Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  23 February 1893

  Today I did something unworthy. I tried to get round a journalist I hardly know, in order to obtain from him a pass to attend an execution. I have even invited him to dinner. Yet the man bores me, and the sight of blood is repugnant to me – repugnant to such an extent that when I am at the dentist’s, if I hear a cry in the next room, I almost faint and am quite taken ill.

  A pass for the ceremony has been promised to me. Shall I actually go to this execution?

  12 May 1893. Naples

  I have been to see the most beautiful collection of precious stones. Oh, that museum! What delicate profiles and what deft delineations in the smaller cameos! The Greeks are more graceful – I know not what happy serenity enabled them to characterise divinity so well – but the Roman intaglios have such an intense ardour about them! In the setting of one ring there was an adorable laurel-crowned head, of some young Caesar or empress – Caligula, Otho, Messalina or Poppaea – whose expression was exhausted and possessive at the same time, so heart-rending and so weary that I will certainly dream about it tonight…

  To dream! Such dreams certainly make life more worth living … and only dreams can do that for me.

  13 July 1894

  One encounters in the streets, late at night on the evenings of fetes, the most strange and bizarre passers-by. Do these nights of popular celebration cause ancient and forgotten avatars to stir in the depths of the human soul? This evening, in the movement of the sweaty and excited crowd, I am certain that I passed between the masks of the liberated Bythinians and encountered the courtesans of the Roman decadence.

  There emerged, this evening, from that swarming esplanade of Des Invalides – amid the crackle of fireworks, the shooting stars, the stink of frying, the hiccuping of drunkards and the reeking atmosphere of menageries – the wild effusions of one of Nero’s festivals.

  It was like the odour of a May evening on the Basso-Porto of Naples. It was easy to believe that the faces in that crowd were Sicilian.

  29 November, of the same year

  The gloomy and so very distant gaze of the Antinous; the ecstatic and ferocious, yet imploring, eyes of the Roman cameo. I have found them again, in a rather badly-executed pastel, signed with a woman’s name – an unknown painter, but one to whom I would certainly give a commission, if I were sure that she could reproduce that strange expression.

  And yet there is nothing to them! Two or three pastel crayons have been crushed in rendering that square, emaciated face with the enormous raking jawline, with the mouth voluptuously open and the nostrils flared, beneath a heavy crown of violets, with a poppy lodged behind the ear. The face is extraordinarily ugly, of a sad and cadaverous colour – but beneath the scarcely-raised eyelids there shines and slumbers a liquidity so very green: the dejected and depraved depths of an unsated soul; the doleful emerald of some fearful lust!

  I would give anything to find that gaze.

  18 December, of the same year

  Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,

  Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck

  Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;

  Soft, and stung softly —fairer for a fleck.

  Laus Veneris (Swinburne).

  Oh, that wound inflicted on the beautiful neck of a woman, asleep and abandoned almost to death! The calmness of that body prostrated by pleasure! How that wound fascinated me! I would have loved to apply my lips to it, slowly and entirely sucking out the soul of that woman, and the blood as well! Then, that regular pulse would make me weak; the rhythm of her respiration, lifting up her throat, would fascinate me like the swinging of some nightmarish pendulum. I imagined the moment when my trembling hands would grip the sleeper by the throat – yes, by the throat – and squeeze it, until she breathed no more. I would have liked to strangle her, to murder her, to stop her breathing utterly and forever …

  Ah, but she still breathes … !

  I got up, with a cold sweat on my brow, confused by the soul of the assassin I had for ten seconds become. I should have tied my hands together, in order to prevent them placing themselves about her neck …

  She slept on, and from her lips there came a slight odour of decay … that insipid odour which all human beings exhale when they are asleep.

  Oh! how Anthony and the other saints of the Thébaïd were tempted by night, by soft and guilty nakedness, which came to them in the mirage of the desert. Oh, those errant figures of voluptuousness, which lightly brushed them behind and before, emanating waves of incense and perfumes even though they were evil spirits!

  3 January 1895

  I have slept with that woman again, and the temptation has returned – yes, the temptation to murder! How disgraceful it is!

  I remember that as a child I liked to torture animals, I still recall the adventure of the two turtle-doves, which were once put into my hands to amuse me. Instinctively and unconsciously I suffocated them, by squeezing them too tightly. I have not forgotten that atrocious episode. I was only eight years old.

  The palpitations of life have always filled me with a strange destructive rage. Now there have been two occasions when I was surprised by the idea of murder in association with love.

  Might there be a second self lurking within me?

  [The first manuscript concluded at this point.]

  OPPRESSION

  Undated.

  The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart.

  The Opera rats of the corps du ballet; lilies of the Rat mort; frail mondaines with the muzzles of rodents …

  In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers’ wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk …

  I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the tables d’hôte of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up.

  Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shopgirls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths … the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with eaux de toilette, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief.

  It is all fakery and self-advertisement – truquage and battage, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia – all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès – is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the Manchon de Francine read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers.

  To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis fro
m the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret!

  And the odious and tiresome travesty – the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron’s legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandière retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time – of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!…

  Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long?

  The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since … perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

  Oh, that blue and green something which was revealed to me in inert depths of certain gems, and the even-more-inert depths of certain painted expressions – the plaintive emeralds of Barruchini’s jewellery, and the eyes of certain portraits – I had not yet defined it. I had suffered so excessively from my inability to love almost all women because none of them truly had that expression.

  Friday 3 April 1895

  Evil prayers:

  Your mouth is blessed, for it is adulterous,

  It tastes of fresh roses and the ancient earth,

  It has sucked the hidden juices of flowers and reeds;

  When it speaks, it sounds like the rustling of reeds in the distance;

  And that ruby, impious with sensuality, all bloody and utterly cold

  Is the final wound of Jesus upon the cross.

  Today, on Good Friday, a childish desire to recall the long-lost habit of piety took me to mass at Notre-Dame. I wanted to test the vigorous fire of my affliction – oh, if only I were able to extinguish it! – in the cool shadows of a church. While the Latin phrases rose and fell, chanted by the priest with the measured slowness of the knell, I dutifully followed the text in my book … but it was the horrible lines of Remy de Gourmont which fell from my lips like a series of caresses – like a series of sacrilegious caresses!

  Your feet are blessed, for they are dishonest,

  They have donned brothel-slippers and decorated stockings;

  They have put their muffled heels on the shoulders of the poor;

  They have trodden down the poorest, the purest and the gentlest.

  And the amethyst mouth, which tightens the silken garter,

  Is the last tremor of Jesus upon the cross.

  The evening service dutifully mourned the death of Christ, but in the murmurous quietude of the chapel consecrated to the Tomb, I heard nothing but the evil antiphon of the poet…

  Your eyes are blessed, for they are murderous,

  They are full of phantoms, and the irony of chrysalids

  Sleeps in them, as in the still water in the depths of green grottoes,

  One sees sleeping beasts in the midst of blue and green anemones.

  And it seemed that my flesh crawled with the gentleness of those glaucous things evoked by the verse. It was as if fingertips, like cut emeralds or fresh olives, were stroking the palm of my hand.

  I had let my missal fall to the ground and I collapsed on my prie-dieu. I supported myself on my elbows, both arms hanging loose, hands unmoving and open at my sides … while fresh and round things were pouring from my head, dropping into my fingers.

  The sensation was so unexpected, so finely pure and so deliriously light, that a shiver ran up my spine.

  Had I, in a state of sensual hyperaesthesia, contrived to materialise upon my skin some occult contact with the eyes of my covetous desire? While the momentary interval of doubt remained, better to retain the sensation and to make it more fully mine, I lowered my eyelids. But the contact became more distinct, and the insistence of the caress made me look around. I wanted to see what it was.

  A woman dressed in mourning – a woman still young beneath her widow’s veils – was seated beside me. Her dangling rosary rested gently upon the fingers of my open palm.

  Her eyelids were modestly lowered as she dangled the beads, but a smile played upon the slight arc of her mouth. Between her eyelashes, as between her rosy lips, there was an almost silvery glimmer of whiteness.

  O dolorous sapphire of bitterness and fear!

  Sapphire, final expression of Jesus upon the cross,

  Tuesday 16 June 1895

  I was at the Olympia yesterday evening. The ugliness of that room, the ugliness of the whole audience! The costumes! The disgrace of that sheet-metal pomp which constitutes the ideal outfit of modern man: all those stove-pipes which enclose the legs, arms and torso of the clubman, who is strangled meanwhile by a collar of white porcelain. And the sadness: the greyness of all those faces, drained by the poor hygiene of city life and the abuse of alcohol; all the ravages of late nights and the anxieties of the rat race imprinted in nervous tics on all those fat and flabby faces … their pallor, the colour of lard! And in the boxes as in the orchestra-stalls, beside the banal figures of the males, the females glorying in their extravagance and their vanity!

  There were the usual edifices of feathers, gauzes and painted silks crushing frail necks and flattened bosoms; narrow shoulders hunched up by enormous sleeves; everywhere the stiffened thinness of fashionable phthisis – or, even worse, the artificial elephantiasis of fat wives, sculpted in jet – and all displayed under the raw jets of the gaslight.

  And while these marionettes smiled at one another, and examined one another through their lorgnettes, onstage there was the slow and supple deployment, the skilful play of all the muscles of a marvellous human body.

  Swaddled in a tight costume of pale silk, his bare flesh spangled and sparkling wherever beads of perspiration caught the electric light, an acrobat tumbled hither and yon, arching his entire body. Then, righting himself abruptly with a flourish of the hips, with his legs pointing towards the wings, he imposed on the entire audience the hallucinatory spectacle of a man transformed by rhythm, with the supple grace of the closing of a fan.

  I was in the circle box. In France, it is only permissible to admire statues but tropical countries have no such prejudices, and the emergent Oriental in me took full account of the admirable proportions and the harmony of the movements of the acrobat on the stage.

  The Marquis de V … – whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested – was saying to me with a wicked smile: ‘Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that danger affords you. Wouldn’t it be thrilling, if his sweaty hand failed to grip the bar? The velocity acquired by his rotation about the bar would break his spine quite cleanly, and perhaps a little of the cervical matter might spurt out as far as this! It would be most sensational, and you would have a rare emotion to add to the field of your experience – for you collect emotions, don’t you? What a pretty stew of terrors that man in tights stirs up in us!

  ‘Admit that you almost wish that he will fall! Me too. Many others in the auditorium are in the same state of attention and anguish. That is the horrible instinct of a crowd confronted with a spectacle which awakens in it the ideas of lust and death. Those two agreeable companions always travel together! Take it from me that at the very same moment – see, the man is now holding on to the bar by his fingertips alone – at the very same moment, a good number of the women in these boxes are ardently lusting after that man, not so much for his beauty as for the danger he courts.’

  The voice subtly changed its tone, suddenly becoming more interested. ‘You have singularly pale eyes this evening, my dear Fréneuse. You ought to give up bromides and take valerian instead. You have a charming and curious soul, but you must take command of its changes. You are too ardently and too obviously covetous, this evening, of the death – or at least the fall – of that man.’

  I did not reply. The Marquis de V … was
quite right. The madness of murder had taken hold of me again; the spectacle had me in its hallucinatory grip. Straitened by a penetrating and delirious anguish, I yearned for that man to fall.

  There are appalling depths of cruelty within me.

  THE EYES

  Undated

  The eyes! They teach us all the mysteries of love, for love is neither in the flesh, nor in the soul; love is is the eyes which glance, which caress, which experience all the nuances of sensations and ecstasies; in the eyes where the desires are magnified and idealised. Oh! to live the life of the eyes, in which terrestrial forms are obliterated and annulled; to laugh, to sing, to weep with the eyes, to admire oneself in the eyes, to drown oneself like Narcissus at the spring.

  Charles Vellay.

  Yes, to drown oneself like Narcissus at the spring; there would be joy in that. The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure – but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire.

  The world has the same effect on me as a sea of sand. Oh, the wastelands of warm congealed ash, where nothing can slake my thirst for humid and glaucous eyes! Truly, there are days when I suffer excessively. Mine is the agony of a nomad lost in the desert.

  I have never read anything which echoes my soul and my suffering more closely than the work of Charles Vellay.

  … I have passed years searching in the eyes for that which other men cannot see. Slowly and painfully I have discovered in everyone the limitless frissons which extend eternally in the irises of eyes. I have devoted my soul to the pursuit of mystery, and now my eyes are no longer my own: they have been enraptured, little by little, by all the gazes of other eyes. Today they are no more than a mirror reflecting all those stolen gazes, which only come to life in a complex existence agitated by unknown sensations – and that is my immortality; for I shall not die. My eyes will live, because they are not mine, because I have formed them out of all eyes, with all their tears and all their laughter, and I will survive the sloughing of my body because I have all souls in my eyes.