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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  French Decadent Tales

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  STEPHEN ROMER

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  FRENCH DECADENT TALES

  French Decadent Tales contains thirty-six stories from fourteen authors, spanning the period from the mid-1870s to the beginning of the twentieth-century. While ‘Decadence’ was a European-wide movement, its epicentre was Paris, the cultural capital of the fin de siècle, glittering and fascinating, sordid and corrupt. The vast majority of the stories here take place in this modern laboratory of the human spirit, their heroes or anti-heroes caught in a time of bewildering transition. Richly varied though they are, these writers are united in their hatred of an age of rampant commercialism and vulgarity. Self-styled ‘aristocrats of the spirit’, influenced by the dandyism of Charles Baudelaire, they sought to escape from an optimism they deemed ungrounded and philistine. In their writings they explored extreme sensation and moral trangression; drugs, spiritualism and the occult, and every variety of erotic experience. Another efficient remedy was the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer: men such as Guy de Maupassant, Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Laforgue were steeped in his thought. The writings of Freud, on hysteria and fetishism, are also prefigured in some of the stories here. In an age when the spread of mass newspapers and journals created a voracious appetite for ‘copy’, the fin de siècle seethed with literary experiment. Describing Remy de Gourmont’s stories as ‘little tops’ revolving violently and erratically before returning to inertia, Marcel Schwob speaks for the art of the short story in general, which reaches a type of perfection in this period: brief, incisive, trenchantly ironic, and often cruel.

  STEPHEN ROMER is a specialist of French and British modernism. He lives in the Loire Valley, where he is Maître de Conférences at Tours University. He has translated widely from the French and has edited, amongst others, 20th Century French Poems (Faber, 2002). He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Yellow Studio (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2008), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Selection

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology of Major Events and Literary Publications of the French fin de siècle

  FRENCH DECADENT TALES

  JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY (1808–1889)

  Don Juan’s Crowning Love-Affair

  VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM (1838–1889)

  The Presentiment

  The Desire To Be a Man

  Sentimentalism

  CATULLE MENDÈS (1841–1909)

  What the Shadow Demands

  LÉON BLOY (1846–1917)

  A Dentist Terribly Punished

  The Last Bake

  The Lucky Sixpence

  OCTAVE MIRBEAU (1848–1927)

  On a Cure

  The Bath

  The First Emotion

  The Little Summer-House

  JEAN RICHEPIN (1849–1926)

  Constant Guignard

  Deshoulières

  Pft! Pft!

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893)

  At the Death-Bed

  A Walk

  The Tresses

  Night

  GUSTAVE GEFFROY (1855–1926)

  The Statue

  JEAN LORRAIN (1855–1906)

  An Unsolved Crime

  The Student’s Tale

  The Man with the Bracelet

  The Man Who Loved Consumptives

  GEORGES RODENBACH (1855–1898)

  The Time

  REMY DE GOURMONT (1858–1915)

  Danaette

  The Faun

  Don Juan’s Secret

  On the Threshold

  JULES LAFORGUE (1860–1887)

  Perseus and Andromeda

  MARCEL SCHWOB (1867–1905)

  The Brothel

  The Sans-Gueule

  52 and 53 Orfila

  Lucretius, Poet

  Paolo Uccello, Painter

  PIERRE LOUŸS (1870–1925)

  A Case Without Precedent

  Explanatory Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for electing me into a Visiting Fellowship for the Trinity Term 2010, which enabled me to get this anthology underway. I should like to extend special thanks to Micky Sheringham, and to Ian Maclean for the translation tourney. My thanks go also to my colleagues in the English Department at the University of Tours, for their goodwill in granting me this period of leave. For help and encouragement of various kinds, I should like to thank Pierre-Alban Breton, Harry Eyres, Lara Feigel, Nick Goulder, Antoine Jaccottet, Patrick McGuinness, Gilles Ortlieb, Karin Romer, Sébastien Salbayre, Michael Schmidt, Will Stone, and Bridget Strevens-Marzo. Judith Luna, my editor at OUP, welcomed this project with enthusiasm, and has followed its progress with steady encouragement and much patience, for which I am most grateful. My immediate family has been, as ever, hugely supportive. My fond thanks, finally, to Eleonora Barletta, who read through hundreds of pages of Decadent material, and helped me towards finalizing the selection.

&
nbsp; INTRODUCTION

  THIS volume is called French Decadent Tales, in that it assembles a group of writers associated in varying degrees with the so-called Decadent school that flourished in fin-de-siècle Paris. The first story here, by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, was published in 1874, and the last, by Pierre Louÿs, in the first years of the twentieth century. The term décadence, applied to a literary phenomenon which spread across the Channel, to include, most famously, Oscar Wilde, but also Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, appears to have had its most direct origin in the short-lived literary journal Le Décadent artistique et littéraire, founded by Anatole Baju in 1886. As is frequently the case (one thinks in art of ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Cubism’), the term was originally used as an insult by a journalist, but adopted with delight and defiance by the writers thus insulted. Verlaine had already, in the 1880s, danced an arabesque around the term:

  I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. And I refuse, obviously, any damaging connotations it may have, or any suggestion of degeneracy. On the contrary, the word suggests the most refined thoughts a civilization can produce, a profound literary culture, a soul capable of the most intense enjoyments. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is a mixture of the voluptuous mind and the wearied flesh, and of all the violent splendours of the late Empire; it is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.1

  Verlaine captures here the trappings and ornamentation of a certain Decadence, both in style and content, but the tales collected here cover a wider range, and have more satiric bite and acrid energy than the term denotes. Also, by far the majority of them are tales of ‘Modern Life’ in the Baudelairean sense, where however disturbing or horrible the events, they take place in a recognizable, urban setting, of boulevards and gaslight, hansom cabs and frock-coats. Some of the stories belong to the genre defined in French as le fantastique, constituted by ‘the abrupt intrusion of the mysterious within the framework of real life’, and by ‘the hesitation of a being who recognizes only the laws of nature, confronted with an apparently supernatural event’.2 Hence, in one tale, the dreadful pall of apparently interminable darkness that falls upon Paris, when the protagonist is out enjoying an evening stroll. Frequently, a predisposition to nervous excitement, exacerbated by stress, breeds its own psychological terrors.

  ‘La Décadence’

  Verlaine is right in his graphic, late-imperial imaginings, for the Decadent style modelled itself (or so it was given out) on the late Latin literature which the classical scholar from the Sorbonne, Désiré Nisard, in his voluminous study Études de mœurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (1834) had brought to light. It was Nisard, in fact, who put the term décadence into circulation; but he meant it pejoratively, as pertaining to works in which mere description, from being an ornament, becomes an end in itself. He notes also that decadent art is extremely erudite, even recondite; it is a literature of exhaustion, weighed down by the weight of past masterpieces, and it therefore has to seek ‘extreme’ effects in the quest for originality. As we shall see, this is highly relevant to this period, the tail-end of the nineteenth century. It is an elaborate, descriptive, recherché author like Petronius that holds the most appeal: his Satyricon, gleaming in its rich, gold-tooled leather binding, has its place on the shelves of the blue-and-orange cabinet de lecture lovingly decorated by the Duc Jean de Floressas des Esseintes, the seminal creation, or rather confection, of Joris-Karl Huysmans in his celebrated novel A Rebours (1884). We shall have occasion to return to this book, the ‘Bible of Decadence’, which provided, among other things, the model for Dorian Gray. In the long disquisition on the Latin authors, Des Esseintes professes an allergy to the poets of the Augustan Age—Virgil, ‘one of the most sinister bores the ancient world ever produced’—and Horace, with his ‘elephantine grace’ and (hardly a quality for our writers) his good sense. The richness of the style—inlaid with precious and false stones, with silvery flights and terse barbarisms—that could carve out a vivid slice of Roman life and present it whole, without moralizing or satiric intent, was what appealed to the dandy, and through him to Huysmans and to other major writers of the school, like Barbey d’Aurevilly or Remy de Gourmont, who translated from the poets of the Latin Decadence. It would be an error, however, to look too closely to Lucan or Tertullian, Ausonius, Rutilius or Claudian, St Ambrose or Prudentius for genuine analogies with our period. Remy de Gourmont, who emerges as the most perspicacious critical intellect of the time, hints that the whole of chapter 3 of A Rebours was an elaborate hoax on the part of Huysmans, to send the critics baffled by his style scuttling off to Latin poets they had never read.3

  One definition of Decadence (the painter Braque puts it finely, when criticizing the academic work of the pompiers, painters like Bouguereau or Cabanel) is a complete facility of technique, that sets no limits to its material, and imposes upon itself no constraints. Huysmans’s fertile neologisms and preposterously recherché descriptions actually earned praise from the Surrealists. A sentence like ‘Shrunken by the shadow that had fallen from the hills, the plain appeared, at its middle, to be powdered with starch and glazed with the white of cold cream’ (… poudrée de farine d’amidon et enduite de blanc cold-cream)4 is a prize example of this Decadent straining for effect. The implacable Byzantine despots of Gustave Moreau, or Petronius Arbiter organizing, with dandified elegance, to tickle the taste of Nero, carnal and gustatory orgies, fuelled the imagination of Des Esseintes more than any genuine engagement with the literature of the Latin Decadence.

  Symptomatology and the Dissociation of Ideas

  If there is one quality that these Decadent Tales share on every level, it is that of self-consciousness. A Rebours, with its vertiginous intertextuality, is a case in point. But it is a self-consciousness so developed that it comes to resemble a set of symptoms. The nature of the illness is unclear, the prognosis uncertain, and there seems little hope of a cure. Is the consciousness itself diseased? Or is it infected by something rotten outside of it? What is the nature of the mysterious mal du siècle, whose genealogy really begins with Chateaubriand’s pale young aristocrat René, and descends through Byron’s Manfred and Childe Harold, through the ascetic, hysteric dandyism of Baudelaire, down to the authors of the Decadent fin de siècle? Remy de Gourmont, whose stories were described by Marcel Schwob as small spinning-tops reaching their final, convulsive circuits, also wrote Sixtine (1890), with its subtitle, ‘novel of the cerebral life’. The hero of this novel, Hubert d’Entragues, is the type of many of the protagonists gathered here, an intelligent, vaguely aristocratic young man, paralysed by inaction, fascinated by his own incapacity to function, and yet who experiences sufficient vestigial ‘drives’ to woo a woman, Sixtine, who is as much an extension of his own idealization as she is a being of flesh and blood. He loses her, of course, to a passionate, hot-blooded, and practical-minded Russian, who sweeps her off, leaving d’Entragues to his sepulchral solitude, where he ‘resurrects’ her in literature. One useful definition of the term Decadence may be drawn from this, and it is contained in the word ‘effete’, which means, literally, exhaustion from childbearing. These melancholy individuals are the fruit of exhausted loins, they are sapped of vital energies. They are also, like d’Entragues, or Huysmans’s hero Des Esseintes, sated by cerebral and sensual experience. They are effete, and they are sated. Above all, they are the victims of an inexplicable boredom or, to use the august French word, ennui, and its Baudelairean variant, spleen.

  Writing of Des Esseintes and his kind, Marc Fumaroli has described the fin-de-siècle hero as being ‘afflicted by a schizophrenia which spares nothing and which dissociates everything: his soul, his sexuality
, but also his bodily health. He feels death corroding and working away at his mortal tatters.’5 Fumaroli risks the clinical term schizophrenia (itself notoriously slippery and open to diagnostic error), but it did not exist in the vocabulary of the time. Instead we find terminology like hysteria, neurosis, neurasthenia, and madness, which may be generally subsumed today under the rubrics depression and psychosis. One shorthand way of delimiting our complex period is to say that it succeeds Baudelaire who, with his usual pitiless insight, describes his own moral state on a particular day, thus: ‘I have cultivated my hysteria with voluptuousness and terror. Now I feel perpetually dizzy, and on the brink, and today, 23 January 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt upon me a breath from the wing of imbecility.’6 As we shall see, in Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire was the first modern poet deliberately to dissociate ideas, that is, he broke apart their perennial pairings: virtue–reward, vice–punishment, God–goodness, crime–remorse, effort–reward, future–progress, artifice–ugliness, nature–beauty; and it was the new configurations he found for them that made him (and makes him still) such a scandal. The ‘schizophrenia’ of the Decadent protagonist is in fact related to dissociation of this kind—a condition T. S. Eliot came to call, in a famous phrase, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’.7

  The period is also contemporaneous with Charcot’s studies of neurotics and the symptomatology of hysteria at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where in 1895 he was assisted by one Sigmund Freud, who published (with Breuer) his Studies in Hysteria in the same year. Given Freud’s eminence, and his incalculable contribution to our notion of modernity, it is tempting, if too reductive, to describe the literature of the fin de siècle as a kind of raw material awaiting analysis and the talking cure. Adam Phillips has remarked, in the context of Freud’s work, how ‘a more-or-less secular capitalism produces its own counter-culture of symptoms’,8 and it was as true of the mid-to-late nineteenth century as it is now. Several of the stories here describe symptoms that might have come from the clinical casebook of the Salpêtrière, and indeed Maupassant, great psychologist that he was, followed the work of Charcot and carried out his own investigations (see in this collection his story ‘Night’ and, in particular, the fetishistic case study ‘The Tresses’). Maupassant’s curiosity, and his compassion (which reminds one of Freud’s urge to explore motive, and to listen to the sufferer rather than dismiss him or her as ‘mad’ or ‘degenerate’) led him to explore what ‘fetishism’ might be, even before the term had been invented.9