The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3)

  André Couvreur

  The Exploits of Professor Tornada

  Volume 3:

  The Biocole

  The Case of Baronne Sasoitsu

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 4

  THE BIOCOLE 8

  THE CASE OF BARONNE SASOITSU 141

  IN THE AFTERLIFE 242

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 321

  Introduction

  This third volume completes the sequence of stories by André Couvreur featuring Professor Tornada. The first volume of the series contained translations of Une Invasion de Macrobes (1909) and L’Androgyne (1922), as “An Invasion of Macrobes” and “The Androgyne” respectively.1 The second volume contained translations of “Le Valseur phosphorescent” (1923) and “Les Memoirs d’un Immortel” (1924) as “The Phosphorescent Waltzer” and “The Memoirs of an Immortal”.2 The remaining two Tornada stories are “Le Biocole” (1927), here translated as “The Biocole,” and “Le Cas de la Baronne Sasoitsu” (1939), translated as “The Case of Baronne Sasoitsu.” The present volume also contains, by way of a bonus, a translation of Couvreur’s fantasy novella “En Au-delà” (1936), as “In the Afterlife”—a story in a lighter comic vein, with picks up themes from “Les Memoires d’un immortel” and includes an intriguing variant of the metamorphic motif of L’Androgyne.

  Had the publisher Albin Michel followed through with the four-volume contract he offered Couvreur in 1922 for a series of stories featuring Professor Tornada, “Le Biocole” would have been the last of them, and it does provide a conclusion of sorts, although it might not have been planned with that in mind, and eventually turned out not to be the last item in the sequence. Whereas its three predecessors and its successor are all intrusive fantasies of the kind typically making up segmental series—which is to say that they introduce their innovations as anomalies and follow a conventional story-arc that disposes of the anomaly and restores the status quo at the end, “Le Biocole” follows the bolder pattern of Une Invasion de macrobes in presenting a serious and permanent disruption of the world.

  Such stories usually permit sequels only if the author is prepared to set them in a more distant future of the disrupted world, but just as Couvreur had previously ignored that principle and simply reincarnated the mercurial Tornada in an undisturbed present, he did the same again when he brought him back, rather belatedly, for one more adventure. According to the preface that Claude Demecq provided to the 1998 reprint of Une Invasion de macrobes, the author also began a seventh story, entitled “La Mort du Soleil” [The Death of the Sun] and appears to have planned that as the first of a trilogy, to be continued with “La Fuite” [The Flight] and concluded with “Le Nouveau Soleil” [The New Sun], but he was interrupted, firstly by the outbreak of World War II, and then by decrepitude and death. That further exercise too, to judge by the projected titles of the three elements, would not have been content with the conventional story-arc of normalizing intrusive fantasy.

  In breaking out of the straitjacket imposed by the narrative requirement of restoring the status quo in a story’s conclusion, “Le Biocole” is liberated to take wing, and extrapolate the potential effects of its innovative biotechnology on society—and, in so doing, to recover some of the imaginative bravado of Couvreur’s first extravagant philosophical fantasy, the magnificent Caresco, surhomme (1904).3 Indeed, it is in “Le Biocole” that Tornada, who had already taken on Caresco’s surgical skill, also acquired the full measure of his vaulting ambition, becoming the creator of a utopian enclave and awarding himself vainglorious titles, beginning with the eponymous appellation and then following Caresco’s example in terming himself the Superman, even going so far as to proclaim himself God and declaring his ability to outdo “the Other” in his large-scale conquest of death.

  The evidence of the story suggests that the development in question was not planned in advance, and that when Couvreur began writing it, he intended it as mystery story akin to the policiers that were rapidly becoming the most popular French genre of the period—the kind of story, in fact, that “Le Cas de la Baronne Sasoitsu” is. Had he not got carried away with his idea and abandoned that planned story-arc instead of another, the mystery of the apparent duplication of the story’s protagonist would presumably have been cleared up, and his rival for the inheritance would have remained much more involved in the plot as an ongoing antagonist.

  Fans of the mystery genre might think that the whimsical deviation was an error that wrecked the story, but lovers of speculative fiction will merely regret that it required a required a perverse impulse to make the author of Caresco, surhomme take flight for a second time into the empyrean of the imagination, and also that the flight in question was then restricted by limitations of space—Oeuvres Libres, by then Couvreur’s only market, could not accommodate lead stories in excess of 40,000 words in length. The result of that limitation is that the story becomes patchy, and views the transformations of society it imagines from a very limited viewpoint; but that is the kind of limitation with which all writers of such fiction had to cope, in an era when market hostility to speculative fiction was at its 20th-century peak.

  “Le Cas de la Baronne Sasoitsu” is fitted much more closely to the policy of trying to sneak an item of speculative fiction into the marketplace by disguising it as a murder mystery, but illustrates very clearly the essential flaw in that strategy—which is that once the genuinely important matter of the potentially world-changing scientific innovation is introduced into the story’s scheme, the question of who actually murdered Baron Sasoitsu becomes paltry by comparison—and the narrative effort required to close the story-arc conventionally, by refusing to let the idea take flight and change the world, begins to seem manifestly perverse.

  Fortunately, perversity could never be out of place in a story featuring Professor Tornada, who is a personification of constructive perversity—although the two stories translated here demonstrate very clearly that his previous reputation as a mad scientist was based on the erroneous assessment of a world that is so utterly and obstinately mad (not to mention stupid, hypocritical and pusillanimous) that he is virtually the only person in it who is, at times, authentically sane. He started out his eccentric career in Une Invasion de macrobes reduced by unkind opposition to the condition of a gibbering maniac, but he has come a long way in the course of the subsequent five stories, in which he features as both resurrectee and resurrector. Alas, as the conclusions of both “Le Biocole” and “Le Cas de la Baronne Sasoitsu” point out, the world remains unworthy of him, stubbornly unwilling to benefit from any kind of sanity he offers.

  What fun it would have been to see him at full stretch, though, rising to the challenge of the death of the Sun!

  The translations of the three stories that follow were made from the London Library’s copies of Oeuvres Libres nos. 72 (June 1927), 214 (April 1939) and 178 (April 1936) respectively.

  Brian Stableford

  THE BIOCOLE

  To my daughter Denise

  Chapter I

  It was nearly midnight and the old painter Théophraste Lapastille had been dying since morning. After seventy-five years of life, all consecrated to labor, there was more hardship still to come in dying!

  The lamp set on a nearby table revealed his eyes, sunken in the orbits, and his meager chest raised with increasing rarity by his last respiratory spasms. Beneath the tangle of his entirely white beard, however, a great serenity ennobled his features. He seemed to be forgiving society for having failed to re
cognize his talent as a landscape painter, and for having left him to struggle throughout a long, sterile life.

  At his bedside, profiled in the half-light, was his maidservant Mélanie. Almost as old as him, the companion for forty years of his struggles and privations, she was inundating him, before the definitive separation, with the distraught gaze the Mary Magdalen lavished upon the expiring Christ.

  What would become of her on earth without her master? What use would her arms be henceforth, if she no longer had to care for him? Was Heaven, therefore, no longer Heaven, which refused to take them both at the same time? Oh, to be sure, she would not profit for long from the little money she had saved to shelter her from poverty. All the better, to join him more rapidly! And for the first time, a resentment against fate was born in the profoundly generous soul of the old serving woman.

  Tears would have given her some relief, but she forced herself not to weep. How could one tell whether the dying might not perceive what was happening around them? By virtue of a supreme commiseration, she even contrived to smile at the expiring man.

  Then, in order to forget the present, and also the somber future, she began to glean moments from her memories. There were joyous ones, Théophraste Lapastille having retained the whimsy of a young artist into old age. But there were also painful ones, and Gehenna had too often shown its fangs in the lodgings, when the painter was obstinate in not dipping into his modest heritage, in order to save it for whichever of the two of them died the later.

  Mélanie recalled her arrival in the studio, perched on the fifth and final floor of a humble building in the Rue de Montparnasse. At first, the bright light of the main room had seduced her, but on leaving her first place in the home of well-to-do bourgeois she had soon become alarmed by the welcome that she had been given here.

  The master, a lanky fellow in a scarlet toga, while laying out his conditions, threw his paintbrush into the air and caught it in flight. He declared to her, singing like the comedian at the Théâtre de Montparnasse on operetta days, that he expected a willing servant. She would, to be sure, do the housework, the cooking and darn his socks, but she would also serve him as a model. He even made her turn around, and back again, to see how she was put together. Then, he showed her their bedrooms, as well as the kitchen—three narrow rooms, captive in a gallery to which access was gained by a ladder-like stairway, only separated from one another by quilted curtains.

  Those initial observations had nearly put Mélanie off. Oh, no, she was not made to sleep in that garret, cook in that redoubt and, above all, to strike poses like those brazen creatures one passed in the street. She had a traditional soul, and Bohemia frightened her. She was, therefore, about to retire when she noticed the eyes of the scarlet-clad Roman: eyes of a blue similar to the cornflowers of the fields, with such an honest and tranquil gleam that she was immediately conquered—and so she had hitched her life to that radiance.

  For forty years she had slept in the gallery; she had prepared the meals and washed the dishes between the two curtains and, when she was not doing housework, had consented to adopt poses, which were, in fact, perfectly decent, for Théophraste Lapastille only every half-undressed the nymphs that he placed in each of his landscapes. What, in any case, is more virginal than a nymph—the word signifies “veiled woman,” and also “bride”—who is a goddess of health, and of healing...

  So, in accordance with the needs of the location, Mélanie sometimes appeared crowned with flowers, sometimes waving ribbons, sometime holding an urn, sometimes on the point of entering or emerging from a clear pool. She was a naiad next to a spring, a nereid at the crest of a wave, a limoniad next to a pool, an oread in a mountain hollow, a dryad under an oak tree.

  Thanks to her rustic beauty, and her full and harmonious figure, Théophraste Lapastille’s paintings had at first attracted attention. One dealer bought them for export to America, exploiting him. At length, however, the repetition of the same nymph had ended up wearying the art-lovers, making them forget the real seduction of the scenery in which they were placed. And as Lapastille did not have the breadth of a Corot or a Diaz, indifference passed over his work. Glory—and in a very narrow circle—only remained for Mélanie. The painter’s friends had called her “the nymph” for a long time, and Théophraste said “the old nymph.”

  In summer, when the budget permitted, they rented a cottage in the country. They spent a few months there. The master prepared his entry for the Salon, the maidservant lent him her humble assistance. Both from peasant families, brought together by the atavism of the soil, they savored those laborious vacations to the full. Those were the good days...

  Alas, they were about to end, for him, in short order! The woods, the panoramas that he fixed on his canvases, would have no more beauty henceforth. If the earth still called to Mélanie, it was only to follow him into it, as quickly as possible.

  But she shivered. Someone was knocking on the door. Borne away by the past, she had not heard them arrive on the landing. Who could be coming at this hour?

  She would not open up. The master was too poorly—so poorly that to leave him for a second was to risk not being there to venerate his last sigh. But as the appeal was renewed, more imperiously, and the painter still had a little breath in store, she decided to go and see who it was.

  An individual of about forty appeared to her on the landing. In order to climb the dark stairway he had lit the way with a candle that he was holding in the fingertips of his gloved hands. The uncertain light indicated that he was elegant, rich and authoritative.

  “Is this really where Théophraste Lapastille lives?” he asked, on the threshold.

  “It is. What do you want with him, Monsieur?”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Monsieur can’t see anyone. He’s very ill.”

  “So I heard—that’s what brings me here. I’m his cousin, Dr. Marcel Granive.”

  “Oh! You’re the cousin...”

  Deferential to all visitors, Mélanie was nevertheless able to retain a certain suspicion of this unique relative, whom she did not know, but about whom her master spoke with scorn. She knew that a feud, of which she did not know the cause, existed between the Lapastilles and the Granives. A priori, she placed the latter in the wrong.

  The newcomer did not notice, or pretended not to notice, the maidservant’s tone. As she was standing in the doorway to prevent him from coming in, he moved her aside, came into the studio, and stuck his candle into an empty candlestick. Then he turned back to Mélanie.

  “Is it very bad?”

  “Bad enough for me to beg Monsieur...” the old woman persisted.

  But he took no notice. “Has he been visited by a doctor?”

  “His own doctor, yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That my poor Master wouldn’t last the night. That’s why...”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  It was as well to let him do as he wished, in order to get his importunate visit over and done with. It was possible that he was motivated by familial respect. Anyway, who could harm her master now? Mélanie preceded the stranger up the creaking steps.

  When he was beside the bed, Dr. Granive considered the dying man coldly, and then took his pulse, more out of professional habit than to query an irremediable situation. At the same time, an avid joy was inscribed on his face.

  “He’ll be dead within the hour,” he confirmed. “It’s scarcely worth the trouble of my staying, since there’s nothing to be done. I have other patients. Take good care of him until the end, my worthy woman. As for the funeral, if you have need of me...”

  “Monsieur needn’t bother. I’ve done what’s necessary.”

  “Perfect!” said the cousin, who had recovered his self-control and signified with that word his contentment with his enquiry.

  He went back down to the studio, picked up his candle, and headed for the landing, without a word of farewell for the maidservant. Mélanie shrugged her shoulders
and went back up to the dying man.

  She had not been there for five minutes when another noise caused her to sit up straight. This time, there was a racket on the staircase. One might have thought that drunks were making the ascent in the dark, stumbling over every step. A shrill voice was encouraging them, or rallying them; it was impossible to say which. Then a whip cracked, which seemed to restore order. But the racket began again almost immediately.

  “Oh, aren’t they going to shut up! It shouldn’t be allowed!”

  She went back down to the door. As she went past she switched on the electric light in the studio—with the result that, when the door was opened, the bright light put her in confrontation with three individuals far more disquieting than the one who had just left.

  They were of modest heights, clad in hooded garments with sleeves, which permitted Mélanie to observe, in the hand of the one who seemed to be in charge, the small whip that she had heard cracking a few moments before. He raised it, moreover, at the domestic—but she did not flinch. She thought at first that she was dealing with drunken art-students in the process of stupidly larking around, or brigands who had come to burgle her, but it was neither one nor the other.

  It was worse than that. It was a mystery.

  “Is he dead?” asked the animal-tamer, his whip still raised.

  “He’s dying.”

  “So much the better. Where is he croaking?”

  “Upstairs—but you can’t come in.”

  “You think so, old woman?”

  The man turned his whip toward the other hooded figures, uttered a shrill, indefinable cry—some kind of animal onomatopoeia, like “Cui-hui!” and then stood aside to let them pass. The rascals then leapt upon Mélanie, surrounded her with muscles of steel, and tied her to a chair. She only retained from that violent action the breath of a respiration that was not human.