The Voyages Excentrique Novels (transl.: “Eccentric Voyages”) were written by “Paul d'Ivoi” and spanned twenty-one novels. “Paul d’Ivoi” was the pseudonym of Paul Deleutre (1856-1915), an extremely popular commercial writer of pulp science fiction.

Deleutre was one of several French authors in the nineteenth century who created an inter-connected fictional universe in his work. This trend began with Honoré de Balzac, whose La Comédie humaine (transl.: “Human Comedy”) cycle spans nearly ninety novels, including Father Goriot. Others who connected their novels and stories into a single fictional universe included Émile Gaboriau (see: The Lerouge Affair) and Jules Verne (see: Robur the Conqueror, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). Deleutre was a relatively late arrival to the crossover/metalepsis phenomenon, being anticipated by decades by Balzac, Gaboriau, and Verne, but what Deleutre did with the crossovers was an innovation and an anticipation of twentieth-century popular culture crossovers. Rather than take the Verne approach and have a number of singleton novels and stories contain references to other (otherwise unconnected) singleton stories and novels, and rather than take the Gaboriau approach and write a large number of sequels in a series, what Deleutre did was create an ongoing fictional universe connected by both singletons and series of novels. In this, Deleutre was a groundbreaker, and anticipates the most common type of crossover in the twentieth century, the shared universe made up of ongoing, open-ended series rather than singletons.¹

In most respects, however, Deleutre was not an innovator, and was instead a writer who produced unusually popular versions of current trends. He did this in part by reducing the elements that were traditionally respected by literary critics—character development, subtlety and nuance of style, and excellence of expression—and emphasizing the elements which Deleutre’s reading audience (lower and middle class readers, usually youthful) was actually interested in—character traits like courage and love, strong emotions simply expressed, and science fictional inventions. And action—especially action. As Deleutre once advised a fellow writer, “It’s action that the reader must have, non-stop action.”² In this Deleutre more than delivered, producing feuilleton serials (later turned into novels) that read like nothing so much as a 1930s American pulp.

What Deleutre can be credited with is the creation of “a kind of narratological stepping-stone between Verne’s generally conservative ‘hard sf’ model and the more fantastic ‘speculative sf’ of authors such as H.G. Wells and J.-H. Rosny aîné (Rosny the Elder).”³ The Voyages Excentrique novels are full of advanced technology, from tanks that turn into boats to ornithopter airships to submarines to ocean liners to high explosive bullets to liquid carbon dioxide bombs. “By their variety and omnipresence, the many technological gadgets in d’Ivoi’s narratives suggest less the cautiously conservative extrapolations of Verne and more the highly whimsical inventions commonly found in the dime novels of Frank Reade, Jr. [see: The Frank Reade Adventures] and Tom Swift."⁴

The final reason why the sf novels of Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentriques seem noteworthy is because they reflect an important change in the semiotic structure of early French science fiction as it begins to evolve away from the dominant Vernian model toward a more Wellsian and post-Wellsian one. Situated midway between the highly mimetic, pedagogy-based fictions of Verne and the more estranging, “absent paradigm”-based fictions of authors such as J.-H. Rosny aîné and Maurice Renard, the works of d’Ivoi and other Verne School writers straddle two narratological worlds. Although still ostensibly didactic, the science in these narratives is often watered down and/or simulated; instead of implanting knowledge, it now serves more fictional purposes such as verisimilitude-building, plot progression, or special effects. As a result, its place in the narrative moves from primary to secondary—from subject to context—as it now seeks to appeal to the creative imagination rather than the reasoning intellect of the reader.⁵

Deleutre was generally not an innovator, as mentioned, something that extended to his characters, which were heavily inspired (not to say complete rip-offs of) other author’s creations. The three main series in the Voyages Excentrique novels were the Cigale novels, the Doctor Mystery novels, and the Lavarède novels. The Cigale novels (1899-1903) are about a Parisian orphan who has a series of adventures in India, the United States, South America and the Caribbean. Cigale is courageous and in some ways innocent and can be described as an updated version of Gavroche, the patriotic street urchin from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Cigale can also be described as an anticipation of Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin, but this was no particular stroke of brilliant innovation on Deleutre’s part. The French adventure magazines at the turn of the century “were filled with what we might label ‘Proto-Tintins’ – fearless teenagers or young reporters, embarking on extraordinary adventures around the world, making full use of then exotic means of travel such as aeroplanes and submarines.”⁶

raw material for his stories in the current events of the time. The bloody Boxer rebellion and the much publicized siege of the foreign embassies in the summer of 1900, for example, figured prominently in his novel Cigale en Chine [Cigale in China], published the following year. The catastrophic 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique became a major focus of his 1903 Les Semeurs de glace [The Ice Sowers], where the explosion is shown to have been triggered by an evil scientist’s experiments with liquid carbonic gas. And the depredations of British colonialism during the fin-de-siècle are often depicted¼.⁷

But, of course, questions can be raised about proprieties and good taste when one writes about current events. This is especially so in the case of The Ice Sowers, in which Deleutre exploits a natural disaster that killed thirty thousand people and destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre, all in order to sell copies of a feuilleton and later a novel in order to enrich himself. This sort of lack of taste and poor judgment is not uncommon in genre literature—examples of it go back at least as far as Edgar Allan Poe, whose “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries) was based on the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers (circa 1820-1841)—but Deleutre’s use of the Mount Pelée eruption, the worst volcanic disaster of the twentieth century, seems egregious. Nor was this the only time that Deleutre wrote in bad taste. In Cigale in China (original: Cigale en Chine, 1901), Cigale helps the French legation during the Boxer siege (the Chinese being portrayed in stereotypically negative terms) and helps the French diplomat Roseau-Fleuri foil the evil schemes of the Yellow Peril Emperor Tsou-Hsi, the “living Buddha.”

The use of a mad scientist in The Ice Sowers is another example of the nineteenth century’s version of the insane experimenter character type. The obvious example that Deleutre in all likelihood based the mad scientist, Olivio of Avarco, and his exploding volcano on is the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, in which

De Sade is approached by a chemist, Almani, who shares de Sade’s enthusiasm for sadism and has discovered the secrets of nature’s destructive powers. Almani has spent twenty years duplicating causing artificial earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes, and killing ordinary people with him, and he offers to help de Sade. Together the two build artificial volcanoes on Sicily, eventually killing 25,000 Sicilians.⁸

But mad scientists, by the turn of the century, were generally portrayed as insane monomaniacs (see: Charley Wag, the New Jack Sheppard) and Olivio of Avarco is no different.⁹

The Doctor Mystery novels (1899-1900) feature a character that, like Cigale, is modeled on another author’s creation—in this case, Verne’s Captain Nemo (see: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). “Doctor Mystery” is the pseudonym of an Indian prince who is betrayed by a friend who is allied with the Russians and a Thuggee cult. Dr. Mystery goes to Paris and invents a technologically-advanced car and “cyanide pistols” and then returns to India to use his new technology in a war against the Brahmins who betrayed him, eventually achieving his revenge. Dr. Mystery is mysterious and brooding—the hallmarks of Captain Nemo—but his more aggressive and heroics-minded approach is quite un-Verne-like, and is an anticipation of the pulp heroes of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Lester Dent’s Doc Savage.

The Lavarède novels (1894-1898) are about a pair of brothers, Armand and Robert, who have a series of adventures: Armand travels around the world, beginning with only five sous in his pocket, like an impoverished Phileas Fogg (see: Around the World in Eighty Days); Armand flies to the North Pole in a technologically-advanced airship and finds the records of previous lost races (see: The Lost Race Story); Armand and Robert are kidnaped by a Robur-like sky pirate; Armand and Robert meet another of Deleutre’s Captain Nemo-like characters and help him carry out his Count of Monte Cristo-like revenge scheme; and Armand, Robert, and the Captain Nemo-alike free Egypt from English control and thereby bring about the dissolution of most of the British empire. The Lavarède novels are perhaps the most typical of Deleutre’s Voyages Excentrique novels. They are an entertaining combination of fast-paced adventure on a global scale, technologically-advanced weapons and vehicles, international conspiracies, lost races, and mad scientists and tyrants.

In tone and content the Lavarède stories are precursors to the American pulps and French dime novels of the twentieth century. (Negatively as well as positively; like the American pulps, the Voyages Excentrique novels are full of racist, jingoistic, and antisemitic stereotypes). Those who read French and can enjoy shallow, fast-moving, action-heavy fiction should seek them out. As Brian Stableford writes about Around the World on Five Sous (original: Les Cinq sous de Lavarède, 1894),

In some ways, Les Cinq sous de Lavarède exhibits all the worst features of popular fiction of its period: it is derivative, slapdash, uneven, full of outrageous coincidences and, if the pattern of its events is considered with a clinical eye, monumentally silly, but none of that mattered much to the readers who loved it, and there is no surprise in the fact that it made no difference to the book’s enormous and enduring popularity, whereas the novel’s positive features—the balance struck between comedy and melodrama, the introduction of the additional complications of the miserly spending-limit imposed on the hero, and the extraordinary stubbornness of the villain intent on stop him—made a very considerable difference to it.

The novel is pure entertainment, written according to a pattern that makes for easy and relaxing reading, long on story and short on plot.¹⁰

Print: Paul d’Ivoi, Brian M. Stableford, Around the World on Five Sous. Encino, CA: Black Coats Press, 2015.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100176306/. (in French; there is no English language translation of d’Ivoi’s work available online).

Arthur B. Evans, “The Verne School in France: Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentriques,” Science Fiction Studies 36 (2009): 217-234.

¹ The first example of this type of shared universe was Gardner Fox and Everett E. Hibbard’s All-Star Comics 1, no. 3 (Dec. 1940), in which the previously separate superheroes of DC’s line of comics were brought together to form the Justice Society of America (JSA). The JSA was not immediately imitated: Harvey Comics’ superheroes only met up once, in Prize Comics no. 24 (Oct. 1942), Fawcett Comics’ JSA knock-off, the “Crime Crusaders Club,” only got together once, in Master Comics no. 41 (Aug. 1943), and Timely Comics’ JSA knock-off, the “All-Winners Squad,” only got together twice, in All-Winners Squad no. 19 (Fall, 1946) and no. 21 (Winter, 1946). But by the end of comics’ “Silver Age” (1956-1970) this type of shared universe was standard for comic book companies.

² Paul Deleutre, letter, qtd in Arthur B. Evans, “The Verne School in France: Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentriques,” Science Fiction Studies 36 (2009): 221.

³ Evans, “Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentrique,” 217.

⁴ Evans, “Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentrique,” 220.

⁵ Evans, “Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentrique,” 224.

⁶ Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, Tintin (Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2011), 33.

⁷ Evans, “Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentrique,” 221.

⁸ Nevins, “Alchemists, Astronomers, and Wild Men.”

⁹ Interestingly, female mad scientists at the turn of the twentieth century were generally given at least two dimensions and shown to be motivated by something other than monomania. Examples of these non-monomaniacal female mad scientists include L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s Madame Koluchy (see: The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings), T. Mullett Ellis’ Zalma von der Pahlen (see: Zalma), and George Griffth’s Olga Romanoff (see: The Angel of the Revolution).

¹⁰ Brian Stableford, “Introduction,” in Paul d’Ivoi and Henri Chabrillat’s Around the World on Five Sous (Encino, CA: Black Coats Press, 2016), iii.