The impenitent artist who called himself Raphael went into a publisher’s office. Seeing that he had not been able to achieve anything with painting and sculpture, he had devoted himself to poetry. “Monsieur,” he said, “I’ve brought you Vercingetorix Before Caesar, an epic in verse, which I shall have printed at my own expense. I only ask you to put the name of your house on the cover.” 

The editor stared. 

“Oh, have no fear,” said Raphael, “it’s poetry written in the modern fashion. I say that two and two make five at the beginning of every chapter, I mention a young mother who eats her baby with asparagus tips and, half the time, I write things I can’t even comprehend myself. So...” 

“Monsieur...” 

“That’s not all. The work will be printed on emery paper, so that the buyers of my books can always use it for scouring their saucepans.” 

“Monsieur,” replied the editor, with dignity, “here, we only publish works in verse whose pages can serve as fly-paper.” 

Raphael became livid, put his hands to his neck, and fled.

Jean Rameau, 1887

 

“And what astonished him even more, and yet did not astonish him at all, but seemed, on the contrary, to be the most natural thing in the world, was that he soon ceased to distinguish his own face in the mirror, discerning nothing there but a vague green, marshy stagnation—and then he saw, little by little, designed in the floating, melting, scarcely-perceptible features of an apparition on the brink of vanishing, a new face. It was the face of the Undine. She had water-weed for hair, softly serpentine. Her pupils darted a pale glaucous fire, in which all the gray-green of the ambient water was concentrated, She was weeping—and, at the same time, a furtive smile wandered over her wan lips. And all of that was very distant, very alien, very deep, gently and infinitely.”

Jean Richepin, 1921

 

“There, through the monster telescope, the young man saw singular changes taking place on one of the nearer planets. 'What’s that?'

“'Signals. It’s the beginning of the Internationale of Worlds.'

“The young man thought momentarily that he was dealing with a madman, but Dr. Gaël, drawing himself up to his full height, said: 'Pay attention— we’re going to reply.'”

Louise Michel, 1888

 

“The souls of many persons well known on this earth are said to be reincarnated on Jupiter, one of the worlds nearest to perfection; and much surprise has been felt on hearing it stated that persons who, when here, were not supposed to merit such a favour, should have been admitted into so advanced a globe.”

Allen Kardec, 1869

“All the Stars and all the Planets are inhabited, and with a limitless variety, because Nature likes nothing as much as diversity, having thrown it with full hands into those different worlds. None, according to them, is similar to any other; there is always a Sun and Planets, but that repetition excepted, the rest of the symmetry is infinitely diversified; nothing that can be seen and can be known in one Sun is found in another. There are different Animals, different Plants, other human forms, other senses, other knowledge, new ideas, other sentiments, and all of that drawing nearer to the best and most perfect without ever attaining it. They say that all those Suns, so beautiful, so vast and so diverse are as many magnificent habitations that the sovereign Master has prepared for us, and in every one of which we shall have nothing to desire of everything that might make us happy, so long as we want to live in that delightful Fatherland.”

Chevalier de Béthune, 1750

 

"It’s no longer possible to live without the aid of Science, the precious treasure of which increases every day—but that very wealth makes it increasingly difficult to learn; it’s therefore necessary that intelligence becomes increasingly powerful.”

At that moment, a roseate light filled the room, neutralizing that of the lighting microbes. 

“A telephonic communication,” said Sinusia. 

It was, indeed, by such signals that the ancient bells had been replaced. There was no longer any apparent receiver or transmitter; it was sufficient to speak in the direction of the ceiling. The voice was reproduced by a loudspeaker.

Henri Allorge, 1922

 

“I believe that it ought to be the duty of every artist to depart as completely as possible from the place and subject of his previous success.

“The principal fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas. Most of them reproduce them twice, three, even four times. They have neither the courage nor the temerity to leave what is certain for what is uncertain, There is, however, no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one’s whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures. 

“A person who repeats himself is like an imitator, don’t you think? That is the great evil of today. Art has become almost an industry. But, believe me, those who are resigned to this truth are not real artists. If one day I become like that, I shall lay down my pen forever. I shall not complain but quietly go away to tune pianos. Claude Debussy: piano tuner.”

Claude Debussy, 1910

“When Multipliandre had risen up, by means of his wings, to 32,000 feet above the world’s surface, there was no more breathable air. It was impossible to make provision for that; there was only one course of action to take and he took it. That was discorporation. He flew over the highest peak in the entire world and left his body on the inaccessible point of a crag, after having wrapped it up well in furs, having treated it with a health-preserving gel, with which he filled the stomach, the mouth and all the bodily apertures and having placed it so securely that the winds and tempests could not dislodge it. Then, his detached soul could go wherever it wished, because, no longer being in the sphere of corporate life but that of souls, he could dispense entirely with entry into a body.”

Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne, 1802

Memories of Rollinat

When I entered the café, I saw him seated with his back to the window. His gaze, emerging from the half-shadow of his face, looked like a pair of will-o'-the-wisps; a remotely melancholy gaze, that of a fallen angel who had not rebelled, darting brief glances around him.

Across those eyes floated a great lock of hair, comma-shaped, which I saw him suddenly toss back with the whole sweep of a laborer's hand accustomed to the hoe.

I went straight to him.

“Monsieur Rollinat, I have heard Pelleport speak of your poems. They possess an atmospheric kinship with Edgar Allan Poe, whom I once attempted to illustrate. He claims that you compose music resembling your poetry. You will forgive my indiscretion.”

“Sir,” he replied, “I forgive it all the more gladly because you bear a strange resemblance to my brother, alas, now dead. You say you attempted to illustrate Edgar Poe. I should be curious...”

“Oh, I readily admit that one does not illustrate Edgar Poe. One can only create something alongside him, for a publisher's purposes. I shall give you those drawings. But...your music?”

“If five flights of stairs do not frighten you, I still have some wood left and we can light a fire. It is on Rue Saint-Jacques. Do not expect a piano—it is a harpsichord.”

It was on Rue Saint-Jacques, two houses from Rue Gay-Lussac. The staircase was damp and hunchbacked, evoking the mysteries of Eugène Sue.

Rollinat lit a fire, set his pipe upon the edge of the harpsichord, and, in a glowing improvisation, seemed almost to wipe the instrument clean with sound. Its little sharp, vibrating voice jostled itself like battling drops of water in an old basin strewn with dead leaves.

“I shall play you one of Baudelaire's Spleens.”

My chair entered the wall and my whole head entered the piano; my hair, certainly, had suddenly become its strings.

I was elsewhere—elsewhere in the realms of Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, and Eugène Delacroix.

This was not music. It was language.

It seemed to me that this man rolled the very heart of humanity beneath his fingers.

At four in the morning Rollinat was still singing. He nearly got evicted.

Georges Lorin, 1913

“In our belief solar radiation is maintained by the continuous, unbroken succession of souls, in the sun. These pure and burning spirits are replacing the emanations perpetually sent through space by the sun, to the globes which surround him. 

“From their throne of fire, these souls, all intelligence and activity, behold the marvellous spectacle of the march of all the planetary globes which compose the solar world, through space. Placed in the centre of this vast world, understanding the secrets of nature, and all the mysteries of the universe, they are in possession of perfect happiness, of absolute wisdom, and of illimitable knowledge.”

Louis Figieur, 1904

“Journalists! It is no longer a profession. Journalism has been absorbed into information, reportage into announcement or advertisement. The public, increasingly demanding, desires so much to be informed, that its members have ended up gradually, without perceiving it, informing themselves, addressing themselves to newspapers in accordance with their needs, for reportage, news, demands or advertisements, and interviewing one another!

“The newspapers themselves are very much alive and their name is legion. There are not hundreds but thousands and tens of thousands of them, which grow underfoot, arrive via post-balloons from the four corners of the world, in every format, etc., etc. 

“Newspapers no longer only appear in the morning and the evening; some have three or four different editions; they also appear at night, since the brasseries and restaurants have the liberty to remain open. Every corporation, moreover, possesses its particular bulletin, published under the direction of its syndical committee, responding to its needs and defending its interests. They include the Mouron, which is given away free in schools, the Étal, the butchers’ journal, the Lait Chaud de Paris, the organ of dairy-workers, the Flûte, the bulletin of bakers; the Mont-Doré, a specialist sheet for cheese-mongers, etc., etc.”

André Monselet, 1892

 

“The future, which always comes too late for the living, will see these things, and many others too, for the world is born, nowadays, of the union of steam and the railways. Everything that existed the day before yesterday no longer has any reason for being; the new order is already the antipodes of the old; the impossible will regenerate the world; interests are never disunited, they combine; there is no longer any distance; wheels are wings, mountains corridors, ships bridges, oceans streams. What, then, will come to pass after our generation?”

Joseph Mery, 1854

“I would also like, in these notes, to pay homage to that man of incommensurable genius, namely Jules Verne.

“My admiration for him is boundless.

“In certain pages of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, A Trip to the Moon, Mysterious Island and Hector Servadec, he raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language.

“I once had the good fortune to be received by him at Amiens, where I was doing my military service, and there shake the hand which had penned so many immortal works.

“O incomparable master, may you be blessed for the sublime hours which I have spent endlessly reading and re-reading your works throughout my life.”

Raymond Roussel, 1933

 

“'I’m far from finding the canvas restful,' I remarked. It’s as unpleasant as meditating on some of Odilon Redon’s nightmares.'”

Renée Dunan, 1924

“The Dust Fay approached a basin as large as a sea and, plunging her arm into it, she first pulled out strange plants; then animals even stranger, which were still half-plant; then free individuals, separate from one another, living mollusks, and eventually fish, which she made to jump, saying: 'That’s what Dame Dust can produce when she deposits herself on the bed of the waters. But there’s better—turn around and look at the shore.'

“In fact, I saw an arborescent vegetation rise up rapidly and become populated by reptiles and insects, while unknown beings agitated on the shore that caused me a veritable terror. 

“'Those animals won’t terrify you in the earth of the future,' said the fay. 'They’re destined to fertilize it with their remains; there aren’t any humans here yet to fear them.'

“'Wait!' I cried. 'Did you need all these massacres and all these stupidities to make us a compost heap?'

“'The great fay Nature has higher aims,' replied Dame Dust. 'She doesn’t intend to stop at the things you know. She works and invents perpetually. For her, who knows no suspension of life, repose would be death. 

“'The future will make of all of you, feeble human creatures, into fays and genii who possess science, reason and goodness. See what I am enabling you to see, and know that these first sketches of life, summarized in instinct, are closer to you than you are to what will one day be: the reign of the spirit over the earth that you inhabit. The occupants of that future world will then have the right to be as profoundly scornful of you as you are scornful today of the world of the great saurians.'”

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, 1875

“Beware in the future of works which appear to inhabit the skies; often they are a product of a dark, morose mind.” 

Claude Debussy, 1917

“Just as the human soul has its secret folds, so the cathedral. An entirety, which extends beneath the church floor, constitutes the crypt (from the Greek Κρυπτός, hidden). In this low, damp, and cold place, the observer experiences a singular sensation that commands silence: that of power united with darkness. We are here in the asylum of the dead, as at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, necropolis of the illustrious, as in the Roman Catacombs, cemetery of the Christians. Stone slabs; marble mausoleums; sepulchers; historical debris, fragments of the past. A mournful and heavy silence fills the vaulted spaces. The thousand noises from outside, those vain echoes of the world, no longer reach us. Are we about to emerge into the caves of the Cyclopes? Are we on the threshold of a Dantesque inferno, or in the underground galleries, so welcoming, so hospitable to the first martyrs?–All is mystery, anguish, and fear in this obscure cavern… Around us are numerous, enormous, massive pillars, sometimes paired, standing on their broad, chamfered bases. Short, squat, sober capitals with little projection. Rough and crude forms, where elegance and richness give way to solidity. Thick muscles, contracted under effort, which unfailingly share the formidable weight of the entire edifice. A nocturnal, mute, rigid will, tensed in a perpetual resistance to being crushed. Material force that the builder knew how to order and distribute, giving all these members the archaic appearance of a herd of fossilized pachyderms, welded to one another, rounding their bony backs, hollowing their petrified bellies under the thrust of an excessive load. A real but occult force, which exerts itself in secret, develops in the shadows, acts without respite in the depths of the work’s substructures. Such is the dominant impression experienced by the visitor while traversing the galleries of the Gothic crypts.”

Fulcanelli, 1922

 

“The Mother Superior received me afterward, affectionately but sadly.

“'Alas, my dear child!' she said. 'What an unfortunate end for one who had hoped to take the veil! That a former president of the Children of Mary should go on the stage is sad indeed. Yet Monsieur Fevêque foresaw it! He said long ago that you were a born artist.' And she added, in the same words as my aunt, 'We will pray for you!'”

Emma Calve, 1922

 

“A city like that plunges as far into the ground as it rises into the air; its roots go in search of the nucleus of the world and only stop when they arrive at the surfaces of interior lakes or the furnace of the central fire. Beneath the living city extends the dead city, the black city of motionless inhabitants. Broad ventilation-shafts, gaping like the mouths of Hell, lead to the region of crypts and sphinxes. Funereal tribes labor in the vomitory cities, tribes of gravediggers, the slaves of death; those who melt the natrum and the bitumen in boilers; those who weave the mortuary bandages; the coffin-makers, the painters, the gilders and the sculptors of tombs—all those whose works will never see the light of day, and who trace inscriptions by the yellow light of a lamp that lacks air that are immediately covered by shadow and will only ever be read by sightless eyes.”

Théophile Gautier, 1851

“She sings like a locomotive in distress, but her buttered scones are marvellous.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

 

“I regret never having met Odilon Redon. Lithographer, etcher, he had begun to paint at the age of forty, like Titian. This Saturnine visionary of dark worlds, bathed in a halo of obscurity—the years that have passed since his death have so far illuminated only a few too-faint rays of a glory still to come.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1937

 

“For a long time we could not hope to prove to a critic that the Symbolists were not Rosicrucians; we were told that the Rosicrucians declared themselves Symbolists, that Péladan was almost the same thing as Paul Adam. We had to explain that there were symbols and symbols: religious symbols, Rosicrucian symbols, Symbolist symbols, and a variety of symbols for each Symbolist. The bewildered critic would recoil and go away repeating: The Symbolists are occultists.”

Gustave Kahn, 1902

 

“‘What is God?’

“‘The ensemble of Forces,’ stammers the shrill and musical voice. 

“‘What is a force?’

 “‘That which creates movement, heat, electricity, all the states and aspects of nature, and in consequence, the universal physical laws, the attractive relationships of heavenly bodies, nebulae, suns, planets, vapors, seas, waters, vegetation, plasmatic cells, mollusks, fish, amphibians, quadrupeds and humans.’

“‘Did God, then, create humans?’

“‘Yes, through the series of the three kingdoms, and in order that humans, in their turn, in accordance with the evolution of races, would know and adore the harmony of Forces.’

“‘What do you know about Adam and Eve?’

“‘Adam is the red Earth, the incandescent Earth before the gradual cooling of the planet. Eve is Aïscha, or the volitional faculty, the energy that permits the evolution of life, from the humblest cell of vegetal plasma to the scientist and the hero. Because of that, the priests taught that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib—which is to say that human intelligence was extracted by the evolution of cooling matter.’”

Paul Adam, 1891

“Just as the majestic multitude of worlds surpasses our tiny globe, so the night sky seems to me superior to the daytime sky.

“What moves me most about the stars is not the brilliance of these powerful masses, nor the prodigious distances that separate them from one another. 

“It is the presence of the souls gathered around these innumerable hearths.

“We all breathe together in the same light. The scintillations of the stars are for me like an image of gazes crossing everywhere in space. Under the figure of the stars, we discover the august assembly of creatures seated in a circle before our eyes, on the infinite tiers of the amphitheatre of the universe.

“How could one not be stirred in the depths of the soul at the thought of so many unknown and unimaginable beings surrounding us, sharing with us the same time, the same space, the same ether, and, under the hand of the same sovereign, rushing through the varied tumult of life toward the same end? What diverse organisations! What destinies! What alternations of good and evil! What trials! What passions in motion! What surges! What despair! What adorations and prayers!

“In the apparent immobility of the constellations, what an appalling swarming!”

Jean Reynaud, 1863

“'Wouldst thou know my power?' said the false goddess, in her charming and paradoxical voice. 'Listen, then!' She put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet, decorated after the fashion of a mirliton with the titles of all the world’s newspapers, and with this instrument she sounded my name, so that it reverberated in the air like the sound of a hundred thousand thunderclaps, and sent echoes back at me even from the furthest of the planets.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1863

“He decided to devote his stock of teeth to the execution of his mosaic.”

Raymond Roussel, 1914

 

“On this subject, illustrious Amilec, I will tell you that they take the idea of the plurality of worlds to extremes. They know that Mercury, Venus, all the other planets and their satellites are inhabited, like the Earth, or habitable. They also know that every fixed Star is a Sun that illuminates its Earths, as ours illuminates its own. 

“In addition to that, however, they claim that every drop of water, having, as everyone knows, a swirling movement, must be a little world, in the center of which there is a tiny sun, which illuminates even tinier worlds placed at its circumference—with the result that when a Lunar Philosopher drinks a glass of water he regards himself as a monstrous animal swallowing a prodigious multitude of Suns, Earths, Moons and Worlds. 

“Furthermore, they say that, what a drop of water—which is an aqueous world—is to ours, ours may be to a third. It might be that our Sun, our fixed Stars and our Vortices is, as a whole, nothing but a drop of liquid, which some enormous animal, an inhabitant of a Planette much more immense than we can imagine, might one day drink.”

Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche, 1754

 

“The night of my début at La Scala, I was horribly frightened. I sang out of tune and lost my head completely. The audience hissed at me, and quite rightly! How often, since then, have I blessed that fortunate hissing which made me realise my shortcomings and spurred me to undertake the serious studies which I so much needed!”

Emma Calve 1922

 

“Silence, radiant reparative force, slumber of life, brief glimpse of the mountains of faith.....Silence, original to the beginning and the end, overwhelming law.....Silence beneath the arpeggios of the Sun on serene coasts..... Silence of the coraline cities of submarine depths.....Silence of the time when, weary of its futile sleep, the Sun drapes itself, and the clots of its blood stain the quotidian and temporary crosses of the ether.....Silence, promise of Erebus, and of the lairs of inspired seers.....Silence, sole word among the blind who dream the worlds.....Silence, of which only the tortures of hunger draw the iron talons from the excoriated prophet.....Silence, liturgy and panacea.....Silence, thou the hope all the days of the world.....Silence, father of the night of our over-feverish and excessively ambulant dreams.”

Gustave Kahn, 1898

 

“Henri Delaage wrote a number of forgotten works on magnetism, occultism and kindred stimulants of the imagination by which some of the meek are, in every generation, consoled and made insolent.”

Lewis Galantière, 1937

 

“Madame Truphot, rid of her husband, had realized a long-cherished dream. She had opened a literary salon. Symbolism was then at its height, and hordes of fools, devoid of all syntax and spelling, were working to overcrowd the asylums by offering up masses of improbable rebuses for admiration, formulas as unheard of as they were hermetic, in which, it seemed, they had imprisoned Beauty. Madame Truphot was thus a Pre-Raphaelite, ardently. Young men, somewhat kleptomaniac, came every Tuesday and Saturday to pour out the overflow of their genius into her home, in the form of pentameters, hexameters, and myriameters, while simultaneously oozing, as best they could, the scrofula of their aestheticism. After some resistance, Sar Péladan, his head adorned with an armful of sepia-toned shavings and a bundle of steel wool, Sar Péladan himself, finally yielded and, for a year, graced her dwelling with his dandruff and his ears shaped like nightjar wings.”

Fernand Kolney, 1904

 

“You who are passing through the crossroads of infinity, pause; form a circle around me. Although old, my melody is always new. The one who made it is the master to whom I belong. Beneath his hardened fingers, a thousand centuries ago, I learned it in order to make the round-dance of the stars, worlds, skies, people and hours who link hands circulate and sway around him. Again, again! Let the round begin again! Let the suns rotate more rapidly! Let the waltz of the spheres and their satellites pass and pass again, whirling, until they are dizzy, until they say, staggering: “Satellites, where are we?”

Edgar Quinet, 1834

 

“A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume floats above a box of sandalwood.”

Robert Chambers, 1895

The Wax Lady

I watched the mannequin turning round,

Admiring her figure, her bosom fair,

Her golden hair, her teasing little face,

When suddenly I saw her nostril quiver

And her slender neck of viper-like form.

"She lives, then!" I told myself in terror.

And ever since, haunted at every hour

By a love that nothing can destroy,

I have both the fear and the curiosity

Of seeing the wax lady enter my home.

In every weather, beneath an African sky,

Or under clouds uneasy and forlorn,

Like a swimmer pursued by a shark,

Unable to flee, I remain before her display window,

And there I hear my heart beating like a drum.

Though I tell myself, "Horror! Madness!"

There are nights of dreadful darkness—

—So much do I summon her, so much do I desire her!—

When I can imagine it possible

That the wax lady might enter my home.

Just as she is, in her nankeen dress,

With eyes the color of aquamarine,

And that alluring, mischievous smile,

The spinning beauty with crimson lips

Settles herself into my brain and engraves herself there.

I willingly hallucinate her,

And, drunk on strangeness, sink deeper

Into a fog that my reason strives to tear apart,

For it is my most ardently cherished dream

To see the wax lady enter my home.

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

 

“One day I had a bad cold, and I remarked to my teacher that I could not think how I had caught it. She looked at me with a frown and said: 'Have you washed your head?' I nodded. 'Certainly,' I said, 'I washed it two days ago.' She shook her finger vehemently at me. 'A singer never washes her head,' she said. 'She cleans it with tonic. She cleans it with a fine tooth comb. But she never washes it.'”

Emma Calve, 1922

 

“Théa has not accompanied us to the city of Mercure. She has gone back to Jupiter, to which her office summoned her. We are walking alone, Pythie and I, through the miracles of the scientific city.”

Paul Adam, 1898

 

“The mass by Palestrina was incredibly beautiful. Although written in a strict manner technically, its effect is one of perfect whiteness, and emotion is not expressed (as it has come to be) by shrieks and roars, but by melodic arabesques. It is the result to a certain extent of the contours, and the interlacing of the arabesques—producing something which seems to be unique: harmony created by melody.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

“The Bat-Magi, the Satan-Magi, have come to Earth to aid in the reincarnation of Martian souls, to introduce them by means of their perfumes into human bodies and secure them in place by their incantations, after having expelled the human souls. For the Earth is the Martian paradise, the place necessary to Martian souls after death; it is on our planet that these souls are ordinarily reincarnated in the bodies of new-born babes, which become in consequence violent and bellicose individuals, criminals and warriors. And because the population of Mars is four or five times less than that of the Earth, these errant souls find themselves rapidly reincarnated, and the ex-Martians are a minority among human beings. 

“But the cremation of their planet by the Thunderbolt from Jupiter has liberated millions of Martian souls at a single instant! They have arrived on Earth, their paradise, hoping to begin the new existence that will eventually permit them to pass on to Venus, then Mercury—necessary stages of the transmigration that is destined to end in the supreme beatitudes of the central star: the Sun!”

Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet, 1922

 

“Yes, Monsieur, the Ruling Being of Mars has wings. He flies, passing from one continent to another like a spirit, all around his world, although he is unable to move beyond the vestiges of its atmosphere. I see them flying over the plains and cities, in the gilded air that they have there–for although it was believed in former times that the Martian sky is red while ours is blue, it is actually yellow: a beautiful, golden yellow.

Guy de Maupassant, 1887

“I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire,

Through its magical being in which the Sphinx is incarnate;

Through the caressing charm of the light so clear

That escapes in long jets from its two lynx-like eyes,

I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire.”

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

 

“'Nevertheless,' replied Maurice’s guardian angel, 'man has created science. The important thing is to introduce it into Heaven. When the angels possess some notions of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and physiology; when the study of matter shows them worlds in an atom, and an atom in the myriads of planets; when they see themselves lost between these two infinities; when they weigh and measure the stars, analyse their composition, and calculate their orbits, they will recognise that these monsters work in obedience to forces which no intelligence can define, or that each star has its particular divinity, or indigenous god; and they will realise that the gods of Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Sirius are greater than Ialdabaoth.'”

Anatole France, 1914

 

“The child loved Wagner; she sensed something in birth in those monstrous choirs, and, dreamily seeking on her guitar the intervals between the intervals, she found the voice of the wind, and beyond the scales of the wind, yet other scales.”

Louise Michel, 1886

 

“'Father, dear, what will the weather be like in a fortnight’s time—which is to say, on the third day of the second moon?'

“'I’ll tell you, my dear Sinusia. Let me consult the meteorometer.'

“These words, which might seem strange, were exchanged in the workroom—or, rather, the laboratory—of Professor Spherides Altair, in one of the most beautiful dwellings of Jovian Avenue in Kentropol, in the year 9978 of our era.

“'There’ll be a little rain in the morning,' he declared, 'but fine weather in the afternoon and for the next two days.'

“'Ah! So much the better—for I’m planning to take a pleasure trip to the ruins of Paris and London with my friends Aphelia and Parhelia Elliptine, their brother Helikos, and Triagul Parabolis.'”

Henri Allorges, 1922

 

“To be back in Paris I would willingly give the nine symphonies of Beethoven bound in the skin of Richard Strauss.”

Claude Debussy, 1891

 

“The green transparencies

Have drowned into the depths,

Which now roll within their black folds

The sonorous Vertigos.

Conquering Night

Has come,

And one sees the train undulate

Behind her robe fringed with moist stars,

Then disappear.

Behold, far away,

The Lighthouses begin to appear.”

Marie Anastasie Krysinska, 1890

 

“Yes, Monsieur, science will procure the definitive triumph of suffering humankind. It has already done a great deal; it has tamed time and space. Our railways, our telegraphs and our telephones have suppressed distance. If we succeed, as Dr. Pastoureaux seems to anticipate, in demonstrating that we can put intelligence into our machines, humans will be liberated forever from servile labor. No more serfs, no more proletariat! Everyone will become bourgeois! The slave machine will liberate from slavery our humbler brethren and give them the right of citizenship among us. 

“A day will come when machines, always running hither and yon, will operate themselves, like the carrier pigeons of Progress; one day, perhaps, having received their complementary education, they will learn to obey a simple signal in such a way that a man, sitting peacefully and comfortably in the bosom of his family, will only have to press an electro-vitalic switch in order for machines to sow the wheat, harvest it, store it and bake the bread that it will bring to the tables of humankind, and thus finally become the King of Nature.”

Emile Gondeau, 1891

“Evening fell. At sunset the mountains were opalescent. New ones appeared; they trailed laminated algae, which, long and fine as hair, appeared first as captive sirens, then as a vast reticulation; the moon shone through as a jellyfish in a net, as nacreous holothurian; then moving freely through the open sky, the moon turned azure-colored. Pensive stars went astray, whirled, plunged into the sea. Toward midnight appeared a gigantic vessel; the moon illuminated it mysteriously; its rigging stood motionless; the bridge was dark. It passed close beside us; there was no sound of oars, no noise from the crew. We finally realized that it was caught in the ice, between two icebergs that had closed in on it. It passed on by, silently, and disappeared.”

André Gide, 1893

“They are creatures perfect enough to disquiet their creators with the possibility that these strange beings should one day cross, by means of their acquired speed, the narrow frontier within which intelligence confines instinct, trying in their turn to scale the heavens, to stifle their bewildered masters against breasts of bronze, and to render into their native dust the human clay that they once took for gods!”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1884

“The Eye, Like A Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” 

Odilon Redon, 1882

 

“Harmony is nothing but a garment, more or less diaphanous, more or less suitable, which one throws over a beautiful body like gauze, silk, linen or wool, allowing one to discern its forms and outlines, disguising them, or altogether suppressing them. Melody without harmony is always something; harmony without melody is nothing.”

Fabre d'Olivet, 1810