“I have undertaken a task that is beyond me; there being no precedent to go on, I find myself obliged to invent new forms.” 

Claude Debussy, 1885

“At this distance, there’s joy in hearing the silence of the heavenly bodies. At closer range, the harmony of the spheres gets on my nerves. It’s more pleasing to listen to the lyre of infinity when its three strings are broken. Thought rises to the secret of the skies. Everything is counted by weight and measure. Everywhere, however, emptiness is superabundant. Zero is the sacred number. Everything rests on that. Its form is mysterious. It has neither beginning nor end. It grips without grasping. Without being, it appears; and the sphere of the worlds is a great zero that traces its emptiness in empty space.”

Edgar Quinet, 1834

 

“Be patient, Brahymus, proud foster-brother of the divine Brahyma; the cataclysm that ought to deliver you and put an end to the punishment that you are suffering is nigh. The Earth is stirring, its cocoon is growing, without humans perceiving it, for the continent of tomorrow has risen by several kilometers without the equilibrium of the tides being troubled thereby. Soon, it will be possible to calculate the enormous quantity of plasma absorbed by the Saturnian larva. Without that absorption of millions and millions of tons of liquid, America and Europe would already be submerged. Patience! Only two and a half centuries separate you from your liberation. Do not harbor any more hatred for me, whose carnal envelope the snows will preserve intact, when my spirit will be far away in the astral. I salute you, O imprisoned force; be kind to those I love and those who demand of your gaze the mystery of your torment. Adieu!”

Odette Dulac, 1926

Memories Without Regrets

Regarding Ernest Cabaner

Whenever his fortune allowed him to cook for himself and eat at home, here was the recipe for his "frichti" (stew). Actually, it was quite good, and thrifty housewives could make an excellent sweet dessert out of it:

On a bed of well-cooked rice, in a large earthenware dish, a few oranges—which his sense of aesthetics arranged harmoniously—some figs, and raisins; a few prunes, some water: that’s all. He would place this strange food over a low flame and let it simmer for long hours.

So much for food.

As for love, Cabaner held the most curious ideas about women. In his mind, they were inferior and demonic beings, with rare exceptions he would cite without blinking: "Superior women, like Nini-Voyou, Madame de Staël, and Thérésa..."

This state of mind led him to conceive of a paradise reserved specifically for intellectuals. The planet of his dreams was a planet made of flesh, inhabited solely by men—superior men, of course. It was at once the mother, the nurse, the communal wife, and the sanctuary of its inhabitants.

Perhaps I should explain my friend’s fantastical vision a little. As a sanctuary, the planet offered the folds of its skin, and in winter, its forests of hair. As a nurse: rivers, lakes, and seas of milk escaped from its specialized glands. As for wife and mother, I believe I need not elaborate... let us move on.

Cabaner, hating official music, had imagined a secondary system of his own. Everything: music theory, harmony, melodic construction, counterpoint, etc. In truth, when heard, it was actually quite good. 

Charles de Sivry, 1898

“In France, I found some friends on arriving in Paris who took an interest in Indian music, among them the venerable Monsieur Edmond Bailly, who was a lover of India and its music.  With the kind help and co-operation of Lady Churchill, he arranged our first concert in Paris. I gave a few lectures on music, with demonstrations.  I met many musicians, among them Monsieur Debussy, the great composer of France, who became very much interested in our rāgas. The evening when the rāgas were played to him, he always remembered and called it 'the evening of emotions.'”

Inayat Khan, 1924

“Near the confines of the polar circle, in Canada, in Labrador, in Greenland, there exists a species of remarkable animals whose paws are made of crystal, in the form of Champagne flutes, ornamented by a round foot, similar almost to the rackets that indigenous hunters used to walk on fresh snow. Those animals are made of snow doubtless, and ice; their eyes resemble multicolor pearls. Moreover, as they dance in the moonlight, their crystal paws, striking each other, give to the rare voyageurs there the sensation of a concert where one might hear harmonicas only.”

Émile Goudeau, 1888

“Books dealing with the music of ancient Greece usually state, without comment, that the tetrachords apparently constituting the original organization of Greek music had a descending slope; their tones were listed from higher to lower pitch. In several histories of music I read in the summer of 1917, I found brief statements, at times merely footnotes, that the standard musical progressions (or scales) of all ancient cultures descended from high to low notes. The implications of this are vast and profound, indicating that a total reversal of human consciousness of sound has occurred since ancient Greece. 

“Would anyone singing or playing scales today start with high-pitched sounds and gradually descend to lower pitches? Is not the feeling and thought of rising scales absolutely ingrained in present-day musical consciousness? 

“What could have occurred to produce such a reversal in musical consciousness?”

Dane Rudhyar, 1919

 

“'The Great Leader has given his approval to the clearance of America!' trumpeted the loudspeakers from the heights and base of the Monument. 'Go and see the flying machines that will hunt the Terrans—the prodigious volvites! Seven hundred kilometers per hour…departure of the first official squadron in five minutes!'

“'Hurrah for the Great Leader! Hurrah for the Boss!' howled the raucous throats of the Terromartians.”

Theo Varlet 1921

 

The Pebble Dead of Love
A story fallen from the Moon

On the 24th tchoum-tchoum (Wéga reckoning, 7th series), a frightful moonquake devastated the Sea of Tranquillity. Horrible—or charming—fissures appeared in this virgin yet fertile soil. A flint (nothing yet of the age of split stone, and all the more so of polished stone) ventured to roll down from a lost peak and, proud of its roundness, went to lodge itself a few phthwfg from fissure A.B.33, vulgarly called Monkey-Mold. The rosy aspect of this landscape, quite new to it, a flint barely disembarked from its peak, the black manganese moss that overhung the fresh abyss, drove the rash pebble wild; it stopped hard, upright, stupid.

The fissure burst into the delicious but silent laughter peculiar to the Beings of the Atmosphere-less Planet. Its physiognomy, in this laughter, far from losing any of its grace, gained a je-ne-sais-quoi of exquisite modernity. Enlarged, yet more coquettish, it seemed to say to the pebble: “Come on in, then, if you dare!”

The latter (whose true name was SKKJRO) judged it wise to precede his amorous assault with a serenade sung in the perfumed void of magnetic oxide. He employed the imaginary coefficients of an equitation of the fourth degree. It is known that in ethereal space one obtains, by this method, fugues without equal. (Plato, bk. XV, §13.)

The fissure (its selenian name means “Augustine”) at first appeared sensitive to this homage. It was even weakening, welcoming. The pebble, emboldened, was about to abuse the situation, to roll further, to penetrate perhaps…

Here the drama begins—brief, brutal, true. A second moonquake, jealous of this idyll, shook the dry ground. The fissure (Augustine), terrified, closed forever, and the pebble (Alfred) burst with rage. From that moment dates the Age of Split Stone.

Charles Cros, 1886

“At the head of a mauve bed on which the king is sleeping, a colossal serancolin Cherub spreads his hieratic wings. The sibylline monster, whose human head, taurean wings, leonine feet and aquiline wings allegorize the quaternary of eternal knowledge, must be the tutelary guardian of Assur.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1900

“Put your eye to this powerful telescope, and follow my explanations. The island, as you doubtless know, has the form of a human body. Direct the telescope toward its contours and you’ll be able, in places, to convince yourself of it. The Superman resolved to distribute his palaces in accordance with that disposition of nature. He occupies the location of the Brain. It’s from there that he directs the thought and action of his realm. Turn the visual axis of the instrument toward that region, and you’ll perceive, confusedly, the mass of brilliant domes beneath which he presides over our destiny. It’s fantastic! You’ll see that in due course. Come and look backwards now. 

“The Heart is that immense red dome, the swelling of which you can perceive. It is, along with the Brain, the most important system in the realm. Immense factories manufacture omnial, sympathetic, telepathic and other fluids there, the services of which we appreciate every day. Telephony, lighting and the various physical energies have their origin there. Also accumulated there is atmospheric electricity, heat from the central fire, the cold of glaciers and the tidal force of the sea, previously unutilized, which our engineers have been able to store.

“To conclude, separating in the sea, there are the inferior Limbs, populated like the Arms, and the region of the Ankles, where the slaves live.”

André Couvreur, 1904

 

Across the foliated space of the twenty-seven equivalents, Faustroll conjured up into the third dimension:

From Baudelaire, E. A. Poe's Silence, taking care to retranslate Baudelaire's translation into Greek.

From Bergerac, the precious tree into which the nightingale-king and his subjects were metamorphosed, in the land of the sun.

From Bloy, the black pigs of Death, retinue of the Betrothed.

From Coleridge, the ancient mariner's crossbow and the ship's floating skeleton, which, when placed in the skiff, was sieve upon sieve.

From Kahn, one of the golden peals from the celestial goldsmiths' shops.

From Lautréamont, the scarab, beautiful as the trembling of hands in alcoholism, which vanished over the horizon.

From Maeterlinck, the lights heard by the first blind sister.

From Mallarmé, the virgin, the bright, and the beautiful today.

From Mendes, the north wind which blew upon the green sea and blended with its salt the sweat of the galley slave who rowed until he was a hundred and twenty years old.

From Péladan, the reflection, in the mirror of the shield silvered with ancestral ashes, of the sacrilegious massacre of the seven planets.

From Régnier, the sorrel plain where the modern centaur snorted.

From Rimbaud, the icicles hurled by the wind of God into the waters.

From Schwob, the scaly animals imitated by the whiteness of the leper's hands.

From Ubu Roi, the fifth letter of the first word of the first act. 

From Verlaine, voices asymptotic toward death.

From Verne, the two and a half leagues of the earth's crust.

Alfred Jarry, 1911

“I thought: Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me? I thought: Perhaps—Many have written about Edgar Poe. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him. There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum?”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1905

 

“Whereas natural or temporal music will all cease in the course of time, the principal music, whose unity can only be depicted by temporal music in successive form, and which is, in fine, the natural and divine music, will never cease.”

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, 1790

 

“I remember that, from the first measures [of Wagner's Lohengrin] I experienced one of those happy impressions that almost all imaginative men have known in dreams. I felt myself freed from the bonds of gravity. . . . Next, involuntarily, I imagined to myself the delightful state of a man gripped by a great dream in an absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and filled with a vast diffused light; an immensity with no décor except itself. Soon I experienced the sensation of a brighter light, of an intensity of light increasing so quickly that none of the nuances furnished by the dictionary would suffice to express this always renascent increase of brilliance and whiteness. Then I had the full realization of a soul moving in a luminous milieu, of an ecstasy composed of pleasure and knowledge, and soaring above and far away from the natural world.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1861

“The former editor of the Theosophical Society, Henri-Edmond Limet, known as Bailly, died on September 8th last. He was born in Lille on 19th June, 1850, at two o'clock in the afternoon.

“Like Pythagoras, Bailly believed that everything in the world, including planetary movements,‘was created and organized according to the laws governing music,’ music here defined as ‘a harmony formed of several dissonant sounds.’ Through music, he seems to suggest, one could enter into a relation with nature, the cosmos, and all else. All this builds on the theosophical idea that ‘vibrations give form and structure on both the higher and lower planes,’ and that acoustics remake the relations between the visible and the invisible."

Mercure de France, 1917

“In our age of all curiosities is it not astonishing that, apart from two or three hermits whose names each one takes care not to remember, the study of the origin of symbols is nil or almost nil? How is it that such a study, conducted with materials and documents in hand, has not tempted the young phalanx which marches, few in number but ardent, to the conquest of this other golden fleece, the Ideal? 

“Today I experienced the joy of reading a book, the work of an artist who was also a scholar and a philosopher, in which it is established that certain decorative motifs reproduced among all peoples and in all times, on monuments as well as on simple everyday objects, are not due to the simple fantasy of art workers, but constitute a family of hierograms formerly commonly read by the wise men of the whole earth, and since lost due to the eternal inconstancy of human destinies. These signs revealing the most subtle laws of creation, these keys to the mysteries, the writer of the book I am talking about, Mr. Emile-Soldi, rightly considers, as symbols of a primitive language that he calls the Sacred Language.”

Edmond Bailly, 1897

“The value of the word is purely that of a symbol. A sign of the identical unknown that we perceive in everything, it marks the front with a emblem that reminds us of that identity. All things are signs and signs of other signs. Those thoughts were engendered, confusedly, in the minds of the visitors. They had the impression of living, momentarily, in a milieu haunted by symbols.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1904

“One must never explain symbols. One must never penetrate them. He who has drawn the symbol has hidden a truth inside it, but he must not reveal it, or else why symbolize it in the first place?”

Pierre Louÿs, 1895

“Louder than a normal voice, a voice announces accidents, the temperature and declaims a chronicle or a story. Nothing is more bizarre than hearing the thousand phonographs under the arcades. Each of the “stations” carries a sign indicating the nature of the recitations. The lovers of news stop under the Voice of Events; people fond of literature sup tea under the Voice of the Poets. Those who like to relive ancient times drink within range of the Voice of India, the Voice of Rome or the Voice of Greece. The marine murmur of those confused voices causes a kind of anguish.”

Paul Adam, 1897

“I was about to finish—or near enough—The Fall of the House of Usher, but the illness has blown out my hopes. It’s obviously of little importance on Aldebaran or Sirius whether I write music or not, but I don’t like being contradicted and I take this twist of destiny very hard.”

Claude Debussy, 1916

“Naturalists tell us that the eyes of certain animals, particularly ruminants, possess a vision that magnifies things considerably. It is that perception, on a multiple scale, that earns humankind its sovereignty. That reign by optics is one of the most admirable foresights of the harmonist of worlds. It is also that visual exaggeration that cattle must enjoy, to the point of the total stupefaction, in watching trains go past, magnified for them to the measure of enormous mountains in motion.”

Henri Austruy 1925

 

“The time has come when, under the influence of Mars, millions of men are about to kill one another, hatefully, at a distance. Charnel houses will be displayed under the sun, and that star will cause a destructive atom to bloom pitilessly. It will kill as many millions by means of the infinitely small as by the gigantic engines of war.”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“In a time like ours, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed of proportions, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. It only costs ten centimes, too, just like automatic weighing scales! Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminution of the secret forces of art, which until now have been considered indestructible?”

Claude Debussy, 1913

 

“The soul, once free from its body, escapes into the atmosphere, whose electric streams carry it here and there, and whose many-shaped inhabitants it begins to perceive, like fugitive flashes in a thick mist. 

“Then there begins a desperate, vertiginous struggle on the part of the soul, which is still dull and heavy, to rise into the upper strata of the air, to free itself from earthly attraction and reach, in the heaven of our planetary system, the region proper to it and which friendly guides alone can show it. The Greek initiates identified it with the cone of shadow which the earth is always trailing behind it, which shadow reaches as far as the moon; for this reason they called it the Abyss of Hecate. In these murky depths, say the disciples of Orpheus and of Pythagoras, are tossed to and fro the souls which make desperate efforts to reach the circle of the moon, though the violence of the winds beats them back to earth by thousands.”

Édouard Schuré, 1906

 

“'What! You don’t know about the chambardoscope—an instrument invented by an Irish Priest?' None of the ladies or gentlemen was familiar with the chambardoscope. Laflemme brought out his famous old nickel watch. 'It’s not very complicated, as you can see. The instrument is rather reminiscent of a watch, with the difference that it only has one needle. The interior comprises an apparatus that’s extremely sensitive to electric currents passing through the ground. Its use is very simple. You place the instrument flat, like this. If the needle stays on the number six, there’s nothing to fear. If it inclines to the right of the six, it’s because one is dealing with positive telluric currents. If, on the other hand, it steers to the left, that announces the presence of negative currents, which are more dangerous.' All eyes were fixed attentively on the needle, which stayed impassively on the number six. 'We can sleep easy,' Laflemme concluded, cheerfully.”

Alphonse Allais, 1902

 

“'Do not believe, my dear sister, that I wander about in search of adventure and trouble the harmony of the stars. God has traced my path like he has yours, and if my course appears uncertain and wandering, it is because your rays do not extend far enough to be able to embrace the contour of the ellipse which was given to me as my career. My flaming hair is the beacon of God; I am the messenger of the suns, and I dip into their fires in order to share them along my route with young worlds who do not yet have enough warmth and with aging stars who are cold in their solitude. If I tire in my long voyages, if I have a less graceful beauty than yours, if my finery is less virginal, I am nonetheless, like you, a noble daughter of the heavens.'

“After finishing her speech, the comet shakes her mane, protects herself with her ardent shield, and dives into infinite space, where she seems to disappear forever.”

Eliphas Levi, 1854

 

“All that she has revealed to me of her mysterious studies is that she has seen, with her own eyes, plans of aircraft, submarines and automobiles dating back fifteen thousand years before Jesus Christ. She claims that writing has been lost three times on the earth. Thought-reading, which marks one of the phases of human evolution, has existed before. However, arts of speech and writing then became useless, and the spoken word and the pen became obsolete. Fortunately for the loquacious, and for poets, the universal silence of humanity is always followed by the fatal cataclysm that accompanies the somersault of the being known as the Earth, hindered by its growth in its cocoon of humus. Flic, floc! A wave from the depths inundates the continents…and everything begins all over again...”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“Finally, the last scene: Humanity is celebrating its salvation with a grand fête that is unfurling through the Champ-de-Mars, transformed into a flower-garden. The cordial and pompous atmosphere of old is reborn. Orpheus is culminating on a throne, surrounded by the masters of occultism. In the air, the souls of disincarnate adepts form choirs. Up above, the sign of the absolute, the universal pentacle of Martinism, is shining like a sun.”

Willy, 1900

 

“The sea, this afternoon, is quite ordinary, uniformly and extensively dark green; it is an endless enchainment of white foam lighting up, going out, lighting up again, it is a legion of sheep swimming, drowning, bobbing up again, and never arriving, until they are ambushed by darkness.” 

Jules Laforgue, 1887

 

“Don’t put Arkel in the trunk! He doesn’t like it.”

Claude Debussy, 1915

 

“Music represents the maximum of vibrations in matter before it turns into light. In the perpetual effort of subtilization, which comes out of the bowels of the earth and takes on its surface the various aspects of minerals, vegetables, animals, sentiments and thoughts, music is at the summit of man's sentiment and intelligence. As matter in vibration, it masks the last limit between thought and fire. Music is the grand ardent halo of the invisible but sonorous flame that is the human will. In the hierarchy of 'densities' of matter, it represents the beginning of fire, just as the sentiment that follows sensation represents the beginning of thought.”

Riciotto Canudo 1911

 

“‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’

“Either because the crocodile had partisans in the audience or the magic of its words operated naturally, some of the spectators were indeed heard repeating those final words: ‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’ A few members of the audience were even seen to bow down, as if to worship it, and a colossal altar suddenly formed in front of it. At the same time, a head even more colossal formed at the summit.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798

 

“My art is my prayer.”

Richard Wagner, 1868

 

“Richard Wagner and his works represent a great sum of occult power.”

Rudolf Steiner, 1908

 

“There should be in the world a centre of scientific and philosophical research, where the most notable scholars, in possession of new ideas, could readily experiment the value of the hypotheses constructed either by themselves or by their disciples. A centre from which nothing would drive away the good will. A centre wherein a world record could be kept of the entire range of the progressive imagination of man, and where nothing usefully conceived by the human brain would be lost. A centre from which economic and practical knowledge would flow to all parts of the world. A centre and a city outside of all historical and social quarrels, of all economic and national rivalries, a centre belonging, without possible exception, to all. To the Spirit of all. To the Spirit only.”

Paul Adam, 1893

 

“Wagner was one of the masters of Symbolism; his conception of art, his philosophy, his very formula were at the origin of Symbolism. It was impossible to get to the bottom of Wagnerism without encountering Symbolism; that is to say, it was impossible to expound the Wagnerian conception without recognizing in it the doctrine, or at least one of the primordial elements, of the new poetic doctrine.”

Édouard Dujardin, 1936

 

“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Maurice Denis, 1890

 

“The universe is composed of several billions of suns, separated from one another by trillions of leagues, but nevertheless sustained in the luminiferous ether by the mutual attraction of all and the movement of each. While you are traveling toward the constellation of Hercules, our beautiful star is traveling toward the Pleiades; Sirius is hastening toward Columba, and Pollux launching itself toward the Milky Way. All these colossal existences are running through the eternal void, and when you are a star, you will do likewise.”

Jane de la Vaudère, 1893

“I said to music that I gave it the vastest scope to paint whatever it wanted, but I imposed two conditions on that: the first was that the diapason would remain in my archives; the second, that the range of the voice and its instruments would be limited to the planetary scale, like nations—except that I only imposed the second condition for a time, until Herschel had discovered a new planet, which would be the bass register of a new scale, and the tonic of a new octave.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798

 

Metempsychosis

Long after all life

Shall have ceased upon the widowed earth,

The sorrowful shades of humankind,

The plaintive souls of humankind,

Will return to visit

The widowed earth

Where all life shall have ceased.

They will leave behind the new bodies

Which the tyrannical right hand of God

Will have assigned to their wandering fate,

Upon some distant planet,

And piously will come to visit

The widowed earth.

Then their spiritual eyes

And their immaterial ears

Will recognize the forms, the colors, and the sounds

That were the works of their diligent hands,

Through the piled-up and forgotten ages.

That were the works of their feeble hands,

Yet hands stronger still

Than the Void.

While within them throbbed the life of earth

And their mouths proclaimed

The thrice-holy name of immortal Art.

And when, come the returning dawn, another sun

Calls them back to the bodies assigned

To their wandering fate,

Upon some distant planet,

Each wandering shade, each plaintive soul

Will say: —I dreamed a wondrous dream.

And, under the lash of eternal Beauty

And of eternal Melancholy,

Humankind will once more subdue—

Upon that distant planet—

The colors, the forms, and the sounds.

Marie Krysinska, 1890

 

“It was a small consolation for Mrs. Dubonnet when Mary Garden, star of the L'Opéra-Comique, drove up in her Renault one day and bargained for the red curtain cord.”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1915

 

“Debussy was a very, very strange man.”

Mary Garden, 1951

“A poet has said: 'The time has come to conquer the planets and mount an assault on the stars.'

“'We have found our way,' proclaimed all the newspapers, 'the way dimly foreseen for so many centuries! Not the vanished dream of eastward or westward, northward or southward expansion! No, expansion into the skies, expansion towards the stars, where no one shall bar our route!'”

Andre Mas, 1913

 

“I can, as Poe would have it, create revolving worlds and fiery, howling spheres, with the sound of a material dispossessed of a soul; and with this I have surpassed even Lucifer, for I can force disorganized things to blaspheme. Night and day, at my will, skins which were once alive and metals perhaps only not yet so, proclaim inanimate words; and if it is true that the voice creates universes in space, the ones I have it create are worlds which die before having lived. In my house dwells a Behemoth who bellows at the wave of my hand; I have invented a talking machine.”

Marcel Schwob, 1892

 

“Would a luminous insect imprisoned in a block of transparent amber, if it were still alive, have another vision of the universe than that of a milieu transparent and solid to infinity? The highest theogonies all revert to the story of the lion giving his gods the face of a lion. Thousands of men superior in intelligence continue to accept that puerility serenely. If the triangles of geometry books could talk and assemble in council, all of them—the right-angled, the isosceles and the countless host of scalenes—would quickly conclude, by means of irrefutable formulae, that God, if he exists, is evidently the triangle in itself, and perfect. There would be wars of religion in a such a fantastic world, with the army of curved figures, convinced that God cannot be anything other than the perfect circumference.”

Gabriel de Lautrec 1903

 

“No stupid self-respect! The important thing is to succeed. Yes, let’s get together with the other worlds. Let’s create an international and intercosmic company to destroy… to destroy!” Penkenton bit into the repeated world as if it were prey between the teeth of a tiger. “Destroy everything: worlds, suns, space itself, and time! Annihilate everything, engendering nothingness! What an achievement—greater than creating being! And what a god man will be when he has achieved that creation! But one man, one company, or one world isn’t sufficient to the task; we need for associates the 115 planets that surround us and the 38 million suns that flame at the end of our telescopes. So let’s get on with it, without wasting a moment, and reach an understanding with our allies.”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1883

“Then I saw strange animals moving in all directions, mingling their dazzling scales, twisting their fiery coils, walking, crawling, flying and responding to one another with profound and sonorous voices like the notes of an organ. There were sphinxes shaking their bandelets and chimeras with green phosphorescent eyes spitting fire through their nostrils and striking their foreheads with long dragon’s tails. There were griffins, half lion and half vulture, clenching their red paws and stretching out their blue necks, and basilisks with violet bodies undulating in the sand. There were a thousand strange, scarcely suspected, beasts: tragelaphs, half stag and half ox, alligators with the feet of roe deer, goats with the hindquarters of donkeys, owls with serpents’ tails, gigantic chameleons, and terrifying monsters sometimes as tall as mountains and sometimes as slender as reeds. There were immense metal flowers on the legs of women, and dragonflies whose deployed wings resembled the sails of ships and whose bodies shone like steel yardarms.”

Jane de la Vaudere, 1893

“Hashish will be taken under the auspices of Moreau and Aubert-Roche. Arrive between five and six at the latest. You will have your share of a light dinner and await the hallucination.”

Fernand Broissard to Théophile Gautier, 1845

 

A small high-pitched voice caused them to turn round. “Glory to the Superman! May he favor you with an operation, Messieurs!” 

It was a legless man, posed on a silently-wheeled pedestal equipped with a deflector reminiscent of a locomotive’s cow-catcher. His torso was swathed in a kind of green leather sheath bolted to the pedestal, and that armature, hermetically sealed, only opened on the right side, to give passage to a single arm, and at the neck, to let through the head.  But what secured the originality of the face most of all was the complete absence of a lower jaw, replaced by a kind a glabrous membrane that extended to the lower lip, partly opening an entirely toothless mouth. 

“I shall proclaim it loudly forever! I’m perfectly happy, firstly because I’m Dr. Caresco’s masterpiece, and secondly because I’ve greatly diminished the chances of physical suffering and mental disappointments!”

“Would it not have been more complete, in that case, to suppress your existence totally?” said Choumaque. 

“When the Superman wishes to take me!” affirmed the half-man, with pious respect. 

André Couvreur, 1904