The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (2 page)

Three of the most prolific authors from the early 1830s onwards were Eugène Sue (1804–1857), Frédéric Soulié (1800–1847) and Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870). Of these, the first two started out primarily as
frénétique
writers while Dumas, now generally remembered as a historical novelist, began as a Romantic playwright. (The relationship between the
frénétique
and French Romanticism is by no means unproblematic – in many respects the former might be thought of the unacceptable face of the latter.) As the popularity of the
frénétique
began to wane in the late 1830s, all three directed their talents with considerable success to the new phenomenon of publishing novels, sometimes extremely lengthy ones, by instalment in the daily press.

The biographies of these writers tend to mirror many of the fears and anxieties of the time. Eugène Sue, who came from a family which had a long medical tradition, exemplifies this. His father, Dr Jean-Joseph Sue, had even conducted research during the French Revolution suggesting that the head – and not only the head but the arms, legs and inner organs of the body as well – continued to suffer pain for some time after the victim’s head and trunk have been separated by the guillotine. Nearly fifty years later, he would refer in passing to his father’s research in the pages of his best-known work:
Les Mystères de Paris
(1842–43; tr.
The Mysteries of Paris
).

Despite beginning his medical training – first under his father’s instruction, then during military service in Spain and, finally, as assistant surgeon in the French navy where he was sent to the Middle East and the West Indies – Sue immediately gave up the profession when his father died in 1830. Instead, he settled in Paris, in a state of some luxury, and devoted himself to writing. Over the course of the next eight years, Sue would make a major contribution to the development of the
frénétique
novel through his particular knowledge of mutinies, shipwrecks, sea warfare and the slave-trade. Indeed, it would not be wide of the mark to say that he was unrivalled in his description of maritime horrors. In
Kernok le pirate
(1831), for example, the captain of
L’Epervier
, having run short of cannon balls, blows his enemy to pieces by blasting them with a charge of silver coins; while
El Gitano
(also 1831) concludes with a pirate revenging the execution of his captain by infecting the whole of Cadiz with cholera by flooding the city with tainted cashmere shawls.

Any number of such episodes may be found in Sue’s principal works from this period:
Atar-Gull
(1831; tr.
The Negro’s Revenge; or, Brulart the Black Pirate
, 1841);
La Salamandre
(1832; tr.
The Salamander
, 1845);
La Coucaratcha
(1832–34), the author’s only collection of short stories; and
Latréaumont
(1837; tr.
De Rohan; or; The Court Conspirator
, 1845), a bloody historical novel whose title is said to have inspired the pseudonym of the author of
Les Chants de Maldoror
.

What may be less evident to readers more than a century-and-a-half later is that Sue’s tremendous cynicism and pessimism – particularly with regard to materialistic science, the myth of the noble savage, and the notion that all men are born equal – represents an ideologically motivated attack on the principal tenets of the Enlightenment, tenets which were later adopted by the adherents of the French Revolution. But it is for
The Mysteries of Paris
– a vast proto-detective novel largely set in the slums of Paris which took the whole of Europe by storm (six different English translations were at one time being published simultaneously) – that Eugène Sue is nowadays principally remembered.
⁴
Apparently, it was during the writing of this immense work that he was converted, almost overnight, to socialism (not all of his critics were convinced of his sincerity – indeed, Karl Marx was responsible for a scathing attack in 1844) such that his later writing implicitly serves as a refutation of his earlier works (though he never publicly disowned them).

In his day, Frédéric Soulié enjoyed the same level of popularity as Sue or Dumas. His first major prose work – and also his most
frénétique
– was a historical novel, called
Les Deux Cadavres
(1832), dealing with the English Civil War. The two corpses of the title are those of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell and the plot itself revolves round an obscure legend (known to Samuel Pepys and others but generally ignored by academic historians) that the latter issued secret instructions that he should be buried at Naseby. In Soulié’s novel matters are taken a step further and the bodies of the King and the Protector are switched – such that the Royalists, when they finally manage to locate what they believe to be Cromwell’s place of rest, desecrate the body of their own former master. It is this action, according to the author, which is responsible for causing the Plague of London.

Before his untimely death in 1847, Soulié went on to write more than two dozen plays and a similar number of novels – including a remarkable serial novel, entitled
Les Mémoires du Diable
(1837–38), which virtually invented the tradition of publishing fiction by instalments in the popular press. The story translated for the present anthology is taken from his first collection of short fiction, published in 1833.

The third musketeer of this opening section, Alexandre Dumas, is far too well-known to require more than the briefest of introductions here. So prolific was Dumas that by the early 1840s rumours had started to circulate that he bought up complete manuscripts from impoverished hacks toiling in garrets which he published under his own name. Although there was some truth to such stories, he was also an extremely versatile writer whose work was by no means limited to prose fiction: besides his dramatic contribution (in recent years both
Kean
and
The Tower of Nesle
have enjoyed successful revivals), he also wrote a considerable number of travel books (his adventurous life took him as far afield as the remoter provinces of the Russian Empire and the semi-barbarous kingdoms of North Africa). Perhaps it was this versatility which prevented Dumas from doing much more than occasionally toying with
frénétique
themes – though his 1849 collection of inter-locking short stories,
Les Mille et un Fantômes
(1849; tr.
The Thousand and One Phantoms
, 1849), clearly belongs to the genre. Appropriately enough, several of the stories deal with French revolutionary history – including the famous urban myth that Charlotte Corday, after being guillotined for the murder of Marat, blushed when the public executioner held up her decapitated head and slapped her face. (The same narrator, Monsieur Ledru, said to be the son of the physician to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, tells the story of
Solange
in this collection.)

The other three writers gathered together under the
frénétique
heading, though much less prolific, are no less worthy of interest. If they are discussed at all in literary histories, however, it is generally as part of a miscellaneous group labelled ‘minor Romantics.’ This is perhaps a fair description of Alphonse Royer, who penned half-a-dozen or so novels and collections of stories in the 1830s and early 1840s as well as writing librettos (his career as a novelist would seem to have come to an end with his appointment as director of the French opera following the
coup d’état
of 1851). At least two of these novels deserve rescuing from the obscurity into which they have fallen:
Les mauvais garçons
(1829), from which a short self-contained extract is included here, is remarkable for its macabre humour; while
Venezia la Bella
(1834), in its depiction of the city as a living agent exercising control over the destinies of those who live there, seems astonishingly modern.

Among the many strange or bizarre writers who contributed to the development of the French horror story in the first half of the century (indeed, the appellation ‘minor Romantic’ seems to be almost a synonym for eccentricity), two in particular stand out: Pétrus Borel and Xavier Forneret. Borel (1809–1859), the twelfth of some fourteen children born in modest circumstances, came to Paris in the mid-1820s in order to study as an architect but, like many young men of the epoch, was immediately drawn to literature. By 1830, he was the leader of his own small circle of impoverished fellow writers and artists, including Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval (both of whom have left fascinating accounts of these happy days of penury and struggle). This group came to the attention of Victor Hugo, who enlisted Borel as the leader of the ‘claque’ – i.e. those member of the audience paid by the author or the cast to applaud at suitable moments and so create the illusion of popularity – on the opening night of his play
Hernani
. The fighting and confusion that ensued has taken on the proportions of a legend in French theatrical history.

Unlike Gautier and Nerval, both of whom over the course of the last half-a-century or so have been promoted from the ranks of ‘minor Romantics’ to the status of ‘major Romantics’, Borel has remained very much a writer’s writer. Baudelaire much admired him, for example, as did André Breton fifty years later. Indeed, Breton considered Pétrus Borel – whom he described as ‘Surrealist in Liberty’ – as a major precursor of the movement he founded in the 1920s. Yet, as both Baudelaire and Breton acknowledged, Borel’s name seems to have a curse on it. He did produce three fascinating books during the course of his short writing career though (Borel eventually died in poverty in Algeria):
Rhapsodies
, a volume of poetry published in 1832;
Champavert. Contes immoraux
(i.e.
Champavert. Immoral Stories
), a collection of horror stories published in 1833; and
Madame Putiphar
(1839), a compelling novel of sexual persecution under the
ancien régime
. Despite his relative neglect (possibly caused by his extreme left-wing opinions), Pétrus Borel is in many respects the most representative author of the
frénétique
tendency of the 1830s.

Whether Pétrus Borel and Xavier Forneret (1809–1884) ever met is not known. Perhaps their paths crossed in 1834 when Forneret came to Paris to commission a frontispiece by Tony Johannot (another member of Borel’s circle) for his play
Deux Destinées
. The circumstances of Borel and Forneret could hardly have been more different: Borel, scratching around for a living, despairing of finding another publisher following the financial fiasco of
Champavert
; Forneret, the only son of wealthy Dijon merchants (he was reputed to inhabit a Gothic tower and to play the violin into the small hours of the night), able to finance the publication of his own works in luxurious editions.

In fact, over the course of the following years, Forneret’s self-financed publications would become not only more luxurious but increasingly eccentric.
Encore un an de Sans titre
, a collection of short aphorisms published in 1840 (the most remarkable being: ‘I saw a letter-box at a cemetery …’), often has scarcely a couple lines of text on each page while
Pièce de pièces, Temps perdu
(also 1840), a collection of seven short stories, is printed on one side of the page only. But it is this latter collection which is also Forneret’s masterpiece, including as it does not only the wilfully bizarre
One Eye Between Two
but also
The Diamond of Grass
– a story which was much appreciated by the Surrealists, who reprinted it, with illustrations by the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen, in the review
Minotaure
in 1937.
⁵
Writing in 1940, Breton was amazed not so much by the obscurity into which Forneret had fallen – he never enjoyed the slightest popularity during his own lifetime – but by the disconcerting juxtaposition to be found in his work of breath-taking originality and the utterly banal.

On 22 October, 1800 – or rather, since the revolutionary calendar was still in force at this date, 30 vendémaire an IX – a weekly magazine devoted to the arts and sciences published an uncompromising review of the latest book by an author who was just then enjoying a brief respite between periods of incarceration. ‘A loathsome work’ – opined the reviewer – ‘by a man reputed to have published one more horrible still.’ The author in question was one whom no anthology of nineteenth-century horror fiction can ignore: the Marquis de Sade

Appropriately enough, the new book under review was, in fact,
Les Crimes de l’amour
– a collection of eleven stories by the ‘divine’ Marquis with a preliminary ‘Essay on the Novel’. Like the first
Justine
, the
Cent vingt Journées de Sodome
(tr.
The 120 Days of Sodom
) and
Aline et Valcour
, most of these stories had been written during the eleven years that the author had spent in the dungeons of Vincennes and the Bastille between 1778 and 1789.
⁶

Sade, probably intending to publish another collection at a later date, would seem to have kept back a couple of stories though. It is possible that
Dorci, or The Vagaries of Luck
was among this number – though it is also conceivable, given that Sade did not die until 1814, that it was composed during the early years of the nineteenth-century, perhaps during his stay in the Charenton asylum. In any event,
Dorci
did not see the light of day until 1881, when it was published under the aegis of Anatole France.

Although Sade’s shorter fiction tends to eschew the psycho-pathological elements of his ‘great’ works, the underlying philosophy is very much the same. As the author writes elsewhere:
⁷

[…] It is not always by making virtue triumph that one arouses the reader’s interest. [This rule] is in no wise essential to the novel, nor is it even the one most likely to awaken the reader’s interest; for when virtue triumphs, this is how things should be, our tears run dry even before they begin to flow; but if, after severe trials and tribulations, we finally witness
virtue being overwhelmed by vice
, our hearts are inevitably rent asunder and the work in question, having moved us profoundly […], must inevitably give rise to that interest which alone can bring acclaim.