Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  The solitude! The silence! How strongly they excite evil instincts! Ennui causes the sap to rise in all the poisonous blooms of the soul. It is in the cells of monks that Evil issues its sternest challenges to consciousness.

  There is just time to write these few hasty lines in my note-book, in order to establish the fact of my irreedemable fall from grace. Time marches on: the carriage-horses are pawing the ground in front of the steps; I can hear the bags being brought down. In ten minutes, we shall have departed.

  April, Paris.

  Thyrses of crêpe opened out in funereal chalices:

  Proud black irises, I am enamoured of your darkness.

  Flowers of anguish and of dreams, monstrous desire

  Inflates your stems of shadow and fills them with a pleasure

  Vibrant with the strange and heavy ferment of life.

  You live in a fever, eternally unsated,

  And the Evil within makes you stronger by far,

  Than other irises, the chaste and the gentle.

  A slow death-agony embraces your hostile hearts.

  You are cruel and subtle at the same time,

  O dolorous flowers of velvet and the moon.

  Aborted schemes and untamed rancours,

  The dismal treasons of gazes and mouths

  Sleep in the night of your heavy petals:

  The turgid blooms of a garden of tortures,

  You are the sisters and accomplices of my soul

  And of its dream obsessed by harrowing amours!

  I composed these verses in my youth, to sing the praises of black irises – like everyone else, I took to poetry for a while when I was about twenty: the apparent complexity of the game of rhyme and rhythm was bound to seduce a soul as puerile and complicated as mine, so that the barbarous child which remained within me might be amused by the conquest of its difficulties. Black irises! It had to be black irises, and all that they implied, which greeted me on my return.

  Some unknown hand had caused these monstrous blooms to be distributed throughout the ground floor of my apartments in the Rue de Varenne. From the antechamber of the morning-room to the parlour every single room was beset by a disquieting flowering of darkness: a mute outburst of huge upstanding petals of greyish crepe, like a host of bats set within the cups of flowers. They filled the great enamel vases in the hall, the white Sevres urns in the drawing-room and the Satsuma pots in my study. Clumps of heady narcissi mingled with the darker flowers, like a rain of luminous and guileless stars amid all that extravagant black mourning-dress.

  The hall porter explained that they had arrived two days before from Nice: a consignment of five baskets of flowers. He had taken it upon himself to unpack them and distribute them in the vases. The sender was Monsieur Ethal…

  So Ethal was in Nice? Since when?

  In addition, there was another dispatch from Ethal, conveyed by the postman. A little box had arrived eight hours before that avalanche of flowers – but the box came from London. As it was marked ‘personal and fragile’ on every side, in both English and French, the porter had not dared to open it, and it awaited my return in the study. There was also a pile of letters for me.

  ‘There is one from London and one from Nice, in which Monsieur le Duc will doubtless find the explanation for these dispatches.’

  It was eleven o’clock at night, and I was falling asleep, but the consignment of flowers and that mysterious box awoke my curiosity. Nerves jangling with the desire to find out what was going on, I no longer thought of sleep.

  ‘Have someone bring the box here,’ I commanded. Then, with a feverish hand, I sorted through the letters in the tray, searching for those from Claudius…

  What a heap of correspondence! I had been at Fréneuse for a mere six days, and I found more than thirty letters awaiting my return. I knew only too well where they came from: middlemen, touts, shady hotel-proprietors and brothel-keepers. A whole venal and voracious army of inveterate vice dogged my steps like a pack of jackals; for years they had been lying in wait in my shadow, eager to excite my desire in the hope of alleviating my ennui. I crumpled the envelopes between my fingers, not intending to open them because I knew well enough what they contained and what offers they would extend to me. There are days when I am roused to such anger that I am tempted to send these letters to the public prosecutor, in order that society might be purged of a few of their signatories. There is Poissy and Fresnes and Saint-Lazare …

  But, after all, it is certainly true that everyone must live. I know too well, from bitter experience, how false the claims of these spicily amorous advertisements for ‘fresh meat’ really are, and the kind of trafficking in bodies and souls which they represent. All the same, the juxtaposition of the calm and the dispiriting silence of Fréneuse, the return to Paris amid Ethal’s black irises, and the workings of the Stock Exchange of all the prostitution of the city, seems significant and appropriate. It is the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin which was inscribed in letters of fire on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. Dante’s Lasciate ogni speranza … is not only to be seen at Fréneuse.

  That hostile night-watch of sinister flowers upon my threshold – these flowers that I used to love, in times of fever and confusion, these monsters whose praises I once sang – and that shameful correspondence from all those brokers and brokeresses of amour …

  I drag the burden of my life with me, wherever I go. What a punishment!

  There is, however, one note of relief in all this disgust: the news that Ethal is not here. His absence is reassuring.

  His two letters, whose envelopes I tore open almost simultaneously, confirmed my deliverance. I read them at random.

  Nice, 2 March.

  My dear friend,

  I have left London. The divorce of Lady Kerneby has been decided in my favour. I have heard as much from her solicitor. English hypocrisy – from which I have so often suffered – has worked to my advantage this time, against the imbecility of Lord Edward. I have benefited from his condemnation as an adulterer. The court has dismissed his claims in respect of my portrait. You know that of all my works this is the picture which I prize most highly: so far as my aesthetic sensibilities are concerned. The Marchioness Eddy Kerneby is perhaps the prettiest creature who ever lived in the kingdom. I have further idealised her, exaggerating her morbid and slightly funereal grace. It is this portrait – on which I worked for nearly six months – that Lord Edward did not want to give me, and for which he only paid half the fee. The outcome of the lawsuit has settled everything: it is now the property of the Marchioness. Lady Kerneby is here in Nice, dying of consumption! The poor creature has always been ill, but the vicissitudes of these last six months have advanced her illness considerably. If you only knew how beautiful she is, having been refined by that slow death-agony for two years – the span left to her will be far too brief. I see her every day, and spend most of my evenings by her side. I have joined her here because I am counting on the fact that she will decide to return the portrait to me. You may not know that Lady Kerneby is the sister of Sir Thomas Welcome. Welcome is illegitimate, but she has always had the most tender affection for her brother, and if I manage to obtain from her the portrait that I covet it will be on the express condition that I give it to Sir Thomas on his return from Benares, which is where he ought to be at this moment. How complicated these English families are! If this picture is returned to me, I shall take up my brushes again, and you shall see at last the painting of yourself.

  CLAUDIUS.

  P. S. The marchioness, to whom I have spoken of you, has allowed me to ransack her garden and her conservatories in your honour. I address to you, on her behalf and mine also, a whole harvest of narcissi and black irises. I know that you like them, although you have never told me so. These are particularly beautiful, as if they are bloated with horrid black blood: true flowers of the battlefield. I address them less to you than to the little idol which I sent you eight days ago – I still await your news, and am still disturbed by
your departure. It would be a pity if she went astray en route, for – quite apart from the fact that she is unique and of an exceedingly rare material – she has a story attached to her, which you have heard. Her emerald eyes have seen the climax of a dreadful drama. She alone knows the conclusion of the story – the conclusion which she might perhaps reveal to you, if you render her the worship which she requires and show her sufficiently fervent adoration.

  I promise that she will love the form and the perfume of those irises very much …

  I shall remain here until circumstances change – somewhat in the position of a vulture lying in wait for a cadaver.

  Flowers for an idol? A lawsuit won? I had opened the second letter before the first; I should have begun with the one which bore a London postmark.

  My dear friend,

  I have left Paris abruptly, without taking leave of you, summoned here by a matter of great importance. The great scandal of the Kerneby divorce offers me an opportunity to reopen and win my suit against Lord Edward. You know that the vile husband has illegally retained in his possession the portrait that I made of his wife. The Marchioness Eddy should now obtain her divorce from the Marquis, reclaiming all rights in respect of her fortune and her personal possessions. My picture ought to be among the objects due to her; her solicitor, who is also mine, has striven to persuade the judges of this: hence the urgency – more, the necessity – of my presence here. There are a thousand and one personal things I must attend to, but if the portrait comes back into my possession, I feel that the painter I used to be will be reawakened, and that the revitalization of my work will make a new man of me, so that my taste for light and colour will return. Pray to the good and evil spirits alike that I might succeed.

  I have rediscovered, among a heap of curios and forgotten items, a little statuette that will interest you: the little Astarté of onyx at whose feet Monsieur de Burdhes was found strangled in the house in Woolwich; the idol with emerald eyes of whose religion he desired to be the founder, and whose worship – somewhat tainted with blood – has enriched our friend Thomas Welcome with the millions which now permit him to travel the world. When de Burdhes’ effects were auctioned, I bid dearly for her against the antique-dealers of the City. I remember how my description of her appeared to fascinate you, that evening when I described to you the final tragedy of poor de Burdhes.

  This little Far-Eastern idol has a rather pretty halo of mystery. Welcome knew her, perhaps adored her – who knows whether she herself might not have suggested the idea of the murder? For the Astarté of Carthage and Tyre is also known, in the forests of India, as the goddess Kali. The incarnation of the embraces of love, she also symbolises the murderous embraces and through the medium of the sect of Thugs, she is a strangler. The Thugs – the famous brahmin stranglers of Delhi – are her most fanatical devotees. For nearly ten years she has been mine, and I reckon her a dear friend. Permit me, therefore, to offer her to you to remind you of Welcome and of me. She will be one more link in the invisible but strong chain which unites the three of us.

  I know not when I shall be able to return to Paris: I am rather afraid that I may be forced to go to Nice to rejoin Lady Kerneby, who has been receiving treatment there since the begining of winter.

  Have you been to see Gustav Moreau’s old studio in the Rue La Rochefoucauld? I can thoroughly recommend it to you. You will see strange gazes there, limpid and fixed: hallucinatory eyes with divine expressions. Compare them to the eyes of emerald embedded in the onyx of the idol. See how intense they become, especially at night, by candlelight.

  The porter had put the little box in the hall. I opened it with three blows of a hammer, removed the straw and gently unwound the delicate silken wrappings. The blind and androgynous statue was revealed. It is indeed the little idol featured in Claudius’s story. Here is the full torso, the frail and gleaming arms, the receding hips. Hieratic and demonic, her body of pure black onyx attracts and reflects the glow of candlelight. Her firm round breasts thrust forward, gleaming above the shadowed abdomen: the narrow and flat abdomen which swells out at the place where the sexual organs should be, in the form of a tiny death’s-head.

  The mocking, menacing, triumphant death’s head, symbolic of motherhood and of ancestry!

  Beneath her low forehead there is the blind gaze of two green eyes: two profoundly dead eyes which see nothing …

  In the half-light of the antechamber, the black irises and the narcissi stand erect, the blacker silhouettes within the shadows alternating with whiteness; their solemn vigil extends throughout the entire suite of rooms. It seems as if the whole apartment is being guarded by flower-phantoms.

  Outside, carriages roll towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The scent of all the flowers, stronger by night, makes the atmosphere heavy and unbreathable. The little idol is silently mocking, and I am oppressed by anguish and stupor!

  THE CITY OF GOLD

  18 April 1898

  Yesterday evening, on my return to Paris, there was the strange reception of all those black flowers and the little onyx Astarté: the enigmatic idol of the Woolwich sanctuary, introduced to my home by courtesy of Ethal. All these presences suddenly served to remind me of Thomas Welcome, whose natural sister was at that very moment aproaching her final agony in Nice – watched over by the same Ethal. In the midst of all these funereal things, there arrived for me, this very morning, a letter from Benares. The envelope, bearing the stamps of British India, contained eight long pages, written in an unfamiliar hand – which was Thomas Welcome’s!

  Can this be pure chance? Or are these two men, bound together by I know not what obscure past, acting in concert according to some prearranged plan? Have not the simultaneous arrival of these flowers, that statuette and that letter combined to strike me a considerable blow?

  And yet, how stimulating – and how very different from the depressing counsels of Ethal – the long and luminous epistle of Thomas Welcome is! What an appeal to the cause of my health and my deliverance! No, this man wishes me no evil.

  Benares, 19 March 1899.

  Why did you not listen to me, my dear friend? Why have you not followed me into this marvellous land of dazzling visions and consoling legends, into the depths of the mysterious India of the Vedas? Why have you not followed me – as I asked you to, as I almost begged you to – to this holy city of ecstasy and light: Benares? Am I to understand that you are staying in Europe, beneath the narrow sky of our cities, in spite of that tortuous want of expansion which is in you, that thirst for life which is your sickness? Will you remain a prisoner of the inhuman laws of our civilization?

  Here you would have found a sure remedy: here, in this atmosphere of immense fervour, this permanent exaltation of a crowd in prayer, beseeching by day and by night a divinity which is almost visible in the sublimity of the landscape and the sky.

  Benares! The mosque of Aureng-Zeb; the ceaseless flow of the Ganges crawling with the boats of pilgrims; the pilings of temples at the ‘Ghat of Five Rivers’. It is a place of palaces, mosques and domes, all bathing in the river by virtue of their innumerable staircases which descend step by step, with their escorts of statues, into the moving gold of the water!

  Everything is golden in this holy city. Golden: the heavens of apotheosis into which the gold-clad domes and the pink cones of minarets are forever reaching. Golden: the squares, the pillars, the roofs of sanctuaries, and the images of apsaras and musicians springing forth, all in the attitude of distracted flight, the cornices and the entablatures of temples. Golden: the nudity of beggars, crushed by the crowds on the bank of the river. Golden: the immobility of fakirs in trance. Golden: the great vases held between the hands of the worshipful priests moving in procession on the high terraces. Golden also: the mass of the faithful prostrate, step by step and column by column, in mute adoration of the Ganges: ‘Ganga Djai’, mother Ganges; the sacred stream; the holy river which flows through the holy city, to which they dedicate all their vows.

  The who
le of Buddhist India converges at this point, in the exaltation of the light and the infinite thirst for certain wellbeing, visionary, adoring and happy: happy in their fervour and in their faith. Fervour! The whole secret of human well-being is there: love with fervour; be passionately interested in things; encounter God everywhere and love Him madly in each encounter, amorously desiring everything that is natural, beings and things alike, without stopping at mere possession, devoting oneself to unbridled desire for the external world without pausing to worry whether the desire is good or evil. For all sensation is a presence, and the splendour of things derives entirely from the ardour that we have for them. The importance is in the beholding and not in the thing beheld. What does it matter where ecstasy comes from, so long as ecstasy comes? All emotions are like so many doors opened towards a wondrous tomorrow: becoming is the essence of religion. The things of the past are already dead; why tarry over a corpse? Everything possessed is already corrupted, and whenever we regret something, we are already carrying a seed of death within us.

  To enrich oneself with desires: total fervour is there, and fervour is a delicious attrition of love.

  Benares, century after century, agonises and mortifies itself in an intense fervour: it is that very fervour – the hallucinatory ecstasy of all India – which makes it live and sustains it.

  Oh, the golden temple: the holy of holies of the holy city; the displays of idols, lingams and amorous charms in its little narrow steets; their descent towards the river; the infinite succession of palaces and temples; the dreadful promiscuity, puerile and charming at the same time, of the brahmins, the beggars, the idols and the beasts: all received and respected with the same soft and loving gentleness by the religious soul of the crowds!