The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (72 page)

Initially, he refused
point blank to answer my questions. Courtesy having produced nothing, I
confined him in one of the château’s dungeons, which had not been used for more
than a century, and there I left him to meditate on the wisdom of his conduct,
while I devoted myself to a close study of his notebooks. Without penetrating
all their secrets, I quickly realized that they referred to one of the oldest
fantasies of man: becoming invisible — but through science, not through
sorcery. You may imagine into what state of excitement this discovery plunged
me. From then onward, I could have no rest until Ishmael (let us call him such,
for want of anything better) agreed to assist me in producing this wonder, of
which several essential elements escaped me. In order to attain this result, I
found it necessary to keep him chained up for several weeks in his dungeon, on
dry bread and water, and still he did not falter in his resolve, save after a
visit to the torture chamber where our ancestor, Gottfried, Commander of the
Teutonic Order, was accustomed to entertain his captives. (He claimed that
invisibility could bring nothing good to humanity, particularly if it fell into
the wrong hands, but it is my conviction that he desired to be its only
beneficiary.) I was thus not obliged to bring the rack or the irons back into
service, but believe you me, if it had proved necessary, I would have brought
myself to do it.

Ishmael himself was not
the author of the notebooks: they had come into his possession by good fortune,
he assured me — I deduced from this that he had stolen them — and thus he was
obliged to spend long hours studying them in order to gain their secrets.
Gifted with a brilliant intelligence, despite his duplicity, he was also able
to use his powers of deduction and his experience to reinvent certain crucial
details which the original author had omitted to put to paper, doubtless
preferring to consign them to memory so that no one could reproduce them.

Once he had provided me
with a detailed formula, I could easily concoct the potion in my laboratory,
and could even work out alone the antidote which the potion’s inventor had
neglected to provide. If it is at times highly useful to be invisible, you may
imagine how awkward it would be to be so permanently. My coffer will provide
you with a substantial reserve of the potion itself and its antidote, in the
bottles labelled respectively no. 1 and no. 2. When this is exhausted, well,
you will have the choice of interesting yourself in science (I will leave you
all the necessary notes) or engaging the services of a discreet chemist — to
whom, if you mark my words, you will not reveal the final outcome of his work;
my secret should therefore remain yours: the secret of Wilhelm Storitz.

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.

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.