Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  To begin with, there is the story of the Marchioness of Clayvenore, a princess and lady-in-waiting to the queen, who was invited by him to lunch in his studio at Windsor. Once there she was brusquely placed before a terrifying portrait of two grotesque clowns: the two brothers Dario – Reginald the giant and Edward the midget – who, for three years, had caused a considerable stir in the music-halls of New York and London. Lady Clayvenore had seen the two grotesques at the Aquarium two days before, and now experienced all over again the vision of their grimaces and their contorsions.

  Lady Clayvenore had expected to find Ethal’s studio replete with portraits of women and children, but she came by twilight upon a painted nightmare: the tortured faces of the two phenomena. Then the studio became dark. It was the end of December, and night falls quickly in winter. Lady Clayvenore perceived that she was alone in the deserted studio; Claudius Ethal had disappeared – and while, all a-tremble, she went to look for an exit-door behind the curtains, which were no longer drawn back, the hallucinatory portrait came to life.

  First the midget leapt like a toad from the frame, then the huge and skinny giant sallied forth with vulturine wingbeats. Around the woman overwhelmed by consternation, a strange Sabbat commenced. With atrocious convolutions of the arms and the torso they repeated the act which she had seen at the Aquarium two days before, but in the solitude of the deserted studio it was a ghostly phantasmagoria; the dance of two larvae, made far more horrible by shadow and silence.

  The two grotesques, hired and primed by Claudius Ethal, performed their exercises faithfully – but following that private séance Lady Clayvenore kept to her bed for eight hours, and since she was on the point of divorcing Lord Clayvenore, a full account of Ethal’s nasty joke had to be given to the court.

  ‘The divine Marchioness,’ the painter said, by way of excuse, ‘always declared that of all sensations she appreciated only the unforeseen, the violent and the profound. I believed that I was giving her exactly what she wanted.’ Then, clicking his tongue like a connoisseur of fine things, he added: ‘Poor milady! Never have I seen on a human face such a superbly intense expression of terror. I watched in ecstasy: there was such voluptuousness and charm in that distress and horror … I shall treasure it as the memory of a marvellous Lady Macbeth, a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth.’

  And that is merely one of the lesser tricks attributed to that devil of a man.

  In the escapade which took him to Whitechapel in the company of Lady Feredith – an American millionairess, married to a Yankee, who was temperamental, ill-bred and addicted to ether, and who had had an unhealthy curiosity about that district of thieves and prostitutes – things went even further. Two mercenaries hired and posted by the painter treated the old lady in search of sinister sensations as if she were one of the miserable girls who prowled the streets by night. The nocturnal mock-attack culminated in violence and in certain actions of which the American did not complain; stripped of her jewels, her modesty overwhelmed, this particular thirster for the unknown would have regretted nothing. Indeed, she inspired the artist to create one of his most beautiful studies, exhibited under the title Messalina. Claudius Ethal evidently found it an occasion for merriment.

  Finally, to conclude the series of his acknowledged fancies, there is the story of the portrait of the Baroness Desrodes, a converted Jewess, whose annulment awarded by the Court of Rome, fabulous dresses and furniture in asparagus-green laquer had kept the newspaper columnists busy for a year. In an acute crisis of snobbery, Elsie – as she was known to her intimates – had taken it into her head to have a portrait by Ethal. Helleu and La Gandara, her usual painters, were no longer good enough for her. In order to obtain the portrait she crossed the channel, installed herself in London, and set all her acquaintances to work. Whistler and Hercomer, who had already been commissioned to produce portraits of her, arranged for her to be introduced to Claudius. There was a series of dinners and receptions in a house in Charing Cross, to which Elsie had transported her entire Paris establishment in order to dazzle all the good citizens of England: her green-lacquered furniture encrusted with diamonds; her glass cases of unique Dresden and unobtainable white Sèvres; and her entire collection of frogs. She had frogs by Massier, by Carriès, by Lachanal, by Bigot, and frogs all the way from Japan, for she was a veritable fetishist, like all those of her snobbish and superstitious kind. Baroness Desrodes is the woman of the frogs, just as the Comte de Montesquiou is the man of the world … what poverty, what paltriness, what vanity!

  To cut a long story short, the baroness obtained the desired sittings with the painter. Ethal consented without being begged too much; he agreed likewise to portray the baroness at Charing Cross, in her own setting, amid her green lacquer furniture, her frogs and her familiar paraphernalia. The baroness was exultant: she had tamed the wild and savage beast which was the great Ethal! She had become part of his circle of intimates! Ethal had agreed to paint her at home, which he had never done for anyone else! But there was, however, one condition: that she should not see the portrait until it was finished. He would take the canvas away after each sitting and bring it back with him for the next. It was a hard condition, but it was nevetheless accepted. The painter set about his work, and when the portrait was finished the whole shooting-match of friends and acquaintances was assembled in the studio of the painter in order to admire the portrait of Elsie.

  Horror and stupefaction! Seated in the midst of her bronze and ceramic frogs, Elsie too had a green head, enormous briny and gold-circled eyes set in a squashed face, and a goitred throat. Her bare arms, their flesh stringy and flaccid, were crossed so that little palmate hands were raised in front of the goitre. The Baroness Desrodes was a frog: a human frog strayed from the land of Faerie. And here she was, enthroned in the midst of all her admirers!

  The baroness rejected the portrait and referred the matter to her solicitors.

  ‘What did she expect?’ Ethal said. ‘It is her own physique which is the root of the problem. She defies portraiture and demands caricature.’

  And Claudius Ethal is rumoured to indulge less mentionable whims.

  This is the man who proposes to cure me; I am in his hands. What does he want from me? I confess that a dire anxiety has taken hold of me. This Englishman frightens me.

  UNDER THE SPELL

  June 1898

  Ethal was telling the truth; he does indeed resemble the Duc D’Albe’s dwarf. I have returned three times to the Louvre to absorb myself in contemplation before the Antonio Moro, and the odious resemblance became more evident with every visit. Ethal is the frightful double of the Flemish master’s hooded gnome.

  The dwarf has an enormous head, a thick neck and an overlong trunk which does not seem to fit the excessively short and twisted legs. His gnarled and shaggy hands, and his crooked fingers circled by heavy rings, are the hands and fingers of Ethal. Ethal has his receding forehead, his bushy eyebrows and his bulbous sniffling nose; that sarcastic mouth is his too, as are the thick and heavy eyelids whose intermittent shelter conceals a gleam of malice.

  The sensual and maleficent physiognomy of this kobold dressed up as a jester is the physiognomy of my painter; the resemblance is striking. One senses in him a cunning and attentive soul, all lust and irony: the soul of a satyr, which English arrogance and cant do not suit at all, although there is so much affected ambiguity in his being that flashy finery and a fool’s cap and bells seem more becoming than a dinner-jacket.

  One particular detail stands out: that hairy chest, cynically displayed beneath the immoderate expanse of his neck, like the chest of a carter or the body of some frightful spider, covered with bristly black hair …

  I had not noticed all these hideous and repugnant things during our previous encounters: the spirit of that devil of a man exerted such imperious power over me! They only became clear to me in the course of time, and after Ethal had taken care to call my attention to the resemblance. I would not have discovered them at all had they not been
pointed out to me, and yet it was he who sent me to the Louvre, he who caused me to observe the horrible analogy which can be drawn between that horrible dwarf and himself!

  Why? Strangely enough, that ugliness, instead of repelling me, attracts me. The mysterious Englishman has me under his spell; I am no longer able to pass him by.

  Since I have come to know him, the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people of my world, all my unhappy peers, have come to irritate, oppress and sadden me with their noisy and empty chatter, their monstrous and boundless vanity, their even more monstrous egotism, their club gossip … the endless repetition of opinions already formed and judgments already made; the automatic vomiting forth of articles read in those morning papers which are the recognised outlet of the hopeless wilderness of their ideas; the eternal daily meal of overfamiliar clichés concerning racing stables and the stalls of fillies of the human variety … the hutches of the ‘petites femmes’ – another worn out phrase in the dirty usury of shapeless expression!

  Oh my contemporaries, my dear contemporaries…

  Their idiotic self-satisfaction; their fat and full-blown self-sufficiency; the stupid display of their good fortune; the clink of fifty- and a hundred-franc coins forever sounding out their financial prowess, according their own reckoning; their hen-like clucking and their pig-like grunting, as they pronounce the names of certain women; the obesity of their minds, the obscenity of their eyes, and the tonelessness of their laughter! They are, in truth, handsome puppets of amour, with all the exhausted despondency of their gestures and the slackness of their chic …

  Chic! A hideous word, which fits their manner like a new glove: as dejected as undertakers’ mutes, as full-blown as Falstaff…

  Oh my contemporaries: the ceusses of my circle, to put it in their own ignoble argot. They have all welcomed the moneylenders into their homes, and have been recruited as their clients, and they have likewise played host to the fat journalists who milk their conversations for the society columns. How I hate them; how I execrate them; how I would love to devour them liver and lights – and how well I understand the Anarchists and their bombs!

  Why has Ethal stirred up such an outburst of hatred in me? To be sure, this horror of mankind – especially the abomination of the worldly – has always been in me, but it was dormant, latent, smouldering beneath the ashes … Since I have met Ethal, though, it has rapidly fermented, turning sour and seething. A furor has mounted within me like a new wine, a wine of execration and hatred. All the blood is boiling in my veins; all my flesh is sickening; my nerves are jangling and my fists are clenched; murderous desires run through my mind …

  To kill, to kill someone, oh how that would soothe me! That would extinguish my fever. I feel that I have the hands of an assassin.

  So this is the cure I was promised!

  And yet the presence and the conversation of Claudius brings about a sense of well-being. His presence reassures me and the sound of his voice calms me. Since I have known him, the shadowy figures which grimace all around me are less distinct. I am no longer obsessed with penetrating their masks … and the vertigo of the green eyes – the glaucous irises of the Antinous – has been banished!

  The eyes, the eyes, I no longer suffer the madness of the eyes. This man has bewitched my sickness. His conversation is so charming, he provokes so many ideas, the least of his phrases awaken such echoes in me! His words evoke and bring into being thoughts which are my own, although not yet fully formulated: thoughts still distant from my consciousness; ideas of which I had as yet no suspicion. This mysterious provocateur is telling me about myself, putting flesh on my dreams. He speaks to me so distinctly that something like him is awakening in me. It is as if another self more precise and more subtle, born of his conversations, has taken root within me. His gestures define my powers of sight; he has become light and life to me.

  He has brushed aside and dissipated the shadows which gathered around me. Spectres no longer menace me.

  And yet this atrocious hatred and murderous fury still increase!

  Perhaps it is one of the phases of my healing – for I shall be healed. Claudius has promised me that.

  July 1898

  Like me, Claudius has a fascination for music-halls and dance-halls. The human body, whose ugliness normally saddens and irritates him, becomes a source of inexpressible joy when it chances to move with beauty. Purity of form – the suppleness and vigour of the human body – also soothes and brightens his spirits. Claudius has an eye of singular acuity for the discovery of this beauty, however it might be diguised by the most piteous and dreary rags and tatters. His artistic flair enables him to track down and dig up this beauty – which is especially to be found in the haunts of streetwalkers, destitutes and street-arabs – with uncanny skill. And yet this is a painter patronised by great ladies!

  Claudius is drawn by his predilection to the flesh of beggar-women as hogs are drawn to truffles. For sores and tattered garments he has a perspicacious love ‘as dependable as that of an evil Christ’ – as he said of himself, in jest.

  The other evening, on the way home from Versailles, we went into a dance-hall in the Rue de la Gaîté. In the heavy, saturated atmosphere of that overheated room we were surrounded by labourers dressed in their Sunday best, apprentices of every kind of trade and every mode of prostitution. His bright and crafty sensualist’s eye was suddenly attracted to one particular couple.

  The woman, still young, was slimly curvaceous; her straight hair was parted in the middle and bound in a headband. She was young, but already faded: the morbid, sensuous and depraved fading of the suburban Parisian. She was probably a burnisher. But her wicked smile was so feverishly pink, and beneath her great voracious eyes were deathly-dark rings – and what a black look she had as those eyes followed the gushing and gambolling of her dancing partner!

  This dancer, undoubtedly her lover, had released her and was prancing like an escaped colt through the dance-hall, triumphantly snapping up the women in his path and making them pirouette like so many spinning tops. He was dressed in a threadbare velvet jacket, parted just a little in an untidy and aggressive manner. His chest was thrust out and his knees were tensed. One after the other, he carried the women off and lifted them up, then deposited them again on their toes.

  Forsaken, the woman with the black headband, the narrow face and the hard eyes watched him closely, lying in wait for him in muted anguish and mounting anger. The other women made a circle around him, and he, overexcited, now played the part of a lone cavalier, risking ever-greater leaps in response to the tapping of feet, flinging his arms about. He rolled up the sleeves of his jacket, swayed his hips, and bowed low to the wan and silent girl – and, with his rump in the air, like someone playing leapfrog, made laughing faces at her between his legs, before resuming his twirling.

  In the electrified room, laughter and applause burst forth. The girl had become green. She dug in her pocket under the table, but before she could achieve her purpose he seized her by the waist, snatched her up in a greedy embrace and crushed a kiss upon her mouth. Staring into one another’s eyes with moist lips, supporting one another with their legs entwined, their whole bodies were touching. She was suddenly faint and forgiving, laughing as if she had been tickled; he was still vain, cocksure and proud – and off they went, waltzing and pirouetting, with all the defiant arrogance of overt mutual desire and peace finally made.

  ‘The knave is handsome,’ Claudius whispered in my ear. ‘The little one will not be bored tonight.’

  I started involuntarily, his voice having awakened me from a dream. His bright and glittering stare cut through me like a blade. I felt a sharp coldness enter into me. He looked deep into my soul, understood the as-yet-unacknowledged desire which that scene and that boy had disturbed in my flesh … and I felt suddenly full to overflowing with hatred: h
atred for Claudius and hatred for the mistress of that prancing lout!

  So this is the promised cure!

  I am afraid of this Englishman. His voice gives birth to abominable suggestions within me; his presence corrupts me; his gestures conjure up unspeakable visions.

  20 July

  Ethal has gone away. He went on Monday, summoned to Brussels by a letter; a sale of pictures and engravings has caused him abruptly to quit Paris. He ought to have returned two days later, Thursday at the latest, but he has now been there for eight days, sending telegrams all the while to announce his return. The dispatches mount up on my table, but my Claudius does not return.

  What a vital role he has assumed in my life! How I miss him! His presence has become so necessary to me that since he has been gone it is as if a kind of hunger tears me and hollows me out. It is a sensation of hunger, absolutely – but at the same time it chokes and suffocates me.

  And yet, I still feel that I fear and hate that misfortunate Englishman!

  15 July.

  The Three Brides by Toorop. Claudius has sent it to me, a very rare engraving which he bought at a sale in Ouudenaarde and which he posted with a letter anouncing his return on Monday. In three days! He will have been away for fifteen days.

  Toorop. Jan Theodoor Toorop. I know the name; it is famous in Holland.

  The Three Brides.

  It is a sort of quasi-monastic diabolical vision. In a landscape populated with larvae – flowing and undulating larvae called forth like a cascade of leeches by tolling bells – three female figures rise up phantasmally, enshrouded with gauze like Spanish madonnas. They are the ‘three brides’: the bride of Heaven, the bride of the Earth and the bride of Hell…

  The bride of Hell, with her two serpents writhing about her temples to hold her veil in place, has the most attractive mask: the most profound eyes, the most vertiginous smile that one could ever see.