The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (66 page)

Thanks to Ishmael, this was the work of four months, but I am convinced that at the price of several years’ travail, I would have achieved it alone. On the other hand, what I could never have achieved is the other part of the experiment. Because you see, invisibility is not produced by chemistry alone, but also by that force brought to light by the ancient Greeks or, more recently, by Otto de Guericke: the force called electricity, which our German science still masters so badly, despite its achievements and the brilliant work of Von Kleist.

Although English, Ishmael appeared to know its principles, and was even able to manufacture in an easily portable form the apparatus which provides the particular exposure necessary to achieve the perfect result. If you were to dispense with this, you would not become invisible, but simply white as a sheet, in both skin and hair. The electrical radiance alone, on the other hand, would leave visible your hair, your irises, and the blood that pulses in your veins, so much so that you would resemble a fairground freak, ripe for stoning by the ignorant populace.

On the device you will notice a kind of moveable lever: in its higher position it will produce the effect which I have described; in its lower position, it will cancel it. I cannot recommend too strongly that you guard this apparatus as though it were the most precious of treasures, for if there exists anywhere another savant capable of reproducing it, I know him not. Moreover, it is on this point alone that I sometimes come to doubt my reason and to believe in the possibility of Ishmael’s fable. The subject is in any case without interest, for a little while after our success I relaxed my vigilance and my prisoner escaped, taking with him the colossal machine whose true function he had always refused to reveal. Doubtless, I should have subjected him to questioning in order to compel him to disclose it. But, too much obsessed by the secret of invisibility, I postponed that task until it was too late. Whatever the case, I will never see him again, and because he served me admirably, I will cut short my regrets.

For me then began a period of great felicity. Can you imagine what can be accomplished by an invisible man?

Spying without the slightest risk on one’s enemies, on one’s rivals, to discover their secrets, their projects; spying likewise on one’s friends, to discover whether they are well and truly such; spying for ever and a day — even on women in their privacy. I know your temperament: no more so than myself, you will not suffer that a female resists you. Henceforth, if one should reject you, you can take her by force without fearing the vengeance of a father or an outraged husband. I know I will not shock you by telling you that as for myself, whose age and scarred face frighten away young women, I have hardly been the measure of restraint.

All of that you will be able to carry out with impunity. However, if you should take to theft you must exercise the greatest prudence. I do not refer here to the villainous thefts of the common people, from which our wealth distances us; there do arise, however, circumstances in which the most honest man is constrained to steal the belongings of others in order to avert the darkest plots. In my own case, this has proved particularly so in regard to the notes of envious colleagues, forever on the lookout for that which could harm me. If you should find yourself pushed to such extremes, you should be aware that all the objects which you seize upon will not disappear. Slipping them under your clothes will solve the problem, you tell me? No, my son. If it were so, your own silhouette would mask everything behind it, which would outline it clearly, making its invisibility useless. And since we are speaking of clothing, be certain to wear nothing but an immaculate white, for your clothing cannot drink the potion, and the radiance will not work in the slightest on coloured fabric. The least mark will be likely to betray you; thus, you will not be truly safe save in the simplest apparel, but I grant you that this can prove impractical, especially in cold weather.

There, it seems to me, you have all I have to say to you. I hope from the bottom of my heart that my messenger will reach you in time for you to return to Spremberg before my death and allow me the joy of seeing you for one last time. If this is the case, I will myself give you all the preceding explanations. If not, my notary will pass on this letter.

I remain, no matter what should come to pass, your affectionate father,

Otto Storitz.

2

One would judge M. Jules Verne too harshly by reproaching him for having lied in the matter of Wilhelm Storitz. The inexactitudes of his tale after all only concern points of detail, and the truth, if he ever knew it, was too unlikely, too horrible and too shocking to be revealed to an audience primarily composed of adolescents, at the dawn of the twentieth century. As for myself, I only learned of it later, when the letter from Otto Storitz to his son, discovered in the depths of the old family château which I had innocently acquired, provoked my researches.

Before progressing any further, it is appropriate that I should introduce myself: I am he who that monstrous individual which was Storitz called “Ishmael”. I was therefore, albeit unwillingly, one of the principal causes of this lamentable tale, and I am compiling this account in part to relieve my conscience, although I do not know whether it will ever be read.

The events which occurred at Ragz, in Hungary, between April and July 1757, are, thanks to Verne’s novel, too well known to make it necessary for me to give more than a brief summary of them here. A French portrait painter, Marc Vidal, asked for the hand in marriage of a young Hungarian woman of a good family, Myra Roderich, and was accepted by her as well as by her relatives. Wilhelm Storitz, another of Myra’s suitors — this one rejected, which does not surprise me in the least if, in addition to belonging to a nationality for which the Magyars had only contempt, he possessed a quarter of his father’s personality — did everything possible to prevent this union, aided, of course, by his famous “secret”: invisibility. Not the least of his revolting machinations was to render Myra herself invisible, causing her relatives to believe that he had carried her off. Verne records that Storitz’s miserable existence found its end under the sabre of the young woman’s brother, and that he thus became visible due to a massive loss of blood. As for Myra, while still invisible she married her fiancé and, ten months later, gave him a child. The loss of blood which she then underwent returned her too to her normal state, so much so that the Vidal family lived happily from then on.

Even if they are inspired by authentic happenings, novelists, those professional liars, seldom hesitate to enhance these. I am well-placed to know, my own biographer having passably well retouched the tale which I told him before passing it off as a work of fiction. In the case which concerns us, however, Verne perhaps acted in all innocence: without a doubt his inspiration came from the memoirs of Henri Vidal, Marc’s brother, who was a witness to the events — memoirs to which he remains completely faithful. This autobiographical work, of which only fifty copies were published by the author in 1782, and which must already have been quite elusive by Verne’s time, contained enough details for our author to judge any further research pointless — except from a purely geographic point of view, for he liked to sow his novels (a bit too liberally for my taste) with precise descriptions of the countries traversed by his protagonists.

That Henri Vidal himself may have misrepresented the facts to a certain extent is quite conceivable. One should remember that these took place in the mid-eighteenth century: the only dynamos existing at that time were those I had manufactured under duress for Otto Storitz. Perhaps Vidal did not know of them. Perhaps he knew of them, but was unable to guess at their function — which the uneducated servant Hermann would have been incapable of explaining, although he was sure to have seen them in action. Whatever the case may be, the engineer nowhere makes mention of them and attributes the quality of invisibility entirely to an improbable potion. Not too improbable, however, that it couldn’t satisfy several generations of readers.

Since only the chemical aspect of the ‘secret’ was cancelled, it goes without saying that after their haemorrhages, Storitz and Myra did not regain their normal appearance: they became a kind of monster with transparent skin, through which arteries and veins could be seen, as well as a good number of their organs, not to mention the foodstuffs which circulated in their digestive system. A horrific vision, to be sure. The archives which I have been able to consult reveal that Myra Vidal died three months after her confinement; my conviction is that she ended her life after having passed once too often in front of a mirror. All these details, it must be admitted, could not feature either in the memoirs of a respectable engineer in 1782, nor in a novel for the young in 1910.

However, there is worse. The same archives prove without refutation that Vidal’s child was born not ten, but eight and a half months after their marriage. Certainly, one can imagine a slightly premature birth, even conclude that passion had brought the two lovebirds to anticipate the consent of society and the Church to their union — this second hypothesis amply justifies the discretion of those that recounted their lives. Nonetheless, a much more sinister possibility springs to mind, one supported by the fact that following the death of his wife, Marc Vidal placed his child with a tutor and never again wished to hear tell of him. In my opinion, the following occurred:

The secret of invisibility, one should remember, only acted on a perfectly white material. That Wilhelm Storitz himself made use of clothing in white fabric or leather is probable. That Myra Roderich was likewise wearing an immaculate costume the day he entered her home with the purpose of making her invisible is on the other hand more than doubtful. What then did he do? He compelled her to drink the potion, and without doubt a soporific, then to undress completely. And thus, this man who is described to us as completely amoral, ready to perpetrate anything to satisfy his vices, found himself in the company of the woman he had desired for months, naked and at his mercy. Should we believe that he reclothed her in a chaste white gown and respected her virtue? I believe instead that he abused her and that this detestable union brought forth fruit. The dates concur.

And it is this image, that of the monster leaning over his innocent victim, that haunts me by night when sleep eludes me, for without me, this ignoble act would never have taken place.

I now arrive at the manner in which I came into possession of the three famous notebooks with the aid of which I perfected the technique that allowed Otto, then Wilhelm, Storitz to give free rein to their baser instincts. Contrary to the chemist’s insinuations in his letter — he easily lends his own vices to others — this was not by theft: I quite simply purchased them.

This came about some time before the events which my biographer recounts in fictionalised form in the book consecrated to myself. Upon returning from a study trip, I stayed one evening in a small hostelry that I knew near to Port-Stowe, whose landlord, a jovial individual named Mr Marvel, never failed to amuse me with his colourful conversation. Exceptionally, that evening I found him morose. Since I was more or less his only client, he sat at my table without hesitation and, while we dined, he explained the reason for his sombre mood. His establishment was in jeopardy: two other inns had opened in the vicinity. One, which was more respectable than his own, was favoured by the bourgeoisie and their wives; the other, which was much less so, attracted heavy drinkers and light women en masse. A few old faithfuls hardly sufficed to keep things going, and because they were old in all senses of the term, the day would not be long before this small clientele disappeared in its turn. Marvel had therefore decided to pack his bags and, weary of England, to seek his fortune in the Americas. Alas, having found no buyer for his doomed inn, he had not managed to put together the necessary sum to pay his passage.

Over after-dinner drinks, when he had brought a bottle of his best whisky to the table,
on the house,
he declared that I could help him to realize his project, assuring me straight away that he was not asking for charity, but that he possessed an item which would without a doubt be to my benefit to acquire. Did I recall that invisible man that had sown terror in the region several years earlier, before being beaten down by a furious crowd? How could I not remember it? I had followed the affair in the newspapers and since then Mr Marvel himself had regaled me with it each time I had stayed at his inn, which was, moreover, named The Invisible Man. He liked to boast that he had played a part in it which, although minor, gained in importance each time he related the story.

I realized much later that my biographer, always in search of out-of-the-ordinary events, had by a curious coincidence produced another novel drawn from this occurrence, a novel as yet unpublished at the time of my stay in Port-Stowe — luckily for Marvel, as the indiscreet author revealed within it that Marvel had in his possession the notes made by Griffin, the invisible man, which had never been found by the authorities.

When the inn-keeper suggested selling them to me, intrigued, I asked to examine them. Having refilled my glass and his own, he rose with an expression on his face which was the most solemn he could adopt, and went to open the locked drawer of a sideboard, which held a small coffer from which he drew three volumes bound in brown leather and, it must be said, somewhat worn in appearance. He set them in front of me as though they were sacred relics, swearing by all that is holy that he had never before shown them to anyone, which I could well believe. I later learned that there had been at least one exception, but my biographer had always known how to get what he wanted.

Although I leafed through them without close attention, this brief glance convinced me that they came from the pen of a scholar: the equations I discovered there seemed well-balanced and not in the slightest fantastical. Perhaps they would at least give me material for reflection. Led astray by the whisky, and desiring to be of service to my host, I enquired as to the price he wanted, bargained a little on principle, and quickly concluded the deal.