French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  The day came when the head doctor came round, causing a stir of excitement. He stopped in front of no. 52 and said aloud to the nurses: ‘This one will change wards.’ Astonished, 52 asked: ‘But why, doctor?’ The doctor replied, as he continued on his round: ‘Your companions will inform you.’

  No sooner had he left the ward than the concert began. Breathless whistles and catcalls came from everywhere, followed by raucous coughing. Some of the old women drooled with pleasure. Others beat their sheets in a paroxysm of laughter. And no. 53, who had raised herself right up, waved her pipe about and screamed: ‘Why, my lambkin? Because we have petitioned against you. The whole ward. Your bloodied eye is just too disgusting. It puts us off our food.’

  And in a raucous, rasping, husky chorus the whole ward of invalids cried out: ‘Yes, yes, your eye is disgusting!’

  Stupefied, 52 lay back on her pillow. To her left, a woman whose eye-muscles were paralysed, wagged her head from side to side and up and down, observing her discomfort beadily, like a parrot. To her right was an old woman with the shakes, whose jaws clacked frenetically, open and shut. Her face was smooth and mask-like; unceasingly, with her fingers she rolled imaginary cigarettes on her coverlet.

  Lucretius, Poet

  LUCRETIUS was born into a grand family that had long since withdrawn from public life. His early days were lived in the shadow of the black porch fronting a tall house built on a mountainside. The atrium was severe and the slaves silent. Since his childhood he had been nourished with a contempt for politics and men. The noble Memmius, who was the same age, suffered the games that Lucretius imposed on him when they played in the forest. The two of them marvelled at the deeply wrinkled bark of old trees, and at leaves quivering in the sun like a green veil streaked with light. They mused on the striped backs of the wild piglets which snuffled the earth. They passed through swarming streams of bees and moving columns of ants on the march. One day they broke through from a thicket into a clearing completely surrounded by cork-oaks, which were growing in a circle so densely packed together it seemed like a well sunk into the blue sky. The place was infinitely restful. As though they were on a clear, wide road that led to the rarefied air of the divine. Lucretius was touched there by the blessing of calm spaces.

  Accompanied by Memmius, he left the serene temple of the forest to study eloquence at Rome. The aged gentleman who ruled over the tall house found him a tutor to teach him Greek, and enjoined him not to return until he had learned the art of despising the world and all its ways. Lucretius never saw him again. He died alone, railing against the tumult of society. When Lucretius returned, he brought with him into the tall empty house, under the severe atrium among the silent slaves, an African woman who was beautiful, barbarian, and perverse. Memmius had returned to the paternal home. Lucretius had witnessed bloody factions, feuding parties, and political corruption. He was in love.

  At first his life was an enchantment. Against the wall-tapestries the African female pressed her tangled mass of hair. Her languid body married with its full length the contour of every couch. She held mixing-bowls full of foaming wine, with her arms encrusted in translucent emeralds. She had a strange way of lifting one finger and shaking her head. Her smiles had their deep source in the rivers of Africa. Instead of spinning, she would shred the wool patiently into tiny flecks that floated round about her.

  Lucretius wanted nothing more ardently than to melt into that beautiful body. He squeezed her metallic hands and placed his lips against her dark, scarlet mouth. The words of love were exchanged and sighed out; they made them laugh and became worn out. The pair of them brushed against the supple and opaque veil that separates lovers. Their desire grew ever fiercer and sought to become the other. It reached an inflamed extremity that is released over the flesh rather than deep in the entrails. The African withdrew into her remote heart. Lucretius grew desperate at being unable to consummate his love. The woman grew haughty, grim and silent, like the atrium and the slaves. He wandered into the library.

  It was there that he unfolded the scroll on which a scribe had copied out the treatise of Epicurus.

  No sooner had he done so than he understood the huge variety of things in this world, and the futility of trying to turn them into ideas. The universe seemed to him similar to the little flecks of wool the African scattered through his halls. The bees in their clusters and the ants in their columns and the leaves in their moving tissue were like groups and sub-groups of atoms. And within his own body he felt an invisible mutinous people, eager to fly apart. The gaze seemed to him to be more subtly embodied rays, and the image of the beautiful barbarian was now a pleasant and colourful mosaic; he felt the end of this infinity of movement to be sad and vain.

  He viewed the bloodied factions of Rome, with their armed and insulting partisans and claimants, as analogous to the swirling of troops of atoms dyed with the same blood, fighting for some obscure supremacy. And he understood that the dissolution that comes with death was nothing other than the releasing of this turbulent mass that rushes on to a thousand further futile movements.

  So when Lucretius had received instruction from the scroll of papyrus, on which the Greek words were interwoven with each other like the atoms of the world, he went out into the forest through the black porch of the tall ancestral house. He saw the stripy backs of the piglets, with their snouts still snuffling at the ground. Next, slashing through the thicket, he was once more in the middle of the serene temple in the forest, and his eyes plunged into the blue well of the sky. And it was there that he placed his repose.

  From there he contemplated the teeming immensity of the universe; all the stones, all the plants, all the trees, all the animals, and every single man, in all his colour, with all his passions and his instruments, and the history of the most diverse things, and their birth, their diseases, and their death. And as part of all-encompassing and necessary death, he perceived the individual death of his African bride. And he wept.

  He knew that tears spring from a special movement of little glands underneath the eyelids, and that they are caused by a procession of atoms arriving from the heart, and that the heart in turn has been struck by a succession of coloured images emanating from the surface of the body of the beloved woman. He knew that love was caused by nothing more than the swelling of atoms which desire to join with other atoms. He knew that grief at the death of a loved one is the worst of all earthly illusions, because the dead person has ceased to be unhappy and to suffer, while he who is left to mourn does no more than afflict himself with his own miseries and dream darkly of his own death. He knew that there remained of us no simulacrum to shed tears for our own corpse laid out at our feet. And yet, for all his close knowledge of grief, and love and death—that they are but vain images when contemplated from the calm space where he would seal himself off—he continued nevertheless to weep, and to desire love and to fear death.

  Which is why, on returning to the tall and gloomy ancestral house, he went up to the beautiful African, who was brewing something up in a metal pot on the fire. For she too had been thinking, and her thoughts had joined the deep source of her smile. Lucretius looked at the boiling liquid on the brazier. He lightened bit by bit and became like a green turbulent sky. And the beautiful African shook her head and lifted her finger. Then Lucretius drank off the potion. No sooner had he done so than he lost his reason, and he forgot the Greek words on the scroll of papyrus. And for the first time, because he was mad, he knew love. And in the night, having been poisoned, he knew death.

  Paolo Uccello, Painter

  HIS real name was Paolo di Dono; but the Florentines called him Uccelli, or Paul of the Birds, because of the numberless painted birds and beasts that filled his house; for he was too poor to feed animals or procure those he did not know. It was even said of him that at Padua, commissioned to paint the four elements, he painted a chameleon as the attribute of the air. But since he had never seen one, he represented the creature as a large-bellied camel with a gapi
ng mouth. (Now, as Vasari* explains, the chameleon is in fact small, dry, and lizard-like, not a great gangling beast like the camel.) The truth was that Uccello cared nothing for the reality of things, but only for their multiplicity and the infinite lines and angles that form them; so he painted blue fields, red cities, knights in black armour on ebony horses with mouths aflame, and spears bristling skywards in every direction like rays of light. And he used to draw in mazocchi, which are those wooden circles covered with cloth and placed on the head, so that the folds of the cloth hang down and frame the face. Uccello made them pointed, square, multifaceted, pyramid, or cone-shaped, in strict accordance with the dictates of perspective, so much so that he found an entire world of permutations in the folds of the mazocchio. The sculptor Donatello would say to him: ‘Ah, Paolo, you are neglecting substance for shadow!’

  But the Bird went on with his painstaking work, and he assembled his circles and he calculated his angles and he examined every creature in all of its aspects. He sought help with Euclidian problems from his friend the mathematician Giovanni Manetti.* Then he would shut himself away and cover his parchments and boards with the trajectories of curves. He devoted himself to the study of architecture, aided by Filippo Brunelleschi: but he had no intention of applying his knowledge to building. He limited himself to examining the network of lines, from base to cornice, the intersections of right-angles, how fan-vaulting converged at the keystone, and the foreshortening of ceiling beams that seemed to join together at the far end of long galleries. He made drawings of every creature in all its movements, and of the human figure in its every attitude, intent on reducing them to their simplest lines.

  Next, like the alchemist who pores over alloys of metal and organs and who observes their fusion in the furnace to extract gold, Uccello poured every form into the crucible of forms. He gathered them in, combined them, and melted them down, with the aim of obtaining their transmutation into the source-form from which all the others derived. It is for this reason that Paolo Uccello lived like an alchemist in the depths of his little house. He believed that he could transform all lines into a single ideal perspective. He sought to conceive of the created universe as it might be seen by the eye of God, who sees all forms issuing from a single complex centre. Around him lived Ghiberti, della Robbia, Brunelleschi, Donatello—each of them the proud master of his art; and they mocked Uccello for his obsession with perspective, and for his poor house with its cobwebs and empty larder. But Uccello was prouder still. With every fresh combination of lines, he hoped to have discovered the secret of creating. His aim lay not in imitating the thing, but in developing the sovereign potential to extrapolate all things, and the strange series of folded hoods was more of a revelation to him than the magnificent marble figures sculpted by the great Donatello.

  So lived the Bird, and his thoughtful head was shrouded in his cloak; he noticed nothing of what he ate or drank, but lived exactly like a hermit. So it was that one day, in an open field, near a circle of old stones half-hidden by the grass, he noticed a laughing girl, who was wearing a garland on her head. She had on a delicate long dress, drawn in at the waist by a pale ribbon; her movements were as supple as the curves she was tracing. Her name was Selvaggia,* and she smiled at Uccello. He remarked the movement of her smile. And when she looked at him, he saw the little lines of her lashes, and the circles of her pupils, and the curve of her eyelids, and the subtle folds of her hair, and in his mind’s eye he tilted the garland on her head into a multitude of positions. But Selvaggia knew nothing of all this, for she was only thirteen years old. She took Uccello by the hand, and loved him. She was the daughter of a Florentine dyer, and her mother was dead. Another woman had come to live in the house, and she had beaten Selvaggia. Uccello brought her home with him.

  Selvaggia would spend the whole day squatting in front of the wall on which Uccello drew his universal forms. She never understood why he preferred his curves and right-angles, to the tender face lifted towards his own. In the evening, when Brunelleschi or Manetti came by to study with him, she would go to sleep at the foot of the intersecting angles, after midnight, in the shadowy circle cast by the lamp. In the morning, she would wake before Uccello, and it would be a delight, because she would be surrounded by the colourfully painted beasts and birds. Uccello drew her lips, her eyes, her hair, her hands, and he captured her body in every attitude; but he never once did her portrait, unlike the other painters when they loved a woman. Because the Bird did not know the joy of depicting one individual: he never stayed put. He wanted to soar, in full flight, over everything. And all Selvaggia’s forms and attitudes were thrown into the crucible of forms, along with the movements of animals, the outlines of plants and stones, the rays of the light, and the wave-patterns made by terrestrial vapours, and by the waves of the sea. Uccello did not think of Selvaggia, but remained eternally bent over his crucible of forms.

  But there was nothing whatever to eat in the house of Uccello. Selvaggia dared not say anything to Donatello or the others. She said nothing, and died. Uccello drew her body as it stiffened, and her thin little hands joined together, and the shape of her poor eyes, now closed. He did not know that she was dead, any more than he had known she was alive. But he added these new forms to all the others he had assembled.

  The Bird grew old, and no one could understand his paintings. There was nothing but an entanglement of curves. There was nothing of the earth—no plants, no animals, no men. For many long years he worked on his supreme masterpiece, which he showed to no one. It was to be the fruit of all his researches, and in his view it was the very image of them. It represented Doubting Thomas, putting his fingers into the wound of Christ. Uccello completed the painting in his eightieth year. He had Donatello come, and he piously unveiled his painting. Donatello exclaimed: ‘O Paolo, cover your painting up again!’ The Bird enquired of the great sculptor what he meant: but Donatello would say nothing more. And so Uccello knew he had accomplished a miracle. But all Donatello had seen was a chaos of lines.

  Some years later Uccello was found dead on his pallet. His face was radiant with wrinkles. His open eyes were fixed upon the mystery revealed. Tightly clasped in his hand was a little parchment in the form of a circle, covered with intersecting lines, which went from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference back to the centre.

  PIERRE LOUŸS

  A Case Without Precedent

  THE library belonging to Monsieur le Président Barbeville of the bench was his haven of delight. He called it: my bachelor’s den.

  Every morning, while still in his dressing-gown, he would ascend. Having abandoned his chambers, where he had nothing to do since his retirement from the bench, Monsieur le Président Barbeville, still spry, would climb a little spiral staircase made of stone which led up to the top floor, and he would never open the door without a smile of pleasure.

  His treasured books were lit up by a vast glow of greenery. One could see, through the small panes of a large Louis XIV window, the trembling of fresh new leaves. Two chestnuts, whose tops stood taller than the roof of the old red town-house, created a barrier of foliage the sun could not penetrate. But they cast upon the floor a light and moving shadow which imparted an almost pastoral air to the hermit’s cell.

  Enthroned in a large armchair-cum-desk, based on a model belonging to the Duc d’Aumale, the excellent Monsieur Barbeville would place his spittoon to the left, his cigarette-holder to the right, and his book directly before him.

  He had a passion for books. It was almost the only passion that the law courts afforded him, though he was still entirely capable of enjoying many others, and even, at remote intervals, did so. But experiences of that kind gradually became, if not exactly difficult, then increasingly imprudent; and to reassure his doctor, these days he would more often open an old book than a young blouse.

  One morning, as he was reaching the end of a curious pamphlet he had acquired the day before, his doctor paid him a friendly visit.

 
; ‘My dear fellow, what excellent timing,’ said the old man with warmth. ‘I have a question for you, and top marks to you if you reply correctly. I’ve found a point of precedence which would have stumped me, had I not just read about it.’

  ‘Oh, I give up already!’

  ‘Wait. It concerns marriage, and even though it turns on a point of law, it also concerns medicine, as you shall understand in a moment. I have never seen or read anything quite so extraordinary. For fifty-two years I have subscribed to the Gazette des tribunaux and to the supplements to Dalloz;* I myself have heard thousands of cases; I have been regaled with the strangest judicial cases of our time; but nothing quite like this. You find me dumbfounded.’

  Monsieur le Président Barbeville settled more deeply into his armchair, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dressing-gown, and slowly formulated the following question, articulating each term with clarity and precision:

  ‘How can an ordinary marriage agreement, made with the full consent of both parties, involve, by immediate and ineluctable necessity, on the part of one of the parties and with the other acting as accomplice, the crimes of kidnap, false imprisonment, procuring, exhibitionism, multiple rape, incest, adultery, and polygamy?’

  Stunned at first by the list, the doctor then burst out laughing.

  ‘Take note,’ went on Barbeville, ‘take note of what I said: by immediate and ineluctable necessity. These facts are neither successive in time nor due to the initiative of one of the spouses. At the very instant the legal consummation of the marriage takes place, all these crimes are perpetrated at once! and neither of the spouses can prevent this being the case, unless they renounce their union.’

  The judge’s friend pondered for a while, and then asked:

  ‘Is it a fairy-tale?’

  ‘Not at all. Nothing could be more authentic. The case is possible, probable, and true. I shall go further: if the case is to my knowledge unique, there must obviously have been precedents in the past, and it will come up again in the future, I have not a moment’s doubt. The girl’s situation is not, in fact, unique, and nothing is the fault of the fiancé: any man in his place would have undergone the same ordeals.