Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  What poverty of imagination! And how badly she mis-judged me!

  In fairness, she had probably been told that I was a man of a certain kind: a sadist, athirst for violent and complex sensations; a man of bizarre tastes, those which are sometimes called ‘refined’. I know that I have that reputation, carefully cultivated by my friends, or those who pose as friends. In the houses where they dine, they recount indiscretions regarding me over dessert; it is something which ensures further invitations. Then again, journalists often solicit the honour of being introduced to me, of visiting my collection, of describing the interior of my apartments – and Izé was certainly acquainted with journalists!

  She had probably been tipped off in some bar, over the absinthe, or by the gossip in the Neapolitan, while the crowds were leaving some première.

  In any case, she played her part and she threw herself into it; it was touching, in a way. But the pair of them were utterly ridiculous. Forie defended himself – very embarrassed, because I had invited him – but Izé was dead set on wrapping him up … playing to the gallery.

  It began with squeezings of the hand and touches of the knee under the table. They eventually progressed to kisses: kisses on the neck; kisses on the mouth, while eating, Forie choked on them, actually gagging with the arms of the gentle child about his neck and her lips on his! Forie became apoplectic; somewhat weakened by his resistance, she nevertheless clung stubbornly to her plan. She forced herself on his mouth whether he liked it or not: a mouthful of filet portugaise, on the tail of a lobster; kisses à la sauce crevette and kisses à la mayonaisse. It was sufficiently distasteful to to give the painter a very long face!

  During dessert, she installed herself on his knees and delicately put strawberries into his mouth. She made him drink champagne from her glass, dipping her tongue in it beforehand. To protect his shirt-front, Forie had to spread his napkin over it. He turned his head away in the hope of avoiding the tide of caresses, like a man who has grown impatient at the hairdresser’s. Camped on his knees, swaddled in a rose-pink dress, Kranile was the ideal barber: she was certainly giving him a close shave! But it was me that she was really intent on shaving; I noticed that her eyes never left me. The tramp was watching me; both eyes, darting beneath their lids, lay in wait for every quiver of my face, every tightening of my fingers.

  ‘If you will not refrain for my sake, think of the waiter,’ I told them, in the end. ‘I feel like a voyeur. It must be humiliating for you.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what came over her,’ Forie told me, as we left. ‘It’s the first time anything like this has happened. She can’t possibly feel that way about me! She’s drunk!’

  ‘No, just green,’ I replied, in their frightful argot.

  Next day, I sent her two pink pearls and a bouquet of black irises. I have not seen her since.

  Izé Kranile has told all and sundry that I am impotent.

  If she only knew! If they only knew!

  Oh, the nights in Naples and Amalfi, excursions by boat in the gulf of Salerno – and the long and insatiable kisses I shared with two Hungarian sisters at the hotel in Sorrento! The evenings in a gondola on the dead lagoon in Venice; brief intervals in the abandoned canals of Judea … and the unexpected encounters, the passionate adventures of Florence … adventures without tomorrows which seemed eternal. And the exhausting hallucinations of Sidi-Ocba and Thimgad; vampire kisses in the midst of the mirage of the sands, and the salty breeze of the desert!

  If she only knew! If they only knew!

  ENCHANTMENT

  July 91

  The obsession of the eyes has returned to possess me.

  Ever since the low comedy of that girl – since the dinner at Paillard’s with that Kranile and Forie – the liquid green eyes that I once saw shining beneath the plaster eyelids of the Antinous, the plantive emerald lying in wait like a gleam in the orbits of the eyes of the statues of Herculaneum, the alluring gaze of the portraits in the museum, the challenge of centuries captured in the painted eyes of certain faces of infants and courtesans … all the deception and the mystery, all the legend and the eeriness … has returned to persecute me, hallucinate me, solicit me and oppress me, filling me with hatred, shame and sexual excitement.

  Another man has take up residence within me … and what a man! What frightful atavism, what sinister ancestor has it stirred up in the depths of my being? That gaze …

  And the abominations whispered by my desire in the appalling solitude of my nights … appalling! For my nights are haunted, now … oh for the nights of my childhood, long ago and far away, in the old family residence, when I never lost a wink of sleep!

  Same month, same year.

  It is a veritable demon that obsesses me.

  I am convinced of this now, for yesterday evening I was unexpectedly confronted with the apparition of the gaze in circumstances which were thoroughly banal. I saw the unanticipated gleam of the emerald in the course of an excursion in a boat. On some suburban stretch of the river, so near and yet so far away, the eye of Astarté suddenly illuminated the eyes of a crewman. It smacks of the supernatural and the beyond. There is more than mortal sickness in my suffering; there is active evil: an occult influence; an enemy will; witchcraft; enchantment.

  The boat was going slowly downstream, cutting through the heavy water scaled with waterweed and bristling with rushes; here and there, floating on the surface, lay large clusters of somnolent water-lilies. The stream was steeped in shadow and bathed in light. It was the same waterway which enters Poissy and Vilennes and yet, behind the poplars and the willows of the island I knew there was a military camp, a barracks. The Auteuil viaduct was on the horizon, as was the Eiffel tower. The hour was quite exquisite after the oppressive warmth of the day. We were surrounded by the quivering of leaves and the freshness of grass, beneath the shady and delicately roseate silk of the suburban sky, full of the smoke of factories and the play of the sunlight…

  The splash of the oars lulled me and filled me with a sense of well-being, when – quite by chance – I caught the eye of the oarsman seated in front of me. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying out.

  In a suntanned face, cooked and ripened like a smoked fish, two large blue eyes burned: the most intense, the most violent and the purest blue; two hallucinatory eyes of such transparency and such profundity!

  Those eyes! They immediately recalled to me all those other eyes, living and dead: the eyes of Willie and those of the actress Dinah Salher in Lorenzaccio or in Cleopatra — in Cleopatra above all, for in that part the saffron with which the tragedienne coloured her skin had brought out all the exoticism of her eyes. The eyes of the boatman were also the eyes of children in certain portraits of Bastien-Lepage, and certain eyes I had encountered at Basle in the portraits of Holbein and Albrecht Dürer. With my hands clasped on top of my head, trying to contain the painful hammering, I was just about to ask the name of the man when the two liquid sapphires suddenly grew dim, and became green. They had changed into two emeralds, so transparently deep that I had the sensation of standing on the lip of the abyss. Seized by vertigo, not wishing to be engulfed, I stood up in the boat.

  ‘Is Monsieur ill?’ the rower asked me. ‘Does Monsieur wish me to put into shore?’

  The man’s eyes had become blue again: the fresh and vivid blue of the eyes of Willie and Dinah. The boat had passed through a patch of shadow, and the reflection of the bright green foliage of the willows had briefly illuminated his gaze.

  That, at least is the explanation which I have since given myself – but it is not a satisfactory explanation. This is by no means the first time I have gone boating on the Seine, and I have never before encoutered the plaintive emeralds which lurk in the eyes of the statues of Pompeii, the liquid eyes of the Antinous.

  Astarté has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.

  December 97

  My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. I
t lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and – once the crisis is over – leaves me in mortal terror of myself.

  Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing – for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me … and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect.

  Afterwards, I was ashamed.

  I am always ashamed of myself nowadays.

  The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish.

  Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city – all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities – I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy – so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love.

  Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird!

  Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths … those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers … fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises … nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and …

  It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon … a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!

  February 1898

  Why does the memory of that stupid encounter pursue me so insistently? It has stirred up in me I know not what: something unnamable and unhealthy; something I never suspected … and yet, on due reflection, what could have been more straightforward than my encounter with those two masqueraders?

  The female student, peaked cap perched atop her ears, wearing a tunic with metal buttons; and with her that ignoble droll in a cassock, dragging priestly dignity in the gutter – certainly a sight to behold. There was nothing there to invite misinterpretation; it was the night of Mardi Gras. The waddling of the woman, her wide hips beneath the drape of her tunic, the shameless make-up of her face … it all stank of the partying and debauchery of carnival night: all of it, including the smug attitude and the oblique smile of that street-hawker in clerical costume! But in that badly-lit street in Les Halles, at the door of that cheap hotel, the silhouettes of those two masqueraders became dangerous and disquieting. The hour was ominous too; it was close to midnight. What were they going to do together in that flophouse? The impression imposed upon me by the image of the androgynous student accompanied by the pseudo-priest was somehow abominable, ignominious and sacrilegious.

  I have always loved masquerades; masks fascinate me. The enigma of the face that I cannot see attracts me strongly; it is the vertigo of the brink of the abyss. In the great throng of the Opera balls, as in the vulgar and noisy crowds of the music-halls, eyes glimpsed through the holes in black velvet loups, or beneath the lace of mantillas, have for me a particular charm, a sensual mystery which excites and intoxicates me with an occult fever. There, when I am seized by the hazard of the game and the fervour of the chase, it always seems to me that those liquid eyes of pastel green that I love – the distant gaze of the Antinous — shine and look out at me from behind the masks.

  March 1898

  What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul.

  They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike!

  They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic – for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels.

  I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks … and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask … and the girl in the next doorway was also masked … and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring …

  I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks … when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive.

  Their vitreous eyes were looking at me …

  I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile’s left eye and Willie’s right eye … so that every one of them appeared to be squinting.

  Am I to be haunted by masks now?

  THE TERROR OF THE MASQUERADE

  April 98.

  Masks! I see them everywhere. That dreadful vision of the other night – the deserted town with its masked corpses in every doorway; that nightmare product of morphine and ether – has taken up residence within me. I see masks in the street, I see them on stage in the theatre, I find yet more of them in the boxes. They are on the balcony and in the orchestra-pit. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by masks. The attendants to whom I give my overcoat are masked; masks crowd around me in the foyer as everyone leaves, and the coachman who drives me home has the same cardboard grimace fixe
d upon his face!

  It is truly too much to bear: to feel that one is alone and at the mercy of all those enigmatic and deceptive faces, alone amid all the mocking laughs and the threats embodied in those masks. I have tried to persuade myself that I am dreaming, and that I am the victim of a hallucination, but all the powdered and painted faces of women, all the rouged lips and kohl-blackened eyelids … all of that has created around me an atmosphere of trance and mortal agony. Cosmetics: there is the root cause of my illness!

  But I am happy, now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres.

  The other evening, in that café-cabaret in the Rue de la Fontaine, where I had run aground with Tramsel and Jocard, who had taken me there to see that supposedly-fashionable singer … how could they fail to see that she was nothing but a corpse?

  Yes, beneath the sumptuous and heavy ballgown, which swaddled her and held her upright like a sentry-box of pink velvet trimmed and embroidered with gold – a coffin befitting the queen of Spain – there was a corpse! But the others, amused by her wan voice and her emaciated frame, found her quaint – more than that, quite ‘droll’…

  Droll! that drab, soft and inconsistent epithet that everyone uses nowadays! The woman had, to be sure, a tiny carven head, and a kind of macabre prettiness within the furry heap of her opera-cloak. They studied her minutely, interested by the romance of her story: a petite bourgeoise thrown into the high life following the fad which had caught her up – and neither of them, nor anyone else besides in the whole of that room, had perceived what was immediately evident to my eyes. Placed flat on the white satin of her dress, the two hands of that singer were the two hands of a skeleton: two sets of knuckle-bones gloved in white suede. They might have been drawn by Albrecht Dürer: the ten fingers of an evil dead woman, fitted at the ends of the two overlong and excessively thin arms of a mannequin …