French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (44 page)

Catoblepas
: ‘In ancient authors, some African animal, perhaps a species of buffalo, or the gnu, a species of antelope’ (
Oxford Latin Dictionary
). ‘Now made the name of a genus including the Gnu’ (
OED
).

Pyramus and Thisbe
: the Babylonian tale of star-crossed lovers, as told in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and retold in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

Spinoza
: Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, renowned for his concept of the indivisible substance of Being, known as pantheism, and frequently viewed as a type of atheism. He made his living as a lens-grinder.

The Truth About Everything
: the Monster’s philosophy lesson that Andromeda has absorbed like a kind of bedtime story is steeped in Schopenhauer and in the jargon of Edvard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose
Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869) was one of the first works to posit the existence of an impersonal, psychic unconscious that creates and drives the world.

Bellerophon … Chimaera
: ancient Homeric legend. Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, was set tasks intended to kill him, such as slaying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing monster, ‘lion in front, serpent behind, goat in the middle’.

Garden of the Hesperides
: the garden at the world’s end in the far west, which contained a tree of golden apples, guarded by the Hesperides, the ‘daughters of the evening’, with the help of a dragon.

Pillars of Hercules
: the two mountains on either side of the western entrance to the Mediterranean.

Cadmus
: in Greek mythology, the son of King Agenor, brother of Europa, and founder of Thebes.

Phrixus and his sister Helle
: children of Athamas, victims of their stepmother Ino’s jealousy. About to be sacrificed, they escaped on the back of a ram sent by Hermes or Zeus. Helle fell off into the sea, thereafter called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached Colchis on the Black Sea and sacrificed the ram to Zeus. Its fleece was later captured by Jason and the Argonauts.

Eteocles and Polynices, and pious Antigone
: warring Theban brothers, and Antigone, their sister, whose loyalty to family over
raison d’état
is the subject of the tragedy by Sophocles.

Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal
: the abrupt change of scene at the end of Laforgue’s retelling of the legend is enigmatic. The little dialogue between Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal (whose name Laforgue may have chosen as a kind of ironic conflation of the French Renaissance translator of Plutarch, Jacques Amyot, and the ‘Images d’Épinal’, or popular prints of religious and fairy-tale subjects) and the Princess of U… E… serves to heighten further the urbanity of tone used throughout the tale, and to foreground its existence as pastiche. Laforgue may have borrowed the setting from
Nuits espagnoles
(1854), a collection of stories by Méry (Eugène Didier), in which a group of socialites gather one night in a castle on the heights of Granada, tell stories, and apostrophize the constellations.

Lohengrin and Parsifal
: heroes of the Grail Quest in the Germanic tradition, and of Wagnerian opera.

‘The Brothel’ was collected in Marcel Schwob,
Oeuvres
, ed. Sylvain Goudemare (Paris: Phébus
libretto
, 2002). ‘The
Sans-Gueule
’ was collected in
Coeur double
(Paris: Ollendorff, 1891); ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ in
Le Roi au masque d’or
; ‘Lucretius, Poet’ and ‘Paolo Uccello, Painter’ in
Vies imaginaires
(Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1896).

‘May The Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’
: inscription seen on doors during times of the Black Death, along with the sign of the Cross.

Morgiana
…
brigand
: Schwob is alluding to an episode in
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
, collected in the
Thousand and One Nights
.

[title]: literally, ‘the faceless ones’. I have retained the French, partly because there is no English equivalent as piquant, and also because Schwob’s story so hauntingly prefigures the
gueules-cassées
—the name given to soldiers whose faces were horribly disfigured in the First World War. Schwob may be thinking of an episode from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Schwob’s account of the life of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus,
c
.99–55
BCE
) depends heavily on the very few sources available, which are in any case probably corrupt (notably the story, told by St Jerome, that the poet died after quaffing down a love potion). Certainly Lucretius addressed his great poem, the
De rerum natura
(
On the Nature of Things
), to his friend Gaius Memmius, ostensibly to assuage the latter’s fear of death by denying the afterlife, and belittling the role of the supernatural in human affairs. The poem is based on the beliefs of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270
BCE
), a materialist who considered the universe to be an infinite and eternal dance of atoms that cluster together and then break apart. There is no afterlife, and the aim of this life is to attain a state of
ataraxia
, or stress-free tranquillity.

Vasari
: Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), Tuscan painter and architect, whose celebrated biographies of the Renaissance artists,
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
(1550), supplies the inspiration and some of the incidental detail for Schwob’s account of Uccello (1397–1475). The painters, sculptors, and architects of the
quattrocento
that Schwob introduces into his text—Ghiberti, della Robbia, Brunelleschi, Donatello—were all contemporaries of Uccello’s, whose lives Vasari also describes in his book.

Giovanni Manetti
: presumably Schwob means Antonio Manetto (1423–97), a Florentine mathematician who, according to Vasari, taught Uccello geometry and the principles of perspective. He also wrote a biography of Brunelleschi.

Selvaggia
: Vasari notes merely that Uccello had a wife, who commented on her husband’s obsession with perspective. He would spend all night trying to find the vanishing-point, and when his wife called him to come to bed he would reply that perspective was a lovely thing. He also left a daughter, Antonia, who had some knowledge of drawing, and became a Carmelite nun. The details concerning Selvaggia therefore seem to be Schwob’s invention.

Collected in
Archipel
(Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1906).

Gazette des tribunaux
…
Dalloz
: French legal publications.
La Gazette des tribunaux
was founded in 1777, and taken over by
La Gazette du palais
in 1935. Dalloz, a legal publishing firm, founded by Désiré Dalloz in 1845, exists to this day.

Argus’s hundred eyes
: in classical mythology, Argus is the Latinized form of the Greek Argos ‘Panoptes’, the all-seeing. He was a giant, and guardian of the heifer-nymph Io.

Janus
: the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions; he looks two ways, into the past and the future.

Cerberus
: the three-headed dog of classical mythology, that guards the entrance to the underworld.

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