French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  of being insensitive: Maximilien here aspires to the condition of Baudelaire’s ideal dandy: ‘But a dandy can never be someone vulgar’, and ‘The beauty of the dandy’s character consists in the coldness of his demeanour, and his unshakable resolution, not to give way to emotion…’ (see Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le Dandy’, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 2011), 709–12).

  CATULLE MENDÈS

  What the Shadow Demands

  This story was collected in the volume Rue des Filles-Dieu, 5 ou L’Héautonpératéromène (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1895).

  the prison of La Roquette: La Grande Roquette, opened in 1851, was the central prison in Paris at the time, at the entrance to which, in the street and in view of the public, a special base was constructed for the guillotine.

  wiping it off the map: Mendès must be referring to the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, in the vicinity of Java and other islands, that caused tsunamis with innumerable casualties in their wake. News of this catastrophe caused a stir in Europe and North America.

  the universal law would no longer be transgressed: it is here that the story shows most clearly its appurtenance to the genre of littérature fantastique, defined as an occurrence that cannot be explained rationally erupting within a framework obedient to the laws of nature.

  LÉON BLOY

  These three stories were collected in Histoires désobligeantes (Paris: Dentu, 1894).

  A Dentist Terribly Punished

  an uncanny resemblance to the man Gerbillon had murdered: the idea that a child might bear a resemblance not to the biological father but to the object of the mother’s obsessions is to be found in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and also in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Ce qui ne meurt pas: ‘Allan’s mother, who was English, had apparently spent the full nine months of her pregnancy staring at a portrait of Lord Byron… and it was his countenance… that she had given to her son.’

  The Last Bake

  Charles V: the Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Spain Charles V (1500–58), who voluntarily abdicated in 1556, living in monastic seclusion until his death.

  the divine Bourget: Paul Bourget (1852–1935), the most fashionable novelist of the period. Catholic, traditionalist, and didactic in tendency. Opposed to Naturalism, he set out to write the ‘moral anatomy’ of his age. But he came to be seen by his peers as the portraitist, and the flatterer, of the rich—hence Bloy’s mockery.

  invention of the Crematorium: Bloy visited the crematorium at Père Lachaise cemetery, and he wrote about the experience in his Journal on 3 April 1893: ‘One day I shall undoubtedly write about this infamy, which calls down upon itself all the furies of God.’

  Benjamin Franklin’s expression: i.e. ‘Time is money.’ The saying was first promulgated by Franklin (1706–90), one of the founding fathers of America, in his Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748).

  the ‘Columbarium’: a place where cinerary urns are kept and commemorated, usually by small inscribed plaques. The Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris has a fine example.

  The Lucky Sixpence

  Bloy draws on folk-tale tradition for the horrible dénouement of this story, whose sources are legion. One notorious example, drawn from classical sources, is Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

  half-remembered melodrama: Bloy may be remembering the famous ‘mourning dinner’ held by Des Esseintes in Paris, in the first chapter of A Rebours, in which the entire decor was done out in black.

  OCTAVE MIRBEAU

  ‘On a Cure’, ‘The Bath’, and ‘The Little Summer House’ formed part of the volume Les Vingt et Un Jours d’un neurasthénique (Paris: Fasquelle, 1901); ‘The First Emotion’ was collected in La Pipe de cidre (Paris: Flammarion, 1919).

  On a Cure

  Ariège: one of the southernmost départements of France, bordering the Pyrenees.

  78 The future!… Progress!…: the narrator tells us that early on, as a young man, Fresselou had ‘tasted the poison of metaphysics’. His contemptus mundi here bears the imprint of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, but seemingly without the philosopher’s belief in the consolatory powers of art.

  The Bath

  Woman is a marvellous animal: a commonplace of the time. In his essay on ‘La Femme’ included in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire quotes approvingly Joseph de Maistre’s view of woman as un bel animal (see Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 713).

  sphingids: the family of lepidoptera known as the hawk moths or sphinx moths, after the shape of their caterpillars.

  The First Emotion

  at the Ministry of Education: Mirbeau himself, like Huysmans and Bloy, had first-hand experience of the humiliation and boredom experienced by the petit employé, or office clerk.

  Petit Journal: a hugely popular daily newspaper which ran from 1863 to 1944. At its height, in the 1890s, the paper had a circulation of 1 million.

  the Eiffel Tower: Gustave Eiffel’s famous iron structure was erected between 1887 and 1889, in time for the Exposition universelle of the same year.

  The Little Summer-House

  Panama Syndicates: in 1892 close to a billion francs were lost in the scandal surrounding the bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company, the stricken speculative enterprise founded by Ferdinand de Lesseps. Members of the government took bribes to keep quiet about the situation, which led to the greatest financial scandal of the Third Republic.

  some Reinach to hand, or some Yves Guyot: Joseph Reinach (1856–1921) was a French politician implicated in the Panama scandal; later he became the fiercest champion of Alfred Dreyfus. Yves Guyot (1843–1928) was a politician and economist, and a defender of free trade. Presumably Mirbeau’s allusions to these men is ironical, given the fate of the Panama Canal Company.

  Orléanist Monarchy: the period of constitutional monarchy that began with the July Revolution of 1830, and enthroned Louis-Philippe, of the Orléans branch of the House of Bourbon, as king. He was known as the ‘Bourgeois King’.

  Fragonard: Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), French painter of the rococo style, famous for his elegant genre scenes portraying a hedonistic society; his subjects are often erotically charged, as in the famous painting The Swing.

  on all of this!: the frenetic rehearsal of the narrator’s fears in the preceding section recalls some of Poe’s similarly distraught narrators.

  JEAN RICHEPIN

  ‘Constant Guignard’ and ‘Deshoulières’ were collected in Les Morts bizarres (Paris: Decaux, 1876), ‘Pft! Pft!’ in Cauchemars (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1892).

  Constant Guignard

  [title]: the name in French contains word-play. La guigne means to be dogged by bad luck. Add to this his first name, and it is clear the protagonist’s endless misfortune seems to be predestined.

  Cayenne: the notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana, otherwise known as Devil’s Island. It was in operation from 1859 until it was finally closed in 1953.

  the military substitute: in the days of obligatory military service, a man’s turn to serve was sometimes decided by a lottery system. He could, though, pay for a substitute to take his place.

  Papavoine: Louis-Auguste Papavoine (1783–1825) was executed for stabbing to death two children in the Bois de Vincennes, without apparent motive.

  the asylum at Charenton: the celebrated lunatic asylum near Paris, that once housed the Marquis de Sade, was founded by the Frères de la Charité in 1645, and was noted for its humane treatment of inmates.

  Place de la Roquette: located in Paris, where public executions by guillotine were carried out (see note to p. 52).

  Deshoulières

  a veritable Proteus: Richepin pushes to the point of absurdity Baudelaire’s insistence that the dandy should discipline his life as if it were lived continuously in front of a mirror. Proteus, a sea-god in Greek mythology, was famous for changing his form.

  his deplorable homonym: Richepin is presumably referring to
the prolific and mediocre poetess Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières (1638–94), who rose to prominence in the literary circles around Louis XIV.

  Tertullian … De cultu foeminarum: Tertullian (c.160–225), a Father of the Church, sometimes credited as the founder of western theology. His De cultu foeminarum (‘On Female Fashion’) is a tract counselling Christian women to dress modestly and without ornament.

  the Widow: i.e. La Veuve, historical French argot for the Guillotine, as in ‘my father married the Widow’ (Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man).

  He was … page-boy style: the last two lines are elliptical: ‘Il avait trouvé l’imprévu de la guillotine. Il s’était fait couper la tête aux enfants d’Edouard.’ The phrase aux enfants d’Edouard refers to the sons of Edward IV of England, the ‘Princes in the Tower’, who were later portrayed with the famous ‘page-boy’ haircut.

  Pft! Pft!

  [title]: I have retained the original French title; its meaningless yet suggestive syllables work equally well in English.

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  ‘At the Death-Bed’ was first published under the pseudonym Maufrigneuse in the review Gil Blas, 30 January 1883, and collected in Guy de Maupassant, Oeuvres complètes, vol 28, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris: L. Conard, 1908–10); ‘A Walk’ in Yvette (Paris: Victor Havard, 1885); ‘The Tresses’ in Toine (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1884); ‘Night’ in Clair de lune (Paris: Ollendorff, 1888).

  At the Death-Bed

  ‘Rolla’ : the long poem by Alfred de Musset (1810–57) recounting events in the life of the famous rake Jacques Rolla, and showing up the life of prostitutes and the poor. In this poem of 1833 Musset seems to deplore the libertinism ushered in by philosophes like Voltaire, which in turn casts an oblique light on the greater debunking of romantic love carried out by Schopenhauer.

  vestiges of his thought: Maupassant is surely giving his own estimate of Schopenhauer’s devastating influence, and he himself underwent it. But there is an element of mockery in the black humour of this tale, directed at those for whom the philosopher had become the object of a cult.

  A Walk

  the model employee that he was: compare Mirbeau’s treatment of the same theme, in ‘The First Emotion’, above.

  Quand le bois reverdit: roughly translatable as: When the woods are green again | My lover says to me | Come and take the air, my love | Under the greenwood tree.

  The Tresses

  the flâneur: literally, the ‘stroller’ or the ‘saunterer’. In nineteenth-century Paris the type took on an exemplary literary pedigree, thanks largely to the thought and work of Charles Baudelaire, where the flâneur becomes emblematic of a certain type of modern, urban experience.

  Dictes-moy où … d’antan?: two stanzas from the ‘Ballade des Dames du temps jadis’ (the ‘Ballad for Ladies of Times Past’), part of François Villon’s poem Le Testament:

  Now tell me where has Flora gone,

  The lovely Roman, her country’s where?

  Archipiades, Thaïs that shone,

  Her cousin once removed? And fair

  Echo speaking across the air

  Of pools and meadows where sounds go,

  Her beauty more than human share:

  Where is the drift of last year’s snow?

  (…)

  Where’s queen Blanche, like lily, swan –

  With siren voice she’d sing an air?

  Big-footed Bertha, Beatrice gone;

  Alice, and Arembourg, Maine’s heir;

  Lorraine’s good Joan, in Rouen square

  Burnt by the English. Where d’they go,

  O Queen and Virgin, tell me where,

  Where is the drift of last year’s snow?

  From François Villon, Poems, trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil, 2001), 75.

  Sergeant Bertrand: François Bertrand disinterred corpses to assuage his sexual appetites; after a much-publicized trial he was sentenced in 1849, and since then his name has been associated with necrophilia.

  Les Halles: at this period the great central wholesale market of the city, celebrated by Zola as ‘the belly of Paris’. The market was demolished in 1971, replaced by the Forum des Halles, a modern shopping precinct.

  GUSTAVE GEFFROY

  The Statue

  This story was collected in Le Coeur et l’esprit (Paris: Charpentier, 1894).

  the Parc Monceau: the luxurious quarter of Paris in the seventeenth arrondissement that developed throughout the nineteenth century. It was home to many art-collectors, among them the Rothschild, Cernuschi, and Ephrussi families.

  Villa Médicis: the splendid Villa in Rome, on the Pincio, just above the Spanish Steps. It was purchased by Napoleon for the French state in 1801. To this day the Médicis receives artists-in-residence, winners of the ‘prix de Rome’, for periods of up to three years.

  drawn direct from nature: it is impossible not to think that Geffroy had in mind Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) as part of the inspiration behind this story, and perhaps it was his works that so troubled the sculptor here. Rodin was celebrated for his exact anatomical imitation of nature, both in his sculpture and his drawings.

  JEAN LORRAIN

  ‘The Man Who Loved Consumptives’ was collected in Sonyeuse. Soirs de Province. Soirs de Paris (Paris: Charpentier, 1891). ‘An Unidentified Crime’, ‘The Student’s Tale’, and ‘The Man with the Bracelet’ were collected in Histoires de masques (Paris: Ollendorff, 1900).

  An Unsolved Crime

  Mardi Gras: Lorrain is referring here to the ‘Carnaval de Paris’, a huge and joyous ceremony, held around Shrove Tuesday, involving masks and disguise, whose origins date back to the Middle Ages. In the 1890s it reached something of a climax, with the invention of confetti and the paper streamer. The Carnival fell out of the popular calendar in the 1950s, and despite various efforts to do so, has never been successfully revived.

  nervous troubles: Lorrain was a self-confessed ether addict, so much of this description can be taken as autobiographical.

  The Man with the Bracelet

  Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel: the first line of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (‘Evening Twilight’) from Les Fleurs du mal. ‘Here is the delightful evening, the criminal’s friend’ (trans. Francis Scarfe).

  pognon … rousse: French criminal slang or argot. Equivalents in English might be ‘dough’ (as in money) and ‘the cops’.

  smiling head of Scylla: in the original Greek legend, the sea-monster Scylla was supposed to have had six heads, and a ring of barking dogs around her belly. Along with the whirlpool Charybdis, she guarded the Straits of Messina, and devoured the sailors who escaped the whirlpool.

  Banville … ‘You Will Return’: Théodore de Banville (1823–91), poet and prose-writer, admired by Baudelaire. The story referred to here by Lorrain has never been identified.

  Je vois un port rempli … vague marine: from Baudelaire’s ‘Parfum exotique’ in Les Fleurs du mal. ‘I see a port all filled with sails and masts that ache still from the briny wave’ (trans. Francis Scarfe).

  Hôtel Pimodan: formerly the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Île Saint Louis. Baron Jérôme Pichon acquired it in 1842, and welcomed poets and artists as lodgers (including Gautier and Baudelaire). The famous ‘club des haschichins’, described by Baudelaire in Les Paradis artificiels (1860), was founded in 1845 by the painter Émile Brissard.

  Ah! malheur à celui … gauche!: lines taken from Musset’s poem ‘La Coupe et les lèvres’ (‘The Cup and the Lips’, 1832). Literally: ‘Woe to him who lets debauchery | Plant herself like a nail in his left breast.’

  Canler’s Memoirs: Louis Canler (1797–1865) was head of La Sûreté (the Criminal Investigation Department). His Memoirs were published in 1862.

  Wagram dance-hall: the celebrated Bal Wagram, built in 1812. It became a café-concert and its large ballroom was often used for political meetings.

  The Man Who Loved Consumptives

  Legendre’s Play: act
ually Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in the translation by Louis Legendre, whose ‘adaptations’ of Shakespeare were in vogue among theatregoers in the 1880s.

  Garde ta fille, elle est trop chère!: ‘Keep your daughter, she is too expensive!’ The expression does not occur in the original. Legendre must be adapting Claudio’s lines, ‘There Leonato, take her back again, | Give not this rotten Orange to your friend’ (IV. i).

  Roybet … Ziem … Porel: Ferdinand Roybet (1840–1920), fashionable society painter of the period, specializing in portraiture and depicting theatrical costume; Félix Ziem (1821–1911), watercolourist and traveller, famous for his paintings of Venice and the East; Paul Porel (1843–1917), actor and man of the theatre. He became Director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon where the performance of Shakespeare’s Much Ado in Legendre’s adaptation, described by Lorrain here, was staged in 1886.

  The Saint-Ouen horror crime: a woman under the name of Valentine Dolbeau was found strangled on a deserted road near Saint-Ouen. The culprits were identified, a woman and her two lovers. The former, whose real name was Pauline Siller, had adopted the name Valentine Dolbeau, until the real Valentine Dolbeau became a danger, and so they did away with her. Account taken from Le Progrès illustré, 27 Nov. 1892.

  GEORGES RODENBACH

  The Time

  First collected in LeRouet des brumes: contes posthumes (Paris: Ollendorf, 1901).

  without an idée fixe: compare Van Hulst’s obsession with collecting timepieces with a similar fixation, differently placed, in Maupassant’s ‘The Tresses’ above.

  rue de L’neaveugle: ‘Blind Donkey Street’. Rodenbach evidently relishes the picturesque street-names of Bruges, which add to the element of fairy-tale in the story.