French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  I held it for a long, long time in my hands, until it seemed to stir, as if a trace of the soul it belonged to remained lodged within it. Then I laid it back on the faded velvet, shut the drawer, locked the desk, and went out to walk the streets and think.

  I walked in a daze, full of sadness, and with the kind of emotion that lingers in the heart, after a loving kiss has been bestowed on one. I felt I had lived before, and that I must have known this woman.

  Like a stifled sob, Villon’s lines rose to my lips:

  Dictes-moy où, ne en quel pays

  Est Flora, la belle Romaine,

  Archipiada, ne Thaïs,

  Qui fut sa cousine germaine?

  Echo parlant quand bruyt on maine

  Dessus rivière, ou sus estan;

  Qui beauté eut plus que humaine?

  Mais où sont le neiges d’antan?

  *

  La royne blanche comme un lys

  Qui chantoit à voix de sereine,

  Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys,

  Harembouges qui tint le Mayne,

  Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine

  Que Anglais bruslèrent à Rouen?

  Où sont-ils, Vierge souveraine?

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?*

  When I got home, something compelled me to have another look at my strange discovery; I took it out again and felt, as I handled it, a long shudder pass through my limbs.

  For a few months my state of mind remained normal, even if the thought of the mane of hair remained active, and never left me.

  Whenever I returned home I had to get it out and handle it. I would turn the key in the lock with the same emotion one might turn the doorhandle leading to the loved one, for lodged in my hands and my heart was a confused, peculiar, sustained, and sensual need to dip my fingers into that lovely stream of dead hair.

  And when I had finished caressing it, and closed up the desk, I still felt its presence, as if it were a living being, but sealed up like a prisoner. I felt it and I desired it once more, and the same imperious need to take it and feel it came over me, to feel against me that cold, slippery, irritating, maddening, delicious thing, until I almost fainted away from nervous excitement.

  I continued like this for a month or two, I no longer recall exactly. The hair obsessed and haunted me. I was in that state of blissful and torturing anticipation known to lovers, after the avowals and before consummation.

  I would shut myself away with it, so as to feel it on my skin, to plunge my lips into it, to kiss and bite it. I rolled it over my face, I drank it in, I covered my eyes with its gilded wave so the world was fair when I looked through it.

  I was in love with it! Yes, I loved it. I could no longer be without it, not even for a single hour.

  And I waited… and I waited… what for? Did I not know?—For her.

  One night I woke with a start, persuaded that I was not alone in my room.

  I was alone, however. As I was unable to fall asleep again, and a feverish insomnia had taken hold of me, I got up to go and touch the hair. It seemed to me to be softer than usual, and more animated. Do the dead return? The kisses I bestowed upon it made me faint with happiness; I took it with me into bed, where I lay with it, pressing my lips against it, as if it were a mistress, before the act of love.

  The dead do return! She came to me. Yes, I have seen her, I have held her, I have possessed her, as she was, tall, blonde, voluptuous, with cold breasts and haunches shaped like a lyre; I have run my lips the full length of that divine and wavy line that runs from her throat to her feet, and followed every curve of her flesh.

  Yes, I had her, every day, and every night. She came back to me, the Dead Lady, the beautiful Dead Lady, the Strange, Mysterious, Adorable one, she was with me every night.

  So great was my happiness, I could not hide it. With her I felt superhuman delights, and the deep, inexpressible joy of possessing the Impalpable, the Invisible, the Dead! No lover has ever tasted such keen and terrible pleasures.

  I could not conceal my happiness. I loved her so much I could not leave her. I took her with me everywhere. I walked about with her in town as though she were my wife; I took her to the theatre with me, and sat with her in a closed box, as though she were my mistress… But people saw her… they guessed… and they seized me… And they cast me into prison like a criminal. And they took her away from me… Oh misery!…

  The manuscript ended at this point. And as I raised my horrified eyes to the doctor, a dreadful cry, a scream of impotent fury and longing, sounded through the asylum.

  ‘Listen to him,’ said the doctor. ‘We have to stick him under the shower at least five times a day, the filthy lunatic. It isn’t only Sergeant Bertrand* who loved the dead.

  Beside myself with shock and horror and pity, I stammered out:

  ‘But… the hair… did it really exist?’

  The doctor got up, opened a cupboard full of instruments and flasks, and tossed in my direction, across his consulting-room, a long tress of blonde hair that flew towards me like a golden bird.

  I shivered as the light, caressing thing landed in my hands. My heart was beating with disgust and desire, the disgust associated with criminal exhibits, the desire to probe deeper into something vile and strange.

  With a shrug of his shoulders, the doctor went on:

  ‘The mind of man is capable of anything.’

  Night

  I LOVE the night with a passion. I love it as one loves one’s country, or one’s mistress, with an instinctive, deep, invincible love. I love it with all my senses, with my eyes that can see it, with my sense of smell that can breathe it, with my ears attentive to its silence, with my whole body, caressed by its darkness. Larks sing in the sun, in the warm air, in the light air of fine mornings. The owl plunges into the night, a black form crossing the blackness, and delighted, intoxicated by the black immensity, he gives his resonant and sinister hoot.

  Daytime wearies and bores me. It is noisy and brutal. I find it hard to get up, I dress wearily, go out regretfully, and each step, each movement, each action, each word, each thought wearies me, as if I were under the burden of a crushing load.

  But when the sun starts to sink, my whole body comes alive with an intense joy. I wake up, I come alive. As the shadows lengthen I feel a different person, younger, stronger, more alert, and happier. And I watch it, the great soft shadow falling from the sky, I watch it growing thicker: it drowns the city, like a thick and immaterial wave; and it hides, blots out, destroys colour and form; houses, beings, and monuments are smothered under its lightest of light caresses.

  It is then that I want to utter a shriek of pleasure like the owls, and bound from roof to roof like the cats; and an imperious desire for love starts running through my veins.

  So I set off, walking vigorously; either in the darkened suburbs or in the woods adjoining Paris, where I can hear my sisters the creatures, and my brothers the poachers.

  What you love too violently finishes by killing you. But how can I explain what has happened to me? How can I plausibly even relate this story? I do not know, I do not know, all I know is that this is how it is.—That’s all there is to it.

  So, yesterday—was it yesterday?—yes, no doubt it was, unless it were before that, a different day, a different month, a different year—how should I know? But it must be yesterday, because day has not come since, the sun never reappeared. But how long has the night lasted? Since what time?… Who can say? Who will ever know?

  So, yesterday—I went out as I do every evening, after dinner. It was very fine, very mild, very warm. As I walked down to the boulevards I looked at the black, star-filled river above my head, cut into sections by the rooftops which, in a way resembling a veritable river, turned and guided this rolling stream of stars.

  Everything stood out clear in the light air, from the planets to the gas-jets. With so many fires burning up there, and down below in the city, the darkness itself seemed luminous. Such brilliant nights are mo
re joyous than long sunny days.

  Café lights were blazing along the boulevard; there was laughter, conviviality, drink. I stopped by a theatre for a few moments, which one I no longer recall. But it was so bright in there I found it oppressive, and I came out rather cast down by the brutal glare of the naked light striking the gilded balcony, the false brilliance of the enormous chandelier, the footlights, and the melancholy at the heart of all this superficial and showy glister. I reached the Champs-Élysées, where the café-concerts seemed like fires seen through the foliage. The chestnuts, refulgent with yellow light, were like painted, phosphorescent trees. The electric globes, like pale and glinting moons, or moon-eggs fallen to earth, or monstrous, living pearls, projected a whiter light through their nacre shells, turning the gas-jets, the dirty gas-jets into something royal and full of mystery, and brightening the garlands of coloured glass.

  I stopped beneath the Arc de Triomphe to gaze down the avenue, the splendid starry avenue that heads into central Paris, with its twin streams of lights, under the stars! The remote, distant stars in the heavens, the unknown stars cast randomly in the galaxy where they form the strange patterns that set men dreaming and wondering.

  I went into the Bois de Boulogne, and stayed there for a long, long time. A strange excitement had taken possession of me, a powerful and unexpected emotion, an exaltation of thought which bordered on madness.

  I kept walking, on and on and on. Then I turned back.

  What time was it when once again I passed under the Arc de Triomphe? I do not know. The city was going to sleep, and clouds, great black clouds, were streaming slowly over the whole sky.

  Then, for the first time, I felt that something new and strange was about to happen. It seemed cold suddenly, and the air was thickening, my own beloved night came to weigh upon my heart. The avenue was by now deserted. Only two city constables were patrolling past a line of stationary carriages, while on the road, now barely lit by the gas-jets, which seemed to be running low, was a line of vehicles loaded with vegetables heading for Les Halles.* They were moving slowly, loaded with carrots, cabbages, and turnips. The drivers were sleeping and invisible, and the horses moved steadily, following the coach in front, silent on the wooden surface. As they passed under each lamp on the pavement, the carrots lit up red, the turnips white, and the cabbages green: and they moved one behind the other, these coaches, red as fire, and white as polished silver, and green as emerald. I followed them, then turned up the rue Royale, and rejoined the boulevards. There was not a soul about, no lighted cafés, just a few late stragglers, hurrying home. I had never seen Paris so dead or so empty. I pulled out my watch. It was two o’clock.

  Some force was propelling me onwards, so I kept walking. I went as far as the Bastille. And it was there I realized that I had never seen a night so dark, I could scarcely make out the Column, and the golden Hermes was concealed by an impenetrable darkness. A vault of clouds, thick as immensity itself, had engulfed the stars, and seemed to be bearing down upon the earth as if to destroy it.

  I turned back. Now there was no one near me. Except, at the Place du Château d’Eau, a drunk nearly careered into me, and then vanished. For a moment I could still hear his loud, unsteady footsteps. I kept on. At the junction with the Faubourg Montmartre a carriage went by, heading down towards the Seine. I hailed it. The driver didn’t respond. A woman was hanging about near the rue Drouot: ‘Please Monsieur, listen to me.’ I quickened my pace to avoid her outstretched hand. Then nothing again. In front of the Vaudeville a rag-picker was working the gutter. His little lamp was held at ground level. I called out: ‘What time is it, good fellow?’

  He growled back: ‘How should I know. Don’t ’ave a watch.’

  Then I noticed that the gas-jets had gone out. I knew that they were put out early in this season, to economize; but daybreak was still a long way off, a very long way off.

  ‘I’ll go to Les Halles,’ I thought, ‘there’s bound to be people there.’

  I set off, but I could hardly see where I was going. I moved forward carefully, as if I were in a thick wood, counting off the streets.

  A dog growled at me in front of the Crédit Lyonnais. I turned up the rue de Grammont, and then got lost. I wandered on, and recognized the Bourse by the iron railings surrounding it. A cab went by in the distance, a single hansom, perhaps the one that had passed me a little while ago. I tried to catch up with it, heading towards the noise of its wheels, plunging through the lonely streets, that were black, black as death.

  I got lost again. Where was I? What folly to cut off the gas so soon! Not a single pedestrian, not a single straggler, not a rodent, not even the scream of a cat in heat. Nothing.

  Where were the town constables? I thought: ‘I shall shout, then they’ll come.’ I gave a shout. No one answered.

  I shouted louder. My voice faded out, and gave no echo—weak, stifled, crushed by the impenetrable night.

  I screamed: ‘Help! Help! Help!’

  But my desperate call found no answer. What time was it now? I pulled out my watch, but had no matches. I listened to the light ticking of the clockwork with a strange, intense joy. It seemed to be alive. I felt less alone. It was all a mystery! I started off again, tapping the walls with my stick, like a blind man, and I raised my eyes continually to the sky, hoping for the first trace of daybreak; but the space up there was black, blacker even than the city.

  What time could it possibly be? I felt as though I had been walking for an eternity; my legs trembled under me, my chest was heaving, and I felt a terrible hunger.

  I resolved to ring at the next doorway. I pulled on the copper bell, and it rang throughout the house, but strangely, as if it were the only sound in the whole house. I rang again, and waited some more—still nothing!

  I was frightened now. I ran to the next house, and twenty times pulled on the bell in the dark corridor where the concierge should be sleeping. But he did not wake—so I went on, tugging on every bell-pull I could find, kicking and beating with my cane on doors that remained stubbornly closed.

  Suddenly, I realized that I had come to Les Halles. Les Halles was empty: there was not a sound, not a movement, not a single coach, or man, not a stick of celery or a single bunch of flowers.—The place was empty, motionless, abandoned, dead!

  Terror seized me. What was going on? My God! What was happening?

  I started off again. But what was the time? Who would tell me the time? The bells in the clock-towers and monuments had fallen silent. I thought: ‘I shall open the glass front of my watch and feel for the hands with my fingers…’ But it had stopped. There was nothing now, nothing at all, not the slightest gleam, not the whisper of a sound in the air. Nothing! Not even the sound of a cab passing in the distance—nothing at all.

  I had reached the quay, and a glacial chill rose from the river.

  Was the Seine still flowing?

  I wanted to find out, so I found the steps, and went down… there was no sound of water flowing fast under the arches of the bridge… More steps… now sand… and mud… now water… it was flowing, but cold… cold… so cold… almost frozen… almost stopped… almost dead.

  And I knew then that I would never have the strength to climb back up… and that I would die there… I would die—of hunger—of exhaustion—of cold.

  GUSTAVE GEFFROY

  The Statue

  THROUGHOUT the engagement, the preparations, and the day itself, when the young woman formally contracted to marry the young sculptor, she had a fairly clear idea of the uncommon existence that she would lead from then on. As a young débutante, she had moved easily in the brilliant world of fashion, with all its excitements, and in the literary and artistic milieu that contained the principal actors of Parisian social life. It was the sort of milieu in which everything can be said, or at least suggested, in the malicious, gossipy, blasé conversations that are its very being. Some girls understand little—others know exactly what is going on. Some can live through the most scanda
lous times, and hear the most scabrous things, and still lose nothing of their flower-like freshness, their virginal candour, their childlike naivety. Then there are those who seem to grasp everything straightaway, in a manner that is as mysterious to others as it is to themselves, and they come into possession of the finest keys that open the most secret locks. This latter type is no more to be censured than the former is to be praised, and the difference can only be laid at the door of physiological chance and the mystery of the instincts.

  The young woman in question belonged to the latter type, and when she moved from girlhood into womanhood she believed that she would be able not only to order her existence and her future in accordance with the desires of her heart and mind, but would be able also to foresee any obstacle that might arise, and by turning it to her advantage, secure her lasting happiness.

  And it was precisely here, in her pragmatism, that her romanticism appeared, and the qualities one might have thought suppressed—virginal candour, childlike naivety—came into play.

  She had wanted to be an artist; she frequented museums and enrolled in the painting schools. She had also wanted to be a writer; she read a great deal and contrived to converse with men of letters. In the end, she gave up on the idea of producing art herself, and curbed her ambition, which was now to become wife to an artist.

  This she achieved. She was wife to a fashionable sculptor, who was busy all day with official commissions and producing busts for the Salon; he was much in demand, and liked to receive guests himself, in his sumptuous house near the Parc Monceau.* And besides all this, he was intelligent; he knew that his work was a little glib and superficial—but he was curious, he was likeable, and he was in love.

  Jeanne was in love too, and very attached to this husband of hers; her passion would flare up easily, and she was jealous. With her head full of novels and memories, determined that her future should continue as idyllic as her present, the first change she implemented concerned the role of the female model in the work of the artist.