The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  The other three writers gathered together under the frénétique heading, though much less prolific, are no less worthy of interest. If they are discussed at all in literary histories, however, it is generally as part of a miscellaneous group labelled ‘minor Romantics.’ This is perhaps a fair description of Alphonse Royer, who penned half-a-dozen or so novels and collections of stories in the 1830s and early 1840s as well as writing librettos (his career as a novelist would seem to have come to an end with his appointment as director of the French opera following the coup d’état of 1851). At least two of these novels deserve rescuing from the obscurity into which they have fallen: Les mauvais garçons (1829), from which a short self-contained extract is included here, is remarkable for its macabre humour; while Venezia la Bella (1834), in its depiction of the city as a living agent exercising control over the destinies of those who live there, seems astonishingly modern.

  Among the many strange or bizarre writers who contributed to the development of the French horror story in the first half of the century (indeed, the appellation ‘minor Romantic’ seems to be almost a synonym for eccentricity), two in particular stand out: Pétrus Borel and Xavier Forneret. Borel (1809–1859), the twelfth of some fourteen children born in modest circumstances, came to Paris in the mid-1820s in order to study as an architect but, like many young men of the epoch, was immediately drawn to literature. By 1830, he was the leader of his own small circle of impoverished fellow writers and artists, including Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval (both of whom have left fascinating accounts of these happy days of penury and struggle). This group came to the attention of Victor Hugo, who enlisted Borel as the leader of the ‘claque’ – i.e. those member of the audience paid by the author or the cast to applaud at suitable moments and so create the illusion of popularity – on the opening night of his play Hernani. The fighting and confusion that ensued has taken on the proportions of a legend in French theatrical history.

  Unlike Gautier and Nerval, both of whom over the course of the last half-a-century or so have been promoted from the ranks of ‘minor Romantics’ to the status of ‘major Romantics’, Borel has remained very much a writer’s writer. Baudelaire much admired him, for example, as did André Breton fifty years later. Indeed, Breton considered Pétrus Borel – whom he described as ‘Surrealist in Liberty’ – as a major precursor of the movement he founded in the 1920s. Yet, as both Baudelaire and Breton acknowledged, Borel’s name seems to have a curse on it. He did produce three fascinating books during the course of his short writing career though (Borel eventually died in poverty in Algeria): Rhapsodies, a volume of poetry published in 1832; Champavert. Contes immoraux (i.e. Champavert. Immoral Stories), a collection of horror stories published in 1833; and Madame Putiphar (1839), a compelling novel of sexual persecution under the ancien régime. Despite his relative neglect (possibly caused by his extreme left-wing opinions), Pétrus Borel is in many respects the most representative author of the frénétique tendency of the 1830s.

  Whether Pétrus Borel and Xavier Forneret (1809–1884) ever met is not known. Perhaps their paths crossed in 1834 when Forneret came to Paris to commission a frontispiece by Tony Johannot (another member of Borel’s circle) for his play Deux Destinées. The circumstances of Borel and Forneret could hardly have been more different: Borel, scratching around for a living, despairing of finding another publisher following the financial fiasco of Champavert; Forneret, the only son of wealthy Dijon merchants (he was reputed to inhabit a Gothic tower and to play the violin into the small hours of the night), able to finance the publication of his own works in luxurious editions.

  In fact, over the course of the following years, Forneret’s self-financed publications would become not only more luxurious but increasingly eccentric. Encore un an de Sans titre, a collection of short aphorisms published in 1840 (the most remarkable being: ‘I saw a letter-box at a cemetery …’), often has scarcely a couple lines of text on each page while Pièce de pièces, Temps perdu (also 1840), a collection of seven short stories, is printed on one side of the page only. But it is this latter collection which is also Forneret’s masterpiece, including as it does not only the wilfully bizarre One Eye Between Two but also The Diamond of Grass – a story which was much appreciated by the Surrealists, who reprinted it, with illustrations by the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen, in the review Minotaure in 1937.5 Writing in 1940, Breton was amazed not so much by the obscurity into which Forneret had fallen – he never enjoyed the slightest popularity during his own lifetime – but by the disconcerting juxtaposition to be found in his work of breath-taking originality and the utterly banal.

  On 22 October, 1800 – or rather, since the revolutionary calendar was still in force at this date, 30 vendémaire an IX – a weekly magazine devoted to the arts and sciences published an uncompromising review of the latest book by an author who was just then enjoying a brief respite between periods of incarceration. ‘A loathsome work’ – opined the reviewer – ‘by a man reputed to have published one more horrible still.’ The author in question was one whom no anthology of nineteenth-century horror fiction can ignore: the Marquis de Sade

  Appropriately enough, the new book under review was, in fact, Les Crimes de l’amour – a collection of eleven stories by the ‘divine’ Marquis with a preliminary ‘Essay on the Novel’. Like the first Justine, the Cent vingt Journées de Sodome (tr. The 120 Days of Sodom) and Aline et Valcour, most of these stories had been written during the eleven years that the author had spent in the dungeons of Vincennes and the Bastille between 1778 and 1789.6

  Sade, probably intending to publish another collection at a later date, would seem to have kept back a couple of stories though. It is possible that Dorci, or The Vagaries of Luck was among this number – though it is also conceivable, given that Sade did not die until 1814, that it was composed during the early years of the nineteenth-century, perhaps during his stay in the Charenton asylum. In any event, Dorci did not see the light of day until 1881, when it was published under the aegis of Anatole France.

  Although Sade’s shorter fiction tends to eschew the psycho-pathological elements of his ‘great’ works, the underlying philosophy is very much the same. As the author writes elsewhere:7

  […] It is not always by making virtue triumph that one arouses the reader’s interest. [This rule] is in no wise essential to the novel, nor is it even the one most likely to awaken the reader’s interest; for when virtue triumphs, this is how things should be, our tears run dry even before they begin to flow; but if, after severe trials and tribulations, we finally witness virtue being overwhelmed by vice, our hearts are inevitably rent asunder and the work in question, having moved us profoundly […], must inevitably give rise to that interest which alone can bring acclaim.

  The earlier work attributed to him by the reviewer of Les Crimes de l’amour does not make the same concessions to the reader as Sade’s short fiction since it is presumably the final and definitive version of the adventures of the long-suffering Justine, La nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la Virtu, published clandestinely in 1797. This, of course, is not only the most celebrated of the novels of the Marquis de Sade but might also be rightly considered one of the most horrific novels ever written. As in the two earlier versions Justine passes from the hands of one extraordinary tormentor to those of another, experiencing every imaginable suffering and degradation. Unlike the earlier versions, however, in the 1797 edition the author no longer leaves the reader in any doubt as to the precise nature of horrors to which Justine is subjected.8

  If Sade’s writing was merely a catalogue of atrocities, a compendium of psychopathia sexualis, it might still be lacking in literary distinction. What makes it worthy of our attention is the economic, philosophical and political thought which informs it. Indeed, it is this intellectual framework – frequently paradoxical and always far from consistent with the author’s own behaviour in real life – which makes Sade’s fiction so compelling. The extent of his impact on French hor
ror fiction – particularly on the roman frénétique – is difficult to determine though. Pétrus Borel describes Sade’s liberation from the Bastille with approval in the pages of Madame Putiphar, Jules Janin and P. L. Jacob wrote damning essays about him in the pages of La Revue de Paris. In a sense Sade’s profound misanthropy and misogyny are encountered everywhere in the nineteenth century, though the author himself remains elusive – an invisible presence.

  Thus it was that as the fashion for frénétique tales published in the literary reviews gave way to the new fashion for immense serial novels published in the newspapers, the short tale of horror (excluding the conte fantastique) experienced a hiatus until it was reborn (as the conte cruet) as a result of a new literary impetus which, once again, came from abroad.

  The sense of excitement which greeted the publication of the first volume of Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories is captured by the entry for July 16, 1856 in the Journal des Goncourt: ‘Left with a feeling that the critics have missed something after reading Poe. This is a new way of writing; a new literature for the twentieth century. Scientific miracles, plots woven out of A + B, writing which is at the same time obsessive and mathematical. […] The subject of love is displaced by other sources of interest. In short, the novel of the future will be forced to deal more with what passes through the head of humanity than that which passes through the heart.’ In his introduction to the Histoires extraordinaires, Baudelaire is even more categorical: not only is there no love interest but, ‘despite Poe’s remarkable talent for the grotesque and the horrible, there is not a single lewd passage, or one which deals with sensual pleasures, in his entire oeuvre.’9 Such would not be the case with Poe’s French imitators.

  Indeed, many of the authors grouped together here under the heading conte cruel would seem to have sought to have the best of both worlds. On one hand, they share not only Sade’s misanthropy but also his fascination with every form of sexual ‘aberration’; on the other hand, they quickly mastered from Poe the lessons of conciseness, psychological insight, and the appeal of the scientific macabre. The French reading of Poe would be radically different from that which occurred in Britain and America.

  Jean Richepin (1849–1926), for example, refers to Poe on several occasions in his collection of tales Les Morts bizarres (1876). (He also later lectured on him.) Indeed, Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) – about a man who confesses to a murder even though there is not the slightest chance of detection – would seem to inspire (this is perhaps not quite the right word since Poe’s original intentions are entirely subverted) two different stories by Richepin. Firstly, Le chef-d’oeuvre du crime recounts not so much the confession of the murderer (which is not believed by the authorities, even when the criminal publishes a short story to the effect which is quickly turned into a popular play) but the adroit manner in which the crime was committed. Like Poe’s narrator, Richepin’s criminal is driven to insanity by the end of the story – not from remorse though, but from his failure to prove how he cleverly escaped conviction. Secondly, in Deshoulières, Richepin invents an eccentric individual whose crime is not only a masterpiece but also totally macabre: he plans not only to murder his mistress but, after having had her body embalmed, continue to remain her lover afterwards. Even after he is sentenced to be guillotined, his restless imagination seeks out new sensations. Twisting round during execution, he manages to have the top of his head sliced off like a boiled egg.

  Richepin was by no means the only French author behind whom one can detect the somewhat distorted shadow of Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire’s relationship with Poe is the subject for a book in its own right (included here is one of the short prose poems he wrote just before his premature death, aged 46, in 1867). Léon Bloy (1846–1917) and J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907), two of the most interesting writers of what has sometimes been called the Catholic reaction, on occasion make use of some of the more macabre scientific developments of the epoch in their writings. Moreover, it might be worth recalling that Des Esseintes, the principal character of A Rebours (1884; tr. Against Nature, 1959), is described as preferring Poe above all other writers. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889), like Huysmans a committed Catholic and an impeccable stylist, also came under the spell of Poe – though he was also prey to all the fashionable isms of the day (which included not only Wagnerism but also occultism and spiritualism). A fitful genius, the slender collection of stories assembled in 1883 under the title Contes cruels took him more than fifteen years to compose, during which time he lived in Paris, often in conditions of atrocious poverty.

  Catulle Mendès (1842–1909), whom Mario Praz describes as the belated purveyor of the more ‘succulent morsels from the Baudelairean table’, wrote about little else other than sex (though literary historians tend to stress his youthful involvement with the Parnassian poets).10 Author of some fifteen novels and several dozen collections of short stories, Mendès was one of the most prolific decadent writers. His first collection of stories – Histoires d’amour (1868) – set the tone of what would follow. The longest story in the book is a dramatic study of precocious adolescent sexuality caused by prolonged illness; another story concerns the adroit scheme of an ageing society belle to take a younger lover (Mèndes would quickly establish himself as a master of this sort of Gauloiserie); while a third features a young dandy who attracts a string of mistresses by affecting such a sense of ennui that he is always on the point of committing suicide. Generally speaking, Mendès’ novels take a more pessimistic approach to the activities of the bedroom. La première maîtresse (1887), for example, concerns a young woman with some ill-defined sexual proclivity (though a form of vampirism is inferred) which causes her lovers to fall into a rapid decline and die of exhaustion. Given Mendès’ reputation for being charming, thoroughly corrupt and a born philanderer (one contemporary said of him that he looked like a Christ who had caught the clap), it is perhaps not surprising that when, in 1863, he proposed to Judith Gautier, her father, Théophile, was horrified. The marriage was not a success, the couple soon separated, and for the next forty or so years Mendès sought to live up to his reputation as a man about town.

  The three other authors included under the heading conte cruel are all very different from one another. Charles Cros (1842–1888) is primarily remembered as a poet though, at the time, he was better known as the inventor of the monologue (of which an example is given here). Jules Lermina (1839–1915), who would seem to have been involved with the occult group around Papus in the late 1880s, also found time to write two curious collections of short fiction (Histoires incroyables, 1885; Nouvelles histoires incroyables, 1888) as well as popular pot-boilers such as Le Fils de Monte-Christo (1885). Finally, Edmund Haraucourt (1857–1941), whose literary career began with a sulphurous collection of poems (La Légende des sexes, 1883), several of which deal with the theme of necrophilia, published a single collection of horror stories early in the new century.

  Just as the original impetus for the roman frénétique was provided by the English Gothic novel and that for the conte cruel by the psychological insight of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, the conte fantastique also had a foreign source: the work of the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).

  In all three cases, the receptivity of French literary culture to new ideas and narrative techniques imported from abroad resulted in the creation of fresh and innovative genres which ultimately bore but little resemblance to the works which had inspired them. In a sense, this is always the fate of new ideas: the very act of translation is a selective process, individual texts or entire oeuvres are deliberately or accidentally distorted to answer the needs of the host culture, while local authors borrow just as much or as little as they require for their own particular purposes, rewriting their own literary history as they do so. Moreover, a certain amount of common ground is essential before any form of cultural dialogue is possible. Thus it is that a writer who is seminal in his own country (Hoffman
n provides an excellent example) and widely translated in another (several different editions of his complete works are still commonly available to this day in France) may be largely neglected elsewhere (Britain and America have never exhibited more than a cursory interest in his work).

  The French reception of Hoffmann is seen in certain quarters to have been aided by the existence of an earlier work – the only one for which the author is today remembered – by Jacques Cazotte (1719–1792): Le Diable amoureux (1772; tr. The Devil in Love, 1793). This fine tale, which concerns an abortive pact with the devil, is even considered by certain commentators to have been partially recycled by authors as diverse as M. G. Lewis (in The Monk, 1796) and Friedrich Schiller (in Der Geistersehr, 1789; tr. The Ghost-Seer, or Apparitionist, 1795). Whatever the truth of this, it was certainly a work which enjoyed some currency in the late eighteenth century and may be read with pleasure even today.11