A Wild Ride Through The Night

Using twenty-one drawings from the work of Gustave Doré, the most successful illustrator of the 19th century, Walter Moers has created a wondrous and utterly delightful tale. In a world between legend and dream, in a time between childhood and adulthood, A Wild Ride Through the Night describes the exhilarating and comic adventures of 12-year-old Gustave, a boy who aspires one day to be a great artist. But before he can achieve this, Gustave must first tackle Mysterious Giants and a Siamese Twins Tornado; he also finds himself encountering the Greatest Monster of All, freeing a maiden from the claws of a dragon, riding through a forest full of ghosts, navigating a Galactic Gully and meeting a dream princess, a talking horse, scantily-clad Amazons and even his own self. Having made a wager with death for nothing less than his life and his soul, he must travel from the earth to the moon and back in a single night.

About the Author

Walter Moers was born in 1957 and is a writer, cartoonist, painter and sculptor. He has refused to be photographed ever since his comic strips The Little Asshole and Adolf were published, the latter leading him to be declared persona non grata by the political right in Germany. The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was published to superb reviews and has sold 250,000 hardback copies in Germany. Walter Moers lives in Hamburg.

List of Doré’s principal illustrated works (from Henri Leblanc)

1847	Les Travaux d’Hercule, Doré
1851	Ces Chinois de Parisiens, Album Les Désagréments d’un voyage d’agrément, Doré Musée comique, Album Œuvres illustrées du bibliophile Jacob, Paul Lacroix Trois artistes incompris et mécontents, Doré Seul au monde, A. Brot
1852	Tableau de Paris, Edouard Texier
1853	Œuvres complètes, Lord Byron
1854	Le Médecin du cœur, A. Brot Le Bourreau du roi, A. Brot Les Différents publics de Paris, Album Histoire pittoresque de la Sainte-Russie, Doré La Ménagerie parisienne, Album Gargantua et Pantagruel, Rabelais
1855	Contes drolatiques, Balzac La Chasse au lion, Jules Gérard Histoire populaire de la Guerre d’Orient, Abbé Mullois Les Chercheurs d’or, J. Sherer Voyage aux eaux des Pyrénées, Hippolyte Taine
1856	La France en Afrique, B. Gastineau Contes d’une vieille fille, Mme de Girardin L’Insurrection en Chine, Haussmann La Légende du Juif Errant, Pierre Dupont Le Chevalier Jaufre, Mary Lafon L’Habitation au désert, Mayne-Reid Mémoires d’un jeune cadet, V. Perceval Refrains du dimanche, Plouvier et Vincent Histoire de la cordonnerie, M. Sensfelder
1857	Géographie universelle, Malte-Brun Fierabras, Mary Lafon Nouveaux contes de fées, Mme de Ségur Aline, V. Vernier
1858	Boldheart the Warrior, G. F. Pardon The Adventures of St George, W. F. Peacock
1859	La Guerre d’Italie, Charles Adam Batailles et combats de la Guerre d’Italie, various authors Les Compagnons de Jéhu, Alexandre Dumas Les Folies gauloises, Album Essais, Montaigne
1860	Romans historiques, various authors Le Nouveau Paris, La Bédollière Histoire des environs de Paris, La Bédollière Théâtre des opérations militaires en Syrie, Malte-Brun Voyage aux Pyrénées, Hippolyte Taine—new edition
1861	Le Roi des montagnes, Edmond About Histoire de Jésus-Christ, Abbé Bourasse Inferno, Dante Chansons d’autrefois, Charles Malo Les Coulisses du monde, Ponson de Terrail Le Chemin des écoliers, X. B. Saintine
1862	Les Aventures du Baron de Münchhausen, Théophile Gautier Histoire de France, Victor Duruy L’Espagne, Abbé Godord Histoire populaire de France, various authors Histoire de la Guerre de Mexique, La Bédollière Contes et légendes, de Laujon Histoire de la Capitaine Castagnette, L’Épine Contes, Perrault La Mythologie du Rhin, X. B. Saintine
1863	Don Quixote, Cervantes Atala, Chateaubriand Paris illustré, Adolphe Joanne Bade et la Forêt-Noire, Adolphe Joanne La Légende de Croque-Mitaine, L’Épine Sous la tente, Charles Yriarte
1864	Histoires d’une minute, Adrien Marx Histoires des chevaliers, Elizé de Montagnac
1865	Balle-Franche, Gustave Aiward Crécy et Poitiers, J. G. Edgar The Fairy Realm, Tom Hood De Paris en Afrique, B. Gastineau Les Mille et une nuits, Galland L’Epicuréen, Thomas Moore La Flêche d’or, M. V. Victor
1866	Le Capitaine Fracasse, Théophile Gautier Paradise Lost, John Milton La Sainte Bible selon la Vulgate
1867	The Pyrenees, H. Blackburn Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo La France et la Prusse, La Bédollière Fables, La Fontaine Coila’s Whispers, Knight of Morar Le Page Fleur-de-Mai, Ponson de Terrail Elaine, Alfred, Lord Tennyson Vivien, Alfred, Lord Tennyson Guinevere, Alfred, Lord Tennyson L’Eau, Gaston Tissandier
1868	Purgatory and Paradise, Dante Les Ardennes, Elizé de Montagnac Enid, Alfred, Lord Tennyson Idylls of the King, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1869	Les Couteaux d’or, Paul Feval Sonnets et eaux-fortes, various authors
1870	The Doré Gallery, Edmond Ollier The Works of Thomas Hood, Hood Le Chevalier Beau-Temps, L’Épine Les Coulisses artistiques, P. Véron
1871	The Cockaynes in Paris, Blanchard Jerrold
1872	Histoire de la guerre de 1870–1871, La Bédollière Les Races humaines, Louis Figuier London: A Pilgrimage, Blanchard Jerrold Histoire des Papes, M. Lachâtre Hespérus, Catulle Mendès
1873	Récits de l’inWni, Camille Flammarion L’Emigrant alsacien, Jacques Normand Gargantua et Pantagruel, Rabelais—new edition
1874	L’Espagne, Charles Davillier Histoire des Français, Théophile Lavallée
1875	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge River Legends, Knatchbull
1876	Londres, L. Enault Le Chevalier noir, Mary Lafon L’Art en Alsace Lorraine, René Menard
1877	Histoire de paysans, Eugène Bonnemère Nos petits rois, H. Jousselin Histoire des croisades, J. Michaud Montreux guide, Rambert
1878	L’Espagne, Edmondo de Amicis Voyage autour du monde, Comte de Beauvoir Voyage aux pays annexés, Victor Duruy
1879	Le Coureur de bois, Gabriel Ferry Voyage au pays des peintres, Marie Proth Catalogue de la société des aquarellistes français
1880	Chacun son idée, Jules Girardin Chansons choisis, Gustave Nadaud Le Jour de l’an et les étrennes, Eugène Muller Les Drames du désert, Noir
1881	En revenant de Pontoise, H. le Charpentier L’Amérique septentrionale, Hippolyte Vattemare
1882	La Chanson des nouveaux époux, Mme Adam Life of George Cruikshank, Blanchard Jerrold
1883	The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe Catalogue de la société des aquarellistes français
1907	Versailles et Paris en 1871, Doré

GUSTAVE DORÉ

GUSTAVE DORÉ, French painter and illustrator, b. Strasbourg, 6 Jan. 1832, d. Paris, 23 Jan. 1883, displayed an outstanding talent for drawing as a boy and lithographed sketches for a history of manners in his tenth year. He moved to Paris at the age of thirteen and was employed as a caricaturist by the Journal pour rire two years later. In 1854 he published his earliest illustrated work, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. This was only the first of the numerous series that made him one of the most popular, prolific and successful book illustrators of the mid nineteenth century. His inexhaustibly fertile imagination and exceptional facility led ultimately to the grotesque lack of moderation that marred his last major work, the drawings for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Chronology

IT WAS DARK when Gustave put to sea. He preferred to travel by night. In any case, visibility seemed unimportant to someone who had no idea where his voyage would take him. The sky was enshrouded in clouds as black as ink. Now and then a star or the moon’s pock-marked face would peep forth, shedding just enough light for him to see the ship’s wheel in his hands. Gustave had read somewhere that it was possible to get your bearings at sea by observing the position of the stars. He wanted to master that art some day, but at present he had to rely on his instincts.

‘Hard-a-port!’ he shouted, and spun the wheel to the left. Was ‘port’ on the left or the right? Did a ship turn right when you turned the wheel to the left, or was it the other way round? Temporarily brushing these questions aside, Gustave spun the wooden wheel vigorously so as to give his crew an impression of grim determination.

‘We’ll never outrun it, Cap’n!’ Dante, his trusty, one-eyed boatswain, had come up behind him. The experienced seaman’s voice was trembling with fear. ‘ We can’t possibly outrun it, can we?’

Although Gustave was only twelve, the crew of the Aventure looked up to him as if he were a giant—even though they had to bend down to do so. Kneading his cap in his calloused hands, Dante regarded his young skipper with a look of hope in his lone eye. Gustave turned to face the wind and sniffed it. The air was as warm and moist as it tends to be before a violent storm.

‘Outrun it?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Outrun what, my faithful Dante?’

‘I mean a Siamese Twins Tornado, Cap’n. It’s hot on our heels, too!’ Dante levelled a trembling forefinger at something beyond the ship’s stern, and Gustave followed the direction of his gaze. What he saw there was terrifying indeed: two enormous waterspouts had arisen from the sea. Their whirling shafts towered as high as the dark clouds overhead, sucking the water and all its contents into the sky. Roaring like maddened giants, they sped towards the Aventure at a rate of knots.

‘Oh, so it’s a Siamese Twins Tornado,’ Gustave said in a deliberately casual tone. ‘An unpleasant phenomenon, but absolutely no reason for anyone to lose control of his knee joints.’ He cast a reproachful glance at Dante’s trembling legs.

‘Take in sail!’ he ordered briskly. ‘Steer three—no, four degrees to starboard!’ The boatswain pulled himself together and saluted, shamed by his imperturbable young skipper’s death-defying composure. ‘Aye-aye, Cap’n!’ he cried. He clicked his heels and strode off, stiff-legged.

Gustave’s own knees did not start knocking until Dante had stalked off. His hands gripped the ship’s wheel tightly. A Siamese Twins Tornado, eh? Great! The most dangerous natural phenomenon anyone could encounter anywhere on the seven seas! A pair of tornadoes, two meteorological twins who seemed to communicate by telepathic means and hunted ships as a team. If one failed to sink you, the other finished the job.

Gustave looked back at the roaring waterspouts. They seemed to have doubled in size in no time. He could see huge octopuses, whales and sharks being plucked from the sea and hurled through the air. Shafts of lightning darted back and forth between the gigantic, whirling tornadoes, creating a dazzling white network that lit up the Aventure like a ghost ship.

‘Ah, so that’s how they communicate!’ Gustave told himself. ‘By electricity! I must convey this information to the International Tornado Research Centre without delay—if I survive.’

He looked straight ahead again. ‘It doesn’t matter a row of beans which way I steer,’ he reflected. ‘If we go left, the left-hand tornado will get us. If we go right, the right-hand one will.’

This disheartening thought had only just occurred to him when the Aventure was borne upwards by a huge wave. For a moment the ship hung almost motionless in the air, poised on its foaming crest. The ocean seemed to pause in its eternal undulations, almost as if it had become the tornadoes’ accomplice and were serving up the fleeing ship on a tray of white froth.

‘We’ve come to a standstill,’ Gustave thought desperately. ‘We’re done for!’

At that moment the left-hand tornado seized the Aventure, enveloping her in darkness. A fearsome gurgle from the bowels of the ocean drowned every other sound including the sailors’ cries of terror. Gustave strapped himself to the ship’s wheel with his belt and shut his eyes.

He was prepared to die—prepared to plunge with his ship to the bed of the ocean if the sea-gods so ordained; as her captain, it was his duty to do so. In his mind’s eye he could already see his skeleton nibbled clean by fish, still lashed to the wheel of a wreck lying on the seabed with stingrays swimming through its splintered remains.

Then silence fell: not a sound, not a whisper, no motion at all. Gustave felt as if he were floating, weightless, in space. Only the wheel in his hands reminded him that he had been in the thick of a raging storm just a split second earlier.

‘I’m dead,’ he thought. ‘So that’s what it’s like: you don’t hear a thing any more.’ He risked opening his eyes and looked up. Overhead was a kind of enormous funnel, and through it he could see straight into the cosmos, a black disk filled with scintillating stars. Around him was a vortex of sea water, splintered wood and whirling air, all of it being propelled outwards by centrifugal force: Gustave was in the eye of the storm, the zone of absolute stillness in the heart of the tornado.

He watched in horror as the grey tube sucked his men into the sky, but he could only see their gaping mouths and staring eyes, not hear their heart-rending cries.

The Aventure was lifted into the air once more. Gustave thought she would soar straight into outer space, but the tornado suddenly detached itself from the surface of the ocean and rose into the air. It released its hold on the ship and whirled skywards, growing thinner and thinner. Closely followed by its twin, it plunged into the dark mass of clouds like an immense serpent composed of sea water, air, sailors, and ship’s wreckage. The two storms emitted a last, triumphant bellow from inside the clouds. Then they were gone.

But the Aventure herself fell back into the sea. The impact snapped her rigging and made the nails pop out of her planks like bullets. White foam blossomed around her hull as she landed. Timber splintered, sailcloth ripped, anchor chains rattled. Then came silence, absolute silence: the waves had subsided. The ship rocked gently to and fro, sending a few barrels rumbling across the deck, but that was all. The tempest was over as suddenly as it had begun.

Gustave unbuckled himself from the ship’s wheel. Still thoroughly bemused, he tottered off on a tour of inspection. The Aventure was nothing more than a wreck, her sails in shreds, her hull riddled with holes, her deck bristling with sprung planks like the body of a half-plucked chicken. She was slowly but steadily sinking.

‘Yes … “All that comes into being is worthy of perishing,”’ replied a voice from the ship’s stern. Gustave turned to look. Amid the snapped masts and crazy tangle of rigging he saw a horrific figure perched on the taffrail. It was a skeleton, a man devoid of skin and flesh attired in a voluminous black cloak. His bony hands were holding a casket, his empty eye sockets facing in Gustave’s direction.

At his feet knelt a young woman who must once upon a time have been very beautiful. Now, however, her fine features were distorted into a mask of insanity as wild and disordered as her flowing fair hair. She was in the act of rolling two dice across the deck.

‘No, the quotation was from Goethe. I’m Death, and this is Dementia, my poor, mad sister. Say hello, Dementia!’

‘I’m not mad!’ the young woman retorted in an unpleasantly harsh and strident voice, without interrupting her game of dice.

‘Good,’ said Death. ‘I’m in the right place, then. I’ve come to fetch your soul.’ He indicated the casket in his hand, which, Gustave now saw, was shaped like a miniature coffin. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘It’s a soul-coffin,’ Death announced with a touch of pride in his sinister voice. ‘Yes indeed! My own invention. I’m not interested in your body. That will either feed the sharks or be dispersed in the ocean by a process of decay as natural as anything ever is on this pitiless planet of ours. I want your soul, just your soul, so that I can burn it.’

‘No, he belongs to me!’ screeched Dementia, pointing to the dice. Having just thrown a double six for the second time, she scooped them up and threw them again.

‘Hm,’ Death said sullenly, ‘we’ll have to see about that.’ The dice came to a standstill: a five and a six.

‘He’s mine!’ Dementia exclaimed in triumph, and uttered a hysterical laugh. Her glowing eyes flickered nervously as she gazed at Gustave.

‘It’s like this,’ Death explained. ‘I’ll get you anyway, sooner or later, but if you’re really unlucky, my esteemed sister will also get a slice of the cake. That means you’ll go mad before you die. In your case the process will probably take the following form: you’ll spend a few weeks drifting around on a raft until the merciless sun dehydrates your brain and you start seeing water sprites, or maybe your dead grandmother, who’ll address you in the voice of your violin teacher—or something of the kind. And then you’ll start to eat yourself alive.’

Death shrugged his shoulders and threw the dice. ‘I’m sorry, those ideas aren’t mine. That’s simply how it is with, er … insanity.’

He tapped his skull meaningfully with a bony forefinger, but not before making sure that Dementia was concentrating on the dice as they rolled across the deck. A double six.

‘You see?’ said Death, ‘I’m doing my best for you.’ He threw again. Another double six.

‘What else? You don’t imagine we’d board a sinking hulk during a Siamese Twins Tornado

1832	Gustave Doré born on 6 January at 5 rue de la Nuée-Bleue, to Pierre-Louis-Chistophe Doré and his wife Alexandrine Marie-Anne, née Pluchart.
1837	Doré’s talent first attracts attention when, at the age of five, he draws caricatures of his relations and teachers in his exercise books.
1839	He starts to learn several musical instruments, becoming a virtuoso on the violin.
1841	The family moves for professional reasons to Bourg-en-Bresse in the Jura. Doré attends the local collège. His first attempt to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy.
1847	First published work: Les Travaux d’Hercule, Aubert, Paris.
1848	First visit to Paris with his parents. Doré makes contact with Charles Philipon, a magazine publisher, who puts him under contract as an illustrator. Death of his father.
1849	Doré’s mother moves to Paris.
1851	Publication of his early work, Les Désagréments d’un voyage d’agrément. He joins the staff of the magazine L’Illustration.
1853	Doré illustrates Lord Byron’s Œuvres complètes.
1854	He publishes his first major illustrated work, Gargantua et Pantagruel by Rabelais, which causes a great stir. The same year sees the publication of Histoire pittoresque de la Sainte-Russie, a satirical and stylistically audacious illustrated history of the Crimean War which may safely be classified as one of the most imaginative forerunners of the comic strip. Doré gains his first successes as a painter.
1855	World Exhibition, Paris. Doré illustrates Balzac’s Contes drolatiques. Together with his Rabelais cycle, this lays the foundations of his international renown as a book illustrator. John Ruskin condemns Balzac’s text as shamelessly blasphemous and Doré’s illustrations as monstrous and disgusting.
1857	Doré illustrates the Comtesse de Ségur’s fairy tales. In the ensuing years he devotes himself to a wide variety of projects, some of a non-literary nature.
1861	Dante’s Inferno marks the beginning of Doré’s grand design: a world library of illustrated works. His artistic output becomes steadily more industrialised, and he tackles more and more assignments simultaneously.
1862	Doré illustrates Charles Perrault’s fairy stories and Gottfried August Bürger’s Münchhausen. Preliminary sketches for Don Quixote.
1863	Don Quixote, his most successful work to date, appears. Only his Bible exceeds it in number of editions printed.
1864	Napoleon III invites Doré to spend ten days at his court.
1866	Don Quixote becomes an international bestseller and Doré the highest-paid artist of his day. The Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost appear with Doré’s illustrations. His paintings are less successful. The merciless verdict of one contemporary critic: ‘Wallpaper is worth more.’
1867	Doré illustrates La Fontaine’s Fables and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
1868	Disappointed by the failure of his paintings in France, Doré temporarily emigrates to London, where he triumphs as a painter and illustrator. Opening of the Doré Gallery at 35 New Bond Street. He illustrates Dante’s Purgatory and Paradise and undertakes numerous excursions through the more disreputable districts of London, sometimes with a police escort, for the purpose of making drawings for a London volume based on texts by Blanchard Jerrold.
1870	Fall of the French Empire; Napoleon III captured at Sedan.
1872	Doré has begun to sculpt as well. The London volume appears, together with several historical works.
1875	He is received in audience by Queen Victoria. Illustrates The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge.
1877	Joseph Michaud’s Histoire des croisades published with illustrations by Doré.
1878	Preliminary illustrations for A Thousand and One Nights.
1879	Publication of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Doré’s last major cycle. He is appointed an officer of the Légion d’honneur.
1880	Death of Jacques Offenbach, one of Doré’s closest friends.
1881	Doré’s mother dies.
1883	Gustave Doré dies of a heart attack in Paris on 23 January. The same year sees the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, his last illustrated work.

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

List of Doré’s principal illustrated works (from Henri Leblanc)

GUSTAVE DORÉ

Chronology