by Terry Hale
Charles Nodier and Gérard de Nerval both wrote curious essays on Cazotte – though, significantly, not until 1836 and 1845 respectively, well after the French vogue for the conte fantastique was under way. More significant still is the adroit manner in which both essayists continually establish the link between Cazotte’s reputed gift of second sight and the bloodshed of the French Revolution. Indeed, it might be said that each of these essays resembles a short tale of terror in which Cazotte’s main function is to provide a background – the real point being to demonstrate that some form of supernatural agency is watching over mankind. This is achieved in a particularly deft manner by Nodier who begins by proclaiming that he has no intention of discussing Cazotte’s famous prediction concerning the French Revolution (which he then in a sense proceeds to discuss by not discussing it), continues by relating a childhood memory of an evening spent in the company of Cazotte (who was a close friend of his father) in the early 1790s, and concludes with the statement that Cazotte was beheaded four months later. As if to emphasise the point, the anecdote which Nodier has Cazotte relate is left unfinished.
Neither essay represents a biographical sketch in any real sense, though Nerval does at least deal in passing with one or two incidents from Cazotte’s early manhood. In fact, Cazotte’s life is of far greater interest than one might expect from reading Nodier or Nerval. As a young man he penned a number of ballads and satirical pieces which earned him admittance to Parisian literary circles; entering the Marine Department of the civil service, he was involved in various naval campaigns; this was followed by two stints as an administrator on the island of Martinique, postings which left his health broken; on his return to France in 1759, he lived in some reclusion, writing and pursuing his interests in occult philosophy. Fascinating though such material may be, it does not suit the rhetorical purpose of either Nodier or Nerval to reveal much of it – both authors largely ignoring the first seventy years or so of their subject’s existence in order to concentrate on the final few months.
The ideological appropriation of Cazotte began some years earlier however with the publication of the posthumous fragment, claimed to be a prophecy uttered by Cazotte in 1788, by Jean-François La Harpe (1739–1803) which is included in this volume. Indeed, La Harpe – who was a dramatist, journalist and literary critic – probably contributed more to keeping Cazotte’s reputation alive than anything he actually wrote or said. The story itself shows every indication of being an example of what are called today urban myths, though there is no reason to suspect that La Harpe did not believe every word of it. But this is the manner of urban myths – the story is always passed on by narrators who are convinced of the truth of what they relate. Just as importantly, urban myths also contain a strong moral message – in this case one expressing a warning about the consequences of political upheaval.12 Given the turmoil of France throughout the nineteenth century, the continued relevance of this warning hardly needs stating.
But the story also suggests the extent to which late eighteenth-century occult beliefs (Cazotte, as has already been hinted, was himself involved with various sects and apparently allowed séances to take place in his house) provided a suitable terrain for the conte fantastique to take root in early nineteenth-century France. Indeed, it is as if some fifty years were required for such notions (which were formerly the preserve of economic and intellectual elites) to percolate through the social system, the process aided and abetted by the innumerable writers who contributed to the development of the fantastique as a literary genre. In fact, there was no shortage of stories and novels dealing with fantastique themes prior to the publication, accompanied by an extremely adroit publicity campaign, of Hoffmann’s works in the late 1820s and early 1830s. A certain vicomte d’Arlincourt, for example, had an unlikely best-seller in 1821 with a novel about a monster who turns out to be Charles the Bold returned from the dead. But in 1830, it was the late E. T. A. Hoffmann who was the literary lion of the moment.
Hoffmann introduced a range of themes, ideas and narrative techniques which served to renew the conte fantastique (the murderer who is unmasked at the end of Madame de Scudery, for example, must surely be one of the first psychopaths in European literature outside the works of de Sade), which then remained in vogue in France, in one form or another, for the next seventy years. Charles Nodier himself led the way with the bloody story of Hélène Gillet, published in 1832 – a work which also serves to demonstrate the fragility of literary taxonomies. Notwithstanding the author’s insistence in the opening paragraphs that Hélène Gillet belongs to the tradition of the fantastique, this story might be classified with equal legitimacy (like the story by Frédéric Soulié which opens this collection) under the frénétique heading. This is hardly surprising perhaps since, as we have already suggested, the frénétique was one of the dominant literary modes of the period.13 Genres also develop by the deliberate blurring of boundaries.
Despite their friendship with Pétrus Borel, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) always remained somewhat sceptical of the frénétique. In the case of Gautier this is exemplified by his ironical remarks about horror writing in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), which remains one of his best loved works to this day, and by the psychedelic stories he wrote under the influence of opium over the course of the next decade or so. Indeed, even The Dead in Love is as much a testimony to his belief in art for art’s sake as a celebration of vampirism. A similar remark would hold true for his last conte fantastique – Mademoiselle Dafné (1866) – which, despite (or because of) its stylistic brilliance, never quite seems to take the Gothic elements entirely seriously.
Gérard de Nerval equally eschewed crude horror in favour of the fantastical. Indeed, even more than in the case of his friend Théophile Gautier, the fantastic was for him not so much a literary convention but a part of everyday reality – so much so that it seems as if the dream world finally crowded out his sanity. Nerval’s first serious mental crisis occurred in 1841 (though, as Gautier noted later, it is probable he was mentally unbalanced long before anyone consciously noted it), followed by renewed attacks in the years leading up to his suicide in 1855. Paradoxically, these final years – including as they do not only such works as Aurélia, which explores the author’s visions, dreams and hallucinations (the final episodes are set in the clinic of Dr Emile Blanche at Passy where Nerval himself was treated), but also a remarkable sonnet sequence, Les chimères – were among his most productive. The Green Devil, which dates from this period, is included here not so much because it is successful as a story in its own terms but for what it reveals about the frightening mental condition of its author.
Perhaps the closest in spirit to E. T. A. Hoffmann, however, was the writing team Erckmann-Chatrian. Celebrated at the time as the authors of a long sequence of historical novels set during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Emile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890) also regularly contributed fantastic tales to the popular press of the epoch. Among the first, and perhaps the most famous, of these is The Burgomaster in the Bottle (1856), in which the authors explore the possibility that the soul of a man buried beneath a vine may be transfused into the wine which it produces.14 Other stories deal with bizarre forms of reverse anthropomorphism (a particularly memorable tale concerns a man who is a reincarnation of a cat and, when in a state of somnambulism, kills for the sake of killing) or seem to anticipate the sort of sensational inventions which would shortly be encountered in the novels of Jules Verne.
The best of Erckmann-Chatrian’s tales also indicate the renewal of interest in the mid-century in such occult phenomenon as reincarnation, hypnosis and spirit communication. The tomb of the man responsible for this, the French spiritualist Allan Kardec (1804–1869), whose seminal work Le Livre des esprits (1856) was an immediate success, still attracts throngs of visitors to the Père-Lachaise cemetery at weekends. Essentially, Kardec believed that the spiritual essence was contin
uously incarnated in human form until finally perfected, at which time it is released from the wheel of karma. Although Kardec did not approve of attempts to physically materialise spirits (though he did encourage automatic writing), a small number of mediums were already active in France by this time. These ideas, or variants upon them, were quickly picked up by other writers, notably Henri Rivière (1827–1883).
Henri Rivière is a somewhat elusive figure. After what appears to be an adventurous life, which possibly included a spell as a mercenary, he settled down and began to turn out fiction, only a small proportion of which is of interest to us here – indeed, just the four collections of stories he produced in a short spell between 1862 and 1866. The Reincarnation of Dr Roger, which is by far his most compelling work, was published in the second of these. The impact of Kardec is apparent in several other works though, notably a story entitled Cain (1866) in which the central character is haunted, mentally and physically, by the memory of a dead man. By the end of the story, the latter has more or less completely possessed him.
The final two writers included under the heading conte fantastique – Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) and Jean Lorrain (1855–1906) – move us forward to the fin-de-siècle. Of the two, Maupassant is far too well-known to require more than the briefest of remarks here. His contemporaries found the ease with which he seemed to compose his fictions disconcerting (he published more than thirty horror stories alone), and predicted that his reputation would not survive. We now know, of course, that this was not the case – indeed, Maupassant is without doubt the most famous writer of short fiction France has ever produced (though in addition to his sixteen volumes of short stories he also wrote six novels and three collections of travel sketches). His horror stories demonstrate the same qualities of simplicity and economy as his other works.
Beneath his robust exterior, Maupassant’s mental and physical health was being slowly eroded by overwork and a dissolute life-style – the last eighteen months of his life were spent in a mental asylum. Some hint of what dissolute living in end-of-the-century Paris involved is given in Jean Lorrain’s second novel, Très Russe (1886), in which the beautiful but extraordinarily sadistic Russian heroine so arranges matters that two men – one of whom rumoured to be based on Maupassant; the other said to be the author – fight a duel to the death for her sexual delectation. Though the story is unlikely to be true (not least because Lorrain’s sexual preferences lay elsewhere), Sonia Livitinof typifies Lorrain’s delight – perhaps encouraged by his addiction to ether – in the creation of bizarre central characters. These include not only Monsieur de Burdhe, the main focal point of One Possessed (1895), a story which celebrates the vampirism of connoiseurship at the same time as running through almost the entire gamut of the fin-de-siècle macabre, but also the remarkable Monsieur de Phocas (1901), the hero of which is clearly based on the author himself.15 Mario Praz said of this last work that although imitative of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it ‘surpasses its model in the intensity of the obsessions it displays.’16 But the same might be said of all Lorrain’s writing – for Lorrain, together with Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, J.-K. Huysmans and one or two others, was among the principal architects of the fin-de-siècle imagination.
Though the French horror story of the nineteenth century may have freely requisitioned ideas gleaned from British, German and American authors, it also adapted and altered those ideas in unpredictable ways. This is the way genres always develop and renew themselves (the debt of the English Gothic novel to eighteenth-century French writing was no less important, for example). Born in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Romantic writers of the 1820s and 30s brought to the genre narrative sophistication and their own set of macabre fears and anxieties concerning such matters as the death penalty, anatomical research, the cholera epidemic, infanticide, and man’s inhumanity to man; the rise of spiritualism in the mid-century presented a fresh collection of moral problematics; finally, the end of the century, especially under the impact of pioneering work in the discipline later to become known as psychology, witnessed a renewed fascination in diabolicism and morbid sexuality. Although the most recent of the stories included in this anthology was written more than ninety years ago, it is hoped that none of them have lost their macabre charm even today.
– Terry Hale
1 Charles Nodier: ‘Critique Littéraire. Le Petit Pierre, traduit de l’allemand, de Spiess’ (1), Annales de la Littérature et des Arts, 1821, No. 16, pp. 77–83, at p. 81.
2 Victor Hugo: Han of Iceland, tr. John Chesterfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1903), I, pp. 171–172. (The translation has been slightly modified.)
3 An English translation of this short piece by Balzac is published in Jules Janin: The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman, ed. Terry Hale (London: The Gothic Society, 1993).
4 An English edition was published by Dedalus in 1988.
5 Translated by Terry Hale (London: Atlas Press, 1991).
6 The best of these stories have recently been made available elsewhere. The Marquis de Sade: The Gothic Tales (London: Peter Owen, 1965; reissued 1990); Crimes of Love (London: Peter Owen, 1996). In both cases the translator is Margaret Crossland.
7 ‘Idée sur les romans’ (1800), in Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Pauvert, 1988), Vol. X, pp. 70–71. This same passage is quoted by Sade’s critic, Villeterque, in his 1800 review mentioned above.
8 The New Justine concerns two sisters, Justine and Juliette, who are expelled from their convent school on the bankruptcy and death of their father. Whereas Juliette employs her natural charms to become wealthy and powerful, Justine’s profound reluctance to engage in vice leads to her unrelenting persecution. For reader’s unfamiliar with Sade, it was tempting to include an extract from The New Justine here – the episode, for example, in which Justine is mechanically tortured, a passage which surely receives greater emphasis in the 1797 edition following the widespread guillotinings during the Terror, is particularly grisly. However, although strict censorship laws in Britain prevented the importation even of severely bowdlerised American translations of Sade’s work until 1983, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse’s excellent 1965 translation is now commonly available: Justine (London: Arrow, 1991).
9 Charles Baudelaire: Edgar Allan Poe: Histoires extraordinaires (1856; rept. Paris: Bookking International, 1996), p. 29.
10 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 153.
11 A modern translation, by Judith Lantry, was published by Dedalus in 1991.
12 Another example of a conte fantastique which almost certainly started out as an urban myth is that of the German student who befriends the woman of his dreams by the side of the guillotine (the story occurs during the Terror), takes her home, and in the morning goes out to find a larger apartment. When he returns, she is dead. The officer who investigates the case recognises her as one of the victims of the guillotine from the previous day, which is confirmed when he undoes the velvet band she wears round her neck. Washington Irving, the first to recount this tale in 1824, no doubt acquired it during his travels; Pétrus Borel, who took it from Irving, published a version in 1843; while Alexandre Dumas, who turned it into a novel in 1850, wrongly credited Hoffmann, who did indeed visit Paris during the Terror, as his source.
13 Although Charles Nodier (1780–1844) was one of the major figures of French Romanticism, as the number of occasions on which his name has occurred in this introduction might suggest, he tends to remain an unfamiliar figure to British and American readers. Two of his finest stories, Smarra and Trilby, were published in a new translation by Judith Landry by Dedalus in 1993.
14 A fascinating account of how this story was appropriated by the Italian writer I. U. Tarchetti is given by Lawrence Venuti in his introduction to the former’s Fantastic Tales (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992).
15 A translation by Francis Amery of Monsieur de Phocas was published by Dedal
us in 1994.
16 Mario Praz, p. 354.
Frenetic Tales
The Lamp of Saint Just
Frédéric Soulié
No more than a century ago, in the church of Saint Just at Narbonne, in the centre of the chapel situated to the right of the tomb of Philip the Bold, there burned night and day a magnificent silver lamp. This lamp was perpetually fuelled with aromatic oil, which must have been of pure olive. The care of this lamp was not entrusted to the coarse hands of the vergers and their servants; a young abbot was usually appointed to the task of keeping it clean and bright. This magnificent lamp was stolen about the year 1734, and was replaced by a candle that had similarly to be kept continuously lit; but the candle did not compel the adoration of the faithful as did the precious lamp, and it disappeared completely about the year 1750. There are however still some old men who recall having seen it, and who have spoken to me of it. This is what I have been able to ascertain about the origin and the establishment of this lamp.
On 12 February 1347, around midnight, a young knight of no more than nineteen, escorted by four men at arms on horseback bearing broadswords, stopped at the door of Lubiano Marrechi, a Lombardy Italian who was a merchant trading in the town of Narbonne. Since the door did not open at the first knock, the men at arms made ready to break it down, but without further ado the key turned in the lock, and the knight and his men entered a dimly-lit room. The door had been opened to them by a little old man of a not unusual aspect, having, like all those of his profession, a pair of keen, mistrustful eyes. It was as if he wanted to study at one and the same time every face and every hand in order to see deep into the former and keep check on the latter. Just as the men at arms came in through the street door, a young girl en déshabille rushed out of the door opposite and ran up to the knight, throwing herself upon his neck with a cry of joy as she said: