French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  ‘Clarisse!…’ he shouted, ‘Clarisse… I feel awful… awful… Clarisse!’

  And suddenly his staring eyes showed their bloodshot whites. He tried to raise himself, his hands beating the water with a feeble, convulsive movement, and then he collapsed, sliding in a great gurgle to the bottom of the bath.

  Clarisse pursed her lips a bit and murmured:

  ‘My darling, don’t do that, that’s not nice of you at all!’

  The First Emotion

  HE was an old man, rather bowed, very mild, very silent, very clean, who had never, ever, thought about anything.

  His life ran more regularly than clockwork, for even clocks can sometimes stop or go wrong. He had never known the eagerness of being a little ahead, or the worry of being a little slow, or fancied he heard bells ringing madly in his soul.

  His name was Monsieur Isidore Buche, employee at the Ministry of Education.* Strange to relate, he retained, as an old man, the same rank and the same emoluments, the same office and the same work as he had had as a young man, when he first joined the civil service. A promotion would have upset his routine; he couldn’t have brooked the idea, even had the idea come to him. But no idea ever did come to him. The eruption of anything new into his existence would have been worse for him, and would have scared him more than death.

  Monsieur Isidore Buche rose at eight o’clock, winter and summer alike, walked to his office by the same streets, without once pausing to look in a shop window or look round at a fellow pedestrian, or waste time following the light step of a lady, or admire a pretty poster on a wall. Same thing at six in the evening: he went home, via the same streets, with the same measured, mechanical step. He would take his frugal, indescribably bland meal in his room, brought up to him by the concierge; then go out and buy the Petit Journal* from the same place and with the same formalities, bring it home under his left arm, and then read it in bed, until nine o’clock. Then he went to sleep.

  He was good, which was easy, since he had no one to love; no wife, no child, no relation; no friend, dog, waif, or flower! He was good, by which I mean he never spoke ill of his superiors; he had never spoken out against a colleague, and had always sat under every insult and attack without ever answering back. People said of him, using a singular euphemism: ‘Ah, old Isidore Buche, he’s a brick!’ He worked all day Sunday—for his emoluments were modest—balancing the account books of an old lady in Clichy, who owned five working-class dwellings. He was sixty years old and had never thought about anything.

  He had never thought about anything. But suddenly, one day, he was astounded to see something in the sky on his way to the office, something very tall which he didn’t know. He didn’t know Notre-Dame, he didn’t know the Obelisk or the Arc de Triomphe or the Pantheon or the Invalides; he didn’t know anything. He had passed all these monuments without seeing them, and consequently without wondering why they were there or what they signified. He did, however, have a vague notion of their proximate presence. The sculpted façades, the domes, the spires, the great masses of cut stone, the arches under the dreaming sky, the squares, the horizons, the breaches made by the streets, all these things melted into the great nothingness that included, in his mind, the city, the countryside, all things and all beings, except for his office, his room, the clerks at the Ministry, his concierge, and the Petit Journal. But the sudden eruption of this unfamiliar thing which blocked the sky and which disturbed the nothingness—this he was compelled to see, and having once seen it, he was compelled to think about it. His Petit Journal informed him that it was the Eiffel Tower.*

  And then, his mind went to work.

  Every morning he experienced tortures of perplexity, he wondered what the Eiffel Tower really was, what function it could serve, and why its name was Eiffel. This was the only moment in his life when, inside his brain, there laboured something resembling intellectual excitement. He became dimly aware that there might be some life outside of his own, a life that existed beyond his concierge; he came to some vague and groping consciousness in which embryonic forms took shape, and larval movements corresponding to them. But he got such a headache thinking of all these things. In terror, he would exclaim every morning to the clerks at the Ministry: ‘I saw the Eiffel Tower again!’ And in the evening, with the same terror sharpened by some remote biblical memory, he would say to his concierge: ‘I saw the Tower of Babel again!’ And then he started to get distracted as he read his Petit Journal. Several times he stopped short in the street, in front of a poster; and one day he had been surprised by the strange gaze of a passer-by. Sensing the approach of various undefined fantasies, combined with an insidious need to break through the narrow walls of his room and the blackened ceiling of his office, he became terrified. But soon this remarkable convulsion within his breast calmed down, and the crisis passed. Gradually he stopped speaking again, he stopped seeing and hearing, he no longer stopped to look at a poster or notice the commotion in a human gaze. The regular tick-tock of his inner life was re-established. And the Eiffel Tower became blended with the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Obelisk, the Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon, and the Invalides in the thick mist attendant upon the death of his mind and the death of his eyes. He started once more not to think about anything.

  He started once more not to think about anything. But then something unexpected and stupefying happened to him.

  One night, he had a dream!

  He dreamed he was on a riverbank, fishing.

  Why that dream? He had never gone fishing.

  Why any dream? He had never dreamed.

  His nights were as empty of dreams as his days. He slept as he lived: in nullity. Day and night, the same moral shadowiness went on.

  To him, the thing was serious, it was terrible, the eruption of a dream into his nocturnal life, as terrible as the eruption of a thought in his diurnal life. But he did not seek to explain the wherewithal of this new mystery.

  The next night, he dreamed again.

  He dreamed he was fishing. Yes, he saw himself thus, sitting, on a bank amongst fragrant flowery grasses. In his hand was a long, thin fishing-rod. From the far end of the rod hung a horsehair attached to a red float that was bobbing on the water. From time to time the float twitched on the still, hard, mirror-like surface. Then he tugged with all his might and with both hands on his end of the rod. The line was taut, the rod bent, and he spent hours trying to land the invisible fish. Then he would wake up, all in a lather, panting and exhausted, and for some minutes in the darkness of his room, which seemed to be lit with the fantastical and phosphorescent carcasses of fish, he was held by the horror of the bent rod, the taut line, and the stony surface of the water which showed no jumping minnow or cruising pike, or indeed any ripple around the red float.

  The dream recurred every night, for a period of several months.

  ‘Shall I never bring it in?’ he exclaimed to himself in horror.

  He thought about his dream all day. And he would have preferred not to think about anything.

  He would have preferred to think about nothing. But from thinking so hard about his dream, he developed a passion for fishing.

  To reach his office, Monsieur Isidore Buche made detours, wandered along the quays, and lingered to watch the fishermen. On his way home in the evening, he stopped in front of a shop where rods and lines and every kind of attractive accessory were displayed in the window. He didn’t know what they were for, but he should have liked to possess them. He experienced a glow of pleasure when he looked at the carp made of golden card, hanging high up in the window, attached to a silk thread. And he said to himself again, with beating heart and a rush of hot blood through his veins: ‘I’ll never bring it in!’

  One Saturday evening he steeled himself and went into the shop, spent lavishly, and went home, prey to a most unusual excitement. At dawn the next day he made his way towards the Seine, furnished with rods, lines, landing-nets, pockets stuffed with tins and little cases. He followed the Seine to Meudon, and at
Meudon he picked a spot where the water looked deep and the grass soft. As he prepared his line, according to the instructions they gave him in the shop, he kept murmuring: ‘Come now!… Come now!… I’ll never bring one in!’ Then he cast his line on the stream…

  The morning was festive, the water sang gently by the banks, in a clump of reeds. Walkers dawdled on the towpath, and picked flowers.

  Monsieur Isidore Buche stared at the red-and-blue float bobbing on the quiet surface of the water. His lips were pursed and his heart riven with anxiety. Something hard and burning seemed to be clamped over his skull, which was covered by the inevitable straw hat.

  Suddenly the float tremored, and around it appeared a growing series of ripples…

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ said Monsieur Isidore Buche, who had gone very red…

  The float moved more rapidly on the water, and then disappeared in a small trail of bubbles.

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ he said, very pale.

  And he felt a shudder… Pulling up, he saw the line go taut and the rod bend; his heart started beating like an Easter bell… Cold sweat broke out on his temples… he collapsed on the bank… stone dead!

  The Little Summer-House

  I HAD suffered serious losses in enterprises, alas less solid but quite as honourable as the Panama Syndicates,* the Southern Railways, and suchlike. So the day came when I was forced to make my assets ‘earn their keep’, as they say. There are moments in life when one misses not having some Reinach to hand, or some Yves Guyot,* which would ease things a great deal. But stop this whingeing! I’m not writing these lines out of self-pity.

  So I cut down on my expenses and reduced my service to the bare minimum—a butler and a cook—which as it turned out represented no great saving, since the two loyal retainers began to rob me as much as the other five I had dismissed. I sold my horses and my carriages, my collection of paintings and Persian porcelain, a section of my wine cellar, alas! and my three greenhouses, which contained some rare and splendid plants. In the end, I resolved to rent out a little summer-house, a delectable little place, set apart from the main property. I had done the place up specially so that I might receive clandestine visits, which cost me a lot of money, so I had to renounce those too. Thanks to its isolated position in the grounds and its comfortable furnishings, it could serve as a country retreat for a member of either sex who, for the three summer months, felt inclined to vary their celibacy or hide their adultery, depending on their situation.

  Titillated by the suggestive wording of my advertisements, many people—strange and hideous people, mostly—came to have a look. To them I vaunted the excellence and the security of this refuge, with its exterior covered in Virginia creeper, though not its interior, for that wouldn’t do at all—ho! ho!—there must be no creeper on the inside, and no virgins either. But these people demanded I do so much work on the place—they wanted the cellar in the attic and the attic in the cellar—that in the end we couldn’t come to terms. I began to despair of renting the summer-house, by now it was well into the season, when one afternoon a little gentleman, clean-shaven, upright, extremely polite, and somewhat advanced in years, arrived, hat in hand, to inspect the place. He was wearing garments of an old-fashioned cut, unpressed, with a long watch-chain hung with strange charms, and on his head a wig, greenish-blond in tint, whose shape recalled the worst days of the Orléanist Monarchy.*

  The little gentleman found everything to be perfect… quite perfect!… and spoke of the place in such glowingly complimentary terms I scarcely knew what to say. In the bathroom, which was decorated with mirrors and licentious paintings on alternating panels, his wig shifted and nearly came adrift, and he exclaimed:

  ‘Aha! Aha!’

  ‘They’re by Fragonard,’* I explained, uncertain whether his ‘Aha!’ signalled disapproval or pleasure. But I was soon enlightened.

  ‘Aha!’ he said again… ‘Fragonard?… Really?… Wonderful!’

  And I saw his little eyes blink weirdly in response to a definite sensation.

  After a short silence, during which he scrutinized the panels more closely, he said:

  ‘Very well… it’s agreed… I shall take the perfect summer-house.’

  ‘Which is so discreet…’ I added in a suggestive way, gesturing eloquently through the window at the tall, thick, impenetrable wall of greenery that surrounded us on every side.

  ‘Discreet indeed… perfectly so!’

  Noting the respectful and probably slightly ‘twinkly’ enthusiasm of my accommodating tenant, I found various ingenious reasons to increase the rent, which was already exorbitant, by adding a few hundred francs on to the advertised rate. But this is by the by and of no significance, and if I mention it, it is only to pay homage to the perfectly good grace of the little gentleman, who even declared himself charmed by the way I had received him.

  We returned to the house, and there I hastened to draw up a short contract, under private agreement, for which I required his surname, first names, and civil status. I learned that his name was Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin, formerly a property lawyer at Montrouge. To complete the contract in due and proper form, I asked him if he was married, widowed, or single. Instead of replying he placed upon the table in front of me a wad of banknotes, which obliged me to write him a receipt and put an end to my questions. ‘He’s obviously married,’ I thought… ‘But he is embarrassed to admit it, because of the… Fragonard paintings.’

  Then I looked more closely at him, and at his eyes, which might perhaps have been gentle ones if they had been anything. But at that moment they were quite expressionless, and quite dead, as dead as the skin of his face and cheeks, which was slack, wrinkled, and entirely grey, as if it had been cooked and re-cooked in boiling water on a low flame.

  After accepting a glass of orangeade, out of politeness, Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin took his leave, with an effusive show of gratitude, salutation, and deference. He advised me that—if it were not inconvenient—he should like to settle into the summer-house the very next day. Upon which, I gave him a key.

  The next day, he didn’t come. Nor did he come the day after. Eight days, fifteen days went by without news from him. This was strange, but certainly explicable. Perhaps he had fallen ill—and yet, such was his excessive politeness, he would have written to tell me so. Or had the companion he was to have brought with him to the summer-house refused to come at the last moment? This seemed altogether more likely, for I didn’t doubt for an instant that Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin had rented this discreet and perfect summer-house with a mistress in mind, for the way his eyes blinked at the sight of the Fragonards and the way his wig had gone awry was proof enough of his concupiscent designs. In any case, I felt I had no need to be unduly preoccupied, since he had paid me generously, beyond all expectation.

  One morning I went to open up the little summer-house in order to air it, since it had stood closed since Lagoffin’s visit. I crossed the hall, the dining room, the salon, and at the entrance to the bathroom I let out a scream and backed away in horror.

  There on the cushions was a naked body, the corpse of a little girl, stretched out and horribly stiff, her limbs all twisted and convulsed, like those of a torture victim.

  To call for help, call my servants, call everyone—that was my first impulse. But once I had got over the first flush of horror, I decided it were better that I should examine things by myself first of all, and with no witnesses. I even took care to triple-lock the door to the summer-house.

  It was indeed a little girl, with the slender figure of a young boy. At her throat were marks of strangulation; and on her chest and belly were long, thin, deep incisions, made with fingernails, or with cutting and pointed claws. Her swollen face had turned black. On a chair lay her pauper’s clothes, a wretched little dress, frayed at the edges and all muddy, and a ragged petticoat, folded almost punctiliously. On the marble-topped bathroom table I saw a bit of paté and two green apples, one of which had been nibbled, as if by mice. And an empty bottle of cham
pagne.

  Nothing was altered in the other rooms, which I scanned one after the other. Each piece of furniture, each object, was in its usual place.

  Rapidly, feverishly, and in no logical order, my mind started racing:

  ‘Should I alert the police, the law?… Never… The magistrates would come and I would not know what to say to them… Accuse Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin?… Obviously the man had given me a false name, and there was no point in going to Montrouge to find out he had never lived there… What then?… They would not believe me… They would think I’d invented it… They would never believe that this man had committed an atrocious crime almost on my doorstep, in a strange house that belonged to me, without my seeing or hearing anything… Tell us another!… You can’t tweak the nose of the Law like that… And then, suspicious, with hyena-looks, they would examine me, and of course I would fall into the snare laid by their insidious and sinister questions… They would ransack my whole life, looking for clues… Fragonard would be held against me, Fragonard would scream out the grossness of my pleasures and the shame of my routine lusts… They would want to know the names of every woman who had come here, and of all those who had not… And then I would be calumnied by the servants I had dismissed, by the grain merchant I had boycotted, by the baker I had accused of using false measures, by the butcher whose poisoned meat I had sent back… all of them would be ready, under the protection of the Law, to sully me with their vengeance and their rancour!… And finally the day would come when my hesitation and reticence and embarrassment in response to their questionings would be taken as a confession of my guilt, and they would charge me with murder… No!… There must be no judges, no gendarmes, no policemen here!… Nothing… Nothing but a little earth to cover this poor little corpse, and a bit of moss over the earth, and silence, silence, silence… on all of this!…*