Voyage Beneath the Waves. Jules Rengade

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JULES RENGADE

      Voyage Beneath the Waves

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by Brian Stableford

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      INTRODUCTION

      Voyage sous les flots, rédige d’après le journal de bord de L’Éclair, which also bears the heading Aventures extraordinaires de Trinitus and the signature Aristide Roger, was first published in book form by “P. Brunet” (Paul Bory) in 1868; it was also serialized in Le Petit Journal, beginning in October 1867. The book version was issued in Brunet’s Bibliothéque de la Science Pittoresque, and advertised as an exercise in the popularization of science, more specifically as “a fantastic voyage in which the author describes, in an exceedingly curious and interesting fashion, the innumerable marvels of the submarine world.”

      Jules Verne, who came across the serial version of Voyage sous les flots while the serial version of his own Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870 in book form; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) was in preparation, wrote to Le Petit Journal in order to make it clear that he had come up with the notion independently of “Aristide Roger”—or, more accurately, of Pierre-Jules Rengade, the author behind that pseudonym—his own story of an underwater voyage having been advertised as forthcoming in P.-J. Hetzel’s Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation in September 1867. Verne probably did that because his sensitivity to such issues had been considerably sharpened by an attempt made to sue him for plagiarism by René de Pont-Jest, on account of similarities between the initiating incident of Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and the one featured in his story “La Tête de Miner” (tr. as “Mimer’s Head”) in the September 1863 issue of the Revue Contemporaine.

      Pont-Jest had abandoned his suit, presumably persuaded that he could not win it—although he was probably right to assume that Verne had “stolen” his idea of prompting a voyage of exotic discovery to Scandinavia by means of a runic cryptogram—but the incident had been unfortunate. George Sand was later to allege that it was she who had fed the suggestion of writing a novel about an underwater voyage to Hetzel, who had then passed it on to Verne, so Verne was probably correct to feel that people might get the wrong idea if he did not make his position clear.

      There was, of course, nothing new about the notion of a submarine, and previous literary use had been made of one by Théophile Gautier in Les Deux étoiles (1848; tr. as The Quartette), which features a plot to rescue Napoléon from his exile in Saint Helena by that means, but the point at issue was not that Verne’s Nautilus might seem to have been inspired by Rengade’s Éclair; the real question was that the wonders of the undersea world that the vessels in question revealed might seem excessively similar. There is, in fact, little similarity between the magnificent Nautilus and the rather petty Éclair, but it is not surprising that the imagery of the undersea worlds glimpsed by their passengers should have much in common, because the authors were drawing on the same meager resources, not only in terms of the scant knowledge provided by divers and fishermen but in terms of traditional melodramatic potential.

      Having made that point, however, the most striking aspect of any comparison made between the two texts is not the similarities due to common research but the differences resulting from Verne’s far greater sophistication as a thinker and writer. There was, of course, some direct inspiration involved in the coincidence between the two works, but it was not to do with the machines that provided their central motifs, and the flow of that inspiration was undoubtedly from Verne to Rengade—or, more likely, from Hetzel to Brunet. Voyage sous les flots is, in fact, one of the earliest examples of imitative “Vernian fiction,” the rapid accumulation of which established Verne’s “voyages extraordinaires” as a genre rather than an idiosyncratic endeavor. The relative crudity of Rengade’s novel also serves to illustrate the fact that, within the genre who creation he had inspired, Verne had an unmatchable talent and intelligence. Other people could do what he was doing, on a prolific scale, but they could not do it anywhere near as well.

      The 1860s was a boom period in France for the popularization of science; there was a rapid proliferation of sections in popular periodicals dedicated to that task, and several specialist publications were launched with that objective. One annual of the latter kind was edited by Samuel Berthoud, a physician who had been a successful feuilletonist twenty years earlier, and Berthoud made extensive use of fiction in dramatizing the history and progress of science, although only a handful of his works in that vein are speculative. On the other hand, scientists like the astronomer Camille Flammarion also tried to extend their range and appeal of their essays by clever fictionalization. Most such work was a trifle clumsy, because scientific fact does not lend itself well to fictional transfiguration—as demonstrated by the elaborate newspaper hoax produced by the pioneering science journalist Henri de Parville, whose episodes were collected as Un Habitant de le planète Mars (1865; tr. as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars), most of which simply records the speeches made at an imaginary scientific conference.

      It was probably Hetzel rather than Verne who decided, before he persuaded Verne to turn a series of projected articles on ballooning into a novel—which materialized as Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon)—that the appropriate strategy was to reverse the priority and write a adventure story in which the various phases of the adventure might provide hooks on which scientific observations and discussions could be hung, but that idea was only one per cent of the genius of Vernian fiction, and it was Verne’s hard labor that provided the other ninety-nine. As Voyage sous les flots illustrates very obviously, the strategy was relatively impotent in the absence of the craftsmanship to put it into practice with due artistry. Rengade also demonstrated, as Verne did –again, more successfully—that once the priorities have been reversed, there is a tendency for the popularization of science to fade away entirely, so that the climactic phases of such endeavors become pure and unalloyed melodrama.

      Voyage sous les flots was by no means a commercial failure, however. The Brunet edition went through half a dozen printings, and the story was given a further lease of life in 1889 when Louis Figuier reprinted a slightly-revised serial version in La Science Illustrée, which led to a new book edition—with a preface by the author in which he proudly reprinted Verne’s letter, in order to demonstrate his ideative kinship with the great man. The other book of a similar kind that “Aristide Roger” contributed to the series in which Voyages sous les flots appeared—Les Monstres invisibles [Invisible Monsters] (1868), a fictionalized study of life in the microcosm revealed by microscopy—also went through half a dozen editions, but Rengade made no further attempt to repeat the trick. Brunet advertised a third Aristide Roger title in the series, La Machine humaine [The Human Machine], but it did not appear, although Rengade used the title on a series of articles featuring different organs of the body, and it might well be the case that the projected book would simply have been a collection of those articles. Its non-appearance might indicate that Rengade and Brunet had quarreled, but that would not have prevented Rengade from writing more Vernian fiction had he had the urge to do so.

      In fact, the only subsequent work of prose fiction that Rengade published after Les Monstres invisibles was a naturalistic roman de moeurs detailing the exploits of a Parisian physician during the siege of Paris in 1870, Le Docteur Fabrice (1888), issued under his own name. He did, however, publish the texts of several plays including a “revue-féerie en 2 actes et 5 tableaux,” Vers l’Avenir! [Toward the Future], addressed to the workers of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, and he seems to have thought of himself as a writer in the tradition of Molière; one of his endeavors was the one-act comedy Le Médicin de Molière (1878). His last works to be published included two advertised under the heading “roman scénique contemporain” [contemporary fiction in dramatic form], Alma mater! Les Victimes de la Sorbonne (1909) and La Bête à concours [The Beast in Competition] (1910).

      Like Samuel Berthoud, Rengade was a qualified physician—he always signed his plays “Dr. J. Rengade”—but, unlike Berthoud, he does not seem ever to have practiced medicine after finishing his qualificatory stints as an intern in two Parisian