by Jean Lorrain
And while that room convulsed with laughter and thrilled with pleasure, greeting her buffoonery and her animal cries with a dolorous ovation, I became convinced that her hands no more belonged to her body than her body, with its excessively high shoulders, belonged to her head…
The conviction filled me with such fear and sickness that I did not hear the singing of a living woman, but of some automaton pieced together from disparate odds and ends – or perhaps even worse, some dead woman hastily reconstructed from hospital remains: the macabre fantasy of some medical student, dreamed up on the benches of the lecture-hall … and that evening began, like some tale of Hoffmann, to turn into a vision of the lunatic asylum.
Oh, how that Olympia of the concert-hall has hastened the progress of my malady!
May 1898
O brothers, sad lilies, I languish in beauty
That I might be desired amid your nakedness,
And towards you, nymphs, nymphs of these fountains,
I come in the pure silence to offer my vain tears.
The hymns of the sun have faded. It is evening.
I hear the golden grass growing tall in the holy shadow
And the perfidious moon holds up its mirror,
So that the bright fountain is extinguished by the night.
Thus, thrown in the harmonious reeds,
I languish, O sapphire, in my sad beauty;
Antique sapphire and magical spring,
Where I forgot the laughter of the ancient hour,
How I lament your pure and fatal outflow!
Formerly, in my hour of need, I had only to open my caskets and to rest my temples upon a cold pool of gems in order to refresh them. The sombre azure of sapphires calmed me best of all; the sapphire is the the stone of the solitary and the celibate; the sapphire is the gaze of Narcissus. Franz Ebner, the jeweller of Munich, brought me back such beautiful sapphires from India: sapphires whose depths were so profound and clear that it seemed the transparent nights of Ceylon still dwelt therein; nocturnal sapphires in which I was able, not so very long ago, to drown my fever whenever I caressed them with my fingers and my eyes.
And the beautiful lines of Paul Valéry! What calmness their sublime nostalgic melancholy brought me! Those lines substituted for my horrible sickness the plight of Narcissus; and thereby cooled that suffering and phosphorous soul which the plaintive eyes of the Antinous has lighted in my being. But sapphires no longer appease me, now that I am haunted by the masks.
1st June 1898
Is it because I have taken so much pleasure in the cold depths of jewels that my eyes have been taken captive by this atrocious clairvoyance?
The simple fact is that I am suffering and dying of something which is not seen by others, but which I can see! My ‘hallucination’ is only an extra sense: it is some unnamable facet of the human soul which is brought forth to bloom upon the skin, and which lends to every face the semblance of a mask.
I have always had some defect which makes me suffer from the ugliness of people encountered in the street, especially the little people: labourers going to work; clerks to their offices; housekeepers and servants. The ugliness of a saddened and miserable clown is further aggravated by the vulgarities of modern life, the degrading promiscuities of modern life …
Oh, the horror of a shower of rain in November, the interior of a bus station! All the ugliness of a Parisian street: the poverty of certain necks beneath the thin hair and weaselly faces of certain hurrying housewives; the exhausted and vicious chlorosis of the excessively-pallid lips and the oblique eyes, always sunken under bulging eyelids, of certain woman-chasers! The perfect hideousness of a Paris street! With the first frosts that hideousness becomes terrible! All this, at any rate, is easily explicable.
The poor downcast faces of aged artisans and shopkeepers display all the everyday cares of menial work: the burdens of petty preoccupations and the anxiety of the unpaid bills which made the end of every month fearful. The lassitude of the penniless at odds with life – a soured life without foresight – and all the unhappiness of simply existing, without a single elevated thought in their heads, has created those flat and mournful horrors.
How could one hope to find an expression in those eyes, fixed by stupefaction or hardened by hate: the glassy, criminal eyes of all those poor devils? Naturally, the thought occurs that perhaps there is one among them who is not entirely sordid and worthless; but one only sees the light of money and theft glimmering in their eyes. Lust, when they experience it, is venal and vandalistic. Each one, in his secret thoughts, dreams of nothing but the means to cheat and rob others.
Modern life – luxurious, pitiless and sceptical – has formed the souls of these men, and their women likewise, into those of prison guards or bandits. It has given them the flattened heads of venomous snakes, the pointed and twisted muzzles of rodents, the jaws of sharks and the snouts of pigs. Envy, desperation, hatred, egoism and avarice have re-created humanity as a bestiary in which every low instinct is imprinted with animal traits…
But those ignoble masks! To think that I have believed for so long that they were the sole prerogative of the poorer classes. Mere racial prejudice has made me think so.
The poorer classes! What blasphemy! I have not looked closely enough at my own kind.
10 June 1898.
The one joy in my Hell, the one consolation to be found in the haunted shadows where I struggle, if there is any consolation at all, is that I am no longer alone in my struggle!
There is another man who has the same obsession as myself, another man who is haunted by the masks, another man who sees them and dreads them. That man is a great painter, an English artist known throughout Europe, one of the most famous men in London. It is Claudius Ethal, the renowned Ethal, who has removed himself from England and set up home in Paris in the wake of the notorious lawsuit involving Lord Kerneby.
Ethal also sees the masks; more than that, he immediately sees through the mask of every human face. The resemblance to an animal is the first characteristic that strikes him in every being he encounters … and he suffers so acutely from this dreadful clairvoyance that he has been obliged to renounce his calling. This great painter of portraits will henceforth paint nothing but landscapes – Claudius Ethal, creator of The Young English Rose and The Woman in Green!
By means of what secret presentiment has that visionary become aware of my own sickness? Was it instinct, or intelligence communicated to him by the indiscretions of my acquaintances, that brought him to me so quickly in the salon, the day before yesterday, with a familiarity that the mundane introduction before dinner hardly authorised? Why did he speak to me in that low and distant voice – a completely different voice from that which he had displayed at dinner – why did he say to me with that air of mystery and complicity: ‘Do you not find, Monsieur le Due, that the Marquise de Sarlèze is strangely reminiscent of a stork this evening?’
It was insane, but it was true.
That evening, with her long stippled neck, her narrow face, her round eyes with membranous lids, above all with her great nose tapering like a beak and the evident artifice in the wig imperfectly secured to her cranium, the Marquise de Sarlèze was a horrid stork out of some nightmare. The resemblance suddenly seemed to cry out to me, and I felt my reason darkened by the unknown, for in the vaporous luminosity of the chandeliers, along the high windows draped with pale green satin and in the doorways, the rooms of the Sarlèze apartments were suddenly populated with masqueraders.
It was the Englishman who evoked and imposed them on my vision. The half-naked woman at the piano, who was singing as if weighed down by the burden of her throat, had the profile of a bleating sheep; her blonde hair had the dull and woolly aspect of a fleece. The muzzle of a fox emerged from Tramsel’s face, the mouth of a hyena from the novelist Mireau. In the group of seated women – all the flowers of the faubourg in a single basket – there were heavy bovine faces: the aqueous eyes of ruminant cows, ranged alongside the
receding brows of carnivores and the round eyes of birds of prey.
That terrible Englishman identified all the resemblances for me. Standing next to Pleyel, the woman with a sheep’s face, the Comtesse de Barville, continued to bleat a song by Chaminade; her pianist-a professional with the protruding eyes of a batrachian in a crushed and stupid little face – provided desultory and jerky accompaniment.
Claudius Ethal, leaning close to my ear, continued to put names to these monsters. The entire suite of the Sarlèze apartments – with their long parallelograms of ancient panellings, slightly touched up with gilt – was populated with ghosts by that diabolical Englishman. As if by means of some magical rite, the whole atmosphere swarmed with larvae, like a drop of water viewed through a microscope. The dreadful faces were allowed to become transparent to the instincts and ignoble thoughts of the souls within. All around us was a great whirlpool of grimacing mouths of shadow.
The nightmare immediately lost its grip when the Englishman fell silent.
THE HEALER
June 98
What kind of man is this Ethal? Is he genuine? Is he a great artist or a mountebank? I left his studio confused, intrigued, but nevertheless under his spell. For a moment I believed myself cured …
Well, given that I am just as disturbed as I was before, I evidently am not – but this is a different disturbance. I am less anxious about my problem but so disquieted by the man!
What a marvellous improviser he is; what an awakener of new ideas – strange ideas which nevertheless seem true!
This Claudius Ethal has bewitched me. I saw nothing in his studio: not a drawing, not a sketch, not a trace of oil-paints … and what a singular workplace for a sensual and sumptuous artist like him! Four bare walls lit by the cold daylight of a huge window with a view of rooftops – and what roofs! The Pantheon and the steeples of Saint-Sulpice. The Englishman has seen fit to settle on the other side of the river, at the end of the world, behind the Luxemburg …
In that vast hall, its ceiling so high that it seems to recede into shadow, there is not a single ornament, not a single bright patch of antique fabric, not a single gilt frame. It is a painter’s studio denuded of all the customary decor. There is a certain luxury, though, in the austerity: the silky smoothness of a waxed and polished floor in which one can see one’s face, the parquet gleaming like a field of ice – and, in one corner, a tall Imperial cheval-glass, mounted in a mahogany frame decorated with masks.
There were Debureau masks: the pale faces of Pierrots with pinched nostrils and tight smiles. There were Japanese masks, some in bronze and others in laquered wood. There were masks from the Italian commedia, made of silk and painted wax, and a few of black gauze stretched over brass wire. There were enigmatic and cleverly horrid Venetian masks, like those of the characters of de Longhi.
An entire garland of grimaces had been posed around the sleeping pool of the mirror.
I had come to see a painter and his paintings, but I had fallen upon a collection of masks. I experienced a moment of near-dread.
‘I have brought them out for you,’ said Claudius Ethal, with the graceful gesture of a dancing-master. ‘I have a fairly full collection here. Debureau masks are becoming rather scarce; I have had enquires about those from Venice, they simply cannot be found today. I don’t have to tell you about the Japanese; all Edo has come to London and the avenue of the Opera.’
I remained on my guard, and he continued. ‘Don’t stand in awe of them: the only chance you have of being cured of your obsession with masks is to familiarise yourself with them, and to see their ordinariness. Study them at your leisure; handle them; penetrate their inspiring and horrifying ugliness – for there are those among them which are the works of great artists. Their ugliness born of dreams has extended for you the distressing qualities of human ugliness. The best cure for such delusions is homoeopathic. I am quite familiar with your problem; it is my own. It is the only reason for my voluntary exile from London. The fuliginous atmosphere and the fogs which rise out of the Thames fashion spectres and mannequins out of all mankind, in a manner too dreadful by far to be endured. I can breathe so much more easily since I began to live with masks! So I have brought them all out for you.’
Moving aside, with the peculiar grace of a dancer, Ethal displayed to me a mahogany sleeping-couch decorated in the same fashion as his cheval-glass: a whole heap of masks encumbered the cushions.
There were charming ones as well as terrible ones, that I must admit. The painter was particularly entranced by Japanese masks: warriors’, actors’ and courtesans’ masks. Some of them were frightfully contorted, the bronze cheeks creased by a thousand wrinkles, with vermilion weeping from the corners of the eyes and long trails of green at the corners of the mouths like splenetic beards.
‘These are the masks of demons,’ said the Englishman, caressing the long black swept-back tresses of one of them. ‘The Samurai wore them in battle, to terrify the enemy. The one which is covered in green scales, with two opal pendants between the nostrils, is the mask of a sea-demon. This one, with the tufts of white fur for eyebrows and the two horsehair brushes beside the lips, is the mask of an old man. These others, of white porcelain – a material as smooth and fine as the cheeks of a Japanese maiden, and so gentle to the touch – are the masks of courtesans. See how alike they all are, with their delicate nostrils, their round faces and their heavy slanted eyelids; they are all effigies of the same goddess. The black of their wigs is rather beautiful, isn’t it? Those which bubble over with laughter even in their immobility are the masks of comic actors.’
That devil of a man pronounced the names of demons, gods and goddesses; his erudition cast a spell. Then: ‘Bah! I have been down there too long!’
Now he took up the light edifices of gauze and painted silk which were Venetian masks. ‘Here is a Cockadrill, a Captain Fracasse, a Pantaloon and a Braggadocio. Only the noses are different – and the cut of their moustaches, if you look at them closely. Doesn’t the white silk mask with enormous spectacles evoke a rather comical dread? It is Doctor Curucucu, an actual marionette featured in the Tales of Hoffmann. And what about that one, with all the black horsehair and the long spatulate nose like a stork’s beak tipped with a spoon? Can you imagine anything more appalling? It’s a duenna’s mask; amorous young women were well-guarded when they had to go about flanked by old dragons dressed up in something like that. The whole carnival of Venice is put on parade before us beneath the cape and the domino, lying in ambush behind these masks … Would you like a gondola? Where shall we go, San Marco or the Lido?’
He laughed.
His vivacity stunned me. I laughed with him, charmed by his fluency, dazzled by the scintillation of so many memories – and I no longer saw, in the eye-holes of all those masks, the frightful gleam of suffering which had previously shone therein for me.
‘That’s enough for today,’ he declared, after an hour and a half of rambling. ‘You must come again, as often as possible. Your case is so interesting! When you have become fully inured to the masks, we will thumb through the albums of the great caricaturists together: Rowlandson, Hogarth, and above all Goya. Ah! the genius of his Capriccios, the soothing horror of his witches and beggars! You have not yet made sufficient progress to face the terrible Spaniard, but his work is a philtre which will facilitate your cure. There is also Rops, but the lewd aspects of that artist would reawaken fevers in you which we must let lie for the time being. Perhaps Ensor and his modern nightmares, when you are better. This is an authentic cure that I have set in train.
‘If we were in Madrid, I would tell you to go to the Prado every morning, so that you might enjoy the suggestive influence of Velasquez’ madmen, the mad Hapsburgs; they provide a perfect diversion. As we are not, you must go instead to the Louvre. Antonio Moro’s portrait of the Duc D’Albe’s famous dwarf will teach you an important lesson. To begin with, he will familiarise you with my face: it is said that he resembles me. And on that note, adieu, or rathe
r à bientôt.
‘You shall certainly be healed.’
July 98
Why did Claudius Ethal tell me that he resembled the Antonio Moro in the Louvre? Was it to disturb me or to make a mockery of me?
This Claudius is, it appears, a terrible practical joker. In London, he has practised the art of ‘fun’ with such malice and refinement of purpose that he was forced to expatriate himself to France; his situation there had become untenable. His legal dispute with Lord Kerneby, regarding his portrait of the duchess, was nothing but a convenient pretext; the truth is that he has fled an explosion of the righteous wrath of rancorous old men: wrath and rancour stirred up with all the artistry of an ironist, who elevated the poser above the painter of portraits when he went into their homes. The scandal of his condemnation, the ruination visited upon him by the lawsuit, were only reprisals; the court did not lash out at the acrimonious, crabby and speechless artist but at the incorrigible and triumphant jester.
For ten years Ethal was painter by appointment to the aristocracy, and revelled in the impunity guaranteed by the status of his clientèle. Fortified by his talent and his great name, arrogance and hypocrisy led him to jeer and scoff at that same aristocracy which had taken him most painfully to its heart. Dreadful stories are told about him.
