French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  He thought for a moment, and went on in a melancholy tone:

  ‘Love?… Too late.—Glory?… I have known it!—Ambition?… Leave that bauble to the politicians!’

  Suddenly he let out a cry:

  ‘I have it!’ he said: ‘REMORSE!…—that’s what my dramatic temper needs.’

  He looked at himself in the mirror, pulling a face stretched and convulsed as if by some inhuman horror:

  ‘That’s it!’ he finished: ‘Nero! Macbeth! Orestes! Hamlet! Erostratus!*—Ghosts!… Yes! Now it’s my turn to see real ghosts!—like all those aforementioned gents, who were lucky enough to see ghosts round every corner.’

  He struck his forehead.

  ‘But how?… Am I innocent as the newborn lamb?’

  And after a further pause:

  ‘Ah, it depends on that!’ he went on. ‘The end must have the means… I must surely have the right to become what I am meant to be? Humanity is my right! If I’m to feel remorse, I must commit the crime to go with it! Well so be it, I’ll go with crime: what difference does it make, as long as I commit it… with the right intention?—Exactly so…—It’s settled!’ (And he started to speak in dialogue) ‘—I shall do atrocious things.—When?—Straightaway. Don’t put off till tomorrow…—What crimes?—Just one!… But huge!—An atrocity, an enormity! Something to bring all the Furies forth from hell!—What, then?—The most dazzling, of course… Bravo! I have it! FIRE! Time is pressing! I must start my blaze and pack my trunks! And then return, duly muffled behind the window of some cab, to enjoy my triumph among the desperate crowds! I must harvest the curses of the dying—and then take my train to the north-west, with enough remorse on my plate to last the rest of my days.

  ‘And then I shall go and hide out in my lighthouse! In the light, out at sea! Where the police will never find me—for my crime will be disinterested.* And I shall lament all alone.’—Here Chaudval straightened up, practising this line, absolutely worthy of Corneille:*

  ‘Washed of Suspicion by th’Enormity of the Crime!

  ‘It is spoken.—And now,’—concluded the great actor, picking up a cobblestone and looking around to make sure he was quite alone—‘and now you, you will never reflect anyone again.’

  And he hurled the stone against the glass, which shattered into a thousand dazzling shards.

  This first duty expedited, he hurried away—satisfied with this initial, but nonetheless energetic and striking act—and rushed towards the boulevards where, a few minutes later, he hailed a cab, jumped into it, and disappeared.

  Two hours later the flare of a huge catastrophe, leaping up from large depots of petrol, oil, and matches, licked against all the windowpanes in the district of Le Temple. Soon there were squadrons of firemen rolling and pushing their machines, rushing in from all sides, their bugles sounding sinister blasts, waking with a start the citizens of that densely populated area. The sound of numberless running feet echoed on the pavements, and the crowd assembled in the large Place du Château d’Eau and the neighbouring streets. People were already being organized into water-chains. In less than quarter of an hour the soldiery had closed off the area, and policemen kept the crowds moving, by the ruddy light of torches, away from the fire.

  Carriages came to a standstill, gridlocked. Everyone was shouting. Further off, cries could be heard coming from the terrible crackling of the fire. Victims trapped in that hell were screaming, and burning roofs caved in on top of them. Around a hundred families, from the burning workshops at the centre of the blaze, were trapped, deprived of relief or refuge.

  Some way off, a solitary carriage, with two stout trunks on its roof, was stationed behind the milling crowd in the Place du Château d’Eau. And there in the carriage sat Esprit Chaudval, born Lepeinteur, known as Monanteuil; from time to time he parted the blind to contemplate his handiwork.

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he muttered to himself, ‘now I feel an object of horror to God and man!—Yes, that is indeed the look of one rebuked!…’

  The good old actor’s face looked radiant.

  ‘O wretch!’ he hissed between his teeth, ‘what dreadful avenging insomnia I shall suffer, a prey to the ghosts of my victims! I feel mingling within me the souls of Nero, burning Rome with an artist’s exaltation! Of Erostratus, burning the temple at Ephesus to immortalize his name!… Of Rostopschin,* burning Moscow for love of his country! Of Alexander, burning Persepolis for love of his immortal Thais!… But I, I burn out of DUTY, having no other means of existence!—I burn because I owe it to myself… I acquit myself! What a Man I shall be! Now at last I shall know what it feels like to have a tormented conscience! What sumptuous nights of horror I shall have!… At last, I can breathe… I feel born anew… I exist!… To think that I have lived as an actor!… And now I am no more, to the vulgar eyes of common mortals, than fodder for the scaffold—let us flee at the speed of light! Let us shut ourselves away in our lighthouse, to enjoy our remorse at leisure.’

  Two days later, in the evening, having travelled without hindrance, Chaudval reached his destination and took possession of his old, abandoned lighthouse, situated along our northern coasts: an obsolescent lamp atop a dilapidated structure, that an act of ministerial compassion had relit on his behalf.

  It was hardly as if the beacon were of any use to anyone: all that was nothing but a superfetation, a sinecure, a dwelling with a flame on its roof which everyone could do without, except for Chaudval.

  So it was that the worthy tragedian, having brought with him bedding, victuals, and a tall mirror with which to study the effects of all this on his physiognomy, shut himself up without more ado in his lighthouse, out of reach of human suspicion.

  All around him murmured the sea, where the old abyss of the heavens dipped its starry points. He watched the waves breaking on his tower, driven by the squalls, much as the Stylite* might have watched the sand scatter against his column, driven by the gusts of the desert storm.

  He watched distractedly, in the distance, the vapour from the steamboats and the sails of fishing boats ply back and forth.

  And every moment, the dreamer forgot about his fire.—He went up and down his stone staircase.

  On the evening of the third day, Lepeinteur—shall we call him?—sat in his room, sixty feet above the waves, rereading a Paris newspaper in which the events surrounding the great disaster were recounted.

  ‘An unidentified miscreant is reported to have thrown some lighted matches into a petrol depot. The monstrous fire that ensued in the area of the Faubourg du Temple kept the firemen and the surrounding neighbourhoods at their exertions all night.

  ‘There were close on one hundred casualties: unfortunate families plunged into the blackest despair.

  ‘The whole area was in mourning, and still smoking.

  ‘The name of the wretch who did this deed is unknown, as is the motive for the crime.’

  On reading this, Chaudval jumped for joy, and rubbing his hands with delight exclaimed:

  ‘What a huge success! What a wonderful villain I am! Shall I be sufficiently haunted? What ghosts I shall see! I was sure that I would become a Man! Ah, I admit that the way was hard! But it had to be done!… It had to be done!’

  Turning back to the newspaper, which continued with the announcement that a charity performance was to be given to raise money for the victims of the fire, Chaudval murmured:

  ‘Well, well! I should have deployed my talent and come to the aid of my victims!—It would have been my final performance. I would have declaimed Orestes.* I would have been extremely lifelike…’

  And with that, Chaudval began living in his lighthouse.

  The evenings fell, and after them the nights, in succession.

  Something which stupefied the artist came to pass. Something appalling.

  Contrary to his hopes and expectations, his conscience dictated nothing resembling remorse. No ghost made its appearance.—He felt nothing, absolutely nothing!…

  He could not believe the Silence. It dumbfo
unded him.

  Sometimes, scrutinizing himself in the mirror, he noticed that his cheery countenance had not changed in the least!—In fury, he dashed up to the beacon and tampered with it, in the radiant hope of luring some steamboat onto the rocks—anything to help activate or stimulate his stubborn remorse!—To bring on his ghosts!

  All to no avail!

  A complete waste of time and effort! He felt nothing. He saw not a single threatening spectre. He couldn’t sleep any more, stifled as he was by despair and shame. Until one night, suffering a cerebral attack in his luminous solitude, in torment he cried out—accompanied by the sound of the ocean and the gales howling round his tower standing out there in the infinite: ‘Ghosts!… For the love of God!… Just one, let me see just one!—I have earned it!’

  But the God he invoked refused to grant this favour—and the old ham expired, declaiming in his florid style his ardent desire to see ghosts—not realizing that he had himself become that which he sought.

  Sentimentalism

  I esteem myself but little when I look at myself; highly, when I compare myself to others.

  (Mr Everyman)

  ONE evening in spring, two well-brought-up young people, Lucienne Emery and the Comte Maximilien de W***, were seated under the tall trees of the Champs-Élysées.

  Lucienne is that beautiful young woman who always wears black, whose face has a marble pallor, and whose past is obscure.

  Maximilien, whose tragic end we heard about, was a wonderfully talented poet. Further, he was attractive, and elegant in his manners. An intellectual light shone in his eyes that were charming, but, like precious stones, a touch cold.

  The two had been intimate for six months at most.

  On that evening they sat in silence and watched the dim silhouettes of cabs, shadows, passers-by. Suddenly, gently, Madame Emery took her lover’s hand.

  ‘Does it not seem to you, my friend, that as the result of being ceaselessly excited by artificial, and, in a manner of speaking, by abstract impressions, great artists—like yourself—end up by blunting their capacity really to undergo the torments or the pleasures that Destiny puts in their way! At the very least, you have difficulty in expressing—something which people might take for lack of sensitivity—the personal sentiments that life bids you feel. Judging from the cold deliberation of your movements, people might think that you only throbbed as a matter of courtesy. A preoccupation with Art, no doubt, pursues you constantly, even in love and grief. From the habit of analysing the complexities of these feelings, you fear too much not being perfect in your responses, is that not so?… You can never rid yourself of that niggling thought. It paralyses your noblest flights and tempers all natural expansiveness. It’s almost as if—being princes of a different universe—an invisible crowd surrounds you ceaselessly, ready to praise or blame.

  ‘In short, when you experience some great joy or misfortune, what stirs in you first of all, even before your mind has really taken anything in, is the obscure desire to seek out some retired actor to ask how you should be carried away and what gestures are appropriate for the circumstance. Does the pursuit of Art then lead to a certain hardening?… That worries me.’

  ‘Lucienne,’ replied the Count, ‘I once knew a singer who stood by his fiancée’s death-bed, and listening to his sister’s convulsive sobbing, could not restrain himself from commenting, despite his own affliction, on the defects of her vocalizing. He even thought of certain exercises that would give her sobs “more body”. Does that seem horrible to you?… And yet, it was the singer who died of his grief, while the sister came out of mourning at the first prescribed opportunity.’

  Madame Emery looked at Maximilien.

  ‘Listening to you,’ she said, ‘it would be hard to define in what true feeling consists, and by what outward signs it might be recognized.’

  ‘I should be glad to enlighten you on the subject,’ replied Monsieur de W*** with a smile. ‘But the technical… terms… er… are unpleasant, and I rather fear…’

  ‘Stop that! I have my bunch of Parma violets, and you have your cigar; so please go on.’

  ‘Very well, then! I shall obey,’ replied Maximilien. ‘The cerebral fibres affected by the feelings of joy or pain appear, you seem to be saying, distended in the artist, by the excess of intellectual emotion required on a daily basis by the cult of Art.—In my opinion, these mysterious fibres are merely sublimated!—Other men seem content with more predictable shows of tenderness, and with passions more openly expressed, more serious, in fact… My own view is that the placidity of their organisms, still somewhat occluded by Instinct, causes them to present, in lieu of supreme expressions of emotion, mere overflowings of animality.

  ‘I maintain further that their hearts and brains are served by nervous centres which, enveloped in the torpor of habit, send out infinitely fewer and more muffled vibrations than our own.

  ‘These leaden natures are what the world calls acting “in character”—their hearts, their beings—are violent and empty. Let us refrain from being duped by the dullness of their cries. To broadcast weakness in the secret hope of rendering it contagious, in order to benefit, at least in one’s own eyes, from the real emotion that one has provoked in others—thanks to a shadowy pretence—is really only suitable for fragmentary beings.

  ‘By what right can they claim that their writhings, of a more than dubious alloy, are required in the expression of life’s sufferings or ecstasies, and how dare they accuse those who have the discretion to abstain from them of being insensitive?* Is the ray that strikes a diamond in the raw state more truly reflected than in one properly cut in which the essence of fire enters? In truth, those men and women who let themselves be carried away by such crude expressiveness are of the type that prefer confused noises to deep melodies: that is all.’

  ‘Excuse me, Maximilien,’ interrupted Madame Emery: ‘I am listening to your rather subtle analysis with very real admiration… but would you be kind enough to tell me what hour is chiming?’

  ‘Ten o’clock, Lucienne!’ replied the young man, consulting his watch by the light of his cigar.

  ‘Ah!… That’s all right, then.—Do go on.’

  ‘Why all of a sudden this anxiety about the time?’

  ‘Because our love affair has one more hour to go, my friend!’ replied Lucienne. ‘I have a rendezvous with Monsieur de Rostanges at eleven-thirty this evening; I have put off telling you this till the last moment.—Are you angry with me?… Please forgive me.’

  If the Count turned a little paler at these words, the ambient darkness veiled his emotion; not a flicker betrayed the effect of this announcement on his being.

  ‘I see!’ he said in an even and well-modulated tone. ‘A most accomplished young man who well deserves your affection. Then I shall say my adieux, dear Lucienne.’

  He took his mistress’s hand and kissed it.

  ‘Who knows what the future may have in store?’ replied Lucienne with a smile, even though she was rather taken aback. ‘Rostanges is merely an irresistible caprice…—and now,’ she went on after a brief silence, ‘go on, my friend, I beg you. I should like to know, before we take our leave of each other, what is it that gives great artists the right to be so scornful of the behaviour of ordinary mortals?’

  There was a pause, silent and terrible, beween the two lovers.

  ‘We experience, to put it simply, ordinary feelings as intensely as the next man,’ Maximilien went on. ‘Yes indeed, the natural, instinctual fact of an emotion we experience physically, just like everyone else! But it’s only at the very outset that we experience it in that human way!

  ‘It is the near impossibility of expressing its immediate repercussions that makes us, almost always, seem paralysed, in so many circumstances. By the time most men have got over and forgotten such emotions, through a failure of vitality, in us they get louder, rather like the sound of roaring as you approach the sea. Such perceptions and their hidden repercussions, such infinite and marvellou
s resonances, these alone are the things that establish the superiority of our race. This is the source of the apparent discrepancy between thought and act when one of us tries to express, in the conventional manner, what he feels. Think of the distance that separates us from those early ages of Feeling, buried so long ago in the depths of our spirit. The flatness of the voice, the inappropriateness of the gesture, being lost for words, all of this is in contradiction with the sincerities and banalities of current usage, tailored to the way the majority experiences emotion. We ring false: people think us cold. Observing us, women can’t believe their eyes. They imagined that we too would be moved, at least a little—and drift off into our “clouds” where, according to a saying which suits the Bourgeoisie, we “poets” are meant to take refuge. They are astonished to see quite the contrary! The disdainful horror they feel, discovering this, for those who duped them on our behalf, is excessive—and would procure us some amusement, if we were vengeful.

  ‘No, Lucienne, it does not do for us to travesty ourselves with the false and extroverted performances that people put on. It is vain for us to try and wear the old human cast-offs that have lain forgotten in our antechamber since time immemorial!—People identify us with the essence of Joy! With the living idea of Grief! That’s how it is.—We alone among men have come into possession of an almost divine aptitude: being able to translate, simply from our contact with it, the transports of Love, or its torments, into a form that has immediate universality. That is our deep secret. Instinctively, we keep it hidden, to spare our neighbour, as far as possible, from the shame of not understanding us.—Alas! We are like those potent crystals that enclose, in the Orient, the pure essence of dead roses, which have been hermetically sealed by a triple envelope of wax, gold, and parchment.

  ‘A single teardrop of this essence—an essence kept in the precious amphora (which represents the fortune of the whole race and is handed down as a sacred treasure with the blessing of the elders)—a single teardrop, I tell you Lucienne, is enough to infuse volumes of clear water! And the latter can perfume dwellings and tombs for years on end!… But we are not the same (and therein lies our crime) as these flasks filled with dull perfumes, sad and sterile phials that people mostly neglect to stopper and whose virtue therefore sours or disperses on every passing wind.—Having conquered a purity of feeling inaccessible to the uninitiated, we would become liars in our own eyes if we were to participate in the “expected” mime-shows and expressions that satisfy the vulgar. Indeed we would hasten to disabuse him if he took upon faith the first cry that a happy or fatal event sometimes draws from us. It is from a very exact notion of Sincerity, precisely, that we owe it to ourselves to be sober in our movements, scrupulous in our language, reserved in our enthusiasms, and self-contained in our despairs.