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The Song of the Skylark (1880) is quite uncategorizable, defying classification as a novel, yet its complexity stretching the notion of a book-length “poem in prose”. It is unique in the annals of French literature, although it has certain affinities with Edgar Quinet’s Merlin the Enchanter (1860), which similarly attempts to fuse a transfiguration of…
Towards the end of the 17th century, under the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV of France, in Brittany, Count Guy de Rohan is dispossessed of his great wealth and exiled due to the villainous schemes of the Royal Steward and Alain Polduc, a jealous relative. His son is dead, but his daughter, Valentine,…
French Legionnaire Battron parachutes into Sicily to lay the groundwork for the allies invasion of Italy during WWII ! July, 1943. In preparation for the British-American invasion of Sicily, Battron parachutes onto the island with a mixed group of Allied intelligence operators. Led by his old comrade Captain Bryan Watson-Cole (SOE), and a young Lt….
French Legionnaire Battron is on a mission in Sicily with a group of Americans to assist in the Allies invasion of Italy during WWII ! Sicily, Summer 1943. Occupying various obscure outposts in the mountains around Mt. Etna, Battron and his intelligence team has observed and reported on German columns rushing toward the Allied invasion…
1968. Donald J. Trump, moonlighting for the Tsar’s secret police, is dispatched by his handler to Tijuana to stop a diabolical plan by Republican terrorists to restart a colonial war between the French and Mexican Empires. Tsar? Empires? This satirical novel, starring the most unlikely secret agent of all, takes places on a dystopian alternate…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Zigomar is a character dreamed up by Léon Sazie in 1909, two years before the now much more celebrated Fantômas. An evil, nefarious character, a criminal genius, Zigomar was so popular in his time that his picture could be found on bags of bread, pipes and matchboxes. Masked, hooded, or in disguise, Zigomar constantly bedevils…
The Contes de fées, defined here as tales that contain fées, i.e.: “fays” (as opposed to “fairies,” which in British literary history referred to imaginary entities often different from the French fées), were invented by aristocratic women of the 17th century, such as Madame d’Aulnoy, the Comtesse de Murat, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, etc. In…
Françoise le Marchand deserves to be reckoned a significant, if slightly shadowy, figure in the revival of contes de fées in 1730s and 1740s France. It is not obvious why either of the two novellas translated here, Florine (1713) and Boca (1735) had to be published illicitly, but it undoubtedly reflects the fact that the…
The Comte de Caylus was one of the major writers of the “second wave” of fairy tales produced in the 1730s and 1740s, when the publication of unlicensed works became far too abundant for effective suppression by the authorities. He displayed a flair for the bizarre that continually edged into the surreal, and never entirely…
The Marquis de Lupiano (1858) is the fourth and final volume in a sprawling saga that tells the story of the secret government’s spy network, the Secret Bureau, that intercepts and opens all private mail. In this tome, we finally discover the hidden origins of the mercurial Marquis de Lupiano and his connection to the…
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