by Jean Lorrain
If she existed. how I would love that woman! I feel that if that smile and those eyes were in my life they would be all the cure I need!
I could never tire of the study and contemplation of that hallucinatory visage.
The Three Brides is very peculiar in its detail and composition. It is the whimsy of a dream rendered with astonishing fastidiousness: the delusion of an opium-smoker composed in the style of Holbein.
‘It is the product of an Asiatic Catholicism,’ Claudius told me in his letter. ‘A dreadful, terrifying and self-explanatory Catholicism – for the Dutchman Toorop is Javanese by birth. I know that you will love this Toorop, because there are only three painters in the world who can tease out the expression for which you are searching: BurneJones, the great Fernand Knopff and him.
‘I know which of these Three Brides will excite your desire. It is the Infernal one, is it not, whose eyes haunt you?’
A SERIES OF ETCHINGS
‘It is an Asiatic Catholicism, a Catholicism of ecstasy and perversity, a dreadful, terrifying and self-explanatory Catholicism – for the Dutchman Toorop is Javanese by birth.
‘I know that you will love this Toorop.
‘There are only three painters in the world who can tease out the expression for which you are searching: Burne-Jones, the great Fernand Knopff and him.
‘I know which of the three brides will excite your desire. It is the Infernal one, is it not, whose eyes haunt you?’
And that is the one which haunts me now; my obsession with intense eyes has returned. By touching the scar, Ethal has reopened the wound. The scar? The wound had hardly closed …
Why has Claudius sent this etching, which disturbs me, and this letter, which causes me yet more anguish! Oh, the haunting of those emerald eyes!
So this is the cure that I was promised!
There is a practical joker in him. Is he playing some kind of cruel game, aggravating my sickness with fresh poison?
3 August 98
He should have returned. He said he would return yesterday.
A telegram arrived.
Antwerp. Departure delayed. Going to Ostend to see Ensor. Very curious artist. Will send you his masks if I can make a deal; difficult. Unearthed here yesterday, in second-hand dealer’s, proof set of Goya prints: the series of Capriccios. A treasure. Am detaching one to send to you, for your patience. Study it. Letter follows. Best wishes.
The promised etching was delivered to me. The inking is marvellous. It depicts a grimacing head with a snub nose and visionary eyes, feverish with a frightful ardour, lit up like beacons in their cavernous orbits. It is a socratic head, into whose gaze all life seems to be concentrated: the head of an alchemist or some ossified and desiccated cenobite; a batlike head with thin lips, well used to prayers; the lips of an old woman, whose creased mouth has turned into a mere hole. Under the mouth, the narrow chin abruptly recedes, giving the profile the aspect of a muzzle, while atop that ancient, shrivelled and decrepit thing, an inordinate forehead spreads out and overhangs, its enormous temples bulging: the dreadful disproportion of a gigantic brain.
The total baldness of the forehead gives the whole head the aspect of a fantastic glabrous skull: a skull whose sad muzzle is crumpled. The polished ivory of that prodigious skull fumes, ripples and breaks into waves; the skull seethes and fumes like the lid of a saucepan. And its pale and errant fumes become, in the darkness of the etching, snouts and beaks: so many grimacing beasts; so many larvae and venomous nudes. The abnormal brain peoples the night with mad and menacing grins.
In the margin, underscoring the abominable nightmare, this aphorism of Goya’s appears in French and in Spanish:
Genius deprived of reason gives birth to monsters.
Why has Claudius sent me this? What is he trying to tell me? What is his objective? What is the meaning of this hideous etching, and of his sending it to me so that I might fall ill in looking at it? This rare proof attracts me, repels me, attaches itself to me. There is a kind of poison in those piercing and fixed eyes!
And the horror of those leeches with human faces, these rippling and and fluent tadpoles, to which the melting skull gives birth: the head is making me ill.
Afer the Toorop, the Goya! I have tried hard, but can find no explanation. And the return continually deferred, from day to day …
What sinister game is this mysterious Englishman playing with me?
5 August
All through the night, atrocious images of insects and infusoria swarmed within the curtains of my bed: strange reptiles with the beaks of storks; toads winged like bats; enormous beetles with gaping abdomens crawling with worms, moving towards newborn children fringed with leeches.
I sweated with anguish and struggled in the spasms of a shadowy nightmare. The Goya etching has given birth to these monsters. I shall have to double my usual dose of bromide this evening.
8 August 98.
A letter from Claudius, postmarked Ostend: a letter and a scroll of parchment. What has he sent now?
The letter first:
My dear Due, please excuse me one more time. I have broken my word to you for the third time – and this year you have given up your summer expedition to take the waters and visit the Tyrol, in order to stay in Paris with me … I would be the most wretched man alive had I not the most serious motive to lay before you. The most marvellous curio – an extremely rare sixteenth century piece, of a kind of which I am excessively fond, a museum-piece such as one no longer encounters in the market-place – was brought to my attention by Ensor. It is very near here, in Holland; in Leyden, to be precise.
The piece is in the home of an old collector whose showcases are to be put under the auctioneer’s hammer by order of the court. The poor man has gone mad and his family must liquidate his estate. The summer sales are the only ones available to them disastrous for the seller, of course; the buyer always has the best of it.
I depart in an hour for Leyden, I will come back with the item in question if it is the last thing I do, for if Ensor has described it to me accurately it is a unique piece which will be my pride and glory. If I can secure it I will take up my brushes again and rediscover my talent. If I cannot paint this thing I shall never again set paint to canvas.
You shall see it, and you shall love it as much as I do – perhaps even more. Then we would be rivals!
I would not go for any other reason than to find some such thing as Ensor has told me about! Ensor sees with his imagination, but his vision is perfectly accurate, of an almost geometric precision. He is one of the very few who can really see. Like you, he has an obsession with masks; he is a seer as you and I are. The common herd, of course thinks that he is mad.
I have told him the story of your case, and he is naturally very interested in it. Although he does not know you he has been seized by a strong compassion for you; between sick persons there is always a bond of understanding. As a token of his sympathy, he has chosen one of the most beautiful etchings from his folio, and has asked me to offer it to you; I have dispatched it to you, bearing his signature. If not the most beautiful, it is at least the most intense of his series of Masques.
You shall see what sort of man Ensor is, and what a marvellous insight he has into the invisible realm where our vices are created … those vices for which our faces make masks.
Await now a telegram from Leyden, which will announce to you my success and – this time – my return.
ETHAL.
P. S. I could not strike a bargain with Ensor on my own behalf.
So yet again his return is deferred, his absence prolonged. When can I expect him now? It is as if he is firmly determined to exhaust and exasperate my patience.
And this unique curio, this collector’s item that he has gone to Holland to acquire, and of which he wishes to paint a masterpiece – what could it possibly be? Yet more mystification.
I am seized by curiosity – and, at the same time, by doubt, suspicion and increasing terror.
&nbs
p; I sense that all these dispatches of hideous and hallucinatory engravings are starting something. They are deranging and depraving my brain, populating my imagination with the produce of stupor and trance … and the nervous trepidation of this perpetual waiting …
I have entered into a mystery, and the mystery has entered into me. It is as if a vast net envelops me and closes around me. I feel that a mesh of shadows is contracting all around me, hour by hour.
And this etching by Ensor, this new dispatch? What horrible thing is winging its way to me now? No, I shall not even unwrap the parcel. I cannot bring myself to open it. This time I will not touch the parchment. No, I will not look at this engraving.
9 August 98
Lust.
My curiosity proved too strong, and I have broken the seal of the scroll. Lust— that is the title of Ensor’s etching.
It seems, at first sight, to be set in a furnished room in some tawdry brothel. There is an armchair upholstered in velvet, a mahogany chest of drawers: the decor of banal and bourgeois depravity. Sprawled in the armchair, hands spread out on his stomach, is a hideous bespectacled gentleman, bald, smug, taut-necked and lantern-jawed: some old notary, pharmacist or churchwarden, a Flaubertian Monsieur Homais running to fat. His snout and his big. myopic eyes are avidly savouring the spectacle before him: in an alcove there is a bed, set a little too high, its curtains gracefully swept back; and on the bed, languishing in semidarkness, spreading out her two stout bare legs, there sprawls the pale puffy body of a fat prostitute, a whore with coarse features and a belly like some huge and hideous balloon, which gives the impression of being distended by the semen of an entire barracks.
Settled beside the sated girl, in complete contrast to her full and lazy flesh, is a thin and miserable figure in a long cassock. Waspishly hunched over her, he embraces the woman, gluttonously biting and sucking her neck! Oh, the hardness of that face contorted by desire, the whites of the eyes upturned by lust!
Lust! Wearing a Greek cap, sunk into his armchair, the fat man in the spectacles contemplates, rejoices and burns. It would be a thoroughly base spectacle were the phantasmagoria of the surounding walls not sharply heightened by a wild grandeur – for the brothel-chamber is haunted! Under the artist’s etching-needle, the design of the wallpaper in the room has become a sinister and swarming tapestry. The room is infested with tadpoles and gnomes with sinuous flowing bodies. Ugly grimaces and taut smiles, blind dead eyes and slobbering mouths, float about the walls and in the bed-curtains.
The lust of the three masks displayed – an enfeebled and sterile lust – has populated the room with amorphous and embryonic beings: a swarm of stillborn monsters has gushed forth from the enraptured eyes of the churchwarden, and from the greedy kiss of the seminarian.
At the bottom of the luxurious print, with a knowing but brutal and intransigent gesture, Ensor has signed his own name and added a line from Baudelaire:
Hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother!
Lust. Quivering with disgust, I felt some ancient fire simmering in the marrow of my bones.
So the old madness was progressing still!
On closer examination of the figures in that vengeful etching, it seems to me that the seminarian resembles me. He has my thinness, my fixed and sad eyes. The resemblance is odious. Is it intentional, or mere chance? I have examined the print very carefully, and it seems to me that after the print was struck someone has used a pen and ink to retouch the figure of the man who is devouring the neck of the sleeping whore.
Yes, it has definitely been touched up. Who has done it? Ethal or Ensor? Ethal surely – Ensor does not know me.
Why have they sent it to me? Oh, it is evil to trouble me thus. I feel myself shadowed by the unknown; my mind is sinking; all the marrow in my bones is aflame; my heart, as if disconnected from my body, capsizes and floats free.
And this Ethal has promised me a cure!
THE DOLL COLLECTOR
13 August 1898
Pierre de Tairamond has just left me.
Tairamond is a distant cousin of mine – one of those vague and distant kinsmen by which every great family extends into the suburbs. It is one of the prerogatives of the nobility to trail such strings of relatives behind them, forever extending new shoots into every insignificant provincial town, however distant. It is a privilege and an affliction to possess such an army of collaterals, descendants of the same bloodline and pretenders to the same coat of arms!
Tairamond is one of the very few kinsmen of mine that I have ever been able to tolerate. He is also the only one with whom I maintain any kind of communication. He was at school with me, when we used to play together; now, in Paris, he touches me for loans to supply his needs and sustain his social life – and as he is poor and unpresumptuous I have consented to adopt the role of banker, occasionally providing him with sums of money which he has always neglected to repay. I like his careless cynicism. I think he has a certain affection for me, although he is incapable of gratitude. The loans he solicits from me are the principal reason for his maintaining the connection with me, although his ego – he is a clubman ten times over – revels in the ambiguity of my reputation.
Sharp as a needle, Pierre has always maintained a perfect discretion with regard to me. With an affected dandyism, he has always had the courtesy to appear to be ignorant of the abominations that are laid to my account. He has never interrogated me as to how I spend my days, or as to the mystery of my nights. He is a spoilt child, but tactful – a species which is becoming rare. I like him as much for his faults as his good points. Given the man that he is, the fact that he has taken the step of coming to me, and all that he has said to me regarding Ethal, should not be allowed to disturb me – for it was to talk about Claudius that Tairamond came.
For two hours he talked to me about Claudius. His conversation moved in fits and starts, listless and reticent, but I understood well enough that my liaison with the Englishman has caused him some alarm, that he was not the only one in my circle of acquaintances who was anxious about it, and that he had been virtually instructed to undertake his errand by the family and my old friends.
Half of Paris is preoccupied with my intimacy with that Englishman and, detested though I am, there is some concern over the fact that I am courting danger.
Tairamond had no precisely formulated accusation to level against Ethal, and the thousand and one rumours about his life in London and the Indies have nothing to teach me – nothing at all. I already know about all his practical jokes against Lady Clayvenore and other noble ladies. Pierre has added a few more nasty stories, aggravated by the intervention of the police, which would have precipitated the departure of Claudius even more effectively than his lost lawsuit – but grave as they are, these stories do not surprise me in the least. Ethal would not be the artist that he is if he were not an erotomaniac! But what has rather taken my breath away, and given me cause me to reflect, is the question which Tairamond has raised of Ethal’s collection of poisons, and his opium cigarettes.
He has, apparently, brought back from his voyage to the Indies an entire arsenal of mysterious poisons whose very names are unknown in Europe: stupefiants, narcotics and aphrodisiacs – the most powerful and terrible aphrodisiacs – obtained from maharajahs and fakirs by means of prices paid in gold or by fabulous barter; a dangerous treasure-trove of powders and sinister liquors, whose preparation and dosages he has fully mastered. It is further said that he has employed this debilitating alchemy in the worst enterprises; there has been talk of broken wills and atrophied resistance, energetic men and women rendered powerless by means of certain cigarettes proffered or perfumes sent by Ethal. It is said that one of his acquaintances – an old school-friend and a painter as highly-valued and as fashionable as himself— became an idiot in less than two years as a result of frequenting Claudius’ studio.
Certain cigarettes prepared by Ethal are said to provoke the worst debauchery; and it is said that the young Duchess of Searley was dead in
six months, by virtue of having breathed the scent of certain strange and heady flowers in his home, whose peculiar property is to make the skin lustrous and the eyes delectably hollow.
According to Tairamond, dangerous elixirs of beauty are offered by Claudius to those who pose for him. The Marchioness of Beacoscome might have died too, if she had not been ordered by her doctors to suspend her sittings. These marvellous flowers which generate pallors and shadowed eyes contain within their perfume, it seems, the germ of consumption. For love of beauty, in his fervour for delicate flesh-tints and expressions swamped with languor, Claudius Ethal would poison his models!
Tairamond also asked me if I had seen Ethal wearing a certain emerald mounted in a ring, whose green depths contain a poison so powerful that a single drop on the lips of a man would suffice to strike him down. Ethal has allegedly tested that frightful glaucous death two or three times, before witnesses, on dogs.
Cantharidian cigarettes, opium pipes, venomous flowers, Far-Eastern poisons and murderous rings … I knew nothing about any of this. Ethal has never breathed a word of it to me. The tales which Tairamond told gave me entry into a fearful and dismal legend. The corrupter and perverter of ideas that I already knew him to be was overtaken by a new image: he was, definitively, a poisoner: an impish master of every kind of venom.
I received this account with outward indifference. With the characteristic lightness of the clubman, Tairamond – without putting any more faith in the rumours than was merited – had taken the trouble to warn me; he had come from Trouville and was due to depart the following day for Ostend. While passing through Paris he had come to see me, solely to exchange a few friendly words and to put me on my guard. He took his leave without borrowing the few hundred francs which was the customary tax exacted by his visits – and that omission caused me more disquiet than all his revelations. If his mission was not a pretext to ask for a loan then the matter was surely serious! A sportsman would not go to all that trouble for nothing.
