Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  At last, at half past midnight, to add the crown of thorns to that march to Calvary, there was the promised and long-anticipated meeting with Harry Moore, the trainer from Maisons-Lafitte. We found him in the bar in the Rue Auber, idling at the counter, drinking tart and poisonously spicy cocktails. The dirty stories which the bookmaker merrily dribbled out between gin-induced hiccups and bellows of laughter, on the subject of Sir Thomas Welcome, assassinated my fond memory of the melancholic and handsome figure of Thomas just as the odious Ethal had earlier destroyed my vision of Izé Kranile.

  Izé had become a game-bird in a whorehouse; Thomas became a condemned criminal, fit for Devil’s Island …

  It was, in truth, a day of spectres.

  CLOACA MAXIMA

  [From this point on the manuscript is interrupted by baffling lacunae and becomes subject to errors of date – perhaps accidental, perhaps deliberate. There are alterations in the handwriting, and there is a disconcerting general incoherence. Its author was evidently struck down by illness.]

  January 1899

  That first-night audience! What an awesome parade of infamy was manifest at the lips of the boxes. All those diamonds: the spolia opima of fortunes acquired by crime and prostitution. All the sergeants of the great army of vice were there, half-naked in their dress-uniforms beneath the skilful make-up and the proudly-set smiles, like so many triumphal idols: all of them aflame with gaudy necklaces and the false gold of dyed hair; all of them flanked by junior ministers or apprentice academicians, basking in the notoriety of politics or letters; all the radiant ex-virgins à la mode — for they are espoused now – set amongst their husbands and their lovers.

  And in the orchestra stalls, dressed up to the nines, all the frail and tormented grace of actresses from little theatres and today’s bits on the side: a host of Izé Kraniles and Willie Stephensons; little women with diminutive and fervent heads, weighed down by their copious hair, posing like insolent and precious page-boys with their delicate and fragile profiles, emanating a haunting and perverse charm …

  Further up, the listlessness of men out on the town, their boiled-fish complexions aggravated by the porcelain whiteness of their shirt-fronts: the rictuses of their soft mouths; the broken lassitude of their bearing; and the ugliness of their cooked eyes.

  Then, the rancorous faces of the critics: the oblique glances of augurs tacitly judging the piece; all the ignominy of their ‘my dear chaps!’ and the confidential handshakes of their old boys’ network.

  I had, of course, seen the spectacle a hundred times before – but never had I perceived with such acuity the ugliness of the masks! Never before had my nostrils so sharply extracted from all the routine deception of perfumes and powders the atrocious odour of putrefaction. I knew the vices and the defects, the scandals and the miseries, of every woman and every man in the boxes of that theatre – just as they knew all the frightful rumours whispered in connection with my name, and the distress of my life. Do we not go to such occasions – each and every one of us, quite cynically – primarily in order to display our fashionable Parisian personalities: all the glory of the boulevardiers, complete with the disgraces of yesterday and the disasters of tomorrow?

  From the movement of a lorgnette aimed at me, and the contrived smile of an eavesdropping woman, I can always deduce that my name has been pronounced and the subject taken up …

  In one of the stage-boxes sat Naiderberg: the stout Naiderberg enriched by ten bankruptcies, executions by the Bourse settled by the purchase of villas in Cannes and grand hotels in Switzerland; the bloated Naiderberg, swollen up with greasy unwholesomeness, with his leprously white face and his overblown bearing. Then, continuing along the tier of boxes, there were the three Helmann brothers, like avian skeletons with their high shoulders, their meagre, jutting torsos and their eager muzzles; their lips were thin, their noses thinner and their eyes thinner still – but gleaming metallic yellow beneath their blinking eyelids. All three are bankers, maintaining in limited partnership the beautiful Conchita Merren, blooming like a white camellia between their three black suits. Then Maicherode, another banker, Viennese this time – a Viennese expelled from Vienna – who makes an ostentatious display of poor Nelly Ferneil, his draught-screen, but whose motto – whispered behind closed doors and well-known to the Prefecture – is ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ All of them naturalised Frenchmen and true cosmopolites: the masters of Paris.

  Extrapolating the line formed by the men of politics – both those in government and those who set the prices of abstentions and amendments – seated in the boxes, the eye arrives at the great journalists, paid so much per article, who – for a hundred francs or so – will either praise the piece, or not speak of it at all, or spitefully denigrate it as required. (If the director does not care to reach for his cheque-book, an invitation to supper with the star of the troop, or the favourable consideration of a manuscript, might well suffice.)

  I recognised several members of the herd: Evrard, the beau of the Bois, who exploits the girls and will fight for them if need be, svelte and curved in his silk-lined dress-coat; de Marsonnet, the painter who has married his mistress Nina Marbeuf, without caring that her fortune was entailed and would pass, upon her death, to the three children she bore Baron Harneim; Destelier, the editor who only edits Dreyfusards, and Dormimo, his colleague who only publishes nationalists – but who both have covert operations, one of them issuing the books of Gyp because Gyp is profitable and the other the pamphlets of Ajalbert, because pamphlets are his bread-and-butter. All hypocrites and all cheats: a whole set of respectable fronts sheltering lizards beneath, from the espousers of adulterated dowries provided by natural fathers who roost in scrupulous and belated austerity to the likes of Saint-Fenasse, who pulls the horses which he rides in races for his brother, and Marforade, the anarchist poet in the hire of Fraynach, who reproaches Moreuse for liking the army of the École militaire and lives with a masseur.

  Then – come to see the star of the show, the delicious and fragile Eva Linière, with the huge eyes of a Gozzoli angel, frightening and frightened, wild and promising, so ill-fitted to her ragamuffin face – there was the Lesbos of the premières: all the accursed women who bring to our spectacles the perverse charm of professionals in travesty. There was Maud White, blanched with the soft blonde beauty of the Irish, in the box of Althorneyshare, the old Duchess of Ethal’s soiree. The duchess was even more plastered with unguents, and her ancient flesh seemed more greenishly ghostly than ever beneath the nacreous pustules of an armature of pearls. Maud’s brother was there too. In a ground-floor box, the heavy throat of the Marquise Naydorff was side by side with the thick figure of Olga Myrianinska: the Slav and the Sicilian, corrupted by the same tastes, were also there for the girlish shoulders and the thin face of Eva Linière, to be diplayed in ephebic guise in the costume of some refugee from the Oresteia.

  That Eva! It was for her sake, too, that Muzarett, the tightly-corsetted and refined gentleman poet was in his armchair, leaning over to display the top of his narrow, wrinkled and unquiet head. Delabarre, the musician everyone is crazy about, accompanied him: the two enemies had made peace, reconciled at last as fellow devotees in the arcane and sensuous cult of the actress.

  All the starched and scrubbed Englishmen of Claudius’s soiree were there too, dispersed throughout the auditorium, but recognisable by their heavy and elongated faces, as if weighed down by their heavy jaws; they too were all communicants of the new religion. It was as if the entire auditorium had been given over to the celebration of a rite, in which the thin legs of the actress held everyone in suspense, in the hope and the anticipation that some accident might befall her costume.

  Superimposed on all those staring men with their pig’s snouts and all those staring women with their ghoulishly convulsed faces, I saw the remembered image of an etching by Rops: a frightful but honest etching in which Lust, the empress of the world, is depicted as a skeleton crowned with flowers – but a sk
eleton that might be reckoned a siren, in that beneath the vertebrae of the torso there flourishes a fleshy rump, and two spreading legs, the rounded legs of a statue or a dancer, upon which the kidneys nestle like luscious fruit.

  As this vision became more distinct and obsessive, it seemed to me that the actress on stage became fleshless, a death’s-head apparent beneath the flesh of her face. The legs and the loins alone remained carnal and harmonious in their proportions, and I felt a shadow of terror pass over me as I watched that spectre, upon whose mad and empty eyes the whole vast hall of masks was concentrating.

  Then, suddenly, a woman entered the left-hand stage-box. Every gaze, every pair of opera-glasses, turned towards her. I was caught up in spite of myself by the magnetic effluvium which steered my eyes towards the newcomer. It was a tall and slim young woman, very pale, dressed in an exquisite pale blue costume which made her seem paler still!

  She had the disquieting pallor of a eucharistic host, her oval face thinned down by a suffering and spiritual expression which made her eyes seem very large. Their colour was ultramarine, shading to black in the dark rings which surrounded them like lustrous bruises. This strange and fragile creature seined to personify the ideal beauty of the twentieth century: that delicate nose, with its mobile and vibrant nostrils; the gentle rise and fall of that flat bosom; that excessively thin waist under the light plumes of her fan; that incisive and charming pearl-white smile; that laugh displaying the tips of the teeth between the red of her lips. Where had I seen all that before?

  All eyes were devouring that pallor; the lust of the entire auditorium drank down the philtre of that feverish and morbid beauty. In the flushed eyes and smiles, there was exactly the same excitement which had greeted the entrance of the actress upon stage – and which, only a minute ago, had followed the comic steps and daring gestures of her performance.

  The creature in the pale blue dress was accompanied by a man and a woman. The man I recognised as her husband: a man of letters, no less talented than many others of that vocation but no more either. The woman was the Princess of Seiryman-Frileuse, the yankee multimillionaire whose dowry had elevated her from the Faubourg, whose passionate and energetic face was familiar to me from Ethal’s studio.

  ‘The pretty Madame Stalis with the Princess of Seiryman … Then, she too must be … ?’

  All the androgynes in the hall aimed their opera-glasses at the stage-box, studying the American and her new friend, some admiring and others denigrating but all cut to the quick by the same implication and the same lewd conviction. The men, staring and smiling, likewise took the hint.

  On the stage, Eva Linière continued to mimic the anatomy of a young page-boy, in her mauve tights spangled with dull silver: an operatic Orestes, a hellene from Montmartre and a thoroughbred Greek from Asia.

  ‘All marching in step, men and women alike,’ Ethal whispered in my ear, sarcastically. I had quite forgotten that he was there, anaesthetised as I was by the stupor of the surrounding spectacle and the suggestive vision. ‘All in step, as if they were stuck together.’

  Paris on the March was the title of the piece: an idiotic revue, with spectacular scenery and an abundance of feminine nudity.

  ‘Observe, if you will,’ Ethal went on, ‘that Eva Linière and little Madame Stalis belong to the same genre. They have the same gracile and consumptive beauty, the same chlorotic charm and sickly seasoning: Venus of Père-Lachaise, fleshed out in Venetian glass. It is the attraction of that fragility which sets alight the squeezed and sensual brutality of shady financiers, stockbrokers and parvenus …

  ‘These arrivals of yesterday are understandably drawn to the fragile elegance of the finest of the species; their sensations are multiplied tenfold by the thought that they are bruising and smashing the refinements of duchesses or virgins; they grind down flesh as they grind out their gold; they are the movers of the world and the pluckers of lilies …

  ‘We are refined, we sense the cadaverous odour which lingers about them – but it will not be necessary to run away. I am acquainted with the delectable apparition of the stage-box. Madame Stalis is in good health, and so is Eva Linière. That pallor, that languorous attitude, that febrile state of the eyes and lips is a deliberate mask which they have cultivated. It is by means of the douche and a healthy household routine – early morning walks followed by long hours of repose on the chaise-longue – that the Seraphita of the premières and the ephebe of the concert-hall have arrived at that charming and chimerical appearance.

  ‘The precious beauty of Madame Stalis is the inspiration and raisin d’être of her husband, who leads this specimen of a rare flower through all the salons. The cultivated consumption of little Eva excites the clients and fills the house. The public pays good money, and each one gives good value for it. Look how the whole auditorium drools over the two emaciates! What can the anarchists be thinking of when they put their bombs in cafes, or the entrances of railway-stations?

  ‘Isn’t a crowd like this the bitter end? Isn’t each and every soul out there ripe for the final boiling? And yet, you cling to your petty modesty, your sense of shame, and your timidity! Frankly, my dear chap, you’re behind the times.

  ‘Behold – we are in Rome!’

  SIR THOMAS’S MILLIONS

  The evening before last, in the course of an intimate tête-à-tête in Ethal’s silent studio, I forced myself to recapitulate in some detail the mysterious death of Monsieur de Burdhes, which compromised Sir Thomas Welcome in such a bizarre fashion – to the extent that from that day forward Welcome found the doors of every club in London closed to him, and now employed de Burdhes’ millions in travelling through Asia, under the cloud of a permanently blemished reputation.

  On that fateful night a couple of months ago, when Claudius dragged me to that bar to hear Harry Moore tell the story, we were unable to extract anything from the stout trainer but the mumbled utterances of a drunken man: obscene idiocies interrupted by heavy hiccups and Saxon curses. That apoplectic drunkard had belched and vomited his slanders regarding Thomas, soiling my imagination and saddening my memory of him – but had not, however, succeeded in obliterating the impression which the noble and melancholy Irishman had made upon me. The insanities of the surfeited bookmaker only served to repel me, sowing just enough disquiet to make me regret not having followed Thomas in his exodus to India. At the end of the day, the disgusting Harry Moore had not been able to spell out any specific charge.

  Ethal filled in the gaps.

  Monsieur de Burdhes had been found murdered in a small house on the outskirts of London to which Welcome was a frequent visitor. There the two of them, in collaboration with others, had set themselves the task of ‘rediscovering’ – as they put it – the celebration of the rites of a secret cult which Monsieur de Burdhes had imported from the Far East. This eccentric had the ambition to impose upon the world a new religion. The young Sir Thomas – then in the full flower of his twenty-three years – was not merely one of the affiliates of the sect; he was its leading adept, and the favourite disciple of its original instigator – de Burdhes’ heir apparent.

  Thus, on the morning when Monsieur de Burdhes was found strangled in the Woolwich sanctuary, Sir Thomas Welcome inherited ten million pounds. The young Irishman had passed that night with friends, and had a cast-iron alibi, but the fact remained that the tragic death of Monsieur de Burdhes had put into his hands – at twenty-four – one of the largest fortunes in the kingdom. Invoking the famous criminal theory of cui prodest, the whole of society immediately closed ranks against the young millionaire. He found himself excluded from clubs and salons alike.

  The mystery of Monsieur de Burdhes’ murder was never solved. I write ‘Monsieur’ because, although he was a Dutchman by birth and had lived in London for many years, de Burdhes had made the unusual choice of becoming a naturalised Frenchman – an option of nationality which invited the universal scorn of London. But the feasts which he held in Charing Cross, three times at year, and the
eccentricity of his being the founder of a religion recommended him, in spite of everything, to a world of arrogance and elegance enamoured of ostentation and determined individuality. The English have the greatest respect for the liberty of others: any manifestation of energy and personality is certain to please them, for it satisfies a taste for independence which is inherent in their race. To begin to be English it is necessary to be scornful of the ideas and the customs of other countries; to complete the operation one must distinguish and particularise oneself with a full spectrum of idiosyncrasies and an insolent insistence on maintaining one’s own habits. In spite of being a naturalised Frenchman, therefore, Monsieur de Burdhes met all the conditions required to interest and win the favour of London. But to permit himself to be killed by an assassin, and by that same act to make a millionaire of a penniless Irishman with the compromising good looks of a Greek shepherd … that was too much!

  London society made Thomas Welcome pay dearly for the double scandal of the unexpected fortune and the mysterious death. English cant, which had tolerated the disciple of Monsieur de Burdhes, could not accept his heir…

  Thomas Welcome was forced to leave. His travels were a form of voluntary exile. Nowadays, he travels incessantly.

  Without being too precise in his insinuations, but with a feline artistry of implication and hazardous hypothesis – a total mastery of the disturbing science of probability – Ethal sowed his doubts. His slow and monotonous oratory appeared to be detached, but nevertheless contrived to fill me with horror and cut through my last illusions.

  The painter went on to the particulars of Monsieur de Burdhes’ character and the crime committed in the little house; he seemed to obtain a strange pleasure from it.

  ‘The great Dutchman was always in a kind of waking sleep, stupefied by opium. His vitreous eyes and his bloodless complexion seemed to have preserved all the oppressive lethargy of Oriental poisons…’