"So be it Madame!" he murmured. "But the flagrancy of the crime cannot be avowed by your husband, for Madame Silvert is innocent, I swear to you!"
And he placed his hand over the rosette of the Legion of Honour.
"I believe you, Monsieur!"
She gave an adversary's salutation and withdrew, her arm around Jacques' waist. Crossing the threshold of the smoking-room she turned:
"To the death!" she hissed flatly into Raittolbe's ear as he showed her out.
Later, commenting on this strange episode, the valet said:
"Madame Silvert, whom I would have sworn was as blonde as a buttercup when she came in, was as dark as soot when she left ... Either way, a very pretty woman!"
It was Raoule herself who woke Jacques at dawn the next morning; she gave him the addresses of his two seconds.
"Go," she said very gently, "and do not fear. You will be fighting in the open air and not in a fencing-room!"
Jacques rubbed his eyes like one no longer aware of his actions; he had slept fully dressed on his satin bed:
"Raoule," he murmured pettishly, "it's your fault, and anyway I was only joking, nothing more!"
"And I," she said with an adorable smile, "still love you!"
They kissed.
"You will go and do your duty as an outraged husband, you will receive a little scratch, the only vengeance I require from you. Your adversary has been advised of this: he is to respect your person!"
"Ali Raoule, what if he were to disobey you?" Jacques whispered anxiously.
"He will obey me!"
Raoule's tone of voice left no room for an answer.
But Jacques, through the mists of an imagination stupefied by vice, still saw before him the threatening figure of Raittolbe, and he could not understand why she, the beloved, forgave him so weakly.
He found the brougham already harnessed by the main steps, took his place inside mechanically, and drove off to the addresses given him.
Martin Durand did not demur at serving as his second in an affair of which he knew nothing. But cousin Rene, suspecting some involvement by Raoule, found it less than amusing to uphold the honour of Jacques Silvert. He yielded only when he heard it was but a fencing quarrel that was at stake.
Then, since Jacques had married a Venerande and thereby entered their nobility, out of fellowship the cousin joined Martin Durand.
The two seconds, at a loss to know what to believe, exchanged few words. As for Jacques Silvert, he sank into the most comfortable corner of his carriage and fell asleep.
"I'll be hanged!" said Rene, with a mocking gesture towards Raoule's husband.
"Good lord," answered Martin Durand, "this is swordplay for the gallery. Raittolbe probably wants to show him some new thrust or other. Such a complacent husband!"
Rene waved a haughty hand, cutting short the architect's ill-judged speech.
After an hour and a quarter of his thoroughbred's highstepping trot, Jacques was roused by his seconds and leapt to the ground at the edge of the wood. It took them a few moments to find their adversary. Everything about this duel was odd, and the place of rendezvous was no more precise than its real motive.
Finally Raittolbe appeared, bringing with him two former fellow-officers. Jacques knew that an adversary was to be greeted and he greeted him.
"Very dashing, very very dashing!" averred Rene.
Then the seconds came up to him, and Jacques, to affect the looks of a real man, lit a cigarette offered by Martin Durand.
It was March, the weather was grey but very mild. It had rained the night before and the nascent buds on the trees sparkled with a thousand brilliant droplets. When he looked up Jacques could not stop himself from smiling the vague smile that was all the wit his soft substance could muster. Why was he smiling? God, he did not know; but those drops of water had struck him like limpid eyes lowered upon his destiny, and he felt the joy of it in his heart.
When he looked at the countryside Raoule was on his arm, and the body of that fearsome creature, who was master of his, blocked all before him.
And he loved that woman cruelly; it was true that he had cruelly offended her over this man who had so badly hurt his neck ...
His gaze returned to the earth. Here and there violets poked through the grass. Then, just as the drops of water had sown spangles in the murk of his mind, so the dark little eyes of the flowers half-hidden by the blades of grass like melancholy lashes, made it still murkier.
He looked at the dull muddy earth and shivered at the thought of one day lying down there never to rise again.
Yes indeed, he had offended that woman; but why had this man hurt his neck so badly ...?
And none of it was his fault! Prostitution is a sickness! They had all had it in his family: his mother, his sister; could he have fought against his own blood ...?
So much had he been feminised in the deepest recesses of his being that depravity had him in its grip like lockjaw! Besides, what he had dared to wish for was more natural than what she had taught him!
And he shook his red hair in the wind while thinking of these things! They were going to cross swords for a little while, some warming-up moves. "Come gentlemen!"
They would lunge and parry until he received the promised scratch, then he would hurry back to have her drink with a kiss the purple pearl no bigger than a pearldrop of rain ...
Yet, this man had hurt his neck badly ... The choice of arms was Raittolbe's. He chose. When Jacques took up his sword he was surprised to find it heavy. The ones he was used to were very light. The sacramental "Come gentlemen!" was pronounced.
Jacques handled his weapon as clumsily as ever. The baron did not wish to look directly at Jacques, but the young man's apparent calm was so great, although wordless, that Raittolbe felt a chill invade his soul.
Make haste, he thought to himself, let us rid society of an unspeakable being!
At that moment dawn rent the grey skies. A beam of light played over the two duellers. It shone on Jacques and, as his shirt fell open at the hollow of his chest, there could be seen skin as fine as the skin of a child, golden curls that were but a blur on his flesh.
Raittolbe made a feinte. Jacques parried, but somewhat shakily. He too wanted it to be over with ... What if the baron were to miscalculate? His thrust was fearsome, he had learned to his cost. Worst of all was this sacramental silence that weighed over him! At least Raoule amused him with her biting witticisms when she gave him lessons and he wanted to cut a fine figure ...
Raittolbe hesitated for a moment or two. He was racked by a terrible anguish and an icy sweat flooded over him.
This Jacques, so rosy, seemed joyful! Was he then not a faint heart, this accursed creature, did he not understand, for he did not defend himself ...? Did the thrusts of the sword mean no more to him than the lashes of the whip on his godlike young limbs?
Then, wishing no longer to know what would come of it, with a swift cut and a slight realignment of his head he lunged forward, his blade reaching Jacques in the very midst of those russet curls that the daybreak made to shine like gilt. It seemed to him that his sword unaided entered the flesh of a newborn. Jacques did not cry out, falling in his misfortune upon the tufts of grass where the little dark eyes of the violets regarded him. But Raittolbe did cry out; he gave a piercing cry that shook the seconds.
"I am despicable!" he said in the voice of a father who has inadvertently murdered his son. "I have killed him! I have killed him!"
He threw himself upon the outstretched body.
"Jacques!" he implored, "Look at me! Speak to me! Jacques, why did you wish this? Did you not know that you were doomed? Oh it is a dreadful thing, I cannot have killed him, I who love him! Tell me sir, it is not true? I am dreaming ...?"
Dismayed by his unexpected grief, the seconds tried to calm him while they lifted Jacques.
"For a duel that was first blood the outcome is regrettable," mumbled one of the two officers.
"Yes! A disastrous b
usiness," murmured Martin Durand.
"And no doctor," added Rene, dreadfully vexed by the conclusion of the episode.
"I am used to these things, I'll dress his wound; fetch me some water, quickly," said the baron's other second.
While water was being fetched Raittolbe had pressed his lips against the wound and was trying to stimulate the scant flow of blood.
Jacques' brow was dampened with a handkerchief. He half-opened his eyes.
"Are you alive?" said the baron. "Oh my child, will you forgive me?" He went on in a broken voice, "You did not know how to fight, you offered yourself to death."
He was interrupted by one of the officers, who thought his friend was going too far. "We can testify that Monsieur de Raittolbe conducted himself impeccably."
"You must be in a lot of pain, are you not?" the baron persisted, ignoring them, "you who trembled at the slightest ill. Alas! You have so little man in you! I must have been mad to accept this encounter. Poor Jacques, answer me, I entreat you!"
Silvert's eyelids sprang wide open; his lovely mouth, its warm hue faded, stretched in a bitter smile.
"No Monsieur," he stammered in a voice that was now less than a breath, "I do not hold it against you ... It is my sister ... who is the cause of everything ... my sister ...! I loved Raoule well ... Oh! I am cold!"
Raittolbe made to suck the wound again for the blood still was not flowing.
Then Jacques pushed him away, saying in an even smaller voice:
"No! Leave me, your moustache would tickle ..."
His body shuddered as it fell back. Jacques was dead.
"Did you not observe," said one of the baron's seconds, when the carriage had driven off bearing the corpse, "did you not observe that Raittolbe for all his despair forgot to give him his hand?"
"Yes, and for that matter this duel could not have been more unseemly ... I feel for our friend."
On the evening of that mournful day Madame Silvert sat hunched on the bed of the temple of Love and, armed with scarlet tweezers, a velvet covered cuticle hammer and solid silver scissors, she was engaged in a painstaking task ... Now and then she would wipe her sharpened fingernails with a lace handkerchief.
Baron de Raittolbe has returned to arms in Africa. He goes on every dangerous mission. Was it not predicted that he would die by gunfire?
In the left wing of the Venerande mansion, whose windows are always shuttered, there is a walled-up room.
This room is all blue as a cloudless sky. On the shellshaped couch guarded by a marble Eros, there lies a wax mannequin covered in a skin of transparent rubber. His red hair, his blond lashes, the golden down upon his chest are natural; the teeth that adorn his mouth, the nails of his hands and feet have been torn from a corpse. His enamel eyes have an adorable look in them.
The walled room has a hidden door in the draperies of a dressing room.
At night, a woman dressed in mourning, or sometimes a young man in a suit of black clothes, open this door.
They come and kneel by the bed, and after they have gazed for a while upon the marvellous forms of the wax statue, they enfold it and kiss it upon the lips. A spring set inside the lower body is connected to the mouth and makes it move.
This mannequin, an anatomical masterpiece, was manufactured by a German.
The modern woman approaches the Decadent novel with some trepidation and soon discovers that her fears are not without foundation. The pages are filled with female blood. Rachilde especially is fascinated with the subject. Her short story `The Blood Drinker' concerns the moon sucking the life-force of a young girl - `the moon snickers, the moon, flower of fire, who lives off the blood of women.' In `Grape-Gatherers of Sodom' the blood of a murdered girl is mixed with wine and produces a poisonous cocktail which drives men mad, while the powerful, langourous, starving animal in `The Panther' sinks her teeth into the neck of the child who has come to save her.
Death and sex, the two abiding passions of the Decadents, in this way, combined in the occurrence of female vampirism. Blood is passed from person to person, death looks ominously near, sex is to blame. The language of the late Nineteenth Century is unnaturally similar to that of the late Twentieth Century. Syphilis was most important in producing the alienated, sated, world-weary, Decadent man, just as it was responsible for shaping the morbidity of his concept of sex.
The fin-de-siecle Nineteenth Century woman is weighed down by this heavy sense of guilt and sexual negativity, a position now filled by the homosexual man in the Twentieth Century. Parallels are startlingly obvious. Through the woman's sexuality comes death. Salome in Huysmans' A Rebours is `a true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament'. Her beauty is terrifying and inescapable, to indulge in the pleasures she offers invites death and suffering. Rachilde's girl `creature' in the `Grape-Gatherers' entwines herself around the boy in a `serpentine fashion' certain to cause his doom.
Decadent literature shows all the signs of a society trying desperately to come to terms with a life-threatening sexual disease. The descent into alienation and misogyny is a sign of fear which mirrors our own fin-de-siecle crisis. The crisis is also marked by fundamental changes in society. The modern woman reader emerges again to examine the text.
Raoule de Venerande is one of the most powerful heroines in fiction. The strength of her sexuality is undeniable. She is the supreme dominant mistress and yet master at the same time. She exalts in her position of power and luxuriates in all the desires of her perversity. She is every submissive man's ultimate fantasy - Jacques twisted and turned, losing blood through the gashes which Raoule reopened with refined sadistic pleasure'. Jacques addresses her as `dear master of my body' and like Cathy in Wuthering Heights she brandishes a whip.
Raoule has all the signs of becoming a cult heroine. Although there is no other character like her in Decadent fiction (obviously because there are no other female writers) there are numerous examples of writers exploring female sexuality in a similarly exhibitionist fashion. In response to the advent of psychotherapy and most importantly, to the rise of the Women's Movement, society had discovered that women did have sexual impulses and the Decadents were intent on exploring them in all their lurid detail. One of the most extraordinary examples is a short story by Remy de Gourmont called `Pehor' in which a young girl discovers masturbation, menstruation, sex and finally death.
Neither Raoule nor Douceline in `Pehor' is forced into marriage or motherhood. These women have their own sexuality which may be destructive and deadly, but is acknowledged. Similarly they are active, not passive victims. The strength of their portrayal and the acknowledgement of their independent sexuality is as important today. The woman's position is again under threat in the light of the AIDS crisis, just as it was at the end of the last century. `Syphilis became an obsessive public crisis at the precise moment when arguments over the future of marriage, discussions of the New Woman, and decadent homosexual culture were at their peak'.' Whilst women were struggling for emancipation and questioning their traditional roles in society, syphilis was used as an excuse to control and condition them. Similarly it is monogamy, celibacy and above all, the state of marriage which are being propounded as the solution to the AIDS problem.
Decadent philosophy was totally opposed to a Rousseauian worship of nature and instead espoused the `cult of artificiality'. This again removed women from `natural' motherhood and thoughtless marriage. Indeed it helped dispel idealized images of romantic love which even today may lead to unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The Decadent woman is no quietly suffering Mary, instead she is a Mary Magdalene, a woman who, in Remy de Gourmont's `The Faun' becomes annoyed with her husband and goes to her room to `give herself up to a dream of sumptuous fornication.'
Decadent writers recognised the subversive power of sexuality. Monsieur Venus was considered indecent and banned when first published in 1884. In recent years Arrow publishers were faced with similar action when they published the works of de Sade. Sex has the potential
to undermine the structure of society and is still seen as threatening hundreds of years after an idea has gone into print. Although therefore the sexual activity depicted and suggested by the Decadents at the end of the last century may now seem mild, their very concentration and emphasis on sex is still a threat to the conventions of society and may still offend, just as the very name of de Sade causes horror - `In general sexually repressed people cannot tolerate any public and overt expression of sexuality'.2
It is part of the Decadent culture to embrace the innate perversity of human nature. Lesbianism, for example, is acknowledged and explored while it is not even recognised in British law. If this is subversive so much the better.
1. Sexual Anarchy Elaine Showalter - Virago (1991)
2. The Erotic Arts Peter Webb - Secker & Warburg (1983)
French language literature in translation is an important part of Dedalus' list, with French being the language par excellence of literary fantasy.
French books from Dedalus include:
Seraphita - Balzac £6.99
The Quest of the Absolute - Balzac £6.99
The Devil in Love -Jacques Cazotte k5.99
Les Diaboliques - Barbey D'Aurevilly k6.99
The Books of Nights - Sylvie Germain 8.99
Angels of Perversity - Remy de Gourmont £6.99
La-Bas - J. K. Huysmans £7.99
En Route -J. K. Huysmans £6.99
The Cathedral -j. K. Huysmans 6.99
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux £6.99
The Diary of a Chambermaid - Octave Mirbeau ,E7.99
Torture Garden - Octave Mirbeau £7.99
Le Calvaire - Octave Mirbeau £7.99
Smarra & Trilby - Charles Nodier 5.99
Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript -Jan Potocki £6.99
Monsieur Venus - Rachilde £6.99
The Mysteries of Paris - Eugene Sue £6.99
The Wandering Jew - Eugene Sue £9.99
Micromegas - Voltaire £5.99
forthcoming titles include:
The Dedalus Book of French Fantasy - ed Christine Donougher
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 14