French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  They were about to publish the banns. With the lightning decisiveness that marks out great dentists, Alcibiade had schemed for the extermination of his rival.

  On a morning of torrential rain, the purveyor of umbrellas was found dead in his bed. A medical examination proved that a rogue of the worst stripe had strangled the wretched man as he slept.

  The diabolical Gerbillon, who knew better than anyone what happened, had the effrontery to confirm the scientific validity of this finding. In fact he had covered his tracks so well, that after an inquiry as vain as it was meticulous, the authorities had to abandon their hunt for the culprit.

  The bloodthirsty dentist was saved, but he did not go unpunished, as you shall hear.

  As his crime had always been a means to an end, no sooner was the umbrella-seller under the sod than the dentist began to lay siege to Antoinette.

  The dignity and superiority he had shown during the inquiry, the light he had shed upon this obscure crime, and above all, the delicate way in which he had made his compassion felt for the young person so cruelly afflicted, eased the access to her heart. It was not, truth be told, a heart that was difficult to take; it was no Babylon of a heart. The ironmonger’s daughter had a steady head on her virginal shoulders. She was doing all right, and her plunge into grief was altogether a shallow one.

  She had no pretensions to eternal, vainglorious lamentation, and made no show of being inconsolable.

  ‘Let the dead bury the dead, lose one husband, find ten more, etc,’ murmured Alcibiade. A few more sentences plucked from the same abyss soon revealed the nobility of this raptor, who appeared quite transcendent to her.

  ‘It is your heart, Mademoiselle, that I should like to extirpate,’ he told her one day. That clinched it.

  At this charmingly turned phrase, which was one that the girl—who was educated—could savour, she made up her mind. Besides, Gerbillon was an acceptable husband. They soon came to terms and the marriage went ahead.

  But why should this dearly bought happiness be poisoned by the memory of the dead? The black-bordered letter, the memory of which had begun to fade, returned to haunt the mind of the murderer: he felt roundly denounced by it. Two days before his wedding—as we have seen—the obsession had returned stronger than ever, driving him almost to madness, and he wandered about for a whole day, in parts of Paris he didn’t know, until the terrible moment when he at last summoned the courage to order his marriage invitations from the printer in Vaugirard, who had surely guessed he was a murderer.

  It was all very well to have been so clever and so cunning; to have put justice off the scent; to have won the hand, against all the odds, of the woman he adored—all of this, just to have his life poisoned by guilty dreams!

  The ecstasy of the first days was a mere respite. The fine horns of the newlyweds’ crescent honeymoon had not even ceased to pierce the azure when the first sign of trouble appeared.

  One morning Alcibiade found a portrait of the purveyor of umbrellas. Oh, just a simple photograph that Antoinette had innocently accepted from him as a gift, shortly before they were due to be married.

  Beside himself with rage, the dentist smashed it into pieces before the eyes of his wife, who was appalled by his violence, even though the relic meant precious little to her.

  At the same time—it being impossible to destroy anything—the threatening image which up till then had existed only on the paper, like the visible reflection of one of the fragments of that invisible photographic film that envelops the universe, ended up by fixing on to the suddenly suggestible memory of Madame Gerbillon.

  From then on, she was thoroughly haunted by the memory of the deceased she had almost forgotten; she lived only for him, she lived him perpetually, she breathed him through all her pores, and through all her exhalations, which flooded her poor husband, who was at first surprised, and then desperate, upon finding that cadaver perpetually interposed between him and his wife.

  At the end of the first year they had an epileptic child, a monstrous male child with the face of a thirty-year-old, that bore an uncanny resemblance to the man Gerbillon had murdered.*

  The father fled the house, uttering dreadful cries, wandered like a madman for three days, and then, on the evening of the fourth, he bent sobbing over the cradle of his son, and strangled him.

  The Last Bake

  When one is dead, it lasts for a long time.

  (An Inheritor)

  MONSIEUR FIACRE-PRÉTEXTAT LALBARIE had retired from business at the age of sixty, having amassed considerable riches from his coffin-making.

  He had never once disappointed his clientèle, and the aristocracy of Geneva, that had placed so many orders, were unanimous in celebration of his loyalty and care.

  The excellence of his handiwork, which passed muster even in scrupulous England, had also obtained the plaudits of Belgium, Illinois, and Michigan.

  His retirement had thus been met with bitter regret in both worlds, when lamenting international dispatches announced that the famous artisan was leaving the rites of the shop-counter to devote his august white hairs to his beloved studies.

  Fiacre was, in truth, a contented old man, whose philosophical and humanitarian vocation did not emerge until the very moment at which his own fortune, less blind and less mean than the vain multitude might suppose, had heaped its benefits upon him.

  In no way did he despise, like so many others, the infinitely honest and lucrative business which had raised him from almost nothing to the pinnacle of his ten millions.

  On the contrary, he used to recount, with all the naive enthusiasm of an old soldier, the numerous campaigns waged against his competitors; and he liked to recall the heroic rolling fire of his inventories.

  He had simply abdicated, like Charles V,* from his empire of the invoice, to devote himself to the higher life.

  Having amassed, in short, enough to live on, and now too elderly to keep his beady eye much longer upon his business—that flare for spontaneity which knows how to forestall and disarm the competition—he had the wisdom to dispose advantageously of his commercial empire before the star of his patent began to pale.

  From this moment on, he devoted himself to the pleasures of the human species.

  With touching lucidity, he had grasped the fact that a crowd of nincompoops had failed in all their efforts to improve the condition of the poor; and convinced as he was, moreover, of the usefulness of the poor, he concluded that he had better things to do than to put his financial and intellectual resources at the service of the unwashed masses.

  Instead, he resolved to dedicate the last glimmers of his genius to alleviating the sorrows of millionaires.

  ‘Who ever thinks’, said he, ‘about the sufferings of the rich? I alone, perhaps, along with the divine Bourget,* whom my clientèle all adore. Because they fulfil their mission, which consists in slaving for the sake of business, people think too hastily that they must be happy, forgetting the fact that they have a heart. People have the effrontery to set against them the crude tribulations of the wretched, whose duty is to suffer, after all, as if hunger and rags could be put in the balance against the dread of dying. Such is the law. No one really dies, if they possess nothing. The possession of capital assets is an indispensable condition of giving up the ghost, this is what no one seems to grasp. Death is nothing other than to be separated from one’s money. Those without money, are without life, so how can they know what it is to die?’

  Heavy with such thoughts—that went deeper than he supposed—the coffin-maker set his whole soul to abolishing the pangs of death.

  Monsieur Lalbarie had the signal honour of being among the first to conceive the generous invention of the Crematorium.* To his thinking, the traditional horror of death was in large part caused by the dreadful image of the corpse in decomposition. The Guild of Incinerators elected him their president, and it was to them he described the stages of putrescence—that subterranean chemistry—with an eloquence fuelled by fear; the idea
of turning into a flower, for example, was repellent to his accountant’s soul.

  ‘I do not want to end up a corpse!’ he bellowed. ‘As soon as I die, I demand to be burned, I insist on being carbonized, reduced to ashes, purified by fire, etc.’

  His wish was fully granted, as you shall see.

  The excellent man had a son, which is something to be wished on everyone who knows the value of money.

  And here I must beg permission to launch for an instant into dithyrambic mode.

  Dieudonné Lalbarie was, if possible, even more admirable than his father. Conceived in a most auspicious hour, one that saw his father triumph over impertinent competitors, he was the very model of all the solid virtues that a serious house of credit requires.

  At the age of fifteen he had already invested his savings, and he kept his own person as tidily as his account book. No instrument could detect in him the slightest trace of frivolity.

  It would have been a gross injustice to charge him with giving way to a moment of enthusiasm, or with an access, even repressed, of gratuitous tenderness for anyone, or over anything whatsoever.

  When he spoke, his happy father was obliged to lean against the counter or the till, such was his pride at having spawned such a son.

  This blessed child is alive and prospering. He has already doubled his wealth since losing his parents, having contrived to make himself loved by a hugely wealthy keeper of tortoises, to whom he is married; many there are who will know of whom I speak, but I fear I would offend his modesty if I sketched him out more fully.

  I shall let you guess. Perhaps it is already saying too much, if I add that he has the face of a handsome reptile, and is usually accompanied by a hound of monstrous size.

  What follows is the little-known story of his father’s death and funeral. Lovers of mild emotions are advised to stop reading here.

  One morning the coroner declared that the great Fiacre had ceased to exist.

  Instantly, Lalbarie fils went into action. Without wasting a moment on useless tears, without wearing out the precious ‘fabric’ of his own life, by which is meant ‘time’, to adopt Benjamin Franklin’s expression,* which he quoted endlessly, he set to and got things ready.

  At ten thirty-five the papers were apprised that he had gone into mourning, and his words of sorrow were scattered on the winds in a thousand copies—the card announcing the sad news having been judiciously designed and executed a long time in advance.

  The same thing was true of the black marble slab destined for the ‘Columbarium’,* which showed a phoenix beating its wings amidst the flames, and, on the orders of the deceased, the following terrifying inscription:

  I SHALL RISE AGAIN

  To blow away the cobwebs, Lalbarie fils went for a bicycle ride, lunched copiously, received a few mourners, made his ritual devotions at the Bourse, executed, towards evening, some profitable placements, and spent the night on the town, as a token of his extreme grief.

  The next day a sumptuous funeral carriage loaded with flowers, and followed by an unprayerful crowd, bore the remains of the deceased to the Crematorium.

  ‘Ha! You will rise again!’ said the amiable Dieudonné to himself, who entered alone into the terrible inner sanctum, with the two men whose job it was to commit his father to the furnace. ‘We shall see if you rise again!’…

  The bier had been fashioned out of thin planks, according to the correct administrative norms, so it would combust instantly once introduced into the oven that was heated to seven-hundred degrees; it rested on a mechanical trolley, whose two sprung-metal handles, thrust with force, hurl the dead into the furnace, and then return with a squeal, in a diastole–systole movement lasting twenty-five seconds.

  So things stood, and Dieudonné had reached this climactic moment of filial grief, when a sound was heard, coming from inside the coffin…

  Oh, a vague and muffled sound, to be sure, like a corpse come alive and stirring in its shroud. The coffin seemed to shudder, even…

  At that very instant the oven door, manoeuvred with precision, opened wide.

  The three faces, reddened by the atrocious flame, looked at each other.

  ‘It’s the body deliquescing,’ said Dieudonné placidly.

  But the two men hesitated still.

  ‘Well get on with it, in heaven’s name!’ screamed the parricide suddenly. ‘I tell you it’s the body deliquescing.’ And he thrust a bundle of banknotes into the hand of the man nearest him.

  The handles leaped forward, and leaped back…

  The door slammed shut, but not quite fast enough, it seems, because Dieudonné, planted square in front of it, thought he saw, in the instantaneous combustion of the coffin, his father, with a petrified face and his arms stretched out.

  The Lucky Sixpence

  MONSIEUR TERTULLIEN had just reached his fiftieth year; his hair was still admirably black, his business successful, and his influence growing daily, when he had the misfortune to lose his wife.

  This was a terrible blow. It would have been sheer perversity to imagine a more pleasing companion.

  She was twenty years younger than her husband, with the most winning looks and a character to go with it, so sweet that she never let an occasion pass without dazzling.

  The magnanimous Tertullien had married her, even though she didn’t have a penny to her name. In this he was like most merchants who get tired of celibacy, but who are too busy to set about seducing exigent virgins.

  He married her ‘between two cheeses’, as he liked to remark skittishly. For he was in fact a wholesale cheese merchant, and he had undertaken the solemn act of matrimony between a memorable delivery of Cheshire and an exceptional delivery of Parmesan.

  But the union, I regret to say, was not blessed with offspring, and this cast a shadow over the gracious picture.

  Who was to blame? It was a weighty matter, still undecided among the fruiterers and grocers in the neighbourhood. A hare-lipped butcher’s wife who had been passed over by the handsome Tertullien accused him openly of impotence, overriding the objections of a spotty mattress-seller who claimed to have empirical evidence.

  The pharmacist, however, declared it was too early to form an opinion, and the benevolent crowd of concierges, quite uninterested in the matter, approved the circumspection of this thoughtful man.

  The crowd of them laid down the law as follows, saying that Paris wasn’t built in a day, that all’s well that ends well, that you spread your relish thinly if it’s to go a long way, etc., etc., and that in consequence there was every reason to suppose that the happy event would arrive, which would add the finishing touch to the dazzling prosperity of the cheeseman.

  They might have been speaking of the Heir Apparent.

  News of this sudden death, which cut down so many legitimate hopes, was met with real sorrow.

  Unless Tertullien were to remarry rapidly—a hypothesis that in his grief the cheese merchant did not entertain for an instant—the future of his business, the work of his own hands and by now so richly endowed, though it had started from nothing, would falter, and his clientèle pass into the hands of a younger rival!

  The perspective, indeed, looked black, and it must have added a tinge of bitterness to the regrets of the grieving spouse, who seemed on the point of plunging headlong into a gulf of despair.

  I do not know to what extent anxieties about not having an heir for his cheese business exercised him, but I myself was witness to his bellowing grief and the unrepeatable anathemas he cast upon himself for having to process behind Clémentine as she was borne to her grave, and in short order too, though he could not bring himself to set a date.

  Ten years of business dealings with him had enabled me to observe at length the character of this amiable man, and there was a trait in particular that I noted, admirable but little known.

  He lived in terror of being made a cuckold. All his ancestors had been, dating back two or three hundred years, and the tenderness he had for his wife was b
ased essentially on the unshakable certainty that he was safe on that front, and her honesty entire.

  His gratitude had about it something deeply unusual and touching. The more I thought about it, it came to seem almost tragic; and I sometimes wondered if Clémentine’s notorious sterility was not in some peculiar way brought about by Tertullien himself, whose doubts concerning his own identity—and a sublime fear of cuckolding himself—prevented him from impregnating her.

  But it was all too perfect, too far above the common herd, and the banal thing occurred that was bound to occur.

  Clémentine had given up her soul to the Lord, and the unfortunate widower had given way, vigorously, to the groanings and bellowings of grief, as nature will have it.

  When he had paid this first tribute—to employ one of his own favourite expressions—and before the whole crowded business of the funeral which he dreaded, he desired to put some order into the papers and relics of his beloved.

  And it was thus that his destiny, like a cruel stepmother, struck him; the ridiculed standard of the Tertulliens was raised above his head.

  In a secret drawer deep in a private desk, which the most jealous husband would never dream of suspecting, he found a whole correspondence, whose volume and variety held him absolutely riveted.

  All his friends and acquaintances were represented. With the exception of myself, all had been cherished by his wife.

  His own employees—he found letters from his own employees written on pink paper—had been simultaneously gratified.

  He now knew with certainty that the dear departed had betrayed him night and day; at any time, and practically everywhere. In his bed, in his cellar, in his attic, in his shop, under the very eye of the Gruyère, and in the effluvia of the Roquefort or the Camembert.