French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Dandies of the Unpredictable

  Different types of pathology are everywhere attendant or consequent upon sexuality—and Freud’s formal pronouncement on the matter, that sexuality, from the polymorphous perversity of babies onwards, was fundamental to all areas of human experience, was only a step away. ‘There is nothing but syphilis’, is the jaded view of Des Esseintes. In the famous eighth chapter of A Rebours, the Duke introduces a selection of exotic plants, including the carnivorous varieties, into his house; this is followed by a dreadful nightmare, in which a woman is metamorphosed into a particularly savage form of the Venus Flytrap, and the final image of him being drawn towards a gaping ‘Nidularium’ at the centre of the flower, that bristles with blades, is unmistakably a version of that ancient terror, the vagina dentata. But sexuality can also provide, obviously, the extremes of pleasure, the ‘novel shudder’ of the Decadent quest. It takes other forms as well—this quest for the essence and the rarefied. In the vision of luxe, calme et volupté that exists in his country of Cocagne, heightened by the effects of opium or hachisch, in the prose version of ‘L’Invitation au voyage’, Baudelaire declares that he has found his ‘black tulip’ and his ‘blue dahlia’. Jean Lorrain, who was addicted to ether, liked to sport such flowers in his lapel, and his own dandified hero, Monsieur de Phocas of the eponymous novel (1901), travels the world in search of a particular shade of glassy-greenish transparency to be found in the ‘dead water’ of certain precious stones, or in the eyes of Astarte, or in those of young prostitutes. A sado-erotic streak—something Lorrain is brilliant at isolating—fuels an ancillary passion of Monsieur de Phocas: rigid with a ‘dreadful’ anticipation, he watches acrobats performing without a safety net.

  One could pass in review other quests for the nouveau frisson. In politics, at a time of ‘mediocre’ republican democracy, some passionately anti-establishment men, like Fénéon and Mirbeau, ardent supporters of Dreyfus, were attracted to the thrill and promise and sporadic violence of anarchism. There was the music, or rather the ‘total art form’, of Wagnerian opera (a deep and universal passion among this group of writers); recreational drugs for Lorrain; classical erudition and esoterica for men like Gourmont and Schwob; a brand of zealously reactionary Catholicism for Barbey and his protégé Léon Bloy. Many of them dabbled in spiritualism and table-turning, so prevalent at the time that it became little more than a parlour game. The new ‘sciences’ of mesmerism, magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, and the like fired the imagination of Villiers, and Maupassant explored ‘modern’ pathologies like hysteria, neurosis, and fetishism. Jean Richepin anatomizes this quest for originality at all costs in his little comic satire included here, ‘Deshoulières’. Whatever their chosen way, the Decadents were united in their hatred of the epoch, so favourable to the complacent, money-making bourgeois with his sideburns, his pot-belly, his vulgarity. Baudelaire recoiled from it, as intensely as any man, and his great cry, to be ‘Anywhere out of the world’, finds its echo in his followers.

  The Stories

  (In discussing the stories I have tried to avoid ‘spoilers’, but the reader may care to read the stories first, and then return to this section of the Introduction.)

  This selection of thirty-six tales by fourteen authors aims to show several facets of French fin-de-siècle writing, from the richly orchestrated addition to the literature of Don Juan by Barbey d’Aurevilly, through the more traditional ghost story by Villiers, and the inner psychic terrors described by Maupassant, to the savage anti-bourgeois satire of Bloy and Mirbeau. Aspects of the French Decadent movement described above infiltrate these stories to a greater or lesser degree; but any idea that decadence implies a lack of stylistic energy should be immediately expelled. They have been chosen not only for their sumptuous powers of description, but also for their verve and bite, and for their fearlessness: the common sobriquet contes cruels is, after all, an apt one. It is probably these aspects of the fin-de-siècle tale—its energy and, often, its violence that still has the capacity to shock—which strike the first-time reader.

  These writers were in fact a close-knit group, so mutual influence, admiration, affection—followed not infrequently by a cooling of affections, if not execration—was common. It was also an age in which writers used the dedication ubiquitously and pointedly. Villiers, Richepin, Schwob, and others dedicate every single story to a confrère. Many of them dedicate to Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, with whom this selection opens. Barbey was born in 1808, in the Premier Empire under Napoleon, so belonged to an earlier generation entirely than the décadents, and indeed he was of the same generation as Victor Hugo, the one preceding Baudelaire. Dubbed by his peers le Connétable des Lettres (the High Constable of Letters), Barbey was a great writer and a grand personnage, descended from the nobility, a monarchist and a staunch Catholic reactionary. It is his well-documented loathing of the growing mercantilism, democratization, and general secularization of the age that served to rally the Decadents around him. Above all, he loathed Zola (the feeling was mutual), and one of his final critical acts was to recognize the genius of A Rebours and hail Huysmans’s escape from the ‘sordid toils’ of Naturalism. The story selected here is taken from his most famous collection, Les Diaboliques, published when he was sixty-six, in 1874. Part of the print-run was seized by the public prosecutor, and Barbey only avoided a trial for assault on public morals by settling out of court, unlike Flaubert and Baudelaire before him. ‘Don Juan’s Crowning Love-Affair’ prolongs the august lineage of the Don, who takes, this time, the aristocratic form of the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès. In a sumptuous set-piece description, the Comte is invited by a group of female society hostesses to a very private dinner, in the peach boudoir of the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. Barbey relishes the kind of baroque description—of decor, costume, and of the sumptuous forms of mature women—in a vocabulary that becomes a stock feature of Decadent writing. There is in Barbey a genuine love of, and an almost chivalric respect for, women, even, or perhaps especially, when they are at their most perverse or capricious—a quality that fades out with the later writers. Barbey was one of the great French dandies: he sported ruffles on his shirts, and wore sleeves hemmed with lace. He wrote on Beau Brummel and Byron, and along with Baudelaire he attempted a theory of dandysim. The elegant, feline pasha of this story, Ravila, is one of its purest expressions. His charms may be ‘satanic’ and fatal to women, but it is worth noting the plangent, elegiac note that sounds through the story—Ravila is described as the Don Giovanni of the fifth act: he and his elegant listeners are a breed threatened with extinction, they are passing into history before our eyes.

  Although of a different generation, Barbey has much in common with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89). Villiers was also of noble extraction, from a Breton family that had fallen on hard times. Bad luck, inflexible patrician pride, and hopeless idealism in love ensured he would be lonely and penniless in an age whose scientific positivism he particularly abhorred. Neglected by the general public, he was, however, the centre of a very exclusive clique of distinguished writers, including Mallarmé, Bloy, and Gourmont, who treasured his eccentricities and between them helped to ensure his literary immortality. Villiers was cruelly rebuffed by an English heiress, whose beauty was only matched by her vulgarity. There is a legendary, tragi-comic adventure in which Villiers travels to London in astrakhan coat and new dentures—neither of which were paid for—to claim his new bride. The lady in question, perhaps understandably, took fright at the peculiar Frenchman, and fled. Coat and teeth then had to be returned. This episode probably explains the tinge of misogyny in the story ‘Sentimentalism’, which is in part a meditation on the ‘artistic sensibility’. It involves the dandified notion of strictly controlling emotion: such is the explanation of the young Count Maximilien de W***, when confronted about his lack of ‘reactivity’ and unbending elitism by his companion Lucienne Emery. This is one of Villiers’s most realistic and subtle stories, in its setting and psycholog
y, and it reads like a sincere attempt on the author’s part to ‘explain’ his own reactions and behaviour. As such, it is a valuable addition to our picture of the fin-de-siècle dandy. ‘The Presentiment’ is a more classical ghost story in the tradition of Poe, while ‘The Desire To Be a Man’, despite the dreadful, gratuitous crime it recounts, is more in the vein of Maupassant, dwelling on fears and insecurities that are bred in the mind, and feed off the mind.

  ‘What the Shadow Demands’ by Catulle Mendès (1841–1909) is a tour de force in the same vein, in which a terrible crime is committed not through any easily recognizable, externally driven motive like jealousy or greed, but through a type of obsession (we would probably call it a psychosis today) that comes to haunt the afflicted narrator, who in everything else is a respectable, orderly petty-bourgeois in the haberdashery business. Mendès, who resembled, in one account, ‘a debauched Christ’, was a prolific writer in every genre, and a prodigious ‘networker’, at the literary epicentre of our period. His star has mysteriously been eclipsed, partly through his own derivative and often torrid style, sometimes verging on the pornographic, and partly, one suspects, through the malign agency of others (like Maupassant and Bloy) who mistrusted him, and later on André Gide, who dismissed his work. In this story, however, which becomes apocalyptic in its monomania, Mendès manages an extended, finely modulated dramatic monologue in which comedy and terror are curiously blended.

  Comedy is also to be found in the astonishing Histoires désobligeantes by Léon Bloy (1846–1917), but it is of the blackest kind. Bloy is a fascinating figure, possibly the most difficult, touchy, reactive, and reactionary figure in the whole writhing snake-pit; a fundamentalist dogmatic Catholic, the protégé of Barbey, to whom he was attached with almost filial devotion. His hatred of ‘filthy lucre’ and his championing of the poor and downtrodden (he ‘saved’ and had a relationship with a young prostitute he picked up off the streets) remind one more of Dostoevsky than of any of the other writers represented here. Bloy’s faith was of the most intransigent kind: convinced of man’s fallen nature, and seeing evidence of this all around him, Bloy believed that only intense suffering could bring him to salvation (but he did believe in salvation, which was not an option for the ‘pessimists’ among the Decadents, steeped in Schopenhauer and Darwin). He described himself as the enragé volontaire (the willingly, or readily, enraged); certainly, there was nothing of the emotionally self-controlled dandy about him. If he belongs here, it is because of the venomous and hilarious treatment he metes out to his bourgeois victims, whom he admitted to treating pretty much as the fancy took him. In a preface he wrote to the stories he confesses: ‘I cannot remain calm. When I am not out to massacre, I have to be disobliging. It is my destiny. I am a fanatic of ingratitude.’17 Bloy was so inflammatory (he was a born pamphleteer) that he fell out not only with every editor but with all his friends as well. One of the glories of this writer, in the three nasty little tales of lust and cupidity included here, lies in his style, which has been much admired—a unique mixture of epigrammatic latinate concision and a blatant, almost bullying irony.

  No sooner are the palms awarded to Bloy than they have to be taken away again, possibly, and re-awarded to Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) for the sheer energy of his hatreds. Both writers came from backgrounds they grew to despise; and Mirbeau suffered from a brutal, even abusive, education at the hands of the Jesuits (if his novel Sébastien Roch is taken to be autobiographical). When they came to Paris from the provinces, both were obliged to take humiliating jobs—in Bloy’s case as an office clerk in the railways; Mirbeau spent years as secretary and general factotum to various conservative politicians, which did little to enamour him to the breed. When he later came out as a full-blown anarchist, defender of Fénéon and a supporter of Dreyfus, the Establishment as a whole became his target. Like so many others here, he also earned money as a prolific, and ferocious, journalist and critic. Mirbeau’s brand of anti-bourgeois satire, mixed with a sulphurous, entirely sadomasochistic vision of sexuality, in such novels as Le Calvaire, Sébastien Roch, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (later made into a film with Jeanne Moreau), and Le Jardin des Supplices, have ensured his literary survival. The stories here reflect different facets of this complex personality; ‘The Little Summer-House’ shows Mirbeau’s fascination with crime and its ‘metaphysical’ consequences, and sketches a memorable portrait of the ordinary-looking personage, Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin, whose eyes are quite dead. ‘The Bath’ is a little fable about a complacent fool, who opts for marriage as a quick means to ensure his own home comfort. ‘The First Emotion’ is of interest in that it belongs to a particular type of satire, more Naturalistic than Decadent, which is really an early treatment of what, in the succeeding century, would become a major theme in a writer like Kafka, urban angst and alienation. Monsieur Isidore Buche (like Maupassant’s Monsieur Leras in ‘A Walk’, also included here) is an office-worker who has become, through grinding routine, an automaton; but here these figures are the butt of satire. Roger Fresselou, the protagonist of the powerful little story ‘On a Cure’, is again a type of the melancholic, decadent young man, who withdraws, not this time to a familial chateau, but to a remote mountain village, a victim, literally, of pessimism when adopted as a philosophical position. The narrator recoils from this, reminding us that Mirbeau is too energetic, too politically engaged, and too angry to conform entirely to the Decadent aesthetic; indeed, in some of his work he parodies the type.

  Jean Richepin (1849–1926) is possibly less familiar than many here, though he deserves to be known better. Richepin is an incisive, epigrammatic, and at his best an extremely funny writer. He is, so to speak, the joker in the pack. His natural talent is for satire, and few have targeted the dandyish type, and the ‘quest to be unpredictable’, as brilliantly as he does in his story ‘Deshoulières’, the tale of an eccentric who pushes this quest to a murderous extreme. Richepin was an extravagantly bohemian, larger-than-life character himself, his wild hair topped by fantastical hats; his family hailed from deeply rural areas of France, Picardy and the Aisne. His first popular success was a poem, La Chanson des gueux (1876), which landed him in prison for a month. He pursued his career as a poet, but if he survives today it is thanks to his stories, which are sometimes horrible, and always piquant. Like an unexpected, and hilarious, twist in one of his own stories, in 1908 Richepin was elected to the Académie française. The eponymous anti-hero of ‘Constant Guignard’, on the other hand, suffers from his name—avoir la guigne means ‘to be dogged by bad luck’—and Richepin is ruthless in his pursuit of the theme. ‘Pft! Pft!’ is a clever little story, which reads as a parody of stock Decadent misogyny (and as such it comes as something of a relief); for here the target is less the woman—considered by the male so absolutely empty that her sole riposte to the reproaches of her lovers is a kind of charming sulky moue, a tut-tut, though the noise given here is pft! pft!—than the men who fall for her, including a self-styled and ‘dandified’ cynic who in the end falls harder than the rest of them, and damns himself eternally as a fool.

  To pass from Jean Richepin to Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) is to pass from something (relatively) light into something very much darker. Maupassant’s great tales of psychic terror, brought on by his own incipient syphilis and the drugs he used to control it, are masterpieces of the type of hallucinatory fantastique réel (as opposed to supernatural occurrence) that is self-induced by the disturbed mind. Stories like ‘Le Horla’ or ‘Lui?’ are barely fictionalized accounts of his own madness, a form of autoscopy, seeing himself as detached from himself—for instance, as a figure sitting in his chair, seen from the door of his own room (as in the story ‘Lui?’). Maupassant’s great subject in these stories is in fact not so much madness as the solitude that brings it on. Biographers ponder the consequences of the very strong, and lifelong attachment he had to his own morbidly imaginative mother. Compulsive womanizer though he was, Maupassant was a solitary, and love, in the sen
se of a lasting relationship of trust with one person, was always lacking. Intellectually, he was another ‘victim’ of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, though the little known tale ‘At the Death-Bed’, included here, which recounts a gruesomely hilarious anecdote relating to the death of the grim-visaged philosopher, would suggest he had put some distance between himself and the German Master. An ultimate solitude, leading to panic and terror, is described here in the famous story ‘Night’. Charcot has already been evoked in this Introduction, and Maupassant’s fascination with clinical pathologies. It was his interest in fetishism, and the displaced love-object, that led to his story ‘The Tresses’. (In another fetishist story, ‘A Case of Divorce’, the husband, horrified by the conjugal bed, displaces his libido on to exotic flowers.) The elderly office clerk Monsieur Leras, in ‘A Walk’, is also a lifelong solitary, who puts off marriage until it is too late, feeling he cannot afford to keep a wife; the unusually prolonged stroll he takes one balmy summer night, however, reveals to him, poignantly and terribly, the desert of his own life. Famous, prolific, successful, Flaubert’s prize ‘pupil’, Maupassant must nevertheless go down as one of the most tormented and darkest writers of this group. The syphilis he contracted early in his life, and which brought about his premature death, in the end unhinged his mind and darkened, almost unbearably, his view of the world. At the end of ‘The Tresses’, the doctor shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘The mind of man is capable of anything,’ and Maupassant’s stories here give us a fair sense of that.