SOURCE: “Faerie and Fantastic Phenomena and Motifs,” in The Short Stories of Marcel Aymé, University of Western Australia Press, 1980, pp. 11–17, 20–56.

Les fées sont agréables à
fréquenter. Les hommes
aussi.

—Marcel Aymé

It is the physical fantasies that are most commonly accepted as Aymé's trade-mark. All three pastiches of his work stress this kind of story. Commentators trying to analyse Aymé's extremely varied use of the physically unreal have had recourse to a multitude of terms to qualify it: fantaisie, merveilleux, surréel, fantastique, fabuleux, absurde, non-sens, miraculeux, féerique, science-fiction. This list makes the analysis of Aymé's unreal stories seem a particularly daunting project, but in fact many of these terms are wrongly or too vaguely applied. Aymé's unreal has little connection with the vogue of Surrealism, the ‘literature of the Absurd’ or the rather anglophone trend towards verbal nonsense, and the theoreticians of the unreal tend to condemn the terms merveilleux and fantaisie as being too general, along with the once precise but now vague use of miraculeux and fabuleux.

Part of Aymé's originality is that he dabbles in several different currents of fantasy. Apart from a thin vein of science fiction, Aymé's imagination can be divided between the two widely accepted currents of féerique and fantastique. It is important to make a clear distinction between these two because Aymé tends to disregard literary convention by mingling them and adapting them to his own purposes. The féerique implies a world apart, like C. S. Lewis's Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, a world inhabited by fairies, unicorns and sorcerers. Its normal phenomena are spells, magic lamps and moonlight. Describing the faerie world of Perrault, Marcel Schneider writes of ‘un monde où tout vit, où tout parle, où tout agit. Ce monde a un sens.’ It is also a moral world where man's causality is absent even though his attributes may be reflected in humanized animals; Isabelle Jan underlines the tradition of ‘L'Ours-valeureux’, ‘le Cochon-tyran’, ‘le Renard-fripon’ and ‘le Chat-brigand’. Man's presence is not obligatory but Aymé obviously finds that faerie is much more relevant and interesting if man participates. Yet this participation will usually be temporary; man will return to the security of his own world at the end.

The literature of the fantastic tends to be taken more seriously than faerie because it talks of our world, our own time and space coordinates. Humans provide most of its protagonists even if they have some frightening new power, and where there are monsters—vampires and werewolves—they often reflect man in their creation. Several common themes recur: metamorphoses, time manipulation, invisibility, voyages to a ‘beyond’, statues that come to life, pacts with occult powers, monstrous psychological reflections of human feelings or experiences. The essence of the fantastic is the intrusion of something strange and frightening into our secure world. The fear is stressed because our security is threatened; man himself is closely involved and usually helpless before the fantastic. He could kill a fire-breathing dragon but the spectres that he encounters now are often part of himself, the fantastique intérieur that is so important in the work of Hoffmann and Poe.

There are elements of both faerie and the fantastic in the stories of Marcel Aymé. He admits appreciation of the work of Andersen and Perrault and has written prefaces to the stories of both. In his comments on his own childhood Aymé refers to the influence of fairy stories as well as to his penchant for Jules Verne and the comtesse de Ségur. All of these influences are to be seen in borrowings of material, but what is more interesting is the way Aymé adapts, distorts and often parodies that material.

.....

Aymé's most recognizable borrowings are from faerie literature. He does not exploit faerie very often, perhaps because the inventive and nonconformist conteur felt constrained by the particularly strong rules of a tradition which ‘n'admet pas d'acte vraiment créateur ou vraiment libre’. What is more, Aymé is essentially a humanist and faerie is too far removed from man. He has exploited only a few truly faerie characters: a water-sprite, a wicked ogre and a centaur; but several stories are infected in a more general way by the faerie spirit.

Aymé's break with tradition starts very early. The water-fairy Udine in ‘Au clair de la lune’, after nine hundred years at the bottom of her river, enters man's time and space scale. She is quite a conventional fairy: long blonde hair ‘comme elles ont toutes’, magic wand, crystal and jade chariot drawn by white rabbits. One of Aymé's recurrent themes is the clash between reality and fantasy. This is accentuated here by bringing Udine out of her traditionally closed context into our world. Udine is quickly threatened with a fine for driving on the highway without lights. An evil fairy, smiles Aymé, would have turned the gendarme into a merino ram or a coffee-grinder, but Udine is a kind fairy: she adapts to his world by telling him she is ‘la femme du préfet’. The clash of real and fantasy continues as Udine tries to help young Jacot win the hand of his Valentine. Reality threatens to turn her conte rose into a conte gris: she sees her rabbits beaten by Jacot's sports car and then she is so disturbed that she muddles up her magic spells. Aymé's sad smile persists at the end: Udine does manage to bring the lovers together but must go on her way discouraged by a world where man's law requires head-lights even though ‘la lune éclate au firmament étoilé comme la rose livide dans un parterre de jasmins’ (PI 171) and where Jacot cannot go and ‘chanter la romance éternelle sous les fenêtres de Valentine (…) dans ces jardins tout parfumés de blanche aubépine et de tendre péché’ (PI 179) because Valentine's father has set traps in the flower-beds!

Aymé's ogre in ‘Conte du milieu’ suffers even more than Udine in his confrontation with man's world. This ogre no longer inhabits a cave in Fairyland but runs a café near the Porte St. Martin. His particular vice is to touch young ladies on the cheek with his magic ring and mutter the incantation ‘Calvados, Cognac, Fine Champagne’ to shrink them and store them in his salad bowl until he wants to take his pleasure or eat them. After bringing this faerie out of its context into the reality of Paris Aymé almost parodies a conventional fairy-story plot. The young hero's mistress is spirited away and Janot sets out to rescue her, turns the ogre's own weapon against him, rescues Riri la Blonde and they live happily ever after as proprietors of a brothel. We do not need Pierre Berger's ribald etchings in the separate edition of this tale to realize that it is pure entertainment.

Aymé enlivens several of his more serious short stories by borrowing faerie accessories and effects from their traditional context and applying them in a very real frame. At the end of a rather lengthy account of an unmarried mother's sacrifices to give her young son enough to eat, Aymé introduces magic into ‘Les Bottes de sept lieues’ to provide a happily-ever-after ending that he shows to be sadly impossible if we remain tied to reality. The boots enable young Antoine to escape his life of poverty and bring back poignantly simple treasures to his mother in their cold attic:

En dix minutes, il fut à l'autre bout de la terre et s'arrêta dans un grand pré pour y cueillir une brassée des premiers rayons du soleil qu'il noua d'un fil de la Vierge.

Antoine retrouva facilement la mansarde où il se glissa sans bruit. Sur le petit lit de sa mère, il posa sa brassée brillante dont la lueur éclaira le visage endormi et il trouva qu'elle était moins fatiguée.

(PM 230)

Magic tears, gestures and incantations are used in Les Contes du chat perché as well as the eerie sound-effects that accompany the metamorphosis in ‘L'Ane et le cheval’: rattling chains, a music box and the howling of a non-existent storm. Aymé further mixes his genres by applying moonlight effects to the fantastic time jump in ‘La Fabrique’ and the strange storm motif accompanies the time movement and metamorphosis in Le Décret, which by its structure and theme belongs well and truly in the fantastic vein.

The novels La Table aux crevés, Gustalin and La Vouivre are coloured by elements of Aymé's native Jurassian mythology that should clearly be classed as faerie. Yet, despite its influence on his childhood, this pagan faerie with its mysterious trees and rocks, its enchanted ponds and snake-charming nymphs, touches only one short story, ‘Les mauvaises fièvres’, and there as hardly more than an accessory. Aymé more often exploits the faerie of classical mythology. ‘Fiançailles’ is the story of a young centaur called Aristide who has the torso and face of a charming adolescent but the body of a stallion. Here, too, the intrusion of fantasy into reality and man's own reaction are underlined. Aristide has been born to the marquise de Valoraine and then hidden away to avoid social scandal. The story describes his discovery of the outside world, his sexual coming of age and his choice between the two sides of his nature. He becomes excited by the budding young god-daughter of the local bishop and thinks that it must be his ‘âme’ that he feels stirring at the sight of her rounded ‘croupe’. His spontaneity, candour and evident lack of social conditioning provide some rather amusing situations, the best of which is the proposed marriage of real and fantasy. The bishop is at first shocked by the proposition, seeing nothing but ‘péché’ and ‘animalité’ in the uneducated Aristide, but soon jumps at the opportunity to marry off his ward.

Aymé turns this story into a light-hearted dig at the religious and social constraints that the untutored centaur cannot comprehend. Aristide relives Udine's experience with the representative of society's law and order: the gendarme in this case regards Aristide's very existence as an affront to authority and threatens to arrest him for ‘attentat à la pudeur publique’. Aristide is confused and instinctively decides that his animal half must be the better one. He rather symbolically breaks out of the park and runs off into the forest with the first real mare he meets, leaving poor Ernestine to have her stirrings repressed by the nuns of the école Sainte-Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus.

Just as recognizable as Aristide or the seven-league boots are several images which are biblical or at least religio-moral in origin while being féerique in spirit. Aymé's preface to the stories of Andersen shows that he regarded this as a legitimate extension of faerie material. Whether his irreverent story is to be based on Samson's magic hair, a comic-strip God astride a cloud, the Devil riding up to the pearly gates on a broomstick to parley with St. Peter, or St. Francis of Assisi appearing to a sadist to ask him to read his Vita (Editions du Ciel, of course), Aymé's parodic exploitation of the image is similar to his use of more conventional material.

‘La Fosse aux péchés' exploits the biblical parable tradition with a story of allegorical monsters acting out the battle between good and evil. Aymé uses a dream to frame a ribald pastiche of the whole tradition. This is one of several stories where the ironic Aymé subjects a pure character to temptation. The hero this time is Martin, a ‘professeur de pureté’ who gives in to temptation in a very familiar pattern: he sells his soul to the Devil for a golden calf but the Devil snaps him up on his way to spend it. The following scene in hell, where an English pastor does battle with the Devil's seven deadly henchmen, allows Aymé to indulge his Rabelaisian streak of verbal amusement. The pastor vanquishes one by one the grotesque sins which take the form that the sinner imagines them to have. Here is Aymé's vision of pride:

Son corps avait la forme d'une commode Louis XV. (…) Il avait le derrière empanaché d'un flot de tentacules multicolores où dominaient l'or et la pourpre. Ses jambes de pierre étaient d'un blanc laiteux, ses pieds et ses cuisses couleur merde d'oie. Il portait en sautoir, imprimé sur la peau, un grand cordon violet fileté de blanc et, sur son torse Louis XV, deux rangées de décorations qui étaient ses excroissances naturelles aux coloris des plus chatoyants. Ses cornes étaient dorées, ses oreilles de veau d'un rouge éclatant.

(VP 138–9)

At the end of the epic struggle hell vomits its prey, but this ending is deceptive. Aymé's target is once again the constraints placed on man by a religio-social educative process, so he arranges a reversal of the standard moral ending: the Devil's pleasure-creed ‘Le péché est la substance essentielle de la vie’ wins the day. Once back among his disciples, Professor Martin tells them:

—Déchirez mon traité de prophylaxie de l'âme. (…) Si vous voulez vous garder des mauvaises tentations, ne haïssez pas le péché, mais familiarisez-vous avec le péril. Ne soyez pas bêtement modestes, ne méprisez pas les bonnes nourritures, ne fuyez pas les femmes, etc.

(VP 150)

Hypocritical conceptions of virtue are ridiculed more bitterly when Aymé uses the décor of heaven and an imaginary country for his ‘Légende poldève’. The exaggerated virtue of the old maid Mlle Borboïé is Aymé's target. Her virtue is constrained, ritual and above all egoistic. All her actions are directed towards her own entry into paradise. Aymé's satire of her self-righteousness continues right up to the gates of a heaven that is disturbingly like an administrative office. She pleads her ‘dossier’ with St. Peter as with any other public servant and tries to get him to take a personal interest in her case:

—… Prière du matin, action de grâces, puis messe de six heures par tous les temps. Après la messe, invocation spéciale à saint Joseph et remerciement à la Vierge. Chapelet à dix heures, suivi de la lecture d'un chapitre des Evangiles. Benedicite à midi … (…)

—Ecoutez, dit ce bon archange, votre cas me paraît intéressant. Je veux tenter quelque chose pour vous.

(PM 156–7)

Aymé subjects the hypocritical old maid to a final test: to attain paradise she must pretend to be whore to a regiment of hussars! In ‘Légende poldève’ Aymé is very close to Voltaire in his blend of ironic humorist and bitter moralist. This is visible not only in his imitation of the style of Candide and his satire of the spinster and her heaven, but also when he describes the comic-strip war fought for national honour:

Un petit garçon de Molletonie pissa délibérément par-dessus la frontière et arrosa le territoire poldève avec un sourire sardonique. C'en était trop pour l'honneur du peuple poldève dont la conscience se révolta, et la mobilisation fut aussitôt décrétée.

(PM 151–52)

Wartime God-on-our-side sentiments and the idea that wholesale slaughter becomes moral when backed by a ‘noble’ cause are mocked as Aymé reveals the ignoble side of militarism: the swaggering local soldiery assault, rape and plunder the very civilians they are supposed to be protecting. And of course all combatants (and only combatants), automatically ‘morts pour la patrie’ and also ‘pour le bon droit’ even if they are the enemy, are admitted to heaven with no questions asked.

True to Voltairian tradition, Aymé works through irony rather than direct statement. Certainly he is exploiting the faerie mode to satirize reality, but faerie is only a ruse. Aymé's main weapon is his language itself. His attitude is conveyed by tone rather than by the actual events that are narrated. A good example of this is his treatment of the contrast between Marichella Borboïé and her nephew Bobislas. The nephew is a thorough scoundrel: we follow his career through lechery and drunkenness to theft, rape and pillage. Aymé appears to have created an obvious candidate for the fires of hell and yet the joyous, flowing narrative contradicts these appearances: it provokes a smile which lures the reader into feeling a certain sympathy for the ribald Bobislas:

Un chapelet d'abominables jurements l'annonçait du bout de la rue où demeurait la vieille demoiselle. Titubant, son grand sabre cognant et s'embarrassant à tous les meubles, sans autre bonjour qu'un blasphème, il lui signifiait, éructant et braillant, qu'elle eût à sortir son argent et à se hâter. Plusieurs fois même, comme elle tardait à s'exécuter, il avait à moitié dégainé son bancal et menacé la sainte fille de la partager en deux dans le sens de la longueur

(PM 153)

while the dry irony of the sentences devoted to the ‘virtuous’ but stupid old spinster and her misguided faith leaves no doubt as to Aymé's opinion of her:

Pendant cinq ans, Mlle Borboïé voulut croire qu'il s'amenderait un jour et lui prodigua inlassablement les bons conseils et les pieuses exhortations avec tout l'argent qu'il fallait pour les faire fructifier.

(PM 151)

The theme, the reversal structure and above all the rather féerique accessories of ‘Légende poldève’ recur in the very similar ‘L'Huissier’. The comic potential of the heavenly décor is more fully realized here; it is brought into more profitable contrast with reality. Aymé opens the story with another light-hearted parody of a Last Judgement trial scene. The magistrate is St. Peter with his book of records, the defendant is an over-zealous, cynical and self-righteous bailiff called Malicorne, the evidence is a large vat full of the tears of the widows and children he has evicted, and the appeals judge is God, who enters on his cloud to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder. Malicorne's refusal to be cowed by the situation provides some rather splendid dialogue. Undeterred by St. Peter's opening remark that there are hardly any bailiffs in paradise, he suavely assures the guardian of the gates that he does not really insist on being with his colleagues. … Asked about his ‘bonnes oeuvres’, he searches back fifteen years in his memory and cites the occasion when he gave ten centimes to a beggar. The objection that the coin was counterfeit leaves him unperturbed too; the beggar would have passed it on quite easily. Naturally there is also a dark side to this humour. Malicorne's cynical defence is that he was only doing his job to the best of his ability (‘Dieu merci, mes affaires marchaient bien et je n'ai pas chômé’, PM 232), but he was obviously rather too zealous a bailiff. St. Peter is all for stoking up the fires of hell and washing down Malicorne's burns with the salt water from the vat, but Malicorne appeals against this judgement. The appeal is heard, because ‘La procédure est la procédure’, even in heaven. God deems that St. Peter was rather too hasty in his condemnation: it is not the bailiff (over-zealous or not) who is at fault, but the human laws whose agent he is. Yet they can hardly allow a bailiff into heaven because ‘Ce serait un scandale’.

Malicorne is sent back to earth to redeem himself. He tries to buy his way back into heaven by performing good deeds and he records these for St. Peter in a little notebook drawn up with debit and credit columns:

‘J'ai, spontanément, augmenté de cinquante francs par mois mon clerc Bourrichon qui ne le méritait pourtant pas.’

(PM 236)

At the end of his first day of reprieve Malicorne has performed twelve of these empty ‘bonnes oeuvres’ at a noted cost of 600 francs. It seems that the only good deeds he can think of involve money. Aymé is not only using his faerie borrowings, complete with suggestive dream frame, to scourge those hypocrites who would purchase salvation with their ‘charité intéressée’; he has also treated us to a neat ironic reversal. We have before us a miser who is now determined to part with his fortune. It is almost as if Aymé had started a new story by suggesting that ‘Il y avait, à Paris, un méchant huissier qui, un jour, décida de devenir bon.’ This is a particularly fruitful premise because Aymé has chosen a rather excessive bailiff to start with:

Il y avait, dans une petite ville de France, un huissier qui s'appelait Malicorne et il était si scrupuleux dans l'accomplissement de son triste ministère qu'il n'eût pas hésité à saisir ses propres meubles.

(PM 231)

Obviously there is great potential for humour in this reversal. Imagine the bewilderment of the bailiff's staff when their tyrannical master suddenly doubles their salary! Malicorne sets his target of good deeds at twelve a day, but increases this whenever an ache or pain makes him afraid his end might be near. At the end of a year he has filled six exercise-books, and Aymé indulges in a superb parody of the classic Scrooge image: Malicorne gloating as he weighs his tally-books and leafs delightedly through their pages (PM 241).

Here, too, there is a dark side to the humour, a sombre dramatic irony in the bailiff's first post-metamorphosis encounter with his client, the landlord Gorgerin, who does not know that Malicorne is now working against his interests. There is even more bitter irony in the comparison between the two men's ambitions: Malicorne is trying to be known as ‘bon’ while Gorgerin is desperately trying to avoid it. Money is the only tool Malicorne knows. As the bailiff does his rounds dispensing alms to the poor, Aymé builds a case against Malicorne's former clients, the heartless slum landlords like Gorgerin who exploit the poor in their defenceless misery. Malicorne is received in heaven at the end but it has nothing to do with his false generosity. He is finally moved by the poverty of a tawdry seventh-floor garret and, in his first truly spontaneous gesture, turns on Gorgerin shouting ‘A bas les propriétaires’. He is shot dead for his treason and of course goes straight to Aymé's anti-serious heaven that is reserved, like his sympathies, for the meek and the down-trodden:

Dieu, émerveillé, commanda aux anges de jouer, en l'honneur de Malicorne, du luth, de la viole, du hautbois et du flageolet. Ensuite, il fit ouvrir les portes du ciel à deux battants, comme cela se fait pour les déshérités, les clochards, les claque-dents et les condamnés à mort. Et l'huissier, porté par un air de musique, entra au Paradis avec un rond de lumière sur la tête.

(PM 245–46)

This unexpected reversal motif, already visible in ‘La Fosse aux péchés’ and ‘Légende poldève’, is a favourite one with Aymé. He uses another faerie image to pursue it in ‘Conte de Noël’, where ‘l'enfant Noël' distributes joy to the ladies of a brothel instead of to spoilt little rich children, and again in ‘Dermuche’ where ‘le petit Jésus’ comes down to die instead of a morally innocent criminal. ‘La Grâce’ explores the same thematic area with a hero who is so virtuous that he is awarded a halo. He has to wear it around the streets of Montmartre. Here Aymé is again combining two genres; the halo is essentially a faerie accessory but the situation—a mortal has a strange gift conferred upon him within his own context—is clearly fantastic. Duperrier is quite embarrassed by his distinction. At first he replaces his bowler hat with a wide-brimmed one to hide the halo, but finally tries to get rid of it. This is where the common notion of virtue comes under fire. It seems reasonable to the victim that he should simply sin to get rid of it. This neat paradox—a saint trying desperately to sin—provides Aymé with some very comic situations. Duperrier is innocent of lust, for example, and has to consult ‘un livre révoltant où se trouvait exposé, sous forme d'un enseignement clair et direct, l'essentiel de la luxure’ (VP 95). He tries pride, anger, greed, envy, laziness and avarice as well as lust but all to no avail. He finally becomes a pimp on the boulevard de Clichy, counting the night's takings by the light of his halo. Aymé's notion of sin and virtue is no ordinary one. His spokesman is perhaps the Devil in Les Jumeaux du diable when he says to St. Peter:

—Vraiment le monde est trop vertueux. C‘est un scandale. Tu ne recevrais pas dix âmes par an, si le monde allait raisonnablement.

(JD 10)

In ‘Samson’, Aymé pastiches the biblical story line while adapting it to his own ends. His hero has magic hair and a lucid knowledge of his destiny, but Aymé adds to the psychological interest of the theme by describing a superman who is ‘désespérément seul’, who aspires to mediocrity and anonymity and whose submission to Dalila is quite conscious. ‘Samson’ is a rather heavy tale and not as typical of Aymé's style as the lighter hearted and much freer adaptation of the same motif in ‘Le faux policier’, where Martin's mistress Dalila insists he shave off his moustache, thus changing his appearance and bringing catastrophe.

The entertainer in Aymé is very fond of parody. This comes out again in ‘Le Mendiant’, which adapts the biblical Nativity theme to a modern American setting. Aymé's intermediary is the pauvre type (American style) Theo Bradley who is pitied by all his friends because he has to drive a car that is several years old. One night Bradley is visited by an angel who takes him to a ramshackle Detroit garage where a young couple are just putting the finishing touches to a car that has taken them nine months' effort. We witness the ecstatic moment of completion (‘il est né!’) and the arrival of three worshippers from afar bearing petrol, oil and water. From what seems to be a dream, Bradley wakes with a sense of purpose: he will be the prophet of ‘Le Grand Moteur’ and will found ‘La Grande Eglise Motorisée’. The tale grows bitter now as Aymé satirizes the commercialization of the new religion and acidly underlines the American worship of the motor car. He sketches the repressed, hypocritically puritan, racist matriarchy that preoccupied him in the plays Louisiane and La Mouche bleue. Aymé was criticizing the United States from first-hand experience. In 1949 he had been invited to the United States by Collier's magazine, which planned to publish his impressions in article form. ‘Le Mendiant’ was part of his offering. It was politely declined.

Aymé's rather liberal attitude towards literary convention is visible again in the special case of Les Contes du chat perché. This collection is one of Aymé's best-known works. It won him the Prix Chanteclair and has been consistently re-edited ever since its first publication. In 1979 several of the tales were even adapted for the theatre by a young Parisian troupe, the Compagnie de la Licorne. Outwardly, these stories seem to have been written for children. Aymé intimated quite early that they were part of ‘l'art d'être grand-père’ and that they were written for his granddaughter Françoise, but he later confessed: ‘Mes contes pour enfants, je les ai écrits pour moi-même. Je ne crois pas à la littérature enfantine.’ His second prière d'insérer to these tales was probably more honest: like so many so-called children's books, Les Contes du chat perché were ‘écrits pour les enfants âgés de quatre à soixante-quinze ans’. For Marcel Aymé there was certainly an element of personal nostalgia in them too: they harked back to his games of ‘chat’ in the Cours St Maurice at Dôle and to the happy days of his early childhood in Villers-Robert and his adventures with his cousins in his uncle's mill.

These tales are special in two ways: firstly, because Aymé makes a faerie world apart out of a very real setting, and, secondly, because some of the unreal within that world is distinctly fantastic in character. The seventeen stories are set in a special farmyard and centred on the farmer's two young daughters, Delphine (‘l'aînée’) and Marinette (‘la plus blonde’) and their animal friends. This is an ideal frame for faerie. Aymé encourages the feeling of this being a world apart not only by setting the action in the farmyard and its surrounds but also because the stories feature an esoteric child's point of view. The farm is a children's world like so many that have been exploited in literature, an

univers enfantin séparé, replié sur lui-même et où peuvent faire irruption l'improbable, l'étrange et même l'impossible.

We are much closer here to the Wonderland of Peter Pan or Alice than to a Fairyland of giants and magic spells. Alice and Wendy are surely related to Delphine and Marinette and a long line of young girls whose imagination and sensitivity have been exploited to link fantasy and reality.

The magic of the farm mainly surrounds the animals. It is not the simple magic proposition of Aymé's earlier novel La Jument verte, where he proposed a storytelling horse with a highly refined sensuality; here it is much more episodic. The animals can talk and play humanized roles and to a certain extent they can use their reason.

Aymé is clearly conscious of the tradition which produced the ‘Cochon-tyran’ and the ‘Renard-fripon’ but he varies his characterization. His fox is the traditional wily creature but his pig is usually stupid, vain and rather nasty, his duck very clever and helpful, his cat rather passive and his rooster proud, arrogant and even treacherous. Yet any stability from story to story depends on Aymé's whim and on the girls' imagination. The pig turns out smart enough to play the detective in ‘Les Vaches’ and the ass, normally stupid and obstinate of course, appears as sensitive and intelligent in ‘Le mauvais jars’.

Most of the action depends on contact between the girls and their animal friends. There is complicity and understanding only between them. The girls try to educate an ox; the animals help the girls with their homework and troop into the classroom to see the results. As well as occasionally adopting human roles, the beasts change roles among themselves: a deer swaps with an ox, a panther comes to live on the farm, a wolf wants to play ‘chat perché’ with the girls and a duck turns world-traveller. Animals talking and thinking is not an end to the magic. Aymé waves his wand once more and we see blindness transferred by telepathy, a hen that changes into an elephant, two white cows that disappear and a horse that shrinks to the size of a rooster. The fantastic even touches Delphine and Marinette to change them into an ass and a horse. This potentially frightening situation is eased somewhat by the fact that it occurs within a frame where such events seem almost acceptable.

The magic often starts with mischief; one of the girls' pranks backfires on them or one of the animals does something unnatural. A frequent story pattern starts with the parents going to town for the day and warning their daughters against doing one particular thing in their absence. Of course Delphine and Marinette disobey and promptly get into a fix. Their situation worsens as they try to repair the damage and the ominous moment when their parents will return approaches. This tension is usually eased by a convenient last-minute solution. It is the girls' curious predicaments and the inventive solutions that provide much of the charm of these tales.

Delphine and Marinette's pranks are caused by their very innocence. Aymé is presenting the world through unconditioned eyes. He has created a frame where the girls can question the constraints, the conventions and the routines of the adult world and find them lacking. There is fantasy not only in the metamorphoses but also in the girls' minds: perhaps the wolf would make a nice playmate after all; perhaps the donkey is really quite clever despite what people say; and why should a panther not live on the farm? It is their fecund and strangely logical imagination that often provokes the magic. In ‘Les Boîtes de peinture’ Delphine and Marinette try to draw the two white cows, but it is not possible to draw them on white paper, say the girls, or at least they would not be visible: ‘C'est comme si vous n'existiez pas.’ So the offended animals promptly disappear. The animals apply the same innocent process to the girls' homework. The problem is to calculate how many trees there are in a hypothetical forest, so the animals simply set out to count the trees in their own real forest. And when the girls want it to rain so they will not have to go and visit their nasty old aunt, what more natural solution than to ask Alphonse the cat, transposed from the Aymé apartment on the rue Paul-Féval, to wash his whiskers?

Naturally the parents cannot participate in this innocence. They are depersonalized, being referred to and even addressed as ‘les parents’. In fact the other adults suffer the same fate, becoming ‘la maîtresse’, ‘l'inspecteur’ and ‘l'aveugle’. Even aunt Mélina and uncle Alfred tend to be stereotyped figures. When they are active, the parents are always enemy figures. They seem hard-hearted, suspicious and miserly. What little dialogue they are accorded is unsympathetic: they spend their time scolding the girls or else rather optimistically warning them to ‘soyez sages …’, and they whisper ominously to each other as they watch the pig or the chicken growing plumper each day. There is a communication barrier represented by different attitudes to the animals. For the practical parents they are beasts of burden and work and candidates for the cooking pot, while for the girls they are playmates. The parents' main function in this faerie is obviously to represent the parallel, real world, the world of farm chores, homework and the threatened ‘pain sec’, a world to which the girls usually return after each episodic tale.

Strange things may occur and the girls will get into all sorts of scrapes, but in the end all will be put right. The animals will be restored to their proper forms and proportions, Delphine and Marinette will cease to be a horse and an ass and the blind man will retrieve his blindness. The kidnapped hens are brought back, the lost cows are found and the little black rooster can employ all the guile he can muster but will end up au vin in the pot all the same.

Often a return to reality includes a moral ending. Good deeds are rewarded and pride, hard-heartedness, arrogance and treachery are suitably punished whether in the pig, the rooster, the drunken soldier or the parents. Yet these moral punishments almost never involve Delphine and Marinette. Grandfather Aymé is clearly trying to teach the girls a lesson without actually punishing them. The threatened punishments for disobedience are miraculously waived (an exception: their ‘affreux péchés' of falsehood and disobedience in ‘Le petit coq noir’). Sometimes this is simply because Aymé finds the parents too malicious: the girls fool their parents and allow Alphonse the cat to escape his drowning in ‘La Patte du chat’ because the parents were being quite unjust. Sometimes it is because the girls have had a fright and already learned their lesson: they are temporarily eaten by the wolf in ‘Le Loup’, harshly whipped as animals in ‘L'Ane et le cheval’ and made to feel thoroughly ashamed in ‘Les Boîtes de peinture’. But more often it is simply that the girls have got into a fix through their own innocence or generosity: they are led into mischief in ‘Le Loup’ and ‘Le petit coq noir’. Good intentions and the saviour figure of uncle Alfred retrieve the situation in ‘Le Mouton’. The girls seem to deserve punishment in ‘Les Cygnes’ because they have again disobeyed their parents, but their pure hearts and good intentions save them once more.

Delphine and Marinette are not wilfully disobedient; it is just that girls will be girls. … This same reasoning is even applied to the animals. The pig's raving vanity should perhaps be punished in ‘La Buse et le cochon’ but he is let off because Nature made him the ugliest of all; and when the wolf eats the girls he is only being his natural self. So when he is painfully cut open to free them he is sewn up again instead of being left to die. And in any case, he seems to have learned a lesson so why punish him? It is he, rather than the scolding parents or a moralizing Aymé who rounds off the tale: ‘Je vous jure qu'à l'avenir on ne me prendra plus à être aussi gourmand. Et d'abord, quand je verrai des enfants je commencerai par me sauver’ (CP 182).

The reprieve in ‘Les Cygnes’ gives the entertainer in Aymé a chance to show off his talents in a superb ending. The girls have crossed the road in spite of their parents' admonitions and are being held prisoner by some swans who turn out to be harsh disciplinarians. They are finally liberated by a wise old swan and returned to the farmhouse just in time to welcome their parents. But the effort costs their liberator his life: it is his swansong that will enchant the parents just long enough to let the girls scurry home. The final irony lies in the parents' comment: ‘Quel dommage que vous n'ayez pas traversé la route tout à l'heure. Un cygne a chanté sur les prés’ (CP 325).

Les Contes du chat perché is the work of a storyteller much more than of a moralist. This is clear above all in his endings. When the animals cause an uproar in the classroom trying to help the girls with their arithmetic homework, the teacher gives them ‘zéro de conduite’. But the inspector, fortuitously present that day, saves the story by giving them the ‘croix d'honneur’ for their originality! This is the Aymé who, having allowed an ass a certain measure of cunning to teach the nasty gander a lesson, rounds off his tale with:

Aussi n'est-il plus question, depuis ce jour-là, de la bêtise de l'âne; et l'on dit, au contraire, d'un homme à qui l'on veut faire compliment de son intelligence qu'il est fin comme un âne.

(CP 264)

Aymé has often been called a fabulist more than a moralist. Indeed there is something of the simple world of La Fontaine or the medieval fabliaux in stories like ‘Le petit coq noir’, ‘Le Paon’ or ‘Le mauvais jars’, where the animals interact among themselves. The moral character of this world cannot be denied. It has been stressed by almost all those who have written on Aymé. Yet for him the purity lies not so much in the moral character as in the lack of artificial adult preoccupations. In his first prière d'insérer Aymé wrote:

Je les écrivais pour reposer mes lecteurs éventuels de leurs tristes aventures où l'amour et l'argent sont si bien entremêlés qu'on les prend à chaque instant l'un pour l'autre, ce qui est forcément fatigant. Mes histoires sont donc des histoires simples, sans amour et sans argent.

The fact that we are adventuring in a moral world should not necessarily provoke a search for an individual lesson at the end of each story. This has been a common failing among commentators, who have felt obliged to label as many stories as possible. The formulae ‘A chacun sa fonction dans la vie’, ‘la sottise des gens qui vont à l'encontre de leurs talents naturels’ or the more complicated ‘la dangereuse séduction dont jouissent les révolutionnaires dans les milieux intellectuels’ may not be actually wrong, but to sum up Aymé's tales like this is absolutely to miss the essence of his talent. This kind of formulation (and thus limitation) quite destroys the conteur's nostalgic, whimsical, grandfatherly charm. Such activity is as futile as the criticism of André Rousseaux, who missed the point entirely when he accused Aymé of ‘lèse-réalisme’, asserting that ‘Si les bêtes parlaient, elles tiendraient un tout autre langage.’ Aymé's ironic reply is contained in his second prière d'insérer:

Il avait bien raison. Rien n'interdit de croire en effet que si les bêtes parlaient, elles parleraient de politique ou de l'avenir de la science dans les îles Aléoutiennes. Peut-être même qu'elles feraient de la critique littéraire avec distinction.

.....

Jules Verne and the comtesse de Ségur are two of Aymé's most often avowed sources of inspiration. Ségur's influence is easily seen in the Contes du chat perché, but it is only when we move towards Aymé's fantastic vein that we encounter a thin vein of science fiction which might be a product of Aymé's penchant for Verne. For Aymé, science fiction seems to be an extension of the fantastic. He avoids the traditional thematic material—interstellar invasions, space stations and one-eyed Martians:

Habituellement, je n'éprouve pas de sentiment bien vif pour le genre science-fiction. Dans la réalité, les exploits des spoutniks ne m'ont jamais fait battre le coeur.

Aymé's science fiction is more humanized, like his faerie and like the more traditional fantastic. He often uses future man to focus attention on present man.

Aymé's most significant contribution to the science fiction genre is a long and serious nouvelle called Pastorale. He launches into the futurism of a seventeenth Republic where a series of skyscraper villages shelter the whole of France. On the surface this is pure fantasy but on closer examination it is an Orwellian world closely based on reality, reflecting present problems like over-population, centralization and government control of all aspects of life. Aymé describes a society where the social authorities exercise total control over the individual, the kind of society that Aymé foresees and criticizes not only in stories like ‘La Carte’ and the play La Convention Belzébir but also in several polemic articles devoted to civil liberties. It is a society where nothing is left to chance. The number and sex of all children are regulated, dreams are monitored, excess population is exterminated, all desires find immediate satisfaction and poets are re-educated in mathematics and the physical sciences in case they upset society's logic. The ugly buildings and lifeless inhabitants of Pastorale allow Aymé to exercise his acid wit against many of our social and political customs and institutions.

Futuristic imagination sparkles even more darkly in a story called ‘La Fille du shérif’ and subtitled ‘Le roman que je n'écrirai jamais’. This is an undeveloped sketch for a longer story, rather clumsily blending Aymé's black humour and his post-Liberation political views. Several of his magazine and newspaper articles of the period strongly criticize the government's attempts to tie France's defence to America and N.A.T.O. Written in 1951 and supposedly set in 1953, ‘La Fille du shérif’ tells of an atomic war between Russia and America using France as the battleground. France is obliterated and then abolished by the U.N. Most of the French have been killed and the rest are enslaved by the United States. Aymé once again takes the opportunity to scourge de Gaulle: during the atomic war a government of ‘la France libre’ is set up in Missouri and their radio broadcasts tell the French to give their lives willingly for France. Their post-war épuration executes 100,000 and imprisons twice that number.

The fantastic genre seems to be less governed by literary convention than Fairyland or Flash Gordon and more widely accepted as a tool of ‘legitimate’ literature. Aymé takes full advantage of this freedom. In Fairyland, Aymé's man has worn seven-league boots, made love to a dryad and defeated a magic ogre, but here his Everyman, so often called Martin, will be more personally and more disturbingly involved. Yet Aymé still anchors his fantastic creations in reality. Reality is his source material even more visibly than it was with his faerie. One of the rules accepted by most writers of the unreal is that one must not get too far from the recognizably real:

Pour arriver à créer une oeuvre viable, en quelque domaine que ce soit, il est nécessaire de s'éloigner assez du réel pour le dominer, tout en restant assez près de lui pour ne pas le perdre de vue.

Like most creative minds, Aymé starts with known elements and rearranges them rather than indulging in total creation. He can suggest that two minds may inhabit the same body or that one being can have multiple bodies, but they will be real bodies. They will never have three arms or two heads. Aymé never goes as far as the grotesque. Man may be given a halo or a changed face, but not green horns or a tail. Aymé's fantastic images are usually either extensions or reversals of reality. An extension is proposed in Le Décret, where instead of the government advancing the clock one hour in summer, the move proposed is seventeen years in order to reach the end of an interminable war. ‘La Liste’ is an extension of a different kind: a poor farmer has so many daughters that he has to have a list to remember their names. When one name is accidentally torn off the list, he forgets the particular daughter and the poor girl disappears. A reversal of reality is the basis of ‘La Grâce’, where Duperrier wears his halo despite what is normally regarded as a life of sin. Mostly Aymé tries to reverse or extend the more certain elements of man's existence—death, space, time, identity—so that our shock is all the greater.

Spectres, vampires and werewolves, the traditional fantastic creatures, do not interest Aymé much more than ‘les exploits des spoutniks’. The closest he comes to this tradition is in Les Jumeaux du diable with its supernatural twins. It is man and his society that concern Aymé. Much of his fantastic is concerned with giving new capacities to man and then exploring the consequences. Just as the faerie of ‘L'Huissier’, ‘La Fosse aux péchés’ or ‘Légende poldève’ and the science fiction of Pastorale were used to mask social criticism, so Aymé's fantastic is put to this use. In ‘Dermuche’ capital punishment and the cruelty of prison authorities chained by impersonal regulations come under strong attack. The simpleton Dermuche is condemned for a triple murder but he has no comprehension of a crime he committed simply because he liked the tinkling of a music box. He is morally innocent, having ‘une petite âme claire comme une eau de source’ (VP 122). Dermuche has long talks with the prison chaplain about ‘le petit Jésus’ and on the eve of his execution he writes to heaven to be allowed to have his little music box when he reaches paradise. That night Dermuche's soul dominates his body to the extent of transforming him into a new-born baby complete with the same tattoos. It seems that the soft-hearted Aymé has granted Dermuche a reprieve, and this would be a typical Aymé ending, but this time he is not in the mood for reprieves. The chief warder is stubbornly unmoved: ‘je ne veux pas d'histoires’. The rules are the rules even in the face of a miracle. We are treated to several pages of Aymé's blackest irony as the guards coldly verify Dermuche's birthmark and fingerprints and carry the child up to the guillotine regardless. As with Pastorale and ‘La Fille du shérif’, Aymé is using the unreal mode to complement the real mode; he criticized the judicial system and capital punishment in several polemic articles and in his notorious play La Tête des autres.

Aymé's satire is not quite as bitter when he underlines the commercial exploitation of creative artistry in La bonne peinture. The fantastic premise of this nouvelle is a concretization of the intellectual satisfaction derived from the contemplation of a work of art. Lafleur's canvases have very special qualities:

sa peinture était devenue si riche, si sensible, si fraîche, si solide, qu'elle constituait une véritable nourriture et non pas seulement pour l'esprit, mais bien aussi pour le corps. (…) Le menu variait selon le sujet du tableau, sa composition et son coloris, mais il était toujours très soigné, très abondant et il n'y manquait même pas la boisson.

(VP 171)

Like ‘Avenue Junot’, La bonne peinture is a rambling frolic through Aymé's familiar Montmartre with his artist friends, but here there is more direction to the tale. The basic situation is familiar: the poor but happy artist whose lifestyle is threatened by fame and fortune and the grasping parasites—critics, gallery-owners and journalists—who are attracted by his success. Aymé exploits his premise for its comic potential by satirizing the American scientists who try to analyse Lafleur's gift and the art critics who are nonplussed by the tangible qualities of his work. In another comic scene the dealer Hermèce gets indigestion from feasting his eyes.

Of course there is a darker side to this humour. Hermèce and his fellow parasites think of nothing but profit. The dealer doesn't even want to tell Lafleur about his talent, and buys up the paintings as fast as he can. The state soon puts a stop to this by nationalizing Lafleur, and Aymé's cynical wit now describes the artist as one of France's ‘instruments de production’ with a factory and the associated bureaucracy. Art has become ‘efficace’, a political tool and a means to material rather than intellectual comfort.

Aymé obviously found the conte fantastique well suited to social criticism. More than with his faerie, the entertainer now often takes second place to a more serious side of Aymé. Many of his ridiculous situations are used to present parallel realities through which Aymé can snipe at the corresponding real situations. This process is used particularly well in ‘La Carte’. Yet in general, Aymé's fantastic is still much more personal than his faerie; it is above all the more individual human failings that he underlines. The social or political criticism is often accessory to his story's primary effect.

The little ironic twists introduced into reality often provide Aymé or his protagonist with a rather special position, a privileged point of view from which to reassess reality. The short story seldom allows room to discuss this advantage and it is the novel La Jument verte that provides Aymé's most explicit comments. When the painter Murdoire endows a canvas of a green mare with the gift of observation so that she can spy on the Haudouin family from her wall, the mare offers her remarks directly to the reader:

Je m'appliquai à observer mes hôtes, à réfléchir sur le spectacle qu'ils me livraient de leur vie intime. (…) Tandis que l'observateur ambulant ne peut s'attacher à découvrir dans le monde que les harmonies des grands nombres et le secret des séries, l'observateur immobile a cet avantage de surprendre les habitudes de la vie.

(JV 21)

A much more personal advantage is gained for Cérusier by his change of face in La belle image. Since his friends no longer recognize him, he can overhear what they say about him behind his back. But what he hears is not always to his liking:

Tiens, dit Joubert le sculpteur, voilà la bonne de Cérusier. A propos, qu'est-ce qu'il devient, ce pauvre Cérusier?

—Pauvre, protesta Garnier. Il n'est pas à plaindre.

—Je ne dis pas qu'il soit à plaindre, mais c'est quand même un pauvre type.

Quoiqu'il en eût dit, le ton de ses paroles exprimait une commisération à mon égard.

(BI 43)

Cérusier, too, has time to reflect on this new ability to see beneath his own façade, ‘examiner sa vie avec un lucide regard d'outre-tombe et pénétrer en étranger dans ses propres secrets’ (BI 85).

The novel La belle image deserves in many ways to be treated as a short story. It starts with the same absurd premise and proceeds to explore the consequences and the protagonist's reactions. It is almost as if an ideal short story situation has been stretched and padded artificially to fill a novel. In fact this kind of situation is much better suited to the pace and concision of a short story. Much the same could be said of the play Les Oiseaux de lune except that there Aymé stretches his situation with much more subtlety and variety.

An almost identical advantage is engineered in ‘Le Nain’, where the dwarf Valentin suddenly grows up and is not recognized any more. The truths he overhears are more flattering than Cérusier's but equally revealing. Delphine and Marinette are given an unpleasant insight into what it is like to be an animal on their parents' farm in ‘L'Ane et le cheval’, and a spoilt young bourgeoise in ‘La Fabrique’ is given a much more instructive appreciation of her own existence by means of a jump in time. Valérie is told that if she does not stop biting her fingernails by Christmas there will be no presents this year. We see her wake on Christmas Eve to discover that she has indeed bitten them again:

Elle eut un mouvement de retraite comme pour échapper à la triste réalité, et croyant s'enfoncer sous les couvertures, elle s'enfonça dans la nuit des temps et de cent vingt ans en arrière, en sorte qu'elle se retrouva en 1845.

(EJ 121–22)

This trip is a lesson in humility. Valérie is put in the position of invisible observer of a day in the life of an underprivileged family. This new reality chills her to the bone. The youngest son is dying of consumption but he is still sent to work in the freezing factory because the family needs the pittance he will earn and above all because if he is left at home his retarded brother will probably assault him. Hippolyte knows he is going to die, just as many of his young colleagues have that winter, but he has heard of the visits that ‘l'enfant Noël’ pays to little rich children and wants to see a Christmas tree before he dies. At the end of his terrible day's work, the speechless Valérie follows him home. On the way, he hears hammering: ‘C'est Papa qui cloue mon arbre de Noël’, but in fact his father is making a little coffin. Valérie can bear it no more: taking him by the hand she succeeds in translating them both back to her century. On Christmas morning she gives him her tree and her presents and is just about to tell her parents she has a little brother for Christmas when his exhaustion and happiness finally kill him and he disappears. ‘La Fabrique’ is a rarity in Aymé's work, a story completely devoid of humour. It was the last short story Aymé ever wrote and was published after his death. One of the most moving of Aymé's tales, ‘La Fabrique’ was very successfully adapted for television by Pascal Thomas and shown on Christmas Eve 1979.

Cérusier's ‘coup d'oeil oblique’ is also reflected throughout the Contes du chat perché in the innocent, unconditioned eyes through which Delphine and Marinette interpret the world, but a richer exploitation of it is found in Le Décret, with its voyage seventeen years into the future and abrupt return. The anti-serious Aymé uses this premise to provoke several comic situations. The narrator tries to return a cycle he hired during his stay in the future and discovers that the shop still sells umbrellas! The owner, who has the same name as the cycle seller, finds rather ridiculous the idea that one day he might sell ‘bécanes’. Seriousness returns as the narrator continues:

Tandis qu'il parlait ainsi, je comparais à ce jeune visage frais et rieur, un autre visage de dix-sept ans plus âgé, dont un lupus déformait tout un côté.

(PM 116)

It is this ability to see through present appearances to a future reality that is the most disquieting aspect of the narrator's position and the most fruitful for Aymé's social commentary too. Here he meets a friend in the métro:

Il est très déprimé et me confie qu'il est dans une situation extrêmement difficile. Je regarde avec curiosité cet être minable qui, dans une dizaine d'années, se trouvera à la tête d'une fortune colossale, malhonnêtement gagnée à de scandaleux trafics. Tandis qu'il me parle de sa misère présente, je le revois dans sa future opulence. (…) je suis partagé entre la compassion et le dégoût que m'inspire sa brillante carrière.

(PM 123–24)

The splitting effect of this privileged position is the main theme of this long humanist nouvelle. The victim can see things that are invisible to others. He does not always like what he sees; he quickly rejects his privilege, effectively ‘forgetting’ the future. Like Samson, he wants to be nothing more than an ordinary man.

Aymé's physical unrealities also serve him particularly well by providing a tangible image for an abstract process, sentiment or quality. This often borders on the traditional role of the fantastique intérieur with its physical representations of psychological activity. Aymé is not so much a moralist here as a very serious humanist. Le Décret gives a physical dimension to the feeling of déjà vu and, as young Valentin changes more and more of his friends into birds in Les Oiseaux de lune, we are afforded a bleak look at the effects of absolute power on man's soul. Both of these show a particularly serious Aymé. His lighter tone returns in the use of Duperrier's halo to represent his inner virtue in ‘La Grâce’, or in the concretization of inner satisfactions in La bonne peinture. ‘Le Romancier Martin’ is perhaps the most fruitful example of the mental becoming physical. Here Aymé uses the fantastic to give a concrete dimension to the experience of artistic creation. He adopts the Pygmalion gift of life motif (akin to what the French theoreticians call the statue vivante) in portraying a novelist who creates his characters so thoroughly that they come to life and manage to exist on the same plane as their author. They have a will of their own and try to change the course of their novel. Finally some of them even escape from Martin's control. The powerless novelist confesses: ‘J'abandonne mes personnages, mais leur vie continue.’

The special experience of childhood is to some extent made concrete in Les Contes du chat perché and Aymé proposes a tangible image for the next stage of the human cycle in ‘Le Nain’. Valentin's body becomes adult but he still has the innocence of a child. Like the narrator in Le Décret and the centaur in ‘Fiançailles’, he is torn between what he was and what he is becoming. His metamorphosis also reflects Aristide's potentially traumatic discovery of sex through the eyes of someone who knows nothing of social convention and constraint. His clumsy but spontaneous advances to Germina are rejected. The ex-dwarf tries frantically to learn another circus trick so that he can stay in the circus and win back the love that Germina bore him. But that love was innocent and can never be the same. He reluctantly leaves the artificial, protected, childhood life of the circus where he no longer belongs and goes to face the adult responsibilities of earning a living and forming mature relationships. M. Barnaboum finally announces: ‘Le nain est mort.’

The physical image in ‘Le Couple’ intensifies the next stages in the human cycle: marriage and divorce. Antoine and Valérie love each other so much that their bodies fuse together into one. Society's sexism is reflected in the choice of Antoine's body to express the union. Valérie lacks physical presence and effectively loses her identity in this marriage. She finds no fulfilment wearing her husband's body so the union disintegrates after a few weeks. The experience of death is explored somewhat less seriously in ‘La Carte’ and ‘Le Temps mort’, which propose a sort of relative death through the total disappearance of a victim for a short period. But Aymé is more interested in the manipulation of time in these stories and, apart from touching on man's egoistic resentment that the world will keep on turning when he is gone, hardly explores the notion of death any further.

Man's solitude, a strong element in the modern literary conception of man, is often Aymé's primary target in these fantastic intensifications. Newly unrecognizable characters are placed in a situation where their isolation from others is increased by their fantastic affliction. After his face change, Cérusier feels that ‘Cette solitude soudaine dans un monde qui ne vous connaît plus, c'est une chose épouvantable’ (BI 90) and the dwarf Valentin feels cut off in the same way when his metamorphosis removes him from his friends:

Valentin regardait Mlle Germina galoper sur la piste. Debout sur son cheval, et le bras tendu vers la foule, l'écuyère répondait par des sourires aux applaudissements, et Valentin songeait qu'aucun de ces sourires n'était pour lui. Il se sentait las et honteux de sa solitude.

(NA 27)

Valentin is not spared Aymé's irony: his happiness lay in his deformity itself.

The most striking intensification of man's solitude is probably the image of the superman Samson who feels cut off from other men because of his magic hair and wants to return to the ranks of ordinary mortals to discover ‘la sensation d'équilibre que procure une force musculaire à la mesure de l'homme’. Despite its rather faerie character, Samson's magic hair serves as a fantastic intensification of the absurdity of his condition and provides a physical metaphor for his frustration when faced with the forces of a destiny he cannot control. This is another reason why he tries to have his magic hair cut off: his superhuman strength is too strong for his merely human will. He is not in control of himself:

Ma force m'apparaissait comme une personne surajoutée à la mienne, un maître qui se servait de mes membres, de mes mains, de mon corps et disposait sans discussion de ma volonté. Ecrasé sous la pression de ce géant et emporté par son élan imbécile, je n'étais qu'une créature dérisoire, reléguée dans un coin de mon être et moins libre que ne peut l'être un paralytique.

Samson has a split image of himself as man and superman, ‘assis entre deux sièges’. He is very conscious of his destiny as national liberator but he wants to be just human. The impossibility of this is brought out by his symbolic attempt at suicide: he goes to Gaza looking for a girl who will sell him to the Philistines. Shaved, blinded and chained to a mill-stone, he seems to have escaped the ‘présence étrangère’ and found his human self. But his hair is beginning to grow again …

Aymé had already tried to give a physical dimension to grace and free will by describing man's life as predestined and controlled by a guiding master in Les Jumeaux du diable, but the novel's length and heavy style negate the potential advantage of Aymé's graphic image. Les Jumeaux du diable, like La belle image, is easier to appreciate if it is considered more as a short story mistakenly stretched to novel length. The opening of the novel reflects the tongue-in-cheek tone and the easy style that were to become the trade-marks of the conteur:

A travers les infinis où les dimensions se reposent, Satan chevauchait un manche à balai qui est le véhicule ordinaire aux créatures infernales d'occident. Il avait hâte, murmurant à chaque instant: Keibal, Ikal, formule incomparable pour presser l'allure des manches à balai

(JD 9)

and Aymé follows up the image with the sort of proposition that was to become the backbone of his short stories:

—Céphas, j'ai rêvé un jeu amusant. J'imaginais deux hommes de la Terre, deux hommes tout pareils, d'âme et d'apparence, (…) Je n'ai pas imaginé plus avant, Céphas. Seulement, je m'interrogeais s'ils étaient promis au Ciel ou à l'Enfer.

Le Diable sourit.

—même, je me suis demandé s'il se pouvait que l'un fût damné et l'autre élu de Dieu.

(JD 10–11)

But what follows is an over-long and rather unimaginative exploitation of the early momentum of the story and is totally lacking in the charm of Aymé's later developments of this kind of proposition. The novel is a clumsy mixture of the mysterious and the banal. Aymé clearly sensed the failure of this, his first venture into the unreal: he always refused to have the novel reprinted, calling it ‘un très mauvais roman’.

‘Le Romancier Martin’ shows what Les Jumeaux du diable might have become had it been written ten years later. Aymé explores a similar thematic area through the image of a god-author who cannot refrain from ending his novels with a massacre:

Il y avait un romancier, son nom était Martin, qui ne pouvait pas s'empêcher de faire mourir les principaux personnages de ses livres, et même les personnages de moindre importance. Tous ces pauvres gens, pleins de vigueur et d'espoir au premier chapitre, mouraient comme d'épidémie dans les vingt ou trente dernières pages, et bien souvent dans la force de l'âge.

(DM 9)

Siné's humorous sketch on the cover of the Livre de Poche edition shows bodies sandwiched between pages of manuscript while Martin eyes off the fleeing remnants of his characters, wondering whom to impale next with his giant pen. The main action of this story is a revolt by Armandine Soubiron, who comes to plead with her creator and ‘maître’ in a prayer situation. She is upset by her ‘fatalité’ and Martin's excessive use of arbitrary power over his characters' destinies. Martin protests that he is not really in control and Armandine comes to realize that she is free as long as she doesn't regard herself as a prisoner of destiny. She finally escapes completely from Martin's novel.

The frantic running out of time as man rushes towards his absurd death is given a physical dimension in ‘Le Temps mort’, where another Martin simply ceases to exist every second day. Aymé has also given a solid dimension to the relativity of time. For Martin, time actually does pass twice as fast as for everyone else. His solitude is intensified by the difficulty of communication with those around him. His mistress is used to bring out the way two people develop at different rates:

Son amour, qui durait depuis deux années pleines, n'avait ni la fraîcheur, ni l'élan que gardait celui de Martin, âgé d'une année seulement.

(DM 107)

Aymé exploits Martin's predicament, drawing brief glimmers of comedy from his pathetic ruses to make time go more slowly and from the situations he finds himself in when he suddenly comes back to life.

The fantastic time rationing of ‘La Carte’ is probably Aymé's most striking attempt to give a concrete dimension to the abstract. Here, too, the relativity of time is intensified. He describes the inhuman logic of a governmental decree that institutes time rationing, a situation reminiscent of the authoritarian excesses of Pastorale. Those citizens whose work is regarded as socially productive will live full time while all unproductive consumers will be rationed by time cards and ‘tickets de vie’. The relativity of time is well underlined by Aymé's marvellous stretching month. A humble painter may experience a month of only fifteen days while the necessary butcher lives the full thirty-one and a corrupt official or a wily black-marketeer may stretch the month even further! This relativity leads to interesting problems of communication. How can the painter and the butcher share their experiences, since for one of them time goes twice as fast as for the other and a month only contains half as much experience? How can Flegmon arrange a rendezvous with his mistress when the day in question will have a different date for each of them?

This kind of intriguing invention allows Aymé to touch on potentially complicated concepts of time and then move on quickly before the story is slowed down by intellectualism. Aymé's story of fluid time is also a pretext for him to explore the humorous consequences of his premise: Monsieur Dumont arranges to have his fifteen days of existence in the second half of the month so as to avoid his shrewish wife, while the Roquenton couple come back to life in their bed separated by Lucette's lover. The guilty pair pretend not to know each other but the outraged husband finds their story ‘bien invraisemblable’. But Aymé is a realist as well as a humorist; there will always be serious consequences too. The government's draconian decree only remains valid for as long as it takes the resourceful few to profit by it or find a way around it. One of Flegmon's rivals takes advantage of his temporary annihilation to manoeuvre against his candidature for the Académie Française. All efforts to change to a useful job are soon declared illegal, and very few citizens succeed in their attempts to obtain additional time tickets. So we soon see more sinister solutions. Flegmon and many others take to living at twice the pace, eating twice as much to make up for the days when they will not exist. To his credit, Flegmon also tries to work at twice the pace. Trading in time tickets begins, soon to blossom into a flourishing and well-organized black-market. The rich and the wily exploit their weaker fellows and amass large numbers of tickets, and they find themselves able to lengthen a month beyond its normal thirty-one days. Finally the decree has to be repealed because the expected economy of food has not been realized, but not before Aymé has used the consequences of his premise to highlight man's inhumanity, his lack of courage and moral fibre and his blatant egoism, all illustrated by the intellectual Flegmon.

Of course Marcel Aymé is using his fantastic time rationing to comment on reality. ‘La Carte’ is not one of Aymé's frivolous fairy tales; it is a very dense story and contains some of his most serious socio-political commentary. And far more than just being a pseudo-philosophical glance at the relativity of time, Aymé's tale is an indictment of events in the France of 1943. The time being taken away by decree in ‘La Carte’ is a metaphor for the human life that was being so callously disposed of during the Deportation. Of course the time rationing in ‘La Carte’ is a reflection of food rationing, but is not food a source of life? Aymé's pattern of trading, hoarding and black-marketeering closely follows the real patterns induced by wartime food rationing. But Aymé's story of relative death (so it is christened by the trendy set at their death soirées) is really an indictment of French acquiescence in deportation and extermination. The arbitrary but rationalized nature of the time decree:

Afin de parer à la disette et d'assurer un meilleur rendement de l'élément laborieux de la population, il serait procédé à la mise à mort des consommateurs improductifs

(PM 71)

could not fail to suggest Hitlerian policies to the Frenchman of 1943. The economic reasons given reflect some of the lame justifications advanced by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews in the 1930s. Aymé's choice of victims for the fantastic rationing reflects the Nazis' deportation priorities too: among them are artists, prostitutes, intellectuals and of course Jews. The latter are allowed only half a day's existence per month.

It is above all people's reactions to this crisis that interest Marcel Aymé. Frenchmen who peeped from behind curtains (or worse, who stood and stared in the market-places) as their Jewish countrymen were trucked to the Vélodrome d'Hiver must have felt a little guilty on reading Aymé's fantasy: in ‘La Carte’ no one who is untouched by the decree pleads for the victims, no one protests, all are silently thankful that they are not on the list. Not even the Church, in the person of its bishop (a stand-in for Pope Pius XII, who was criticized for not denouncing Hitler's policies forcefully enough) is prepared to condemn the measures. Indeed, many people stand to gain from their colleagues' temporary deaths, just as neighbours and competitors must have often benefited from the Jewish deportations. To the sinister reactionary Maleffroi, society as a whole has benefited from the decree:

On se rend compte alors à quel point les riches, les chômeurs, les intellectuels et les catins peuvent être dangereux dans une société où ils n'introduisent que le trouble, l'agitation vaine, le dérèglement et la nostalgie de l'impossible.

(PM 83–4)

Nor are the victims of the decree totally blameless. None of them seem revolted by the ghastly inhumanity, the absurdity, the arrogance of the decree; they are all too busy trying to gain some personal advantage. Collective resistance is undermined by individual egoism. In Flegmon's diary entry for 18 February Aymé reiterates the often-voiced suggestion that Europe's Jews went into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the cattle trucks and even the gas chambers without putting up much resistance. That day's entry describes a queue of victims waiting to register for their card. It is very like a rafle, complete with French police doing the dirty work and the victims' faces seeming to say, ‘Je ne veux pas mourir encore.’ But no one really resists. Flegmon tells us of his own ‘cri de révolte’, but adds that it was bellowed ‘mentalement’. This suggestion of the victims' resignation to their fate blends into a brief, pessimistic comment on the speed with which man can adapt to and passively accept this kind of measure, his perception of injustice dulled by the fact that the decree is official and perhaps by the knowledge that many of his fellows are similarly afflicted. Flegmon gets used to his fate with rather unhealthy rapidity: just before his first disappearance he is ‘angoissé’ but the very next time he expresses ‘Aucune appréhension’. Roquenton's second experience of death is even greeted with ‘bonne humeur’.

Aymé's experiments with time also lead him to indulge in conventional time travel. He matches Valérie's trip backwards in time in ‘La Fabrique’ with a double time movement in Le Décret. Cathelin stresses the conte philosophique aspect of both ‘La Carte’ and Le Décret and Dumont devotes a whole chapter to Aymé's time manipulation, referring to the theories of Lavelle, Bergson and Bridoux, but in fact Aymé's stories are much more human, more personal than these critics suggest. Just as Aymé avoids Jules Verne or H. G. Wells time machines, so he avoids getting out of his depth with philosophical complications. The first half of Le Décret is Aymé's only failing in this respect. The story starts very slowly because Aymé spends several pages telling of man's growing awareness of compressible, relative, physiological and subjective time and his efforts to control it (including a reference to the previous tale, ‘La Carte’). It is only after eight pages that Aymé's victim starts to tell of the trip to the Jura and the inexplicable (and for him gratuitously mysterious) reversion to 1942, and it takes him several more pages to ascertain that he is in fact the only person who has retained a memory of the future.

At this point the orientation and quality of Aymé's story changes. It is almost as if the learned arguments about time, the narrator's difficulties in adapting to 1959, his trip to Dôle with its mysterious forest and strange fall back through time were nothing more than a pretext. Aymé's conte philosophique is really about man's loss of control in his attempts to master time, and his subsequent confusion. Psychological chaos results for a narrator split between time zones and not really knowing where he belongs. As he says, belonging is not just a matter of changing the clock:

‘Etre d'une époque, pensai-je, c'est sentir l'univers et soimême d'une certaine manière qui appartient à cette époque.’

(PM 112)

The discussion of time in the first half of this long nouvelle leads to a much more human discussion in the second half. More explicitly than in ‘L'Huissier’, Aymé seems to start a new story: ‘Il y avait, à Montmartre, en 1942, un homme qui connaissait l'avenir.’ Once again, Aymé sets out to discover the human consequences of the special gift. The same loss of control is visible in Rechute when time is reversed by a similar governmental decree. The Assemblée Nationale institutes a ‘projet de loi visant à instituer l'année de 24 mois’. This seems reasonable enough except that in Aymé's world it means that everyone's age in years is thereby halved! The result is the kind of split already seen in stories like ‘Fiançailles’, ‘Samson’, ‘Le Nain’ and Le Décret: Josette now has the body of a child but the experience of an eighteen-year-old. For her it is not only disconcerting but humiliating:

‘Si mon bébé pleure, j'appelle le grand loup méchant’, disait maman. Et papa: ‘Comme tu dois être contente! C'est si charmant d'être une vraie petite fille!’ Leur enjouement m'était odieux, j'enrageais d'entendre leurs sottises. J'aurais voulu les écarter, les chasser d'auprès de mon lit, mais, en face de ces grandes personnes, je n'étais qu'une fillette de neuf ans que ses larmes ne protégeaient pas.

(EA 51)

Youth stages armed revolt against the egoism of their elders' abuse of power and the law is abrogated.

Rechute is a longer, more complicated nouvelle than many. The rather high-handed and egoistic actions of the adults, and above all their official hypocrisy and lies, are certainly criticized here. Yet a more pertinent theme in 1950, when the story was published, was young Bernard's collaboration. Aymé describes Bernard's situation and justification very fairly. The young man's metamorphosis leaves him with naturally divided loyalties: while Josette and Pierre revert fully to physical childhood despite their emotional advance, Bernard was just old enough to keep his ‘réalités physiologiques’ as well as the memory of what they were for. So, although partly a child, he is tempted to side with the adults. When he is accused of collaboration and threatened with the comité d'épuration (a practice that Aymé's polemic articles describe as being hardly better than the excesses of the Occupation forces), his defence is that of so many Frenchmen who simply tried to pick the winning side and lost:

—Je nai pas collaboré! proteste-t-il. Comme tant d'autres, j'ai eu tout d'un coup treize ans, j'ai dû m'accommoder d'une situation moralement très pénible et, matériellement, des plus menaçantes. Bien sûr, l'idée ne m'est pas venue qu'un coup de force pouvait rétablir l'ordre légitime, mais je ne suis pas le seul à n'y avoir pas pensé.

(EA 90)

Josette forgives him but only because he is part of the sexuality that she is just rediscovering.

The confusion provoked by these manipulations of time is also a feature of several stories where Aymé explores the multiplicity of man's personality. The duality of someone who is placed in the position of having to choose between two sides of himself recurs in ‘Le Passe-muraille’. Dutilleul is an unassuming pauvre type whose monotonous existence is divided between his job as civil servant (third class) and his leisure hours reading the paper and sorting his stamp collection. Aymé has created a particularly ordinary character in order to use him as a vehicle for the clash between reality and fantasy. One day, Dutilleul discovers that he has the ability to walk through walls without encountering the slightest resistance. At first he has no idea what to do with this ‘étrange faculté qui semblait ne répondre à aucune de ses aspirations’ (PM 8). His early, hesitant steps in the world of fantasy provide Aymé with some rather hilarious moments. First of all Dutilleul scares his tyrannical superior Lécuyer by appearing head and shoulders on the wall of his office like a hunting trophy. Having whetted his appetite, Dutilleul takes his crusade to extremes: he terrorizes Lécuyer to such an extent that within a day the poor fellow has lost a pound in weight. Within a week he is fading away, having taken to eating his soup with a fork, and he is spirited off by men in white coats. This light-hearted vein in ‘Le Passe-muraille’ is the one chosen by Jean Boyer to exploit in his film version of Aymé's story, made in 1950. Unfortunately, the adaptation made by Boyer and Michel Audiard takes some quite unjustified liberties with Aymé's plot and characters. It fails completely to reproduce Aymé's symbiosis of solid reality and outrageous fantasy, leaning towards the tradition of boulevard comedy instead. It is worth seeing only for Bourvil's performance as Dutilleul.

Aymé's ‘Le Passe-muraille’ does not rely much on comedy. Dutilleul's next step is to become a burglar—an ideal profession for someone with his particular talents. By day he continues as the modest Dutilleul but by night he becomes the romantic Garou-Garou who grandly autographs each crime in red chalk. This second self is of course the antithesis of the meek civil servant from which it sprang. Dutilleul soon has the police baffled, and provokes the resignation of the Minister for the Interior, since he can escape at will through the challenging walls of the Santé prison. Dutilleul's adventure is of course a revolt against mediocrity and anonymity. He longs to be someone. When the mysterious Garou-Garou starts to become famous, Dutilleul cannot resist confessing to his colleagues at the ministry, ‘Vous savez, Garou-Garou, c'est moi.’ Mortified by their scornful laughter, he allows himself to be arrested and is vindicated by the appearance of his photograph on the front page of the paper. His colleagues start growing little goatees like Dutilleul's in homage and admiration; Dutilleul has acceded to full existence. Soon he abandons his dual life, preferring that of Garou-Garou. He buys different clothes, shaves off his beard and takes a new apartment. His metamorphosis seems complete. In reality, of course, Dutilleul is still there beneath the mask.

The duality light-heartedly sketched in ‘Le Passe-muraille’ is made tangible in a different way in ‘Le Cocu nombreux’. A vagabond traveller arrives in a village where the relationships between the people he meets begin to seem rather complicated. Slowly he realizes that each person has two complementary bodies. Here is Aymé's description of one of the women he meets:

C'était pour un quart, une petite femme sèche, à la voix pointue, et pour les trois autres quarts, une gaillarde ventrue et fessue, aux bras énormes, à la voix de tonnerre.

(DM 131)

Always on the lookout for the most outrageous side effects of his inventions, Aymé describes a husband who has been cuckolded by another of his own bodies! The traveller tries to question them about their multiplicity but they cannot communicate because they have not the same ‘notion de personne’. But there is a still more troubling aspect of the side effects. Aymé underlines society's conditioning towards ‘normality’ and the repression of the individual: the only person to live by the one body-one mind ratio has a black cross painted on his house and is known as ‘le fou’.

‘Héloïse’ provides an excellent image of fluidity with its Martin who changes into a woman (Héloïse) every night and then back again every morning. ‘Les Sabines’ intensifies the same fluidity of identity and gives Aymé the opportunity to pursue the consequences of his initial situation much further through the metamorphosis motif. Variety of experience is given a physical dimension by Sabine's ability to multiply her body at will. She starts by creating a twin ‘pour la commodité d'examiner son visage, son corps et ses attitudes’ (PM 23) but soon tastes the joys of a varied existence, wanting ever more variety. Here, again, the humorist gives free rein to his penchant for Rabelaisian enumeration: Sabine is

dans le même instant, lady Burbury, assise à une table de bridge en face du comte de Leicester; la bégum de Gorisapour, étendue dans son palanquin porté à dos d'éléphant; Mrs Smithson, occupée dans l'Etat de Pennsylvanie à faire les honneurs de son château Renaissance synthétique; Barbe Cazzarini dans une loge de l'Opéra de Vienne où ténorisait son illustrissime; Rosalie Valdez y Samaniego, couchée sous la moustiquaire, dans une hutte d'un village de Papouasie, …

(PM 41–2)

‘Les Sabines’ is perhaps rather long, given the premise Aymé is working from, but he succeeds in rescuing his tale to some extent by bringing it back towards a more easily manageable duality. He does this by describing a moral struggle taking place within Sabine: she is tempted by her infinite, luxurious variety but deep down she feels she should belong to one man. Aymé develops the struggle between ‘la Providence’ and ‘le Péché’. Some Sabines turn to charity and repentance to make up for their sinful sisters. Dark realism contrasts with fantasy when Louise Megnin, one of the repentant ones, goes on a mission of charity and self-sacrifice to the zone St. Ouen, ‘ce dernier cercle de l'enfer terrestre’ (PM 59) where she is abused, raped and finally murdered to atone for the excesses of her other embodiments.

In these exploitations of the fantastic to underline certain aspects of reality there are clearly some very serious themes involved, yet the anti-serious ironist is always hovering nearby and the result is often an irritating refusal to pursue them. The essence of Aymé's conte is still the invention of a disturbing situation and a brief exploration of its most interesting consequences. Social commentary and pseudo-philosophical discussion take second place to this. The confusion in stories like Le Décret, ‘Le Cocu nombreux’ or ‘Les Sabines’ is the final stage; Aymé proposes no solutions, offers no intellectual discussion. His primary goal is to find an image that will intrigue us, disturb us, increase our awareness and amuse us.

It seems inevitable that with this questioning of what is often regarded as stable and absolute—one of Aymé's greatest short story successes—he should venture further than confusion of time and identity. Indeed, the stability of reality and existence themselves suffers half mocking, half serious distortion too. In ‘La Clé sous le paillasson’ Aymé exploits a less exaggerated image of fluidity than in ‘Les Sabines’ but moves the reader further towards a fluid reality. The basic movement of the story is a gentleman burglar's search for his lost family and his true identity among all the aliases that he has been using:

‘J'ai eu tant d'états-civils, depuis que je cours l'aventure, et tant de faux parents respectables que je ne suis pas fichu de m'y retrouver. Aussi bien, je me demande quel est mon nom véritable?’

Il porta la main à son front et cita rapidement une cinquantaine de noms.

(NA 251)

To add to the confusion, Rodolphe is initially proposed as a character who has escaped from between the pages of a detective novel to arrive in a real country town! His search involves a constant mingling of two levels of reality.

Aymé pursues this transfer between two levels of reality much further in ‘Le Romancier Martin’. Not only do the novelist's creations now leave their fictional frame to attain the same level of reality as their author, but Martin has the power to remove people from real life and imprison them in a purely literary reality. A thorough mingling results: Martin's editor falls in love with one of his characters and another friend wants the novelist to translate his mistress Jiji into a ‘personnage de troisième plan’ so that he can be rid of her. It is rather surprising that an author so interested in images of mingled identity and fluid reality should have missed the ideal figure of a spy; maintaining two or three identities at once and living in an unstable world of changing loyalties and disintegrating façades, the spy could have combined Cérusier, Rodolphe and the bewildered time traveller in Le Décret to become Aymé's greatest creation.

Most of Aymé's short stories question reality to some extent. He often seems to create absurdities in order to have them accepted as realities, whether by the victim, who hardly has any choice, or by the reader, who is equally bound if he wants to read on. Cérusier is at first bewildered by his face change and goes through a period of confusion when he concludes that ‘le monde feint d'exister’ (BI 85). Finally he accepts Roland Colbert, his new self, as a ‘nouvelle réalité’. In Le Décret Aymé does not just aim at confusion of time for his victim but goes as far as the brief suggestion of a parallel existence:

J'arrivais à cette conclusion baroque qu'il existait simultanément deux villes de Dôle, l'une vivant en 1942, l'autre en 1959.

(PM 114)

Aymé suggests very strongly that this other reality is perhaps only ever mental; the deeper reality is in the eye of the beholder. ‘Oscar et Erick’ deals directly with this important theme. Oscar has for a long time been painting only imaginary things, but the people of the northern kingdom of Ooklan where he lives hardly appreciate his inventiveness and (shades of the villagers of ‘Le Cocu nombreux’) call him ‘Oscar le fou’. One day his Viking brother comes home from the sea bearing real objects that appear to be the exact models for Oscar's fantasy canvases. The unreal has become real, or what is unreal in Ooklan exists as reality elsewhere.

It is this fantastic vein that is most often regarded as typical of Aymé's short stories. The three successful pastiches of his stories all stress this vein of the unreal. Yet anthologists of the fantastic have tended to ignore Aymé, probably because his fantastic is so often anti-serious and contains so little of the deep-rooted fear that is so essential in Poe, Hoffmann and even marginal writers like Lovecraft. There are occasional thematic similarities but Aymé's attitude to his material and his adaptation of it to accentuate reality is different. Because of Aymé's disarming, anti-serious, anti-intellectual stand it would also be wrong to align him too closely with the Surrealists who were often among his friends and who used similar processes in arriving at their strange images, or with the dramatists of the Absurd whose phenomena and situations so often resemble his own. Aymé has created his own distinctive blend of faerie, fantastic and reality. The accumulation of unreal imagery in his fictional world gives the impression that it is a special world apart where any absurdity is allowed. Exploring story after story, the reader feels that the fantastic is really quite banal and, what is worse, even expected. Masson's pastiche best captures this atmosphere when it describes a world where

Le merveilleux est partout. Seulement il se cache. Et le plus souvent, vous mourrez avant de vous être aperçu du don que les fées vous ont donné au berceau.

So we see his hero Mouton (read Martin) wondering what his next gift will be—transmutation of cobblestones into gold or the power to stop a bus with nothing more than telepathic commands. Sadly enough, Masson was right: after reading a lot of Aymé we are tempted to expect phenomena whose charm should really be in their unexpectedness.