L'Homme truqué is a short novel by Maurice Renard, initially published in March 1921 in the magazine Je sais tout. Regularly republished in France during the 20th and 21st centuries, it also benefits from numerous publications abroad.
Maurice Renard tells the story of Jean Lebris, a soldier who lost his sight during the trench war, returning to his home town. Having acquired superhuman vision following a medical experiment aimed at restoring his sight, he tries to hide his cumbersome secret from those around him.
Written in the aftermath of the First World War, the novel features a war cripple. It appears as a pessimistic work, both by its theme - the difficult rehabilitation of a disabled soldier - and by its tragic ending. As such, it bears witness to the trauma suffered by the French population in the aftermath of the war.
At the same time, Maurice Renard, leader of the scientific-marvel literary genre, seeks with this tale of scientific imagination to give the reader food for thought. He pushes the latter to question the scientific progress on which he occasionally offers a nuanced look, notably through the question of the superhuman, but also on the existence of the invisible worlds that surround us.
In 2013, writer Serge Lehman and cartoonist Gess revisited this classic of the scientific-marvel genre in a homonymous comic book, transposing the character created by Maurice Renard into a superheroic context.
Origin of the work
Maurice Renard, cantor of scientific-marvel
Maurice Renard is a novelist of the scientific imagination who seeks to theorize a literary genre under the name of "scientific-marvel"In 1909, he appropriated the expression "scientific-marvel", used by critics to designate scientific novels as a whole, to which he added a hyphen. This typographical addition also transformed the expression into an adjective. novel to promote its emergence. Author of the successful Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908) and Le Péril bleu (1911), he assigned in a founding article published in 1909 considerable aspirations to the literary genre, namely to give the reader food for thought through the application of scientific methods to irrational events. During the first quarter of the 20th century, the writer tries to make his readers think about the effects of progress. Thus, Maurice Renard advocates the use of science, no longer as a setting like the scientific novels of Jules Verne, but as a disruptive element that generates a wonderful phenomenon.
The war suspended his literary activities, as he was mobilized between August 1914 and January 1919. After the war, his financial problems forced him to devote himself to a more popular literature genre. He then produced hybrid texts in which the police and love plots took precedence over the scientific-marvel dimension.
When defining the scientific-marvel, Maurice Renard explicitly refers to the works of several novelists he admires, including the French-Belgian J.-H. Rosny aîné and the Englishman H. G. Wells. Thus, the novelThis short novel is sometimes called a short story L'Homme truqué is inspired by the work of these two authors, namely the stories Un autre monde by Rosny aîné and Un étrange phénomène by Wells, two works published in 1895 that deal with individuals handicapped by their fantastic vision. In addition to literary works, he probably also drew his inspiration from the invention of radiography. In November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen took the first photographs of his wife's hand, in which the bones appear clearly surrounded by the lighter halo of the flesh. Maurice Renard transposes this process to a vision of the electrical phenomena with which the main character is provided, who manages to see a tree-like image of the nervous tissue of individuals.
A creative context marked by war
If the rapid development of science and technology in the late 19th century produced optimistic works by novelists of scientific imagination, at the same time a number of novels were concerned with the social danger that science could represent. The First World War and the trauma induced by the devastation caused by technology reinforces in these novelists this mistrust of science, especially with the proliferation of mad scientists in fictional stories.
Besides this nuanced look at science and its potential, the figure of the soldier transformed by war, whether physically or psychically, is a theme that appears from the beginning of the conflict. Thus, J.-H. Rosny aîné, in his novel L'Énigme de Givreuse published in 1916, presents a wounded soldier returning from the front line after having been split into two completely identical copies. In this story, which is not about war but about its consequences, Rosny Aîné questions scientific research and its own limits. This theme, also important for Maurice Renard, appeared as early as 1920 with the short story La Rumeur dans la montagne, which featured a painter traumatized by the war. The following year, he published the novel L'Homme truqué which, like L'Énigme de Givreuse, deals with a soldier returning home after having undergone a physical transformation caused by scientists.
The story
Abstract
Prologue and Epilogue In the post-war years, the constables of Belvoux, Mochon and Juliaz, discover in the woods, the corpse of Doctor Bare, shot in the head. The constables go to the victim's house and discover that his home has been completely searched. They nevertheless find a manuscript written by the doctor that had escaped the vigilance of the criminals. This document forms a narrative of which the bloody death of the doctor is only the epilogue.
The revealing gesture
Dr. Bare's manuscript begins with his reunion with Jean Lebris, who had been presumed dead for France in June 1918. The latter tells the doctor that after a battle during which he lost his sight, he was taken by Germans to a doctor experimenting a new ophthalmological treatment. It is by taking advantage of the discontent of his jailer that he was able to escape and return to his home town. As Jean returned to his mother's house, Dr. Bare observed him through the window and witnessed an incredible scene that made him doubt the young man's real blindness: at the last stroke of noon, he looked at his watch and set it back on time.
Jean Lebris' adventure A couple of weeks later, while the doctor is examining Jean for his worsening cough, he meets Madame Lebris' new tenant, a young girl named Fanny, and is immediately seduced. The doctor finally learns Jean's secret, when he surprises him in the woods: surprised, the young man turns around and points his gun at the doctor hidden behind a bush. Learning that the doctor is his friend Dr. Bare, Jean sets out to tell him the truth. He reveals to her that after being wounded in the battle of Dormans, German soldiers have taken him to a clinic in a forest in central Europe. Blinded, he was treated by Dr. Prosope, who removed his eyes and replaced them with new ones. When he wakes up from the operation, Jean manages to see a being of light in front of him despite the blindfold on his new eyes. Doctor Prosope explains to him the principle of his new vision: for a normal person, the eye is connected to the brain by the optic nerve, which transmits to the brain the light impressions that the eye has received. By replacing John's eyes with organs that allow him to see electricity, electroscopes, he can see the nervous system of people, even through walls. Following the argument of Doctor Prosope with his servant, the latter secretly leaves the clinic taking Jean with him. He takes him to Strasbourg where Jean can first join his military hierarchy, before returning to his home town.
Radiography In the weeks following Fanny's arrival in Belvoux, the young girl and Dr. Bare become so close that Dr. Bare finally confesses his feelings for her and asks for her hand in marriage. Fanny refuses on the grounds that the news would break Jean's heart, in whom she guesses to have feelings identical to those of the doctor. She replies that she will accept in two months when Jean, who is very ill, will be dead. After Jean agrees to be x-rayed by the doctor, the hospice housing the laboratory is the prey of a fire. Dr. Bare then suspects that Prosope was involved in destroying the evidence of Jean's electroscopes.
The last days of the phenomenon Increasingly ill, Jean suffers a violent attack accompanied by hemoptysis that leaves him bedridden. During his enforced rest, Jean's well-developed sixth sense can distinguish unsuspected forms of electricity moving through the air, which could be an invisible race, made up exclusively of electricity, surrounding us. His condition worsens and Jean eventually dies. The doctor then tells Fanny about the electromagnetic eyes and his plan to prevent anyone from stealing the eyes of the corpse. Having left to instruct the masons to make his grave impossible to break into, the doctor leaves Fanny at Jean's bedside before replacing her at nightfall. At night, when he hopes to steal the electroscopic eyes, he discovers that they have disappeared. In the morning, going to Fanny to tell her about his disappointment, he discovers that she has also disappeared and deduces that she has manipulated him since their meeting. The doctor tries to reassure himself by saying to himself that she had to love him a little to have allowed him to remain alive.
Main characters
The main character of this novel is Jean Lebris. This soldier, who disappeared during the war, reappears after the conflict in his home town. Blinded by a shell explosion in the trenches, he is rescued by a German ambulance before being handed over to mysterious doctors. At his own expense, he becomes the subject of a medical experiment to restore his sight. Having recovered his sight thanks to the installation of electroscopes allowing him to see electricity, he managed to flee and reach his village of Belvoux. Feeling in danger, he hides his increased vision from those around him.
This secret is nevertheless discovered by his friend Dr. Bare, who takes care of his declining health. As the narrator of the story, he is the confidant of Jean Lebris' revelations. His love for the beautiful Fanny Grive also blinds him and prevents him from protecting his friend's secret. Indeed, the young woman arrives with her mother some time after Lebris' return to Belvoux. Becoming very quickly friends with Bare and Lebris, she manages to manipulate the doctor to recover the electroscopes for the account of Doctor Prosope. This medical genius, of unknown nationality, is at the origin of Jean Lebris' transplanted eyes. A mysterious scientist whose secrets are never revealed, he owns a clinic in the heart of central Europe, where he experiments his inventions on wounded soldiers.Jean Lebris detects, thanks to his augmented vision, eleven other patients present in the clinic of Doctor Prosope. After seeing his invention escape him, and although he only appears in Lebris' memories, his shadow hangs over the whole story.
Critical review If the novel appears retrospectively as a major work of the scientific-marvel genre - the science-fiction essayist Jacques Van Herp praises in 1956 the dramatic force of the work of Maurice Renard as "a long lucid nightmare" that the author manages to carry out with mastery, the essayist Pierre Versins admires in 1972 a nightmarish tale marked by "a strange visual poetry", while the two essayists Guy Costes and Joseph Altairac qualify in 2018 the novel as "one of the most poignant texts of Maurice Renard" -, from its publication, the contemporary critics of L'Homme truqué welcome, on the whole, a successful although fanciful story.