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Monique is an emancipated French woman who leaves home to escape a marriage of convenience to a man whom her parents have forced on her. She then succumbs to all sorts of carnal temptations including a lesbian love affair with a singer. The scandal provoked by Victor Margueritte’s La Garçonne (1922), here translated as The…
The Companion (1923) by Victor Margueritte is the second novel in the trilogy that begins with his 1922 controversial best-seller, The Bacheloress, and concludes with The Couple (1924). In contrast to the victimized Monique Lerbier, heroine of The Bacheloress, who appears in this novel in a supporting role, Annik Raimber is, a staunch proto-feminist with…
The Couple (1924) is the concluding volume in Victor Margueritte’s trilogy, following The Bacheloress (1922) and The Companion (1923). It features both of the couples formed in the course of the earlier novels-Monique Lerbier and George Blanchet, and Annik Raimbert and Amédée Jacquemin, respectfully-but focuses primarily on their children and the broad social implications of…
This elaborate French utopia, written by Monsieur de Listonai (pseudonym of Daniel Jost Villeneuve) and published in 1761, describes the journey of an inhabitant of the Earth to the hidden face of the Moon which is reached via a flying space galley, complete with pilot, navigator and crew. There, he meets the Selenite Arzame who…
Delphine de Girardin (1804-1855) was the daughter of famous writer and playwright Sophie Gay (1776-1852). She began writing at an early age, publishing two books of poems in 1824 and 1824, and a popular collection of children’s stories in 1833. She later married writer-journalist Emile de Girardin (1802-1881) and became an important figure in the…
Armand Lavarède is a penniless young journalist who inherits a fortune from a wealthy cousin on the condition that he must first travel around the world in under a year with only five “pennies” in his pocket. If he fails, the money will go his creditor, the rapacious M. Bouvreuil, but during his journey, Lavarède…
In Voyages and Adventures of Jacques Massé (c.1710), Simon Tyssot de Patot dispatched his protagonist to an imaginary land in an heretofore unknown austral continent, where he comes across a “lost world” utopian civilization inhabited by strange creatures that have survived from prehistoric times. The text also includes an early appearance by the Wandering Jew…
Pierre Véron (1833-1900) was a frequent contributor to two of the most popular Parisian humorous papers, Le Charivari (which served as the model for the English magazine Punch) and the Journal Amusant, until becoming editor-in-chief of both in 1874, retaining that position until a few months before his death. Although The Merchants of Health (1862)…
This is the ninth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique. The eight stories collected here were published between 1860 and 1928. They include two remarkable short novels: Charles Guyons’s A Voyage to the Planet Venus (1888), a significant early “planetary romance” in which…
Originally published in 1896, The Missing Men of the Sirius tells the extraordinary adventure of three French sailors whose ship was sunk in the Mediterranean Sea. While everyone believed them dead, they are captives inside the sunken wreck; they escape and discover an underground Egyptian city and, through mazes and tombs, eventually manage to return…
Felicien Champsaur’s Nora, The Ape-Woman (1929) is a sequel to both Homo-Deus and Ouha, King of the Apes. Nora is the story of two hybrids: a beautiful dancer sired by an orangutan and a human scientist, further humanized by surgery, and the son of a native woman and the part-human orangutan Ouha, King of the…
Odette Dulac’s The War of the Sexes (1926) describes a strangely fanciful sexual biology, combined with insectile analogies and an astrological theory of evolution. It incorporates an idiosyncratic mysticism based on Buddhist and Hindu ideas, filtered through the reinterpretations of theosophist feminism. The result of that triple layering of fantastic notions produced a unique literary…
The Ultimate Pleasure (1925) is a dystopia that describes in stark, uncompromising terms a future tyranny and the struggle of its heroine, known only as B 309. In that world, a small technocratic elite use deliberate terror in a desperate attempt to preserve the last remnant of the human race from a worldwide disaster precipitated…
In The Murderer of the World (1910), Gaston de Wailly imagined that the Earth is a living being, whose surface we inhabit as parasites. Moved by revenge against the “evil beast” which destroyed his family, a mad scientist schemes to literally murder the world by striking one of its vital organs. The novel may seem…
Jules Gros’ The Fossil Man (1882) is a mildly satirical comedy describing the progress of an 1876 international scientific expedition to a fictitious island south-west of New Zealand, which comes across the existence of fossilized human remains. The theme was still very controversial when the story was set, especially in Catholic France, where religious opposition…
The World of Mercury was first published in 1750 before Voltaire’s MicromÃ(c)gas (1752) or Tiphaigne’s Amilec (1753). In developing his world, Béthune shaped one of the few “Creationist fantasies” entirely unaffected by religious dogma. His Mercury shines with originality, adventurousness and, especially, bizarrerie. The description of the aerial conflict between the defenders of Mercury’s Great…
