French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  I took the frayed and muddied dress, the ragged petticoat, and in them I wrapped the little body of the unknown girl, like a shroud… Afterwards, once I had ascertained that everything in the summer-house was hermetically closed and sealed against the indiscreet or accidental curiosity of my servant, I went out. I wandered around the summer-house for the whole day, waiting for nightfall.

  That evening was the village fête. I sent off my servants, and when I was alone, completely alone, I set myself to burying the little girl in the grounds, deep in the earth at the foot of a beech tree…

  Yes! Silence, silence, silence, and earth, earth, earth, over all that!…

  Yesterday, in the Parc Monceau, I spotted Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin. He still had the same slack, grey skin, the same dead expression, the same greenish-blond wig. He was following a little flower-girl, who was selling sunflowers to passers-by. Near me, a municipal policeman was waddling along, ogling a girl… But the stupidity of his face made me turn on my heel… I foresaw nothing but complications, the Whats?… and the Hows?…

  ‘Ye gods! Let them work it all out,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s none of my business…’

  With a light step, I fled in the opposite direction to the municipal policeman, to Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin, and to the little flower-seller… that someone else may have to bury in his grounds, under a beech tree, and at night!…

  JEAN RICHEPIN

  Constant Guignard

  THE Guignard spouses, married for love, longed passionately for a son. As if the little soul who was so desired had hastened to fulfil their wishes, he arrived prematurely. His mother died in childbirth and, unable to bear the loss, his father hanged himself.

  Constant Guignard had an exemplary but an unhappy childhood. He spent his time at school doing detentions he didn’t deserve, receiving thrashings meant for others, and being ill on the days when all the important exams were held. He completed his studies with the reputation of a cockroach and a dunce. When it came to the Baccalaureate, he did his neighbour’s Latin translation for him. His neighbour passed, but Guignard was expelled from the exam for copying.

  *

  Such inauspicious beginnings in life would have turned a lesser nature vicious. But Constant Guignard had a soul of the higher type, and convinced that happiness is the reward of virtue, he resolved to conquer his ill-fortune by sheer force of heroism.

  He entered a house of commerce, which burned down the next day. As the fire raged, he noticed the distress of his employer, and plunged into the flames to retrieve the safe. His hair burned and his limbs suppurated, but he managed, at peril of his life, to break the safe and take the contents out.

  But the fire consumed them in his hands. When he emerged from the furnace, two constables grabbed him by the collar. A month later he was condemned to five years imprisonment for having tried to steal, at the opportune moment offered by the fire, a fortune that was quite safe where it was in a fireproof strongbox.

  *

  A riot broke out in the high-security prison where he was held. In his attempt to come to the rescue of a warder being attacked, he tripped him accidentally and left him to be massacred by the rebels. So they sent him to Cayenne* for twenty years.

  Driven by the knowledge of his innocence, he escaped, made his way back to France under an assumed name, and truly believed he had shaken off ill-fortune, and once more set about doing good.

  *

  One day, during a fair, he saw a runaway horse dragging a cab straight towards the edge of the rampart. He flung himself at the head of the horse, got his wrist twisted, his leg broken, and had several ribs stove in, but he managed to prevent the dreadful fall. Except that the horse turned round and charged into the middle of the crowd, crushing an old man, two women, and three children. There had been no one in the cab.

  *

  Wearied by these acts of heroism, Constant Guignard took instead to doing good quietly, humbly devoting himself to alleviating everyday hardships. But the money he gave to families in need was spent by the husbands on drink; the woollens he distributed to poor workers, used to the cold, made them catch pneumonia; a stray dog he rescued gave rabies to six people in the neighbourhood; the military substitute* he purchased to get an interesting young man out of the army sold passkeys to the enemy.

  *

  Constant Guignard came to believe that money did more harm than good, and rather than spreading wide his philanthropy, he decided to concentrate it on a single person. So he adopted a young orphan girl, not in any way beautiful, but graced with the most loveable nature, and he looked after her with all the tenderness of a father. Alas! He was so good, so devoted, and so kindly towards her, that one evening she flung herself at his feet, declaring that she was in love with him. He tried to make her understand that he had always considered her as his daughter, and that it would be a crime were he to succumb to the temptation she presented. He made her understand, in his fatherly way, that what she took to be love was in fact the awakening of her senses, and he promised her that, taking note of this sign of nature, he would not delay in seeking a husband worthy of her. The next day he found her lying against his door, a knife in her heart.

  *

  With that, Constant Guignard decided to give up his missionary role, and swore that from now on he would seek satisfaction simply in trying to prevent evil.

  Some time after this, he was apprised by accident of a crime that one of his friends was going to commit. He could have denounced him to the police; but he preferred to try and prevent the crime, and save the criminal. So he became closely involved with the planning, understood all the details, and waited for the precise moment when, having set everything up, he would scupper the whole plan. But the rascal he was trying to save saw through his game, and managed to outwit him, in such wise that the crime was perpetrated, the criminal got away, and Constant Guignard was arrested.

  *

  The public prosecutor’s requisition against Constant Guignard was a masterpiece of logic. He recalled the defendant’s whole life, his miserable childhood, with its punishments and expulsions, the audacity of his first attempted theft, his despicable treachery in the prison riot, his escape from Cayenne, his return to France under an assumed name. From this moment on, the orator rose to the greatest possible heights of legal eloquence. He scourged the hypocritical virtue of the man, who was a corrupter of decent families, who for his own pleasure had sent honest husbands out to drink his money; this false do-gooder who contrived, by giving presents, to attain an unmerited popularity, this monster hidden in the habit of a philanthropist. He dwelt in detail upon the refined perversity of a wretch who rescued rabid dogs only to let them loose on society, of a demon who, in love with evil for its own sake, was prepared to injure himself in order to stop a runaway horse, and why? For the unspeakable pleasure of seeing the animal plunge into the crowd, crushing to death old men, women, and children. Such a man would stop at nothing! And there were certainly other crimes to his name as yet unknown. All the evidence pointed to the fact that he was the accomplice of the mercenary who had betrayed France. And as for the orphan he had raised, and who had been found one morning dead at his door, who else but he could have murdered her? This crime was undoubtedly the bloody end to one of those family dramas made up of shame, debauchery, and filth, the like of which was hard to contemplate. After such a list, it was scarcely necessary to dwell on this latest crime. In this case, and despite the impudent denials of the accused, the evidence was incontrovertible. It was necessary, therefore, to condemn this man with the full rigour of the law. The punishment was just, and no punishment could be heavy enough. The defendant was not only a great criminal, he was one of those geniuses of crime, one of those monsters of malice and hypocrisy that make one doubt the existence of virtue and despair of humanity.

  Before such a crushing indictment, Constant Guignard’s lawyer had no alternative but to plead that his client was mad. He did his best, spoke learnedly of the compulsion to evil, p
ortrayed his client as an irresponsible monomaniac, as a kind of unconscious Papavoine,* and concluded by saying that such behaviour was more appropriately treated in the asylum at Charenton* than on the Place de la Roquette.*

  The verdict was unanimous: Constant Guignard was sentenced to death.

  *

  Men of virtue, driven wild by their hatred of crime, went into transports of joy, and cried hurrah.

  *

  The death of Constance Guignard, like his life, was exemplary but unhappy. He mounted the scaffold without fear and without pretence, his face as calm as his conscience, and with a martyr’s serenity about him which onlookers took to be the indifference of a brute. At the final moment, aware that his executioner was poor and with a family, he whispered to him that he had left him his entire fortune. The executioner was so moved by this that it took him three attempts to sever his benefactor’s neck.

  *

  Three months after this, one of Constant Guignard’s friends, returning from a long journey, learned of the honest man’s sad end. Knowing only the man’s merits, he set about trying to repair as best he could the injustice meted out by fate. He purchased a permanent concession, ordered a fine marble tombstone, and composed an epitaph for his friend. The next day he died of a stroke. Nevertheless, the expenses had been paid in advance, so the guillotined man got his sepulchre. But the stone-carver employed to execute the epitaph took it upon him to correct a letter that had been badly written on the manuscript. And the poor virtuous man, misjudged in his lifetime, lies in death with the following epitaph for all eternity:

  Here lies Constant Guignard

  A Zero

  Deshoulières

  HIS name was Deshoulières and he didn’t like it.

  In this he was wrong, for it was doubtless in large part his name, and the banalities associated with it, that led to his singular obsession with being original.

  He was indeed, as far as originality goes, a species apart, rare and whole.

  Having dabbled in nearly everything—arts, letters, pleasures—he had forged for himself an ideal, that consisted in being unpredictable in everything.

  At first sight, this wasn’t anything strange, the theory merely indicating a curious soul, the enemy of the commonplace, a seeker of the new—in common with all true creators. But where things became unusual was that Deshoulières made of this theory a rule of conduct in his daily life and in his dealings with the world, pushing it to the point of extreme eccentricity.

  He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.

  *

  So it was that, finding originality only in change, he invented the following axiom: one should never look like oneself, physically, especially. It is this that explains his extraordinarily varied clothes, manners, voice, and even physiognomy. Making ample use of make-up and false hair, he emerged each day with a different head, and lived like a veritable Proteus.*

  His mind was as various as a kaleidoscope, showing up paradoxes like coloured glass, mingled with the most monstrous truisms, which made in reality for a dazzle of words, ideas, images, arguments, quite blinding for those who wanted to take the measure of this fantasmagorical intelligence.

  *

  He was, moreover, extremely gifted.

  Robust and well-built, he was two feet longer than the verses of his deplorable homonym,* and one could discern a modern beauty under all his borrowed facets. He had marvellous facility in assimilating every virtue and every vice, all the sciences and all the arts. He was known for his acts of heroism and his acts of cowardice, for his tours de force and his swoonings, for incomparable fragments of verse and prose, for snatches of novel melody, for sketches which showed the marks of a future master. Potentially, he possessed every human genius.

  But he never took anything further, claiming that it would be too banal to do so. It sufficed him to say that he had all the power necessary to become a great man, poet, musician, painter—but he renounced such things, such grandeurs being altogether too vulgar and below him.

  It’s all as old as the hills, he would say. There is no point in my being the god of my century, since I already am. It might amuse me to be that god, if I were a mere brute! But even that has been done before!

  Mostly, people wrote him off as a lunatic. But some men thought of him as a kind of Antichrist.

  But this Antichrist was much too subtly eccentric to believe in himself.

  If God did exist, he said one day, and if I were He, I wouldn’t be so stupid as not to prove to myself I did not exist.

  *

  Holding such theories, it is obvious that Deshoulières could exist only in Paris, and only in our own times; and he would surely have lived on there quietly, for many years to come, a source of anxiety to a few friends, but mostly an amusement to the crowd, no more nor less than a simple clown, had he not in fact been the man of genius that he was.

  An ordinary original would not have had the idea of carrying out the extreme eccentricity that cost him his life.

  He contrived to murder his mistress, have her embalmed, and to continue as her lover.

  The crime was carried out with such skill, and with such novelty in the manner of concealing it, that it remained undetected.

  But it was the fact that this monstrously sadistic crime was a secret, this is what seemed banal to Deshoulières. He considered that there was no great originality in being a monster and escaping the exactions of the law. He confessed to the crime himself, showing not the slightest remorse, which was, indeed, essentially unpredictable.

  The whole of Paris cried out in horror, and every eye was riveted upon Deshoulières.

  *

  This was the moment, if ever, to be unusual, and his task now was to find a way of being unpredictable, while surrounded by the vulgarities of prison, the assize court, and the guillotine. Deshoulières remained true to his mission.

  In prison, he busied himself not with his defence, nor with his notoriety, but with classifying and codifying the mysteries of animal magnetism, and of transforming this dense philosophical treatise into a sequence of monosyllabic sonnets. After writing three he gave up, having satisfied himself that the thing was possible.

  *

  In the dock, he was magnificent.

  His barrister, an illustrious member of the profession, was tickled by the challenge presented by the difficulty of the case and the indifference of his client; his speech for the defence was extraordinary, and he succeeded in shaking the jury and wrong-footing the public prosecutor. Numerous irrefutable proofs, a powerful current of pity, and a winning eloquence combined to establish Deshoulière’s innocence and ensure his acquittal.

  The judge had tears in his eyes when he asked the accused if he had anything else to say in his own defence.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Deshoulières, ‘I should first of all like to offer sincere congratulations to my lawyer for his masterly piece of eloquence in the tradition of French justice. There is only one passage I could perhaps improve upon.’

  And he commenced to rework one of his advocate’s arguments, in a way that shed new light and conquered the sympathy of the court.

  ‘Alas,’ he went on, ‘I cannot say the same of the honourable gentleman the Public Prosecutor, who seems unfit for the grave task entrusted him by the Republic.’

  The judges looked startled, the prosecutor furious, the jury baffled.

  But this was as nothing to the effect produced when Deshoulières, having enumerated all the weak links in the Prosecutor’s argument, undertook to rebuild from the beginning the case for the prosecution. And he did so with such fire, such energy, such power! He showed in their true light all the hideousnesses of his crime, he took the defence apart brick by brick, and concluded by proving his own guilt so comprehensively that no possible doubt could remain. The verdict that had seemed so certain was reversed by him like a glove, and he obtained what he wanted: the unpredictable result of having himself, by his own volition, condemned to death.

&nbs
p; *

  He spent the last hours of his life inventing a new dance-step and an oyster sauce.

  When the prison chaplain came to hear his confession, as his final hour drew near, Deshoulières refused to comply, unless the priest first confessed to him. That done, he confessed nothing, but rather spoke to the priest thus:

  ‘In your speech just now, you quoted a phrase of St Augustine’s. It is from Tertullian, the ninth paragraph of his De cultu foeminarum.* Go in peace, my son, and quote no more!’

  In spite of these capricious attitudes and his force of character, Deshoulières grew anxious when he saw the guillotine.

  Not that he was afraid! But he dreaded coming to a banal end after a life of unremitting eccentricity. It displeased him to think that he was to have his neck severed like any Tom, Dick, and Harry. So he contrived a way of being guillotined in an unpredictable fashion.

  He must have found one. For his face, as he mounted the scaffold leading to the Widow,* was lit up by a smile of joy.

  And he offered no resistance when they strapped him down on the sinister plank.

  But at the instant it tilted into place, he made a gigantic effort, broke his bonds with his Herculean strength, and thrust himself backwards so his head was no longer engaged up to the neck in the lunette of the machine.

  The spring was released, nothing could stop the blade, and Deshoulières had his skull topped like a boiled egg.

  *

  He was unpredictable on the guillotine.

  It chopped his head, page-boy style.*

  Pft! Pft!

  ONCE upon a time, exactly where I could not say (for in truth, the land has been called by every name and exists at all times), lived a woman whose exact appearance I cannot sketch either.

  Every man saw her differently and each was right, because he found her appealing like that.

  To which must be added the fact that she herself did nothing to try and appear in a certain light. She was content to be in reality everything that people thought she was, not knowing herself exactly what she was.