The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century (45 page)

Ah! Those moonlit nights, those wild rides in a tollgate cab from the boulevard Bineau to the banks of Billancourt, those slow, evocatory drives along gloomy roads lined with fences and a few scarce villas with closed shutters. How easily the aura of crime and the flowering of evil issue and rise from these leprous, poverty-stricken landscapes! How this province of the prowler and the bricklayer’s whore is indeed that of the modern nightmare, and how cheating Astarte, who so stubbornly withholds herself in the enchanted cities of the Orient, does willingly surrender in all her ghoulish finery by the stretches of waste ground and deserted
guinguettes
. Whether the place is the route de la Révolte, the plain of Malakoff or the clay-pits of Montrouge, Astarte’s laughter is everywhere, be it in the solitude of Gennevilliers or the stinking banks of the Bièvre.

Then the little market garden walls, the edges of stock-raisers’ plots, above the roofs of sheds blue-shaded by the moon, the guilty heads of the executed rise, Pierrot-heads with bright red neck ties. So wan are they that they seem made of plaster, wan, but so waggishly prophetic with their blue lips and their pale cold teeth, the heads of murderers or anarchists, the like of Gamahut, Pelz and Lediez along with Ravachol;
⁵
all of them with their hair on end and yet so close-cropped at the back of the neck, with the air of John the Baptists of crime, for Salome dances forever before the old Herod exhausted with lust, and not for nothing does she hold out the symbolic lotus to the king of mournful civilizations.

Astarte! What an irony and a trap. To have dreamt of a goddess of Asia, a freed slave woman almost empress of Rome, and of the monstrous hallowed love-cults of the shrines, cast out of the East and come to rest among the smells of blood and cheap wine one morning at la Roquette, on the day of an execution.

Yet one night it seemed to me I did encounter the glaucous lustful eyes of the veiled woman in the pastel.

It was at Constantine, in the street of Ladders, the street of whores and prostitution that tumbles down so steep above the river Rhumel!

From one Moorish café to another, and from Spanish posadas to Maltese drinking-dens, how had we ended up in that sinister kief-smokers’ hovel? Fifes and tambourines yelped out a high-pitched, droning threnody, and at the centre of a circle of hunched Arabs, two bloodless creatures with drawn and deadened eyes, supple as grass snakes, swayed loathsomely from side to side with a strange twitching of their lower bodies. Oh! The desperate, almost convulsive pleas of those spindly arms above those rigid faces! With painted eyes and painted cheeks they twisted about, unbelievably slender in their floating gauze and tulle of gold lamé, such as women wear, shaken at intervals from head to toe by brief and total shudderings, as if by a discharge of electricity. One of the dancers abruptly stopped still, quite stiff, with a piercing hyena-like call, and in his rolled-back pupils I saw the elusive green gaze shine out. I threw myself upon him and took him by the wrists; he had collapsed, there was foam on his lips. He was an epileptic and, worse still, a poor blind creature, a wretched Kabyle dancer exhausted from vice and consumption, destined before long to die.

Here the second manuscript ended. The rest fell into incoherence, into madness and an eroticism so fantastic and unhealthy that the text’s transcription becomes no longer possible; the possessed man was edging towards mental derangement, cerebral anaemia was becoming apparent, and as his writing grew more frantic so his thoughts were more clouded. Here however are a few excerpts.

Venice. October 1888
– Today I imagined I had found the beseeching gaze which obsesses me, the flickering green look which has turned me into an unbalanced wretch, an outcast and a madman. It was at the hospital for the venereally ill, in the warm sickly atmosphere of a big ward with whitewashed walls, its windows on fire with sunlight on the loveliest of afternoons. She was laid out amid the questionable whiteness of her bedsheets, and her mane of mahogany red hair, spread out on the pillows, made her yellowed syphilitic’s face appear all the more sallow. She remained silent and unmoving among the murmurings, which had scarcely subsided upon our entrance, of twenty other women, twenty convalescent or less sick women jostling in their shifts around the table cluttered with glass beads, numbers and cards; with the liveliness of gesture and speech characteristic of their race, every able-bodied person in the ward was playing the
lotteria
. The wax-pale invalid alone did not speak, did not stir. But between her half-closed lashes there shone a green water spangled with gold, a sad slumbering water yet on fire with light, like the bed of some dark spring at noonday; and at the same time such a painful smile contracted her poor withered lips and the corners of her bruised eyelids that for a moment I thought I saw a gleam of that same expression of infinite weariness and drunken ecstasy as upon my first apparition.

In curiosity I bent over the bed; her face had relaxed, her eyes had closed. ‘A spasm of the kind she often has,’ said the doctor who accompanied us, ‘it’s a tumour on the ovaries; there is no hope.’

Nor did the consumptive little dancer at the café in Constantine have any hope either. Might I be in love with the throes of death?

This unconquerable attraction to those about to die is horrifying and disconcerting.

Florence, February 1890
.

Glowing but sickly, her sorrowful face

Has in the mournful spell of its native grace

The charm of a virgin and a perverse boy.

The prelate’s favourite or Ophelia the wise,

Suffering, exaltation, madness are her mystery,

And flow, like some black philtre, through her green eyes.

A black philtre flowing through green eyes, this encapsulates the gaze that I seek, these are also the eyes of Botticelli’s
Primavera
. The unknown poet who wrote those lines into this hôtel album well understood, like me, the intensity of those unforgettable eyes; he too must have been one possessed. Thus throughout the world there are poor kindred souls cast adrift, made for mutual understanding but never meant to meet.

Rome April 1890
– I am fond of these frescoes of the
Aldobrandini Wedding
; these postures of women draped in thin veils, like vapours, have a chaste sensuality, an untrammelled grace which is altogether delicious; these are more cloth bindings than clothes. There is a religiously mystical voluptuous modesty which turns these stooping bodies, veiled in mauve and white, into great sacred flowers which one is forbidden to approach. The vision from Asia which appeared to me one day had these same postures; the creature with green eyes with which I am besotted, should I ever find it, will surely have these same harmonious and evasive swaying movements.

Alas, all the figures in these frescoes have their features erased and their eyes are spent.

I am in love with phantoms.

Paris, June 1892
– This evening at the Neuilly fête I encountered a programme seller who had strange teeth like those of a young dog.

Yes, the more I think of it, that was the smile of the dancing young fun in the Vatican – a smile both ironical and bestial.

Paris, August 1892
– I shall most certainly not keep this rendez-vous I have made at the house of Jeanne de Carcilles. This acrobat has the most wonderfully shaped hips and legs, but her face is really too much like a hairdresser’s dummy.

She resembles Émilienne.

How could I have been smitten, even for ten minutes, with that doll’s face and its idiotic smile, and then that too tiny mouth, those over-large eyes, those excessively pink cheeks and that ridiculously blonde hair?

It would be settled by those twenty-five louis, for miss Adda does not put herself out for less; bah! It would be paying too dearly for something I thought better of, no, not thought better of, something that made me feel sick.

I ought rather to have gone to Bayreuth than have lingered on in Paris this summer.

Marseilles, April 1893
– The dream takes me over, the dream possesses me, and I am no longer anything but a sleepwalker, and yet this winter like all the other winters spent in Algeria, in Cairo or Tunis, Astarte has disappointed me again, Astarte has lied to me again.

Yet this winter I really thought … Yes, on that moonless night on the Nile, with the rowers of the
Dahabieh
asleep at last, as slowly, oh so slowly, we sailed down river on those stagnant waters and the vast and endlessly flat landscape spread away out of sight, a faint shade of ash against the night’s deep blue, I really thought this time I saw the goddess appear. For an hour, I had been observing with curiosity the increasing visibility of a strange black point on a still distant bend of the Nile, the entablature of some ancient temple or perhaps just a rock with its base dipping into the water.

The
Dahabieh
sailed slowly and steadily, as if in a dream, and slowly, in the silence of the starless night, the shadow which intrigued me came closer, taking shape, and became (for it was now clear) the rump of a huge pink granite sphinx whose profile was eroded by the centuries. On board all slept in a slumber that was truly disconcerting, the whole crew fallen into a leaden torpor; and the movement of the craft noiselessly approaching the motionless beast filled me with growing terror, for the sphinx now appeared luminous; as if a vaporous brightness issued from its rump and in the hollow of its shoulder there could be seen a creature standing, her head thrown back and sleeping.

It was a young slender form, clad, like the donkey-driving fellahs, in a thin blue gandura with gold circlets on the ankles, the adolescent form of a prince or a slave, for the attitude of this offered slumber was at once both royal and servile, royal in its assurance, servile in its self-exposure and knowing abandon.

The gandura was open on an ivory-white flat bosom, but on the neck there bled what looked like a broad gash: a scar or a wound? As for the face, I guessed at its exquisiteness from only the ovally tapered chin, but, tilted backwards, it was bathed entirely in the shadow.

I called out, shouting loudly, but was unable to awaken anyone on board; the indigenous crew and the English servants were all struck down as if in a magic slumber, and they did not wake until dawn, with the sphinx out of sight far behind.

When I recounted my adventure the next morning, I was given an answer by the dragoman that this must have been some peasant with his throat cut by the Arab bandits who are numerous in these parts. Having killed the child, they set its corpse there as a warning to travellers, an ironic and salutary lesson.

And maybe, after all, I had dreamt it, and no one gave it any more importance; on the ship I passed for a visionary, for I dream so much now.

This was the end of the manuscript.

  
1
   Philibert-Louis
Debucourt
(1755–1832). French painter and print maker.

  
2
   The English poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne
(1837–1909) was admired by French decadent writers almost as much for his extravagant sexual proclivities as for the naked imagery of his poetry. Lorrain quotes from his
Laus Veneris
– in which love is presented as a deadly and carnivorous passion.

  
3
   The statue of
Antinous
in the Louvre, with its pronounced suggestion of androgyny, was a constant preoccupation of the ‘Romantic agony’. One finds references to the precocious if baffling sensuality of this sculpture as early as 1829 in Henri Delatouche’s forgotten masterpiece
Fragoletta
.

  
4
   Julia
Soemias
Bassania, mother of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus. Heliogabalus’s short reign (A.D. 218–22) was a matter of some speculation among
fin-de-siècle
authors (particularly Rémy de Gourmont, J.-K. Huysmans and Lorrain). In brief, Heliogabalus, who was reputed to have been endowed with an Antinous-like beauty, did not reach Rome (in the company of his mother) until the second year of his reign. For the next three years, the city is said to have witnessed unparalleled scenes of debauchery associated with their religious practices.

  
5
   François Koenigstein, though he is better known under his mother’s name of
Ravachol
, was a French anarchist responsible for several bombings in the early 1890s. He was executed on July 11,1892.

  1   Frédéric Soulié:
The Lamp of Saint Just
(
La Lampe de Saint-Just
).
First published in
L’Europe littéraire
, March 3, 1833; first published in book form in
Le Port de Créteil
, 2 vols (Paris: Dumont, 1833).
Translated by Liz Heron.

  2   Eugène Sue:
A True Account of the Travels of Claude Belissan, Clerk to the Public Prosecutor
(
Relation véritable des Voyages de Claude Belissan, clerc de procureur
).
From:
La Coucaratcha
, 4 vols (Paris: Canel et Guyot, 1832–34).
Translated by Terry Hale.

  3   Alexandre Dumas:
Solange
.
From:
Les Mille et un Fantômes
, 2 vols (Paris: Cadot, 1849), chapters VI and VII.
This anonymous translation originally appeared in
The London Journal
in 1849.

  4   Pétrus Borel:
Monsieur de l’Argentière, Public Prosecutor
(
Monsieur de l’Argentière, l’accusateur
).
From:
Champavert, contes immoraux
(Paris: Renduel, 1833).
Translated by Terry Hale; verse translation by Stanley Chapman.

  5   Alphonse Royer:
The Covetous Clerk
.
Extract from
Les marvais garçons
2 vols (Paris: Renduel, 1829).
The title employed here has been added by the translator.
Translated by Terry Hale.

  6   Xavier Forneret:
One Eye Between Two
(
Un oeil entre deux yeux
).
From:
Pièce de pièces, temps perdu
(Paris: E. Duverger, 1840).
Translated by Liz Heron.