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William’s Angel (1838) is based on the story of William FitzOsbert, who led a popular uprising by the citizens of London in the spring of 1196, and was executed. S. Henry Berthoud goes on to weave a semi-mythical retelling of this incident, that includes the characters of Robin Hood and Richard the Lionheart. This book…
The present volume contains De Lautrec’s short novel The Sacred Fire (1904), and a selection from short prose poems (1898). The latter benefit from being juxtaposed with the former because one of the episodes of the novel reveals the circumstances in which they were composed, with not only explains their surreal nature but allows them…
Young knight Konrad de Felseneck, last descendant of a noble line, discovers that a curse hangs over his family: women are the curse of the Felseneck since the betrayal of his ancestor during the first crusade. Then he falls into the hands of the beautiful and cruel Gertrude, a young widow whose previous husbands have…
André Couvreur’s Human Seed, (1903) was one of the most shocking works of its era, one that attempted more fervently than any other to push back the boundaries of the conventionally-unmentionable, such as contraception, abortion and eugenics, illustrated through the lives of the eighteen children of the Grignon family, afflicted by the ongoing social disasters…
The novel is set in the 1480s, during the war in which the French annexed Bretagne. At the Benedictine Abbey in Paimpol, a scholarly monk named Ollivier, reputed to have practiced necromancy, is buried under the watchful eyes of two Dominican heresy hunters, the burial only attended by his fellow scholar Brother Primael, who believes…
Paul Furneret, a young artist working in Paris in 1901, is invited to attend a séance at Camille Flammarion’s observatory after having participated in an experiment in “automatic drawing” at another séance a week earlier, in which he drew a picture, while unconscious under hypnosis, of a young woman recognized by one of the participants…
Paul Furneret returns to Paris after a four-year interval. He again contacts Camille Flammarion, Jane de La Vaudère and Madame Zosima;, who now runs a women’s refuge and employs hypnosis to enable women to “remember” their alleged past incarnations. One night, he is intercepted by Baron de Rochemure, who had recognized his daughter in the…
The concluding volume of the trilogy, Living with the Dead is set in and around Toulouse, shortly after the death in Paris of Jane de La Vaudère. Madame Louvot is now serving as Paul Furneret’s housekeeper. He is living close to an old convent leased by the residents of which apparently have orders not to…
The speculative motif featured in The Bad Dream–the possibility of suspended animation achieved by means of refrigeration–has a substantial literary history in works of fantasy. Jules Hoche’s depiction of a technology of suspended animation is however, much closer in spirit and speculative technological depiction to modern development in “cryonics” than anything that has gone before,…
The Alluring (1931) is what is known as a Robinsonade–an account of a castaway on a desert island and his hard battle for physical and psychological survival. Félicien Champsaur, having decided to write a Robinsonade, aware that he was following in a great tradition, wanted to make it a Robinsonade that would go further than…
Double-Head (1927) is a bold narrative about stock-market manipulation, extrapolating the notion of technologically-aided telepathy while detailing a quest to rediscover the alchemists’ fabled philosopher’s stone. The novel is sufficiently innovative and intelligent to transcend its deliberately popular format, has considerable imaginative substance, and deserves to be reckoned a significant contribution to the genre. It…
In 1737, French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) constructed a life-sized automaton known as the Flute Player, which established him as a pioneer in the field. It was swiftly followed by a Tambourine Player and the Digesting Duck. Vaucanson’s endeavors in matters of industrial automation are largely forgotten, but the ingenious toys he built in…
Written in collaboration in 1922 by the author of Felifax, this five-volume saga (of which this is the first), purporting to chronicle the early years of the 21st century, takes place in a quasi-utopia-like Earth, where war no longer exists, poverty has been banished, men no longer consume meat, and, thanks to the genius of…
Weird fiction has long been not only unappreciated but actively maltreated by orthodox esthetic evaluation, but its stature has improved considerably in modern times, and that has encouraged a reexamination of the genre’s history. It has required nearly two centuries since the beginnings of modern weird fiction in the cradle of the Romantic Movement for…
Written in collaboration in 1922 by the author of Felifax, this five-volume saga (of which this is the second), purporting to chronicle the early years of the 21st century, takes place in a quasi-utopia-like Earth, where, thanks to the genius of master scientist Oronius, humanity has mastered natural forces. However, Oronius’ former colleague Otto Hentzen,…
This anthology collects stories belonging, at least approximately, to the genre of scientific fiction, which were published in various periodicals between 1886 and 1938. Many of them were never reprinted in book form. The early stories–which are arranged in the chronological order of their publication–were produced in an era of relative optimism with regard to…
