Our friend Doug Skinner, on his Ullage Group site, just posted a translation that he’s done of a French short story entitled “Houses of Flesh and Bone.” The story, written in the 1890’s by Paul Vibert, is about living inside of large animals. Here’s a clip:

…It could be relocated at will; and man would thus solve the problem of the portable house, and make himself the equal of the snail and the turtle.

Attend for a moment, and you will soon see that my plan could easily be realized. Be it understood that if I wished to travel overground, I would establish my little residence in an elephant’s stomach, where there is room, and not its belly — which would be absurd, as it is filled with interminable corridors and intestines. And I would move into the stomach of a whale, if I planned to undertake a voyage by sea.

In the latter case, I would then have a little submarine of flesh and bone, just like good old Jonah — see the Bible, page etc. — nothing could be simpler. But here the benevolent reader stops me with a triumphant and peremptory gesture, saying:

- Excuse me, but I don’t see how you would have room to live in those creatures, even snugly, particularly if you had a family, with a wife and mother-in-law, not to mention the kids.

– Don’t be impatient; for I have solved that problem, and this is precisely my point of pride. To begin with, I place my young elephant in a greenhouse-stable, or my young whale into a basin-aquarium, and submit them to the well-known effects of violet rays; and after six months, I have a pachyderm, or whale, five or six times larger than its ordinary congeners; and I therefore have in its stomach a comfortable little apartment for the entire family….

Knowing Doug, and some of what interests him, my guess is that no one prior to this had ever bothered to translate this piece, or, for that matter, any of Vibert’s work into English. I, of course, (as a closeted furry) love the idea of living inside of animals, and I also very much like the scientific theory on the properties of violet light, but what I like most is just the very fact that it exists at all, and that, thanks to the hard work of one friend in New York, millions and millions of people can read it… It’s kind of nice to think that maybe, in a hundred and twenty years, someone from another culture might stumble across one of my massive, wandering posts and take the time to translate it. (Hopefully it won’t be my post on being strangled by feet.)