Eugène Sue - The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World - A Tale of the Millennium

It has long been said of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda that the novel would improve immeasurably should the two halves – that of Gwendolen as the first, and Deronda, the second – be separated and published independently. Then, Deronda's half would stand as a novel of greatness, while Gwendolen would fall to where she should belong, which is somewhere amongst the middling novels of England. Eugène Sue's novella, The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World - A Tale of the Millennium is a novel with similar failings. Its first half is melodramatic and somewhat ridiculous, while the second is brutal, violent, and vile. Split them apart and neither half makes sense, but the second half, with its brutish nastiness, is much more engaging, and by far the stronger section.

The Infant's Skull is a novella set around the year 1000 in France. It opens with an idyllic Spring morning shared by two lovers, the type of scene where Hugh the Capet will tell the amorous, adulterous Queen that,

"Blanche, they are foolhardy people who use the word 'always,' when barely fourteen years separate us from the term assigned for the end of the world! This is a grave and fearful matter!"

And this is one of the calmer exclamations. It seems that the King, Louis the Do-nothing, is unloved by both his bride and his kingdom, and the rumblings of the clergy about the upcoming apocalypse aren't helping matters. Sue switches rapidly from Spring morning to King's castle to Fool's ravings, with each scene attempting to outdo the previous and the next in melodrama. It's difficult to read, but this is mostly because there is no pleasure to the text, just one ridiculous scene after another.

Soon, though, Kings and men are dead, and the year 1000 approaches...and nothing occurs. Here the second part begins, and Sue is, surprisingly, adept at dealing with the larger view of society. The first half was focused intently on conversation, plotting, and murder, with the result that it was all a bit silly. The second, at least at first, has the focus pulled back, allowing us a view of France as it grapples with the fallout of the mistaken apocalypse. The Church, either hedging its bets or simply running an immense scam, had, in the years leading up to the Millennium, convinced the wealthy and poor alike to donate their possessions and their lands to God to ensure passage into Heaven. After the Millennium, with the world still intact and yet the people much poorer – starvation, famine, a mass upheaval of peasants and the wealthy, and all the associated problems that come with cataclysmic events. Sue writes that,

The Church had fixed the last day of the year 1000 as the final term for the world's existence. Thanks to the deception, the clergy came into possession of the property of a large number of seigneurs. During the last months of that year an immense saturnalia was on foot. The wildest passion, the most insensate, the drollest and most atrocious acts seemed then unchained.

Soon the Church begins to moan about another upcoming apocalypse, this time revolving around Christ's age when he declared himself a God among men. 1033 was to be, now, the year when everything was to be destroyed. Some people bought it, throwing good money after bad, but others rioted, only to find that the clergymen had barricaded themselves into their newly acquired, and ill-gotten, homes.

The corpses of the wretches who died of inanition strewed the fields, roads and highways; the decomposing bodies poisoned the air, engendered illnesses and even pestilential epidemics until then unknown; the population was decimated. Within thirty-three years, Gaul lost more than one-half its inhabitants - the new-born babies died vainly pressing their mother's breasts for nourishment.

Enter Yvon, the fool from the first part. He is older now, a grandfather, and ravaged with hunger. He can but poorly protect his family, and the rumblings of their bellies follow him through the hours he spends hunting. From here Sue swoops down low again, eschewing the eagle's eye view of France as famine and years passed by. But this time Yvon, far from being a fool, has become a weary, wizened and wise man. Sue, perhaps because his pen is focused on one character and not several, is able to slowly add smooth layers of personality to Yvon, who rapidly becomes sympathetic.

After a fruitless hunt, Yvon comes across Gregory the Hollow-bellied, so named because his appetite is insatiable. In Yvon's France, this seems impossible, but the evidence is there to see. Gregory is fat, complacent, and he guards his home with weapons red and wet with blood, and his huge doge stands ready to attack. Yvon, desperate for food, kills Gregory only to discover the man's horrible secret – he was eating travellers.

…he approached the flaming brand to the opening and discovered below a cavern that was almost filled with bones, heads and other human members, the bloody remnants of the travellers whom Gregory the Hollow-bellied had lived upon. In order to put an end to the horrible spectacle, Yvon hurled his flaming brand into the mortuary cellar; it was immediately extinguished

This tale of horror is quite good, and Sue is able to draw out the menace in a satisfactory way. We learn of Gregory's crimes along with Yvon, but Sue is only beginning. He catalogues with loving detail the depravity of Gregory's home, exploring the nooks and crannies of his charnel house. Even better, he dips Yvon into the darkness, ratcheting up the macabre intensity of the story as Yvon, maddened with hunger, takes home to his family a roasted leg of some poor wanderer.

This second half is very good, and it would certainly be remiss of me to spoil the rest. Needless to say, Sue runs the gamut of depravity, and we believe the situation presented because the set up for it worked so well. Where the novella fails, and fails catastrophically, is the abysmal first section, which takes up fully half the story and does nothing a simple prologue couldn't do anyway. And this is demonstrably true, for the introduction to the second part could easily act as the opening to the novella, which would allow Sue to further explore the horror of post-millennial France

The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World - A Tale of the Millennium is revolting, but it is a lot of fun. It's short enough that the first half can be lightly skimmed, or even skipped, and then the much better second half is there to be enjoyed. That said, it's not for the faint of heart, for the gruesome nature of Yvon's grisly discovery is well and truly plumbed. Daniel De Leon, the translator, remarks that the novella forms part of Sue's great cycle, The Mysteries of the People; or The History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages, and refers to it as “a gem in the necklace of gems” of the series. Perhaps, but at the very least it is an effective tale of horror, once the awful first part has passed.

Author	Eugène Sue
Title	Eugène Sue - The Infant's Skull; or, The End of the World - A Tale of the Millennium
Translator	Daniel De Leon
Nationality	French
Publisher	Project Gutenberg
Published	1904 (English)
Pages	68
Availability: ---Amazon (US)

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