French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  ‘So tell me. I’m completely at a loss.’

  Monsieur Barbeville began thus:

  ‘You’ll grasp the thing immediately. An Italian, living in Paris, gave birth one day to conjoined twins. The birth was secret, and the midwife didn’t think of informing the Academy of Science. The child (one or two baby girls, depending on whether you examined her from the top or from the bottom) had two heads, four arms, two chests, a shared pelvis, and only two legs. Such cases are not unheard-of, I believe?’

  ‘No. Especially among stillbirths… Go on. Now I’m with you.’

  ‘But have any been known to survive?’

  ‘Several.’

  ‘They must have been, dare I say, solidly constructed monsters. Give me an example.’

  ‘Ritta-Cristina, two little girls, born in Sardinia around 1830. They were very like the description you have just given; two chests but one pelvis. Their parents brought them to Paris, to show them off at the fair, but the authorities considered such an exhibition to be offensive to public morals and proscribed it. Without other resources, the poor family had to leave the children in a fireless room, and they died of bronchitis.’

  ‘Was there an autopsy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they have separate nervous systems?’

  ‘Entirely, except for the lower abdomen, where sensations were transmitted to both brains at once.’

  ‘Excellent! You’ll see how your example backs up what I’m about to tell you.’

  The old judge inserted a long cigarette into his meerschaum holder, and warmed to his theme:

  ‘The two little girls born to this Italian were registered under the names of Maria-Maddalena. They survived. Their mother never showed them off, but she cared for them very tenderly. They grew normally, and attained the age of puberty. At sixteen years of age they had turned into two very pretty teenagers, despite their beauties being so strangely conjoined. If the siren’s tail didn’t prevent her from seducing men, we shouldn’t be surprised that Maria-Maddalena could stir the heart of a lover.

  ‘In fact, both girls fell in love; but only Maddalena was loved. A young man fell for her; but since he was full of respect for the other, the sisters thought they shared a common love, and they responded together with all the fire of the first flush of youth. Alas, this illusion could not last. The young man felt he must put an end to it. One day a letter arrived, written in his hand, addressed to ‘Mlle Maddalena’. As you can imagine, this awoke in the neighbouring breast a thousand serpents, and when the request for marriage was officially made, Maddalena said yes, and Maria said no.

  ‘They implored, they entreatied, but all in vain. The mother took sides with the lovers, and tried to persuade the refractory girl, but she too met with failure…’

  ‘It’s absolutely hilarious!’ exclaimed the doctor, shaking with mirth.

  ‘Tragic, my dear chap! This has all the makings of an unimaginable drama. To be the enemy sister, the rival in love; to be half-joined to the one you abhor, and condemned by nature to see all the caresses lavished on the other; what am I saying, not just to see, but to feel them as well! And then to carry the fruit of a lover doubly detested! Dante invented nothing like this; it surpasses in horror anything devised in the annals of Chinese torture.

  ‘So—to go on with the story—the Italian, who was set upon marrying one of her daughters, despite the other’s opposition, sought out the local mayor and asked him if he would consent to celebrate the marriage under such conditions. The mayor hesitated, saying that the question was of unprecedented complexity; he felt he had no authority to judge; his humdrum tasks hardly qualified him to resolve a case involving such legal niceties. In the end he asked the concerned parties to send him two lawyers, who would argue the pros and cons.’

  ‘Did the hearing take place?’

  ‘Yes. But in private, obviously, in the mayor’s office, with no one else present except the deputies and the clerk.

  ‘Maddalena’s lawyer was the first to plead. The exordium was ironic, the presentation of the facts facetious. He started his argument in the same tone. In turn, he invoked article 1645 (“the obligation to render up with the thing, its accessories”), or article 569, even more abusively applied. Then, setting these jokes aside, he laid the dilemma out before them: either Maria-Maddalena consisted of two distinct and different women, or she was one woman. If the first case were true, her sister’s consent was clearly not necessary. If the second were true, then the case was even clearer. This was the thesis he adopted, and developed. No one had ever considered, in reality or in the imagination of the poets, that multiple limbs implied multiple individuals. A calf with six legs was still a single calf. Argus’s hundred eyes* do not belong to a hundred people. Janus* had two faces but they belonged to one and the same god. Cerberus* takes a singular, despite having three heads. Why should Maria-Maddalena, who is physically indivisible, be made up of two individuals, when the very meaning of individual, etymologically defined, means that which is indivisible?’

  The doctor laughed, ‘I like his argument!’

  ‘Furthermore,’ the lawyer went on, ‘even admitting the existence of two minds, in this case psychology is nothing to the purpose, it is marriage we are discussing. And marriage has a very precise end in view, which no one can dispute. Now, Maria-Maddalena may have come into the world with a double brain, she is perfectly single from the nuptial point of view. Of the two women you can discern down to the waist, thereafter the single organ makes a single spouse.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘The lawyer representing the other sister replied that he would not get waylaid, like his fanciful colleague, in mythological digression, but would rather plead for common sense. The very fact that Maria and Maddalena have gone to law against each other proves, he said, that they are two people. “Maria refuses to get married. If Monsieur X marries her sister, my client will be the victim of kidnap: this, aggravated by the fact she is a minor, constitutes the first crime. Once kidnapped, she will be held against her will in the marital home of the petitioners: false imprisonment—the second crime. Once there, our falsely imprisoned minor will be forced to be present during all the intimate caresses exchanged between the spouses: indecency and exhibitionism, the third crime. By force she will be brought to bed next to a man, with Maddalena as his willing, and interested, accomplice: procuration and enslavement, fourth crime. Despite her resistance, her virginity will be taken at the same time as her sister’s, because her physical constitution demands that it be so: rape, crime number five. The guilty party will be her brother-in-law: incest, crime number six, not recognized in law, but I retain it as an aggravating circumstance. Finally, the man is married: adultery, crime number seven. Is that it? No, there is more: the marriage of one requires the marriage of the other twin, since the two of them are indivisible, as my colleague has just proved with his luminous powers of deduction. You will be forced therefore to write out two marriage certificates, but with one and the same husband named on them both. By saving him from adultery, you inculpate him with bigamy, incriminating yourself as a party to the fact. You’ll both end up in the labour camp!” ’

  ‘Was the verdict postponed for a week?’

  ‘No! The mayor protested there and then that he had never had the slightest intention of giving his consent, and the marriage never took place.’

  ‘The Lord be praised!’ said the doctor gaily.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  BARBEY D’AUREVILLY

  Don Juan’s Crowning Love-Affair

  First published in Les Diaboliques (Paris: Éditions Dentu, 1874) (the edition was partially seized by order of the public prosecutor); a second edition (Paris: Lemerre) appeared in 1882.

  Maison-d’Or: or more formally Maison-Dorée. A fashionable Parisian restaurant from 1840 until the end of the Second Empire, it was situated on the Boulevard des Italiens, at the corner of the rue Lafitte.

  D’Arnaud de Brescia: (c.1090–1155), Italian reforme
r who preached in favour of a return to the Early Church. His teachings were judged heretical, and he was excommunicated, and then executed.

  The mille è tre: (Italian) one thousand and three, the number of Don Juan’s conquests according to Leporello, in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (Act I, scene 2).

  the victim’s ball: allusion to the balls that were instituted after 9 Thermidor (the date of Robespierre’s overthrow and end of the Revolutionary reign of terror). Entry was restricted to relations of the guillotined.

  Orgon … Tartuffe: in Molière’s Tartuffe (I. 3) Orgon cannot conceal his real interest in the object of his question, just as the Marquise is keen to hear about Ravila.

  Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès: Barbey uses his own Christian names. In French, ‘Ravila de Ravilès’ is a play on words—literally ‘ravish her/ravish them’.

  Faubourg Saint-Germain: the area in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, around the rue Vaneau, which was the heart of aristocratic society.

  Mesmer chain: Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815), German doctor who claimed to have discovered ‘animal magnetism’, a fluid he prescribed, and which he claimed to be universally remedial. Patients sat round a basin of ‘magnetized’ water and held thumbs, a procedure said to favour the circulation of the ‘fluid’. In Paris, Mesmer had a passionate coterie following on the eve of the Revolution.

  The witty Prince de Ligne: Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1735–1814), French military commander. He frequented the cultivated elites of Europe, and was the author of Mélanges militaires, littéraires, sentimentaires. Alcibiades was the famously dissolute Athenian politician and friend of Socrates.

  Comte d’Orsay: Alfred d’Orsay (1801–52), a celebrated dandy, conversationalist, and art-lover—described by Barbey in his study of dandyism, Du Dandysme et de George Brummell (1845).

  Commendatore: in Mozart’s opera, the marble figure of the Commander, the figure of death, who comes for the impenitent Don Giovanni during his final dinner.

  The Amphitryons: the reference is to Molière’s play. Amphitryon is the Theban general impersonated by Zeus in order to sleep with his wife, and his name is synonymous with the figure of the generous ‘host’.

  Sardanapalus: legendary king of Assyria, known for his dissolute life. He committed suicide by throwing himself onto a huge pyre in the courtyard of his palace, onto which he had flung all his goods and chattels, including wives and concubines.

  Byron: Barbey was a lifelong admirer of George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), the dashing, dandified, aristocratic Romantic poet.

  Regency period: Barbey refers here to the Régence of Philippe d’Orléans, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, reputed for its dissolute mores.

  Melusina the sea-nymph: a figure from medieval legend. Because of her sin, Melusina was condemned to become half-woman, half-serpent every Saturday night.

  Café Anglais: a fashionable restaurant for the rich and the jeunesse dorée, situated on the Boulevard des Italiens.

  Jagellons: celebrated Polish dynasty founded by Ladislas Jagellon (1348–1434). The Czartorysky family descended directly from the Jagellons.

  wild oats: the original French, ‘j’avais fini mes caravanes’, is piquant, and hard to translate without explanation. The expression was used by aspiring Knights of Malta, who had to participate in a fixed number of campaigns against the infidel before they qualified to join the Order.

  en ferronnière: after Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait La Belle Ferronière; the hair worn with a chain or a band around it, attached to which is a jewel that rests against the centre of the forehead.

  Borgia comes before Machiavelli: Barbey refers to the Florentine prince Cesare Borgia (1457–1507) famous for his debauched lifestyle, as a guide to the arts of love, much as Machiavelli (1469–1527) was a guide to politics.

  three tails: the horse-tails hung from a Turkish pasha’s lance designating order of rank, three tails showing the highest-ranking officer.

  “little mask”: the expression petite masque was a familiar one to designate a cheeky or a mischievous child.

  dos-à-dos: the love-seat, sometimes known in French as a boudeuse, or ‘sulker’, designed with the two seats placed back-to-back.

  VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM

  The three stories here were collected in Contes cruels (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883).

  The Presentiment

  [title]: the French title is ‘L’Intersigne’—a word belonging to Breton folklore, and thus especially attractive to Villiers. It refers to an obscure sign or an augury, which announces a death. To the word ‘signe’ is added some kind of mysterious exchange or intervention, appropriate to this classic example of le fantastique in literature, relating events that cannot be rationally explained away.

  [epigraph]: ‘Consider, O Man, what you were before birth, and what you will be until your end. For sure there was a time when you existed not. Then, constituted of vile matter, you were nourished in your mother’s womb by her menstrual blood, clothed in membranous matter. Next, enveloped in a vile garment you came among us—in that tunic, that adornment! And you have forgotten from where you came. Man is nothing but a rank sperm, a sack of excrement, food for worms. Knowledge, wisdom, reason, without God, pass by like clouds.

  ‘After man, comes the worm; after the worm, horror and putrefaction. In such wise man changes into what is not man.

  ‘Why do you adorn yourself, why do you fatten your flesh, when, in a few days, the worm will try your sepulchre? Why not adorn your soul, which must come before God and the Angels in heaven?’

  From the Meditations of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), founder of the Cistercian Order.

  Autumn solstice: there is no such thing, of course.

  Avicenna’s cassia brew: Avicenna (980–1037), the great Arab doctor and philosopher.

  Robert d’Arbrissel: (c.1045–1116), an itinerant preacher who founded the Abbey of Fontevrault. He was famous for the extreme severity of his ascetic practices.

  at the very instant: the first use of phrases in italics, that recur and carry a mysterious charge in the story.

  Joseph de Maistre: (comte), 1753–1821, politician, philosopher, and writer, opposed to the French Revolution (he fled to Lausanne in 1793). De Maistre reiterated his monarchist and papist beliefs in Considérations sur la France (1796).

  death-watch beetle: in French, horloge-de-mort (‘clock of death’); the name is clearly freighted with meaning here.

  Rabelais’s “good companion”: in Gargantua et Pantagruel by François Rabelais (1494–1553) ‘le bon compagnon’ is an epithet used at one point of the libertine, cunning knave, and coward Panurge.

  The Desire To Be a Man

  This story is a reflection on the actor and his shifting roles, and on personal identity, born of Villiers’s close knowledge of the Parisian theatre, and his abiding ambition to write successfully for the stage.

  Bourse: the Paris stock-exchange, situated in the second arrondissement.

  the curfew: Villiers sets this story very precisely in the days following the Commune (1871), when the curfew was still in force.

  the Caudine Forks: the mountain pass in southern Italy in which the Samnites trapped the Roman army in the Second Samnite War (326–304 BCE). The Samnites then humiliated the Romans by forcing them to pass, man by man, under the yoke—this time made of Roman spears, since the greatest humiliation for a Roman soldier was to lose his spear. Villiers uses the expression in its familiar sense, meaning anything that someone is forced to do unwillingly.

  Boulevard du Crime: now the Boulevard du Temple. At the time, the centre of Paris theatreland; it was in theatres along this street that cloak-and-dagger melodrama was performed, hence the list of Renaissance Italian clans that follows.

  Esprit Chaudval, born Lepeinteur, known as Monanteuil: the elaborate triptych of names serves to underline the old actor’s essential lack of any stable identity.

  Frédérick Lemaître: birth-name Ant
oine Louis Prosper Lemaître (1800–76), French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the Boulevard du Crime.

  Thalia … Melpomene: the classical Muses of Comedy and Tragedy.

  Ellevious and the Laruettes … Dugazons: characters from the Opéra-Comique of the period.

  Erostratus: an Ephesian who, with the purpose of winning for himself immortal fame, set fire to the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus in 356 BCE.

  my crime will be disinterested: Chaudval’s ‘disinterested’ but murderous intention here resembles the crime of Deshoulières in Jean Richepin’s eponymous story (see below); Chaudval, like Deshoulières, would be a ‘dandy of the unpredictable’.

  Corneille: Pierre Corneille (1606–84), the great French playwright, slightly senior to Racine. Corneille’s greatest play was the tragedy Le Cid (1636).

  Rostopschin: Count Feodor Rostopschin (1760–1826) was appointed Governor of Moscow under Tsar Alexander I, during the Napoleonic Wars. He was credited (by the French) with the burning of Moscow in 1812.

  the Stylite: St Simeon Stylites (390–459), Christian ascetic from near Aleppo in Syria, who lived unprotected from the elements on top of a tall column. His name is now synonymous with extreme ascetic practice.

  Orestes: in Greek mythology, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. He murdered his mother to avenge the death of his father. He appears in several plays, and Euripides named one of his tragedies after him.

  Sentimentalism

  [title]: ‘The sentimental habit of mind; the disposition to attribute undue importance to sentimental considerations, or to be governed by sentiment in opposition to reason; the tendency to excessive, indulgence in or insincere display of sentiment’ (OED). The French title is ‘Sentimentalisme’, a word that does not exist as such in the relevant edition of the Littré dictionary (1878). I follow Pierre Reboul in considering that Villiers uses the word—in the light of what follows, referring to those people who gush about their feelings—pejoratively. See Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Contes Cruels, ed. Pierre Reboul (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1983), 395.