French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  The Decadent writers revelled in recherché description and epithet, and in mixing high literary style with snatches of demotic slang, or argot. One of them, Marcel Schwob, actually compiled a dictionary of recondite argot. Jules Laforgue, on the other hand, pushes preciosity of style to the limit, while never quite (at least in the story here) forging neologisms. They are elegant stylists, especially Barbey or Villiers, whose long, rhythmic sentences contain carefully balanced sub-clauses. The syntax of prose fiction demands a particular kind of fidelity in a way that other genres do not—the freedoms available to the translator are not the same in all mediums. In translating these stories, I have had frequent recourse to the indispensable Littré dictionary, dated 1872, which is the one most appropriate to this period, and which the writers themselves would have known. While trying to keep a sprightly pace, I have retained as far as possible vocabulary and usage that would seem appropriate in stories from the same period in English. Nothing dates faster than inappropriate modernization in this kind of prose fiction.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Major Anthologies of the Period

  Prince, Nathalie (ed.), Petit Musée des Horreurs: nouvelles fantastiques, cruelles et macabres (Paris: Bouquins/Robert Laffont, 2008). A full and informative anthology of fin-de-siècle short stories, including illuminating extracts from the newspapers of the time recounting faits divers and curiosités of different kinds.

  Bancquart, Marie-Claire (ed.), Écrivains fin-de-siècle (Paris: Gallimard/folio, 2010).

  Ducrey, Guy (ed.), Romans fin-de-siècle, 1890–1900 (Paris: Laffont 1999).

  Anthologies in English Translation

  Hustvedt, Asti (ed.), The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from fin-de-siècle France (New York: Zone Books, 1998). An important anthology with specialist essays by Charles Bernheimer, Peter Brooks, Philippe Lejeune, Barbara Spackman, and others.

  Hale, Terry (ed.), Dedalus Book of French Horror: The Nineteenth Century, trans. Liz Hale (London: Dedalus, 1998).

  Stableford, Brian (ed.), Moral Ruins: The Dedalus Book of Decadence (London: Dedalus, 2001). A selection of poetry and prose fiction.

  Gourmont, Remy de (ed.), The Book of Masks, trans. Andrew Mangavite, Iain White, Stanley Chapman, and others, Atlas Arkhive 2 (London: Atlas Press, 1995). Gourmont’s original essays are supplemented by extracts from the writers he analyses.

  Luckhurst, Roger (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2005). Contains some French material (Jean Lorrain).

  Classic Criticism of the Period

  Huret, Jules, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1891; José Corti, 1999).

  Kahn, Gustave, Symbolistes et décadents (Paris: Vanier, 1901; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977).

  Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Praz’s study (originally published in Italian in 1930) remains unsurpassed in its scope, an analysis of Romanticism (and its continuation in Decadence) from the point of view of the erotic sensibility.

  Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Introduction by Richard Ellmann (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958). Symons’s classic study, first published in 1899.

  General Cultural and Literary Criticism

  Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995).

  ——The Complete Verse, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2012).

  Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 2002).

  Bonnefoy, Yves, Sous le signe de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

  Carter, A. E., The Idea of Decadence in French Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968).

  Citti, Pierre, Contre la Décadence. Histoire de l’imagination française dans le roman 1890–1914 (Paris: PUF, 1987).

  Colin, René-Pierre, Schopenhauer: un mythe naturaliste (Paris: PUL, 1979).

  Constable, Liz (ed.), with D. Denisoff and M. Potolsky, Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

  Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in fin-de-siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  Dowling, Linda, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

  Freud, Sigmund (with Josef Breuer), Studies in Hysteria (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

  Gourmont, Remy de, La Culture des idées (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions 10/18 fins de siècle, 1983).

  Hansen, Eric, Disaffection and Decadence: A Crisis in French Intellectual Thought, 1848–1898 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

  Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  Henry, Anne (ed.), Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989).

  Jacquette, Dale (ed.), Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  Juin, Herbert, Écrivains de l’avant-siècle (Paris: Seghers, 1972).

  Jullian, Philippe, Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1974).

  Ledger, Sally, and Luckhurst, Roger (eds.), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Marquèze-Pouey, Louis, Le Mouvement décadent en France (Paris: PUF, 1986).

  Michelet Jacquod, Valérie, Le Roman symboliste: un art de l’extrême conscience (Paris: Droz, 2008).

  Nordau, Max, Degeneration (1892; Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

  Pykett, Lynn (ed.), Reading fin de siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996).

  Pierrot, Jean, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

  Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, 1996).

  A Rebours and J.-K. Huysmans

  Huysmans, J.-K., A Rebours, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: Gallimard/folio, 1983).

  ——Against Nature, ed. Nicholas White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009).

  ——Against Nature, ed. Patrick McGuinness, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

  Baldick, Robert, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, foreword by Brendan King (London: Dedalus, 2006).

  Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

  Mallarmé, Stéphane, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore.

  Maupassant, Guy de, Bel-Ami, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Robert Lethbridge.

  ——A Day in the Country and Other Stories, trans. David Coward.

  ——A Life, trans. Roger Pearson.

  ——Pierre et Jean, trans. Julie Mead, ed. Robert Lethbridge.

  Rimbaud, Arthur, Collected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell.

  CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR EVENTS AND LITERARY PUBLICATIONS OF THE FRENCH FIN DE SIÈCLE

  1870 Franco-Prussian War; defeat of the French at Sedan. The Emperor, Napoleon III, captured. End of the Second Empire, proclamation of the Third Republic, under Thiers and the Republicans.

  Lautréamont, Poems

  Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, La Révolte

  Wagner, Die Walküre

  1871 Defeat of France by the Prussians; armistice with Germany. Thiers becomes President of the Republic. Insurrection in Paris, start of the 73 days of the Commune. Violence on both sides, burning of the Tuileries Palace and destruction of the Vendôme Column. The insurrection is put down with terrible severity and bloody reprisal by the Republican government. Treaty of Frankfurt signed with Germany; France cedes Alsace-Lorraine and has to pay crippling war debt to Germany.

  Mendès, Soixante-treize journés de la commune

  Rimbaud, Le
ttre du voyant; Le Bateau ivre

  Zola, first novel in his Rougon-Macquart cycle, subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire

  1872 Introduction of compulsory military service and creation of a territorial army.

  Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

  Zola, La Curée

  Monet, Impression: le lever du soleil

  1873 Death of former Emperor Napoleon III at Chislehurst, in Kent. Resignation of Thiers, and accession of Maréchal MacMahon as President of France. Institution of the septennat, limiting the mandate of the Presidency to seven years. James Clark Maxwell, Theory of electromagnetism. Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire.

  Corbière, Les Amours jaunes

  Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer

  Verlaine, Art poétique

  Pater, The Renaissance

  Manet, Gare Saint-Lazare

  1874 Laws regulating public morality, including the re-establishment of censorship. French commerce expands in Indochina, Tonkin becomes a French protectorate. First Impressionist Exhibition opens in the photographer Nadar’s studio.

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

  Ribot, La Philosophie de Schopenhauer

  Verlaine, Romances sans paroles

  1875 The Constitution voted, which definitively establishes France as a republic. First explorations in Equatorial Africa, led by Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, later Commissioner-General for the French Congo. Barbey’s Les Diaboliques formally withdrawn from public sale, with the agreement of the writer. Zola criticizes Barbey for this, and earns the latter’s undying hostility.

  Zola, The Sin of Father Mouret

  Moreau, Fleur mystique

  1876 Members of the two legislative bodies, elected in accordance with the 1875 Constitution (Chambres des députés and Sénat), take their seats. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. Villiers wins second prize in the Michaëlis competition for drama.

  Huysmans, Marthe

  Mallarmé, L’Après-midi d’un faune

  Richepin, La Chanson des gueux; Les Morts bizarres

  Wagner, Siegfried

  Gustave Moreau, exhibits in the Salon, L’Apparition and Salomé dansant devant Hérode

  Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, second series

  Degas, L’absinthe

  Rops, Le buveur d’absinthe

  1877 Chamber of Deputies dissolved. Death of Thiers. Republican victory in legislative elections. Edward Muybridge creates the first moving pictures. Edison invents the cylinder phonograph. Ludwig Boltzmann: statistical definition of entropy. So-called ‘Baptism’ of the Naturalist school, around a restaurant table: Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola, with their young disciples Alexis, Céard, Hennique, Huysmans, and Mirbeau.

  Flaubert, Trois Contes

  Zola, L’Assommoir

  Huysmans, ‘Émile Zola et L’Assommoir’

  1878 Universal Exhibition in the Trocadéro; Congress of Berlin (break-up of Turkey, Austria to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus ceded to the English). Charcot starts clinical experiments with hypnosis at the Salpêtrière.

  Duret, Les Peintres impressionistes

  Zola, Une page d’amour

  1879 MacMahon resigns as President; succeeded by Jules Grévy. Gambetta elected President of the Chambre des députés. La Marseillaise becomes the national anthem again. Reprint of Barbey’s Un prêtre marié forbidden by the archiepiscopate of Paris.

  Maupassant publishes an article, ‘Gustave Flaubert’, in La République des lettres.

  Huysmans, Les Soeurs Vatard

  Redon, Dans le rêve, lithographs

  Rops illustrates Barbey’s Les Diaboliques

  1880 Anticlerical decrees order dispersion of the Society of Jesus and other congregations not recognized by the state. Final amnesty granted to participants in the Commune. Official institution of Bastille Day (14 July) as the fête nationale, and adoption of the tricolore. Maupassant is threatened with a court action for offence to public morals, for his poem Une fille; in the end no action is taken. Mallarmé institutes his famous salon, les Mardis, in the rue de Rome.

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Goethe et Diderot

  Maupassant, Boule de suif, gathered in the volume Les Soirées de Médan

  Huysmans, Croquis parisiens

  Mendès, Les Mères ennemis

  Rachilde, Monsieur de la nouveauté

  Villiers, Le Nouveau-Monde

  1881 Jules Ferry presides over the institution of free, secular, and compulsory primary education for all. Law ensuring freedom of the press. Large parts of Tunisia occupied, and France imposes a protectorate upon Tunis. Pasteur discovers anthrax vaccine.

  Maupassant, La Maison Tellier

  Huysmans, En ménage

  Verlaine, Sagesse

  Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (published posthumously)

  Cézanne, Autoportrait

  1882 Fall of Gambetta. The Loi Jules Ferry for primary education becomes law. The new Hôtel de Ville inaugurated, replacing the one destroyed by the Commune in 1871. Charcot begins studying cases of fetishism. Opening of the Grévin Wax Museum.

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Une histoire sans nom

  Maupassant, Mademoiselle Fifi

  Mendès, Monstres parisiens

  Wagner, Parsifal

  Redon, Pour Edgar Poe

  Renoir, Baigneuse

  1883 Death of the Comte de Chambord, last of the succession claiming divine right to the monarchy in France. Colonial wars in Indochina. Charcot starts his study of Satanism, and gathers documents for his Bibliothèque diabolique at the Salpêtrière.

  Villiers, Contes cruels

  Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine

  Huysmans, L’Art Moderne (praise for Moreau and Redon, and for the Impressionists)

  Maupassant, Une vie; Contes de la Bécasse

  Lorrain, La Forêt bleue

  Mendès, Les Folies amoureuses

  Ribot, Les Maladies de la volonté

  Rollinat, Les Névroses

  1884 Colonial expansion, annexation of Cambodia (Kampuchea) to Cochin-China. Legalization of divorce; trade unions legalized. Lewis Waterman invents the first practical fountain-pen; James Ritty invents the mechanical cash-register.

  Huysmans, A Rebours (the ‘Bible of Decadence’)

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Ce qui ne meurt pas

  Maupassant, Miss Harriet; Les Soeurs Rondoli; Yvette (short stories)

  Péladan, Le Vice suprême

  Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

  Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits (studies of Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé)

  1885 Fall of Jules Ferry’s government. Jules Grévy reelected President of the Republic. Death of Victor Hugo. Harim Maxim invents the machine-gun. Karl Benz invents the first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine. Freud studies under Charcot at the Salpêtrière; foundation of the Society of Physiological Psychology under the leadership of Charcot.

  Laforgue, Les Complaintes

  Lorrain, Modernités and Viviane

  Mallarmé, ‘Prose pour Des Esseintes’

  Maupassant, Bel-Ami

  Zola, Germinal

  Pater, Marius the Epicurean

  1886 General Boulanger becomes Minister of War. Gottlieb Daimler builds the world’s first four-wheeled motor vehicle. Anatole Baju founds Le Décadent, a journal that gathers writers who will be associated with the term.

  Bloy, Le Désespéré

  Edouard Drumont, La France juive (anti-Semitic tract)

  Gourmont, Merlette

  Maupassant, Toine; La Petite Roque

  Mirbeau, Le Calvaire

  Rimbaud, Illuminations (edited by Verlaine)

  Villiers, L’Eve future; L’Amour suprême

  Zola, L’Oeuvre

  1887 Resignation of General Boulanger; honours scandal forces resignation of President Grévy. Sadi Carnot elected President. Ferdinand de Saussure lecturing on la linguistique générale at the Collège de France. Heinrich Hertz inv
ents radar; Emile Berliner invents the gramophone. Construction starts on the Eiffel Tower. Alfred Binet, in ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’amour’, first coins the term ‘fetishism’.

  Death of Laforgue.

  Laforgue, Moralités légendaires

  Mallarmé, Poésies

  Maupassant, Le Horla

  Mendès, La Première Maîtresse

  Zola, La Terre

  1888 Wilhelm II becomes Emperor of Germany. Foundation of the Institut Pasteur; Chair of Experimental Psychology established at the Collège de France. John Boyd Dunlop patents the first commercial successful pneumatic tyre. Gauguin and Van Gogh in Arles.

  Lorrain, Dans l’oratoire

  Maupassant, Pierre et Jean; Sur l’eau

  Mirbeau, L’Abbé Jules

  Rachilde, Madame Adonis

  Villiers, Histoires insolites; Nouveaux contes cruels

  Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales

  1889 Inauguration of the Eiffel Tower and International Exhibition in the Centenary Year of the Revolution. The Java pavilion and its dancers cause a sensation (Paul Gauguin executes sketches of them). Failed coup d’état by General Boulanger. Sir James Dewar and Sir Frederick Abel co-invent cordite. Opening of Le Moulin Rouge. Anatole Baju publishes last number of Le Décadent. The Mercure de France journal and publishing house founded by Gourmont, Rachilde, and Vallette. Death of Barbey d’Aurevilly and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

  Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience

  Bourget, Le Disciple

  Huysmans, Certains

  Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique

  Maupassant, La Main gauche; Fort comme la mort

  1890 First May-day celebrations, marked by popular unrest. Fall of Bismarck. J. G. Frazer publishes first volumes of The Golden Bough.

  Gourmont, Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale

  Laforgue, Derniers vers (posthumous)

  Maupassant, La Vie errante; L’Inutile Beauté; Notre coeur

  Mendès, Méphistophéla

  Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch

  Villiers, Axël (posthumous)

  Zola, La Bête humaine

  1891 Boulanger commits suicide in Belgium. Popular and social unrest marked by strike action. Foundation of the Rosicrucian Society, with Péladan among its leaders. First petrol-powered automobiles (Panhard and Levassor). In The Man of Genius, Cesare Lombroso cites mental abnormality and disease as a cause of artistic genius. Gauguin’s first period in Tahiti. Death of Rimbaud.