French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

I need hardly add that throughout the whole unedifying correspondence he himself was scarcely spared. He was unremittingly mocked from the first line to the last.

  An employee from the post-office, renowned for the sharpness of his wit, ridiculed his business in the most disobliging way, and went as far as to make some allusions, and to give some bits of advice, that are quite unpublishable.

  But there was something else—extraordinary, excessive, fabulous—enough to send a shudder through the constellation of the Goat.

  Next to this mortifying bundle was an endless series of little wooden sticks. These astonished and baffled him, at first. But then, with the wisdom of a subtle Apache with his ear to the warpath, the light flooded in upon him, when he realized that the number of sticks tallied exactly with the number of admirers encouraged by his faithless spouse, and that each of them was scored with a multitude of nicks made by a penknife, much in the manner of a baker’s account book.

  Clearly, this Clémentine was an orderly woman, who kept her account books up to date.

  Crushed and humiliated, the husband asked, quite naturally, to be left alone with his dead spouse, and shut himself in with her for two or three hours, like a man who wants to give himself up unconstrainedly to his grief.

  A few weeks later Tertullien held a sumptuous dinner to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany.

  Twenty carefully selected male guests gathered around his table. There was a quite unparalleled spread. Exquisite, abundant, unexpected. It semed like the farewell feast given by an opulent prince who is about to abdicate.

  A few of the guests, however, felt a tinge of unease at the funereal aspect of the decor, a product of the now somewhat sombre imagination of the cheese merchant, borrowed from some half-remembered melodrama.*

  The walls, even the ceiling, were draped in black, the tablecloth was black, the lighting came from black candles burning in black candelabra. Everything was black.

  The man from the post-office, completely unmanned, wanted to leave. A jolly pig-breeder stopped him, saying that no one was to ‘let the side down’, and that he himself found it all ‘a good joke’.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the others resolved to spit in the eye of death. Soon enough, the bottles began to go round, and the meal became quite riotous. By the time the champagne came out the pun reigned supreme and the smutty stories were beginning, when a gigantic cake was brought in.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Tertullien, rising, ‘we must lift our glasses, if you will, to the memory of our dear departed. Each one of you knew and loved her heart. You cannot have forgotten, can you? Her kind and tender heart. I would ask all of you therefore to let yourselves be infused—in a quite particular way—with her memory, before we cut into this cake which she would have liked so dearly to share with you.’

  Having never been the lover of the cheese merchant’s wife, probably because I had never met her, I was not invited to this dinner, and I never found out who got the lucky sixpence.

  But I do know that Tertullien got into trouble with the law, for having inserted, into the swollen sides of this almond cake, the heart of his wife, the little, putrefying heart of the delicious Clémentine.

  OCTAVE MIRBEAU

  On a Cure

  BEFORE quitting the Pyrenees, I wanted to see my friend Roger Fresselou, who has lived for years and years in Le Castérat, a small village in the Ariège.*

  It was a long, hard journey. After six days of tough walking and steep climbing, aching and exhausted, I arrived at Le Castérat as night was falling. Picture in your mind thirty or so houses clustering on a narrow plateau surrounded on all sides by black mountains with snowy summits. To begin with the view is majestic, especially when the mist softens somewhat the closed horizon, turning it milky and covering it with gold dust. But this feeling soon vanishes, and faced with these lofty walls of rock, it is replaced by an invasive and dreary sadness, and by a horrid sense of imprisonment.

  The village is at such an altitude that the trees are stunted and the only bird is the heavy ptarmigan with his feathery claws. Only a few meagre rhododendrons survive in this stony soil, and the dwarf thistle which opens its large yellow flowers with their pointed and wounding spines only in the noonday sun. On the slopes below the plateau, to the north, grows short, greyish grass, grazed over in summer by cows and sheep and goats, whose bells tinkle incessantly, like the tinkling of the priest’s bell in our native countryside, that sounds in the evening as he bears viaticum to the sick. Nothing is sadder, and nothing is less flower-like, than the rare species that scrape a living out of this mean and joyless corner of nature; poor stunted plants with whiteish, hairy leaves, and coarse corollas that have the discoloured, clouded look of dead pupils. Winter with its snowfalls, and all the surrounding gulfs filled with snow, cuts the village off from the rest of the world, from the rest of life. The herds move down to the low valleys, the sturdy men of the village seek work or adventure elsewhere, sometimes far away; the post doesn’t even get through… For months and months there comes no news from the other side of the impassable snows. No one living is left, merely the half-alive, the old men, and the women and children who go to earth in their houses, like marmots in their holes. They only come out on Sundays, to hear mass in church, which is made up of a little square tower, its stone fissured, with a kind of lean-to up against its side, shaped like a barn. Oh! The sound of that bell muffled by the snow!

  This is, however, where my friend Roger Fresselou has made his home for twenty years. A little house with a flat roof, a small, stony garden, and with rough, silent, jealous men for neighbours, miserable and complaining, clad in coarse homespun and mountain headgear. Roger has very little to do with them.

  How did he end up here? And above all, how can he live here? In truth I have no idea, and I don’t think he really knows either. Every time I ask him why he has exiled himself like this, he replies with a shrug: ‘How would I know?… That’s how it is…’ offering nothing further by way of explanation.

  One curious thing: Roger has scarcely aged at all. Not a single grey hair, not a wrinkle on his face. And yet I scarcely recognize him under his mountain apparel. His eyes have gone dead, not a spark comes out of them. And his face has taken on the ashen colour of the soil. It’s a totally different man from the one I used to know. There is an entirely new life within him, about which I know nothing. And I try in vain to puzzle it out.

  He used to be enthusiastic, charming, and full of life. Never exactly exuberant in words or acts, he had a melancholy common to all young people who have tasted the poison of metaphysics. In our little circle in Paris, we were fairly confident of his future. He had contributed some literary essays to small magazines which, while not absolute masterpieces, showed ambition, real seriousness, and a curiosity about life. Thanks to his clear mind and his solid, forthright style, he seemed to be one of those destined to break free of the narrow cliques (in which talent can shrink) and reach a wider public. In the domains of art, literature, philosophy, or politics he had nothing of the intransigent sectarian about him, even if he held firm both in radicalism and in beauty. There was nothing morbid about him, no abnormal obsessions, no intellectual bugbears… His intelligence was built on solid foundations… And then we learned, a few months later, that he was living in the mountains.

  Since I have been with Roger we have not once spoken about literature. Many times I have tried to steer the conversation round to a subject he used to love, but every time he has avoided it ill-temperedly. He has asked after no one, and when, pointedly, I mention certain names, once dear to us, and now famous, he betrays not the slightest inner emotion, not so much as a flicker. I sense within him no trace of bitterness or regret. He seems to have forgotten all that, and his former passions and friendships are nothing but dreams, long since blotted out! Of my own work, of my own hopes in part fulfilled, in part disappointed, he has said not a word. And in his house—impossible to find a book, a newspaper, or any kind of image. There is nothing here
, and he himself is as empty of intellectual life as his mountain neighbours.

  Yesterday, as I pressed him one last time to impart to me the reason for his baffling renunciation, he said:

  ‘How would I know?… That’s how it is… I came here by chance, during a summer holiday… I liked the place because of its unspeakable wretchedness… or rather, I thought I liked it… I came back the following year, with no set plan… I thought I would stay just a few days… I ended up staying twenty years!… That’s it!… There’s no more to say… It’s quite simple, as you see…’

  This evening, Roger asked me:

  ‘Do you ever think about death?’

  ‘Yes, I replied… And it terrifies me… so I try to banish the dreadful image…’

  ‘It frightens you?…’

  He shrugged his shoulders and went on:

  ‘You think about death… and you come and you go… and you torment yourself… and twist and turn in all directions?… And you work on ephemeral things?… And you fondle dreams of pleasure, maybe… and even of glory?… Poor little thing!…’

  ‘Ideas are not ephemeral things,’ I protested… ‘they can prepare the future, they can steer progress…’

  With a slow, sweeping gesture he motioned at the circus of black mountains:

  ‘The future!… Progress!…* How can you possibly, faced with that, utter such meaningless words?…’

  And after a short pause he went on:

  ‘Ideas!… Just wind, wind, wind… They pass over… the tree stirs for an instant… its leaves tremble… and then they have passed… the tree becomes still again… nothing has changed…’

  ‘You’re wrong… The wind is full of cells, it carries pollen and winnows seed… it fertilizes…’

  ‘And creates monsters.’

  We remained silent a while…

  And then I felt, coming from the black mountains opposite us, all around us, with their implacable walls of slate and rock, a stifling, oppressive weight… I truly felt the weight of those blocks on my chest and on my skull… Roger Fresselou went on:

  ‘When the idea of death suddenly took hold of me, I felt at the same time the pettiness and the vanity of all my endeavours which were using up my life… But I procrastinated… I would say: “I’ve taken a wrong turning… perhaps I can do something else with my life… art is corrupt… literature all lies… philosophy mere mystification… I shall seek out simple men, rough, good-hearted men… There must somewhere exist, in pure, remote parts, far from cities, human material from which one might strike a spark of beauty… Let us go… let us find it!…” Alas, no, men are everywhere the same… Only their actions differ… And even here, on this silent peak where I see them, these actions are disappearing. There is nothing more than a teeming herd which, whatever it does and wherever it goes, jostles on towards death… You speak of progress?… But progress, swifter and more conscious, is just a big step forward towards the ineluctable end… And so here I have remained, where all is ash, charred stone, dried-out sap, where everything has already entered into the silence of dead things!…’

  ‘Why didn’t you just kill yourself?’ I let fly, exasperated by my friend’s voice, and seized in my turn by the horrible obsession with death which floats on the mountains and around the summits, gliding over the gulfs towards me, borne along to the sound of those tinkling bells, those tolling bells, on the slopes of the plateau.

  Roger answered calmly:

  ‘You don’t kill what is already dead… I have been dead these twenty years, since coming here… And you’ve been dead for a long time too… Why struggle against it?… Stay where you are now!…’

  I summoned the guide who was to lead me back to the world of men, to life, to light… Tomorrow, at first light, I shall be gone…

  The Bath

  AROUND his fortieth year, on a rainy evening when he stayed home, alone and ruminating, Joseph Gardar decided he would get married. Why had he taken this sudden decision? He hardly knew. Was he in love? No. Was he ruined, or ill? No. How could it possibly be, then, that rich, fit, and not in love, he should want to marry? Was he mad? It may be so. It may be also that he felt vaguely weary of all his happiness and his freedom. And then, on the evening in question, it happened that he had wanted to look at an album of japonaiseries that was on a table the other end of the room, and this led to the following consideration: ‘I want very much to look at the album; on the other hand, I don’t want to get out of my chair. If I were married, I would ask my wife to fetch it for me.’ He noted also that a woman with blonde hair, who was tall and svelte, a woman wrapped in lightcoloured material, in smooth, silky chiffon, seated in the armchair facing his, would make a pretty sight, a pretty splash of colour… Also, the silence of his apartment weighed on him. The door never opened brusquely, no ornament was ever broken, no rancorous reproaches, never a voice raised in anger! His papers always odiously in order on the desk!… Oh, just once, not to find a letter he needed!… To know that a poem barely begun, or a novel nearly finished, had been torn up, burned, destroyed, by an unconscious, foraging little hand! He fell asleep with this consoling idea and dreamed of novel and exquisite sensations.

  The last time I saw him, he spoke to me thus:

  ‘Woman is a marvellous animal,* equipped with marvellous instincts. She is quite clearly the masterpiece of terrestrial fauna. Much have I travelled, and nowhere, in the forests or the steppes or in the mountains of the wildest countries, or in the remotest palaeolithic, have I come upon the spoor of a more complicated, a more startling, a more absurd creature, or one with a softer coat, or one more mutinous than woman! But how remote she is from me! I could never make her the companion of my intelligence, the sister to my thought, the ideal spouse to my enthusiasms and my passions. Which is why I shall never marry. At the very most I would set her on a perch, like a parrot, with a golden chain attached to her foot; or else I’d shut her up in a birdcage. Each morning and evening I would bring her, instead of seed and millet, the hearts of young men, warm and bleeding hearts, and I would listen to her sing. What’s the point? I can observe the same spectacle at any salon I choose to go to… Look, I have a cat. My cat is wonderful too, with those mysterious green eyes that spell the hours! The entire occult world is concealed within them… Yet I can understand my cat, I can fathom it; I know what it wants and what it dreams. Its dream is much the same as mine, and of its language, which remains unarticulated, I can seize every nuance, every inflection, every subtle nuance. Of woman, I know nothing; her forehead is a wall; her eyes are walls, and the sensual beauty of her body is a wall, behind which is the void… Very often, stretched out on a couch, I smoke, and send blue rings floating up to the ceiling; next to me my cat, stretched out on a cushion, pricks his ears, shivers and quivers along his back, and watches the smoke-rings as they rise, grow longer, undulate, float in light skeins, dissolve and vanish in the air, like a poet’s ideas. Sometimes an insect with gauze-like wings comes buzzing by, and my cat follows its mad, capricious flight, watching it with wide, sad, solemn eyes, as if it traced the distressing passage of a soul. But no woman has ever been interested in the smoke from my cigarette, or in the flight of my pet insects. As the smoke drifts up into the air, and even higher beat the quivering antennae of the sphingids,* I would say to the woman: “Look.” She would lower her eyes and look at the ground, eyes like the muzzles of tracking dogs, and she would ask: “What’s under this carpet?—The floor.—And under the floor?—The cellar.—And under the cellar?—The sewer.” She would clap her hands: her swollen nostrils seemed to sniff out the subterranean smells, and she would kiss me, exclaiming, “The sewer!… That’s where I want to go!… Come.” And then, suddenly all sulky, she would push me away: “No, not with you…You stink of tobacco!”

  So Joseph Gardar got married. Not to just anyone, I assure you. He had searched long and hard. And he had found the most beautiful, the best, most intelligent, and most poetic among women. Her name was Clarisse. Everyone was jealous of
him.

  Eight days after his marriage, as they were finishing lunch, just the two of them, Clarisse said gently:

  ‘Dearest, wouldn’t you like to have a bath?’

  Gardar was startled.

  ‘A bath!… Now!… Why on earth?’

  ‘Because I want you to, my dearest.’

  ‘Am I dirty or something?’

  ‘No, no!… I just want you to take a bath, right now.’

  ‘But this is madness!… This evening, yes!… But now!’

  ‘Oh but I want you to so much… so much!… so much!…’

  She clasped her little hands together, and her voice became imploring.

  ‘But my darling, what you’re asking me is madness… And what’s more, I tell you, it’s dangerous!’

  ‘Oh! Do it for me!… I want you to, my love…’

  She came and sat down on his lap, kissing him tenderly and murmuring:

  ‘Please, please!… Right now!’

  They went into the bathroom. Clarisse set about getting the bath ready herself, laying out soaps and brushes and gloves and pumice on a table…

  ‘And I shall do the scrubbing!… It’ll be heavenly, you’ll see!’

  Even as he got undressed, he kept complaining:

  ‘What a queer idea!… And it’s dangerous too, so soon after lunch… People have died of it you know!…’

  But she just laughed her clear frank laugh.

  ‘Oh, people! Anyway, when they want to be nice to the little woman, no one ever dies.’

  But he went on.

  ‘And I’m extremely clean… I had a hot tub this morning! I’m spotless!’

  ‘Now, now, don’t be naughty.’

  Still startled, he got into the bath and slid into the water…

  ‘There!’ said Clarisse… ‘Isn’t that lovely? Go right in, my darling! Like that!… Deeper!…’

  After a few minutes, Joseph Gardar didn’t feel well at all. Even though the water was very hot, it seemed to him that his legs were turning cold. He was finding it hard to breathe; his head, which had gone scarlet, was burning hot… There was a ringing in his ears, as if he were deafened by a violent pealing of bells.