The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  He had, they say, brought back from that baleful East, from the souks of Tunis and the caravanserais of Smyrna, an entire treasury of ancient jewels, precious carpets and rare weapons; but I was never allowed in to view these marvels, and on the few occasions when I went to his house, he received me in a room akin to a small parlour, with a very high ceiling and panelled throughout in white wood; some Debucourt1 engravings and two or three licentious etchings had the effect of freezing this starkly libertine and coldly frivolous atmosphere forever in the last century.

  I was not to penetrate the mystery of this bizarre interior with its orientalism and antiquarianism until many years later, eighteen months after the demolition of the old family hôtel, when the property was taken over under compulsory purchase and de Burdhe came to live in the area of the Champ-de-Mars, in the then so gloomy and now noisy avenue de La Bourdonnais, all white with masonry and blocks of apartments to rent. There, at the end of a little garden, in conditions resembling those of the Sainte-Radegonde hôtel, he had found a small detached house long without a tenant and whose abandoned look had charmed him almost at once. It was a small edifice dating from 1840, in a poor Louis XV style, its roofs guilloched with skylights and its plaster wreaths crumbling in a small suburban garden where only sunflowers grew, around it a hundred metres of enclosure and waste ground. It was this solitude which had decided him.

  He moved at the height of the summer, taking advantage of an empty Paris to transport his strange household contents with the greatest ease. In October, on my return from Germany I found him settled in, but the door of this new home was opened no wider than that of the previous one. On the contrary, de Burdhe struck me as more reticent, more stubbornly silent than ever. He had replaced his old valet with a big mournful-faced fellow of the seminarist type, of dubious demeanour, with the quick, darting little eyes of a Paris thug; aberrant iris blooms now replaced the sunflowers, and two crazed porcelain chimerae in a washed-out bluish green stood guard at the top of the front steps; these were the only changes noticeable from the outside. De Burdhe now fought against his terrible need for sleep by tramping about wildly, on out and out forced marches prolonged late into the night through the city’s avenues or along the riverbanks of this deserted district; in vain had I reminded him of the dangers of these nocturnal walks: ‘I have seen plenty of those in the East,’ he would answer with a shrug; ‘nothing can happen to me, nothing; and the fact is I like the look of cut-throat types, the modern frightfulness of those wide avenues.’ And, his eyes faintly sparkling, there would then be an almost loving description of some wanly glowing streetlamp, a shady street corner or a stationary cab halted on a verge and reflected in the water; but he would stop abruptly as if he had said too much, and nothing was more sadly eloquent than these sudden silences. De Burdhe was passionately fond of the night. Did it come about that on one of these perilous outings de Burdhe fell victim to some prowler’s assault? Or was it that his new servant plotted with anonymous assassins and opened the house on the avenue de La Bourdonnais to them? But the mystery which shrouded his whole life became even thicker around his death. This was a tragic and enigmatic end, with a simultaneous whiff of crime and the supernatural; and on the December morning when that unpleasant sacristan’s face, which I could not tolerate, appeared at my house, quite distraught, to tell me that something had happened to monsieur, begging me to come at once, I had an immediate foreboding that I was going to encounter some appalling thing at close quarters. I took only the time to leap out of bed and dress, then I followed this man.

  There was no disarray in the first two rooms we passed through. The same cold parlour as in the Sainte-Radegonde hôtel, this time hung with an English wallpaper supplied by Morice; then a dining room whose walls were painted, its only ornament some large porcelain peacocks. The third room was worthy of attention, and the servant had stopped on the threshold; an old Louis XIV tapestry was hung all around it: this showed, in a colonnaded and terraced garden, warriors dressed in Roman costume with goddesses wearing the decorated tunics of the time, but a strange discolouration had blackened the faces and the flesh, oddly lightening the fabric, so much that on the reddened sky, in the midst of the blue-grey water of fountains, there were no longer nymphs and gods, but demons with the faces of negroes who stared out with their white eyes. A very low, very wide bed spread its gold-flower-patterned mauve silk curtains almost floor length, a monstrous Buddha stood guard at the foot and a tall Empire cheval mirror reflected it back. The bed was still undisturbed, and in the air thick with incense and benzoin a Turkish night lamp burned. The mute servant lifted back a hanging.

  There, in a recess all draped with oriental silks, on a tumble of cushions lay de Burdhe, already stiff; he was in evening dress with a huge white iris in his buttonhole; he had fallen backwards, his knees raised above his torso, and his bloodless head, the nostrils already pinched, had rolled to one side, emphasising the line of the jawbone and the Adam’s apple. The fall must have been violent, and yet his clothes were quite uncrumpled; his shirtfront was only slightly open. One of his clenched hands gripped the silver chain of a superb thurible. Not a drop of blood: just, on the neck, on that part where the flesh is softest and whitest, a purple bruise turning a yellowish brown, like a bite or the suction of a long slow kiss.

  The fragrance of the adjacent room was heavy around the corpse, clinging even more strongly; here it was compounded by smells of pepper and sandalwood, as some bluish smoke still rose from the thurible. In the midst of what practice, the rites of what unknown religion had death surprised de Burdhe? A huge spray of black irises and anthuriums reared malevolently out of a silver vase, and upon a manner of small Hindu altar, cluttered with ciboria and glass tulips, loomed a strange statuette, some kind of androgynous goddess with thin arms, full torso and tapering hips, fiendish and charming, in pure black onyx; she was totally naked. Two encrusted emeralds shone under her eyelids; but between her slender thighs, below the bulge of her belly, in place of her sex, was a sniggering, threatening little death’s head.

  II

  Now chance had it that de Burdhe’s will left me the contents of his bedroom, including the hangings and all the paraphernalia of the little shrine where his unexpected corpse, decorous in its black attire and the buttonhole blossoming a huge white iris, had previously caused me such fright. Not much caring to bring home the tapestries and furniture of such a dwelling, with the evil spell they seemed to bear, I sent everything to the auction rooms, keeping only the Buddha from the bedroom, the little Hindu altar and the androgynous idol of the adjacent room for Arthur Wing, who was both a collector and a dealer and had come running to me almost straight away; but in the to-ings and fro-ings of the house clearance a manuscript fell into my hands, a manuscript entirely written by de Burdhe, although in diverse hands. However obscure these revelations may be, they will perhaps shed new light upon this disconcerting and troubling figure, de Burdhe. I transcribed them just as they were in the incoherent muddle of dates, but necessarily eliminating some whose writing was too bold to be printed.

  On the first page there was a truncated extract from Swinburne:

  There is a feverish famine in my veins …

  Sin, is it sin whereby men’s souls are thrust

  Into the pit? yet had I a good trust

  To save my soul before it slipped therein,

  Trod under by the fire-shod feet of lust …

  Into sad hell where all sweet love hath end,

  All but the pain that never finisheth.2

  11 April 1875 – The obscenity of mouths and nostrils, the ignominious cupidity of the smiles of women met in the street, the cunning baseness and the whole hyena aspect of wild beasts, ready to bite, of traders in their shops and walkers on the pavements, how long I have suffered from them! I suffered from them even as a child whenever I would chance to go down to the pantry and, not understanding, overhear the talk of the servants savaging my family.

  This hostility of all humanity
, this dumb hatred of a race of lynxes, I was to encounter again later on at boarding school, and did not I myself, who loathe and detest all base instincts, was not I instinctively violent and foul, like that self-gratifying murderous mob, the rioting mob that throws the city’s constables into the Seine and a hundred years ago cried out: A la lanterne! just as nowadays they clamour: In the water! In the water!

  30 October 1875 – There is true beauty only in the faces of statues; their immobility is more alive than the grimaces of our physiognomies. What a divine breath animates them, and what intensity of gaze in their empty eyes!

  I have spent the whole day at the Louvre and the marble gaze of Antinous pursues me.3 With what softness and warmth that is both knowing and deep his long dead eyes did rest upon me! At one moment I thought I saw glimmers of green. If this bust belonged to me, I should have emeralds set into its eyes.

  24 February 1877 – Today I committed an ignoble act: I went to a journalist whom I scarcely know to find a way of being able to watch an execution, and yet blood is repugnant to me, and when I am at the dentist and I hear a cry in the adjoining room I almost faint and lose consciousness.

  Pitzer promised me a ticket. No, decidedly, I shall not go to this execution.

  10 May 1877 – I have just been to see the most lovely collection of stones. What pure profiles, what sweetness of line and pose in the tiniest of cameos! The Greeks have more grace, an extraordinary happy serenity which could well be the temperament of divinity, but the Roman intaglios have an uncommonly intense fire. There was one ring setting which had an adolescent head crowned with laurels, some young Caesar, his expression exhausted and sensual, both weary and desiring, of whom I shall dream for many a night … Dream! Indeed, it would be better to live and all I do is dream.

  13 July 1878 – Very late at night on the eve of the holidays, in the streets one encounters the strangest of female passers-by and even stranger male ones. Could it be that these nocturnal plebeian festivities stir forgotten metamorphoses of the past deep within human beings? In the turmoil of the excited sweaty crowd tonight I did indeed rub shoulders with the masks of freed Bithynian slaves and decadent courtesans.

  From the milling crowd tonight on the Esplanade des Invalides among the rifle fire of the shooting ranges, the reek of fried food, the eructations of drunkards and the foul-smelling atmosphere of menageries, there emanated the savage whiff of a festival under Nero.

  25 November, the same year – I have just rediscovered the mournful, ever-distant gaze of the Antinous, and the fierce, ecstatic yet supplicating eye of the Roman cameo, though in a pastel done in a rather slipshod manner and signed with a woman’s name, an unknown female painter to whom however I should gladly give a commission if I were sure she could reproduce this strange gaze.

  And yet nothing to speak of – just two or three pastel crayons smudged around that square, thin face with its massive jawbone tilting right up, its voluptuously open mouth, its dilated nostrils, beneath a heavy crown of braided violets, and a poppy behind one ear. The face is somewhat ugly, a sad, cadaverous colour, but under its scarcely lifted eyelids there shines and drowses a water so green, the mournful corrupted water of an unappeased soul, the doleful emerald of a fearsome lewdness!

  I should give everything to find such a gaze.

  19 December; the same year –

  Oh! This purple mark upon the sleeping woman’s lovely neck, and the surrender almost akin to death, the peace of this body stunned by pleasure! How this mark attracted me. I should have liked to set my lips there and slowly suck out all the life of this woman right down to her blood, for the regular beat of her pulse set my nerves on edge; the murmur of her breath, the even rise and fall of her bosom obsessed me like the ticking of a nightmare clock, and I could picture my clenched hands reaching to grip the sleeping woman’s throat and squeeze it until she could breathe no more; I got up, a cold sweat on my temples, and for ten seconds felt my heart to be that of a murderer, and then from her lips there came a faint odour of decay … the stale odour that all human beings exhale while they sleep.

  Oh saints of the Thebais, what blameworthy nakedness gently exposed would come to tempt us at night in the mirage of the sands! Oh those wondering forms of sensuality, whose glancing loins and bellies would leave behind them furrows ploughed with fragrances and incense, and yet they were evil spirits!

  10 January 1881 – There is in me a core of cruelty which I am frightened by; it sleeps for months and years, and suddenly awakens, bursts out, and when this crisis passes over, it leaves me terror-stricken with myself. That dog just now, in the avenue of the Bois, that I whipped until he bled, and for nothing, for not running to me at once when I called. The poor beast was there, cowering, almost on his knees, his large human eyes fixed on me, and his desperate howling. He would have melted a butcher’s heart! But I was possessed by some kind of inebriation, and the more I struck, the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that writhing flesh imbued me with I know not what wild ardour. A circle had been made around me and I stopped only out of human respect.

  Later, I was ashamed … I remember that as a child I liked to torture animals; and I have never forgotten the story of those two turde doves that on one occasion had been placed in my hands to divert me, and which instinctively, without thinking, I squeezed until I choked them, a dreadful story, and I was only eight years old.

  The palpitation of life has always filled me with a strange fury of destruction and I often have thoughts of murder during love.

  Could it be that I have a double inside me?

  28 February – Why does that idiotic encounter haunt me with such persistence? It has stirred in me something strangely unspeakable and unhealthy, something of which I had no inkling, and yet, when I think about it, what could be more ordinary than encountering those two in their fancy dress? A woman got up as a schoolboy, her cap askew, her bosom strapped into the metal-buttoned tunic, and beside her that revolting scoundrel in a soutane, dragging a priest’s dignity in the gutter, doubtless some thug. There was no risk of being duped on that Shrove Tuesday night, and the way the woman waddled about, her hefty hips bulging under the hang of the tunic, the brazen make-up on that whorish face, all spelled the revelry and villainy of a carnival night, down to the pious mien and lopsided smile of that hawker in his frock and clerical bands. But in that ill-lit street hard by les Halles, at the door of that lodging house, the silhouette of those two masks became dangerous and disturbing; it was a sinister time of night too, around half past midnight. What had those two been up to in that house of assignations? And the fatefully inescapable thought of that androgynous schoolboy in the company of that pseudo-cleric was abominable, vile and sacrilegious.

  15 March – I am now an aficionado of masked balls, I am fascinated by the mask. The mystery of the face which I cannot see attracts me, it is vertigo on the edge of an abyss; and in the crush of the balls at the Opera, as in the dismal, noisy promenade gallery at the Élysées-Montmartre and the Folies, eyes glimpsed through the holes of the mask or beneath the lace of mantillas for me have a charm, an enigmatic sensuality which over-excites me and intoxicates me with a fever I have never known before. In this there is something of gambling’s risks and hunting’s frenzy; I always have a sense that beneath these masks there shine and gaze upon me the liquid green eyes of the pastel that I love, the distant gaze of the Antinous.

  21 November – There is no denying that last night I experienced something more than a vision: a mysterious being made itself manifest out of the invisible and the intangible. I was abed but not sleeping; I had even gone to bed early, since during the day, following my doctor’s advice, I had gone for a long walk, attempting to stifle my nerves with a healthy tiredness: SHE appeared to me.

  My lamp was lit, my nightstand upon my bed, my book before me; so I was not sleeping.

  It was a naked figure, of average height, of rather small and incomparably pure proportions. She stood at the foot of my bed, faintly tilted
back, as if floating through the room, for her feet did not touch the floor; she appeared to be asleep.

  With her eyelids lowered, her lips parted, her nakedness was offered in a chaste abandonment, her naked arms folded behind her neck supported her ecstatic head and brought the arched torso, with its dots of rust on the armpits, to a tapering point.

  Her flesh had a jade-hued transparency, a delirious sight to my eyes; but from her emerald-diademed brow there fluttered and flowed a veil of black gauze, a vapour of crêpe which shielded her sex and wound about her hips and was knotted, like a thong, around both her ankles, so that this pale apparition was all the more mysterious.

  And I should have liked to know the gaze hidden beneath those shuttered eyelids. A secret foreboding told me that this lethargic nakedness possessed the enigma of my malady and my cure; this figure of a dead woman in the ecstasy of love was the living incarnation of my secret. Some words (for she indeed it was who uttered them) trembled at my ear: Astarte, Acte, Alexandria, and the figure vanished.