitard apparently belonged to that camp too. There was, however, a considerable difference in 1837 between being prepared to believe that and being prepared to say so publicly. Most geologists and biologists were extremely diplomatic in writing, if only in the interests of avoiding persecution, of which there was still a real danger. (There are, of course, places in the world where it still is.)

  Even in esoteric publications directed at an academic audience, it was still advisable, in France in 1837, to be very careful of what one said, and how, about transformism, especially where its relevance to humankind was concerned. That diplomatic risk was, however, magnified very considerably when it was a matter of addressing a popular audience. For more than a hundred years in France, “philosophy” had been virtually synonymous, at least in the minds of philosophers, with atheism (which set them against theism but not necessarily against deism—i.e., against theology and the Church but not necessarily against the idea and possible existence of God), but dogmatic religion was regarded as a necessary means of keeping the populace in order.

  Religion was, therefore, generally seen by those early nineteenth century Frenchmen who considered themselves learned and wise as a gigantic confidence trick, whose purpose was to counsel the poor to be content with being poor, while the rich enjoyed themselves, and anyone who opposed that function was, by definition, dangerous to the existing social order—all the more so if he what he said was true. The Revolution of 1789 had abolished all the Church’s privileges for precisely that reason, and the Restoration of 1814 had only turned the clock back partially; the general attitude among the French upper classes in general, and the Church in particular, to geology, transformism, and anything else that might weaken faith, was that if it were true, on no account were the underprivileged to be informed, lest 1789 should happen all over again.

  The Musée des Familles was, as its title declared, a “family magazine” whose sole raison d’être was the education and enlightenment of the underprivileged, specifically including women and children. Its subtitle was Lectures du Soir [Evening Reading], emphasizing that it was intended, in an era when most women were still illiterate, for the husbands to read aloud to their wives and children in a family gathering. In that context, far more than any other, the beliefs that Pierre Boitard held were ideological dynamite. To parade them in its pages was an act of courage, and of provocation, and to parade them in a manner calculated to make them easily digestible, and even entertaining, was, in the eyes of the disapproving,
to add insult to injury. The fact that Boitard did it is therefore surprising; perhaps more surprising still is the fact that he was not prevented from doing it at the editorial level, and almost certainly not merely allowed but encouraged to do it.

  It seems probable, in fact, that it was not Boitard’s idea to do it; one thing of which we can be certain is that he never did it again while he was alive, although he did prepare an even more provocative text, in the revised and expanded version of “Paris avant l’homme,” for posthumous publication—a common tactic among timid rebels who want to make their point without having to suffer the fallout. It seems likely, therefore, that the idea of publishing “Paris avant l’homme” and then following it up with the even more ambitious and equally provocative “Voyage au soleil” did not originate with Boitard, or, if it did, that the idea must have been wholeheartedly endorsed by the editor of the Musée des Familles, S. Henry Berthoud. Whether or not he originated the idea for the two serials, however, we can be certain that Berthoud had much to do with the narrative strategy they adopted, which was something else that Boitard never did again—and nor did anyone else for the next two decades, although subsequent writers have certainly made up for the delay since then.

  The Musée des Familles was one of a number of publications founded by Émile de Girardin (1802-1881), an important pioneer of the popular press in France. His newspaper, La Presse, launched in 1836, was the first one of its kind aimed specifically at the lower orders of society, with an educational mission in mind, and it had been preceded by other publication with the same didactic purpose in mind, of which the Musée des Familles, launched in September1833, was the most important. Girardin’s wife, Delphine, was the daughter of Sophie Gay, whose salon had been one of the cauldrons of the French Romantic Movement, and when she started her own salon after the marriage in 1831 many of the younger members of Sophie Gay’s salon transferred their primary allegiance. It was there that Girardin found editors for his publications, including Berthoud and Jules Janin, and it was there that his editors found contributors to help them fill their pages; thus, the Musée des Familles published important early work by many of the younger members of the Movement: Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Léon Gozlan, Joseph Méry, Eugène Sue, “P.L. Jacob the Bibliophile” (Paul Lacroix) and Paul de Kock.

  During the first few months of its publication, the Musée des Familles followed a format not dissimilar to other magazines of the period, featuring a miscellany of short articles on various subjects, with the occasional short story. When Berthoud took over the editorship in April 1834, however, it did not take him long to adopt very different tactics, running longer stories—mostly novellas, but including some novels—in two, three or four episodes of between 10,000 and 20,000 words. The bulk of the magazine’s contents, and the core of its didactic mission, was transferred to these items, which Berthoud labeled “Études.” Most were “Études historiques” [Historical Studies] or “Études morales” [Moralistic Studies] but he made an evident effort to gather as many of the topics covered by the magazine as possible under that banner, in obvious pursuit of the theory that educational material was more palatable if it were enclosed in a narrative that had all the conventional reader-appeal of popular fiction.

  That is, of course, easy enough to do with history, which is, in a sense, already narrativized, and into which individual dramas can easily be slotted. Indeed, all individual dramas have to be slotted into history in some sense, and the temptation to slot them into interesting periods of history, involving important events and well-known people, is considerable even without any additional informative mission. Berthoud led by example in that regard; he was by far the magazine’s most prolific contributor of études, many reflecting his own particular fascination with the history of arts, and historical legends. There can be no doubt, however, that he also encouraged his other contributors to narrativize their contributions too, making them into stories rather than essays.

  That is not easy to do with regard to science. In 1837, of course, there was no such thing as “science fiction,” and it would be more than thirty years before the term “roman scientifique” changed its meaning to refer to a kind of fiction rather than to scientific theories that the user of the phrase thought absurd. The simplest way to do it was simply to carry on a tradition long established in scientific reportage, which was to embed scientific ideas in a dialogue; that is what one of Berthoud’s scientific contributors, Auguste Bertsch, did in his series on “Le Monde invisible” (1839), which presented early discoveries in microscopy is the context of a series of dialogues between the narrator and his doctor. Boitard employs dialogue too, but chooses a more interesting interlocutor—a choice partly forced by his subject-matter.

  Paleontology and cosmogony are inherently narrativized sciences, which set out fundamentally to tell stories, but the stories in question necessarily extend over very long periods of time and treat large-scale events with no human involvement. It is, therefore, not easy to blend their inherent narrativization with the kinds of narrative that fit so readily into the context of historical depiction. Indeed, in order to for a human viewpoint to be introduced into them, the narrative strategy requires at a minimum, the invention of some kind of time travel, and, in the latter case, space travel as well. In 1837, there was only one previous literary work that had done both: Restif de La Bretonne’s unprecedentedly bizarre Les Posthumes (published 1802 but written 1787-89)1, which was not a model that any reasonable writer would have thought it desirable to follow. Very few people had read it, although there is one episode in “Voyage au soleil” that suggests that Boitard might have been one of them. Without going to Restifian extremes, however, there was one narrative device readily available to fulfill either or both of those functions, and that was dreaming. Naturally, that was the one that Boitard adopted.

  Dreaming can supply interlocutors as easily as it can supply visions of elsewhen and elsewhere, but a far-reaching scientific dream of the kind envisaged by Boitard requires an interlocutor of a special kind, not only in terms of what he knows, and can therefore discuss, but also in terms of what he can do within the dream to guide it and steer a course through it. When Dante had to go to Hell he naturally chose Virgil as a guide and interlocutor, because Virgil had (unwittingly) done so much to help shape the Christian notion of Hell in the Aeneid, but the choice of a cicerone to guide Boitard’s dream-self through the labyrinths of prehistory and the heavenly bodies of the solar system was not so obvious. Given its provocative nature, however, and the attitude that those hostile to it were bound to strike, there was one very appealing contender available in French literary tradition, and that was the one that Boitard selected.

  It is nowadays considered, quite rightly, that dreaming is not an ideal device for dealing with awkward imaginative materials, partly because it is by definition the work of the unfettered imagination, but mostly because it is inherently and essentially anticlimactic, having only one possible denouement, in which it is hard to avoid a suggestion of bathos. Boitard’s evident awareness of that fact is amply demonstrated by the denouement of his second novella. In 1837, however, it would have required an exceptionally intrepid leap into the unknown and the implausible to come up with anything different. That was not the only difficult decision he had to make, however, and two of them were bound to create even bigger problems for the attitude that posterity would be bound to take to his endeavor.

  The first of those problems is, of course, the woeful in adequacy of his data. Paleontology was in its infancy in 1837; the vast majority of its discoveries were made subsequently, and inevitably produced data that challenged many of the inferences drawn from earlier incomplete data. We now know that many of the inferences that Boitard drew were false, and those that were not have come to seem so familiar as now to seem trivial and obvious, although they did not seem so at the time. Astronomy was by no means in its infancy, having existed far longer than any other science, but it was stil
l dependent on instruments that now seem primitive and limited, so in that regard too, Boitard’s description of the worlds of the solar system now seem equally primitive and limited, and we know that some of his hypotheses—most obviously the manner in which the Sun produces heat on planetary surfaces—are utterly false. Those limitations and errors should not, however, make modern readers overlook the extent of the imaginative effort that Boitard was compelled to make, or prevent them from admiring his enterprise.

  The second problem is that neither of the sciences that Boitard was attempting to popularize is independent and self-contained, because no science is or can be. He was as polymathic as it was possible for a man of his epoch to be, but his knowledge of sciences other than his most intensely specialized interests was weak and somewhat flawed. In an essay, such difficulties are routinely avoided by the simple strategy of sticking to safe ground, but fiction inevitably aims for concrete and coherent depiction, and omissions and fudges tend to stand out more obviously to the informed eye. It is improbable, therefore, that any modern reader will be able to peruse the texts in this volume without spotting errors, including some that would pass today for “schoolboy howlers.” Again, however, those errors should not cause modern readers to overlook the fact there are also aspects of Pierre Boitard’s thought that were unusually sound for his time, and that, at the final analysis, in taking the side of the apes in the transformism debate, and striving hard and ingeniously to prove and dramatize his position, he was on the side of the truth, and was not the least of that army’s heroes.

  By virtue of the nature of his exercise, and in spite of his use of purely fantastic facilitating devices, both “Paris avant l’homme” and “Voyage au soleil” are attempts to produce what would nowadays be called “hard science fiction”: speculative fiction based on accurate scientific data. In the former instance, the scientific basis of the speculative method is provided by the work of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the first person to develop the idea that fossils were the remains of plant and animal species that had long become extinct, but which could nevertheless be accurately depicted, even from incomplete skeletal remains, by means of analogical reasoning—although Boitard took leave to disagree with Cuvier with the regard to some of the logical consequences of that theory. In the latter instance, Boitard sought to make use of contemporary data in both astronomy and physics in order to produce an account of the solar system and an analysis of the possibility that its planets—and, indeed, the Sun itself—might be inhabited.