The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (44 page)

13 July 1878
– Very late at night on the eve of the holidays, in the streets one encounters the strangest of female passers-by and even stranger male ones. Could it be that these nocturnal plebeian festivities stir forgotten metamorphoses of the past deep within human beings? In the turmoil of the excited sweaty crowd tonight I did indeed rub shoulders with the masks of freed Bithynian slaves and decadent courtesans.

From the milling crowd tonight on the Esplanade des Invalides among the rifle fire of the shooting ranges, the reek of fried food, the eructations of drunkards and the foul-smelling atmosphere of menageries, there emanated the savage whiff of a festival under Nero.

25 November, the same year
– I have just rediscovered the mournful, ever-distant gaze of the Antinous, and the fierce, ecstatic yet supplicating eye of the Roman cameo, though in a pastel done in a rather slipshod manner and signed with a woman’s name, an unknown female painter to whom however I should gladly give a commission if I were sure she could reproduce this strange gaze.

And yet nothing to speak of – just two or three pastel crayons smudged around that square, thin face with its massive jawbone tilting right up, its voluptuously open mouth, its dilated nostrils, beneath a heavy crown of braided violets, and a poppy behind one ear. The face is somewhat ugly, a sad, cadaverous colour, but under its scarcely lifted eyelids there shines and drowses a water so green, the mournful corrupted water of an unappeased soul, the doleful emerald of a fearsome lewdness!

I should give everything to find such a gaze.

19 December; the same year
–

Oh! This purple mark upon the sleeping woman’s lovely neck, and the surrender almost akin to death, the peace of this body stunned by pleasure! How this mark attracted me. I should have liked to set my lips there and slowly suck out all the life of this woman right down to her blood, for the regular beat of her pulse set my nerves on edge; the murmur of her breath, the even rise and fall of her bosom obsessed me like the ticking of a nightmare clock, and I could picture my clenched hands reaching to grip the sleeping woman’s throat and squeeze it until she could breathe no more; I got up, a cold sweat on my temples, and for ten seconds felt my heart to be that of a murderer, and then from her lips there came a faint odour of decay … the stale odour that all human beings exhale while they sleep.

Oh saints of the Thebais, what blameworthy nakedness gently exposed would come to tempt us at night in the mirage of the sands! Oh those wondering forms of sensuality, whose glancing loins and bellies would leave behind them furrows ploughed with fragrances and incense, and yet they were evil spirits!

10 January 1881
– There is in me a core of cruelty which I am frightened by; it sleeps for months and years, and suddenly awakens, bursts out, and when this crisis passes over, it leaves me terror-stricken with myself. That dog just now, in the avenue of the Bois, that I whipped until he bled, and for nothing, for not running to me at once when I called. The poor beast was there, cowering, almost on his knees, his large human eyes fixed on me, and his desperate howling. He would have melted a butcher’s heart! But I was possessed by some kind of inebriation, and the more I struck, the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that writhing flesh imbued me with I know not what wild ardour. A circle had been made around me and I stopped only out of human respect.

Later, I was ashamed … I remember that as a child I liked to torture animals; and I have never forgotten the story of those two turde doves that on one occasion had been placed in my hands to divert me, and which instinctively, without thinking, I squeezed until I choked them, a dreadful story, and I was only eight years old.

The palpitation of life has always filled me with a strange fury of destruction and I often have thoughts of murder during love.

Could it be that I have a double inside me?

28 February
– Why does that idiotic encounter haunt me with such persistence? It has stirred in me something strangely unspeakable and unhealthy, something of which I had no inkling, and yet, when I think about it, what could be more ordinary than encountering those two in their fancy dress? A woman got up as a schoolboy, her cap askew, her bosom strapped into the metal-buttoned tunic, and beside her that revolting scoundrel in a soutane, dragging a priest’s dignity in the gutter, doubtless some thug. There was no risk of being duped on that Shrove Tuesday night, and the way the woman waddled about, her hefty hips bulging under the hang of the tunic, the brazen make-up on that whorish face, all spelled the revelry and villainy of a carnival night, down to the pious mien and lopsided smile of that hawker in his frock and clerical bands. But in that ill-lit street hard by les Halles, at the door of that lodging house, the silhouette of those two masks became dangerous and disturbing; it was a sinister time of night too, around half past midnight. What had those two been up to in that house of assignations? And the fatefully inescapable thought of that androgynous schoolboy in the company of that pseudo-cleric was abominable, vile and sacrilegious.

15 March
– I am now an aficionado of masked balls, I am fascinated by the mask. The mystery of the face which I cannot see attracts me, it is vertigo on the edge of an abyss; and in the crush of the balls at the Opera, as in the dismal, noisy promenade gallery at the Élysées-Montmartre and the Folies, eyes glimpsed through the holes of the mask or beneath the lace of mantillas for me have a charm, an enigmatic sensuality which over-excites me and intoxicates me with a fever I have never known before. In this there is something of gambling’s risks and hunting’s frenzy; I always have a sense that beneath these masks there shine and gaze upon me the liquid green eyes of the pastel that I love, the distant gaze of the Antinous.

21 November
– There is no denying that last night I experienced something more than a vision: a mysterious being made itself manifest out of the invisible and the intangible. I was abed but not sleeping; I had even gone to bed early, since during the day, following my doctor’s advice, I had gone for a long walk, attempting to stifle my nerves with a healthy tiredness: SHE appeared to me.

My lamp was lit, my nightstand upon my bed, my book before me; so I was not sleeping.

It was a naked figure, of average height, of rather small and incomparably pure proportions. She stood at the foot of my bed, faintly tilted back, as if floating through the room, for her feet did not touch the floor; she appeared to be asleep.

With her eyelids lowered, her lips parted, her nakedness was offered in a chaste abandonment, her naked arms folded behind her neck supported her ecstatic head and brought the arched torso, with its dots of rust on the armpits, to a tapering point.

Her flesh had a jade-hued transparency, a delirious sight to my eyes; but from her emerald-diademed brow there fluttered and flowed a veil of black gauze, a vapour of crêpe which shielded her sex and wound about her hips and was knotted, like a thong, around both her ankles, so that this pale apparition was all the more mysterious.

And I should have liked to know the gaze hidden beneath those shuttered eyelids. A secret foreboding told me that this lethargic nakedness possessed the enigma of my malady and my cure; this figure of a dead woman in the ecstasy of love was the living incarnation of my secret. Some words (for she indeed it was who uttered them) trembled at my ear: Astarte, Acte, Alexandria, and the figure vanished.

Astarte, the name of the Syrian Venus; Acte, that of a freed slave woman; Alexandria, the city of the Ptolemies, of philosophers and courtesans; Astarte, also the name of a demon.

1 December
– Tomorrow I leave for Egypt.

Here ended the first notebook of the manuscript.

I knew Madeleine and Martha in Galilee;

I bleed in Petronius and laugh at Apuleius’s ass,

I am the ardent breath of golden ages past.

I dance in the folds of gowns and of copes,

I dine at the couch of kings and I sup with the popes

I see into your heart and the hearts of others too.

Astarte, Acte, Alexandria! It is ten years since these three names trembled in my ear and for ten years I have travelled hither and thither through the East, obsessed, in search of the frenzied vision of one unforgettable night.

Whether in the climbing streets of the Casbah or around the Cairo mosques, in the sunlit chiaroscuro of the Tunis souks or the mud and reed huts of the Nile villages, nowhere have I found the liquid emerald eyes whose distant, captivating promise made me leave everything behind: homeland, family, souls as dear as well-worn habits which are stronger often than affections; and everywhere, in the deafening alleyways of Constantine, or in the Moorish cafés of Biskra, the Syrian goddess, the intoxicating phantom of the East, Astarte everywhere disappointed me, everywhere deceived me, everywhere lied to me.

She never appeared to me again.

Yet often have I followed those women swathed in the silks and veils of their burning land! Arab women or Moorish women on their way to the mosque, or to the baths, tottering down the shadow-bathed steps of the alleyways, and at length have I questioned their long ecstatic languorous eyes under the haik, those eyes unvaryingly wet with kohl, beseeching like those of gazelles, but, when looked at closely, brilliant and hard like the shimmering pupils of birds, cold empty eyes of jet, for all eyes are black beneath lapis lazuli skies, and no creature met with there, around the pyramid of Cheops or in the stone desert of Petra, kept the promise of the goddess. Neither Ouled-Nail nor even the donkey-driver fellah, not one of all those oriental animals was able to offer me the awesome and sweet aquamarine gaze that the vision promised me.

Astarte, Acte, Alexandria!

If this morbid and elusive gaze does not exist, why then did it shine so strangely beneath the plaster eyelids of the Antinous, why then did it smile, so hopelessly imperious and weary, in the green intaglio of that ring? And where was this gaze encountered or dreamt of, for me to recognise it instantly, by that lady painter who caught it so well in her pastel of the veiled woman?

And the somnolent figure who whispered to me the three fateful names: Astarte, Acte, Alexandria – did she let that cold green light peep out from under her weighed-down eyelids?

Ah! This gaze, in vain quest for which I am exasperated and obsessed, I should surely have met with it under the emperors of decadence, in the Rome of Nero and Heliogabalus, in that of Tiberius too! The gaze of some gladiator or patrician Vestal, the final plea of a virgin delivered to the wild beasts or the prayer of some Asian hierophant who had come with Soemias
⁴
to the city of the Caesars, with what frenzy would I have loved, then strangled with my own hands the adored creature of lust and suffering who would have possessed those green eyes!

Is sensuality perhaps really only the smile of pain? And lust then? Yes, how dreadful, it is indeed hot fierce lust that incites in me the frustrated pursuit of that elusive gaze. It has withered everything, tarnished everything in me like a virus and it is the mud that now flows in my veins. Obscenity spurts all around me, and objects, art itself, everything I behold becomes obscene, taking on vile and double meaning, imposing base thoughts and degrading in me both senses and intellect!

Thus the Debucourt which I bought six years before on the riverbank, and which represents in the painter’s softened, delicately nuanced tonalities, two young women clasped together playing with a dove – why does this Debucourt inspire in me naught but obscene notions? Yet this engraving is rather well known; its title is
The Bird Brought Back To Life
. Powdered, swathed in the gauzes and floating muslins of the day, both these creatures had flesh of an adorable complexion and an aristocratic beauty, so why was their grace and freshness associated in my mind with the memory of the Queen and Madame de Lamballe? … And this is the vilest calumny of the time, the filthiest of lies to be found in the
Père Duchêne
, the very mire of the Jacobin clubs which is conjured in my eyes by this engraving, precisely because of the gesture with which one of the women draws back her fichu of cotton lawn as she plucks from her breasts the dove nestling between them, whiteness among whiteness.

And then my memory is besieged by all of the infamies spouted about the liaison between Marie-Antoinette and the unfortunate princess; and this is like a fever. A frenzy of rutting and cruelty takes hold of me and, amid the rumbling noise of a rioting populace, I find myself suddenly transported a century back, on a hot stormy day, in the precincts of a prison. A sweating crowd of men in red bonnets, street porters with brutish faces, their shirts open on hairy chests, jostle and suffocate me; there is a clamour of voices, hatred-filled eyes all around. The air is heavy, reeking with alcohol, the smells of squalor and raggedness, there are naked arms waving pikes and with a great shouting I suddenly see a decapitated head rising into the lead-coloured sky, a bloodless head with spent staring eyes, drunk men passing it from hand to hand, slapping it and kissing it on the lips. Wound around his naked arm, like a bundle of bloodied ribbons, one of them carries a tangled mass of entrails; he is sneering, his lips adorned with a dubious blond moustache resembling the curls of pubic hair … and this false moustache is the object of foul suggestions, coarse offensive laughter; and the head swings about above the crowd, brandished on the end of a pike: the head of the Princess de Lamballe which the Septembrists have just had coiffed, curled, powdered and re-animated with rouge to take it to the hôtel de Penthièvre and from there to the Temple under the Queen’s windows.

And I came to again revolted with horror.

And this decapitated head became for me an obsession. I now see them everywhere, the rictus of the decapitated and the cold teeth of the guillotined jeer and importune me. This hallucination takes shape above all in the suburbs, in those sinister deserted roadways along the city’s fortifications, and, since I love my malady like a true invalid, I know where and how to bring about this cruel, unsettling vision.