Genealogies of Public Domain Fictional Characters

I have been imagining my own framework for a shared continuity between various Public Domain fictional sags and characters for the purpose of stories I may write in the future.  It is influenced by the Wold Newton Universe but ultimately different, starting with my disinterest in the very plot device it is named after.  But it is particularly influenced by the French WNU work on CoolFrenchComics.com.

One idea constantly floating around in WNU circles I particularly don't like is Captian Nemo being the same person as Professor Moriarty.  First of all it contributes to the White Washing of Nemo, Nemo should be Indian which is one of the few things I give Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman credit for.  But also it just doesn't fit personality wise or archetypically, Nemo like Robur opposes the British Empire from without not from within.  I'm all for the idea of Moriarty actually being a nationalist rebel against Britannia, but based on him and Moran having Irish surnames and The Valley of Fear it would be Irish nationalism carrying on the mission of Fergue O'Breane (Of Feval's The Mysteries of London) and Sarah O'Neil (Of Feval's John Devil) through The Gentlemen of The Night.  (The recent Anime Moriarty The Patriot is a pretty decent exploration of the idea of Moriarty as a Revolutionary, I haven't seen season 2 since it's not Dubbed yet but I suspect it will be.)

While Public Domain characters are the focus, plausible connections to non PD characters for the purposes of Fan Fiction will come up occasionally.

My unique combination of interests makes me an Otaku looking to strengthen the ties between the lore of Lupin III and and the original Arsene Lupin.  The CoolFrenchComics Lupin Genealogy has connections I like and would keep and others I would discard or adjust.  I think their Arsene Lupin Timeline is pretty solid except that I would probably at least not directly mention any stories not written by Maurice Leblanc.  I won't be able to comment on the Borostyria=Montenegro theory till I read The Woman with Two Smiles for myself.  Now the only versions of Lupin III that can really fit a shared universe like this, at least with the "Third" part being literal, are period pieces set in the 60s and 70s, of which my starting point would always be The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.  Maybe some stuff set in the 80s or early 90s could still work if you're willing to imagine the characters actually now look older then they're at face value being drawn, after all the original Arsene Lupin had a career the spanned over 30 years.

The mother of the Arsene Lupin The 2nd who's the father of Lupin The Third I have decided should be Florence Lavasseur.  I have also decided that Albert d'Andresy descends from Hortense Daniel, that of course probably conflicts with the Nestor Burma theory CFC endorses, but I imagine that theory had problems on it's own.  It's a decision that is symbolic of my viewing Albert d'Andresy as the heir of the 813 form of Arsene Lupin (Jean-Marc & Randy Loffcier's analysis of 813 in the introduction to their translation is spot on).

[Update June 2025: I've been considering changing my mind are arguing Lupin II's mother is Raymonde from The Hollow Needle who died in 1909, but I'm unsure there is room in the timeline of their relationship for a pregnancy, been awhile since I read the book.]

As far as the ancestry of the original Arsene Lupin goes.  For those who don't know Theophraste Lupin comes from Maurice Leblanc himself.  C .Auguste Dupin actually being a Lupin and Theo's father with Poe simply changing the first letter for some reason I like, however I feel the generation between Dupin and Balzac's Bibi-Lupin (who I think could be the same person as Alexandre Dumas' Monsieur Jackal in The Mohicans of Paris) is unneeded, Bibi could easily have sired Dupin directly.  And their lineage going back to the protagonists of Paul Feval's The She Wolf and The White Wolf I also like.

Next is the question of the Lecoq line.  Farmer created Albert Lecoq to be the grandfather of Gaboriau's Lecoq with probably no idea a candidate for the in-between generation already existed, in fact I bet Farmer only knew of Gaboriau's Lecoq because he was mentioned in A Study in Scarlet.  

I am going to keep Feval's Lecoq as the father of Gaboriau's Lecoq in-spite of it's problems because of how it fits on a Meta-Level with Feval having been Gaboriau's Sensei, and Gaboriau contradicted himself on Lecoq's backstory anyway.  I also keep the Ballmeyer-Rouletabille connection and the Lecoq children who kept the last name in the Fan Fiction of Fortuné de Boisgobey, William Busnach & Henri Chabrillat and the 1908 La Fée au Vitriol memoir of Lucien, and I'd like to somehow add Beautrelet of The Hollow Needle. [Note: I'd missed or forgotten that Beautrelet was already on CFC's Lecoq family tree, still I think I may want to change where, I think I like Beautrelet as a younger brother of Rouletabille.]

However my imagination extends the genealogy even further to make Lecoq the real meaning of the L designation in Death Note, Lawliet can still be his forename, he wouldn't be the first Lecoq named alliteratively.

Albert Lecoq is rendered unnecessary by no longer keeping Wold Newton itself.  Albert as the forename of Toulonnais L'Amitie's father certainly isn't a problem, but what Wold Newton writers familiar with Feval and The Blackcoats like Rick Lai and Win Scott Eckert tend to do with Albert doesn't actually fit Feval's lore.  A Normandy family like the Lecoqs would not have become affiliated with The Colonel or the Veste Nere until they first set up shop in Paris in 1818.  In fact I'm pretty sure The Colonel didn't actually use the title of Colonel or even set foot outside of Corsica till then either.

But there is an even bigger issue I have with the CFC's Lecoq tree, and that's making Marguerite Sadoulus the mother of Monsieur Lecoq and Albert's wife a descendent of Milady De Winter.  

First of all in Heart of Steel it's pretty clear to me that Marguerite's relationship with Lecoq doesn't begin till 1832 so it exists 100% contemporary with her marriage to Joulou and her formally holding the title of La Comtesse DeClare, so any son she bore then would be presumed to be Joulu's and raised as a potential DeClare Heir and thus not have had the Lecoq name even if Lecoq was the real biological father, so Inspector Lecoq must have had a different mother, maybe a secret marriage Toulonnias had in his native Normandy.

But also, given how often there are Meta symbolic reasons for these Wold Newton style genealogical connections.  Why make Marguerite's boyfriend an heir of Milady De Winter rather then Marguerite herself?  

Usefulcharts did a series of videos on hidden European Matrilineal family trees starting with the House of Garsenda, in order to try breaking away from how patrilineal by default the study of genealogies has long been.  Well the writing of fictional genealogies has mirrored reality in this regard.  So I've been working on constructing a Matrilineal family tree of fictional French Femme Fatales with Marguerite Sadoulus being the focal point.  I shall post here what I have so far but it is subject to change.

Update; I'm already half regretting some aspects of that, but the gist of that is still my starting premise.

The Mysteries of Gotham

I obtained the other day a Hardcover copy I ordered of Denny O'Neil's novelization of Knightfall.  As I often do I skipped to read the afterward before the actual book, in this case it didn't spoil anything since I knew the story from the BBC Radio Drama, and got a glimpse of the actual Comics in Robin Flying Solo, from various reviews I've read these adaptations of the story are improvements, or at least more polished.

The afterward I'm assuming is also written by O'Neil since no one else is credited and it seems like what he'd say.  In it he suggests that the ability of a Bat like creature which used to be a symbol of evil to become a modern Hero perhaps has it's roots in how the way cities are viewed changed in the middle of the 19th Century.  Dickens is the literary reference he cited, but I feel that theory provides good context for my desire to talk about how the roots of Batman and the genres he traverses stem from Eugene Sue and his French peers.

It was in Les Mysteries de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris) that Eugene Sue pretty much invented the modern Urban Crime and Mystery genres.  But key pieces that came before were Balzac's Human Comedy, Vidocq's memoirs and Lamothe-Lagon's The Police Spy.

I'm hardly the first to compare the protagonist of Sue's novel to Bruce Wayne, an Aristocrat secretly fighting evil by night in the Streets.  Key factors of who Bruce Wayne is are missing of course, but still he could be described as the first Dark Knight.

One of the evidences of the Dick Tracey influence on the Golden Age Batman stories is the commonality of villains with hideous scared or deformed faces, often explained by an accident involving Acid or Chemicals, like The Joker and Two-Face.  Well that trope also begins in The Mysteries of Paris with le Maître d'École (The Schoolmaster) who intentionally scared his face with acid to conceal his identity.

That novel was a massive hit and thus naturally spawned a slew of imitators, the most obvious of which tended to be called "The Mysteries of _____".  Stephen Knight's book The Mysteries of The Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in The Nineteenth Century talks about many of them.  Not all will be specifically mentioned here.  And I will mention here some he didn't.

Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte-Cristo began from an editorial mandate to create another Mysteries of Paris.  But the final product is not really street level enough to make that connection clear.  I'd guess the most Suesque novel Dumas wrote was probably The Mohicans of Paris.

There were two novels called The Mysteries of London.  One by an actual Englishman, George Reynolds, which was vital to kicking off the Penny dreadful craze.  And there was Paul Feval's Les Mysteries de Londres which actually began serialization sooner.  It was also an overlooked influence on tCoMC, and it had an abridged English Translation in about 1847/8.  And later Feval made it part of a shared universe with many other Crime novels he wrote, chiefly John Devil and The Blackcoats series.

But we also can't overlook Sue's own next project, The Wandering Jew, which was about equally as big a hit, and carried on some similar themes.  And later in the last couple novels of Sue's Les Mysteries du People saga he made them part of the same universe.

In the 1850s, Ponson Du Terril sought to emulate The Mysteries of Paris with his Les Drames de Paris series, which inevitably morphed into the Rocambole saga.  Rocambole was so influential a French literary term was named after him, Rocambolesque.

In John Devil, the character of Gregory Temple very much anticipates Sherlock Holmes, but the influence seems to have been indirect.  The key middle man was Emile Gaboriou who started out working for Feval, but then wrote many detective novels of his own.  Chiefly the Monsieur Lecoq series, Lecoq is cited by name in the first Holmes novel.  Nick Carter who was created in America about the same time as Holmes also has about the same roots.

All of these French novels and writers were an influence on later writers like Gaston Leroux (Cheri-Bibi, Phantom of The Opera and Rouletible), Maurice Leblanc (Arsene Lupin) and Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre (Fantomas).  And in turn on early silent serials like the Fantomas adaptations, Les Vampires, Judex and Belphagor ect.

On the Penny Dreadful connection.  One character who's existence is probably just a coincidence but still worth noting is The Human Bat.

The known and confirmed immediate artistic influences on Batman were 1, Superman who DC wanted a repeat of, 2, Kane being visually inspired by Silent films like The Bat, and The Man Who Laughs which was in turn an adaptation of one of Victor Hugo's later novels (Brian Stableford suggests that novel owes a slight debt to Paul Feval).  3. Bill Finger who actually wrote the stories was mainly drawing on Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, Dick Tracey, The Shadow and similar pulp character like The Spider, and perhaps a bit from hard boiled Detective novels like those of Hammett and Chandler.

Zorro's name being a Spanish word for Fox is further evidence to me his roots go back to Paul Feval's Le Loup Blanc, and it's prequel La Louve.  The former had three English translations in the mid 1800s all called The White Wolf.  Other swashbucklers Feval wrote that are similar and had English translations were Le Bossu and The Three Red Knights: or, The Brothers' Vengeance.  As well as Bel Demonio which even had an English Language stage play adaptation performed in London.

I agree with Rick Lai that the immediate roots of The Shadow lie chiefly in The Phantom of The Opera, Arsene Lupin, and Judex.

Let's talk about Batman's villains a bit.  Professor Hugo Strange actually appeared first of the recurring villains.  In his very first appearance he wasn't mainly a Mad Scientist which modern depictions focus on, he was explicitly a Professor Moriarty figure.  And Moriarty was inspired by criminals Lecoq faced and in turn by Feval villains.

I actually did a post about The French History of The Femme Fatale, in which I mentioned French predecessors for both Catwoman and Poison Ivy, chiefly Irma Vep of Les Vampires for the former.  Thing is however, Catwoman didn't wear a costume at all in her first appearance, the original Catwoman has been described as being like a female Arsene Lupin.  The Lupin novels themselves arguably more then once toyed with the idea of a female Lupin, as I also hinted at in the Femme Fatale post.

The Penguin has also been compared to Dick Tracey villains like Broadway Bates.  But I feel a key predecessor of The Penguin was Gutman from The Maltese Falcone, who looks more like The Penguin in the 1931 film version then he does in the more well known 1941 film. 

Batman and Superman have both changed a lot from how they were in the earliest of their Golden Age stories.  I personally think that's for the best with Batman yet lament it with Superman.  I certainly love all the expansions of and additions to the Superman mythology to come from later writers, but I feel a core piece of the soul of Siegel and Shuster's character has been lost.  Which is why I still feel the best Live Action Superman is George Reeves and the best Animated are the Fleischer Shorts, but even there what I'm referring to is already fading, The Champion of The Oppressed.

I think my justification for that different perspective is partly because Batman was a more blatantly derivative character.  Siegel and Shuster had to fight for years to get a publisher to take a chance on Superman, while Batman was the product of an editorial mandate to recreate the success of Superman, just like so many works made in the wake of The Mysteries of Paris.

Not to say Superman wasn't also influenced by earlier fiction/mythology.  Comparisons to Pulp adventurers like Doc Savage and the one Cracked.com accused Superman of ripping off are common.  And Siegel and Shuster's goal was partly to create a modern Samson but with an origin that was a SciFi version of Moses.  The connection to Samson in turn causes comparisons to other mythical strongmen from Herakles/Hercules to Machiste.  And the origin story I feel happens to resemble Sargon and Perseus more then Moses.

But the point is Superman was from the start clearly distinct from his literary ancestors, while Batman's distinctive characterization had to be developed by later writers.  Writers like Frank Robbins, Denny O'Neil, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, Chuck Dickson, Jeph Leob, Greg Rouka and Gail Simone.  And while they're a mixed bag we can't overlook Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  And plenty of what's been done in other media was important too.

But of course it's not just the Golden Age writers who drew on earlier stories.  Later Batman writers first off drew on earlier Batman stories.  But also in the 70s there was a lot of James Bond influence, Ra's Al Ghl is a product of that.  And later Nolan cited James Bond influence for Batman Begins (which was also novelized by O'Neil), Heat and Clockwork Orange for The Dark Knight, and Joseph Campbell and Star Wars for TDKRises, and also A Tale of Two Cities, so Dickens was relevant after all.  But I feel the James Bond books themselves owe a debt to Batman, particularly the villain Goldfinger who has a very Penguin vibe to me, or at least based on the same earlier characters as The Penguin.

Jeph Leob's The Long Halloween was in Batman canon a simultaneous sequel to Miller's Year One and reworking of aspects of Eye of The Beholder.  But he was also drawing on The Godfather films, Raymond Chandler novels like The Long Goodbye which inspired the name, and Silence of The Lambs.  And Tim Burton shared Bob Kane's love of old German Expressionism Silent Films, thus we see plenty of Cabinet of Dr Caligari in Batman Returns.

And even those influences can still be traced back at least partly to these French Authors I'm seeking to draw more attention to.

I haven't read Gotham by Gaslight yet, but from the premise I'm already disappointed.  Things like using Jack The Ripper rather then normal Batman villains isn't what I want.  For starters I would like these 19th century literary roots of Batman to be looked at in how to adapt him for a period piece.  And then the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was once New York police Commissioner makes using him as inspiration for Gordon seem natural.

But also I saw Gangs of New York a few weeks ago, and it has some things in common with how I'd imagine a 19th Century Batman story.  Daniel Day Lewis character could make a good model for The Penguin, and Cameron Diaz for Catwoman, and Twede for Rupert Throne.

Years ago I saw a documentary on The History channel about Crime in Ancient Rome, the main host/narrator of the show seemed similar to me to Keith Scott from One Tree Hill, but I don't know if it was really the same actor.  That naturally got my mind spinning about how you could do Batman in Ancient Rome.  But now I'm well off the main subject of this post.

Prequels are a long established part of Genre Fiction

An ongoing thing that comes up in discussing the Star Wars Prequels are arguments against doing Prequels in general.  I already did a post on Why I Like Prequels.

What I want to talk about here is that they are not some inherently new gimmick devised by Hollywood executives who ran out of Sequel ideas.  They are just as much an established part of Literary tradition as Sequels are.

I could go on a long diversion about the ambiguities of applying modern terms like Sequel, Prequel and Reboot to ancient, medieval and renaissance literature, poetry and theater.  But I don't think that's necessary.

The Sequel in the sense of how we mean that in talking about modern Nerdy Genre Fiction was probably invented by Alexandre Dumas, as he and his French peers laid all the foundations of modern Popular Fiction.  He wrote sequels to many of his works but by no means all (he never did a follow up to The Count of Monte-Cristo).  But the ones that probably most mark the birth of the modern Popular Fiction Sequel would have to be his sequels to The Three Musketeers.  In fact you could even call the D'Artagnan Romances the first modern Trilogy.

The Three Musketeers novels are among other things literary ancestors of Star Wars.  The Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon style serials that inspired George Lucas, and the Pulp Fiction they were based on, were largely predicated on taking the tropes of the Swashbuckler genre codified by The Three Musketeers as well as Paul Feval and placing them IN SPACE.  Star Wars Rebels I feel was very much acknowledging this.

The Three Musketeers sequels are at least to the English speaking world not quite as popular and well known as the original.  But Dumas also wrote Prequels, and it was his Prequels that had a tendency to surpass their original.

Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge was the first written but chronologically last of what are called the Marie Antoinette Romances.  It was successful and influential enough on it's own to be a direct inspiration for The Scarlet Pimpernel.  But the chronological first two books, Joseph Balsamo aka Memoirs of a Physician and The Queen's Necklace were a far bigger deal, as relatively unknown in English as everything of Dumas but his big two, but in the French World they have come to define the legacy of Count Cagliostro.  And like the Star Wars Prequels they were the story of a Villain more so then of a Hero, they played a vital role in creating the modern Super Villain, and I see much of Joseph Balsamo in Darth Sidious, (an argument can be made that Althotas is the prototype of the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise).

Also The Whites and the Blacks is a prequel to The Companions of Jehu.

Next in line is Eugene Sue.  His Les Mysteries du People series was his intended magnum opus.  The volume set during the original French Revolution, The Sword of Honor, became also a prequel to both Les Mysteries de Paris and The Wandering Jew, setting up the hero of the former and villain of the latter.  Then the next and last book of the series set during the 1848 Revolution, became a sequel to both said novels, creating perhaps the first Shared Universe.  So his main Prequel came before his main Sequel.

Paul Feval's first significant success was Le Loup Blanc (The White Wolf), which is arguably the first masked vigilante.  Later Feval wrote a prequel to that called La Louve (The She-Wolf), which is pretty indisputably the first female masked vigilante.  So that is a pretty important literary innovation that was done in a prequel, he retroactively made his Heroine predate his first Hero.

Later Feval wrote Salem Street and The Invisible Weapon to be Prequels to the main narratives of the original three novels of The Blackcoats saga.  However the continuity divergences make them more like an alternate continuity, or a different timeline created when Superboy Prime punched a wall.  The Invisible Weapon is generally considered the best Blackcoats novel, by modern fans at least.

Emile Gaboriau created in his 1866 novel L’Affaire Lerouge the character of Monsieur Lecoq, in this first novel he was a supporting character but he became the lead in later stories, he was a French Master detective who predated Sherlock Holmes.  In 1869 he wrote a prequel novel titled Monsieur Lecoq about his first major case.  This prequel quickly became the most successful of his novels, so much so that many think the reference to Lecoq in A Study in Scarlet was based on that novel alone.

The Holmes stories were not written in chronological order ultimately.  So much so that all four full novels are set before The Final Problem even though half were written later.  None are a prequel in the traditional sense since none give Holmes an Origin Story or set up any story-lines we'd already seen the ending of.  Still Hound of the Baskerviles tends to be labeled the best Holmes story, yet the reader knew even when it first came out that Watson will live to witness The Final Problem, so he was never truly in danger, according to traditional anti-Prequel logic.

The son of Paul Feval wrote a series of interquels to the D'Artangan saga, set between the first two novels.  Known as the In Between Years series. 

However with Arsene Lupin we again have a prequel origin story novel, La Comtesse de Cagliostro, that becomes possibly the most popular of all his adventures, it's the main basis of the 2004 movie and a superficial influence on the Lupin III Anime film Castle of Cagliostro.  And fittingly this novel's lore is largely derived from Alexandre Dumas' most important Prequels.  I highly recommend the English translation done by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficer for Black Coat Press titled Arsene Lupin Vs Countess Cagliostro.

Other Lupin books written after WWI were also set before some of his earliest adventures, like The Damsel with the Green Eyes.  But in fact the first Lupin Prequel was The Crystal Stopper, written after 813 but set before his major Holmes crossovers.

Now applying the term to Tolkien's Legenderium can be controversial because the first age stories were what he began writing first just never published.   Regardless creating Numenor, then The Hobbit and then LOTR caused him to change things about the first age.  Sauron was really created for those later stories, in the oldest version of Beren and Luthien, the only First Age story Sauron is important to, his role was played by a sort of WereCat.

Regardless the basic argument against prequels still applies, when they were finally published the readers knew Morgoth would be defeated in the end and that Galadriel wouldn't die, and that Numenor would end up being Atlantis, and so on.  Because the LOTR books told us so.

All of these are parts of sagas and from writers that laid all the foundations of modern Popular Fiction, in more then one way I could argue we'd have no Indiana Jones without Arsene Lupin.  So Prequels were a part of the kind of fiction Lucas was making long before he made the decision to call his 1977 film Episode IV.

So let me clarify my premise.  Without certain Prequels that were popular and influential before George Lucas or his critics were even born, we would not have Star Wars or Indiana Jones at all.

Some sagas shouldn't have prequels because arguably doing a Prequel is a symbolic betrayal of what it's about, like Star Trek, I never supported Enterprise, or the 2009 film even before I heard it was an alternate timeline Reboot rather then a Prequel, nor the new series being set before TNG.  I want a 25th Century Enterprise with a Pansexual Korean Woman as the Captain.

But Star Trek and Star Wars are in many ways opposites (one is SciFi and the other is Fantasy) including on this very issue.

Star Trek begins with

"To boldly go where no Man has gone before".

Star Wars begins with

"Long Long Ago".

Star Wars is about the past, it always has been.  Therefore I never really cared what happens post ROTJ, hell I barely care about post ROTS.  The only spin-off idea thrown around I'm interested in is the Young Yoda film, because that can take us centuries into the past, to what was "Long Long Ago" to the people of Episode 1.  And Maz Kanata is older then Yoda so you can throw her in there to appeal to the New Trilogy fans.

Detective Wilden and Lecoq

I've talked about why my love of Paul Feval and Pretty Little Liars overlaps before.  Now I feel compelled to talk about the possible archetypal connection between the PLL character of Detective Darren Wilden,(and maybe also Holbrock who is possibly being turned into a copy of Wilden now, but I shall here focus on Wilden) and Feval's Lecoq aka Toulonnias L'Amitie.

The Lecoq of The Blackcoats is like a corrupt cop though it can be complicated to explain why, the development of French law enforcement over the course of post Revolutionary history is a long story.  Theoretically the organization Lecoq runs is like a Private Detective Agency, but so was the real Surette in it's origin.

Lecoq is among many characters of French literature partly inspired by Vidocq (or rather his embellished memoirs).  Vidocq inspired both heroes and villains. laying the foundations of modern Detective fiction in more ways then one.  Lecoq is the name of both a hero and a villain modeled after Vidocq.  In many circles Gaboriau's heroic Lecoq is more well known, so people might have assumed that's who I meant here.  Gaboriau's Lecoq is a prototype of Sherlock Homles so the PLL character I see as analogous to him would be Spencer Hastings.

Lecoq is also a creeper in a way that's arguably similar to Wilden.  Feval's narrative voice at one point calls Lecoq a "Cassanova" in a way I feel must be meant to be ironic.  From what we see women do not seem to enjoy his advances usually.  He and Marguerite were lovers but they were mutually and knowingly using each other for power like Caesar and Cleopatra.

In Parsian Jungle much of the story largely happens because of Lecoq's obsession with Julie, Andre's wife, but she was completely uninterested.  Fanchette also has a strong aversion to Lecoq, strictly speaking though there is nothing to indicate that ever came from him coming on to her.

As I look back on many Wilden scenes, I feel like I could definitely see Bryce Johnson playing Toulonnias.  Just as I can see Vanessa Ray as Marguerite, besides Marguerite not being Blond.

Once again I am published in Tales of The Shadowmen.

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/talesshadowmen11.htm

I'm still Alphabetically the last one too.  Long as no X, Y or Z join the Shadowmen Author Crew I'll always be the closer.

This Story is much shorter then my first Published story in Volume 10.  But I think Historically literate individuals will like it.

So, make sure you get TOTS 11 on December 1st.

The Scapular of Mercy, a revelation from The Blackcoats: The Invisible Weapon

In The Black Coats: The Invisible Weapon Chapter XIX, Lecoq claims to have once held the Scapular of Mercy and to have looked inside.

“It’s a word: a single word, repeated in a very large number of languages, the greater number of which are unknown to me.  When my eyes fell upon the Hebrew letters that began the series, I thought that they signified the name of God-but the Arabic letters that followed did not say Allah; I remember how the characters were disposed. The Latin, which I already understood, said nihil; then came the German nicht, the English nothing, the Italian niente, the Spanish nada and to spare you the other languages-the French rien.”     “And that’s the secret of theHabits Noirs!” cried Monsieur de Saint-Louis.     “Nothing is the antithesis of God,” murmured Samuel.

I immediately was interested in the fact that the Hebrew came first, perhaps Feval (or the founders of the Brothers of Mercy) agreed with my view that Hebrew was the original Pre-Babel language. Not an uncommon view in Judeo-Christian circles.

I was of course curious if this at first mistaken reading of Lecoq’s is believable in Hebrew etymology, (where indeed different words spelled the same or similarly are common due to it’s lack of vowels) or if Feval was making this up out of thin air.

Fortunately I have a Strongs Concordance so I checked, and ‘al (Strong #: 408) which means Nothing, shares the same spelling as ‘el (Noun Masculine, Strong #: 410) the basic Hebrew word for God, but is pronounced differently (For the former the Aleph is pronounced as our "a" while for the latter it’s pronounced as an "e"). To copy/paste my Strongs computer Program entry on the word.

'al (al);  , Strong #: 408


not, no, nor, neither, nothing (as wish or preference)
do not, let not (with a verb)
let there not be (with a verb understood)
not, no (with substantive)
nothing (as substantive)
KJV Word Usage and Count
never  2
nay  1
neither  1
no  1
none  1
nor  1
not  1
nothing  1
rather than  1
whither  1
nothing worth  1

It's not the only word for Nothing, nor the obvious standard one, and so was probably the favored one here by the creator of the Scapular because of the similarity to El.