Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  His fiction was destined to make him at least as many enemies as his journalism, and Guy de Maupassant was sufficiently incensed by resemblances between himself and one of the characters in Très Russe to send his seconds round to seek reparation from the author. No one knows what passed between them, but no duel actually took place. This was the first of several such incidents. In 1887 Lorrain did go to meet the journalist René Maizeroy, but both came away unscathed. In 1888 Paul Verlaine sent his seconds round after Lorrain had erroneously reported that he had been committed, but the matter went no further. The most famous of his duels was, however, still some way off.

  In the short fiction which he now began to write so prolifically Lorrain frequently introduced homosexual themes. Lesbianism had long been fashionable as a literary theme thanks to Baudelaire – who intended at one point to attach the title Les Lesbiennes to the collection which became Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) – and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1855) but male homosexuality was still hedged about with taboos. Lorrain was not entirely displeased by the shock-wave generated by his stories of this kind, and was happy to cash in on it, ultimately compiling a rich catalogue of brief stories detailing all manner of exotic fetishisms and perversions, but the reputation he cultivated left something to be desired. He would never be regarded as a writer of the first rank in his own country, and there was no possibility of his being translated into English. The work of making male homosexuality acceptable as a literary theme was left for Proust and Gide to do.

  In 1887 Lorrain left Montmartre to install himself in an apartment in the Rue de Courty, which he was able to furnish according to his own calculatedly bizarre taste. The phantasmagorical aspects of this private world were considerably exaggerated by the fact that he had begun drinking ether. His motive for doing this was undoubtedly medicinal, and he was initially impressed by the sudden surge of vitality which a dose of the drug gave him when he was ill or exhausted; it was one of several ‘cures’ with which he attempted to combat his increasing periods of debilitation. Under the hallucinogenic influence of ether, though, his apartments soon came to seem literally and figuratively haunted. Those of his short stories which did not deal with sexual perversity were mostly supernatural, and his works in this vein became increasingly strange and horrific, more akin to the works of E. T. A. Hoffman than Poe; much of his best work is in this vein, and he wrote some very striking stories of bizarre apparitions and peculiar obsessions. He was later to write a self-conscious cycle of ‘contes d’un buveur d’éther’, which were included in Sensations et souvenirs (1895), but the effects of the drug can clearly be seen in the stories in his other collections, particularly Buveurs d’âmes (1893) and Histoires de masques (1900).

  In 1888 Lorrain left the Courtier for L’Evénement, where he was given a regular column in which to extend his mordant literary criticism into a more general critique of contemporary Parisian society. He called his essays along these lines ‘Pall-Malls’, after the English weekly Pall Mall Gazette, which had been edited since 1883 by W. T. Stead. Stead was an odd combination of muck-raker and crusader, who became a role-model for many later journalists. Stead’s exposés of the London brothels which specialised in flagellation and child prostitution caused a great sensation, which was magnified still further when he was condemned to a period of hard labour after buying a child from her mother in order to demonstrate how readily children were sold into prostitution. Lorrain’s image of the English gentry seems to have been largely formed by Stead’s lurid articles, and he set out to do similar disservice to his own countrymen. His political stance was a curious kind of ‘right-wing anarchism’ based on a scornful hatred of both capitalism and socialism. He was a nationalist through and through, despising the revolutionaries of 1789 for their bourgeois tendencies, but the fact that he became a diehard opponent of the Dreyfusards probably had far more to do with his long-standing dislike for Zola than any judgment of Dreyfus’ culpability. (Lorrain was also outspokenly anti-Semitic, but that too might have been a by-product of his personal detestation of Judith Gautier’s Jewish ex-husband.) Problems with obtaining payment for his work led him to quit L’ Evénement in 1890 for the Écho de Paris, to which he was a prolific contributor – under various pseudonyms – until 1895, after which he worked mainly for Le Journal.

  At the end of 1890 Lorrain left his haunted house in the Rue de Courty and moved to Auteuil. By this time his recurrent fevers were complicated by syphilis. Sarah Bernhardt, who did little else for him, at least referred him to a good physician: the celebrated chirurgeon Dr Pozzi, who was a colourful and well-known character in his own right. Pozzi told him to stop taking ether, advising him that his gut had become so badly ulcerated due to the effects of the drug that surgical intervention was necessary. Pozzi carried out the operation, removing a section of the small intestine, in 1893.

  Despite his health problems Lorrain travelled to Spain and Algeria in 1892, the first of several expeditions abroad. He was joined in Auteuil by his mother, who lived with him until his death – a somewhat mixed blessing, given her extreme disapproval of his lifestyle, but a blessing nevertheless. He was now earning good money and was able to support her in style; he sent her to the very best couturiers and had her painted by the noted portraitist Antonio de La Gandara (who also did the most striking portrait of Lorrain himself).

  He formed several new friendships with women around this time. The first – and the one of which his mother most fervently disapproved, especially when rumours began to circulate about a possible marriage – was with the exotic Liane de Pougy, a performing artiste of sorts whose great ambition was to be the most fashionable and most expensive whore in Paris: a perfect femme fatale. Lorrain wrote ‘pantomimes’ for her, just as he composed songs for the more respectable pianist Yvette Guilbert, whom he met the following year. Between 1892 and 1896 Lorrain was also frequently in the company of Jeanne Jacquemin, an artist in pastels, who shared his intense fascination with the occult. Together they ventured into the ‘Occult Underworld’ recently made fashionable by Là-Bas 1891 and made highly visible by the self-styled Rosicrucian mage Josephin Péladan – also a prolific author of books railing against the Decadence of modern Paris. Jeanne Jacquemin’s husband was a friend of Verlaine, and did not seem to mind the wayward lifestyle she adopted. She liked to pose as a notable figure in Decadent Paris – she claimed intimate acquaintance with Rodenbach and Remy de Gourmont – but tended to be jealously possessive, and Lorrain fell out with her before setting off on his second trip to Algiers. He did not see her again for some years, and she faded from the Paris scene; unfortunately, she neither forgot nor forgave him.

  In 1896 Lorrain was probably the best-paid journalist in Paris, and he had reached the summit of his brief celebrity. It is rather ironic that he is best-remembered today for an incident which attracted little attention at the time but which now figures as an episode in the many biographies of Marcel Proust. Lorrain twice attacked Proust’s first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896; tr. as Pleasures and Regrets), the second time in an article published in January 1897. The slanders were no worse than Lorrain’s customary stock-in-trade, but Proust sent his seconds to demand satisfaction and the two men met on 6 February, armed with pistols. Two shots were discharged harmlessly, and the two then shook hands.

  Lorrain continued to make friends as well as enemies, particularly among the people he met in the home of Jean de Tinan, where Rachilde was a frequent fellow-guest. It was there that he made the acquaintance of Pierre Louÿs, whose lush erotic fantasy set in ancient Alexandria, Aphrodite, took Paris by storm in 1896. He also met the poet Henri de Régnier, who remained grateful for the help which Lorrain lent his career, the pioneering surrealist Alfred Jarry, and Colette, who seemed to like him far better than many of the women with whom he kept closer company. The circle dissipated when Tinan died, not long before Lorrain decided that he had to leave Paris for the sake of his health and remove his household to the balmier climes of Ni
ce.

  It is significant that Lorrain abandoned Paris at end of 1900. For ten years he had been the self-appointed chronicler of the fin de siècle and the scourge of Decadent Paris; a great deal of his rhetoric had drawn on the fact that the nineteenth century was winding down, approaching an end that was devoutly to be desired. He was very conscious of the extent to which that rhetoric would lose its force once the new century was born, and this consciousness was reinforced by the spectacular Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900. It was as if he had fallen out of fashion instantly, by prior appointment. He continued to write for Le Journal, but he now gave priority to a new endeavour: the writing of two novels which would provide a kind of retrospective summary of the Decadent Movement and the world which had given birth to it. Huysmans had begun the movement with À reborns and Lorrain set out to provide it with a fitting conclusion. The two novels in question were Monsieur de Phocas (1901) and Le Vice errant (1902). They were recognised as his masterpieces, but were not greeted with any great popular acclaim.

  Things began to go badly wrong for Lorrain immediately after the two novels appeared in print. Jeanne Jacquemin, seemingly repentant of her colourful past, recognized herself in Mme de Charmaille, one of the characters in a nouvelle called ‘Les Pelléastres’, serialised in Le Journal. Lorrain had grafted attributes of his friends on to his fictional characters many times before – often unflatteringly, as in Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897), whose central character is a sharp caricature of Barbey d’Aurevilly – without any significant comeback, but Jeanne Jacquemin sued him for defamation of character. The case generated a great deal of bad publicity, and Lorrain was attacked from all sides by those who had once walked in fear of his sarcasm. The court – perhaps desirous of making an example of him, although it is unclear whose benefit they had in mind – required him to pay astonishingly high damages of 80,000 francs.

  The settlement of this suit left Lorrain broke and vulnerable; he was soon to face a second lawsuit and – perhaps more seriously, in terms of his reputation – a formal charge of corrupting public morals by literary means, brought by a certain M. Greuling against Monsieur de Phocas. A similar charge had once been the making of Baudelaire’s reputation, but in Lorrain’s case it only served to illustrate how dramatically the tide had turned, and how ardently the people of twentieth century Paris desired to advertise that the nineteenth century was dead and gone. He was disappointed that hardly anyone came forward to speak in his defence (Colette was one exception), and particularly hurt by the fact that Huysmans remained silent.

  Lorrain threw himself into his writing in order to pay the damages, and continued to produce work at a furious pace, but much of it was pure hackwork. La Maison Philibert (1904), a calculatedly scabrous novel about a brothel, is of some interest as a Decadent work, but the other novels of this period were much weaker. His health continued to deteriorate, and his tuberculosis returned in full force in 1905; he took various ‘cures’ in the spas of the Riviera, but they left him sicker than before. With typically grim irony he began signing his articles in Le Journal and La Vie parisienne ‘Le Cadavre’. He was grateful to find, though, that he still had some admirers. In 1906 he met for the first time the Italian Decadent Gabriele D’Annunzio, who readily acknowledged him as a great influence, and he received a heart-warming letter of appreciation from the sculptor Rodin, whose work he had always admired and complimented.

  On 12 June 1906 Lorrain returned to Paris to help organise an art exhibition and to involve himself in an adaptation for the opera of one of his contes, La Princesse sous verre (1896). He took the opportunity to see Pozzi, who called in several colleagues to second his opinion that Lorain’s gut was so badly ulcerated that an operation could not help. Pozzi could only prescribe palliative measures, and it was in the course of following this prescription that Lorrain died. He was found unconscious in his bathroom on 28 June, having perforated his colon while giving himself an enema. He was removed to hospital and his mother hastened from Nice to sit with him, but he died without regaining consciousness two days later. A funeral was held in Paris at Saint-Ferdinand-des-Ternes before his body was taken to Fécamp for burial. Régnier was there, and La Gandara, and Paul Adam, and Colette, but Sarah Bernhardt did not come, and nor did Yvette Guilbert; Liane de Pougy sent a wreath.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Introduction

  Monsieur de Phocas

  The Legacy

  The Manuscript

  Oppression

  The Eyes

  Izé Kranile

  Enchantment

  The Terror of the Masquerade

  The Healer

  Under the Spell

  A Series of Etchings

  The Doll Collector

  The Eye of Eboli

  The Thought Reader

  Some Monsters

  The Larvae

  Towards the Sabbat

  Opium

  Smara

  The Sphinx

  Sir Thomas Welcome

  Another Track

  The Spectre of IZ

  Cloaca Maxima

  Sir Thomas’s Millions

  The Abyss

  A Glimmer of Hope

  The Refuge

  Lasciate Ogni Speranza

  A Consignment of Flowers

  The City of Gold

  The Trap

  Thou Shalt Go no Further

  The Lilies

  The Murder

  The Goddess

  Afterword

  Appendix

  Copyright

  MONSIEUR DE PHOCAS

  THE LEGACY

  Monsieur de Phocas. With a flick of my fingers I turned the card over and then back again; the name inscribed upon it was completely unknown to me.

  In the absence of my manservant, who was at Versailles for a twenty-eight day stint in barracks, the cook had introduced the visitor. Monsieur de Phocas was in my study.

  Grumbling, I rose from the armchair where I had been dozing – the day was so warm! – and went into my study, determined to send the unwelcome visitor away.

  Monsieur de Phocas! Having opened the door unobtrusively, I paused on the threshold.

  Monsieur de Phocas was a tall but frail young man of twenty-eight or thereabouts, whose crimped and short-cut brown hair surmounted an extraordinarily old and bloodless face. He was neatly dressed in a myrtle-green suit, and he sported a pale green silk cravat speckled with gold,

  That finely-chiselled profile, the deliberate stiffness of the slim, elongated body, the arabesque quality – one might almost say the tormented arabesque quality – of that elegant figure … I was certain that I had seen it all before somewhere.

  It seemed that Monsieur de Phocas was not yet aware of my presence – or was it that he did not deign to notice me? He stood lightly at ease beside my desk in a graceful pose. With the tip of his walking-stick – it was a malacca cane worth at least two hundred francs, with a head bizarrely carved from raw ivory, which immediately attracted my attention – he was turning the pages of a manuscript set down among the books and papers, scanning them negligently from on high.

  The sheer impertinence of it was intolerably odious.

  This manuscript – the pages of prose or verse which the tip of the cane was stirring – had been set down among my own notes and letters, in the privacy of my own home, by a curious and indifferent visitor! I was both indignant at the act and entranced by its audacity – for I like and admire audacity in all things, and in those persons who exhibit it. Already, though, my attention had been distracted. My eyes were caught by the greenish fire suddenly lit within the folds of his cravat by an enormous emerald, whose proud facets sparkled strangely. The gem itself was strange enough, made all the more so by virtue of the fact that its fine, polished facets seemed almost as if they had been modelled in pale wax. It was similar to those which can be seen, bearing the signature of Clouet or Porb
us, in the gallery of the Louvre dedicated to the Valois.

  It seemed that Monsieur de Phocas did not even suspect my presence. Relaxed and aristocratic, he continued rummaging among my papers from a distance. The sleeve of his jacket had ridden up a little, and I saw that he wore a thin platinum bracelet studded with opals around his right wrist.

  That bracelet! I remembered now.

  I had seen that frail, white, thoroughbred wrist before, and that narrow circlet of jewelled platinum. Yes, I had seen them, but on that occasion they had been working through the select jewel-cases of a prestigious artist, a master goldsmith and engraver. I had seen them chez Barruchini, in the shop of the metalworker who was believed to have run away from Florence and whose establishment, known only to lovers of his art, was hidden in the depths of the Rue Visconti – a curious and ancient courtyard in what is perhaps the narrowest of the streets of old Paris, where Balzac was once a printer.

  Delicately pale and clear, like the hand of a princess or a courtesan, the hand which had been stripped of its glove by the Duc de Fréneuse – for I also knew his real name now – had glided that day with infinite slowness above a veritable heap of lapis-lazulis, sardonyxes, onyxes and cornelians, pierced here and there by topazes, amethysts and rubicelles. That hand, ungloved by the Duc de Fréneuse, had sometimes settled like a waxen bird, designating with a finger the selected gem …

  The selected gem …

  My memories of that day were so precise that I could even recall the sound of his voice, and the manner in which the Duc took leave of Barruchini, saying in a curt tone to the goldsmith: ‘The item must be delivered to me within six days. You have only the inlaying to do now. I am counting on you, Barruchini, as you may count on me.’