Chalet in the Sky Read online

  Chalet in the Sky

  by

  Albert Robida

  translated by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  This is the third volume of translations from the works of Albert Robida that I have published through Black Coat Press, the earlier volumes being The Clock of the Centuries (2008), which also included “Yesterday Now” (ISBN 9781934543139) and The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul (2009) (ISBN 9781934543610). The latter volume featured a translation of Robida’s first novel, originally issued as a part-work in 1879, while the former featured a novel originally published in 1902 and a short story first published in 1890. The two works translated in the present volume, “Un Potache en 1950” (1917; here translated as “A Schoolboy in 1950”) and Un Chalet dans les airs (1925; here translated as “Chalet in the Sky”) belong to a later phase in his work, the latter being his last published novel.

  By the time he wrote these two stories, Robida had witnessed considerable changes in the marketplace in which he worked as a writer and illustrator. Although a boom in the publication of popular magazines in the 1890s had added considerable scope to his opportunities, it had also signaled a future shrinkage of those opportunities as photographic illustration began slowly but inexorably to replace hand-drawn illustrations in the more upmarket periodicals. This trend added to the corrosive effect of the tailing off of the boom in the first decade of the 20th century, and it decisive interruption by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. It is not surprising, therefore, that a gradually-increasing proportion of Robida’s work, not only in magazines, but in his own self-illustrated books, was aimed at younger readers, where the tradition of illustration, especially of the comedic variety favored by Robida, was more robustly maintained.

  There were, however, other reasons why the nature and inclination of Robida’s futuristic illustrations shifted quite markedly after the turn of the century. Having become famous for his pioneering work in futuristic imagery in the early 1880s, when he published the extravagant serial publication Le Vingtième siècle (1882-83; revised 1895; tr. as The Twentieth Century), and the his garish depiction of La Guerre au Vingtième siècle (1883; book version with different text 1887; tr. as “War in the Twentieth Century”), he found himself somewhat typecast, continually asked to add further tranches to the account of life in 1950, elaborately described in the former work and frequently commissioned to illustrate futuristic essays and novels by other writers. In particular, he was often asked to illustrate future war novels, which became increasingly popular in France after 1890—something that must have irritated him somewhat, given that he was a pacifist who had intended his luridly satirical depiction of 20th century warfare as an awful warning, while many popular writers of future war stories were excited, sometimes lasciviously so, by the possibilities of large-scale destruction. As a freelance illustrator, he was presumably reluctant to turn down work, but such tasks as illustrating Pierre Giffard’s long-running part-work La Guerre infernale (1908) must have caused him to wonder whether he was any longer on the side of the angels, or whether he might actually be contributing to the enthusiastic expectation of a new war fought with airships, submarines and high explosives.

  Once the Great War had actually broken out, of course, the marketplace for the depiction of futuristic weaponry—especially its satirical depiction—became very problematic indeed, and depictions of the future in general feel somewhat out of fashion as the urgent vicissitudes of the present monopolized attention. There was, however, an exception to this rule in publication for younger readers, where a requirement a recognized to insulate children somewhat from the worst horrors of the war, and to maintain their morale in a fashion distinctly different from the German-demonizing strategies of adult propaganda. By 1917, the pacifist Robida presumably felt in dire need of some kind of psychological release from the horrors of the war, and one can easily imagine how he came to be attracted by the prospect of returning to the world of 1950 in the milieu of a school, where no thought need be paid, or could be paid, to matters of large-scale international conflict and the possible means of its promulgation.

  “Un Potache en 1950” will undoubtedly seem far less exotic to English readers than it would have done to its original audience because it is, to a large extent, a parody of something with which they are inevitably far more familiar: the English public school story. It is important to remember, while reading Robida’s satire, that no such genre existed in France. Although there are certainly some French novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries set partly or wholly in schools, there was no distinct publishing category of that sort, or anything remotely akin to the deluge of such works published in England. Indeed, the readers of Mon Journal, the children’s periodical in which “Un Potache en 1950” was first serialized, would have been far more familiar with English stories of that type in translation than with similar works originated in their own language. They would, however, have known perfectly well what it was that Robida was mocking.

  Although the roots of the English public school story can be traced back to Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), or even to Charles Dickens’ several accounts of the horrors of English school life, the school story was not formularized and established as a genre until the late 1880s, when it was pioneered by Talbot Baines Reed. Its nostalgic mythos had, however, been satirized in advance by F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (1882), which set out to disprove the common but blatantly absurd axiom that schooldays are the best days of one’s life—an axiom to which the school story offers broad and determined, if not entirely unqualified, support. The genre made such rapid and spectacular progress in the nation’s literary heart that it attracted writers of the status of Rudyard Kipling, in Stalky & Co. (1899) and P. G. Wodehouse, in Mike (1909), and the notion that England’s officer class were in serious training for imperial responsibility—including the attendant warfare—on the playing-fields of its public schools became enshrined in such mawkish masterpieces of bad verse as Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (1897).1

  Equally importantly, in terms of the parody featured in “Un Potache en 1950,” was the spectacular rise of the girl’s school story, pioneered by L. T. Meade, but brought to a strange kind of perfection by Angela Brazil in the long series of novels she launched in 1906. Having displayed his feminist credentials flamboyantly in Le Vingtième Siècle, Robida was only too willing to incorporate similar elements into his account of the rival single-sex school of Chambourcy and Villennes. His anti-racist credentials may not seem to the modern reader to be entirely convincing, but one only has to compare his account of the African Alfred Koufra with the many contemporary accounts of the sons of Indian maharajahs arriving at English public schools—of which Robedia’s subplot is an obvious parody—to see that he was at least a little way ahead of his time, and a long way ahead of such jingoistic writers of English “boys’ books” as G. A. Henty.

  Looking at the genre from outside, with a comedic sensibility, Robida was presumably more acutely conscious than its earnest writers of the fact that the school story was a subspecies of Utopian fantasy, reflecting a perverse yearning for a kind of innocence that had no more real existence than any other imaginary Golden Age. He obviously understood, too, that it was by no means lacking in charm on that account—indeed, quite the reverse.

  There is a curious sense in which some of the futuristic technology that Robida had integrated into his image of 1950 at the outset—especially the miscellaneous aircraft—fitted into that mythos very comfortably, adding an entirely appropriate element of décor. Had other writers taken notice of what he was doing—although no English writer was likely to take kindly to having the piss taken out o
f him (or her) by a Frenchman—it might not have been necessary to announce the death of the genre half a century before J. K. Rowling revealed that all that was required for its triumphant resurrection was a powerful inoculation of fantasy. The uses made of such communicative technology as the “telephonoscope” in the school life of Robida’s 1950 are somewhat less apt, and more obviously played for amiable laughs—a slightly ironic observation, in view of the fact that such technologies have since made much greater strides in actuality than personalized air transport. On the whole, however, the modern reader will have no difficulty slotting as comfortably into the life of the “open air” school of Chambourcy as into the life of Hogwarts Academy, nor in appreciating the equally strong links that bind it to the obsolete but unforgotten mythology of the English school story

  The determined lightness, intense insulation and curious quasi-familiarity of the world within the text of “Un Potache en 1950” cannot, however, conceal the fact that its Utopian ideals are tarnished, if not frankly deceptive. The disasters featured in the novel are the results of accidental breakdown rather than malice, but that only serves to make their threat seem more ominous, especially in combination with the story’s visit to England, and the discovery there of the continuing thrust of the Industrial revolution. Like all Robida’s other accounts of life in 1950, his school story is not as optimistic as it seemingly wants or tries to be. If the story has a moral—and it does not try overly hard to avoid displaying one—it is that technology, in the end, is a treacherous crutch, on which it is unwise to rely too heavily, no matter how ingenious one might be in its sophistication and deployment. Robida meant that very sincerely, no matter how jokily he repeatedly integrated the lesson into his plot

  Robida showed little inclination to return to the world mapped out in Le Vingtième siècle after publishing “Un Potache en 1950,” partly because he had exhausted the inspirational seam and partly because it had become out-dated, especially by the hideous lessons of the Great War. After producing a scorching dramatization of those lessons in L’Ingénieur von Satanas (1918), he did attempt a relatively modest revision, in an unreprinted serial aimed at an adult audience, “En 1965” [In 1965] (1920), but it was probably too unadventurous in its scope at make much appeal, as well as badly-timed, and its relative failure must have demonstrated to him that the marketplace was not only no longer sympathetic to such endeavors, but was becoming actively hostile to them. It is not surprising that he reverted to gentler imaginative fare for a while, but nor is it surprising that he did not give up. He evidently thought it worthwhile to move his imagery forward into a more distant future, in order to update his vision more extravagantly, although he also thought it politic to do so in a book aimed at younger readers rather than the audience for which Le Vingtième Siècle had been written.

  There is a certain propriety in the fact that Robida’s most adventurous futuristic work, in terms of its temporal reach, should be his last—his swan song, in effect—and that it should have been planned as a book for children in much the same vein as “Un Potache en 1950.” That propriety did not, alas, prevent it from proved unmarketable in its intended context—it was not serialized in a juvenile periodical, as he presumably hoped that it might be—as a result of its inability to refrain from touching on adult themes with a distinctively adult sarcasm.

  It cannot be claimed that Un Chalet dans les airs is one of Robida’s best works—its quality does not come remotely close to that of the works of his literary prime—but that is understandable, given that Robida was nearly 80 by the time it was published, and within a year of his death. It is a patchy text, whose frequent trivial repetitions and petty contradictions suggest that he might have kept forgetting what he had written, but it also a remarkable text in several ways. Most importantly, in displaying the extrapolation of his ideas into a further future, it reveals their underlying thrust more explicitly than ever before. It also makes a more obvious, and conspicuously more plaintive, display of the particular kind of nostalgia that he set out in such a lovingly tongue-in-cheek fashion in “Un Potache en 1950.” It is quite possible that the narrative is a patchwork, recovering and absorbing at last one item of work that he had written at a considerably earlier date—the account of the fall of Astra—but it does have a certain overall coherency in the way it carefully extrapolates the fundamental themes of “Un Potache en 1950.” It presents a more expansive account of future transportation, a far more horrific image of a polluted and hyperactive industrial city of the future—New York instead of London—and allows its young protagonists to indulge in the big game hunting that remains out of reach in the earlier story, albeit with a distinct preference for the camera over the machine-gun.

  In a sense, the later story complements the earlier one, whose plot was confined by the school year, in featuring a kind of endless vacation, in which work and study, although notionally going on, are conscientiously avoided to the greatest possible extent. Un Chalet dans les airs contrasts very sharply with “Un Potache en 1950” in one respect, however; in the earlier story, Chambourcy and Paris sit contentedly side by side; however Utopian the “open air school” might be, it is not out of place in the mundane world of which it is a part; it is an appropriate institution for its place and time. The whole point about the “aerovilla” of Un Chalet dans les airs, however, is that it does not and cannot fit into the world where modern road-works writ large are undertaking a complete resurfacing of the globe, whose crust has been exploited to the point of exhaustion. It is the characters’ escape-mechanism from that project, and their intention to return home once they have enjoyed a brief vacation, becomes less convincing with every page that is turned. They really are in full flight from a civilization that has become literally intolerable in its ambition and methods, and the only real question facing them is whether they can possibly find anywhere else to go that is not either a sham (like the Caucasian Archipelago) or in the process of being co-opted (like Astra).

  There is no “if” at all about the question of whether Un Chalet dans les airs has a moral; it does, and how—and whether one can accept that moral wholeheartedly or not, it is certainly shaped with conviction and a certain flourish: a distinctive panache that Robida had at the very beginning of his career, and never entirely lost, even as senility began to get a grip on him. As swan songs go, Un Chalet dans les airs is far from trivial; it is both fascinating and admirable, despite its minor flaws. “Un Potache en 1950” provides a useful and appropriate prologue to it, so the two stories will hopefully make up a satisfactory volume.

  The version of “Un Potache en 1950” used for translation was the reprint issued in 1994 by Apex in its Periodica collection, which is a facsimile of the Mon Journal serial. The version of Un Chalet dans les airs was the photographic reproduction of the first edition available on the Bibliothéque Nationale’s invaluable website, gallica.

  Brian Stableford

  A SCHOOLBOY IN 1950

  I. The Arrival of a Newcomer

  On the morning of September 15, 1950, Gustave Turbille, the son of the well-known businessman, was in the process of packing his bags in order to return to the open air school of Chambourcy, looking to see whether he had forgotten any of his kit for tennis, football, golf, hydroplaning, motor-boating and so on, and whether his rackets, hockey-sticks, skates, notebooks, phonodisks and other important accessories were all present and correct. His sister Colette was doing the same in the next room, for her return to the girls’ open air school at Villennes.2

  A telephone call from his father summoned the boy urgently. The elevator took two seconds to go up to the 12th floor of the comfortable town house, where the large bay windows of Monsieur Turbille’s study, next to the aero platform, overlooked the stirring horizon of the immense city of Paris.

  “Gustave,” said Monsieur Turbille, who seemed to be in a hurry, “you’re a serious boy—14-1/2, aren’t you? Yes? Good… Going back to school today, eh? All ready? Good… First you’re going to t
he Gare du Sud-Ouest for the 10:25 a.m. tube from Bordeaux, to meet young Alfred Koufra, from Villeneuve-sur-Oubangui in the Congo…same age as you, going into the third form with you. I’m his sponsor…too busy to take care of him today, so I’m leaving it to you; take delivery, and you can go on to school together.”

  “All right,” Gustave replied, slightly surprised. “I’ll go—but how will I recognize Alfred Koufra?”

  “It’s agreed with his family that you’ll put our index finger to your nose like this as the voyagers arrive; Alfred Koufra will do the same… A handshake, you become acquainted, he gets into an aeroclette with you,3 and at 10:45, you’re in Chambourcy. Understood?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  Gustave Turbille went back downstairs, tightened a few buckles on his suitcases, ran to embrace his mother and sister and went back up to the 12th floor, to the flight platform, where his aeroclette was waiting for him.

  It was a bright, clear September morning. From the heights of the Saint-Cloud district, the immense city was neatly outlined, with its successive levels, its monuments and its steeples, the curves of the Seine, the local aerial embarkation-platforms, and the long lines of tubes crossing vast spaces beneath arcades before plunging towards all the points of the horizon. The tubes, which had replaced the slow and cumbersome old railways everywhere, transported travelers at 1200 kilometers an hour—even more for the expresses of the major lines.

  Above the thousand details of the earthly panorama there was the landscape of the sky, a picturesque particularity unknown to our ancestors, animated by dense, noisy traffic, swarming with vehicles of every sort: aerocabs, aeroteufs, heavy airships, large Post Office aeronefs, or slender motoclettes, light birds of the air, spiraling up into the blue and flying at all heights. And the customary music of the heavens hummed and vibrated, like the sound of huge perpetual organ-pipes intercut with rapid whistling murmurs.