The Angel Asrael
and Other Legendary Tales
by
S. Henry Berthoud
Translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
BEAUDUIN BRAS-DE-FER 15
THE DEAD 19
THE COOK’S SON 44
THE RUBRICATOR 80
THE SHEPHERD’S CLOCK 98
SIMON THE ACCURSED 104
GILES THE HIDEOUS 113
THE DE PROFUNDIS 122
THE PACT 139
THE EGLANTINE; 154
A STORY HEARD WHILE LISTENING AT DOORS 164
THE SOUL IN PURGATORY 174
THE DELATION 181
THE SPELL 187
THE BEGGAR’S SOU 191
THE SEMINARIST 196
THE ANGEL ASRAEL 208
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION 309
Introduction
Asrael et Nephta, Histoire de Province by S. Henry Berthoud, here translated as “The Angel Asrael,” was first published in Paris in 1832 by the Widow Charles-Béchet. The 1842 bibliography of La Littérature Française Contemporaine, edited by J.-M. Quérard, records that copies of the book also exist bearing what was presumably its original title, L’Ange et le Démon, ou Asrael. I have taken that variation as a license to amend the title again; while the original one carried the false implication that the angel and the demon to which it refers are two individuals rather than one, the belated substitute affords Nephta a parallel status that is unwarranted.
Asrael et Nephta was the author’s first novel, although it is perhaps a little too short to warrant that title and might be better regarded as a novella. It was his fifth publication in volume form. Its first predecessor had been a pamphlet version of a poem that had won a prize in 1823 awarded by the Societé d’émulation de Cambrai, published by that author’s father, the printer Samuel Berthoud (who used that signature on his own books, obliging his similarly-named son to employ his second name in his own signature, anglicizing it as an affectation). That had been followed by two short story collections, Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre (1831), published in Paris by Charles Lemesle, but printed by the Widow Charles-Béchet, and Contes misanthropiques (1831; tr. as Misanthropic Tales), similarly under the aegis of Lemesle but printed by Wedret.
In the same year as Asrael et Nephta, Berthoud also published another novel. La Soeur de lait du vicaire [The Curate’s foster-sister], issued in Paris by Charles Vimont, which is listed ahead of Asrael et Nephta in the 1842 bibliography, but was certainly written later, even if it was published earlier. The four volumes issued in 1831-2 marked the beginning of what was to become a long and prolific, if somewhat checkered, literary career that reached its culmination, and its most successful economic phase, in the 1860s, by which time the author, born on 19 January 1804, was beginning to grow old.
The brief biography attached to Berthoud’s entry in the 1842 bibliography records that in 1817 he received a bursary to enter the Royal College of Douai, which he left in August 1822. He subsequently became the literary editor of a local periodical, the Journal de l’arrondissement de Cambrai, and in 1828 founded La Gazette de Cambrai, in which he published much of his early short fiction, some of which was pirated by Parisian and other provincial periodicals, and even by periodicals in England, America and Germany. That experience led to his recruitment by the pioneering Parisian journalist Émile Girardin, who employed him on the editorial staff of La Mode and La Presse, and he also worked for La Revue de Deux Mondes and La Revue de Paris—then the two central organs of the burgeoning Romantic Movement—as well as La Silhouette and L’Artiste before he was entrusted by Girardin, first with the sole editorship of the revamped Mercure de France, and then that of the pioneering “family magazine” Le Musée des Familles.
The 1842 biography makes no mention of Berthoud ever having attended university or having lived in Paris prior to relocating there permanently in the early 1830s, but there seems to be little doubt that his close friendship with Honoré de Balzac was initially formed some years before then, and it is possible that he spent some time as a student in Paris during the early 1820s, which he later erased from his biography, perhaps because he failed to take a degree. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, however, he certainly became an important person in Cambrai, not merely for his editorial endeavors but also working in local government, primarily in public education—he organized free courses in hygiene, anatomy, geometry, literature and the arts—and subsequently as the administrator of the local hospitals during the great cholera epidemic of 1830-31, during which, according to the biographer, the public health precautions he introduced allowed the epidemic to be attenuated more effectively in Cambrai than any other city in France.
Berthoud was still in Cambrai—and the cholera epidemic was still raging—when he wrote Asrael et Nephta. Once he had taken up permanent residence in Paris, however, he devoted himself entirely to editorial work and authorship, on a prolific scale. In the former capacity, at least, he became one of the lynch-pins of the French Romantic Movement, and did a great deal to stimulate its prose component, especially the imaginative fraction of that component.
Berthoud seems to have remained devout throughout his life, unlike most members of the Romantic Movement, and also gives the appearance to a political agnosticism that was similarly atypical, but there is something odd about the quality of his devotion, as the stories collected in the present volume, especially Asrael et Nephta, clearly illustrate. The other stories included here all come from the 1831 collection, the somewhat misleadingly-titled Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre. It does seem, however, that the collection in question was always envisaged as the first part of a larger work; it was reissued in 1834 as the first of three volumes, the second and third of which do indeed consist almost entirely of historical narratives and supernatural vignettes set in Flanders, whereas the first volume concludes with a number of contemporary documents, some of which would not have been out of place in Contes misanthropiques, Berthoud’s pioneering collection of what would later become known as contes cruels.
It appears from his autobiographical comments that Berthoud did have the ambition at one time to become a genuine folklorist, traveling through Flanders on foot collecting local folktales from the indigenes, but he confessed ruefully that blistered feet soon cured him of the ambition and sent him home. Only a tiny minority of the stories in to Chroniques et traditions even maintain a shallow pretence of being reported folklore, therefore, the great majority are manifestly literary works. This is more particularly true of the stories included in the present volume, because I have omitted nine that I translated previously for the showcase anthology of Berthoud’s works, Martyrs of Science and Other Victims of Devilry and Destiny,1 to wit: “La partie d’échecs du diable” (tr. as “The Devil’s Chess Game”), Le Trou d’enfer” (tr. as “The Mouth of Hell”), “L’Archet du sabbat” (tr. as “The Sabbat Bow”), “La Bague antique” (tr. as “The Antique Ring”), “La Dame aux froids baisers” (tr. as “The Lady of the Cold Kisses”), “La Grange de Montecouvez” (tr. as “The Barn in Montecouvez”), “La Noce de Cavron-Saint-Martin” (tr. as “The Wedding in Cavron-Saint-Martin”) “Le Sire aux armes brisées” (tr. as “The Sire with the Broken Armor”) and “Saint Mathias l’Ermite” (tr. as “Saint Mathias the Hermit”). Most of those stories at least pretend to be accounts of Satan’s interference with human affairs reflective of the role typically attributed to him by popular folklore. The stories in the present volume sometimes begin from the same perspective, but they move in several different directions therefrom
, sometimes very dramatically, most conspicuously and most strikingly in the title story and the two stories from the earlier collection that are evident precursors of it, “L’me du Purgatoire” (tr. as “The Soul in Purgatory”) and “Le Séminariste” (tr. as “The Seminarian”).
It is blatantly obvious from the pattern of Berthoud’s early works that he suffered some deep disillusionment during the 1820s, which left him, as he says in “Le Séminariste,” in which he employs himself as the narrator, “indolent, skeptical and disenchanted.” The annotation of La Soeur de lait du vicaire in the 1842 bibliography observes that “This novel was initially entitled Bah! By that title, the author said, he wanted to express the derisory insouciance with which the passions and their consequences are envisaged today. The author’s friends assembled extraordinarily and, it appears, found Bah! too pretentious and too affected a title.” If that is what happened—the anecdote was presumably supplied by Berthoud—one can hardly blame his friends for thinking that, but it is significant that Berthoud’s initial impulse was so aggressively contemptuous.
It is difficult, in reading Berthoud’s early work, to avoid drawing the inference that he had suffered at least one deep and injurious amorous disappointment, and probably more than one, whose culminating impact was permanent—he never married, and a biographical sketch of him published in the early 1860s found him living alone in Paris, save for his dog Maître Flock and a pet lemur he called Mademoiselle Mine. That disillusionment, as the note observes, was not merely personal, but colored his view of everything that was happening around him, encouraging him to call his second story collection—without his friends intervening—Contes misanthropiques. As to the exact nature of his amorous disappointments, we can only speculate, although his obsession with the theme of doomed love, in various versions, including several in which it terminates, and a few in which it even originates, in eternal damnation, certainly seems to reflect an ease of identification and a fervor of protest.
The 1842 biography, naturally, has nothing to say about intimate matters, but if its details were supplied by Berthoud the fact that it refers to his personal situation at all, albeit very diplomatically, might be regarded as significant. The sketch in question concludes with the observation that:
“In addition to a certain talent that distinguishes him as a man of letters, Monsieur Berthoud possesses special qualities that render his relations precious and which have acquired him numerous friends, among whom one remarks Madame Desbordes-Valmore, whose disciple he is. Endowed with a meditative mind and a great tact as an observer, he is particularly attached to the study of the human heart, and he has obtained a noble profit from that science.”
The reference to the Douai-born poet and actress Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), whom Berthoud presumably first encountered when he was at school in Douai, is at least significant in identifying the esthetic and philosophical position Berthoud took up in affiliating himself to the Romantic Movement, and it might well have been her who recommended him to Émile Girardin and secured him the editorial work on which his long-term financial stability was built.
After her father, an armorial painter, was ruined by the Revolution, Marceline Desbordes had been taken by her mother to Guadeloupe, but when her mother died of yellow fever she returned to France, still in her teens, and began a career as an actress in Douai. After a passionate liaison with the writer Henri de Latouche in 1810-12—although its aftermath dragged on for thirty years, during which Latouche became one of the severest critics of the Romantic Movement—she married her second husband, the actor Prosper Lanchantin-Valmore, in 1817, and published the first of her six volumes of elegiac poetry in 1819 before retiring from the stage in 1823; her poetry became increasingly lachrymose as her life progressed, and all her children died one by one.
As well as adopting Berthoud as a protégé, Madame Desbordes-Valmore became a good friend of Balzac, who once named her as the model for Cousin Bette (1846), although that nomination, if true, is far from complimentary. She is, however, obviously the model for more than one of the tragic women featured in Berthoud’s Contes misanthropiques, several of which feature tormented actresses, sometimes with a predilection for her favorite role, Rosine, in Beaumarchais’ Barbier de Séville. Greatly admired by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Charles Baudelaire, she was the only female writer included in Paul Verlaine’s famous study of Les Poètes maudits (1884), and the noted Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves wrote the most exhaustive of several memoirs of her life, La Vie douloureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1910).
Along with Sophie Gay and the latter’s daughter Delphine, who married Émile Girardin, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore became one of the women who played key roles at the heart of the French Romantic Movement, somewhat underestimated by history, and the fact that Berthoud knew her well before going to Paris—after which he became a steadfast member of Delphine Girardin’s salon—evidently had a considerable influence on his attitude to his work, and to life. Although his principal case-study in his philosophical analysis of the works of the human heart was his own, hers must have been the second, and Balzac the third. Although he eventually followed Balzac’s policy in devoting himself almost exclusively to naturalistic fiction, his early fiction, almost all of which is historical or supernatural, undoubtedly owes more to his first and most dominant muse.
Although Berthoud soon abandoned, or at least greatly modified, the love of reckless fantasy that is conspicuous in many of his early works in order to concentrate on the disenchanted naturalism exhibited to the full in the Contes misanthropiques and almost all of his many novels, it is highly probably that that development of his work was impelled by market forces. The Devil never entirely disappeared from his work, and kept cropping up occasionally, rarely but insistently, even in the 1860s, when almost all of his work was aimed at a juvenile audience and very carefully sanitized. There are, however, good grounds for considering Asrael et Nephta to be the most personal, the most heartfelt and perhaps the most revealing of all his works, precisely because it is the purest of his fantasies, the one that looks back at the perverse and unsatisfactory operations of the human heart from the remotest hypothetical standpoint.
The novella is a significant early contribution to what was eventually to become a great Romantic and Symbolist tradition of “literary satanism,” in which writers deliberately adopted a stance removed from orthodox Christianity in order to reappraise the character of Satan and the role of the diabolical in human affairs. By no means all such works were sympathetic to Satan, although some were wholeheartedly so, including Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Litanies de Satan” (1857; tr. as “the Litanies of Satan”) and Anatole France’s “L’Humaine Tragédie” (1895; tr. as “The Human Tragedy”), the precursor to the subgenre’s second great prose masterpiece, La Révolte des anges (1923; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels). The subgenre’s first poetic masterpiece, Alphonse de Lamartine’s La chute d’un ange (1838) was broadly if diplomatically sympathetic, but its first prose masterpiece, Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (tr. as The Temptation of Saint Anthony), was far more ambivalent—and very uneasily so, having gone through two earlier versions before its eventual publication in 1874, and building upon several precursors among the author’s juvenilia, written in the late 1830s.
Only two subgeneric works of considerable significance were however, available as examples to Berthoud when he began to work within it: Jacques Cazotte’s pioneering novella Le diable amoureux (1772; tr. as The Devil in Love), and Alfred de Vigny’s long poem “Éloa, ou La Soeur des anges” (1824; tr. as “Eloa”). Both are obvious influences on Asrael et Nephta and its precursors; “Le Séminariste” is an intensely focused readaptation of the theme of the former and the “chatelaine of Hell” featured in one of the “ballads” interpolated in the novella appears to be Éloa, although she is not named.
As might be expected of a devout writer, Berthoud shows no sympathy at all for Satan, who remains an arc
hetype of vitriolic nastiness, but in his characterization of the rebel, like John Milton before him, Berthoud cannot help reflecting a certain admiration for his overweening pride and vaulting ambition. What is more remarkable about Berthoud’s Satan, however, is his representation of God, whom he regards as a peer essentially exchangeable with himself, who owes his status not to any intrinsic virtue but merely to his victory in the War in Heaven, which Satan unhesitatingly attributes to chance. And it has to be admitted that, setting piety aside, God really does come out of Berthoud’s clinical accounts of his actions and policies extremely badly: perverse, stingy and, most of all, uncaring; the small modicum of sympathy he does show to the many souls bound for Hell who really do not deserve to be there by any sane and reasonable standard of justice is not attributed to his own benignity so much as the intercession of the Holy Virgin, who can sometimes soften his harshness.
The other forceful indictment of God uttered in Asrael and Nephta is the one credited to Astaroth, who mocks the manner in which God conspicuously fails to reward his most ardent supporters. As with Satan’s own tirade, the reader is free to discount that as a diabolical argument, but the fact remains that the specific charges that Astaroth brings are correct. It is therefore, perhaps unsurprising that—apart from the Holy Virgin, upon whom no aspersions whatsoever are ever cast in Berthoud’s work—the true exemplars and sources of virtue in Berthoud’s satanic fantasies are those condemned to Hell or Purgatory who really ought not to be there: Béatrix in “L’me du Purgatoire,” Jeanne de Beaumetz in Asrael et Nephta, Asraelle in “Le Séminariste” and, of course, foremost and quintessentially, Asrael himself, the fallen angel with whom the reader is invited and expected to sympathize, in the main if not quite wholeheartedly.
Asraelle is perhaps only interesting because we are carefully not told how she came to be a demon in the first place—i.e., the reason for which she joined Satan’s revolt—and it is perhaps that absence, from a story too short to accommodate such a speculation, that led the author to follow it up with a much more considerable companion-piece in which her masculine equivalent is provided with both an elaborate back-story and an extraordinary quest to undertake. The form and impetus of that quest, in search of a minimal palliative that might make Hell slightly more bearable for him, via a human amour that is established by the fundamental parameters of the story as a weak and shabby reflection of the ideal love that can only exist in Paradise, is an original and fascinating literary invention.
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