by Jean Lorrain
Priests slowly wheel around a great bull of red stone, which is the emblem of Siva. A woman devotedly sprinkles a lingam of sandstone with lustral water, and crowns it with marigolds. Cows descend towards the river, nonchalantly chewing flowers. The cow-dung and the fresh leaves are slippery. A beggar implores an image to inform him as to the position of the planet Saturn. At intervals, from loggia to loggia, gongs and enormous tambours ring out; a great rumbling which imparts a dolorous and ardent vibration to the heavy air. Heavy miasmas ascend from the founts of knowledge where the gods reside: the musty smell of decay of the innumerable vegetable offerings accumulated there.
In the wild sky, above the domes clad in gold,’ emerald parakeets wheel about the gleaming ellipses, joining up in pairs to chatter in the forecourts of the temples. The whole place is haunted by the stink of corpses and fermentation; the disturbing soul of the founts of wisdom, which contain life and death.
The boatmen are the masters of the river, the refrain of ‘Ganga Djai!’ always on their black lips as their large sluggish boats surmounted by terraces, where entire families live and die, slide towards the horizon, rocked by the divine current. ‘Ganga! Ganga Djai!’ The guttural refrain seems to encapsulate all the mystery of the different human races. ‘Ganga! Ganga Djai!’ is also the echo of the holy city, and the echo of the centuries; it is the shadowy voice of dark idols and mysterious temples: the very soul of that impenetrable land which is India.
The palaces built by Hindu princes stretch in infinite succession, each one known by name. There is the palace of the Rajah of Indore, with balconies painted with blue-tinted floral designs which might be Louis XV; then there is the palace of the Maharajah of Udaipur, with its crenellated walls and its door flanked by two towers like a citadel…
Here are dogs, big turtles in the water, flames around a pyre, three rigid silhouettes clad in linen, a silent group of people: in Benares the dead are burned. The ashes are put into the river, and because the despised Untouchables who have the sole right to tend such fires make their clients pay dearly, poor people go badly-burnt into the stream. Thousands of men bathe themselves daily in the Ganges, and drink its waters without hesitation; thus the unique substance of life and death is naturally recycled.
Here are yet more terraces, more crowds swarming on the long staircases. There an observatory opens its elegant watch-towers over the river; gigantic instruments loom within. Here a dark alleyway abruptly descends to the river, where an immobile ascetic sits entranced while grey monkeys and bluish pigeons fight over a grain of corn fallen between his feet.
Further away, a ghat broken at the edges has allowed a temple to slide into the river. The columns and sculptures project from the water; stylite fakirs display their thinness upon them, and the backwash of boats rocks floating marigolds in their shadow. Near-naked bodies girdled by shreds of material swarm about the jumble of wherries and bamboo platforms. Among the stray dogs and prostrate worshippers there is a mad flowering of straw parasols, of every possible shade of yellow. They stand up at all angles, fixed in every wall, some thrusting like golden mushrooms above street-stalls, others fiat, set beside doorways like so many shields.
A thousand changing visions, continually renewed. The sinking sun sets them alight. And there is the atmosphere, always conspicuous and triumphant, full of all the disquieting effluvia of the river: the sour odour of scorched flesh and the fragrances of spices, the odours of cinnamon, gum benzoin, withered marigold and cattle-sheds. And always the haunting and spasmodic ‘Ganga! Ganga Djai!’
All this is dominated by the outbursts of bell-turrets and domes, the produce of improbable edifices of stone, some of them reminiscent of flames, others of enormous lotuses: a diverse architecture of reverent ambition reaching for the sky, moving in the heat-haze, crackling with sparks in the magnificence of the evenings.
To describe such an evening would require the molten-metal style of a Villiers de I’Isle-Adam or the gemmed palette of a Gustave Moreau.
The Triumph of Alexander …
Do you know the little museum in the Rue la Rochefoucauld? There and there alone, among the treasures of a unique body of work, you will be able to hypnotise yourself so as to come to know the inflamed splendour and transcendental atmosphere of a March evening in Benares. Benares! I have already been here for fifty days and yet every day, at twilight, the religious emotion of an entire city in ecstasy permits me to watch the sunset as if the daylight were indeed dying.
When a spectacle attains grandiosity in its beauty, it seems that it ought never to disappear. In our European climates, similar emotions cannot be experienced twice. That is why I want you here, why I am sending you this last appeal. With a loving and liquid heart, full to overflowing, you would blossom here in the plenitude of all your desires. That can only happen here, in the exaltation of the light, where every creature and every object is the vibration of a metal and the nuance of a flower. You will be born again into a new Heaven, with a new being, surrounded by things completely renewed. You will learn to carry your good fortune with you, and not to demand it of the past. The past is a decaying carcase; it is that which poisons your whole self. In Benares you will live in impassioned stupefaction, in the midst of architectural, racial and climatic magnificence, where every minute will bring you the savour of an unexpected and perfect encounter.
It is to these encounters that I invite you. It is because I have done all this myself that I say to you: ‘Come.’ Here, life is that which it was intended to be: an intoxicated dizziness. The eagle is intoxicated by its flight; the nightingale by summer nights; the plain trembles in the heat, and the dawn reddens with joy as the moon pales with voluptuousness. It is civilization which has deformed life. Among young peoples, all emotion is intoxication and all joy becomes religious.
Buddhism, which prostrates its crowds at the edge of the Ganges, is the compassionate and enraptured recognition which an entire race extends towards its gods. And the race remains youthful, although it is a thousand years old, because it is voluptuously consumed by its fervour. Nothing is fixed but its future; it is utterly careless of tasting the stagnant waters of the past. ‘Inspired by hope, it isolates itself in its vison, absorbed in the contemplation of nature and indifferent to immediate contingencies. The agitation of others surrounding it only serves to augment the sentiments of its own life.
The fakir does not rub shoulders with others; the possibility does not exist. Oh, how far away we are, here, from ancient Europe!
Come to join me, as quickly as you can, my dear Due. India will be a delicious convalescence for you. Here you will breathe the odour of the eternal lotus, as in the sonnet of Ary Renan, whose lines I have recalled during these last few days in Benares, and which embodies the spirit of Hinduism:
The Brahmins say to me: ‘Ponder the Sutras!
The way to Great Peace is open in Dreams.’
The mitred ones whose robes are long
Offer me pleasure in opening their arms.
Then the noblemen say to me: ‘Follow us. Choose
The caste which pleases you and the drapery
Which suits you.’ In the leper-hospital I hear
The chandala singing: ‘Love and you shall suffer.’
I have chosen to love and to suffer in the shadow.
I forget my sins. They are probably numberless,
But Wisdom and Gold have not dried up my heart.
Marching under an anathema, draped in heresy,
I breathe the scent of the eternal lotus
And in my wooden cup I have tasted ambrosia.
THE TRAP
April.
Have you been to see Gustav Moreau’s old studio in the Rue La Rochefoucauld? I can throroughly recommend it to you. You will see strange gazes there, limpid and fixed: hallucinatory eyes with divine expressions. Compare them to the eyes of emeralds embedded in the onyx of the idol. See how intense they become, especially at night, by candlelight.
ETHAL.
The Triumph of Alexander …
Do you know the little museum in the Rue la Rochefoucauld? There and there alone, among the treasures of a unique body of work, you will be able to hypnotise yourself so as to come to know the inflamed splendour and transcendental atmosphere of a March evening in Benares.
WELCOME.
Gustave Moreau! Ethal and Welcome direct me to the work of this painter as if to a good doctor. Without acting in concert, these two men between whom I sense some irreparable enmity, and who detest one another (of that I am sure) both send me advice – one from Benares and the other from Nice – to the effect that I should go to Rue La Rochefoucauld as if to some marvellous apothecary. And yet Welcome wishes to save me, while Claudius aspires only to aggravate my sickness.
Gustave Moreau: the painter of svelte Salomés streaming with precious stones, of Muses bearing severed heads, and of Helens in robes woven in living gold, posing with lilies in their hands – similar to huge blooming lilies themselves – on dungheaps of bleeding corpses! Gustave Moreau: the manipulator of symbols and the perversities of ancient theogonies; the poet of charnel-houses, battlefields and sphinxes; the painter of Dolour, Ecstasy and Mystery; the one artist, out of all modern painters, who has most closely approached Divinity – and in the course of that approach has discovered so many murderesses: Salomé; Helen; the femme fatale Ennoïa; the Sirens, bane of seafaring men!
Gustave Moreau; the painter and philosopher whose art has always troubled me more than any other! Has any other man been so haunted by the symbolic cruelty of defunct religions and the divine debauchery that was once adored in long-lost lands? A visionary without compare, he is the acknowledged master of the realm of dreams, but insofar as his works embody an uneasy frisson of anguish and desperation, he has cast a spell on his era. The master sorcerer has bewitched his contemporaries, contaminating the entire Jin de siècle of bankers and stockbrokers with a morbid and mystical ideal. An entire generation of young men has been bathed by the radiance of his paintings, becoming dolorous and languid, their eyes obstinately turned towards the splendour and magic of former ages: a whole generation – its writers and poets in particular – nostalgically enamoured, like him, of the long naked bodies, the fearful eyes and the morbid voluptuousness of his dream-enchantresses.
For there is sorcery in the pale and silent heroines of his water-colours.
His princesses, armoured in their nakedness by goldsmiths and jewellers, communicate ecstasy and are themselves ecstatic. Lethargic as they are – as though half-asleep – and so distant as to be almost spectral, they only serve to stir the senses all the more vigorously, and to subdue the will all the more certainly. Their charm is like that of great passive and venereal flowers brought to us from sacrilegious centuries – still in full bloom – by the occult power of damnable memories.
Moreau! This is a painter who can boast of having forced the threshold of mystery, and claim the glory of having troubled an entire century! This man, with the subtle art of the lapidary and enameller, has given powerful aid to the forces of decay which afflict my whole being. He has given to me, as to a whole modern generation of sick visionary artists, a dangerous erotic fascination with dead women and their set and empty expressions: the hallucinatory, long-dead women of yesteryear, resuscitated by him in the mirror of time.
Under the pearly frissons of an ardent and sad sky
Flourished, a hymn adorable in its melancholy,
The song of the sirens.
An incurable ennui swims in the amethyst
Of their deep eyes; the ennui of the god who marooned them
On those serene shores.
The sirens, bedecked with diadems of pearls and madrepores, of the famous water-colour: the sad and implacable sirens, grouped like some monstrous white coral reef whose branches are both dead and living …!
And it is to this morbid oeuvre, to this perilous and disturbing art, that Ethal and Welcome urge me to return; it is in this oeuvre, which has already entered into me so deeply as to augment my suffering, that they assure me I will find my cure.
And that little idol with the emerald eyes, which mocks me … for although she is made of mute matter, I can still hear her unseen laughter in the night.
Paris, 30 April
I have been there, and the same evening …
For shame! If this is what they wanted, they ought to be fully satisfied, for the trial has succeeded, beyond all expectations.
I went there right away. Without stopping in the first room, I asked to be directed to the Triumph of Alexander on the second floor, and I stood before it, utterly absorbed, for a long time. I found it incomparable, one of the most beautiful of his masterpieces.
It depicts a crowd moving through a setting whose splendid and grandiose architecture evokes all the magic of ancient India: a sumptuous procession of human figures, chariots and palanquins, and elephants presenting a frieze of tusks – and incessant trumpetings. The whole crowd is adoring the figure of a man seated on an inaccessible throne decorated with all manner of chimerical designs – dragons, sphinxes and enormous lotuses – like some kind of monumental altar constructed from monsters and flowers. Flowers are strewn around a mosaic floor; in the background, there is the cold blue of the stagnant waters of marble fish-ponds which duplicate by reflection the images of pagodas and temples carved out of porphyry, onyx and precious stones. This doubled image gives the impression of a high, steep cliff whose epic dimensions are entrancing and terrifying. This magical scenery is bathed from the sky above by an indescribable atmosphere, a yellow and blue dust which seems to be compounded of fluid gold and iris-petals. The ambiance created by all the nuances of this ensemble, and all its details, give rise to such a gentle charm and such a drunken joy of life as to generate a poignant regret that one never knew that epoch and that crowd – and at the same time, a disgust for our own time and our own civilization so profound that one might easily die of it.
The Triumph of Alexander! According to Welcome’s letter, this is the atmosphere of Benares!
All around me in the high room – a true museum of the master’s works, which cram the walls from the ceiling to the skirting-board – were the dangerous phantoms with which I was already familiar: the images of Salomé dancing before Herod, with her hair encircled by sardonyx, and the hieratic gesture of her fully extended arms; the dream-cathedrals with cupolas of bright amber which serve as settings for that immemorial scene of lust and murder; variations on the theme – repeated as many as ten times – of the tragic and bejewelled group of Sirens gathered upon the seemingly-foaming rocks; representations of Helen wandering with half-closed eyes on the walls of Troy …
And everywhere – in the images of Helen as in the images of Salomé; in representations of Messalina at Subura as in depictions of Hercules in the house of the daughters of Thespius or in the marches of Lerna – the same obsession with ancient myths is manifest. Those elements which are the most sinister and the most cruel are perpetually on display: the purulent charnel-house of the corpses slain by the Sphinx; the bleached bones of the victims of the Hydra; the heaps of wounded, agonised and dying, dominated by the placid and silent figure of Ennoïa; the bleeding heads of John the Baptist and Orpheus; the final convulsions of Semele, consumed by lightning on the knees of an impassive Zeus…
I wandered about, unsteadily, in an atmosphere of massacre and murder; it was as though an odour of blood floated in the air of that hall. I recalled what Ethal had said to me, boastfully, one evening in his studio in the Rue Servandoni, about the atmosphere of beauty and of dread which always envelops the man who has killed.
I went down the stairs.
The body-count there were no fewer dead bodies on display than there were in the upper hall.
From a heap of putrefying corpses an enormous lily-stem sprung forth, standing up straight, virile and lissom – and in the giant petals of its flower was the seated figure of a mystic princess. She was young and slender, haloed like a s
aint. In one hand she held the globe and in the other a cross. It is from the pus and the putrid blood of the charnel-house that the miraculous flower grows; the produce of all these murders is the angelic figure of a woman.
She too had the empty and fixed expression of the Helens and the Salomés.
I left the corner of the hall where that dangerous symbol glorified the uselessness of martyrdom, and I had already set foot upon the staircase which led down to the street – to the fresh air and the reality of the world outside – when my attention was captured by a large composition at the very end of the vast room.
Between the colonnades of a temple or Greek palace were a host of godlike young men, some in groups, others standing alone, some crowned with flowers, others bejeweled like women, but all striking tragic and impassioned poses. Their refined and barbarous attire served only to emphasize the near-nakedness of their bodies and the tortured convulsions moulded in their flesh. It was a banquet scene, but the banquet had been interrupted, for the amphoras and the metal plates were strewn about the foreground. There they mingled with corpses, for this was also a scene of murder. Extended on the flagstones, the superb bodies spread their limbs, flung outwards by the violence of their falls and stiffened by death. The painting depicted the slaying of the suitors in Penelope’s palace after the return of Ulysses. The hero was visible in the background, standing in the embrasure of a huge bronze door, while Minerva, the Pallas Athene of the Odyssey, appeared as a vertiginously fluttering swallow in a nimbus of flames, guiding the arrows in their flight.
Many had already found their mark, for the palace was full of dead men.