sinking feeling: i.e. Bertha’s domestic decorations are a distressing manifestation of her middle-class taste.
Klinger: a work by Max Klinger (1857–1920), German Symbolist painter and sculptor.
bouffonic: Lewis’s coinage, presumably ‘comic, ridiculous’, from Fr. bouffe (in the sense of l’opéra bouffe, ‘comic opera’), or Eng. ‘buffoon’.
‘Berthe’ … ‘Oui’: Fr., ‘Bertha, you’re a good girl!’ ‘You think so?’ ‘Yes.’ In this context brave is a weak compliment, even slightly pejorative.
Schatzes: Ger., ‘sweethearts’, lit. ‘treasures’. The proper German plural is Schätze; Tarr pluralizes Schatz as though it were an English noun.
coup de foudre: Fr., ‘love at first sight’. The context of smashed icons suggests, however, that Lewis is calling upon the phrase’s literal meaning, ‘a stroke of lightning’.
eikon: alternative spelling of ‘icon’, an image or likeness, particularly associated with religious images of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
‘Vous … Geschmack’: Fr. and then Ger., lit. ‘You are to my taste’, i.e. ‘You’re my type’. Bertha’s use of the formal vous to a male lover is not unusual for French speaker-address of the period, despite her use of the informal Du in German.
caravanserai: an Eastern roadside inn, a large quadrangular building with a spacious court in the middle, where travellers by caravan could rest from the day’s journey.
Pasha … incog.: a Turkish officer of high rank; abbreviated adv. meaning ‘incognito’, ‘with one’s real name and identity disguised’. The theme of the disguised ruler circulating among his people is a staple of both Eastern and Western folk tales and plays.
villégiature: Fr., ‘holiday, vacation’, in parallel with ‘caravanserai’ here short for lieu de villégiature, ‘holiday spot’.
Khalife: alternative spelling for French calife, a caliph or the chief civil and religious ruler of a Muslim country. A caliph figures prominently in the titular parable of Lewis’s essay on art and architecture The Caliph’s Design (1919).
Hymen: the god of marriage in Greek and Roman mythology, represented in art as a boy crowned with flowers and carrying a burning bridal torch.
‘Oh dis Sorbert … Dis!’: Fr., ‘Oh, tell me Sorbert! Tell me! Do you love me? Do you love me? Tell me!’ Bertha’s shift to the informal tu marks her sudden desperation.
‘Oh … m’aimes!’: Fr., ‘Oh, tell me. Do you love me? Tell me that you love me!’
Schopenhauer: German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), best known for his work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstelung (1818, The World as Will and Representation). Schopenhauer was notoriously hostile to women, and in his essay ‘Über die Weiber’ (1851, ‘On Women’), he writes: ‘Women are qualified to be the nurses and governesses of our earliest childhood by the very fact that they are themselves childish, trifling, and short-sighted, in a word, are all their lives grown-up children; a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is a human being in the real sense’ (Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophic Essays, vol. ii, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 614–15).
astral baby: in the late-nineteenth-century hermetic practice of theosophy the ‘astral plane’ was considered to be the next step above the terrestrial or sensible world. The ‘astral body’ was a sort of psychic body or aura made up of emotions, as the physical body was composed of matter.
Ganymed: a 1774 poem by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Dealing with the mythic seduction of the boy Ganymede by Zeus, who is disguised as Spring, the poem was also familiar as the basis of art song settings by Austrian composers Franz Schubert (1797–1828) and Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). Tarr reads the first stanza beginning with the second line:
All round me, you glow upon me,
Oh spring, oh my lover!
With the rapture of a thousand loves
It thrusts at my heart,
This sacred sense
Of your eternal ardour,
Oh infinite beauty!
(trans. David Luke, Goethe: Selected Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 7, 9)
Armageddon: the place of the last decisive battle at the Day of Judgement in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, thus, allusively, any final cataclysm.
more metropolitan speech: in a more urbane and sophisticated manner.
earliest Science … holes: Plutonism, an early school of geology in the eighteenth century associated with Scottish scientist James Hutton (1726–97), theorized that sedimentary rocks were forced to the surface by earthquakes and volcanoes, which were created by pressure originating from a subterranean molten core.
amazon: member of a tribe of warrior women in Greek mythology.
Geschmack: Ger., literally ‘taste’, in this context, ‘fondness’.
redskin impassibility: a stereotype about the Native American peoples taken from nineteenth-century fiction and ethnography. See, for instance, a passage from The Deerslayer (1841), the popular American novel by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851): ‘It is well known that the American Indians, more particularly those of superior characters and stations, singularly maintain their self-possession and stoicism … Chingachgook had imbibed enough of this impassibility to suppress any very undignified manifestation of surprise’ (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1901), 333.
game of grabs and dashes: obscure: perhaps a version of ‘grab’, a children’s card game listed in the New English Dictionary (1900), in which two or more cards of equal value are placed on the table and the player who is quickest to recognize and grab them adds them to his own hand. Or perhaps a game such as ‘capture the flag’, where both players try to seize a prize held by the opposition, and dash away before the opponent can tag him or her ‘out.’
a cat may look at a king: English proverb. Despite his far greater status a king has no power over the behaviour of a cat—thus, ‘I can do what I want despite what you may wish.’
Breton: the historic Celtic language and culture of the inhabitants of Brittany, a region of northern France adjacent to Normandy.
antediluvian: adj., extraordinarily old; literally, from before the time of Noah’s Flood.
‘FRAC’: in Fr., It., and Sp., a formal jacket for evening wear, comparable to Ger. frack, and the English ‘frock coat’.
Kreisler: Otto Kreisler’s first name derives from Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the Prussian statesman and the architect of a unified Germany who was known as ‘The Iron Chancellor’. His surname comes from the literary character Johannes Kreisler, a tormented and increasingly eccentric composer who appears in the work of German Romantic author and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), most notably in the essay Des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreislers musikalische Leiden (The Conductor Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sufferings, 1814), later included as the opening section of Kreisleriana (1814–15), and the novel Lebensansichten des Katers Murr nebst Fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in Zufälligen Makulaturblättern (known in English by the abbreviated title The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr) (1819, 1821). Hoffmann writes of his Kreisler, ‘His friends maintained that in his formulation nature had tried a new recipe but that the experiment had gone wrong … that balance which is essential to the artist, if he is to survive in this world … had been destroyed’ (E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79).
ratiocination: the process of reasoning.
Mont-de-Piété: a public pawnshop, literally Fr. ‘mount of piety’, authorized and controlled by the French government, that lent money at reasonable rates, particularly to the poor.
necropolis: from Gk., ‘city of the dead’, an ancient burial ground, especially one with elaborate tombs.
Gillette blade: a men’s safety razor, patented in 1904, manufactured by the Gillette Safety Razor Company of Boston, Massachusetts.
bismarckian P
russian: a product of military Prussia, a historic state of northern Germany, who has been trained in the tradition of Bismarck. Prussians prided themselves on their organization, discipline, and obedience to authority; others, particularly outside Germany, associated Prussians with regimentation, repression, and arrogance.
german student … duels: the Mensur, or student duel fought with swords, as practised by German fraternities through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a scar from such a match was seen as a badge of honour. Such duels were so common among German students that nineteenth-century university administrators sold confiscated student weapons to local garrisons of the military.
droop: in the early nineteenth century the Prussian guard wore large moustaches, which became essential to Bismarck-era military fashion—and which gave birth to a European industry of combs, brushes, and waxes with which to groom them.
Pas de Calais: a département (administrative division) of northern France.
pop: chiefly British slang, ‘to pawn’.
‘Je ne sais pas vous savez!’: Fr., ‘I don’t know, you know!’ The suppression of an expected comma in dialogue is a feature of Lewis’s style of the late 1920s, particularly when transcribing inane speech, as frequently in The Apes of God (1930).
serried: adj., pressed close together, like a rank of soldiers.
Get your father off on your fiancée: an echo of the novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81), in which Dmitri, the oldest of the brothers, vies with his father Fyodor for the favours of the young woman Grushenka. This violent rivalry leads to Dmitri’s conviction for his father’s murder.
Gare de Lyon: one of Paris’s six large railway stations, which offers mainly train service to the south.
Goths … second century: the Gothic Wars actually took place from AD 376 to 382, and Rome was sacked by King Alaric I and the Visigoths in AD 410. It is ironic that Kreisler blames a Germanic people for the degeneration of civilized Rome.
‘Un Viagre!’: Kreisler is asking in a heavy German accent for un fiacre, a hackney-coach or cab, so named because in seventeenth-century Paris the first carriages for hire were stationed at the Hôtel de St Fiacre.
Big Boulevards: ‘Les Grands Boulevards’ refers to eight large streets—Madeleine, Capucines, Italians, Montmartre, Poissonière, Bonne Nouvelle, St-Denis, and St-Martin—that stretch across Paris from the Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille.
‘Paris by Night’: a phrase associated with the seamy side of Parisian tourism, with implications ranging from the innocent admiring of city lights to indulging in sex for hire. As early as 1871 a London publication titled Paris by Night offered as part of its subtitle ‘A Description of the Casinos, Ball-Rooms, Cafés Chantants, and “Fast” Resorts of the Pleasure Seekers, Grisettes, and “Demi-Monde” of Paris’, and noted that the Paris of the time had upwards of thirty-five thousand prostitutes (cover reproduced in David Price, Cancan! (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998), 12).
that side of the town: the Right Bank and Montmartre, as opposed to the Left Bank, home to artists and students.
kokotten: Ger., ‘cocottes’, women of loose morals, prostitutes. In Blast 1 Lewis blasts France’s ‘Naively seductive Houri salon-picture Cocottes’ (1, p. 13).
Berck-sur-Mer: a commune of northern France, in the département of Pas-de-Calais.
Sagraletto: obscure: perhaps a dialectical form of It. sacrilegio, ‘sacrilege’, or a phonetic rendering of dissacra letto (‘bed desecrator’) with the first syllable elided. Sporco Tedesco, It., ‘filthy German’.
Gauguins … South Sea Islands: Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), one of the leading French post-Impressionist painters. In 1891 Gauguin moved to Tahiti, and lived there for two years, returning to the South Seas in 1894 and dying on the Marquesas Islands. His painting came to reflect the colours and forms of the Pacific Islands, and his canvases of the period contain many striking images of Polynesian women.
Fauve: the Fauves (from Fr. ‘wild beasts’) were a loose association of twentieth-century painters who exhibited together in Paris from 1905 to 1908, including Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and André Derain (1880–1954). Their work was characterized by the use of vivid colours, and effects derived from applying paint to the canvas directly from tubes.
cocotte: see note to p. 71.
‘Also … gewesen?’: Ger., ‘So where is he then, our properly authentic Teuton? I guess he hasn’t been here.’
‘tick’: debt.
The dot: generally Fr., the dowry, a sum of money given to the groom as part of a marriage agreement, usually by the bride’s family. The ‘obscurity’ of the dowry—its size or origin—implies some additional and unspecified irregularity in the affair.
Magog of Carnival: Gog and Magog were traditional figures of Carnival, Old Testament giants, in some traditions associated with the ancient Aryan peoples, whose names appear in the Book of Revelation to designate nations who shall war after the Millennium: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea’ (Revelation 20: 7–8, King James translation).
‘Sacré Otto vas!’: Fr., properly ‘Sacré Otto va!’, ‘Oh, you Otto!’
the Academy: the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts), created in 1803 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.
‘J’ai … temps!’: ungrammatical French: ‘I’ve lost the time! … I’ve lost my time!’.
‘Qu’est-ce … quel genre!’: Fr., ‘How did he put it? He lost his time? Indeed! … That’s a first! What a character!’
côtes de pré salé: chops from a lamb that was raised on the salt marshes of Brittany and Normandy. Considered by some connoisseurs to be the finest such meat in the world, and thus of higher quality than one might expect from a ‘tranquil little creamery’.
military morning suit: the Prussian military equivalent of the morning coat, a men’s jacket with tails. A degree less formal than the full ‘frac’, the morning suit was considered to be appropriate wear for daytime formal events. Kreisler is exceedingly overdressed for his surroundings.
Charivari … The Brush: a confused cacophony, from the French folk custom of banging cans and creating other noisy distractions under the window of newly married couples, referring here to the mismatched and clashing attire of the student artists.
storm and shock: lit. trans. of Ger, Sturm und Drang. See note to p. 200.
dervish performance: a dervish is a follower of an order of Sufism, a mystical order of Islam. The Mevlevi order of dervishes are known as the ‘whirling dervishes’ because of the spinning ritual dance they perform as part of their religious practice.
burnous: a cloak or mantle with a hood, similar to an article of clothing worn in North Africa by Arabs and Berbers.
de profundis: Lat., ‘out of the depths’, the first words of Psalm 130, ‘De profundis clamavi’, ‘Out of the depths I cried’. By association, any cry from the depths of misery or degradation.
‘smokkin’: Fr. and Eng. by adoption, a ‘smoking’ or ‘frac’, ‘formal evening jacket’. The spelling is a phonetic approximation of Kreisler’s attempt at French.
Korps-student: a student belonging to a German duelling society.
‘das Weib’: Ger., ‘Woman’, carrying from the later nineteenth century on an increasingly generic and largely pejorative connotation.
stormy petrel: proverbially, one who brings discord or trouble; from the sea-bird the ‘storm’ or ‘stormy petrel’, associated in sailors’ folklore with storms at sea.
blood and iron: a phrase associated with Bismarck, who gave a speech to the Prussian lower house of Parliament or Lantag on 30 September 1862 in which he claimed ‘Germany does not look to Prussia’s liberalism, but to her power. … Not by speeches and majorities will the great questions of the day b
e decided … but by iron and blood.’ History misremembers the concluding terms in reversed order. (Cited in Louis L. Snyder, The Blood and Iron Chancellor (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand and Company, Inc., 1967), 127; trans. from Die politische Reden des Fürsten Bismarck, ed. Horst Kohl (Stuttgart, 1892–1904), ii. 29–30.)
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