French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  And finally another took back from him her soul, that deliciously ingenuous soul from which he had fashioned a cape in white velvet; and of Don Juan there remained nothing but a hollow ghost, a rich man with no money, a thief without arms, a dreary human grub reduced to its reality, and giving up its secret!

  On the Threshold

  AT the Chateau de la Fourche, everything was melancholy and grandiose: the gallows name,* to begin with, redolent of a more severe and primitive justice, meted out in seigneurial times; the four dark avenues whose lamentations sounded like an ocean; the moats in which black swans swam amongst the broken reeds, the threatening hemlocks, the multitude of blooming yellow flowers, that were like so many dead suns; the chateau, with its storm-coloured walls, its roof undulating like furrows of ploughland, its narrow, ogived, trefoiled windows, its broken tower swarmed over by ivy so thick it seemed as perennial as life itself.

  Having mounted the steps and crossed the threshold, one entered a series of huge, cold, and lofty rooms, hung with greensward on which one gazed once more at the slanting reeds of the moat, the melancholic flowers and the hemlock, sheltering in their shade the royal procession of mourning swans. Simple straw matting was all there was in the way of carpeting; everywhere were sleeping dogs, muzzles between their paws, and a strange, spectral vision (which I could never get used to): moving from room to room, snapping its beak every time a door was opened, was a tame heron. This funereal creature went everywhere; it followed us at mealtimes, pecking at a large pan that contained its feed; at regular intervals the bird would make a noise like a loose tile clacking in the wind against an old wall. It was called the Missionary, because of its resemblance, with its benevolent, sidelong look, to a Capuchin monk who had come to preach at La Fourche. The death of the monk, a few days after, coincided with the appearance of the bird, which had been shot and wounded, and was found on the moat by a gamekeeper.

  When, on my first evening at La Fourche, I heard this story, I had been amused, even though my host told it without a glimmer of humour. The next day, however, I started to find the Missionary unsettling, less for its ugliness than for the absolute assurance with which the creature had taken sovereign possession of the place; as if it really were there to accomplish some supernatural design. No one ever shooed it away or shut it in; as soon as its beak clacked against a door, someone would get up to let it enter, and if it left a room with us, it would always go first, walking gravely, with the expression, not of some Capuchin, but of an old, incorruptible, and gently implacable judge.

  The Missionary: privately, I had already rechristened it, Remorse.

  One evening, when we had risen from table, having dined on venison in juniper-flavoured cider, I nearly tripped over the bird near the door, and in my annoyance I rather hissed at it:

  ‘Well go on through, Remorse!’

  ‘Why did you not call it Missionary?’ the Marquis de la Hogue asked me sharply, seizing my arm and looking at me with eyes alive, not with anger as I had first thought, but with terror.

  He went on in a strangled voice, hardly able to get the words out:

  ‘How did you know its name is Remorse? Who told you?’

  ‘You did!’

  By risking this, which was a shot in the dark, for I was almost as disturbed as Monsieur de la Hogue, I had made myself privy to more confidences.

  When we entered the room reserved for our nightly conversations, the bird was there in front of the fireplace where huge logs were flaming, standing on one leg, its beak under its wing. Hoping our conversation would continue, I enquired casually, as I sat down in one of the wooden armchairs that resembled a stall in a cathedral:

  ‘Is it asleep?’

  ‘It never sleeps!’ replied Monsieur de la Hogue—and sure enough, at that moment, in a brighter light cast by the fire, I saw the cold, ironical eye of the old judge, fixing me with the muddied gleam of a star reflected in a frog-pond—the incorruptible and gently implacable eye.

  ‘It never sleeps,’ went on Monsieur de la Hogue, ‘and neither do I. My heart never sleeps. I know sleep, but I know nothing of the unconscious. My dreams are a seamless continuation of my evening thoughts, and come morning, I join my dreams with equally seamless logic to my thoughts. It seems to me that I have swum for a single hour in full intellectual clarity, for thirty-odd years. And what is it I dream about during the endless hours of my life? Of nothing, or rather, of negations—what I have not done, what I shall not do, what I should not do, even if my youth were granted me a second time. For that is who I am, I am the man who has never acted, who has never lifted a finger to further the fulfilment of a desire, or a duty. I am the lake no wind has ever ruffled, the forest that has never soughed, the sky untroubled by any clouds of action.’

  After uttering these rather solemn, even lapidary, phrases he was silent for a few seconds, and then:

  ‘Do you know about my life? No, you are too young, and in any case what people say about me is not me. I have never told my story, and if you had not, by chance—or by some providential perspicuity—uttered a word—a name!—that (I confess) fills me with dread—then you should not have heard my confession either.

  Here it is:

  ‘I was eight years old, when my mother brought home from her far-flung travels a little girl of about my own age, our cousin, at least by name, whom the death of her parents had left as vulnerably alone in the world as a lamb lost at night in a wood. This adorable little thing instantly became the spoiled child, and an ideal sister, or even a future fiancée for me, an angel fallen from the heavens for my eternal consolation. At twelve, I was a precocious, stout-hearted lad, grown up in the country; even then I loved Nigelle infinitely, and in consequence, until the day I lost her, my love was such that it could neither grow nor decrease. She loved me in return, with the same ardour; I knew it, too, and her dying confession taught me nothing I didn’t know, except my own wickedness.

  ‘As soon as the first glimmer of reasoning inhabited my infant brain, I had arrived at a singular conception of life, which I now feel to be criminal. Having, one hot noon, picked a rose whose scent exasperated and whose purple smile made me want to possess it, I wandered about the garden paths with my rose forgotten between my fingers; I noticed that within an hour it was all crumpled and wilted, wounded by the arrows of the sun. And I thought, it is permissible to desire roses, but one must not pick them.

  ‘And I thought, when Nigelle came up to me, one can desire women, but one must not pick them.

  ‘Following on from this primordial discovery, I was besieged by a host of thoughts, and slowly I came to elaborate a whole philosophy of the negative, a religion of nirvana took root in my proud and shallow mind. One day, I summed the whole thing up in a phrase:

  ‘ “Man must remain on the threshold.”

  ‘A few books came to my assistance, ascetic treatises, a summary of Plato, some fragments of the German metaphysicals,* but to all practical intents and purposes the doctrine was my own. I was very proud of it, and I plunged resolutely into the darknesses of inaction.

  ‘I applied myself to accomplishing only the simplest of acts, and certainly only those which, while procuring me no great pleasure, could never lead to my experiencing any disappointment.

  ‘I had violent desires, and I enjoyed them, I wallowed in them, I got drunk on them. My heart expanded, until it contained the world. Wanting everything, I had everything, but not in the way you hold something between your two small, trembling hands. I took everything, but nothing of its own accord gave itself to me; I had everything—but lovelessly!

  ‘It was only later, at a particularly solemn moment, that I understood the existence of love. Until that time, my pride had sustained my illusion, and my days passed happily; I was proud of having escaped from the disenchantment consequent upon any action when carried through.

  ‘Even today, and now that I know, now that suffering has made me wise, I would still be unable to pick the rose. What purpose would it serve?
This is the terrible refrain that runs perpetually through my head, and it has never been so imperative as now.

  ‘For twenty years Nigelle and I lived side by side: she became shyer and sadder by the day, overawed by my fortune, while she, poor thing, possessed only the treasure of her blonde hair. For my part, I became increasingly proud, and formidably uncommunicative.

  ‘I loved her as much as it is possible to love, but I loved her only as far as the threshold.

  ‘And I never did cross that threshold, and nor did my shadow; and not so much as the shadow of my heart ever walked about in that palace of love.

  ‘Tender and welcoming, the door had been open always, but I turned aside my head, when I passed in front of it, to contemplate my own desire, to commune with my own desire, to confide to my desire the dreams I sought never to realize.

  ‘To cross the threshold? And what then? That palace was possibly a palace like any other—but the palace of my dreams was unique, and no one will ever see its like again.

  ‘She died for love of me, I who loved her, and I say it again, with infinite love. She died with these words: “I love you!” And I replied nothing.’

  The heron changed leg, snapped its beak, and this time buried it under its left wing: now the mournful, ironic eye was fixed upon Monsieur de la Hogue.

  ‘I think that this bird’, went on my host, ‘seems to you ugly and ridiculous, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Above all, grim.’

  ‘Ridiculous and grim. I endure it as a punishment. It frightens me, it pains me, and I wish it thus. You do understand, of course, that if I wanted I could wring its neck in no time at all!’

  ‘Have you thought of doing so?’ I asked. ‘Wringing the neck of Remorse?’

  ‘I have thought of it,’ answered Monsieur de la Hogue. ‘But what would be the point? There is no meaning whatever in this grim and ridiculous bird, except that which I choose to give to it; all I need to do is to withdraw that, and it would be as dead as a stuffed bird. Do you really think I am duped by its inanity? Do you think I’m mad?’

  The old man had risen, shaking out his long, grey locks that fell upon his pallid, hollow cheeks; and then, suddenly relaxed, he fell back into his armchair.

  He asked me again, but now quite at ease, and with a touch of mockery:

  ‘At least, I presume you don’t think I’m mad?’

  As I looked back at him with a smile, and moved my hand unthinkingly towards the feathers of the motionless bird, he jumped up again:

  ‘Do not touch the Missionary!’

  And he uttered these words in the tone of voice Charles I must have used to a bystander on the scaffold: ‘Do not touch the axe!’

  JULES LAFORGUE

  Perseus and Andromeda

  or The Happiest of the Three

  I

  O MONOTONOUS and ill-favoured country!…

  The solitary island, done out in yellow-grey dunes; under meandering skies; and everywhere the sea blocking the view, and the cries of hope and of melancholy.

  The sea! From whatever angle you look at it, hour after hour, whatever moment you surprise it: it is always itself, nothing is ever missing, always alone, empire of the unclubbable, weighty matter in process, ill-digested cataclysm;—as if the liquid state we witness were no more than a destitution! And then there are the days it starts to stir up that liquid state! And even worse, the days it takes on those injured tones that have no face of its quality to look into it, who has no one! The sea, always and unfailingly present and correct, every instant! And in short, not the slightest skirt-tail of a friend. (Oh, really! We must be done with the idea of sharing grudges after confidences, however lonely we have been together all this time.)

  O monotonous and ill-favoured country!… When will it all end?—And even, where infinity is concerned: space monopolized by nothing but the indifferently limitless sea, time by nothing but skies in their seasonal transitions marked out by the passage of grey migrant birds, shrieking and untameable!—What on earth can we make of all this, of all this enormous and ineffable fit of the sulks?* It were better to die forthwith, blessed as we are from birth with a good and feeling heart.

  The sea, this afternoon, is quite ordinary, uniformly and extensively dark green; it is an endless enchainment of white foam lighting up, going out, lighting up again, it is a legion of sheep swimming, drowning, bobbing up again, and never arriving, until they are ambushed by darkness. And over their heads frolic the four winds, frolicking for the love of art, for the pleasure of killing the afternoon, whipping it up into prismatic particles, cresting the foam. And should a sunbeam strike, there’s a rainbow running over the wavebacks like a rich gold lining—that rises for a moment and then dives back down, foolishly untrusting.

  And that is all. O monotonous and ill-favoured country!…

  Into the inner reaches between two grottoes, downed with eider feather and pale beds of guano, the vast and monotonous sea comes panting and streaming. But its lament does not cover the little moans, the little sharp and raucous moans of Andromeda, who, flat on her belly and propped on her elbows, stares without seeing at the mechanical waves, swelling and dying as far as the eye can see. Andromeda is moaning over herself. She moans; but suddenly she becomes aware that her lament is in chorus with that of the sea and the wind, two unsociable beings, two powerful ringmasters that don’t so much as look at her. So she stops abruptly; and then looks around for something to take it out on. She calls out:

  ‘Monster!’

  ‘Poppet?…’

  ‘Hey! Monster!…’

  ‘Poppet?…’

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  The Dragon-Monster, squatting at the entrance to his cave, turns round, and in turning all the rich, sub-aquatic, jewelled impasto along his spine shines out, and with compassion he raises his multicoloured cartilaginously fingered eyelashes, to reveal two large, watery-glaucous orbs, and says (in the voice of a distinguished gentleman who has fallen on hard times):

  ‘As you can see, Poppet, I am breaking and polishing stones for your train; further flights of birds are forecast before sunset.’

  ‘Stop it, the noise gets on my nerves. And I want to stop killing the birds that fly by here. Oh, let them pass and see their homelands.—O migratory flights that pass me oblivious, O legions of waves that come in and die, bearing me nothing, how bored I am!* And this time I am truly ill…—Monster?…’

  ‘Poppet?’

  ‘Why have you not brought me any more of those jewels? What have I done to displease you, my nuncle?’

  The Monster gave a sumptuous shrug of his shoulders, scratched in the sand to his right, lifted a pebble, and extracted a fistful of pink pearls and crystallized anemones, that he had kept in reserve for a caprice of this kind. He waved them in front of Andromeda’s pretty nose and laid them down before her. Andromeda, still flat on her tummy and propped on her elbows, sighed without moving:

  ‘And what if I were to refuse them, and refuse them with inexplicable stubbornness?’

  The Monster took his treasure back and flung it away, where it sank to its aquatic Golconda depths.

  At which Andromeda rolled groaning on the sand, twisting her hair about her face in tragical disarray:

  ‘Oh! My pink pearls! My crystal sea-anemones! Oh, I shall die! And it will be all your fault; can you conceive the irreparable?’

  But brusquely she stopped her wailing and took up her wheedling, crawling in her usual way underneath the Monster’s chin and encircling his neck, his purplish-striped and viscous neck, with her white arms. The Monster gave a sumptuous shrug of his shoulders and, always kind-hearted, started to secrete wild musk from every pore over which he felt brushed by those plump little arms, the little arms of the dear child, who soon took up her plaint:

  ‘O Monster, O Dragon, you say you love me and yet you can do nothing for me. You can see that I am dying of boredom and yet you do nothing. How much I should love you, if you could only heal me! Do something!…’


  O noble Andromeda, daughter of the king of Ethiopia!* The reluctant dragon can only answer you in a vicious circle:—‘I cannot cure you until you love me, for it is in loving me that you will be cured.’

  ‘Always the same conundrum! But when I tell you that I do love you!’

  ‘I don’t feel it any more than you do. It’s no use; I remain just a little monster of a dragon, just an unhappy Catoblepas.’*

  ‘But you could at least carry me on your back, and bring me to a country where there might be some company. (Oh, I do so want to go into society!) Once we got there, I’d gladly give you a little kiss for your trouble.’

  ‘I have already told you it’s impossible. It is here that we must live out our destinies.’

  ‘Oh yes? How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘I know nothing more than you do, O Noble Andromeda of the orange hair.’

  ‘Our destinies, our destinies! But I’m getting older every day! I can’t go on like this!’

  ‘Do you want to go on a little sea-trip?’

  ‘Oh, I know all about your little sea-trips! Find something else.’

  Andromeda flung herself down on her belly on the sand, that she scratched and furrowed all the way down her legitimately hungry flanks, and started up her little groans and whimpers again.

  The Monster thought it a good moment at which to adopt the falsetto voice of the poor child who was growing up, to make fun of her histrionic grievances, and he began to recite, in a neutral tone:

  ‘Pyramus and Thisbe.* Once upon a time…’

  ‘No, please, no! Any more of your worn-out stories and I shall kill myself!’

  ‘Now, now, what’s all this? You must pull yourself together! Go fishing, go hunting, make up rhymes, blow the conch at the four points of the compass, renew your collection of shells; or, I know—carve symbols onto recalcitrant stones (that really passes the time!)…’