by Unknown
One of the less well-known writers of the period is Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926). A prolific short-story writer, Geffroy made his name as a brilliant and progressive art critic, a friend of Claude Monet and supporter of the Impressionists generally. He was actually an admirer of Zola, and the story here, ‘The Statue’, is a nicely turned fable about Idealism and Naturalism, transferred to the realm of sculpture. The story draws in part on the Pygmalion myth, though in reverse; here, the beautiful, well-bred heroine, wife to a fashionable but conventional Salon sculptor, poses for her husband (indeed, she bans from his studio any other female model), and her vanity is flattered when she finds her likeness in the naiad in the fountain or the marble nymph in the park. But then her husband, suffering a severe period of self-doubt, retires from the fashionable art world and devotes himself to becoming a ‘realist’ with a vengeance—a kind of Courbet of sculpture—insisting that his wife continue as his sole model … with complicated results.
Jean Lorrain (1855–1906), who has been evoked already, is probably the most ostentatiously Decadent figure of the whole group—indeed, he did much to incarnate the type, cramming his figure into wasp-waisted evening-wear. He could appear as something like a dreadful caricature of Wilde (whom he met), with his eternal carnation in buttonhole, heavily made-up eyes and sensuous mouth set in a bulging head, and with a face resembling that of a ‘vicious hairdresser’, in Léon Daudet’s phrase, ‘his parting touched with patchouli and those globular, astonished and avid eyes’. With his ostentatious homosexuality, and his penchant for the low-life of the city, to which he introduced his friend Huysmans, he managed to transform all this experience into some of the most memorable and disturbing tales of the age. Lorrain was also a serious ether-addict (some elegant Parisian hostesses were rumoured to serve strawberry fruit salad soaked in the substance); the nightmare horrors and psychic disturbances caused by the drug recur in his work. He was fascinated by masks, and the freedom disguise allows; the mask permits the other side of the personality to emerge, with the risk that the mask will stick or—horribly, as in one of his stories—there is no face beneath the mask at all, just a gaping black hole. His controversial personality (he provoked several duels) and his rackety lifestyle in fact repelled the other, more exquisite candidate for the perfect Decadent—the celebrated Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who was the model behind both Huysmans’s des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Lorrain is a fluent, accomplished stylist, and in the stories here—as in his important novel, Monsieur de Phocas (1901)—he reveals his mastery at grasping the ambivalent and the equivocal in human nature, in particular its attraction to cruelty and sadism, frequently attributes of the criminal mind.
If ever there were an example of the ‘cerebral voluptuary’ it must be Remy de Gourmont (1855–1915). Gourmont was primarily an intellectual and (like Marcel Schwob) a man of enormous culture and ‘curious learning’. Indeed, a legend (perhaps too good to be true) has it that when he was cataloguing the section of the Bibliothèque Nationale known as ‘L’Enfer’ (‘The Hell’), which contained books placed on the index, often pornographic in nature, he contracted a kind of lupus that left him disfigured, and painfully self-conscious about his appearance and his attractiveness to women. His lifelong muse was the fiery and tyrannical Berthe de Courrière, though due to his disfigurement he spent much of his life cloistered in his study in the rue des Saint Pères. He was a distinguished critic—his notions concerning the dissociation of ideas and of impersonality in the artist were to influence Pound and Eliot. Pound even translated Gourmont’s curious treatise The Physiology of Love, a study of the sexual mores of animals and insects. He brought this analysis to bear in his stories, which are often erotically charged and play once again on the ambivalence of sexual desire—deploying a knowing, unillusioned attitude common, as we have seen, among the Decadent writers. His fables included here, taken from Histoires magiques (1894)—‘The Faun’, ‘Don Juan’s Secret’, and ‘Danaette’—retell myths and legends, and are injected with a dose of his own fairly sulphurous fantasy. From Sixtine, his novel of the ‘cerebral life’ (1890), on, Gourmont’s work pits Schopenhauerian idealism (and atheism) against Christian respectability. His materialist leanings enable him to write Le Latin mystique (1892), a study of the neo-Latin poetry of the early Church, entirely for what he deemed its aesthetic qualities. For Gourmont, the artist was an aristocrat of the spirit. He himself was descended from the nobility, and he too, like his friends Villiers and Huysmans, despised the blurring of difference and distinction brought about by an age of universal suffrage. His unrequited passion for the lesbian writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, whom he called his ‘Amazone’, opened up new angles on his otherwise fairly conventional, though subtly handled and highly self-conscious, brand of male fantasy. The fourth story here, the Gothic fable ‘On the Threshold’, is very different, and cuts deeper, recounting a life blighted—two lives, in fact—by infernal pride and a misapplied philosophy of inaction. The Marquis de la Hogue, who owns the crumbling Chateau de la Fourche, is yet another version of the frigid dandy, but this time he is tortured by remorse for his own aloofness.
A different kind of failure, a remorse that comes too late, is at the heart of ‘The Time’ by Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), a story about a coddled, pernickety, middle-aged batchelor, Van Hulst, who develops a passion for collecting timepieces from the antique-dealers of Bruges. The passion for collecting, cast as a symptom or as a form of fetishism, fascinated Maupassant, as we have seen, and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes is nothing if not a querulous and exigent collector of fine books and objets d’art. It is one obvious refuge from mass commodification and vulgarity. Rodenbach was Belgian, and a friend of Maeterlinck. He is best known for the famous portrait of the city he loved, Bruges-la-Morte (1892). But he also lived in Paris, and there his wide network of friends included Mendès, Mirbeau, Villiers, the Goncourts, and Mallarmé, who all appreciated his refined manner and his deep, melancholy sensibility. Here, Rodenbach employs great finesse in embroidering into his story the allegorical or even parabolic figures that start to shine through more clearly as it progresses; there is nothing heavy-handed about the way he lays his snare.
The dazzling but cruelly curtailed career of Jules Laforgue (1860–87) is well known, largely thanks to Eliot and Pound, the great Modernist poets, who quickly fastened upon this extraordinary ironic intelligence. Eliot especially fell under his spell, having discovered the poet in Arthur Symons’s seminal little book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). Symons described Laforgue’s poetry and prose as an ‘art of the nerves’;18 it is also an art of ascetic, almost inhuman self-consciousness—this well-mannered, polished young man, who looked rather like a benign monk, was in fact crippled by shyness. The invention of the ‘Pierrot’ persona in his Complaintes (1885) was an act of genius that allowed him to escape the sub-Baudelairean gloom of his early poetry. As a penurious young man in Paris, Laforgue would work in the unheated ‘extension’ of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and would then retire to his bedsit, eat a boiled egg, and read Schopenhauer by candlelight. Suddenly propelled into the implausible position of French Reader to the Empress Augusta of Germany, in her gloomy palace in Berlin, it was by developing this ironical persona, and by living his life as it were in front of a mirror—as Baudelaire said a true dandy must—that he survived. While there, he fell in love with an English governess with a name out of Poe—Leah Lee—and lived barely long enough to marry her and return to France, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven. Laforgue was primarily a poet, but his late prose pieces, Les Moralités légendaires (1887), show the same ironic style, beautifully modulated into the rhythms of prose. His ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ is the one story here with a ‘mythological’ setting; but Andromeda’s epic boredom in her island exile, and her growing sexual awareness, the Monster’s benign philosophical presence (he spends his days polishing stones, as Spinoza polished lenses), and Perseus’s fatuous vanity,
are all thoroughly modern creations. In his Moralités, the omnipresence of Laforgue’s powerful, underlying pessimism, disguised by humour and a style in which Decadent neologism and sophistication reaches its apogee, announces the absurdist literature of the twentieth century.
Seven years his junior, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was another highly strung individual whose short life was dogged by illness. He is also one of the most accomplished writers of the whole period. Born into a literary family (his father ran a local newspaper and his uncle was head of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris), Schwob was plunged early into adventure-and travel-fiction, and he wrote his first published critical notice (in his father’s journal) at the age of eleven. He read Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a discovery that turned into a lifelong passion for the Scottish writer, whose reputation he championed in France. So great, indeed, was Schwob’s admiration that towards the end of his life, when he was already ailing, he followed in his master’s footsteps and journeyed to Samoa. Schwob had a mastery of English (like Paul Valéry, he visited George Meredith), and knew long passages of Shakespeare by heart. His second great passion was for François Villon, whom he researched in detail. A man of wide learning and tireless curiosity, Schwob was one of the great storytellers of the time, in construction and in range of setting—his tales range from antiquity to the brutish Middle Ages to the brothels and ‘retirement homes’ of contemporary Paris. He can suggest the spirit of time and place with elegance and concision—a master of the telling detail. This talent finds expression in perhaps his greatest single work, the Vies imaginaires (1896). In this text he casts his forensic, but voluntarily unhistorical eye upon a heterogeneous collection of lives, ranging from classical figures like Empedocles, Erostratus, and Lucretius, all the way through to (among others) the Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur, by way of Nicolas Loyseleur (a searing portrait of Joan of Arc’s murderous judge) and the painter of the quattrocento Paolo Uccello. Declaring in his preface that ‘art, opposed to general ideas, describes only the individual, desires only the unique’,19 in these brief texts he concentrates his acids on the single, exceptional trait—taking his cue here from Giorgio Vasari and his Lives of the Artists (1550). Vasari describes, for example, Pontormo as being reclusive, ‘solitary and melancholy’, and Andrea del Sarto as exhibiting a certain ‘timidity of spirit’. Similarly, Schwob’s ‘Lucretius’, included here, struggles (and fails) to reconcile a hereditary gloom and contemptus mundi with the extremes of erotic attraction. His ‘Paolo Uccello’, picking up on Vasari’s account of a painter obsessed with the science of perspective, neglects human needs and comforts altogether. The stories with contemporary settings show different powers: ‘The Brothel’ is a disturbing description of a silent, sealed house, while ‘The Sans-Gueule’ (surely written with the Franco-Prussian War in mind, but frighteningly prophetic of the Great War lying ahead), and ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ are incisive studies in a type of sadism, conscious or otherwise, with a veneer of black comedy, that little can match for sheer cruelty, before or since.
The anthology concludes with a comic, and frankly sulphurous, story by Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925), the youngest of the group. ‘A Case Without Precedent’ is a mixture of men’s talk and legal jargon, between Monsieur Barbeville, retired judge, bibliophile, and former ladies’ man, and his doctor. Louÿs was an erudite and civilized young man, who began his career writing Parnassian poetry in the circle of Lecomte de Lisle and José-Maria Hérédia; in 1891 he founded the review, La Conque, in which he published Verlaine and Mallarmé and some early work by Paul Valéry, who, with André Gide, became a close friend. For better or worse, he made his name with erotic texts set in antiquity, Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894) and Aphrodite (1896). Louÿs was, in fact, what the French like to call an érotomane—he was sexually obsessed—and after his death a mass of pornographic writings (and drawings) were discovered among his papers, including intimate journals and lists recounting in minute detail his numerous and complicated liaisons. The most celebrated of these was with Hérédia’s beautiful daughter Marie, who was actually snatched from under Louÿs’s nose, so to speak, by a more senior writer, the distinguished symboliste Henri de Régnier, who married her. Marie, however, then claimed Louÿs as her lover, and the three of them went on holiday together to Amsterdam. Louÿs, who was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, snapped the married couple; but there existed also a ‘secret’ dossier of pictures showing Marie in various erotic poses, taken in the writer’s batchelor flat in Paris where they would meet.20
The dashing Louÿs was in many ways, given his interests and his style, the Ideal Decadent. His star declined in later life, because the literary age to which he belonged, that of the Symbolists and the Decadents, came to an abrupt end, though it had a last, glorious flowering in the A la recherche du temps perdu of Proust, a work that originates in the same era but which transcends it. Proust’s range is such that he comprehends—notably in the figure of the Baron de Charlus—both the magnificence and the vulnerability of the flawed dandy, with his recherché tastes. These are indeed those of Des Esseintes, but Proust’s psychological penetration goes far beyond Huysmans. As the age of Decadence came to an end, Proust and Gide between them, in the radical innovations of their fiction, were already forging a style for the new century.
NOTE ON THE SELECTION
IN a period teeming with short-story writers, working to supply the insatiable demand for copy of a whole array of newspapers and literary journals, anxious to amuse, divert, terrify, or titillate their readers, the anthologist of the fin de siècle is spoiled for choice. By the same token, however, the writers who supplied the copy are uneven in quality—even the best ones could turn out mediocre work—and today’s reader has every right to demand ‘quality control’ in a selection of this kind. It is to this end that I have, for example, avoided the stories set in exotic or classical settings. The Cleopatras in their baths of mare’s milk, the implacable Salomés, the sexually voracious Aphrodites—often associated with the painting of Gustave Moreau—I have chosen to avoid. They have become the stuff of cliché, and too much of the writing is over-orchestrated, when it isn’t frankly pornographic. I have made an exception for Laforgue, but his ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ is altogether superior and in a different tonal and stylistic register from the others. Instead, I have opted deliberately for the tales of recognizably ‘modern life’, because they are, to my mind, not only better but more likely to engage the reader of today, thoroughly versed in types of urban angst. Several of the names will be familiar—no anthology of this kind can do without Villiers or Maupassant, Mirbeau or Lorrain—but I have introduced some writers perhaps less familiar to the anglophone reader, such as Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, or Gustave Geffroy—for the sheer quality of their work. Surprise, mordant irony, and incisive economy of means are the qualities I have particularly sought out.
There are various ways of arranging an anthology of this kind: thematically, chronologically, or alphabetically. The chronological presentation by date of birth that has been chosen is advantageous in that the reader becomes more readily familiar with the style of a particular author when the stories are grouped together. Shifts of tone and emphasis become noticeable—there is a perceptible move from the stately, descriptive sentences of Barbey d’Aurevilly, to the acrid notations of Bloy or Mirbeau, to the cerebral dissociation of ideas in the fierce little tales of Remy de Gourmont. By starting with Barbey d’Aurevilly, who was a contemporary of Balzac and Hugo, and ending with Pierre Louÿs, a contemporary of Valéry and Gide, I have attempted to cover the whole of the period that might reasonably be characterized as ‘Decadent’.
The vast majority of these stories were first published in newspapers and little magazines of all kinds; the authors would then collect them into individual volumes, though sometimes this would be done posthumously. The original source for each story is to be found in the Explanatory Notes at the back of the book. In our own time, several excellent and wide-ranging anthologies
of the period have appeared in French, to which I am indebted; details are to be found in the Select Bibliography.