Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert: The Mother of Planetary Fantasy – GUEST POST By Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier & Brian Stableford
Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert:
The Mother of Planetary Fantasy
By Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier & Brian Stableford
Long before Catherine L. Moore chronicled the planetary exploits of Northwest Smith, or even before Edgar Rice Burroughs sent his stalwart heroes explore Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and other celestial bodies of our Solar System, an 18th century French woman had boldly dispatched her protagonist, Lord Seaton (“Ceton” in the original French), to the then-known seven worlds orbiting the Sun.
Voyages de Milord Céton dans les sept planettes (sic) [The Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets] was first published in four volumes in The Hague in 1765-66, with the by-line “translated by Madame de R.R.” In it, the eponymous hero and his sister Monime travel to the seven planets of the Solar System on the wings of the genie Zachiel. They discover that the inhabitants of each world represent a human character trait—Selenites are capricious, Martians bellicose, Venusians lovers, etc. Her eclectic hierarchy of celestial beings includes genies, the equivalents of Christian angels and demons, as well as pseudo-Paracelsian elementals. Eventually, they return to Earth where Monime inherits the throne of Georgia.
“Madame de R.R.”—who was the author rather than the translator of the work—was Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert (1705-1771), a woman born into an aristocratic family that had already come down in the world considerably by the time she was born. Her father was acquainted with Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), author of Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; tr. in 1687 as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds), the enormously influential popularization of the Copernican theory of the Solar System. She met Fontenelle on more than one occasion and retained a sufficiently elevated idea of his importance to grant him a place of honor in her City of Philosophers on the Sun, where all the great minds go to live after death, but if she ever read his masterpiece, she does not seem to have taken its lessons aboard, as her own account of the Solar System relies more on pure fantasy than science.
Marie-Anne’s parents died while she was still young, and the debts her father left caused a posthumous bankruptcy that left her devoid of any inheritance; the relative who became her guardian put her into a convent, from which she only emerged to be married off to an advocate named Robert. The only brief biographical notice written by someone who apparently knew her, Joseph de Laporte, has nothing to say about Monsieur Robert, except that he was highly esteemed in his profession. The preface of Voyages de Milord Céton finds Marie-Anne alone and “without support”, and strongly suggests that she was a widow by then.
It was not until relatively late in life that Marie-Anne decided to try her hand at writing. She might have taken some inspiration from the examples set by Madeleine de Scudery and Madame de La Fayette a century earlier, or from the slightly more recent success of Francoise de Graffigny. Her works followed a pattern not dissimilar to theirs, including both naturalistic “sensibility novels”—the ancestors of stereotyped modern love stories—and fantastic tales borrowing motifs from Madame d’Aulnoy’s Fairy tales and Classical mythology.
Marie-Anne published two realistic novels prior to venturing into fantasy with Voyages de Milord Céton, the first of which was La Paysanne philosophe [The Philosophical Peasant Woman] (1761-62), detailing the complex but relentlessly moral love life of an orphan peasant girl adopted and brought up by an aristocratic woman. That novel was reprinted three times, and appears to have been considerably more successful than her La Voix de la nature [The Voice of Nature] (1764), another tale of an orphan in quest of true love. The plaintive preface to Voyages de Milord Céton, as well as certain comments in her account of life on the Moon, suggests that the relative failure of her second novel might well have impelled her to attempt something more eye-catchingly unusual with Voyages de Milord Céton.
Voyages de Milord Céton belongs to the tradition of interplanetary fantasies launched in France by the posthumous publication of Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde, ou Les États et empires de la lune (1657; tr. as Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) and more recently carried forward by the Chevalier de Béthune’s Relation du monde de Mercure (1750; tr. as The World of Mercury), Charles-François Tiphaigne de Le Roche’s “Zamar” (1754), and Monsieur de Listonai’s Le Voyageur philosophe (1761; tr. as The Philosophical Voyager). While Madame Robert had very likely read these works, her novel’s subtitle, however, indicates that her principal literary model was François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699; tr. as The Adventures of Telemachus), in which the protagonist is taken on an educational tour by his tutor Mentor. Her account of the more far-ranging educational tour to which the genie Zachiel subjects Lord Seaton and his sister Monime is, to a large extent, an homage, to Fénelon.
It has to be admitted that Voyages de Milord Céton is not the most readable of texts today; it is not only prolix, repetitive and inconsistent, but it certainly does not lack in boldness. It must have required a defiantly eccentric courage to set out to write an interplanetary fantasy novel if you not only unsure as to whether the Ptolemaic model the solar system or the Copernican is the correct one, but not even sure as to why it makes a difference, and to offer an account of the City of Philosophers on the Sun when you only have the slightest idea what any of these philosophers discovered or believed, and why it was significant.
Like many writers of philosophical extravaganzas, however, Marie-Anne appears to have been using the writing of her novel as a means of clarifying her own ideas about various matters, and attempting to fix her own moral compass by working on some difficult issues. Not all the issues in question were resolved, and it is arguable that the remaining ambiguities and ambivalences are more revealing of her own state of mind and the confusions of her historical moment than the firm commitments she makes. Her attitude to war is one interesting instance, as her occasional polemics against it—and famous warriors receive remarkably short shrift in her allegorical account of the Temple of Glory on Mars—are counterbalanced by her account of Seaton’s preparation for a military career and by the striking intervention of Monime in the battle fought in the climax of the plot. It is notable that the gushing depiction of the utopian world of Saturn takes it for granted that the planet’s inhabitants still fight regular wars, even though there does not appear to be any possible source of their provocation.
Nevertheless, the narrative also has some striking compensatory virtues such as the intensely exotic imagery of some of its passages—the visit to a comet, for instance—and the sheer bizarrerie of its plot, for example the love affair between Prince Petulant and the temporarily-amnesiac Monime, as monitored by the perversely-conflicted Seaton in the form of a stinging fly.
After publishing Voyages de Milord Céton, Marie-Anne went on to publish a third naturalistic novel, Nicole de Beauvais and a fantasy novella, Les Ondins [The Water-Sprites] (both 1768), three years prior to her death.
It is not easy nowadays to sympathize with Marie-Anne’s intransigent monarchism and her absolutist views on sexual morality. Both attitudes were more than a trifle old-fashioned even in her own day, but those who read Voyages de Milord Céton in the 1760s likely enjoyed the book more for its strangeness, its imagination and sarcastic wit. It is hard not to regret that the feminist opinions that crop up occasionally in both texts are not extrapolated more fully, and are even sometimes flatly contradicted, but that very ambivalence helps to make the leading female character, Monime, the real hero of the novel and far more interesting than the stereotyped heroines of the realistic novels of the times.
BOOK:
THE VOYAGES OF LORD SEATON TO THE SEVEN PLANETS by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert translated by Brian Stableford (also including LES ONDINES), Black Coat Press, 978-1-61227-446-1,