Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  At the rear of Villa Lysis, a marble tablet proposes an alternative to Amori et dolori sacrum, the motto on the front facade, proclaiming that the house was “dédiée à la jeunesse d’amour,” dedicated to the youth of love. A more appropriate wording might have been a dedication to the love of youth. Like many another exile in Capri, Fersen fled to the island to escape obloquy in his native land on account of his erotic fixation with adolescent boys. Many of his fellow outcasts in Capri came, like Wilde, from the Anglophone nations, and many more from Germany, which had equally stringent laws against homosexual relations, yet France, like Italy, had no such laws. The causes of Fersen’s public disgrace were vague, arising more from middle-class outrage at aristocratic privilege than from the objects of his sexual desire. Even a century after the scandal, events are difficult to elucidate. Many documents relating to the court case are suppressed, and contemporaneous attempts to shield prominent public personalities mingle with the available facts to an extent that makes it difficult to distinguish between them.

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  FERSEN’S TROUBLES BEGAN as Emma Bovary’s did, by reading trashy romantic fiction, specifically the novels of Achille Essebac. An admirer of Fersen’s verse, Essebac sent him copies of his novels of schoolboy love. Dédé, his first novel, was a bestseller that was reprinted nine times. The book established the basic elements of the tragic paradigm that Roger Peyrefitte’s novels would follow. When the sixteen-year-old eponym, in whose body “throbbed the naked, blond elegance of ancient Hellas,” finally wins a kiss from his beloved, he dies. The novel concludes with a phantasmagoric apotheosis in grand classical style as Dédé joins the ranks of beautiful boys who died young: “Look! There they are! The ephebes3 of Tiberius descend from the heights of Capri, entwined with mourning garlands of iris and hyacinth.”

  At the time Fersen met him, Essebac had just published Luc, a novel dedicated to “the little bootblacks of Marseilles, to the young flower-boys of the Spanish Steps in Rome, to the cheeky street urchins of Naples, to Pio, the little blind Florentine.” Luc pushes the storyline to a more dangerous level by telling a story of love between an adult and a pubescent boy. The protagonist is a painter who conceives a fatal passion for a schoolboy he hires as his model for Daphnis, the shepherd beloved of Pan. The scene in which Luc poses for the first time inspires a prolonged paean to boyish beauty that struck a chord for Fersen he had never heard sounded in Alfred de Musset’s muted evocations of beauteous maidens:

  It was a marvel when, in the warmth and pleasing solitude of the studio, the ephebe emerged nude, a statue of polished ivory, between the wings of a folding screen covered in Venetian velvet. A strap of goatskin barely covered his dazzling loins; it encircled the rippling, satiny mother-of-pearl of his hips, and revealed, just where he was marked by the shadow of puberty, the smooth hollow of his flat belly and the delicate power of his round, glossy thighs. The bright sunlight of the studio rendered the radiance of the robust young body luminously pale against a scarlet background of antique drapery … Enormous flowers opened their blossoms around him: roses, peonies, and alabaster calla lilies, with their rigid phallic stamens, blooms pale or pink, vibrant and sticky, swollen with fragrant perfumes; yet even the supple firmness and magnificent flesh of their petals were less perfect than the faintly curved shoulders and pale, luminous arms of the adolescent.

  The luxurious complexity and excessive luminosity of Essebac’s prose make a decorative impression, but it soon becomes limp and tedious. It must have impressed Fersen, who would later imitate it closely in his own effusions on the beauty of young men in classical settings. It goes without saying that this is a French phenomenon, which does not resemble anything in Greek literature.

  In 1903, after Fersen had completed his compulsory military service, he took an apartment in the eighth arrondissement near his mother’s place, on avenue de Friedland, close to Parc Monceau. The neighborhood is the setting of Luc; the boys in the novel make their assignations in Parc Monceau. Soon after he moved into his apartment, Fersen met Louis Locré, nicknamed Loulou, a fourteen-year-old student at Lycée Carnot. According to Peyrefitte, Fersen met him while he was standing in front of a bookshop that displayed the novels of Achille Essebac in its window, on rue de Berri, the street where Loulou lived. It might well be true: the writer Paul Morand, a classmate of Loulou’s who often walked to school with him, was one of Peyrefitte’s principal informants about this period of Fersen’s life. Morand later confided to a friend that The Exile of Capri was “boring, but full of meticulous accuracy.”

  Fersen spoke to Loulou, who revealed that he studied at Lycée Carnot. In the days that followed, Fersen stalked him, loitering on rue de Berri and lurking by the gates of the lycée, like the menacing pedophile in a trashy thriller. After toying with his handsome, noble suitor, Loulou finally consented to come to Fersen’s apartment for tea, where he gorged on cakes. Chez Fersen was decorated in high Aesthetic style, hung with silks from Liberty, a painting of Venus and nymphs by Boucher, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt costumed as Napoleon II in Rostand’s play L’aiglon. It was furnished with Louis Quinze daybeds and Turkish divans, Chinese pedestal tables and Persian carpets, and lit with electrical lamps, the latest thing. The centerpiece, flanked by a harp and a piano, was a group of two bronze nudes, one male and the other female, representing “Two Loves striving for a heart fallen at their feet.” The theme was one of immediate concern to the sculpture’s owner, for the plans for his marriage to Blanche de Maupeou were moving forward.

  One tea led to another, and soon Loulou was coming for regular worship sessions at avenue de Friedland. Fersen began giving parties for Loulou and his classmates, sometimes held within a day or two of soirees for adult aristocrats and literati, with his mother in attendance. At first the gatherings were small groups of boys with flowers entwined in their hair, who listened to Fersen reading Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and of course the host’s own poems about amorous shepherds, followed by cream puffs and babas, sometimes served with small libations of champagne. As the guest list grew, the entertainments developed into amateur theatricals. Fersen staged elaborate tableaux vivants illustrating classical themes, with the guests attired in togas, enacting romantic scenes that did not require the participation of female characters, such as Pan and Daphnis, and Apollo and Hyacinth. Death scenes were often performed, which eventually dispensed with the togas: Heliogabalus, the boy-emperor of the late empire who married his favorite charioteer, a subject beloved of the Decadents; Antinous drowned amid water lilies, on a mirror to represent the Nile; Adonis on a bed of roses. An eyewitness gave a detailed description of one death scene in which a naked youth lay “on a white bearskin, his body covered with golden gauze, his forehead covered with roses and his arms resting on a skull of polished ivory.” Music was introduced, written for the occasion by fashionable composers such as Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s former lover.

  Fersen’s tableaux vivants enjoyed a vogue among the gratin. Monocled nobles and celebrated courtesans would drop by to take in the spectacles on their way to the opera. The boys enjoyed dressing up and were thrilled by the attention from grown-ups, and might have been too young to grasp fully the implications of the louche themes. They had already been exposed to them: a master at Lycée Carnot, Albert Tozza, in collaboration with a successful pulp novelist and poetaster named Aimé Giron, had published a series of sensational novels about Antinous, Gilles de Rais, and the life of Petronius, which circulated among his students. Fersen staged a tableau based on the last theme, impersonating the author of the Satyricon himself to a piano accompaniment by Hahn.

  It was getting out of hand, if for no other reason than that the tableaux had become a laborious proposition. The time to reform arrived when Fersen’s mother concluded negotiations with the vicomte de Maupeou and his wife, and invitations were issued for a betrothal party. The date was set for July 9, the feast of Saint Blanche; although the prospective fiancée was Protestant, her family might have wanted Catholi
c guests to experience a sympathetic vibration. Fersen decided to put a stop to the tableaux. There was nothing overtly vicious about them, but despite the aristocratic guest list they were hardly respectable. To celebrate turning over a new leaf, he published a collection of verse with the funereal title Processions That Have Passed (Les cortèges qui sont passés), in which the references to pagan orgies and sentimental shepherds were few and muted. He composed an elegiac poem of farewell for Loulou, “The Last Kiss.”

  Fersen’s resolution to reform came a melodramatic moment too late. On the evening of July 9, 1903, as Fersen was dressing for the fete at which his engagement would be announced, there was a knock at his door. A news story in Le Figaro the next day would report that the police “arrested the Baron d’A., aged twenty-three, who is accused of luring young boys to his bachelor flat in the Avenue de Friedland and there holding veritable saturnalias.” In a wretched irony, the newspaper’s society page ran a previously written story about a tea party at a swanky tennis club on l’Île de Puteaux, on the outskirts of Paris, where the guests included “Baronne Axel d’Adelswärd, whom everyone was congratulating on the engagement of her son, the Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd, to Mlle. Maupeou.” When the police suggested to Fersen that he dress more simply for jail, he opened his wardrobe, revealing hundreds of cravats and bespoke shoes, mingled with an assortment of theatrical togas and laurel wreaths. He spent the night in a jail cell, as his mother and sisters and Blanche de Maupeou waited in vain for him to arrive at his own engagement party.

  The case against him, which might have arisen from a denunciation by a disgruntled former valet, apparently supported by police surveillance of some of the Carnot boys, was thin and ambiguous. The age of consent in France at that time was thirteen. What is clear from a contemporary perspective might have been only vaguely apparent to Fersen and the court: capital-D Decadence was on trial more than his own behavior. It was the twentieth century, and modern times demanded men of action. The dandyish airs of men like Robert de Montesquiou were old-fashioned. In her study of Fersen’s trial, the American scholar Nancy Erber summarized Fersen’s legal predicament thus: “Contemporary anxiety over the presumed corrupting influence of literature and the perceived danger to the Republic of an aristocratic class seemingly exempt from the social contract converged.” Fersen’s unforgivable offense was the same as Wilde’s, as Robert de Tournel had explained it to the fictional Jacques d’Adelswärd in the dining room of the Quisisana Hotel, in The Exile of Capri: it was the crime of getting caught, of making his private aberrations a public spectacle.

  For five months, as Fersen idled in jail awaiting trial, the scandal owned the front pages of the newspapers, providing a pretext for screeds representing every partisan shade. The Catholic press saw in the story a proof of Protestant immorality, the anticlerical papers delighted in the abundant presence of Catholic priests, and despite the absence of Jews in the story, there were anti-Semitic critiques. Even the royalists found an angle, portraying Fersen as a victim of the nation’s educational system, and when that did not stick, they presented him as a Swedish interloper. Above all, the radicals had ample material to exploit the scandal as a proof of the degeneracy of the aristocracy.

  The headline, the journalistic shorthand for the scandal, derived from that skull: it was l’affaire des Messes Noires. The coverage spread abroad: American papers published lurid accounts of Black Masses; the Italian and German press were full of le messe nere and schwarze Massen. Although there was nothing to suggest that such a thing had occurred, Fersen was supposed to have lured innocent children to his temple of vice to invoke evil spirits, in the tradition of Gilles de Rais. Demonism was in the air. After the success of À rebours, Huysmans, on his tortuous path toward mystical Catholicism, had expanded that book’s diabolical undercurrents into a novel on the theme of Satanism in modern France. Published in 1891, Là-bas (the title literally means “down there”; it has been translated as The Damned, though “At the Bottom” might be closer) tells the story of a medievalist who becomes obsessed with Gilles de Rais and eventually performs a Black Mass himself.

  Fersen, thus identified with the Decadents, stood convicted before his trial began. He had not helped himself by having published, when the risqué tableaux were at their peak, a collection of poems entitled The Hymnal of Adonis, “in the style of the Marquis de Sade,” a delirious evocation of a factitious Greece, “mother of perfume, gaiety, and roses.” The police searched the apartment on avenue de Friedland and found the paraphernalia for the tableaux vivants, including the damning skull, and—shades of Bosie—Loulou’s love letters. Fersen was charged with inciting minors to debauchery, a vague, subjective crime that was difficult to defend against. Simply reciting Baudelaire would have sufficed to sustain the charge for some right-thinking Frenchmen. A second charge of outrage to decency was dropped, perhaps for fear it might drag in aristocratic members of his audiences. Fersen had few defenders: it would have taken courage for the homosexual artists and writers he socialized with to speak out on his behalf, and some of them pusillanimously denounced him in the hope of deflecting attention from their own activities. Proust pleaded for compassion, insisting that everyone has a right to love in his own fashion, a controversial position in the reactionary atmosphere of the times. Alfred Jarry, the openly gay author of the symbolist landmark play Ubu Roi, also stood up for Fersen.

  Fersen’s mother, at great expense, hired Charles Edgar Demange, the lawyer who had defended Alfred Dreyfus. He mounted a weak defense, presenting his client as a child of privilege whose mind was debilitated by a family history of insanity, alcoholism, and epilepsy, a theory disproved by the lucid testimony of the defendant, dressed in an elegant blue suit, who quoted Plato, Virgil, and Shakespeare from memory. Loulou Locré gave a polished performance on the stand that posed no threat to the solidity of butter in his mouth. The prosecutor assumed an attitude of compassion, putting the blame for the alleged crimes on “the poison of literature.” Fersen was found guilty and sentenced to five months’ time served.

  The morning after his release, he tried to enlist in the French colonial army but was refused, ostensibly on the grounds of his health. The Ministry of War referred him to the Foreign Legion, but Fersen rejected the idea, fearing it would damage his reputation (though that hardly seemed possible). He moved on to his alternate plan, a thrilling beau geste in the grand Romantic tradition, a scene from Balzac rather than Huysmans. He bought a revolver and a bouquet of flowers and hired a carriage to take him to the Maupeous’ country estate. When he arrived, he ordered the coachman to take the bouquet and his calling card to the door. The footman gave them to his master and swiftly brought them back with a demand that the uninvited caller leave immediately. Fersen pulled out his gun and shot himself, grazing his forehead. The vicomte de Maupeou reportedly leaned over the terrace and shouted, “Throw him out, even if he’s dying.”

  Fersen’s efforts at redemption might have had a pathetic air, but he cannot be blamed for considering himself a ruined man at twenty-three. Virtually all his friends deserted him. For the rest of his life, his name was synonymous in France with criminal debauchery. He was cruelly lampooned in a pornographic novel, Memoirs of Baron Jacques: Damnable Lubricities of the Decadent Nobility, a chaotic sequence of disgusting sexual exploits that were presumably intended to be in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade. Baron Jacques exhumes his mother’s skeleton and rapes little boys above it; he drowns a child in semen. Years later, Paul Morand and his father encountered Fersen as they were crossing Piazza San Marco, in Venice. Morand recognized him from his schooldays at Lycée Carnot. He wrote in his memoir Venises that his father, a curator of painting at the Louvre, swerved aside, saying, “I don’t shake hands with pederasts,” prompting Morand to observe that he probably did so every day without knowing it. Fersen’s family proposed that he move to Sweden, while the Swedish Adelswärds thought he should start a new life in America or Australia. He chose Capri.

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  FERSEN’S LITERARY WORKS have been so drastically undervalued by nearly everyone who has commented on them, under the baleful influence of Roger Peyrefitte and Compton Mackenzie, that any critic with an instinct to be truthful must undertake some effort at rehabilitation. Fersen has been inaccurately portrayed as a vanity author who inflated the success of his books by publishing first editions that falsely claimed on the title page to be second or third impressions. In fact, most of his books were published by Léon Vanier, a prominent editor who also published Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. The assertion that he presented first editions as reprints is quickly disproved by browsing in the National Library of France. Cocteau condemned Fersen as a purveyor of “Graeco-Preraphaelitico-Modernistic bric-à-brac, at once priest and acolyte not of the Black but of the Pink Mass.” Even judicious Shirley Hazzard scornfully dismissed Fersen as a “rich poetaster” in Greene on Capri, a memoir of her seasonal encounters with Graham Greene on the island.