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Leonie Rouzade, angry, combative, and prominent in the feminist cause, delivered a scathing social commentary in this pair of tales from 1872. When a shipwreck strands a man in a perfect island civilization in A Voyage to the Isle of Utopia, he, after confronting a parade of didactic lectures, accepts that the rigors of logic…
Meet Dr. Marc Vanel, son of a scientist and a beautiful exotic spy, polymath, engineer, gifted with prodigious strength and intelligence, trained by the Brahmins of India. When Vanel acquires the power of invisibility, he becomes Homo-Deus, invisible but for his emerald green eyes, haunting the dreams of evil men and lovely women alike. Felicien…
Edmond Haraucourt’s Daâh: The First Human (1914) begins with the proto-humans Dâh and his wives, Hock and Ta, living a solitary existence, and then sketches, episodically, an account of their slow ascent towards civilization. With Daâh serving as a kind of “collective hero,” the novel proceeds through a sequence of epiphanies that includes the invention…
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 dual nature of the vampire, stretching between love and death, creates a moral ambiguity which is omnipresent in its literary treatment, incorporating and contrasting seduction and horror, heroism and villainy. It only reflects the nature of life after death, and how it is perceived by its surrounding culture. Is it a desirable dream, or…
The stories contained in this collection, featuring some of the most famous vampires in literary history, incorporate all of these contradictions; in them, vampires can be both super-human and sub-human, sexual predators and impotent, romantic and passionate, and yet devoid of soul. Ultimately, the vampire is our own face, reflecting in the mirror of our…
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…
