Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  In the last few months of his life, de Burdhes had tried to combat his terrible lack of sleep by foolish measures. He undertook veritable forced marches, late at night, along the bank of the Thames, all the way from the deserted streets of the West End to the Docks, and even into Whitechapel and other districts into which it was very dangerous to go alone. When Claudius – who knew of what he spoke – advised the madman as to the peril in which these nocturnal expeditions placed him he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders: ‘I have seen worse places in the East. Nothing ever happened to me. Anyhow, I like the cut-throat aspect of it: the sinister modernity of the river after midnight, the emptiness of its quays and avenues.’ There was a glint in his eye as he spoke, launching into an almost amorous description of the corner of some suspect street, where he had caught a fateful glimpse of a car parked on the bank, reflected in the water of the river – then he stopped suddenly, as if he felt that he had said too much. Nothing was more sadly eloquent than his silence.

  This de Burdhes had a passionate love for silence and the night.

  Was it as a result of one of these perilous sorties that de Burdhes fell victim to nocturnal aggression? Or was it, on the other hand, the complicity of one of the initiates of the new faith which had contrived to open the door of the house in Woolwich to anonymous assassins? The mystery which surrounded de Burdhes’ life became even denser around his death.

  It was a tragic and obscure end, in which elements of the criminal and the fantastic were combined. The murder must have been committed by someone familiar with the practises and habits of the victim, because Monsieur de Burdhes was struck down in the middle of his devotions, on a night when he had gone to the house employed by the cult. There he had stayed up late in order to conduct some rite – but what rite? Was he alone, or was someone else with him?

  ‘Hurriedly prepared by Thomas Welcome,’ Ethal went on, ‘I was taken by him into the temple. The police were already on the scene. They had not moved the corpse. I had never been into the famous lodge before. There was nothing out of place in the hallway or the first two rooms we went through next. The only decoration was a pair of enormous ceramic peacocks posed against walls painted golden yellow. Only the third room merited attention. Thomas, quite overwhelmed, stood rooted to the threshold.

  ‘That room! I can still see it, as if it were only yesterday. A Louis XIV tapestry ran all around it. It depicted a garden with terraces and colonnades, full of gods in the costume of Roman warriors and goddesses in the ankle-length tunics of the time – but a strange discolouration had blackened the faces and the bodies while singularly lightening the material, to such an extent that against the russet sky and amid the blue-grey of fountains the figures no longer seemed like gods and nymphs, but demons with negroid faces whose white eyes transfixed onlookers.

  ‘A very low and very large bed – was it customary for the devotees to lie down on it, I wonder? – was spread out almost at floor level, curtained in mauve silk patterned with golden flowers. At its foot, a monstrous Buddha was on watch; its image reflected in an Empire cheval-glass. The bed had not been disturbed. The air was thick with incense and gum benzoin. A Turkish night-light was still burning.

  ‘Two policemen were in the room. One of them lifted up a door-curtain.

  ‘There, in an alcove line with dull pink silk, on a tumbled heap of cushions, de Burdhes lay dead. He was in evening dress; an enormous white iris was in his buttonhole. He had fallen backwards, so that his knees were higher than his head. That bloodless head, the nostrils already pinched, had rolled to one side. The jawline and the Adam’s apple jutted out. The fall must have been violent, and yet his clothes were not crumpled; the front of his shirt had scarcely come apart. One of his hands was clenched about the silver chain of a marvellous censer. There was not a drop of blood, but on the neck, at the place where the flesh is softest and palest, there was a mark like a bruise slowly turning to yellowish brown, as if the flesh had been bitten or slowly sucked for a long time.

  ‘The perfume of the adjoining room still held sway near the corpse, very strongly and tenaciously but it was complicated by the odours of pepper and sandalwood. A little bluish smoke was still rising from the censer.

  ‘In the middle of what practises, I wonder—what secret rite of the mysterious religion – had death surprised de Burdhes? An enormous bunch of black irises and red anthuriums stood up in a silver vase, in a strangely hostile fashion. On a little Hindu altar, surrounded by tulips of glass and caskets of gold and bronze, stood a strange statue moulded in pure black onyx. It was a kind of androgynous goddess with frail arms, a full torso and slim hips, completely nude.

  She was demonic and charming at the same time. Two glittering emeralds were inset beneath her eyelids – but between her slender thighs, at the swollen base of the belly, where the sexual organs should have been, there was instead a mocking, menacing little death’s-head.’

  THE ABYSS

  As Ethal’s slow and monotonous voice evoked the vision of the little onyx Astarté, the impassive accessory to the murder of Monsieur de Burdhes, the shadows in the studio seemed to become denser and more sinister. It was as if they were woven out of mystery by Ethal’s narration.

  So Thomas Welcome had supposedly committed a murder. Perhaps the enigmatic quality of his charm was the legacy of his crime. The man who has killed is always surrounded by an atmosphere of terror and beauty. Hallucinatory gleams dart from the eyes of the great murderers of history, forming an aura about their heads, and even the finest of heroes have corpses for their pedestals.

  Death and Beauty are two profound things

  So full of mystery and the azure of legend:

  Two equally terrible and fecund sisters

  Sharing the same enigma and the same secret.

  (VICTOR HUGO.)

  Ethal did not articulate all these bloody thoughts, nor did he recite that quatrain, but he suggested them to me. Now that he fell silent, I realised that my unreasoning sympathy for Thomas had been, primarily at least, sympathy for the assassin. The melancholy of that handsome face, all its gentleness and energy, was the product of the regret of having killed, and perhaps also – who can say? – of the desire to kill again. The taste of blood is the noblest kind of intoxication, seeing that all beings have the instinct to murder. The struggle for love, the struggle for existence itself, requires the suppression of other creatures. Has not Jehovah himself said: ‘By the deaths laid at my door, you shall know that I am the Lord’?

  All these counsels of death were insinuated into my ear by a mouth of shadow: a mouth of shadow which might perhaps have been that of the symbolic skull of the little Phoenician idol.

  Yes, Thomas Welcome was an instinctive person, and there was the root of all the puissance of his charm. Instincts! Had he not boasted of their wholesome energy in the course of that enthusiastic conversation where, sure of his own eloquence, he had laid out before me his theory that the joy of life was to be found only in adventure, and in the intoxication of sensations released by researches in the unknown?

  That life of action had been granted to him by the homicide which made him the master of millions; it was by courtesy of a corpse that he had been able to live his life. But was he free from remorse?

  What was that obsession of glaucous eyes which tormented him as it tormented me? What were those severed heads by which he was haunted? Whence came the nightmare of the assassinated native on the banks of the Nile? Whence came that furious compulsion to walk alone in the nocturnal suburbs? Had he inherited that too from Monsieur de Burdhes? Might it not rather be the mania of a criminal who is subconsciously drawn back towards the scene of his crime?

  Ethal was silent, but I felt his gaze pressing upon mine. It seemed to bore into my congested brain like a cold sharp-pointed gimlet. His horrible ideas were populating my mind with bloody imagery: the red larvae of murder following the green larvae of opium! That man was a veritable poisoner, in having denounced Thomas to me! That man, who
ought to have been healing me, was aggravating my sickness …

  The impulse to strangle him that I had experienced before made my hands feverish and caused my fingers to clench involuntarily.

  Ethal broke the silence himself. ‘You really ought to go and look at Gustav Moreau’s museum, you know—the one which he left to the State. You will find a valuable lesson in the eyes of some of his heroes and the daring of his symbolism.’

  He got up to show me out.

  He had lit a torch. Close to the door, he lifted it up, and called my attention to the glass reliquary enshrouded in green serge where his wax doll lay – ‘the marvel of Leyden’, as he called it. He had formerly reproached me for my failure to appreciate the indefinable and corrupt attraction of that morbid and ostentatious curio modelled in painted wax and dressed in old brocade. Now, he gently separated a flap of material and displayed the doll to me, upright in all its finery, the colour of amadou, with its hair of yellow silk floss flowing from its bonnet of pearls.

  ‘My own goddess,’ he said, laughing derisively, slyly caressing it. ‘She may be dressed in the cast-offs of the centuries, but no death’s-head grins beneath her robe. She is Death herself: Death with all her make-up and the translucency of her decompositions. Our Lady of the Seven Carcases! You are already acquainted with Our Lady of the Seven Lusts—and one cannot always worship Our Lady of the Seven Dolours.’

  February 1899

  ‘All marching in step, men and women alike!’

  That ignoble refrain, which Ethal chanted in my ear the other evening – along with his anecdotes and his jeers regarding the mass of humanity assembled for that first night, with a leitmotif of infamy introduced into the biography of each and every one – continues to deform and deprave everything around me. The calumny has made its way from the dunghill of vices complaisantly retailed by Claudius to the cadaver of Monsieur de Burdhes, bringing forth a hideous flourishing growth of lubricious images and shameful thoughts. That Ethal! He has blighted eveything, soiled everything within me, like some virus poisoning my blood – and now it is mud which runs in my veins. ‘All marching in step!’

  I am haunted by obscenity. All objects, even works of art, have become obscene in my eyes. Everything has taken on an equivocal and ignoble taint, imposing base ideas upon me and degrading my senses and my intellect.

  It is as if I were possessed, and walking abroad in the forest of Tiffauges described by Huysmans: that sexual nightmare of old forked trees with gaping crevices in their bark has taken odious form in the midst of modern life. I am accursed, wretched and mad. I have been bewitched by ancient black magic.

  Six years ago I bought from a dealer on the quays a Debucourt which represents, in the softened and delicately shaded tones typical of the painter, two young women holding one another tightly and playing with a dove. Why does this Debucourt now inspire me with only unhealthy ideas? The engraving is fairly well-known; it’s title is ‘The Revived Bird’. The two figures, enveloped by the gauzes and floating buckrams of the epoch, have healthy powdered complexions and an aristocratic beauty. Why should such innocent and graceful creatures now be associated in my mind with the memory of the Princess of Lamballe and Marie Antoinette?

  ‘All marching in step, men and women alike!’ It is the most ignominious calumny of the time, the most odious pamphlets of Father Duchêne, all the filth of the Jacobite clubs, that this engraving now brings to life as I look at it. All of that is embodied in the gesture which one of the women is making, separating the folds of her buckram shawl and placing between her breasts a cowering dove. My memory is beset by all the scandalous ordure heaped upon the liaison of Marie-Antoinette and the unfortunate princess. It is as though I am seized by a fever: a frenzy of sexual excitement, and of cruelty too. I find myself suddenly transported into the remoteness of a bygone century, to the precincts of a prison on a warm and stormy day, seething with rumours of a popular uprising. A sweaty and clamorous crowd of men in red bonnets – street-porters with brutal faces, unbuttoned shirts on their hairy chests – jostles me and stifles me; I am surrounded by eyes full of hate. The heavy air reeks of alcohol, filthy rags and squalor. Bare arms are waving pikes aloft. A great cry goes up as I see raised towards the leaden sky a severed head: a head drained of blood, with fixed and extinguished eyes; the image of decapitation which haunted Thomas Welcome’s nights.

  The remorse of the handsome Irishman has become my obsession too.

  It is the head of a woman. Drunken men are passing it from hand to hand, kissing it on the lips and slapping its face. Their low and receding brows are the foreheads of convicts. One of them has a mass of knotted viscera rolled around his bare arm like bloody thongs; he is joking with his comrades. His lips are ornamented with an equivocal blond moustache which looks as if it consists of pubic hairs. Under this false moustache he is smiling broadly, despicably, outrageously. The head swings above the crowd, brandished at the tip of a pike, cheered, barracked, insulted and mocked. It is the head of the Princess of Lamballe, which the revolutionaries powdered and revived with make-up, setting the hair in curls, before they carried it to Penthièvre, and from there to the Temple, parading it under the queen’s windows…

  I regain my self-possession, broken, revolted and charmed by horror. There is something corrupt in my being. The dreams which delight me are frightful.

  March 1899

  Slums!

  Ethal has given me a taste for the slums; he has awakened in me a dangerous curiosity regarding streetwalkers and guttersnipes. The bulging eyes of cut-throats, the soliciting eyes of suburban strumpets, all the acute and brutal depravity of beings reduced by wretchedness to the elementary gestures of instinct, attracts and fascinates me.

  I arrive in the outlying boulevards in the evening, to prowl about interestedly, surveying the scene, on the lookout for whores. Low prostitution excites and entices me with its reek of musk, alcohol and white grease-paint.

  Worse: after the crapulous intoxication of cheap dancehalls, I am overtaken by a hysterical desire to follow the couples to the peep-holed doors and grimy staircases of cheap lodging-houses. There, with some chance companion on my arm, I have listened to the sounds which are audible through the partition walls: the delirious fevers of sexual excitement, like the love-making of wild beasts; the noise of surprise attacks! Sometimes encounters begun with kisses finish in blows, and one hears, from the room above, the scrape of muffled struggles, atrocious hand-to-hand conflicts, and the voices of strangled women crying out for help. The creaking of mattresses moved by vibration provides me with less pleasure than certain frightful silences which follow rattles and sobs. Then, a piercing anguish clutches as if at my heart, at the thought that a crime might have been committed, and the descent of the police imminent.

  To think that I, the Duc de Fréneuse, have passed hours and hours waiting and dreading a raid: a terrible raid, which would send the pimps and the girls hurtling from their beds and hidey-holes, fill the corridors with frightened galloping, and end with my being escorted to the Prefecture.

  Oh, the poignant fear of ambushes and brawls, the sweating vigils in the furnished thieves’ kitchens of the Boulevard Ornano and the Quatre-Chemins – and the anticipation of the final stab which might perhaps put an end to everything!

  Yes, I am on the very brink of the abyss.

  Ethal can lead me no further.

  A GLIMMER OF HOPE

  One evening when I slept beside a frightful Jewess …

  BAUDELAIRE

  Adieu: I sense that in this life

  I shall never see you again!

  God passes, he leads me to you and forgets me.

  In losing you, I feel that I love you.

  No tears, no vain complaint!

  I know enough to respect the future.

  When the sail comes to bear you away,

  I will smile as I watch you go.

  You go away full of hope,

  Proudly you will return;

  But those who
will endure your absence,

  You will not recognise.

  …………………………………………………….

  …………………………………………………….

  One day you will perhaps realize

  The value of a heart which understands you.

  The good which is found in knowing it

  And what is suffered in losing it.

  24 March 1899

  I read these verses by de Musset quite by chance, while mechanically turning the pages of a book. Why do they fill my eyes with tears, today? I have not wept once in the last twenty years, and even in my childhood I was not as easily moved as other children. Why, today, am I dolorously and deliciously moved by reading that adieu? Why have I opened this particular book? Like others of my generation, I am deeply scornful of de Musset – but look how the quatrains of the author of Rolla have capsized my heart in a sea of tears.

  Adieu: I sense that in this life

  I shall never see you again!

  It is because I have never felt that kind of poignant distress, or the pride of a lover resigned to the departure of a mistress who is abandoning him. I have never loved.

  The joy to which even the least of artisans and the most humble of bureaucrats lay claim – that minute of superhuman existence which every man and woman is supposed to enjoy at least once, thanks to love – has always been a closed book to me. I am a freak and a fool.

  I have never been prey to ignoble instincts, and yet all the base ordures to which existence is party, magnified by the imagination, have made my life a sequence of nightmares. I have never had the gift of sensibility; I have never known the gift of tears.

  I have always sought to fill up the illimitable void which is within me by recourse to the atrocious and the monstrous. Lust has been my damnation. It has deformed my sight and depraved my dreams, multiplying tenfold all the horrors of ugliness and transforming all the beauty of nature, so cleverly that only the repugnant side of persons and things is apparent to me. Thus I subsist in the punishment of my sterile depravity.