French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
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Godeliève: by choosing this name Rodenbach further charges his story with medieval legend. Born near Bruges, St Godeliève (c.1049–70), patroness of unhappy spouses, especially of women abused by their husbands, was a beautiful girl who desired to become a nun. Feeling obliged to marry, for the sake of her parents, she suffered torments at the hands of her spouse, one Bertolf, who in the end had her strangled and thrown into a well. He consequently repented and entered a monastery near Rome. Godeliève was known to be highly gifted with needle and thread, a trait Rodenbach retains in his story, along with her saintly, ascetic appearance and her apparently ‘immortal longings’.
Memling Madonna: Hans Memling (c.1430–94), German-born painter who moved to Flanders. He is thought to have resided in Bruges in 1473.
REMY DE GOURMONT
All four stories were collected in Histoires magiques et autres récits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894).
Danaette
[title]: Gourmont’s allusion here is clearly to the Danae of Greek mythology, a princess of Argos, who was impregnated by Zeus when he visited her in the form of a shower of gold.
The Faun
Arlette … Robert le Diable: the mother and father of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard, since Robert le Magnifique (called Le Diable) kept Arlette as his concubine and never married her.
with a pointed beard: the appearance and behaviour of Gourmont’s faun here resembles the satyr of Félicien Rops, in his etching ‘Satyriasis’.
Don Juan’s Secret
[epigraph]: ‘such things are vain dreams’; the expression is also to be found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.
On the Threshold
the gallows name: fourches patibulaires was the name given to the gibbets that were once a familiar sight in the French countryside.
German metaphysicals: among them, most probably, Schopenhauer, who proposed a neo-Buddhist form of detachment in the face of absurdity and desire.
JULES LAFORGUE
Perseus and Andromeda
The story was collected in the posthumous publication of Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires (Paris: Éditions de la Revue Indépendante, 1887).
[title]: in Greek mythology, Andromeda was chained to a rock to assuage the fury of Poseidon, aroused by the hubris of Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia. The sea-monster Cetus kept guard over her. Returning from slaying the Gorgon Medusa, Perseus slew Cetus and rescued Andromeda, and then married her. Andromeda was placed among the constellations, alongside Perseus and Cassiopeia.
ineffable fit of the sulks: the monotonous island is really a physical analogy for Schopenhauer’s absurd universe. Laforgue was a devoted student of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
how bored I am!: Andromeda’s bored, disenchanted, and yet histrionic tone here is typical of Laforgue’s persona in many of the Moralités légendaires and the poems that make up Les Complaintes. It is an ironic variant of Baudelairean spleen.
daughter of the king of Ethiopia: Andromeda was a princess of Ethiopia, her mother, Cassiopeia, was queen.
Catoblepas: ‘In ancient authors, some African animal, perhaps a species of buffalo, or the gnu, a species of antelope’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary). ‘Now made the name of a genus including the Gnu’ (OED).
Pyramus and Thisbe: the Babylonian tale of star-crossed lovers, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and retold in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, renowned for his concept of the indivisible substance of Being, known as pantheism, and frequently viewed as a type of atheism. He made his living as a lens-grinder.
The Truth About Everything: the Monster’s philosophy lesson that Andromeda has absorbed like a kind of bedtime story is steeped in Schopenhauer and in the jargon of Edvard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) was one of the first works to posit the existence of an impersonal, psychic unconscious that creates and drives the world.
Bellerophon … Chimaera: ancient Homeric legend. Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, was set tasks intended to kill him, such as slaying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing monster, ‘lion in front, serpent behind, goat in the middle’.
Garden of the Hesperides: the garden at the world’s end in the far west, which contained a tree of golden apples, guarded by the Hesperides, the ‘daughters of the evening’, with the help of a dragon.
Pillars of Hercules: the two mountains on either side of the western entrance to the Mediterranean.
Cadmus: in Greek mythology, the son of King Agenor, brother of Europa, and founder of Thebes.
Phrixus and his sister Helle: children of Athamas, victims of their stepmother Ino’s jealousy. About to be sacrificed, they escaped on the back of a ram sent by Hermes or Zeus. Helle fell off into the sea, thereafter called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached Colchis on the Black Sea and sacrificed the ram to Zeus. Its fleece was later captured by Jason and the Argonauts.
Eteocles and Polynices, and pious Antigone: warring Theban brothers, and Antigone, their sister, whose loyalty to family over raison d’état is the subject of the tragedy by Sophocles.
Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal: the abrupt change of scene at the end of Laforgue’s retelling of the legend is enigmatic. The little dialogue between Monsieur Amyot de l’Épinal (whose name Laforgue may have chosen as a kind of ironic conflation of the French Renaissance translator of Plutarch, Jacques Amyot, and the ‘Images d’Épinal’, or popular prints of religious and fairy-tale subjects) and the Princess of U… E… serves to heighten further the urbanity of tone used throughout the tale, and to foreground its existence as pastiche. Laforgue may have borrowed the setting from Nuits espagnoles (1854), a collection of stories by Méry (Eugène Didier), in which a group of socialites gather one night in a castle on the heights of Granada, tell stories, and apostrophize the constellations.
Lohengrin and Parsifal: heroes of the Grail Quest in the Germanic tradition, and of Wagnerian opera.
MARCEL SCHWOB
‘The Brothel’ was collected in Marcel Schwob, Oeuvres, ed. Sylvain Goudemare (Paris: Phébus libretto, 2002). ‘The Sans-Gueule’ was collected in Coeur double (Paris: Ollendorff, 1891); ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ in Le Roi au masque d’or; ‘Lucretius, Poet’ and ‘Paolo Uccello, Painter’ in Vies imaginaires (Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1896).
The Brothel
‘May The Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’: inscription seen on doors during times of the Black Death, along with the sign of the Cross.
Morgiana … brigand: Schwob is alluding to an episode in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, collected in the Thousand and One Nights.
The Sans-Gueule
[title]: literally, ‘the faceless ones’. I have retained the French, partly because there is no English equivalent as piquant, and also because Schwob’s story so hauntingly prefigures the gueules-cassées—the name given to soldiers whose faces were horribly disfigured in the First World War. Schwob may be thinking of an episode from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Lucretius, Poet
Schwob’s account of the life of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, c.99–55 BCE) depends heavily on the very few sources available, which are in any case probably corrupt (notably the story, told by St Jerome, that the poet died after quaffing down a love potion). Certainly Lucretius addressed his great poem, the De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), to his friend Gaius Memmius, ostensibly to assuage the latter’s fear of death by denying the afterlife, and belittling the role of the supernatural in human affairs. The poem is based on the beliefs of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE), a materialist who considered the universe to be an infinite and eternal dance of atoms that cluster together and then break apart. There is no afterlife, and the aim of this life is to attain a state of ataraxia, or stress-free tranquillity.
Paolo Uccello, Painter
Vasari: Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), Tuscan painter and architect, whos
e celebrated biographies of the Renaissance artists, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), supplies the inspiration and some of the incidental detail for Schwob’s account of Uccello (1397–1475). The painters, sculptors, and architects of the quattrocento that Schwob introduces into his text—Ghiberti, della Robbia, Brunelleschi, Donatello—were all contemporaries of Uccello’s, whose lives Vasari also describes in his book.
Giovanni Manetti: presumably Schwob means Antonio Manetto (1423–97), a Florentine mathematician who, according to Vasari, taught Uccello geometry and the principles of perspective. He also wrote a biography of Brunelleschi.
Selvaggia: Vasari notes merely that Uccello had a wife, who commented on her husband’s obsession with perspective. He would spend all night trying to find the vanishing-point, and when his wife called him to come to bed he would reply that perspective was a lovely thing. He also left a daughter, Antonia, who had some knowledge of drawing, and became a Carmelite nun. The details concerning Selvaggia therefore seem to be Schwob’s invention.
PIERRE LOUŸS
A Case Without Precedent
Collected in Archipel (Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1906).
Gazette des tribunaux … Dalloz: French legal publications. La Gazette des tribunaux was founded in 1777, and taken over by La Gazette du palais in 1935. Dalloz, a legal publishing firm, founded by Désiré Dalloz in 1845, exists to this day.
Argus’s hundred eyes: in classical mythology, Argus is the Latinized form of the Greek Argos ‘Panoptes’, the all-seeing. He was a giant, and guardian of the heifer-nymph Io.
Janus: the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions; he looks two ways, into the past and the future.
Cerberus: the three-headed dog of classical mythology, that guards the entrance to the underworld.
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A SELECTION OF
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Cousin Bette
Eugénie Grandet
Père Goriot
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The Flowers of Evil
The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
Adolphe
DENIS DIDEROT
Jacques the Fatalist
The Nun
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (PÈRE)
The Black Tulip
The Count of Monte Cristo
Louise de la Vallière
The Man in the Iron Mask
La Reine Margot
The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years After
The Vicomte de Bragelonne
A LEXANDRE DUMAS (FILS)
La Dame aux Camélias
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
A Sentimental Education
Three Tales
VICTOR HUGO
The Essential Victor Hugo
Notre-Dame de Paris
J.-K. HUYSMANS
Against Nature
PIERRE CHODERLOS
Les Liaisons dangereuses
DE LACLOS
MME DE LAFAYETTE
The Princesse de Clèves
GUILLAUME DU LORRIS and JEAN DE MEUN
The Romance of the Rose
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A Day in the Country and Other Stories
A Life
Bel-Ami
Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories
Pierre et Jean
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
Carmen and Other Stories
MOLIÈRE
Don Juan and Other Plays
The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays
BLAISE PASCAL
Pensées and Other Writings
ABBÉ PRÉVOST
Manon Lescaut
JEAN RACINE
Britannicus, Phaedra, and Athaliah
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Collected Poems
EDMOND ROSTAND
Cyrano de Bergerac
MARQUIS DE SADE
The Crimes of Love
The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales
GEORGE SAND
Indiana
MME DE STAËL
Corinne
STENDHAL
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
PAUL VERLAINE
Selected Poems
JULES VERNE
Around the World in Eighty Days
Captain Hatteras
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas
VOLTAIRE
Candide and Other Stories
Letters concerning the English Nation
ÉMILE ZOLA
L’Assommoir
The Attack on the Mill
La Bête humaine
La Débâcle
Germinal
The Kill
The Ladies’ Paradise
The Masterpiece
Nana
Pot Luck
Thérèse Raquin
Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas
The Kalevala
The Poetic Edda
LUDOVICO ARIOSTO
Orlando Furioso
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
The Decameron
GEORG BÜCHNER
Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck
LUIS VAZ DE CAMÕES
The Lusiads
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Exemplary Stories
CARLO COLLODI
The Adventures of Pinocchio
DANTE ALIGHIERI
The Divine Comedy
Vita Nuova
LOPE DE VEGA
Three Major Plays
J. W. VON GOETHE
Elective Affinities
Erotic Poems
Faust: Part One and Part Two
The Flight to Italy
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
Selected Tales
E. T. A. HOFFMANN
The Golden Pot and Other Tales
HENRIK IBSEN
An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm
Four Major Plays
&nb
sp; Peer Gynt
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Selections from the Notebooks
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Four Major Plays
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
Life, Letters, and Poetry
PETRARCH
Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
J. C. F. SCHILLER
Don Carlos and Mary Stuart
JOHANN AUGUST STRINDBERG
Miss Julie and Other Plays
1 Quoted in Guy Ducrey (ed.), Romans fin-de-siècle, 1890–1900 (Paris: Laffont 1999), p. xxvi.
2 The definition is by Tzvétan Todorov, quoted in Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, ed. Alain Géraudelle (Paris: Hachette, 2006), 208–9.
3 See Remy de Gourmont, ‘Stéphane Mallarmé et l’idée de décadence’, in La Culture des idées, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1983), 119–37.
4 J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours (Paris: Gallimard, collection Folio, 1983), 98.
5 See Marc Fumaroli’s preface to J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours, 26.
6 See Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 668.
7 Eliot uses the term in his essay ‘The Metaphysicals’ (1921); but he draws on Gourmont’s seminal essay ‘La Dissociation des idées’ (1899), in La culture des idées, 81–116.