Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  It was a peacock of enamelled metal which he had come to order from the master engraver. He had come to select for himself the jewels to be displayed on the piece, which would be one more original to add to a vast collection. The fancies of the Duc de Fréneuse could no longer be enumerated; they had become the stuff of legend.

  More than that, the gentleman himself had become a legend in his own right: a legend unconsciously created at first, but which he had undertaken to cherish and maintain. Such fabulous tales were whispered concerning this young man – a millionaire five times over, scion of a great and well-connected family – who played no part in society, had no friends, showed off no mistresses, and routinely left Paris at the end of November in order to spend his winters in the Orient!

  A profound mystery, thickened according to one’s taste, enshrouded his life. Outside of two or three theatrical premières which mobilised all Paris in the spring, the pale and tall young man whose figure was so straight and whose face was so world-weary was never encountered. At one time he had kept a racing stable, and had enjoyed considerable success as a breeder, but he had abruptly ceased to attend the meetings; he had sold his horses and his stud-farm. After deserting the boudoirs of young women he had for a short time defected to the salons of the suburbs, but these had only briefly retained his interest before he made a clean break and disappeared completely.

  Nowadays, Fréneuse was a virtual stranger in his own land. In the spring, however, when some sensational acrobat, male or female, was advertised to appear at the Olympia, the circus or the Folies Bergère, it sometimes happened that one would encounter Fréneuse every evening of the week – and that strange insistence would became a new pretext for stories, a new source of hypotheses, and of such copious gossip that everyone would know about it. Then Fréneuse would suddenly immerse himself again, retreating into silence. One would hear that he had set out once more for London or Smyrna, for the Balearics or Naples, perhaps for Palermo or Corfu – no one would be any the wiser, until the day came when someone at the club might report having met him on the quay, at the home of an antiquary, at the establishment of some dealer in precious stones in the Rue de Lille or some numismatist in the Rue Bonaparte, seated most attentively at a table, magnifying glass in hand, before some twelfth-century intaglio or some collectible cameo.

  Fréneuse kept in his apartment in the Rue de Varenne an entire private museum of precious stones, celebrated among collectors and merchants alike. He had also, it was said, brought back from the Orient – from the souks of Tunis and the bazaars of Smyrna – a veritable treasure-trove of antique jewellery, precious tapestries, rare weapons and deadly poisons; but Fréneuse had no friends, and few visitors were ever admitted to the family apartment-house. His only intercourse was with merchants or other collectors like himself; among these, the master engraver Barruchini was perhaps the only one who was ever allowed to cross his threshold in the Rue de Varenne. The rest of the world was politely shown the door.

  ‘One would be deranged by the opium fumes,’ said the world, by way of revenge – and that was the most anodyne of the stories which were put about regarding the Comte de Fréneuse, so vindictively was the handsome young man despised by the great society of idlers and good-for-nothings. This man, it was said, had brought back with him all the vices of the Orient.

  And it was the Duc de Fréneuse that I now had in my home, negligently rifling through my papers with the tip of his cane! It was Fréneuse and his legends – his mysterious past, his equivocal present and his even darker future – who had entered into my house under a false name.

  He lifted his eyes, perceiving me at last. After a polite inclination of his head, he made a gesture as though to reassemble the pages scattered on my table.

  ‘Firstly,’ he said, as if he had read my thoughts, ‘I must ask you to excuse me, monsieur, for introducing myself into your home under a false name, but that name is now my own. The Duc de Fréneuse is dead; there is no longer anyone but Monsieur de Phocas. Besides, I am on the brink of departing for a long absence. I am exiling myself from France, perhaps forever. This journey is the last one remaining to me; I have come to an important decision. All this undoubtedly matters little to you – and yet, given that I have taken the trouble to come to see you, perhaps it does matter a little.’

  He gestured his refusal of the seat which I offered him, and likewise demanded that I let him continue.

  ‘You know Barruchini. You have written an unforgettable tribute to the engraver and his artistry – unforgettable for me at least, since it is their author that I chose to visit today. It was in the Revue de Lutèce. You have understood, and described in poetic terms, the multitudinous and turbid glimmers which constitute the prismatic art of that goldsmith-magician. Oh, what a mute and ever-changing fire sleeps within his jewels, what minute details of animals or flowers are set by him in the depths of gems! You have elegantly sung the praises of that golden flora, which is at once Byzantine, Egyptian and Renaissance! You have grasped the coralline quality of those submarine jewels – yes, submarine, for it is as if the almost-cerulean bloom of beryls, peridots, opals and pale sapphires, the colour of seaweeds and waves, has rested for a long time at the bottom of the sea. Like the rings of Solomon or the cups of the king of Thule, they belong to the caskets of cities engulfed by the sea; the daughter of the king of Ys must have worn such jewels when she delivered the keys of the lock-gates to the Demon …

  ‘Oh, the Barruchini necklaces, those rills of blue and green stones, those over-weighty bracelets encrusted wih opals! Gustave Moreau has decked the nude bodies of his damned princesses with them. They are the jewellery of Cleopatra and Salomé. They are also the jewellery of legend, the jewellery of moonlight and evening:

  ‘And that which took place in times most ancient.’

  ‘That is the formula, as you have written, which springs to the lips when one confronts these glazed fruits, these flowers of polished stone set in gold. It is of Egypt and of the divided Roman Empire especially that these jewels of Memphis and Byzantium make one dream, but perhaps they remind one even more of the city of the king of Ys and its submerged lock-gates.

  ‘You see that I know my authors. Now, no one has suffered more than myself from the morbid attraction of these jewels; and, sick unto death – seeing that I am being carried away by their translucent glaucous poison – it is you in whom I now wish to confide, monsieur: you, who have understood their sumptuous and dangerous magic well enough to communicate to others its thrill and its malaise.

  ‘You alone can understand me. You alone can indulgently recognise the affinity which attracted me to you. The Duc de Fréneuse was merely an eccentric, monsieur; for all others save yourself, Monsieur de Phocas would be a madman. I mentioned just now the name of the city of Ys and the Demon which caused that city to be engulfed: the Demon of Lust, which seduced the daughter of the king. Such curses have the power to extend across the centuries. I tell you that this Demon is within me. A veritable Demon tortures and haunts me, and has done ever since my adolescence. Who knows – perhaps it was already in me when I was merely a child? Even though I may seem to you to be deluded, monsieur, I have suffered for many years the effects of a certain blue and green something.

  ‘Whether it is the gleam of a gem or a gaze that I lust after – worse, that I am bewitched by – I am possessed by a certain glaucous transparence. It is like a hunger in me. I search for this gleam – in vain! – in the irises of eyes and the transparency of gemstones, but no human eye possesses it. Occasionally, I have detected it in the empty orbit of a statue’s eye or beneath the painted eyelids of a portrait, but it has only been a decoy: the brightness is always extinguished, having scarcely been glimpsed.

  I am above all else a lover of the past. Do you want me to tell you how the showcases of Barruchini have exasperated my illness? I have seen emerging and springing forth from his jewels that gaze which I seek. It is the gaze of Dahgut, the daughter of the king of Ys. It is also the gaze
of Salomé. Above all, it is the limpid green clarity of the gaze of Astarté: that Astarté who is the Demon of Lust and also the Demon of the Sea …’

  He paused, doubtless observing alarm in my features, and went on: ‘Yes, agreed: I am a visionary, and what visions I have! Pray that you might be spared such torture, for I suffer so much from them that they will surely kill me. Yes, it is because of these visions and their horrible counsel, because of the whispers heaped upon me in my nightmares, that I am leaving Paris, leaving France, and leaving ancient Europe, which no longer has the power to contain such things …

  ‘Will I escape them even in Asia?

  ‘That night still … but I am abusing your hospitality. This is what I have come to ask of you, monsieur. I am going away, perhaps never to be seen again. I have consigned to these pages the first impressions of my illness: the unconscious temptations of a man of today, sunk in occultism and neurosis. Will you permit me to entrust these pages to you, and will you promise me to read them? I will send you the continuation of this first confession from Asia, for which I shall shortly be embarking and where I wish to settle, in the hope that I might there find a remedy for my obsessions, for I need to cry out to someone the pangs of my anguish. I need to know that here in Europe there is someone who pities me, and would rejoice in my recovery if ever Heaven should grant it to me. Will you be that someone?’

  I offered my hand to Monsieur de Phocas.

  THE MANUSCRIPT

  ‘And his hands – the lax gentleness of his icy handshake, his fingers gliding between yours like an escaping serpent! You haven’t noticed his hands? They always made a singular impression on me … if you could call such an elusive embrace of a cold and fluid hand a handshake!’

  ‘For me, it was the eyes which were particularly disquieting – those pale blue eyes, hard as diamond. They had such a frosty gleam they might have been made of lapis lazuli or steel, those eyes. And the stress of their regard! I, for one, was utterly disconcerted by them, every time he spoke to me at the club.’

  ‘Yes, he is a rather bizarre fellow, like all his generation!’

  ‘You know that he is at least forty?’

  ‘Him! he looks twenty-eight.’

  ‘Come on, have you never looked at him? His face is horribly old. I admit that the body has remained young – no one is more sveltely supple than he – but the face is ravaged. His complexion has the grey-brown tinge of an abominable lassitude, and as for the mouth! The thinness of his smile! That mouth has been tightened by the experience of a hundred years.’

  ‘Opium ages people prematurely. Nothing brings the European down like the Orient.’

  ‘Ah! He is an opium-smoker, then?’

  ‘Without doubt. What other explanation could there be for the strange depressions and the frightful fatigues which overwhelm him so suddenly during these last five years. Sometimes, at the club, when he was on the point of departure, he would be compelled to stretch himself out and lie down for hours on end …’

  ‘Hours?’

  ‘Yes, long hours, lying inert and exhausted, as if his limbs were hanging loose. Look, de Mazel, you’ve known him for years – hasn’t he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?’

  ‘Forty hours?’

  ‘Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Fréneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.’

  ‘The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I’ve never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.

  ‘Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!’

  ‘You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Fréneuse. Fréneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It’s the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis ‘ – le Mazel released the word carelessly – ‘it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide.’

  Then Chameroy spoke. ‘You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Fréneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No – a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation – has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Fréneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times, under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard – a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings – which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Duc de Fréneuse. As far as I’m concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill – and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness…’

  Such were the discussions stirred up by the departure of Fréneuse. The apartment-house in the Rue de Varenne and all its associated goods and chattels had been put up for sale, advertised two days in advance on page four of Le Figaro and Le Temps. Rumours, legends, hypotheses … it only required the name of Fréneuse to be pronounced, as if it were a kind of yeast, for the fermentation to begin: a vast brew of stupidities, falsehoods, presumptions … but for me there was nothing to be learned from these elegant and airy clubmen.

  All the muffled whispers of the scandalmongers, all the rustlings of intrigued and mystified public opinion surrounding the true name of Monsieur de Phocas, had been going the rounds for ten years. And this was the man who had chosen me as a confidant! It was to me that he had offered, of his own free will, the honour or the shame of deciphering his life. I would have the opportunity to understand, at last, the enigma which he had consigned to the pages of his manuscript.

  The manuscript was entirely written by his own hand, although in divers styles – for the handwriting of a man changes with his states of mind, and graphology bears witness, as a trait of the pen, to the fall of an honest man who becomes a rogue. I decided, one night, to read the pages entrusted to me: those which Monsieur de Phocas had read over so disdainfully while he spread them out on my table with the tip of his cane, reading out of the corners of his eyes beneath their darkened brows.

  I transcribe these pages exactly as I found them, disordered and incoherent as to their dates – but I have taken leave to suppress a few whose contents are too audacious to be set in print at the present time.

  At the begining, on the first page, there appears a quotation which is taken, with the supplementary note, from Swinburne’s Laus Veneris:

  There is a feverish famine in my veins …

  ……………………………………………….

  Sin, is it sin whereby men’s souls are thrust

  Into the gulf? yet I had a good trust

  To save my soul before it slipped therein,

  Trod under by the fire-shod feet of lust.

  Oh, ‘the sad hell where all sweet love hath end, all but the pain that n
ever finisheth!’

  After this there are four lines of De Musset taken from Of what young girls dream:

  Ah! misfortune to him who allows Debauchery

  To fix her iron nail beneath his left breast!

  The heart of a virgin man is a profound vessel;

  The surface of the sea is calm when the blemish is on its bed.

  The personal inscriptions commence as follows:

  8 April 1891

  The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant’s quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth.

  This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, ‘String up the aristos!’ just as they shout ‘Down with the army!’ or ‘Death to the Jews!’ today?

  30 October 1891

  True beauty is only to be found in the faces of statues. Their immobility is a kind of existence very different from the grimaces of our features. It is as if a divine breath animates them sometimes – and then, how intense the gaze of their eyes becomes!

  I have spent all day at the Louvre. The marble gaze of the Antinous still pursues me. With what softness and warmth – at the same time knowing and profound – its long-dead eyes settled upon me! For a moment, I believed that I perceived a green glimmer lurking there. If that bust belonged to me, I would mount emeralds in its eyes.