French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  It was the man with the bracelet, who was detained that evening by the police. For ten months he had been operating with impunity. Out of perhaps two hundred victims, not one had dared report him. The fear of ridicule, fear of the police, the thought of the scandal that might ensue as a result of a suspect liaison—all these had made them hold their tongues:

  Ah! malheur à celui qui laisse la débauche

  Se planter comme un clou sous la mamelle gauche!…

  The Man Who Loved Consumptives

  ‘AH, here’s a new one!’ said an elegant black suit sitting in front of me in the orchestra stalls, during the second act of Legendre’s play.* Smiling into his moustache, he trained his glass on a box to the side, where a slender young woman had just taken her place, extremely pale, in a beautiful dress of light blue tulle which made her look even paler.

  It was the middle of the second act, the scene in the chapel, during which Lord Claudio, frowning craggily, his hand on the pommel of his sword, insults Leonato and the candid Hero in the famous Shakespearean apostrophe:

  Garde ta fille, elle est trop chère!*

  Rapt as the audience was by the drama of the scene, and by the dazzling Roybet costumes against the wonderful Ziem watercolour that Porel* had mingled with the set design, every eye, and every lorgnette, followed the lead given by the opera-glass, so that the fragile creature, leaning now on the red velvet of the box, seemed to reflect, in her disturbing and spectral pallor, the gaze of all the men and women that had turned their eyes upon her.

  Her face was oval, but drawn, with a languid, suffering expression: her eyes, that seemed enlarged, were ultramarine bordering on black. They were unnaturally bright, deep-set in their bruised and blueish rings, spotted with pearl: her delicate nose, with its arched and quivering nostrils, breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if in an atmosphere too thin to sustain her in life, and with her great feathered fan resting against her flat chest, from time to time, with her teeth that shone bright against the red of her mouth, she would bite at the burning purple of her lips, hard enough to draw blood. A man had now taken his place next to her; he was tall and strongly built, flourishing in the prime of health, and very smartly dressed; with the wide silk ribbon of his opera-glass threaded through his white evening waistcoat, his sartorial elegance was reminiscent of the Prince de Sagan. He leant towards the pale, fragile woman, whispering in her ear, and now and again offering her, from a soft silk bag, crystallized Parma violets, which she would nibble at, half-smiling, half-choking.

  ‘She’s not long for this world,’ sniggered my black-clad neighbour. ‘Two months at the outside. That little woman is suffocating, she must be coughing up lungfuls of blood, but I bet she’s fired up with fever between midnight and two. She’s extremely pretty too, if a little on the thin side.’

  He took the lorgnette from his friend’s hands, and with both lenses fixed on the box, he described every contraction of the pale blue dress, and every attention proffered by the large white waistcoat.

  ‘All the same, he’s got damned strange taste,’ the lorgnette went on, ‘going for skeletal women; he’s a fervent adherent of love’s funeral rites.’

  ‘Good old Fauras, I never see him except with funereal Venuses, and they’re always different. How many mistresses has he expedited by now?’

  ‘At least three or four in the last two years. It’s a kind of monomania, almost as if he collects them from the hospital; illness excites him, especially consumption. We have seen the hangman’s mistress, now we have the lover of doomed ladies; in love with tears and the elegiac, the excellent Fauras, who keeps himself in such good trim, loves only those who are close to death. The frailty of their existence makes them all the dearer and more precious to him. He chokes with their spasms, shivers with their fevers, and listens out for the slightest sigh; attending to their stifling, he spies, like a broken voluptuary, on the progress of their disease, and lives their dying agonies—he’s a sybarite, that’s what he is!’

  ‘Yes, I know. He’s a beast, a kind of sadist, prey to macabre ideas, the next thing to a necrophiliac, seeking the last warmth in a cadaver, and in death the last piquancy of love. The Saint-Ouen horror crime* relived every evening in the privacy of the boudoir. The quest for novel sensations, proof from the sanction of the law because the victim is still just alive.’

  ‘My dear fellow, you could hardly be more wrong! Fauras is a tender-hearted, elegiac soul, obsessed with the exquisite manifestations of sadness, besotted with mourning; he wears black crêpe in his thoughts and has a funeral urn in place of a heart. Deliciously distressed, and delighted to be so, he is forever fingering the evergreen cypress of his regrets above his latest loves—a phoenix eternally rising from the ashes!’

  ‘I must confess, I am completely lost.’

  ‘What a lumpish man you are! To love a woman who is doomed to die, to know that with every kiss and caress time is running out, to feel with the rasping of her breath everything ebbing away forever; to know oneself condemned to despair and yet exalted, to be aware that each fresh pleasure is one step closer to the grave, and that with one’s own hands, shaking with horror and desire, one is hollowing out within the love-nest the pit wherein you will lay your love to rest, that is the piquancy of the thing! A man can never have known the bitter appeal of stolen assignations which may never be repeated, not to understand a passion of this type, with its piercing melancholy, hatched in relationships like this, marked indelibly by Pleasure and Sin!’

  ‘But that’s monstrous!’

  ‘And yet absolutely true. Frailty is the great appeal of beings and things, the flower would scarcely move us if it never faded; the faster it perishes, the sweeter the scent, its life is exhaled with its fragrance! The doomed woman is exactly the same; dying, she abandons herself frenziedly to pleasures that fill her with burning life even as they hasten her death; her time is running out; her thirst for love, her need to suffer burns and flames within her, and she clings to love with the final convulsions of the drowning; and desiring still, she redoubles the force behind her last kiss. Twisted under the hand of Death, she would kill the object of her desperate adoration, were she not expiring herself; and his long, crushing, and furious embrace makes her swoon, and die.’

  ‘Voluptuous!’

  ‘Voluptuous, indeed! And Fauras has another advantage; with these consumptive women of his the relationship is never broken off brutally, there are no disagreeable scenes, unavoidable even for a gentleman, there is no vitriolic and sordid settling of accounts: tactful and clear-sighted, Fauras escapes all the predictable disgust and lassitude at the end of such affairs, the dull and wretched conclusion to all such liaisons in which satiety and boredom succeeds passion. His love affairs come to an end with the clean white, silver-threaded winding-sheet in a young woman’s coffin, amidst violets and roses in clusters, by candlelight, to the sound of anthems and organ music, with the dead girl laid out like Ophelia. A modern Hamlet, he follows the procession of his own love, and if his heart is wrung, at least it is so within a beautiful setting, with flowers and incense, with music and priestly psalms, in an uplifting scene of apotheosis. His is an artist’s grief, in short, but an artist who is also practical and clear-headed, for he has taken death as his notary and his counsel, and he charges the keeper of Montparnasse cemetery with the disposal of his feelings. What is more, the tears he sheds for his mistress are real; now she is dead, he brings her favourite flower to the graveside, and arranges it carefully, and wins the hearts of the family standing by; and so, with a sweet melancholy, embellished with the adored images and the light ghosts of women, his life flows on, between the beloved friend of yesterday and the one who is to come, already perfumed with regret, trembling with echoes, beating with hope, nuanced with memories!’

  ‘The man’s a monster, a vile wretch, a…’

  ‘… great sensualist and a wise man, my dear fellow, for he has contrived to get Death to work for him in the amorous exploits of his life, and he has gi
ven body to his dreams by idealizing that nuisance known as Memory. And whatever anyone may say, he is our superior, for he is the only man who mourns his mistresses sincerely, the only man who savours genuine loss, which is the the philtre and the poison that killed the legendary lovers of yesteryear. Very few of their kind remain, and they are stranded in this century, this century of unbelief and lucre, in which tuberculosis remains the only killer.’

  GEORGES RODENBACH

  The Time

  ‘BARBE, what is the time?’

  ‘A quarter to five,’ answered presently the old servant, who had gone to the mantel where, between two old-fashioned vases, stood a small Empire-period clock with four little columns of white marble, bearing aloft a short pinion embellished with gilt bronzes in the form of sinuous swans’ necks.

  ‘But I think our clock is slow,’ she went on. And with the steady, deliberate tread of people in the provinces who aren’t in a hurry, she went to the window, lifted the muslin curtain, and stared out at the nearby tower, the dark tower of the Halles de Bruges, to which is affixed, like a great crown, a vast dial which declines the hour unceasingly to the deserted streets around it.

  ‘Oh, yes! It is slow: it’s about to strike five o’clock,’ she went on. ‘The hands are already in place.’

  Sure enough, one minute later the peal went out, and sent a kind of carolling, flustered nest effect into the air; less a song than a plaint, less a snow of flying feathers than a rain of iron and ash… Then the great bell struck five times, at regular intervals, slow and solemn, and each time it struck the nimbus of melancholy in the silence expanded, as a stone thrown into the waters of a canal makes rings that shimmer outwards until they reach the banks.

  ‘How long it goes on!’ said Van Hulst, falling back among his pillows, wearied from sitting up, even for these few instants, on his bed, to which for weeks now he had been confined by illness.

  He had recently entered upon his convalescence, after the attack of typhoid fever which had laid him low. But at least the accesses of the fever had taken from him the sense of time, prostrating him until he lost consciousness, or exalting him in delirium and nightmares whose melting imagery absorbed him. It was only now, when things had grown calmer, that the days had started to drag, divided into the minutes that he had to live through and, as it were, tell out one by one.

  And movement, occupation of any kind, was forbidden: and no company was to be admitted to the empty house, to this solitary bachelor’s world, crossed only by the silent tread of the old servant, faithful Barbe, who had got him up and seen to his needs, watched over him and restored him with an almost maternal solicitude.

  But she could do nothing now to divert him a little: she could not converse, or try reading aloud. And he felt so alone, a prey to the slow, sad passage of time. Especially in the leaden northern twilight, in this late autumn on the quays of Bruges (he lived on the Quai du Rosaire), where a contagious melancholy came in through the windows, settled on the furniture in pallid tones, afflicted the mirrors with a kind of valedictory light…

  And then there was the impartial little clock in his room, telling out its rosary of minutes without end! During his enforced inaction, empty of event and thought, the patient had little by little become obsessed with the time. He worried about the clock as if it were a living presence. He looked at it like a friend. It made him learn patience. It distracted him with its moving hands and the noise of its workings. It alerted him to the arrival of cheerier moments, when his light meals were served, milk or broth; best of all, to the return of darkness, and with it a good stretch of oblivion, which helped shorten the time. Mesmerizing dial! Other patients use their eyes to count out, mechanically, the number of flowers on the wallpaper or on the cretonne curtains. He engaged in calculations based on the clock. He sought the day when he would be cured, which was already imminent—but still imprecise… He consulted the clock, he checked the time, since often, like today, there was a discrepancy between his timepiece and the ancient clock on the tower. When it pealed, he compared one with the other. It became a small diversion for him, seeking the same time on the two dials, as one might a resemblance beween two faces.

  When Van Hulst was better, he carried over from his sickness this preoccupation with the right time. In a town as calm and circumscribed as his own dead Bruges, the tower can be seen, or at any rate heard, in every district, even as far as the suburbs. So the correct time, the official time, so to speak, was given out by this clock. Elsewhere, time is never more than approximate. Everyone keeps their own, and makes do with it. Van Hulst had set his watch against the dial on the belfry, and through the entire period of his illness had never altered it; now, every time he went out, he would check it, and became almost vexed if he remarked it were slightly fast or a tiny bit behind. His timetable, his meals, when he went to bed, when he got up, always at the same time, were synchronized to the minute.

  ‘Gosh! I’m five minutes slow,’ he would say sometimes, as if dismayed.

  He made sure that his watch and the clocks in his home were always synchronized, not just the little Empire-period clock with the swan’s neck bronzes, but the kitchen clock with its dial decorated in red tulips, which old Barbe would consult for her housework chores.

  One Friday, market day, Van Hulst, who was still convalescing, was out on one of his gentle strolls; he lingered among the stalls in the main square, and noticed a rather strange Flemish clock. It was half-hidden, almost buried, in the miscellaneous chaos covering the pavement. They sell everything at this market: canvas, cotton stuffs, objects in metal, agricultural implements, toys, antiques. A pell-mell patchwork, a turning-out of the centuries. The market is not limited to the stalls, where the sellers display their wares elegantly, underneath pale canvas awnings, shaped into hoods, rather like the winged coifs worn by nuns. Frequently the merchandise is piled or stacked anyhow on the ground, still covered with grey dust, as though issued straight from some inventory, the sale of some missing person’s goods and chattels, brought out of a house long since deserted and closed-up. Everything is old, dusty, oxidized, rusted, faded, and would look plain ugly were it not for the intermittent northern sun, which suddenly lights up patinas, or Rembrandtian russet golds. It was among such ruins, where occasionally a surprise lies hidden—a piece of furniture, an old jewel, some lacework—but of fine workmanship, that Van Hulst found the Flemish clock, which he instantly wanted to possess. It was made up of a long oak case with sculpted panels, warmly coloured by time, in varnishes and sheen; but its most original feature was the dial. Made of copper and pewter, wrought with taste and imagination, a whole playful cosmography was affixed to it, with a laughing sun, a gondola shaped like a crescent moon, stars that browsed with the bodies of lambkins, moving over the numerals as though they wanted to pick them out like flowers in the grass.

  Van Hulst was delighted with this antique clock, which wore its date of birth triumphantly: ‘1700’, incised onto the original metal. But had the mechanism survived, after counting out innumerable years? This was Van Hulst’s chief concern, for he desired it less as an antique curiosity than as one more clock which, old as it was, would synchronize with the young clocks in his house.

  The merchant assured him that the clock worked perfectly, that even the chiming mechanism functioned accurately; in short, that it had never once gone wrong, throughout all its long years of telling the time.