French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

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  Godeliève: by choosing this name Rodenbach further charges his story with medieval legend. Born near Bruges, St Godeliève (c.1049–70), patroness of unhappy spouses, especially of women abused by their husbands, was a beautiful girl who desired to become a nun. Feeling obliged to marry, for the sake of her parents, she suffered torments at the hands of her spouse, one Bertolf, who in the end had her strangled and thrown into a well. He consequently repented and entered a monastery near Rome. Godeliève was known to be highly gifted with needle and thread, a trait Rodenbach retains in his story, along with her saintly, ascetic appearance and her apparently ‘immortal longings’.

  Memling Madonna: Hans Memling (c.1430–94), German-born painter who moved to Flanders. He is thought to have resided in Bruges in 1473.

  REMY DE GOURMONT

  All four stories were collected in Histoires magiques et autres récits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894).

  Danaette

  [title]: Gourmont’s allusion here is clearly to the Danae of Greek mythology, a princess of Argos, who was impregnated by Zeus when he visited her in the form of a shower of gold.

  The Faun

  Arlette … Robert le Diable: the mother and father of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard, since Robert le Magnifique (called Le Diable) kept Arlette as his concubine and never married her.

  with a pointed beard: the appearance and behaviour of Gourmont’s faun here resembles the satyr of Félicien Rops, in his etching ‘Satyriasis’.

  Don Juan’s Secret

  [epigraph]: ‘such things are vain dreams’; the expression is also to be found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

  On the Threshold

  the gallows name: fourches patibulaires was the name given to the gibbets that were once a familiar sight in the French countryside.

  German metaphysicals: among them, most probably, Schopenhauer, who proposed a neo-Buddhist form of detachment in the face of absurdity and desire.

  JULES LAFORGUE

  Perseus and Andromeda

  The story was collected in the posthumous publication of Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires (Paris: Éditions de la Revue Indépendante, 1887).

  [title]: in Greek mythology, Andromeda was chained to a rock to assuage the fury of Poseidon, aroused by the hubris of Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia. The sea-monster Cetus kept guard over her. Returning from slaying the Gorgon Medusa, Perseus slew Cetus and rescued Andromeda, and then married her. Andromeda was placed among the constellations, alongside Perseus and Cassiopeia.

  ineffable fit of the sulks: the monotonous island is really a physical analogy for Schopenhauer’s absurd universe. Laforgue was a devoted student of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

  how bored I am!: Andromeda’s bored, disenchanted, and yet histrionic tone here is typical of Laforgue’s persona in many of the Moralités légendaires and the poems that make up Les Complaintes. It is an ironic variant of Baudelairean spleen.

  daughter of the king of Ethiopia: Andromeda was a princess of Ethiopia, her mother, Cassiopeia, was queen.

  Catoblepas: ‘In ancient authors, some African animal, perhaps a species of buffalo, or the gnu, a species of antelope’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary). ‘Now made the name of a genus including the Gnu’ (OED).

  Pyramus and Thisbe: the Babylonian tale of star-crossed lovers, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and retold in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, renowned for his concept of the indivisible substance of Being, known as pantheism, and frequently viewed as a type of atheism. He made his living as a lens-grinder.

  The Truth About Everything: the Monster’s philosophy lesson that Andromeda has absorbed like a kind of bedtime story is steeped in Schopenhauer and in the jargon of Edvard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) was one of the first works to posit the existence of an impersonal, psychic unconscious that creates and drives the world.

  Bellerophon … Chimaera: ancient Homeric legend. Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, was set tasks intended to kill him, such as slaying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing monster, ‘lion in front, serpent behind, goat in the middle’.

  Garden of the Hesperides: the garden at the world’s end in the far west, which contained a tree of golden apples, guarded by the Hesperides, the ‘daughters of the evening’, with the help of a dragon.

  Pillars of Hercules: the two mountains on either side of the western entrance to the Mediterranean.

  Cadmus: in Greek mythology, the son of King Agenor, brother of Europa, and founder of Thebes.

  Phrixus and his sister Helle: children of Athamas, victims of their stepmother Ino’s jealousy. About to be sacrificed, they escaped on the back of a ram sent by Hermes or Zeus. Helle fell off into the sea, thereafter called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached Colchis on the Black Sea and sacrificed the ram to Zeus. Its fleece was later captured by Jason and the Argonauts.

  Eteocles and Polynices, and pious Antigone: warring Theban brothers, and Antigone, their sister, whose loyalty to family over raison d’état is the subject of the tragedy by Sophocles.

  Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal: the abrupt change of scene at the end of Laforgue’s retelling of the legend is enigmatic. The little dialogue between Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal (whose name Laforgue may have chosen as a kind of ironic conflation of the French Renaissance translator of Plutarch, Jacques Amyot, and the ‘Images d’Épinal’, or popular prints of religious and fairy-tale subjects) and the Princess of U… E… serves to heighten further the urbanity of tone used throughout the tale, and to foreground its existence as pastiche. Laforgue may have borrowed the setting from Nuits espagnoles (1854), a collection of stories by Méry (Eugène Didier), in which a group of socialites gather one night in a castle on the heights of Granada, tell stories, and apostrophize the constellations.

  Lohengrin and Parsifal: heroes of the Grail Quest in the Germanic tradition, and of Wagnerian opera.

  MARCEL SCHWOB

  ‘The Brothel’ was collected in Marcel Schwob, Oeuvres, ed. Sylvain Goudemare (Paris: Phébus libretto, 2002). ‘The Sans-Gueule’ was collected in Coeur double (Paris: Ollendorff, 1891); ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ in Le Roi au masque d’or; ‘Lucretius, Poet’ and ‘Paolo Uccello, Painter’ in Vies imaginaires (Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1896).

  The Brothel

  ‘May The Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’: inscription seen on doors during times of the Black Death, along with the sign of the Cross.

  Morgiana … brigand: Schwob is alluding to an episode in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, collected in the Thousand and One Nights.

  The Sans-Gueule

  [title]: literally, ‘the faceless ones’. I have retained the French, partly because there is no English equivalent as piquant, and also because Schwob’s story so hauntingly prefigures the gueules-cassées—the name given to soldiers whose faces were horribly disfigured in the First World War. Schwob may be thinking of an episode from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

  Lucretius, Poet

  Schwob’s account of the life of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, c.99–55 BCE) depends heavily on the very few sources available, which are in any case probably corrupt (notably the story, told by St Jerome, that the poet died after quaffing down a love potion). Certainly Lucretius addressed his great poem, the De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), to his friend Gaius Memmius, ostensibly to assuage the latter’s fear of death by denying the afterlife, and belittling the role of the supernatural in human affairs. The poem is based on the beliefs of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE), a materialist who considered the universe to be an infinite and eternal dance of atoms that cluster together and then break apart. There is no afterlife, and the aim of this life is to attain a state of ataraxia, or stress-free tranquillity.

  Paolo Uccello, Painter

  Vasari: Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), Tuscan painter and architect, whos
e celebrated biographies of the Renaissance artists, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), supplies the inspiration and some of the incidental detail for Schwob’s account of Uccello (1397–1475). The painters, sculptors, and architects of the quattrocento that Schwob introduces into his text—Ghiberti, della Robbia, Brunelleschi, Donatello—were all contemporaries of Uccello’s, whose lives Vasari also describes in his book.

  Giovanni Manetti: presumably Schwob means Antonio Manetto (1423–97), a Florentine mathematician who, according to Vasari, taught Uccello geometry and the principles of perspective. He also wrote a biography of Brunelleschi.

  Selvaggia: Vasari notes merely that Uccello had a wife, who commented on her husband’s obsession with perspective. He would spend all night trying to find the vanishing-point, and when his wife called him to come to bed he would reply that perspective was a lovely thing. He also left a daughter, Antonia, who had some knowledge of drawing, and became a Carmelite nun. The details concerning Selvaggia therefore seem to be Schwob’s invention.

  PIERRE LOUŸS

  A Case Without Precedent

  Collected in Archipel (Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1906).

  Gazette des tribunaux … Dalloz: French legal publications. La Gazette des tribunaux was founded in 1777, and taken over by La Gazette du palais in 1935. Dalloz, a legal publishing firm, founded by Désiré Dalloz in 1845, exists to this day.

  Argus’s hundred eyes: in classical mythology, Argus is the Latinized form of the Greek Argos ‘Panoptes’, the all-seeing. He was a giant, and guardian of the heifer-nymph Io.

  Janus: the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions; he looks two ways, into the past and the future.

  Cerberus: the three-headed dog of classical mythology, that guards the entrance to the underworld.

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  A SELECTION OF

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  Cousin Bette

  Eugénie Grandet

  Père Goriot

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  The Flowers of Evil

  The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo

  BENJAMIN CONSTANT

  Adolphe

  DENIS DIDEROT

  Jacques the Fatalist

  The Nun

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS (PÈRE)

  The Black Tulip

  The Count of Monte Cristo

  Louise de la Vallière

  The Man in the Iron Mask

  La Reine Margot

  The Three Musketeers

  Twenty Years After

  The Vicomte de Bragelonne

  A LEXANDRE DUMAS (FILS)

  La Dame aux Camélias

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Madame Bovary

  A Sentimental Education

  Three Tales

  VICTOR HUGO

  The Essential Victor Hugo

  Notre-Dame de Paris

  J.-K. HUYSMANS

  Against Nature

  PIERRE CHODERLOS

  Les Liaisons dangereuses

  DE LACLOS

  MME DE LAFAYETTE

  The Princesse de Clèves

  GUILLAUME DU LORRIS and JEAN DE MEUN

  The Romance of the Rose

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  A Day in the Country and Other Stories

  A Life

  Bel-Ami

  Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories

  Pierre et Jean

  PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

  Carmen and Other Stories

  MOLIÈRE

  Don Juan and Other Plays

  The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays

  BLAISE PASCAL

  Pensées and Other Writings

  ABBÉ PRÉVOST

  Manon Lescaut

  JEAN RACINE

  Britannicus, Phaedra, and Athaliah

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  Collected Poems

  EDMOND ROSTAND

  Cyrano de Bergerac

  MARQUIS DE SADE

  The Crimes of Love

  The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

  GEORGE SAND

  Indiana

  MME DE STAËL

  Corinne

  STENDHAL

  The Red and the Black

  The Charterhouse of Parma

  PAUL VERLAINE

  Selected Poems

  JULES VERNE

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  Captain Hatteras

  Journey to the Centre of the Earth

  Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

  VOLTAIRE

  Candide and Other Stories

  Letters concerning the English Nation

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  L’Assommoir

  The Attack on the Mill

  La Bête humaine

  La Débâcle

  Germinal

  The Kill

  The Ladies’ Paradise

  The Masterpiece

  Nana

  Pot Luck

  Thérèse Raquin

  Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas

  The Kalevala

  The Poetic Edda

  LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

  Orlando Furioso

  GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

  The Decameron

  GEORG BÜCHNER

  Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck

  LUIS VAZ DE CAMÕES

  The Lusiads

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  Don Quixote

  Exemplary Stories

  CARLO COLLODI

  The Adventures of Pinocchio

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  The Divine Comedy

  Vita Nuova

  LOPE DE VEGA

  Three Major Plays

  J. W. VON GOETHE

  Elective Affinities

  Erotic Poems

  Faust: Part One and Part Two

  The Flight to Italy

  JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM

  Selected Tales

  E. T. A. HOFFMANN

  The Golden Pot and Other Tales

  HENRIK IBSEN

  An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm

  Four Major Plays

&nb
sp; Peer Gynt

  LEONARDO DA VINCI

  Selections from the Notebooks

  FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

  Four Major Plays

  MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

  Life, Letters, and Poetry

  PETRARCH

  Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works

  J. C. F. SCHILLER

  Don Carlos and Mary Stuart

  JOHANN AUGUST STRINDBERG

  Miss Julie and Other Plays

  1 Quoted in Guy Ducrey (ed.), Romans fin-de-siècle, 1890–1900 (Paris: Laffont 1999), p. xxvi.

  2 The definition is by Tzvétan Todorov, quoted in Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, ed. Alain Géraudelle (Paris: Hachette, 2006), 208–9.

  3 See Remy de Gourmont, ‘Stéphane Mallarmé et l’idée de décadence’, in La Culture des idées, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1983), 119–37.

  4 J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours (Paris: Gallimard, collection Folio, 1983), 98.

  5 See Marc Fumaroli’s preface to J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours, 26.

  6 See Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 668.

  7 Eliot uses the term in his essay ‘The Metaphysicals’ (1921); but he draws on Gourmont’s seminal essay ‘La Dissociation des idées’ (1899), in La culture des idées, 81–116.

 

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