The Lynx Read online

  The Lynx

  by

  Michel Corday & André Couvreur

  Translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Le Lynx by Michel Corday and André Couvreur, here translated as The Lynx, was first published by Pierre Lafitte in 1911. It had the unusual privilege of an English translation, published in America by Dillingham in 1913 as The Inner Man, but that version is extremely rare and almost impossible to find; even Everett Bleiler, the great bibliographer of American imaginative fiction, never managed to lay his hands on a copy; thus, the present translation seemed a worthwhile endeavor.

  The novel is notable within the history of French roman scientifique as a significant extended treatment of the notion of telepathy, and it represents a point in the evolution of the genre in which it had become both possible and expectable to combine a serious conte philosophique, attempting to address an interesting question regarding the desirability of a hypothetical alteration of human nature, in the context of a suspenseful thriller in which a powerful and clever arch-villain must somehow be thwarted, although the odds are heavily stacked in his favor.

  It was not the first time that the philosophical aspects of the “thought-reading” had been addressed in French fiction; the first extensive treatment was carried out by Delphine de Girardin in Le Lorgnon (1832; tr. as “The Lorgnon” in the Black Coat Press edition of Balzac’s Cane)1, but Madame de Girardin had approached the theme more prudently, in the context of a mild social satire and a relatively conventional love story. Her thought-reading device, although given a slight pseudoscientific gloss, was essentially magical, and thus of intrinsically arbitrary and strictly limited existence; the one featured in Le Lynx, by contrast, is the product of scientific discovery, invested with a much more forceful hypothetical reality, capable of being reproduced indefinitely and gifted to the entire human race. That sharpens the philosophical question markedly, and it is also worth nothing that it changes the love story element of its more complex plot considerably. Like Le Lorgnon, Le Lynx is orientated toward a problematic “happy ending” seemingly difficult of attainment, but it calls the assumed “happiness” of the ending into question in a far more brutal, and far more intriguing, fashion than its pioneering predecessor.

  Both of the authors who collaborated in the writing of Le Lynx had written previous contes philosophiques within the genre of roman scientifique, although both were better known at that point in time for naturalistic fiction; both of them were also to go on to write more works of a similar nature. Couvreur must certainly be reckoned one of the key contributors to the genre, especially to the sector of it that Maurice Renard called “scientific marvel fiction,” and although Corday’s contributions to the same sector of the genre were fewer in number and lighter in literary ambition, they were by no means insignificant. There were other pairs of writers who worked in tandem within the genre but they were mostly pedestrian producers of formularistic works; the exceptions all appear to be instances in which an experienced and artful writer—Jules Verne and Théo Varlet are the most conspicuous examples—revised a manuscript produced by someone else, without any preliminary association. Corday and Couvreur certainly did not require anyone to revise their work, and must surely have planned and executed the writing of Le Lynx in close collaboration, discussing every element of it even if they took turns at writing particular sections. It represents, therefore, the most interesting marriage of minds within the genre.

  According to the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue, Michel Corday was born in 1869, although other sources record the date as 1870. He was educated at the Collège Chaptal and the École Polytechnique. He is best known today because he edited the final collection of works left unpublished at his death by his friend Anatole France, Pages inédites d’Anatole France [Unpublished Pages by Anatole France] (1925), and also wrote a memoir of the author, Anatole France, d’après ses confidences et ses souvenirs [Anatole France, in accordance with his confidences and memories] (1927). The latter helped pave the way for Corday to achieve considerable success thereafter with two further biographically-based works, La Vie amoureuse de Diderot [Diderot’s Love Life] (1928), focusing on the private life of the great Encyclopedist, and Charlotte Corday (1929), about his most famous namesake, the assassin who stabbed the Revolutionary leader Marat in his bath.

  Prior to that late success, Corday had enjoyed a long career, when he was moderately well-known as a writer of light popular fiction, mostly in a sentimental vein. His first novel, however, had been the more intensely earnest Le Cancer [Cancer] (1894), written when that diagnosis was still relatively unfamiliar and the mere word first began to engender a quasi-superstitious terror, thus afflicting the luckless protagonist with the status of a modern leper. It was presumably that novel, which has something in common with André Couvreur’s early work, that attracted his eventual collaborator’s admiring attention. Intérieurs d’officiers [Officers’ Home Lives] (1894) set a pattern that was to become more typical of Corday’s endeavors, however, and was followed by Femmes d’officiers [Officers’ Wives] (1895), Jeunes mariés [Young Couples] (1896) and Coeurs de soldats [Soldiers’ Hearts] (1897).

  Mon petit mari, Ma petite femme [My Dear Husband, My Dear Wife] (1899) was probably Corday’s most successful novel, and in the early years of the twentieth century he became a regular contributor to the new generation of middlebrow magazines that sprang up in that period, including Touche à Tout, which serialized several of his novels and numerous shorter pieces, and Je Sais Tout. He continued to publish steadily, save for the expectable interruption by the Great War, when he worked as a civil servant—an experience that served to instill him with an ardent pacifism—until his death in 1937.

  Corday’s first significant venture into roman scientifique was the striking novelette “Le Mystérieux Dajan-Phinn” (1908 in Je Sais Tout; tr. as “The Mysterious Dajan-Phinn” in the Black Coat Press anthology The World above the World),2 about the difficulties a reclusive scientist has in persuading his skeptical colleagues that he has created an artificial human being. Le Lynx was his second. Among his post-war works, the satire En Tricogne, un an chez les Tricons, roman très contemporain [In Tricogne, a Year among the Tricons: An Exceedingly Contemporary Novel] (1926) also has an inevitable fantastic element, but his most significant contributions to roman scientifique were La Flamme éternelle (1931; tr. as the title story of the Black Coat Press edition of The Eternal Flame and Other Stories),3 about the discovery of a new source of power, and its sequel, describing a bold experiment in induced pacifism, Ciel Rose (1933; tr. as “Pink Sky” in the same collection).

  André Couvreur was born in 1863 at Seclin in the Nord; his baptismal name was actually Achille-Émile-Henri Couvreur, but he signed his early literary works, all of which were intended for the theater, “A. Chils,” adapting his Christian name. The first production that was staged, in Lille in 1885, appears to have been a farce entitled Ipéca et Cuana. It is difficult to determine whether any others were produced prior to Le Secret de Polichinelle [The Secret of Polichinelle], a satirical play in verse staged in 1893, which appeared in print in the same year under the extended pseudonym of “André Chils.” The author retained the André when he began to use his own surname instead of the improvisation

  By the time Le Secret de Polichinelle was produced, Couvreur had qualified as a physician, receiving his degree in 1892—slightly belatedly, perhaps because he had been pursuing his literary ambitions in parallel with his studies. His father and older brother were both doctors, and he had doubtless been encouraged to follow in their footsteps, perhaps a trifle reluctantly, but it must have been obvious by 1892 that m
edicine offered him far better opportunities to make a living than literature, and he presumably made a firm commitment to establish a steady income when he married, in 1893. He never surrendered his literary ambitions, however, and when his novels began to appear he was quick to become an active member of the Societé des Gens de Lettres as well as maintaining his medical endeavors; it was probably through that organization that he met and befriended Corday.

  The 1890s was a good time to begin writing novels set in the world of medical practice, which was becoming a fashionable literary topic, aided by the abundant publicity given to the medical advances it was hoped that intensive scientific research—like that carried out at the Institut Pasteur, founded in 1887—might soon produce. Corday caused something of a sensation with Le Cancer, which broke new literary ground in its consideration of the psychological and social effects experienced by its protagonist after receiving the diagnosis of his condition, and Léon Daudet caused a sensation of a different kind in the same year with his scathing satire on the medical profession in general and surgeons in particular, Les Morticoles [a slang term for doctors, approximately decodable as “death-sowers”].

  Couvreur’s first novel was Le Mal nécessaire (1899; tr. as The Necessary Evil),4 a scathing account of a brilliant but morally irresponsible surgeon, Armand Caresco, who has something in common with the villain of Le Lynx, Dr. Castillan, although the latter is more of a caricature, as befits his more luridly melodramatic context. Le Mal nécessaire was advertized as the first volume of a trilogy collectively entitled Les Dangers sociaux [Social Dangers], and was soon followed by two thematic sequels Les Mancenilles [a noun improvised from the toxic plant Hippomane mancenilla] (1900) and La Source fatale [The Fatal Source] (1901), the former dealing with the threat posed by syphilis and the nexus of infection maintained by the prostitutes of Paris, and the second with the perils of alcohol abuse.

  After completing his first trilogy Couvreur began a second, collectively entitled La Famille [The Family], with La Force du sang [The Strength of the Blood] (1902) and La Graine [The Seed] (1903). Before writing the third volume, however, he digressed into fiction of a very different sort by producing a futuristic sequel to Le Mal nécessaire featuring the same protagonist: Caresco, surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie: Conte humain (1904; tr. as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia)5 —a rare example of a boldly fantastic sequel to a grimly naturalistic work. In Caresco, surhomme, which is set in the mid-twentieth century, Caresco, now immensely rich and equipped with numerous advanced technologies, has acquired a heavily-defended private island where he has establish a utopia of sorts, in which surgically-enhanced beauty is almost universal, free love is assisted by elaborate aphrodisiac technologies, and he is worshiped as a Dionysian demigod.

  Although Couvreur did go on to complete his second trilogy with Le Fruit (1906), the core of his subsequent literary work consisted of a series of scientific marvel stories dealing with potential developments in biotechnology, all credited to one Professor Tornada. Tornada began his career in Une Invasion de macrobes (1909 in the literary supplement of L’Illustration, reprinted in book form, in a revised version, 1910; tr. as “An Invasion of Macrobes” in the first of the three volumes of The Adventures of Professor Tornada)6. It was the publisher of the book version of that novella, Pierre Lafitte, for whom Couvreur and Corday then wrote Le Lynx. Both stories appear to have been deliberate attempts at popular melodrama, presumably reflecting the relative lack of success of Caresco surhomme (for all its ambition and spectacular brilliance) and his later naturalistic novels.

  Presumably the experiment in question was not deemed a success either; although Une Invasion de macrobes was reprinted several times in the course of the century, Le Lynx was not, and became almost as hard to find as The Inner Man. When Professor Tornada returned after the interval of the Great War (in spite of the inconvenience of dying at the end of the first novella), he was a markedly different character, having combined Caresco’s surgical skills with his original biochemical expertise, in order to figure mercurially in a series of extended contes philosophiques, in which melodrama, although by no means eliminated, took a back seat by comparison with satirical and sentimental issues. All the later novellas in the series appeared in the periodical Oeuvres Libres, only the first of them, L’Androgyne (1922; tr. as “The Androgyne”) being reprinted in book form, the publisher of that volume, Albin Michel, apparently having pulled out of a four-book contract to issue more.

  The subsequent stories in the Tornada sequence were “Le Valseur phosphorescent” (1923; tr. as “The Phosphorescent Waltzer”), “Les Mémoires d’un immortel (1924; tr. as “The Memoirs of an Immortal”), “Le Biocole” (1927; tr. as “The Biocole”) and “Le Cas de baronne Sasoitsu” (1939; tr. as “The Case of Baronne Sasoitsu). The last-named is of particular interest in relation to the present volume in that it reiterates the speculative motif of Le Lynx, again in the context of a crime story in which an innocent man is famed for a seemingly-perfect murder, and subjects the central philosophical issue to a re-examination that might be reckoned considerably more cynical.

  Le Lynx is not the best of Couvreur’s scientific marvel stories, by any means, but it has a more complex plot than any of the others, which adds an extra measure of suspense to the story, and it is as challenging as any of the others in the problematic rhetoric of its conclusion. The ending tacitly invites the reader to make an assessment of an evaluation of the key philosophical question offered by a character whose entitlement to issue such an evaluation is dubious in the extreme, thus making the problem even more convoluted than it is in essence. It is, in consequence, a story well worth reading and well worth weighing with all due care in the scales of approval, no matter how the balance might eventually tip in the reader’s mind.

  This translation as made from a copy of the Lafitte edition kindly loaned to me by Marc Madouraud; I am extremely grateful for his kindness in making a very rare text available for a new translation.

  Brian Stableford

  THE LYNX

  PART ONE

  I

  In the clear night, Gabriel Mirande made out the white walls of the village and, above the foliage of the square, the brown silhouette of the church and the bell-tower. The young scientist was alone, absolutely alone, on the road that traversed the fields, linking the railway station to Chaligny. Nothing was alive, nothing was moving in the nocturnal countryside save for the scintillating stars swarming in the summer sky.

  Sometimes, a perfume passed through the calm air, the odors of ripe crops, trodden grass and warm earth; and Mirande shivered as if it were a caress. Since his departure from Paris his senses seemed to have been refined and sharpened under the empire of an abnormal nervous tension. Perhaps he owed that to the excessive emotions that had assailed him recently, perhaps to the stimulant injection that his master, Brion, had given him in advance.

  He penetrated into the village, where his footsteps resonated between the closed facades. Everyone was asleep. Only one window remained illuminated, on the first floor of the inn. From time to time, as he passed by, a dog barked in a courtyard; and, incapable of mastering his nervousness, he started every time, his spine chilled by a frisson, although all the houses were familiar to him in the village where he had been born.

  Mirande passed under the linden trees of the square, whose flowers embalmed the night. Then he pushed a gate, which grated sadly. He was in the cemetery, whose graves were grouped together, in accordance with the ancient custom, around the church.

  That path was very familiar to him, alas. He and his sister Jeanne had still been children when they had escorted their father and their mother, at a short interval, to that nearby mound, shaded by yews and florid with roses. The names on the crosses, already half-effaced by time, and the steles reminded him of the faces of friends...

  This time, however, it was before a freshly-filled grave that he intended to meditate first. Three days…for three days Simone Castillan had bee
n buried in Chaligny cemetery. He knew the family tomb well, a large and heavy stone almost level with the ground, in a quiet corner, under large aspens. In the shadow increased by the screen of foliage he made out the bouquets, wreaths and sprays that strewed the stone, whose flowers, still fresh, were shining, as if they had retained the light in their corollas.

  Standing there, head bowed, he sank into a dolorous meditation. He wept for the adored friend of his childhood and youth, for all the love and all the poetry of his life.

  How he had loved her! She had always appeared to him prestigious, distant, almost divine. Already, when he was no more than a village schoolboy, a little peasant, thin and timid, he had contemplated her with a kind of veneration through the railings of the noble estate where she lived on the bank of the Yonne. And later, when a tutelary hand had raised him above his condition, when he returned to Chatigny on leave in the tunic of a collegian, he had experienced, in crossing Simone’s path, in going past her dwelling, the same religious hesitation.

  Perhaps he would never have addressed a word to her without his sister Jeanne, whose hard life under the patronage of Sens had not eroded either her valor or her enthusiasm. The two girls, doubtless seduced by the contrast in their nature, had acquired a mutual amity. Simone’s parents, who were reputed in the village to be proud, dared not deprive their daughter of that playmate, and the beautiful domain had been opened to the ecstatic little Mirande.

  Those vacations… they remained for him the intervals of light, the blue gaps in the somber wall of the boarding-school. Innocent days, fishing expeditions, picnics on the grass, escapes into the woods, in which his timidity melted, in which Jeanne’s laughter rang out, and the well-behaved and careful Simone became animated.