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The most ambitious work of futuristic fiction written in the eighteenth century was L’Enclos et les oiseaux [The Enclosure and the Birds] by Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, written between January and May 1796. There was, admittedly, not a lot of competition. L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500) by Restif’s friend Louis-Sébastien Mercier, got all the publicity then and still gets it now although its snapshot vision of the future merely consists of imagining the worst atrocities of contemporary Paris tidied up. The immortal hero of L’Enclos et les oiseaux, by contrast, witnesses the entire future history of the Earth until the planet is swallowed by the Sun hundreds of thousands of years hence. Along the way he lives through the planet’s near-collision with a comet, which causes a worldwide upheaval and supplies the world with a second moon, occasioning a burst of rapid evolution whose products include a new species of winged humans.
There must have been even more dramatic events, concerned with the further physical and mental evolution that was bound to take place, within the context of the author’s elaborate cosmogonic theory, but we do not know what they were, because all the information that we have about the book is indirect, derived from Restif’s other works. Nobody would publish it in spite of all the desperate efforts the author made to get it into print.
L’Enclos et les oiseaux is not the only landmark work of roman scientifique that is only known by virtue of second-hand reportage—by far the most ambitious work of imaginative fiction produced in the seventeenth century, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde (tr. as Other Worlds), is incomplete because the latter half of its second part and the whole of the third were stolen and destroyed—nor would it be the last, but it must certainly have been one of the most interesting.
There is no surprise in that; we know that people seriously interested in the future are without honor, not merely in their own country, but everywhere. Fortune tellers are only ever in demand if they are liars prepared to pander to the near-universal mental disease of optimism. That is a tragedy—but we know, too, that the only play in town is the tragedy “Man” and its hero the conqueror worm. Nevertheless, the play sometimes retains its interest in spite of our knowing how it will end, and there is color enough in Restif’s flirtations with futuristic speculation even in the absence of their centerpiece and summation.
The first fictional products of Restif’s fascination with cosmogony and transformism are contained in a book that wore all the disguises necessary at the time to get into print without suffering the penalties of persecution and prosecution. La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français (tr. as The Discovery of the Austral Continent by a Flying Man; or, The French Daedalus) was published in 1781 in four volumes that also contained four shorter works.
The title page of the book falsely claimed that it had been published in Leipzig because all books published in France without a royal license were illegal although Paris was awash with them. All booksellers sold them under the counter, generally referring to them euphemistically as “philosophical books” because all works of philosophy that were suggestive of any challenge to the dogmas of the Church were banned. Not all such banned books were philosophical in a strict sense, but La Découverte australe very evidently belonged to the satirical tradition that Voltaire—the philosophe most intensely loathed by the clergy—had labeled contes philosophiques.
The preliminary pages announced the book as the second in a series of the Oeuvres posthumes de N******. The preface was signed “T. Joly,” posing as the book’s editor. That formula of presentation linked the work to the 1780 novel La Malédiction paternelle, lettres sincères et véritables de N****** à ses parents, ses amis et ses maitresses, avec les réponses; recueillé et publié par Timothée Joly, son exécuteur testamentaire [The Paternal Curse; Sincere and Veritable Letters by N****** to his parents, friends, and mistresses, with the Responses, collected and published by Timothée Joly, the executor of his will], also allegedly published in Leipzig but likewise actually published in Paris by the widow Duchesne.
When he published La Découverte australe, N****** [Nicolas] was forty-six years old. He was the son of Edmé Rétif, a peasant farmer in the Yonne but a well-off peasant farmer who also served the functions of a local magistrate; Nicolas was thus in much the same social situation as the one in which we initially find Victorin, the hero of La Découverte australe, except that his family was much larger; Nicolas was the eldest of the eight children of his father’s second marriage, following a first that had been almost as prolific, of which two of the sons had taken holy orders.
In 1742 the family moved on to land that Edmé Rétif had recently bought, which included a field called La Bretonne; it was sold again later, but that did not prevent Nicolas from adding it to his signature in a tongue-in-cheek fashion in order to give it an aristocratic implication, further enhanced by changing Rétif to the more upmarket Restif, although he sometimes reverted to the earlier spelling. His first schoolmaster detected signs of intellectual promise in him, which led his father to place him, in 1746, under the tutelage of his stepbrother, Abbé Thomas.
It was while he was with Abbé Thomas that Nicolas fell in love for the first time, with the daughter of a notary—the first of many hopeless infatuations. His supposedly excessive interest in young women was one of the reasons Abbé Thomas gave for getting rid of his pupil in 1750, the other being insubordination. Restif was to go on to cultivate a deep and abiding loathing for the clergy. It was in that period that he began writing, beginning a record of his “Adventures”—i.e., a diary—from which he was later to draw the inspiration for most of his works of fiction.
Nicolas found great pleasure in writing, and his exercises in poetry soon became voluminous. His first venture into autobiographical fiction, begun in 1753 and concluded in 1755, ran to four thousand lines. That was preceded, however, by another substantial poem, Les Douze mois or Mes Douze travaux [The Twelve Months, or My Twelve Labors], which was a long daydream fantasy in which the protagonist, having done a favor for the king, is rewarded with a plot of land enclosed by a high wall containing a vast aviary and twelve beautiful young women, where he lives as if in an Earthly Paradise. That fantasy too was to recur resoundingly in his later work, vaguely echoed in the Découverte australe but much more robustly recovered in L’Enclos et les oiseaux.
Nicolas was apprenticed to a printer in Auxerre in July 1751 where he fell hopelessly in love with his employer’s wife. Having served his apprenticeship and learned the trade, he went to Paris in 1754 and became a typesetter at the Imprimerie Royale du Louvre for a year before moving on to various other employers, constantly shifting in the context of the long battle fought by the censors against the activities of illicit printers of subversive posters, pamphlets, and books.
Nicolas returned to Auxerre for a while in 1760 and there married Agnès Lebègue, with whom he eventually had four daughters, Agnès, Marie, Elisabeth, and Marion (or Marie-Anne). The couple returned to Paris in 1761 where Nicolas again worked for various printers as a typesetter until 1767, when he published his first novel La Famille vertueuse [The Virtuous Family]—an exercise in popular “sensibility fiction” that had no difficulty obtaining a license. He immediately became a full-time writer, pouring out a long series of prose works.
For a long time, bibliographers had difficulty counting the works that Restif produced under various signatures, many of them in multi-volume series that were often subsequently augmented by additional volumes, but the final count, according to Pierre Testud’s Rétif de La Bretonne et la creation littéraire (1977), was 187 volumes, comprising 44 titles, totaling some 57,000 pages. That is the equivalent of some ten or twelve million words produced over thirty-five years—a total that would not seem vast to the numerous nineteenth and twentieth-century writers who routinely produced more than a million words a year for long periods, and sometimes twice as many, although it has to be borne in mind that Restif was writing with goose-quills and that he insisted on typesetting all his own works. The latter factor is important to bear in mind.
Restif’s early works included Lucile, ou le Progrès de la virtue [Lucile; or, The Progress of Virtue] (1768) and Le Pied de Fanchette, ou le Soulier couleur de rose [Fanchette’s Foot, or the Pink Shoe] (1769). The latter earned him the distinction, when psychologists began searching for technical terms to describe various sexual deviations, of encouraging some of them to name shoe fetishism “retifism,” as they had named sadism after the Marquis de Sade. Whole books have been written on the subject of whether Restif was or was not a shoe fetishist, but he clearly was not: a fetishist is someone who substitutes the fetish object for the “real” desired object; whereas Restif certainly appreciated a dainty foot and found high-heeled shoes sexy, there was never the slightest doubt that what he lusted after, incessantly and obsessively, was the real thing.
The other three books Restif published in 1769 included Le Pornographe [a neologism then signifying “Writing About Prostitutes,” and by implication, “About Sex”], a utopian tract offering practical proposals for the legalization and organization of prostitution in the interests of public order and morality. It was the first of several such tracts addressing various specific issues of concern, including Le Mimographe [Writing about the Theater] (1770), Les Gynographes [Writings about Women] (1777), addressing the social role and status of women, and the more generally political L’Andrographe [Writing about Men] (1782; also known, more accurately, as L’Anthropographe [Writing About Humans]). There is a certain irony about the fact that Restif’s first neologism immediately caught on, not in its intended literal meaning, but as a pejorative term applied to the kind of “philosophical books” that Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “books to be read with one hand.”
Restif’s first considerable success was the quasi-autobiographical Le Paysan perverti [The Corrupted Peasant] (1775), which detailed the educative and corrupting effects of life in Paris on an emigrant from a humble background, but the success of that volume was outstripped by Les Contemporaines, ou Aventures des plus jolies femmes de l’Âge présent [Contemporaries; or, The Adventures of the Prettiest Women of the Present Era] (1780), a collection of short stories detailing the problematic lives of young women of various estates, to which he continued to add further series under various other titles for the rest of his career. In the meantime, however, he was already working on his intended masterpiece: his multi-volume autobiography, to which he refers in the frame narrative of La Découverte australe as Compère Nicolas [Friend Nicolas], but which eventually appeared as Monsieur Nicolas ou Le Coeur humain dévoilé [Monsieur Nicolas; or, The Human Heart Laid Bare] (sixteen volumes, 1794–97).
The frame narrative of La Découverte australe, which provides a kind of self-portrait of the author circa 1780, also lays bare one of the existential cancers that was eating away at the author’s soul during the period of his initial success: the distress caused by his wife’s adultery and his suspicion that at least one of his daughters was not actually his. From 1768 onwards, the couple were estranged although still living together, and in 1778, when employment was found for Marion, Agnès went back to live with her father. It was then that Restif, temporarily left alone (two of his daughters eventually came back to live with him), took to prowling the streets of Paris—particularly the Île Saint-Louis—by night, terming himself “le hibou” [the owl] and accumulating the observations that were later to provide the raw material for another of his famous works of quasi-autobiographical fiction, Les Nuits de Paris ou le spectateur nocturne [Parisian Nights; or, The Nocturnal Spectator] (four volumes 1788; augmented by others at intervals until 1794).
According to the account given in Monsieur Nicolas, La Découverte australe was begun in 1778 when Restif was confined to bed by illness before he began work on Les Contemporaines. It was a deliberately self-indulgent exercise, redeveloping one of his childhood daydreams of what he might do if he were able to fly. That initial draft was probably restricted to the story of Victorin’s adventures in the early years of the eighteenth century in devising a powerful set of artificial wings and using them to prepare carefully for the abduction and seduction of his beloved Christine, to whom he cannot pay court in any socially sanctioned way, being too humble of status; he eventually establishes her on top of the Inaccessible Mountain as the “queen” of a miniature utopian society.
Restif set the manuscript aside while he wrote Les Contemporaines, and it was probably when he took it up again thereafter that he added the frame narrative and the second part of the story, which describes Victorin’s removal of his mini-utopia to the South Seas and his subsequent exploration of the archipelagoes of those seas. The island neighboring Île Christine is inhabited by “Patagons”—giants modeled on those described by Antonio Pigafetta, who reported on Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. Patagons had played a significant role in the arguments set out in Benoît de Maillet’s posthumously published and severely bowdlerized Telliamed (third ed. 1757) in support of the notion that the human species had originated by gradual metamorphosis as new species adapted to live on land newly emerged from the sea.
Several other variant human species mentioned in Telliamed are also located in the islands of Restif’s austral seas and many other “hommes-brutes” [beast-people] combining physical features of humans and various animals. The explanation for the existence of the beast-people is largely worked out by Victorin and his descendants before a fuller explanation is obtained from the superhuman and culturally advanced Mégapatagons.
The second part transformed the nature of the narrative very considerably and made the book unique not only within the pattern of the author’s productivity but within the context of French imaginative fiction to that date. The manner in which the attempt to rationalize the daydream fantasy that gave birth to La Découverte australe became a launching pad for further thought was initially illustrated by the other works added as supplements, which take up part of the third volume and all of the fourth, two of which are particularly significant.
“Cosmogénies ou systèmes de la formation de l’univers suivant les anciens et les modernes” [Cosmogonies; or Systems of the Formation of the Universe According to Ancient and Modern Writers] places Maillet’s cosmogony in its broader historical context, progressing from a comprehensive survey of classical systems to those of Descartes, Isaac Newton, and the Comte de Buffon. Restif then goes on to elaborate his own suggested elaboration and modification of his synthesis of Maillet and Buffon as sketched out in La Découvertre australe by the Mégapatagon sage.
“Dissertation sur les Hommes-brutes” [Dissertation on Beast-People] is a massive survey of legendary and folkloristic accounts of exotic species of humans and beings hybridizing human and animal features, greatly expanding the survey contained in Telliamed. In essence, it tries to offer justifications for taking seriously the plausibility of La Découverte australe’s representation of various kinds of mythical humans, placing them all within the evolutionary theory sketched out in the main narrative.
The research invested in those two essays is intensive, and it illustrates an aspect of Restif’s tendency to obsession rather different from the one displayed in his relentless production of fiction, more akin to the earnest insistence of his plans for eutopian reform; both demonstrate that once he got a bee in his bonnet, he tended to pursue it as far as it would go. That was certainly what he did with his cosmogonic thesis; he eventually developed it more extensively in nonfictional form in the supplements to Monsieur Nicolas that bore the separate title of La Philosophie de Monsieur Nicolas (1796), but before then he had extrapolated it very elaborately in graphic fictional form in his account of the cosmic voyages and futuristic explorations of Duc Multipliandre, first written in 1787–89 within the strangest work of fiction ever penned by anyone and half of the most far-reaching imaginative endeavor ever attempted—unfortunately, the only half that survived.
The realization that the pattern of life on Earth’s surface must have changed drastically over a vast expanse of time had surely occurred to other natural philosophers prior to Benoît de Maillet, but they would have hesitated to voice it because it was an exceedingly dangerous opinion to hold. The Comte de Buffon and his contemporary Linnaeus both knew, as a result of their exhaustive taxonomic studies, that evidently related species must have evolved gradually by differentiation from common ancestors, but Linnaeus was careful to say so explicitly only in personal correspondence, and Buffon declared it only in a tentative fashion, specifically excluding humans from the assertion.
The “transformism” of species was difficult to explain because there was little or no evidence of it going on in the present or having occurred significantly within the timespan recorded by history, during which species seemed to have been constant, and the record of extinct species contained in fossils was still exceedingly patchy and controversial. It was therefore impossible to study the process in action, and possible mechanisms could be conjectured only as corollaries of cosmogonic theories relating to the general transformation of the Earth, which tended to have markedly different accounts of the lifespan of the planet and the precise nature of the forces that had shaped it.
Maillet is rather vague about the beginning of life in the sea, concentrating his arguments on the thesis that land animals originated by the transformation of marine creatures, but it is tacitly inherent in his general thesis that the marine ancestors of terrestrial species must have evolved by a natural process of what would now be stigmatized as “spontaneous generation” from nonliving matter, probably on the seabed.
Although it did not take long after the publication of comprehensive taxonomic analyses of the Earth’s plant and animal species for someone (Erasmus Darwin, Linnaeus’ English translator) to voice the possibility that all life of Earth might be traceable back to a single common ancestor and that spontaneous generation might have happened only once—a thesis for which biologists borrowed the term “monogeny” from theologians—the more likely hypothesis seemed to many early transformists that it was probably something that had happened lots of times in lots of places (polygeny) and might still be going on, even though it was frustratingly difficult to find evidence of it.
Restif was a relatively extreme polygenist, but that was not unusual or unreasonable for his time, especially given his similarly extreme commitment to the idea that creation followed stereotyped patterns (which he later summarized by the dictum that “everything in Nature is type and image”) and that it was also cyclical, so that the evolution of worlds, solar systems, and the entire universe was a repetitive process, analogous to the life cycles of living organisms. Indeed, he committed himself to the view that everything in the universe, including worlds and stars, is alive. That idea might seem excessively implausible now, but in an era where the concept of life was dominated by the notion of a “vital spark” of some kind, it could not be reckoned absurd, and the context of changes to the planet’s surface offered a useful framework for conjectures as to which the generation and transformation of new life forms had happened much more rapidly in the past.
Maillet, unlike his contemporaries, had not hesitated to include humans in his general evolutionary schema, and when he went in search of “links” between humans and other animals, having no hominid fossils to which to refer, his immediate recourse was to legendary and mythical reports of quasi-human species of various degrees of exoticism, of which there is no shortage in the work of historians such as Herodotus and natural historians such as Pliny as well as popular folklore and ancient literature. Restif followed that strategy far more elaborately and inevitably came up with a hypothetical account of human evolution more exotic and varied than the one that would later be based on fossil “missing links” between humans and ape-like ancestors.
Like Maillet before him and Lamarck after him, Restif made the notion of adaptation the key element of his notion of transformism, and like them he assumed that adaptation was an inherently progressive process: that organisms were in some sense impelled to work for their own “perfectibility.” In his view as in Lamarck’s, the mysterious vital spark that provides the definitive feature of life is inherently restless, always and everywhere stimulating change, albeit very slowly. Like Lamarck, Restif imagines that every living being is constantly transforming and that the evident individual transformations of growth and aging mask a much more gradual process in which every member of a species is working toward its general transfiguration.
Restif’s cosmogony is, we can now see, completely wrong, not just because it mistakenly conceives of suns and planets as living beings or even because modern geological thinking has exposed the oversimplification of Maillet’s notion of desiccation being the primary driving force of changes to the Earth’s surface, but because of a datum that he thought of as an established fact. Restif believed, on the basis of a calculation made by the mathematician Leonhard Euler, derived from astronomical observations that turned out to be mistaken, that the Earth’s orbit was gradually shrinking. He generalized from that supposed observation to conclude that all the planetary orbits must be shrinking as the planets marched in sequence toward the sun, which would swallow them one by one. That conviction formed the basis of his notion of the transformism of solar systems and his thesis that planets begin life as “cometoplanets” with an extraordinary life cycle in which the comets die when they turn into planets but are supplied, while alive, with a remarkable population of animal parasites.
It was not Restif’s fault that the datum in question was erroneous; his extrapolation of it was doubtless overly bold, taking him into imaginative realms far beyond any previously glimpsed, but it was not irresponsible at the time and can, indeed, be regarded as a triumph of creative, rational inference. It is irrelevant that Restif’s theories, seen from today’s viewpoint, were mistaken; the point is that they were a tremendous advance on anything that had gone before. He knew that, and that is why he wanted to continue their development—but he also knew that it would not be easy to do so in a world where “philosophical books” were not only outlaw publications involving considerable risks to their authors and publishers but where unprecedented and experimental fiction always alienated a large fraction of the potential audience.
La Découverte australe was not a success, critically or commercially. The utopian tract with which Restif followed it must have sold equally poorly, but he probably redeemed himself in the opinion of his publisher and his audience with the latest in the series of his quasi-autobiographical fictions, LaDernière aventure d’un homme de quarante-cinq ans [The Last Adventure of a Forty-Five-Year-Old Man] (1783), which gave free rein to the erotic fantasies whose indulgence he considered an essential component in laying the human heart bare but which some of his readers thought mere pornography (in the pejorative sense rather than the one he had intended when he had coined the word)—a mistake that did not hurt their sales at all.
La Paysanne pervertie [The Corrupted Peasant-Woman] (1784), a companion-piece to Le Paysan perverti, was in the same vein, and was similarly successful. He published one more of the intended “Posthumous works of N******,” albeit without that designation and without the fictitious editorial interference of Timothée Joly in 1785 but followed that with the next of his autobiographical novels, La Femme infidèle [The Unfaithful Wife] (1786), under the pseudonym Maribert Courtenay—although that probably did not enable his estranged wife to feel any better about it—and focused thereafter, for a while, on his potentially infinite series of short stories about the women of contemporary Paris, for which he did intensive research in soliciting anecdotes from various acquaintances and in literary salons.
It was early in 1787 that he became a regular at one fashionable salon where he appears to have received an unusually warm welcome (his reputation and appearance did not endear him to many people), attending not only the weekly “open house” but also the more intimate secondary gatherings—equally conventional in institutions of that sort—organized by its hostess, Fanny de Beauharnais. Running true to form, Restif fell in love with Fanny although the passion, true to form, remained hopeless; Fanny was the mistress of the young and handsome Michel de Cubières, who appears in both Les Nuits de Paris and Les Posthumes as the Chevalier de Rubiscée (Restif was fond of anagrams). The regular attendees when Restif joined the more select group included Mercier—who probably introduced him to the company—the feminist actress Olympe de Gouges, the mathematician Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and the writer and self-styled Iluminatus Jacques Cazotte. Fanny’s nephew by marriage, Alexandre de Beauharnais, was married at the time to Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie, who was later to marry Napoléon Bonaparte after Alexandre had been guillotined during the Terror.
Restif collected anecdotes for use in his collections in Fanny’s salon, whose members were as willing to supply them as any group of hardened and well-informed gossips. He undoubtedly made his own contributions to the conversation, where ideas for stories of all kinds were inevitably routinely circulated, most of which came to nothing. Restif, however, more obsessive than most, began developing one of the ideas he broached: that of a husband who knows he is going to die and who writes a series of letters to be delivered to his wife one after another following his demise, in order to ease her mourning.
That idea was the seed of a project provisionally titled Lettres du tombeau [Letters from the Tomb], and its development can be tracked through the version that was eventually published as it changed direction and focus several times while Restif was writing it, probably more for his own amusement and that of the members of the salon to begin with, although he must always have had the possibility of eventual publication in mind. He worked on it throughout 1787 and 1788 alongside two works that were intended for more immediate publication with clearly defined professional intent: another set of his exemplary short stories, Les Parisiennes (four volumes, 1787), and Les Nuits de Paris. Both of those projects “overflowed” into the slowly growing text of the “letters from the tomb,” somewhat incongruously at times, following an increasingly marked trend, encouraged by the manner in which Restif drew upon his life for source material even in his most extravagant and exotic endeavors.
It is evident from the first few letters that Restif’s initial intention was to focus narrowly on the relationship between the letter writer, Monsieur de Fontlhète (“font l’hète” is approximately equivalent to the English slang phrase “het up”—i.e., impassioned) and his beloved wife Hortense, analyzing its development by juxtaposing day-by-day accounts of the development of four years in their relationship, two past, one ostensibly present, and one future, although the scheme is confused by the fact that the letters are “actually” being written some time ahead of their intended delivery date, thus confusing the “present” and the “future” in a manner that the author never did manage to sort out or clarify.
At some point after his tentative beginning, however, the author apparently realized two things: first, that his initially intended scheme was too complicated and confusing to be viable as a project; and second, that his format, vaguely planned in the image of the Mille et une nuits, might benefit from a much closer resemblance, in that Fontlhète, instead of devoting himself to an overcomplicated analytical remembrance of things past, could become a storyteller instead, not only possessed of a more interesting predicament than Scheherazade but equipped with the same broad license to fantasize.
In consequence, Restif changed the direction of his self-indulgent whimsy and began to develop the letters as a sequence of fantasies with a subtext trying to convince Hortense that death was an entrance into a wonderland of posthumous opportunity, echoing Mercier’s dream-fantasy of cosmic reincarnation “Nouvelles de la lune” (1787; tr. as “News from the Moon”). Fontlhète does that by making contact with two discorporated souls who have remained closely united after death by virtue of the fact that they were accidentally slain on their wedding night at the moment of their first orgasm, Yfflasie and Clarendon.
The account of Yfflasie and Clarendon’s adventures in the afterlife as related to Fontlhète, initially consists of meeting lots of famous dead people, discovering who they were in previous incarnations, and what has become of the recently reincorporated in their new identities—a formula enabling a good deal of satire, which becomes increasingly self-indulgent as the author panders to his own political judgments and liking for salacious gossip, increasingly giving vent to his personal dislikes and hatreds. He does that in ever more bizarre fashion as he develops the notion of careers in the afterlife, which permits Yfflasie and Clarendon to progress from early days as pastors of desires to become queen and king of the realm of the disembodied (where traditional sex roles are inverted).
When that narrative sequence became too silly, Restif apparently had another change of heart and abruptly, without any explanation, gave Fontlhète the wings that Victorin had invented in La Découverte australe, thus enabling him to become a more active nocturnal vigilante than the alter ego featured in Les Nuits de Paris. Unlike Victorin, who used his wings almost exclusively for selfish purposes, Fontlhète makes definite moves in what was ultimately to become the typical career path of comic book superheroes, using his power of flight to oppose evil and fight crime—not on the local scale preferred in the comic books but on the world stage, taking on evil tyrants and warmongers. That particular narrative thread, however, was soon sidelined, as Restif appears to have been struck by the idea of giving scope to some of his other childhood fantasies and importing other superpowers into the plot: to begin with, the power of exchanging identities by taking over other people’s bodies with one’s own soul.
It is probable that Restif had already developed that idea in a separate story—and that he had written several variants of that story while trying to figure out the best way to account for the origin and development of the power in question—and simply dumped that other story into his plot as he had presumably already done with a few of the brief anecdotes associated with the careers of the discorporate souls. Indeed, he dumped several different versions of that other story into his framework, perhaps with some vague intention of deciding later which one to settle on. At any rate, the amazing Duc Multipliandre made his entrance into the scheme more than once in association with conflicting accounts of his birth and the back story of his superpower and began narrating his own adventures.
Multipliandre was a much more useful superhero than Fontlhète for the simple reason that Fontlhète, being absolutely committed to Hortense, could not use any powers he acquired for the purpose that was, from Restif’s viewpoint, the primary advantage of any superpower: the opportunity to lay women by the thousands even while remaining deeply committed to the moral ideal of true love. Multipliandre’s adventures thus involved not only the acquisition of several more superpowers but the recounting of a vast series of varied erotic adventures, some second-hand but many of them personal. He too found his one true love, but she was perfectly willing to share him and was not overly worried about what his soul might be doing when it was in other bodies than the handsome one she loved.
Restif was not, however, a man to waste the more extravagant opportunities now offered to him by his framework. Multipliandre, as a superhero, was naturally going to set the world to rights as well as having a lot of sex, but he was never going to stop there; having taken up where Fontlhète left off, he was always going to follow Victorin’s example of boldly crossing the boundaries of the known world in order to discover the hypothetical world of Restif’s cosmogonic and evolutionary theories. That he did, and far more extravagantly than Victorin’s descendants.
In so doing, Multipliandre not only transformed the languidly evolving story of the letters from the tomb but Restif’s attitude to it. It ceased to be a dilatory, self-indulgent spinoff from his salon conversations and became a kind of mission: the ultimate development of his personal vision and philosophy, far grander than anything he had been able to imagine doing before and something exceedingly dear to the heart he had not yet laid bare in his long-gestating masterpiece which still remained to be completed.
That exploration took Multipliandre to the other known worlds of the solar system in order to examine their exceedingly peculiar inhabitants and to numerous worlds unknown to contemporary science, including trans-Uranian planets, a comet, and three planets within the orbit of Mercury, the last of them, Io, being on the very brink of being dissolved in the Sun. After that, he set off to visit several other solar systems, including those of Sirius and Vega, and several nebulae before concluding his journey in the vicinity of the “astral center” into which the entire universe of stars will one day be dissolved prior to being regenerated, phoenix-fashion, as an entirely new universe.
Multipliandre then returned to Earth where, being immortal by virtue of his superpowers, he settled down to witness the entire future of the Earth, initially coping with a new evolution of life consequent on a close encounter between the planet and a passing comet, which produces, among other plant and animal species, a new race of winged humans whom Multpliandre naturally calls “angels.” Some of that futuristic text is missing from the published version of the story, but the cosmogonic investigations almost certainly remained exactly where they had been in the summer of 1789 when the Revolution broke out, not only interrupting Restif’s project but bringing an entire era to a spectacularly abrupt end.
The difficulties faced by writers who attempted to publish work after the Revolution are illustrated very clearly by Restif’s travails in trying to carry forward all the projects that were still incomplete in 1789—of which the one uppermost in his mind was necessarily his vast masterpiece, Monsieur Nicolas. Compared with that, the disorderly and misshapen letters from the tomb was a secondary issue. Nevertheless, he did take the latter project up again when he had time, and he probably continued adding further letters sporadically, some of which detail a series of “dreams” in which Multipliandre describes the phases of the Revolution to Fontlhète as a futuristic prophecy.
In fact, Multipliandre had already given Fontlhète a different account of the future after 1787 in which he becomes prime minister of France by means of judicious body-swapping and then unifies Europe under a Republican government, paving the way for the political unification of the entire globe, but Restif simply left that contradiction in place along with numerous others. The dream sequence describing the Revolution is naturalistic except for a brief episode when the dreaming Multipliandre uses one of his superpowers—invisibility—to escape arrest by Revolutionary Guards on suspicion of being a spy.
Restif never stopped writing during the years of the Revolution and the Terror, even when he was on the brink of starvation as he eventually was, nor did he entirely stop publishing although his productions necessarily slowed down. His principal publications, once the Terror was over and a measure of calm had returned, were Le Drame de la vie, contenant un homme tout entier [The Drama of Life, containing an entire man] (dated 1793, when it was presumably typeset, although it was not printed and distributed for some time thereafter) and the work from which it was spun off, Monsieur Nicolas. He also added new text to Les Nuits de Paris and continued his vast series of short stories with Les Provinciales [Provincial women] (twelve volumes, 1795).
By 1795, having survived the Terror and famine, Restif was working with more fervor than ever before. He had already put together a nonfictional account of his cosmogony and evolutionary theory in one of three supplementary volumes of his autobiography, collectively entitled La Philosophie de Monsieur Nicolas (1796), and in the early months of 1796 he set out on another dramatization of that science, taking up the plot of his early wish-fulfillment fantasy about a hero who acquires a private enclosure lavishly supplied with women in which to build his own private paradise and developing it as a novel: L’Enclos et les oiseaux.
There is no way to be sure, but Restif probably intended that project, to begin with, to be a replacement for the disorganized mess of the manuscript containing Fontlhète’s inconsequential and incoherent Lettres du tombeau. He evidently translated many of the imaginative ideas from the Multipliandre sections of the manuscript into the new work, organizing them more coherently in an account of a new superhero who indulges in the usual extensive gamut of sexual adventures before employing the secret of immortality to witness and participate in the entire future history of the Earth.
Even before finishing the manuscript of L’Enclos et les oiseaux, however, Restif was evidently inspired to wonder whether, in fact, the other manuscript might not be salvageable and publishable as one of a pair with the new work in spite of its incoherencies—which could, in principle, be partly written off as eccentricities and perhaps partly smoothed over. A note added to the final pages of the published version of Multpliandre’s adventures suggests that the future histories set out in the two texts were deliberately framed to complement one another rather than duplicating information, so the final phases of L’Enclos et les oiseaux were probably written with that intention.
Again, we cannot be sure, but it seems probable that L’Enclos et les oiseaux was a much more coherent and better organized work than Lettres du tombeau and that it contained a much more elaborate account of a long, hypothetical future, informed by a scientific theory that, although we now know it to be completely erroneous, had been worked out thoroughly and intensely. After completing L’Enclos et les oiseaux, Restif set out to prepare Les Posthumes for publication. His first move in so doing was presumably to supplement the existing text by bringing the sequence of Multiplandre’s “prophecies” all the way to 1796, albeit briefly, before abruptly skipping back to 1787 in order to reorganize the denouement before the Revolution can break out within the timeline of the narrative. Far more laboriously, however, Restif also decided to supplement the existing sequence of letters by adding a series of responses to them written by Hortense, interleaving those with the existing manuscript.
The immediate effect of that move was to add a further level of complication to a text that was already extremely muddled, especially in terms of its internal chronology, and the additions helped to transform an existing confusion into complete chaos. Nor is it immediately obvious why the new text makes any substantial contribution to the story although it is clear that the author wanted to pay some tribute to the story’s origins in Fanny de Beauharnais’s salon by adding her (lightly disguised) and some of her salon’s guests into the weave of the narrative.
Hortense continually includes comments made by the other members of her “society,” including Jacques Cazotte, which some of the individuals named might well have made while the series of letters was being drafted in 1787–89 and makes flattering remarks about them. The flattery might well have been fishing for financial aid to get the book published because Restif had completely exhausted his own resources getting the last few volumes of Monsieur Nicolas and its supplement into print, and no publisher was any longer willing to take the financial risk of printing his more eccentric ventures. That fishing might have had some success as the published version carries a note citing a subsidy from an unnamed “associate”—but L’Enclos et les oiseaux presumably contained no such incentive.
It might have been the case that Restif made a conscious decision not to try to sort out any of the contradictions in the text of Lettres du tombeau but to leave them all in place as essential features of a text whose peculiarity had already exceeded all known bounds. On the other hand, he might simply have realized that L’Enclos et les oiseaux was not going to get into print any time soon, that the whole joint project was a catastrophe from the viewpoint of commercial publication, and he abandoned the revisions half-done. On balance, the latter hypothesis seems more probable.
In the next five years, Restif only contrived to publish one new book: L’Anti-Justine ou les délices de l’amour [The Anti-Justine; or, The Delights of Amour] (1798), an ideological riposte to the Marquis de Sade, intended to demonstrate by example that “pornography” did not have to be disgusting and depraved but could be delightful and virtuous. To its publisher and most of its readers, however, it was presumably just pornography; the police certainly thought so when they seized the remaining copies in 1803 and banned it as the sort of thing that was not going to be tolerated under the Empire. Inevitably, it remained one of his most popular works.
The economic and political corner was finally turned for France when Bonaparte overthrew the Directoire on 18 Brumaire (9 November) 1799 and was appointed First Consul. An appearance of stability returned, and more importantly a wave of optimism unfurled. Restif was still flat broke, but the son of the widow Duchesne, his old publisher, was eager to get the business running at full tilt again, and part of his business plan—probably in response to Restif’s urgent persuasion—was a reissue of Restif’s most successful works, supplemented by new volumes with ready-made reader appeal such as Les Nouvelles contemporaines (1802). How Restif persuaded him to add the letters from the tomb and L’Enclos et les oiseaux to his program is unknown, perhaps by begging, perhaps by promising to do more commercial work in exchange, but most likely simply by finding someone willing to put in a subsidy—the “associate” to whom the supplementary material of the published book refers.
At any rate, Restif set out to typeset the letters from the tomb with a furious sense of urgency, which probably prevented him from making any of the changes that he might have made had he completed his revisions in 1796 or had he been working in better circumstances. It was published as Les Posthumes: Lettres recues après la mort du mari par a femme, qui le croit à Florence, par feu Cazotte [The Posthumous: Letters received after the death of a husband by his wife, who believes him to be in Florence, by the late Cazotte] (tr. as Posthumous Correspondence) in 1802.
Restif knew, when he began to set the type, that the book would not make money and that he was exploiting the good will of the widow Duchesne’s son and his unnamed “associate,” but he was desperate to get it into print at all costs, even in poor shape, for reasons that the text states explicitly. He knew that he was no longer capable of shaping it more elegantly and more coherently and that if he did not publish it while he still had a little life left in him, nobody was going to do it for him posthumously—so he did it, warts and all, laying bare its inner workings for anyone who cared to understand. He did not correct or alter anything in the confused mess that the manuscript still was, only dropping in a few extra notes in order to add flattering references to Bonaparte as well as adding some supplementary material to the beginning and end of the text.
It was presumably in 1802 rather than in 1796 that Restif decided to credit the published work to “le feu Cazotte,” Cazotte having been guillotined during the Terror. There is no trace within the text itself of any such imposture save for one belatedly added note, and although Fontlhète and Hortense inevitably refer to Restif in the third person when mentioning him or his works, no sensitive reader could possibly have been in doubt as to his involvement in the text. Even in the supplementary advertisements appended to the end of the text Restif refers to himself as “the editor,” but only an exceedingly dim-witted reader would have failed to take the obvious inference from the fact that all the advertisements are for works by Restif and that no mention at all is made of Cazotte’s.
As to why Restif made that adjustment we can only guess, but it is unlikely to have been a cynical attempt to increase the sales of the book. It might have been a simple tribute to a much-regretted friend whose comments in discussion might indeed have made a substantial contribution to the first draft while it was in slow progress. But it seems more probable that it relates to an anecdote circulating at the time that was due to a misinterpreted remark by Restif’s arch-enemy, Jean-François La Harpe, in which the latter commented wryly on how amazed the guests at one of Fanny de Beauharnais’s dinners would have been if the Illuminatus had told them in 1788 where they would all be in five years’ time. The comment was repeated as if it were a statement that Cazotte had indeed done that, and Restif might not have been able to resist the temptation to credit his late friend with such a “prophecy,” made, like La Harpe’s remark, after the fact.
Could Restif have done more to repair the work when he finally prepared it for publication? In theory, yes; in practice, probably not. After all, the one thing of which we can be certain is that it was the last thing he ever did by way of publication; he was not able to typeset L’Enclos et les oiseaux, either because he was physically incapable of doing it or because Duchesne flatly refused to publish it, perhaps because the person who was going to pay for it backed out. Either way, that text was lost forever—and whatever one might think of Les Posthumes as an undeniably crippled and clumsy literary work, that loss is undoubtedly a tragedy in terms of the history of speculative and futuristic fiction, at least equal to the loss of the second half of L’Autre Monde.
Restif was sixty-seven in 1802, old by the standards of the day, and he had never enjoyed the best of health. When he typeset Les Posthumes, he believed that he was pressed for time, and he probably identified his own predicament much more closely than he might have wished with Fontlhète’s—with the crucial exception, of course, that he had no Hortense who would miss him, having never managed to find the deep and true mutual love for which he had yearned all his life and which he never ceased to hold up as the great ideal of the human heart.
It was probably not at that point that Restif inserted Fontlhète’s final cry of anguish into the text—“If ever death separates us, you will have things from me sufficiently extraordinary to reread them, and thus conserve my soul, rendered present by the particles of its intelligence that I am leaving you; for thoughts are the particles of the soul, and woe betide the man who does not leave behind those that are dear to him!”—but he must have felt its full force as he set it in type.
He was, by then, at the absolute end of his tether, even though he did not actually die until February 1806. By that time, he must, indeed, have been woestruck by the thought that L’Enclos et les oiseaux would never see the light of day, and he probably could not take as much consolation as he would have liked from the knowledge that, direly imperfect as it was, bearing all the scars of its slow and uncertain genesis, Les Posthumes would at least conserve a few of the particles of his soul, which were even dearer to him than the heart he had never quite succeeded in laying entirely bare.
Brian Stableford lives in Hadleigh, Essex.
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