The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century

by Terry Hale

  Astarte, the name of the Syrian Venus; Acte, that of a freed slave woman; Alexandria, the city of the Ptolemies, of philosophers and courtesans; Astarte, also the name of a demon.

  1 December – Tomorrow I leave for Egypt.

  Here ended the first notebook of the manuscript.

  III

  I knew Madeleine and Martha in Galilee;

  I bleed in Petronius and laugh at Apuleius’s ass,

  I am the ardent breath of golden ages past.

  I dance in the folds of gowns and of copes,

  I dine at the couch of kings and I sup with the popes

  I see into your heart and the hearts of others too.

  Astarte, Acte, Alexandria! It is ten years since these three names trembled in my ear and for ten years I have travelled hither and thither through the East, obsessed, in search of the frenzied vision of one unforgettable night.

  Whether in the climbing streets of the Casbah or around the Cairo mosques, in the sunlit chiaroscuro of the Tunis souks or the mud and reed huts of the Nile villages, nowhere have I found the liquid emerald eyes whose distant, captivating promise made me leave everything behind: homeland, family, souls as dear as well-worn habits which are stronger often than affections; and everywhere, in the deafening alleyways of Constantine, or in the Moorish cafés of Biskra, the Syrian goddess, the intoxicating phantom of the East, Astarte everywhere disappointed me, everywhere deceived me, everywhere lied to me.

  She never appeared to me again.

  Yet often have I followed those women swathed in the silks and veils of their burning land! Arab women or Moorish women on their way to the mosque, or to the baths, tottering down the shadow-bathed steps of the alleyways, and at length have I questioned their long ecstatic languorous eyes under the haik, those eyes unvaryingly wet with kohl, beseeching like those of gazelles, but, when looked at closely, brilliant and hard like the shimmering pupils of birds, cold empty eyes of jet, for all eyes are black beneath lapis lazuli skies, and no creature met with there, around the pyramid of Cheops or in the stone desert of Petra, kept the promise of the goddess. Neither Ouled-Nail nor even the donkey-driver fellah, not one of all those oriental animals was able to offer me the awesome and sweet aquamarine gaze that the vision promised me.

  Astarte, Acte, Alexandria!

  If this morbid and elusive gaze does not exist, why then did it shine so strangely beneath the plaster eyelids of the Antinous, why then did it smile, so hopelessly imperious and weary, in the green intaglio of that ring? And where was this gaze encountered or dreamt of, for me to recognise it instantly, by that lady painter who caught it so well in her pastel of the veiled woman?

  And the somnolent figure who whispered to me the three fateful names: Astarte, Acte, Alexandria – did she let that cold green light peep out from under her weighed-down eyelids?

  Ah! This gaze, in vain quest for which I am exasperated and obsessed, I should surely have met with it under the emperors of decadence, in the Rome of Nero and Heliogabalus, in that of Tiberius too! The gaze of some gladiator or patrician Vestal, the final plea of a virgin delivered to the wild beasts or the prayer of some Asian hierophant who had come with Soemias4 to the city of the Caesars, with what frenzy would I have loved, then strangled with my own hands the adored creature of lust and suffering who would have possessed those green eyes!

  Is sensuality perhaps really only the smile of pain? And lust then? Yes, how dreadful, it is indeed hot fierce lust that incites in me the frustrated pursuit of that elusive gaze. It has withered everything, tarnished everything in me like a virus and it is the mud that now flows in my veins. Obscenity spurts all around me, and objects, art itself, everything I behold becomes obscene, taking on vile and double meaning, imposing base thoughts and degrading in me both senses and intellect!

  Thus the Debucourt which I bought six years before on the riverbank, and which represents in the painter’s softened, delicately nuanced tonalities, two young women clasped together playing with a dove – why does this Debucourt inspire in me naught but obscene notions? Yet this engraving is rather well known; its title is The Bird Brought Back To Life. Powdered, swathed in the gauzes and floating muslins of the day, both these creatures had flesh of an adorable complexion and an aristocratic beauty, so why was their grace and freshness associated in my mind with the memory of the Queen and Madame de Lamballe? … And this is the vilest calumny of the time, the filthiest of lies to be found in the Père Duchêne, the very mire of the Jacobin clubs which is conjured in my eyes by this engraving, precisely because of the gesture with which one of the women draws back her fichu of cotton lawn as she plucks from her breasts the dove nestling between them, whiteness among whiteness.

  And then my memory is besieged by all of the infamies spouted about the liaison between Marie-Antoinette and the unfortunate princess; and this is like a fever. A frenzy of rutting and cruelty takes hold of me and, amid the rumbling noise of a rioting populace, I find myself suddenly transported a century back, on a hot stormy day, in the precincts of a prison. A sweating crowd of men in red bonnets, street porters with brutish faces, their shirts open on hairy chests, jostle and suffocate me; there is a clamour of voices, hatred-filled eyes all around. The air is heavy, reeking with alcohol, the smells of squalor and raggedness, there are naked arms waving pikes and with a great shouting I suddenly see a decapitated head rising into the lead-coloured sky, a bloodless head with spent staring eyes, drunk men passing it from hand to hand, slapping it and kissing it on the lips. Wound around his naked arm, like a bundle of bloodied ribbons, one of them carries a tangled mass of entrails; he is sneering, his lips adorned with a dubious blond moustache resembling the curls of pubic hair … and this false moustache is the object of foul suggestions, coarse offensive laughter; and the head swings about above the crowd, brandished on the end of a pike: the head of the Princess de Lamballe which the Septembrists have just had coiffed, curled, powdered and re-animated with rouge to take it to the hôtel de Penthièvre and from there to the Temple under the Queen’s windows.

  And I came to again revolted with horror.

  And this decapitated head became for me an obsession. I now see them everywhere, the rictus of the decapitated and the cold teeth of the guillotined jeer and importune me. This hallucination takes shape above all in the suburbs, in those sinister deserted roadways along the city’s fortifications, and, since I love my malady like a true invalid, I know where and how to bring about this cruel, unsettling vision.

  Ah! Those moonlit nights, those wild rides in a tollgate cab from the boulevard Bineau to the banks of Billancourt, those slow, evocatory drives along gloomy roads lined with fences and a few scarce villas with closed shutters. How easily the aura of crime and the flowering of evil issue and rise from these leprous, poverty-stricken landscapes! How this province of the prowler and the bricklayer’s whore is indeed that of the modern nightmare, and how cheating Astarte, who so stubbornly withholds herself in the enchanted cities of the Orient, does willingly surrender in all her ghoulish finery by the stretches of waste ground and deserted guinguettes. Whether the place is the route de la Révolte, the plain of Malakoff or the clay-pits of Montrouge, Astarte’s laughter is everywhere, be it in the solitude of Gennevilliers or the stinking banks of the Bièvre.

  Then the little market garden walls, the edges of stock-raisers’ plots, above the roofs of sheds blue-shaded by the moon, the guilty heads of the executed rise, Pierrot-heads with bright red neck ties. So wan are they that they seem made of plaster, wan, but so waggishly prophetic with their blue lips and their pale cold teeth, the heads of murderers or anarchists, the like of Gamahut, Pelz and Lediez along with Ravachol;5 all of them with their hair on end and yet so close-cropped at the back of the neck, with the air of John the Baptists of crime, for Salome dances forever before the old Herod exhausted with lust, and not for nothing does she hold out the symbolic lotus to the king of mournful civilizations.

  Astarte! What an irony and a trap. To have dreamt
of a goddess of Asia, a freed slave woman almost empress of Rome, and of the monstrous hallowed love-cults of the shrines, cast out of the East and come to rest among the smells of blood and cheap wine one morning at la Roquette, on the day of an execution.

  Yet one night it seemed to me I did encounter the glaucous lustful eyes of the veiled woman in the pastel.

  It was at Constantine, in the street of Ladders, the street of whores and prostitution that tumbles down so steep above the river Rhumel!

  From one Moorish café to another, and from Spanish posadas to Maltese drinking-dens, how had we ended up in that sinister kief-smokers’ hovel? Fifes and tambourines yelped out a high-pitched, droning threnody, and at the centre of a circle of hunched Arabs, two bloodless creatures with drawn and deadened eyes, supple as grass snakes, swayed loathsomely from side to side with a strange twitching of their lower bodies. Oh! The desperate, almost convulsive pleas of those spindly arms above those rigid faces! With painted eyes and painted cheeks they twisted about, unbelievably slender in their floating gauze and tulle of gold lamé, such as women wear, shaken at intervals from head to toe by brief and total shudderings, as if by a discharge of electricity. One of the dancers abruptly stopped still, quite stiff, with a piercing hyena-like call, and in his rolled-back pupils I saw the elusive green gaze shine out. I threw myself upon him and took him by the wrists; he had collapsed, there was foam on his lips. He was an epileptic and, worse still, a poor blind creature, a wretched Kabyle dancer exhausted from vice and consumption, destined before long to die.

  Here the second manuscript ended. The rest fell into incoherence, into madness and an eroticism so fantastic and unhealthy that the text’s transcription becomes no longer possible; the possessed man was edging towards mental derangement, cerebral anaemia was becoming apparent, and as his writing grew more frantic so his thoughts were more clouded. Here however are a few excerpts.

  Venice. October 1888 – Today I imagined I had found the beseeching gaze which obsesses me, the flickering green look which has turned me into an unbalanced wretch, an outcast and a madman. It was at the hospital for the venereally ill, in the warm sickly atmosphere of a big ward with whitewashed walls, its windows on fire with sunlight on the loveliest of afternoons. She was laid out amid the questionable whiteness of her bedsheets, and her mane of mahogany red hair, spread out on the pillows, made her yellowed syphilitic’s face appear all the more sallow. She remained silent and unmoving among the murmurings, which had scarcely subsided upon our entrance, of twenty other women, twenty convalescent or less sick women jostling in their shifts around the table cluttered with glass beads, numbers and cards; with the liveliness of gesture and speech characteristic of their race, every able-bodied person in the ward was playing the lotteria. The wax-pale invalid alone did not speak, did not stir. But between her half-closed lashes there shone a green water spangled with gold, a sad slumbering water yet on fire with light, like the bed of some dark spring at noonday; and at the same time such a painful smile contracted her poor withered lips and the corners of her bruised eyelids that for a moment I thought I saw a gleam of that same expression of infinite weariness and drunken ecstasy as upon my first apparition.

  In curiosity I bent over the bed; her face had relaxed, her eyes had closed. ‘A spasm of the kind she often has,’ said the doctor who accompanied us, ‘it’s a tumour on the ovaries; there is no hope.’

  Nor did the consumptive little dancer at the café in Constantine have any hope either. Might I be in love with the throes of death?

  This unconquerable attraction to those about to die is horrifying and disconcerting.

  Florence, February 1890.

  Glowing but sickly, her sorrowful face

  Has in the mournful spell of its native grace

  The charm of a virgin and a perverse boy.

  The prelate’s favourite or Ophelia the wise,

  Suffering, exaltation, madness are her mystery,

  And flow, like some black philtre, through her green eyes.

  A black philtre flowing through green eyes, this encapsulates the gaze that I seek, these are also the eyes of Botticelli’s Primavera. The unknown poet who wrote those lines into this hôtel album well understood, like me, the intensity of those unforgettable eyes; he too must have been one possessed. Thus throughout the world there are poor kindred souls cast adrift, made for mutual understanding but never meant to meet.

  Rome April 1890 – I am fond of these frescoes of the Aldobrandini Wedding; these postures of women draped in thin veils, like vapours, have a chaste sensuality, an untrammelled grace which is altogether delicious; these are more cloth bindings than clothes. There is a religiously mystical voluptuous modesty which turns these stooping bodies, veiled in mauve and white, into great sacred flowers which one is forbidden to approach. The vision from Asia which appeared to me one day had these same postures; the creature with green eyes with which I am besotted, should I ever find it, will surely have these same harmonious and evasive swaying movements.

  Alas, all the figures in these frescoes have their features erased and their eyes are spent.

  I am in love with phantoms.

  Paris, June 1892 – This evening at the Neuilly fête I encountered a programme seller who had strange teeth like those of a young dog.

  Yes, the more I think of it, that was the smile of the dancing young fun in the Vatican – a smile both ironical and bestial.

  Paris, August 1892 – I shall most certainly not keep this rendez-vous I have made at the house of Jeanne de Carcilles. This acrobat has the most wonderfully shaped hips and legs, but her face is really too much like a hairdresser’s dummy.

  She resembles Émilienne.

  How could I have been smitten, even for ten minutes, with that doll’s face and its idiotic smile, and then that too tiny mouth, those over-large eyes, those excessively pink cheeks and that ridiculously blonde hair?

  It would be settled by those twenty-five louis, for miss Adda does not put herself out for less; bah! It would be paying too dearly for something I thought better of, no, not thought better of, something that made me feel sick.

  I ought rather to have gone to Bayreuth than have lingered on in Paris this summer.

  Marseilles, April 1893 – The dream takes me over, the dream possesses me, and I am no longer anything but a sleepwalker, and yet this winter like all the other winters spent in Algeria, in Cairo or Tunis, Astarte has disappointed me again, Astarte has lied to me again.

  Yet this winter I really thought … Yes, on that moonless night on the Nile, with the rowers of the Dahabieh asleep at last, as slowly, oh so slowly, we sailed down river on those stagnant waters and the vast and endlessly flat landscape spread away out of sight, a faint shade of ash against the night’s deep blue, I really thought this time I saw the goddess appear. For an hour, I had been observing with curiosity the increasing visibility of a strange black point on a still distant bend of the Nile, the entablature of some ancient temple or perhaps just a rock with its base dipping into the water.

  The Dahabieh sailed slowly and steadily, as if in a dream, and slowly, in the silence of the starless night, the shadow which intrigued me came closer, taking shape, and became (for it was now clear) the rump of a huge pink granite sphinx whose profile was eroded by the centuries. On board all slept in a slumber that was truly disconcerting, the whole crew fallen into a leaden torpor; and the movement of the craft noiselessly approaching the motionless beast filled me with growing terror, for the sphinx now appeared luminous; as if a vaporous brightness issued from its rump and in the hollow of its shoulder there could be seen a creature standing, her head thrown back and sleeping.

  It was a young slender form, clad, like the donkey-driving fellahs, in a thin blue gandura with gold circlets on the ankles, the adolescent form of a prince or a slave, for the attitude of this offered slumber was at once both royal and servile, royal in its assurance, servile in its self-exposure and knowing abandon.

  The gandura was
open on an ivory-white flat bosom, but on the neck there bled what looked like a broad gash: a scar or a wound? As for the face, I guessed at its exquisiteness from only the ovally tapered chin, but, tilted backwards, it was bathed entirely in the shadow.

  I called out, shouting loudly, but was unable to awaken anyone on board; the indigenous crew and the English servants were all struck down as if in a magic slumber, and they did not wake until dawn, with the sphinx out of sight far behind.

  When I recounted my adventure the next morning, I was given an answer by the dragoman that this must have been some peasant with his throat cut by the Arab bandits who are numerous in these parts. Having killed the child, they set its corpse there as a warning to travellers, an ironic and salutary lesson.

  And maybe, after all, I had dreamt it, and no one gave it any more importance; on the ship I passed for a visionary, for I dream so much now.

  This was the end of the manuscript.

  1 Philibert-Louis Debucourt (1755–1832). French painter and print maker.

  2 The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was admired by French decadent writers almost as much for his extravagant sexual proclivities as for the naked imagery of his poetry. Lorrain quotes from his Laus Veneris – in which love is presented as a deadly and carnivorous passion.

  3 The statue of Antinous in the Louvre, with its pronounced suggestion of androgyny, was a constant preoccupation of the ‘Romantic agony’. One finds references to the precocious if baffling sensuality of this sculpture as early as 1829 in Henri Delatouche’s forgotten masterpiece Fragoletta.