French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (42 page)

‘After man, comes the worm; after the worm, horror and putrefaction. In such wise man changes into what is not man.

‘Why do you adorn yourself, why do you fatten your flesh, when, in a few days, the worm will try your sepulchre? Why not adorn your soul, which must come before God and the Angels in heaven?’

From the
Meditations
of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), founder of the Cistercian Order.

Autumn solstice
: there is no such thing, of course.

Avicenna’s cassia brew
: Avicenna (980–1037), the great Arab doctor and philosopher.

Robert d’Arbrissel
: (
c
.1045–1116), an itinerant preacher who founded the Abbey of Fontevrault. He was famous for the extreme severity of his ascetic practices.

at the very instant
: the first use of phrases in italics, that recur and carry a mysterious charge in the story.

Joseph de Maistre
: (comte), 1753–1821, politician, philosopher, and writer, opposed to the French Revolution (he fled to Lausanne in 1793). De Maistre reiterated his monarchist and papist beliefs in
Considérations sur la France
(1796).

death-watch beetle
: in French,
horloge-de-mort
(‘clock of death’); the name is clearly freighted with meaning here.

Rabelais’s “good companion”
: in
Gargantua et Pantagruel
by François Rabelais (1494–1553) ‘le bon compagnon’ is an epithet used at one point of the libertine, cunning knave, and coward Panurge.

This story is a reflection on the actor and his shifting roles, and on personal identity, born of Villiers’s close knowledge of the Parisian theatre, and his abiding ambition to write successfully for the stage.

Bourse
: the Paris stock-exchange, situated in the second
arrondissement
.

the curfew
: Villiers sets this story very precisely in the days following the Commune (1871), when the curfew was still in force.

the Caudine Forks
: the mountain pass in southern Italy in which the Samnites trapped the Roman army in the Second Samnite War (326–304
BCE
). The Samnites then humiliated the Romans by forcing them to pass, man by man, under the yoke—this time made of Roman spears, since the greatest humiliation for a Roman soldier was to lose his spear. Villiers uses the expression in its familiar sense, meaning anything that someone is forced to do unwillingly.

Boulevard du Crime
: now the Boulevard du Temple. At the time, the centre of Paris theatreland; it was in theatres along this street that cloak-and-dagger melodrama was performed, hence the list of Renaissance Italian clans that follows.

Esprit Chaudval, born Lepeinteur, known as Monanteuil
: the elaborate triptych of names serves to underline the old actor’s essential lack of any stable identity.

Frédérick Lemaître
: birth-name Antoine Louis Prosper Lemaître (1800–76), French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the Boulevard du Crime.

Thalia
…
Melpomene
: the classical Muses of Comedy and Tragedy.

Ellevious and the Laruettes
…
Dugazons
: characters from the Opéra-Comique of the period.

Erostratus
: an Ephesian who, with the purpose of winning for himself immortal fame, set fire to the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus in 356
BCE
.

my crime will be disinterested
: Chaudval’s ‘disinterested’ but murderous intention here resembles the crime of Deshoulières in Jean Richepin’s eponymous story (see below); Chaudval, like Deshoulières, would be a ‘dandy of the unpredictable’.

Corneille
: Pierre Corneille (1606–84), the great French playwright, slightly senior to Racine. Corneille’s greatest play was the tragedy
Le Cid
(1636).

Rostopschin
: Count Feodor Rostopschin (1760–1826) was appointed Governor of Moscow under Tsar Alexander I, during the Napoleonic Wars. He was credited (by the French) with the burning of Moscow in 1812.

the Stylite
: St Simeon Stylites (390–459), Christian ascetic from near Aleppo in Syria, who lived unprotected from the elements on top of a tall column. His name is now synonymous with extreme ascetic practice.

Orestes
: in Greek mythology, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. He murdered his mother to avenge the death of his father. He appears in several plays, and Euripides named one of his tragedies after him.

[title]: ‘The sentimental habit of mind; the disposition to attribute undue importance to sentimental considerations, or to be governed by sentiment in opposition to reason; the tendency to excessive, indulgence in or insincere display of sentiment’ (
OED
). The French title is ‘Sentimentalisme’, a word that does not exist as such in the relevant edition of the
Littré
dictionary (1878). I follow Pierre Reboul in considering that Villiers uses the word—in the light of what follows, referring to those people who gush about their feelings—pejoratively. See Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,
Contes Cruels
, ed. Pierre Reboul (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1983), 395.

of being insensitive
: Maximilien here aspires to the condition of Baudelaire’s ideal dandy: ‘But a dandy can never be someone vulgar’, and ‘The beauty of the dandy’s character consists in the coldness of his demeanour, and his unshakable resolution, not to give way to emotion…’ (see Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le Dandy’, in
Oeuvres complètes
, vol. 2 ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2011), 709–12).

This story was collected in the volume
Rue des Filles-Dieu, 5
ou
L’Héautonpératéromène
(Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1895).

the prison of La Roquette
: La Grande Roquette, opened in 1851, was the central prison in Paris at the time, at the entrance to which, in the street and in view of the public, a special base was constructed for the guillotine.

wiping it off the map
: Mendès must be referring to the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, in the vicinity of Java and other islands, that caused tsunamis with innumerable casualties in their wake. News of this catastrophe caused a stir in Europe and North America.

the universal law would no longer be transgressed
: it is here that the story shows most clearly its appurtenance to the genre of
littérature fantastique
, defined as an occurrence that cannot be explained rationally erupting within a framework obedient to the laws of nature.

These three stories were collected in
Histoires désobligeantes
(Paris: Dentu, 1894).

an uncanny resemblance to the man Gerbillon had murdered
: the idea that a child might bear a resemblance not to the biological father but to the object of the mother’s obsessions is to be found in Goethe’s
Elective Affinities
, and also in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s
Ce qui ne meurt pas
: ‘Allan’s mother, who was English, had apparently spent the full nine months of her pregnancy staring at a portrait of Lord Byron… and it was his countenance… that she had given to her son.’

Charles V
: the Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Spain Charles V (1500–58), who voluntarily abdicated in 1556, living in monastic seclusion until his death.

the divine Bourget
: Paul Bourget (1852–1935), the most fashionable novelist of the period. Catholic, traditionalist, and didactic in tendency. Opposed to Naturalism, he set out to write the ‘moral anatomy’ of his age. But he came to be seen by his peers as the portraitist, and the flatterer, of the rich—hence Bloy’s mockery.

invention of the Crematorium
: Bloy visited the crematorium at Père Lachaise cemetery, and he wrote about the experience in his Journal on 3 April 1893: ‘One day I shall undoubtedly write about this infamy, which calls down upon itself all the furies of God.’

Benjamin Franklin’s expression
: i.e. ‘Time is money.’ The saying was first promulgated by Franklin (1706–90), one of the founding fathers of America, in his
Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One
(1748).

the ‘Columbarium’
: a place where cinerary urns are kept and commemorated, usually by small inscribed plaques. The Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris has a fine example.

Bloy draws on folk-tale tradition for the horrible dénouement of this story, whose sources are legion. One notorious example, drawn from classical sources, is Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
.

half-remembered melodrama
: Bloy may be remembering the famous ‘mourning dinner’ held by Des Esseintes in Paris, in the first chapter of
A Rebours
, in which the entire decor was done out in black.

‘On a Cure’, ‘The Bath’, and ‘The Little Summer House’ formed part of the volume
Les Vingt et Un Jours d’un neurasthénique
(Paris: Fasquelle, 1901); ‘The First Emotion’ was collected in
La Pipe de cidre
(Paris: Flammarion, 1919).

Ariège
: one of the southernmost
départements
of France, bordering the Pyrenees.

78
The future!… Progress!…
: the narrator tells us that early on, as a young man, Fresselou had ‘tasted the poison of metaphysics’. His
contemptus mundi
here bears the imprint of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, but seemingly without the philosopher’s belief in the consolatory powers of art.

Woman is a marvellous animal
: a commonplace of the time. In his essay on ‘La Femme’ included in
Le Peintre de la vie moderne
, Baudelaire quotes approvingly Joseph de Maistre’s view of woman as
un bel animal
(see Baudelaire,
Oeuvres complètes
, vol. 2, 713).

sphingids
: the family of lepidoptera known as the hawk moths or sphinx moths, after the shape of their caterpillars.

at the Ministry of Education
: Mirbeau himself, like Huysmans and Bloy, had first-hand experience of the humiliation and boredom experienced by the
petit employé
, or office clerk.

Petit Journal
: a hugely popular daily newspaper which ran from 1863 to 1944. At its height, in the 1890s, the paper had a circulation of 1 million.

the Eiffel Tower
: Gustave Eiffel’s famous iron structure was erected between 1887 and 1889, in time for the
Exposition universelle
of the same year.

Panama Syndicates
: in 1892 close to a billion francs were lost in the scandal surrounding the bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company, the stricken speculative enterprise founded by Ferdinand de Lesseps. Members of the government took bribes to keep quiet about the situation, which led to the greatest financial scandal of the Third Republic.

some Reinach to hand, or some Yves Guyot
: Joseph Reinach (1856–1921) was a French politician implicated in the Panama scandal; later he became the fiercest champion of Alfred Dreyfus. Yves Guyot (1843–1928) was a politician and economist, and a defender of free trade. Presumably Mirbeau’s allusions to these men is ironical, given the fate of the Panama Canal Company.

Orléanist Monarchy
: the period of constitutional monarchy that began with the July Revolution of 1830, and enthroned Louis-Philippe, of the Orléans branch of the House of Bourbon, as king. He was known as the ‘Bourgeois King’.

Fragonard
: Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), French painter of the rococo style, famous for his elegant genre scenes portraying a hedonistic society; his subjects are often erotically charged, as in the famous painting
The Swing
.

on all of this!
: the frenetic rehearsal of the narrator’s fears in the preceding section recalls some of Poe’s similarly distraught narrators.

‘Constant Guignard’ and ‘Deshoulières’ were collected in
Les Morts bizarres
(Paris: Decaux, 1876), ‘Pft! Pft!’ in
Cauchemars
(Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1892).

[title]: the name in French contains word-play.
La guigne
means to be dogged by bad luck. Add to this his first name, and it is clear the protagonist’s endless misfortune seems to be predestined.

Cayenne
: the notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana, otherwise known as Devil’s Island. It was in operation from 1859 until it was finally closed in 1953.

the military substitute
: in the days of obligatory military service, a man’s turn to serve was sometimes decided by a lottery system. He could, though, pay for a substitute to take his place.

Papavoine
: Louis-Auguste Papavoine (1783–1825) was executed for stabbing to death two children in the Bois de Vincennes, without apparent motive.

the asylum at Charenton
: the celebrated lunatic asylum near Paris, that once housed the Marquis de Sade, was founded by the Frères de la Charité in 1645, and was noted for its humane treatment of inmates.

Place de la Roquette
: located in Paris, where public executions by guillotine were carried out (see note to p. 52).

a veritable Proteus
: Richepin pushes to the point of absurdity Baudelaire’s insistence that the dandy should discipline his life as if it were lived continuously in front of a mirror. Proteus, a sea-god in Greek mythology, was famous for changing his form.