Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  O my childhood! O sad and rainy Normandy!

  Is there any reason why I cannot recapture all that? After all, who can say whether that calm and melancholy might not be the cure I need? Oh, if I might wash away all the shame and all the stains of my life in the lustral water of memory! An immersion in verdure, a baptism of dew – of those November dews which harden into frost, when the vapour of furrows awakes as silver in the dawn – that is what is wanting in my sore and falsified soul and my broken-down imagination. That is how the sword blunted in evil combat might be sharpened again.

  Yes, I must return to Fréneuse! I must escape from Paris, from the deleterious and baleful atmosphere where my sensuality is aggravated, where the hostility of beings and things engenders within me impulses which frighten me. Paris corrodes, depraves and terrifies me; in Paris my hands itch with the urge to murder; in Paris I grow ulcers; Paris has made me cowardly, libertine and cruel.

  The little church of Fréneuse! There I was baptised. There, for better or for worse, I made my first communion. There I followed the funeral-procession of my mother. She rests in the village cemetery: a poor little cemetery, enclosed by a wall of dry earth, which the church shelters with its shadow.

  What might I learn from that grave which I have not visited for more than six years?

  They rest. The alarms and sorrows of sad and ardent life

  No longer haunt their peaceful pillow.

  Dawns and nightfalls bathe them with their tears,

  Life is a detour on the road to the tomb.

  Should I examine the shadow of that road? What do I have to offer that dead woman?

  I know that this is the continuation of my sentimental crisis – but at whatever cost, I must leave. Fréneuse can be my sanctuary. I shall go without leaving a forwarding address; it will be as if I had vanished into the night. I will disappear, and no one shall prevent me; no one must know where I am, especially Ethal. His occult influence would pursue me. It is from him that I must escape. He is my evil spirit, the hand of shadow extended over my thoughts and deeds: the hand with the horrible rings; the monstrous and hairy hand whose gleaming pustules of pearl ooze poison; the predatory and agonising talon which embraces my impuissance and which – if I do not withdraw from its grip – will surely drive me to crime.

  This slow suicide, and the pangs of anguish in the midst of which I struggle, are dreadful! I have had enough of agony! I want to live!

  How triumphant Ethal would be if he knew what terror he inspires in me!

  And yet I shall be shattering my life, repudiating an entire past and all the pleasures of that past. For that past, which I propose to discard, has had its pleasures – guilty, abominable pleasures, but pleasures nevertheless! And I propose to do this on the strength of a spectral visitation: the inanity of a dream; the bloodied image of a ploughman killed twenty years ago!

  I saw him again last night, with his great beautiful, astonished and limid eyes and his suntanned face, his spahi’s cap perched on his bright head of hair – and, at the corners of his lips, that red trail: the flood of lukewarm blood risen from his breast. And across his torso, on his unbuttoned and sweat-stained shirt, was the track of the wheel: a track of mud and blood, but very little blood, more like a bruise than a wound … the crumpling and crushing effect of the cart which passed over his body … the lean and muscular body of a young man of twenty-six.

  It was in August. Twilight was falling. In the farmyard, where the last rays of the sun lingered, three great carts were arriving: three heavy carts loaded with odorant harvested grain. They had run up all the slopes, jolted in all the ruts, as they had so many times before, because it was harvest-time. We were lying on top of the heap of dry grass, with the other haymakers.

  We were both on the middle cart. He was standing up with a bunch of poppies attached by a thread to his waistcoat, gesticulating, cutting a dash, perhaps a little drunk – the day had been so warm! – and he was sounding with all his might the great conch-shell which, in Normandy, serves as the trumpet of the harvesters. All around him, stretched out like the hayricks, girls and boys were laughing and jostling, with the rosiness of pleasure and fatigue in their cheeks and sweat on their brows. In the midst of them, I breathed in all the joy of the life of the farm, shared in all the happy animation of that beautiful evening.

  A cart-wheel sank into a rut; the entire edifice of bundled hay swayed – and the man, losing his balance, fell down, rolling on the ground. The third cart was following behind. The driver, perhaps drunk, could not contrive to halt his horses. There was one great cry, and they rushed headlong over him. The horses did not trample him with their hooves – they avoided him easily enough – but the cartwheels continued to turn with the blindness of mere matter.

  Blood trickled from his mouth; a little mud soiled his bruised breast; the great beautiful eyes, a little stupefied, were still wide open.

  And it is that death which now calls me to Fréneuse! How he resembles Thomas Welcome! If I had not recognised Jean Destreux, I would dread that some evil had overtaken his double, out there in the distant Indies.

  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA

  5 April 1899. Fréneuse

  I have returned here in the hope of a cure and have found nothing but ennui. One by one I have visited the empty rooms, the rooms I left behind twenty years ago. They have not awakened a single emotion in me. Fréneuse, which contained the whole of my childhood, now seems to be a foreign land. In every room whose doors were opened for me by the gardener the fusty odour affected my sensibilities disagreeably. Even in the room where my mother spent the last months of her life I experienced nothing but the dry and cold hostility of an old provincial dwelling examined for the first time by a chance inheritor.

  The gardener’s wife opened the Venetian blinds slightly; a little sunlight leaked through the interstices, awakening the dust on the marble tops of the chests of drawers. Beneath their enshrouding dust-sheets, the rigidity of the chairs retreated into shadow. In the great drawing-room I noticed that the floorboards were rotten and giving way. The pedestal table in the centre was leaning slightly, disturbing the glacial harmony of that vast rectangular space set among the green hemlocks and brocaded gold lyres of its wall-hangings.

  On the first floor, a musty odour of ether still remained, tenaciously clinging to the panels of a cupboard. Mechanically, I opened a bathroom cabinet. Empty medicine-bottles were still ranged on its shelves; I read their labels. It was one of the little rooms where the sick woman liked to go, to seek solace in her suffering, far from her own chamber; this was one of the dispensaries from which she tended her sickness. In a drawer which I pulled open I found a little fan spangled with mica, resting on a bed of dried rose-petals amid faded lilac ribbons. Among these ribbons I happened upon a portrait: a yellowed photograph of a child, blurred and almost effaced. I was quite unable to recognise myself.

  That evening, alone in the great dining-room ornamented with the antlers of stags and other hunting trophies, leaning my elbows on the tablecloth before an empty cup, I waited until nightfall for some emotion or some spectre to surge forth from all those things which had once been my life! I hoped that a tear might ascend to my eye, that some fear-inducing frisson might clutch at my heart and set it to beating a little faster.

  Would the shade of Jean Destreux – whose apparition had brought me here – come forth?

  I heard the nibbling of mice in the wainscot. Perhaps they were surprised and disappointed to find me there, in that sad and uninhabited place, alone in the silence of the sleeping countryside. The Unknown that I awaited did not manifest itself. No tears came to my eyes. What kind of man have I become? My soul has congealed and dried up, and can never be revitalised; it is as if a hunger for enjoyment and a thirst for suffering surrounded something petrified and hardened.

  I wished so fervently that I might be moved, or frightened! A single tear, a single pang of fear, might have signalled a change in the direction of my life: a gateway opening t
o the future! But the future was playing with me. I felt not the lightest embrace of the smallest anguish, merely an acute consciousness of the uselessness of my experiment, of the childish step I had taken, of the ridiculousness of my forlorn presence in that deserted château.

  When the bell of the village church had sounded one o’clock I went out on the front steps to breathe the cold night air. A dog barked in a farmyard; the whole kennel responded with growls. I went to the stables, unleashed two Pont-Audemer dogs, and took them out into the park.

  The great trees were quite still and skeletal – spring comes so late to Normandy! – but the sky was so full of fleecy clouds filtering the moonbeams that it seemed as if a spring of luminous milk were flowing through the mist! What tranquillity! What solitude! I could not hear the stirring of a single leaf, but the odour of young bark and damp moss filled the whole park with freshness. I returned by way of the kitchen-garden. The lights of the sash-windows shone gently in the moonlight, and I had a momentary desire to cool my burning forehead against the glass.

  How cold its bluish lustre was! As cold as the glass in my casements when, as an adolescent enfevered by puberty, I used to rise from my bed and run barefoot to lean my head against their moist surfaces!

  My desire to see the immense and tranquil sky evaporated then, like the mist. What were the ephemeral fevers of my past days, compared to the appalling erosion to which my flesh and my soul had now fallen victim?

  I re-entered the house at dawn, enfeebled by fatigue and soaked with dew. I was bruised and aching, weighed down as if by a tumour by the physical lassitude of my indifference, of my dismal inability to weep and suffer!

  What will it take to burst that abcess of rancour and aborted tenderness, that bloated ganglion of stifled passions and dead dolours? What atrocious forceps and clamps will have to be brought to bear in order to deliver me of that abominable and burdensome foetus which was my soul?

  How shall I come by the gift of tears? I would surely be saved if I could only weep. If I could only recover the spark which reignited the fires of emotion that night in Montmartre, in that three-franc flophouse in the Rue des Abbesses…

  Fréneuse, 6 April 1899

  Today I was confronted with a lamentable and pitiful procession of farmers and local dignitaries, including the parish priest. Everyone knows everything in these bucolic holes. My arrival could not be kept secret, and the village is needy. All the avarice and guile of Normans lying in wait for a windfall has come to the chateau to beg and complain.

  I have given five hundred francs to the priest and reduced the rents of three farmers, but I did not receive the mayor – nor the schoolmaster, who wanted to take me to visit the new school-buildings, built to the plans of a Parisian architect: some monstrous modern construction, if I may judge by the high pretentious roofs which now disfigure the left-hand side of the park.

  The school! I do not even want to return to the farm. It has sufficed to listen to the manager enumerating the improvements made during my absence to meet the demands of the tenants: ditches and conduits; slate roofs to replace the thatch; improved stables and model dairies; paved swimming-baths for bathing the horses. Forty thousand francs kept back from the rents, over three years, for ‘modernisation’.

  No, I have not the slightest desire to return to the farm. Jean Destreux would not have been Jean Destreux under the framework of a slate roof, between the tiled walls of an English stable with pitch-pine boxes instead of the old-style stalls. People are created by their environment, and when that is destroyed, their memory is obliterated. I did not come here to exorcise a ghost, and I have been spared any such sorrow, by virtue of the fact that since my arrival at Fréneuse, all the ghosts have vanished.

  How dismal the region is in April! Springtime is tremulous, harsh and hesitant here. All the showers of March are still suspended in the air, the leaves and shoots reluctant. The cultivated fields curve away to the horizon, bearing the tentative thrust of young rye and green corn. It is the childhood of the harvest, but it is a rickety and destitute childhood under the sour north wind and the menace of an eternally cloudy sky. Oh, how stony and raw Normandy skies seem at the end of March! It was their incurable distress, appearing in the transoms of the high windows of Fréneuse, which saddened my whole childhood and caused my soul to sicken with that strange desire that I have always painted over with acid sensations and other lands.

  It is the same with Fréneuse itself! The rooms, which seemed so vast when I left, now seem shabby. The park I used to love, whose woods once seemed so mysterious and murmurous, is less than three hectares; it could almost be taken in my hand. At the end of every path one can see the fields. The monotony of those fields engulfs and shrivels the soul.

  Being in Fréneuse is like being on an island battered by a sea of ploughed fields, and I now understand the origin of that stormy heaviness, in which I can scarcely breath, where I await I know not what miracle to tear apart the atmosphere of anguish which hangs upon those furrows and that park. I feel that I am locked up here, imprisoned as in a lighthouse, and the infinite extent of the plain gives me the same sick feeling that one sometimes suffers when looking out to sea!

  The sea! The watery eyes of Jean Destreux! It is because those eyes had in them everything that I desired, everything that I have since sought and everything that I still pursue, that they have remained in my memory. They were the first revelation of an impossible good fortune: the luck of the soul! They were the pure eyes of my years of innocence; it was only after I had been depraved and corrupted by contact with men that I began madly to covet the green eyes. The obsession of those glaucous eyes is a symptom of my fall from grace. What a frightful fixity of adoration there was in my loves and my desires, when I was a child! .

  Perhaps the secret of good fortune is to love all creatures and all things without preferring any one!

  I remember reading somewhere that every creature points towards God, but none can reveal him. Because our experience stops short, every creature turns us away from God.

  Same day, nine o’clock in the evening

  A little while ago, while returning from the cemetery, I made a long detour so that I would not have to pass through the village. I wanted to avoid the women gossiping on the doorsteps, the children coming out of school, and the men holding discussions outside the saddlery and the blacksmith’s forge. It seemed to me that my horrid reputation must have preceded and followed me here. Irritated by the anticipation of inane laughter and whispers, I clung to the hedgerows and made my way behind the houses.

  A gypsy caravan was parked in the middle of a field near Castel-Vieux. Outside, a woman was cooking on a little cast-iron stove. Tranquilly seated on a chair, she watched the evening meal as it cooked. Damp linen was hung up to dry at the windows of the caravan. Two children – half-naked urchins with superb black eyes – were teasing a nanny-goat which must have been reckoned one of the family. Grubby little hands were avidly kneading her udders, greedy mouths trying to seize her teats.

  The sky was softened by the twilight, striped near the horizon by vermilion-tinted clouds. The wind had dropped. Through the gentle warmth of the evening the silhouette of a man approached, weighed down by a sack of potatoes which he carried on his shoulder. Silently, the man kissed the woman on the forehead. Then, letting his sack fall to the ground, he untied the goat and took hold of the two little ones, hugging them enthusiatically. He was a big, lean man with a daring face, illuminated by very white teeth. His manner was dark and joyous at the same time as if the scent of broom clung to his rags in spite of the sweat and the dust. He took stock of me, insolently, and burst into nasal laughter, still greedily embracing the kids.

  I stopped to look at him but I went on my way without saying anything, repeating to myself in a low voice a passage from Andre Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth:

  ‘I became a vagrant in order to make contact with other vagrants; I am tenderly enamoured of everyone who knows where to get warm, and I
have a passionate love for all vagabonds.’

  Presently, after dining in the solitary intimacy of my own company, I went into the library and picked out a volume at random, to relieve the tedium of waiting for bed-time. It turned out to be an Italian text of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I leafed through it idly, and fell upon the passage which begins: Lasciate ogni speranza …

  Abandon all hope!

  These words echo throughout Fréneuse.

  A CONSIGNMENT OF FLOWERS

  Fréneuse. April 1899

  My luggage is packed. In an hour I will have left Fréneuse. In five hours, I will be in Paris. I can stand no more! I can stand no more!

  This solitude is suffocating me; the silence weighs me down. Oh, the anguish of last night, in confrontation with the dead tranquillity of the town and the open country! In Paris one can at least feel the breath of a whole population abed: so many lusts remain on watch, so many ambitions, disquiets and hatreds! Here all humanity falls exhaustedly into sleep as if into a hole. Oh, the lethargy of these farms, these mute hamlets under the vast sky – the frightful anguish of all those night-dark places, without a single illuminating spark of life!

  Leaning on my elbows at the open window, I had the sensation of being in a cemetery. It was as if I had been forgotten in the panic of a plague which had emptied the province, left alone in the midst of desolation. It seemed to me that all those villages might never wake again – and I felt a violent and commanding need for some affirmation of life, a lust to bite and kiss which dried out my mouth, a rage to touch and embrace which made my fingers clench painfully.

  If I had still possessed the common knowledge of former times, I would have gone out in search of a farm girl. In town one always knows where to go when such frenzies takes hold. I have experienced these atrocious hysterical crises before. It was only two years ago that I had a similar attack, and it only required me to come to Fréneuse to reawaken the horrible malady. But I came here in search of calm! I believed that this place would provide me with a refuge! On the contrary …