French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (5 page)

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 life-long attachment he had to his own morbidly imaginative mother. Compulsive womanizer though he was, Maupassant was a solitary, and love, in the sense 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.

One of the less well-known writers of the period is Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926). A prolific short-story writer, Geffroy made his name as a brilliant and progressive art critic, a friend of Claude Monet and supporter of the Impressionists generally. He was actually an admirer of Zola, and the story here, ‘The Statue’, is a nicely turned fable about Idealism and Naturalism, transferred to the realm of sculpture. The story draws in part on the Pygmalion myth, though in reverse; here, the beautiful, well-bred heroine, wife to a fashionable but conventional Salon sculptor, poses for her husband (indeed, she bans from his studio any other female model), and her vanity is flattered when she finds her likeness in the naiad in the fountain or the marble nymph in the park. But then her husband, suffering a severe period of self-doubt, retires from the fashionable art world and devotes himself to becoming a ‘realist’ with a vengeance—a kind of Courbet of sculpture—insisting that his wife continue as his sole model … with complicated results.

Jean Lorrain (1855–1906), who has been evoked already, is probably the most ostentatiously Decadent figure of the whole group—indeed, he did much to incarnate the type, cramming his figure into wasp-waisted evening-wear. He could appear as something like a dreadful caricature of Wilde (whom he met), with his eternal carnation in buttonhole, heavily made-up eyes and sensuous mouth set in a bulging head, and with a face resembling that of a ‘vicious hairdresser’, in Léon Daudet’s phrase, ‘his parting touched with patchouli and those globular, astonished and avid eyes’. With his ostentatious homosexuality, and his
penchant
for the low-life of the city, to which he introduced his friend Huysmans, he managed to transform all this experience into some of the most memorable and disturbing tales of the age. Lorrain was also a serious ether-addict (some elegant Parisian hostesses were rumoured to serve strawberry fruit salad soaked in the substance); the nightmare horrors and psychic disturbances caused by the drug recur in his work. He was fascinated by masks, and the freedom disguise allows; the mask permits the other side of the personality to emerge, with the risk that the mask will stick or—horribly, as in one of his stories—there is no face beneath the mask at all, just a gaping black hole. His controversial personality (he provoked several duels) and his rackety lifestyle in
fact repelled the other, more exquisite candidate for the perfect Decadent—the celebrated Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who was the model behind both Huysmans’s des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Lorrain is a fluent, accomplished stylist, and in the stories here—as in his important novel,
Monsieur de Phocas
(1901)—he reveals his mastery at grasping the ambivalent and the equivocal in human nature, in particular its attraction to cruelty and sadism, frequently attributes of the criminal mind.

If ever there were an example of the ‘cerebral voluptuary’ it must be Remy de Gourmont (1855–1915). Gourmont was primarily an intellectual and (like Marcel Schwob) a man of enormous culture and ‘curious learning’. Indeed, a legend (perhaps too good to be true) has it that when he was cataloguing the section of the Bibliothèque Nationale known as ‘L’Enfer’ (‘The Hell’), which contained books placed on the index, often pornographic in nature, he contracted a kind of lupus that left him disfigured, and painfully self-conscious about his appearance and his attractiveness to women. His lifelong muse was the fiery and tyrannical Berthe de Courrière, though due to his disfigurement he spent much of his life cloistered in his study in the rue des Saint Pères. He was a distinguished critic—his notions concerning the dissociation of ideas and of impersonality in the artist were to influence Pound and Eliot. Pound even translated Gourmont’s curious treatise
The Physiology of Love
, a study of the sexual mores of animals and insects. He brought this analysis to bear in his stories, which are often erotically charged and play once again on the ambivalence of sexual desire—deploying a knowing, unillusioned attitude common, as we have seen, among the Decadent writers. His fables included here, taken from
Histoires magiques
(1894)—‘The Faun’, ‘Don Juan’s Secret’, and ‘Danaette’—retell myths and legends, and are injected with a dose of his own fairly sulphurous fantasy. From
Sixtine
, his novel of the ‘cerebral life’ (1890), on, Gourmont’s work pits Schopenhauerian idealism (and atheism) against Christian respectability. His materialist leanings enable him to write
Le Latin mystique
(1892), a study of the neo-Latin poetry of the early Church, entirely for what he deemed its aesthetic qualities. For Gourmont, the artist was an aristocrat of the spirit. He himself was descended from the nobility, and he too, like his friends Villiers and Huysmans, despised the blurring of difference and distinction brought about by an age of universal suffrage. His unrequited passion for the lesbian
writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, whom he called his ‘Amazone’, opened up new angles on his otherwise fairly conventional, though subtly handled and highly self-conscious, brand of male fantasy. The fourth story here, the Gothic fable ‘On the Threshold’, is very different, and cuts deeper, recounting a life blighted—two lives, in fact—by infernal pride and a misapplied philosophy of inaction. The Marquis de la Hogue, who owns the crumbling Chateau de la Fourche, is yet another version of the frigid dandy, but this time he is tortured by remorse for his own aloofness.

A different kind of failure, a remorse that comes too late, is at the heart of ‘The Time’ by Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), a story about a coddled, pernickety, middle-aged batchelor, Van Hulst, who develops a passion for collecting time-pieces from the antique-dealers of Bruges. The passion for collecting, cast as a symptom or as a form of fetishism, fascinated Maupassant, as we have seen, and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes is nothing if not a querulous and exigent collector of fine books and
objets d’art
. It is one obvious refuge from mass commodification and vulgarity. Rodenbach was Belgian, and a friend of Maeterlinck. He is best known for the famous portrait of the city he loved,
Bruges-la-Morte
(1892). But he also lived in Paris, and there his wide network of friends included Mendès, Mirbeau, Villiers, the Goncourts, and Mallarmé, who all appreciated his refined manner and his deep, melancholy sensibility. Here, Rodenbach employs great finesse in embroidering into his story the allegorical or even parabolic figures that start to shine through more clearly as it progresses; there is nothing heavy-handed about the way he lays his snare.

The dazzling but cruelly curtailed career of Jules Laforgue (1860–87) is well known, largely thanks to Eliot and Pound, the great Modernist poets, who quickly fastened upon this extraordinary ironic intelligence. Eliot especially fell under his spell, having discovered the poet in Arthur Symons’s seminal little book
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899). Symons described Laforgue’s poetry and prose as an ‘art of the nerves’;
¹⁸
it is also an art of ascetic, almost inhuman self-consciousness—this well-mannered, polished young man, who looked rather like a benign monk, was in fact crippled by shyness. The invention of the ‘Pierrot’ persona in his
Complaintes
(1885) was
an act of genius that allowed him to escape the sub-Baudelairean gloom of his early poetry. As a penurious young man in Paris, Laforgue would work in the unheated ‘extension’ of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and would then retire to his bedsit, eat a boiled egg, and read Schopenhauer by candlelight. Suddenly propelled into the implausible position of French Reader to the Empress Augusta of Germany, in her gloomy palace in Berlin, it was by developing this ironical persona, and by living his life as it were in front of a mirror—as Baudelaire said a true dandy must—that he survived. While there, he fell in love with an English governess with a name out of Poe—Leah Lee—and lived barely long enough to marry her and return to France, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven. Laforgue was primarily a poet, but his late prose pieces,
Les Moralités légendaires
(1887), show the same ironic style, beautifully modulated into the rhythms of prose. His ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ is the one story here with a ‘mythological’ setting; but Andromeda’s epic boredom in her island exile, and her growing sexual awareness, the Monster’s benign philosophical presence (he spends his days polishing stones, as Spinoza polished lenses), and Perseus’s fatuous vanity, are all thoroughly modern creations. In his
Moralités
, the omnipresence of Laforgue’s powerful, underlying pessimism, disguised by humour and a style in which Decadent neologism and sophistication reaches its apogee, announces the absurdist literature of the twentieth century.

Seven years his junior, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was another highly strung individual whose short life was dogged by illness. He is also one of the most accomplished writers of the whole period. Born into a literary family (his father ran a local newspaper and his uncle was head of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris), Schwob was plunged early into adventure-and travel-fiction, and he wrote his first published critical notice (in his father’s journal) at the age of eleven. He read Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, a discovery that turned into a lifelong passion for the Scottish writer, whose reputation he championed in France. So great, indeed, was Schwob’s admiration that towards the end of his life, when he was already ailing, he followed in his master’s footsteps and journeyed to Samoa. Schwob had a mastery of English (like Paul Valéry, he visited George Meredith), and knew long passages of Shakespeare by heart. His second great passion was for François Villon, whom he researched in detail. A man of wide
learning and tireless curiosity, Schwob was one of the great storytellers of the time, in construction and in range of setting—his tales range from antiquity to the brutish Middle Ages to the brothels and ‘retirement homes’ of contemporary Paris. He can suggest the spirit of time and place with elegance and concision—a master of the telling detail. This talent finds expression in perhaps his greatest single work, the
Vies imaginaires
(1896). In this text he casts his forensic, but voluntarily unhistorical eye upon a heterogeneous collection of lives, ranging from classical figures like Empedocles, Erostratus, and Lucretius, all the way through to (among others) the Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur, by way of Nicolas Loyseleur (a searing portrait of Joan of Arc’s murderous judge) and the painter of the
quattrocento
Paolo Uccello. Declaring in his preface that ‘art, opposed to general ideas, describes only the individual, desires only the unique’,
¹⁹
in these brief texts he concentrates his acids on the single, exceptional trait—taking his cue here from Giorgio Vasari and his
Lives of the Artists
(1550). Vasari describes, for example, Pontormo as being reclusive, ‘solitary and melancholy’, and Andrea del Sarto as exhibiting a certain ‘timidity of spirit’. Similarly, Schwob’s ‘Lucretius’, included here, struggles (and fails) to reconcile a hereditary gloom and
contemptus mundi
with the extremes of erotic attraction. His ‘Paolo Uccello’, picking up on Vasari’s account of a painter obsessed with the science of perspective, neglects human needs and comforts altogether. The stories with contemporary settings show different powers: ‘The Brothel’ is a disturbing description of a silent, sealed house, while ‘The
Sans-Gueule
’ (surely written with the Franco-Prussian War in mind, but frighteningly prophetic of the Great War lying ahead), and ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ are incisive studies in a type of sadism, conscious or otherwise, with a veneer of black comedy, that little can match for sheer cruelty, before or since.