The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

by Gabriel de Lautrec

  The Vengeance of

  the Oval Portrait

  and Other Stories

  by

  Gabriel de Lautrec

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Gabriel de Lautrec was best known while he was alive as a humorist who contributed to such periodicals as Le Rire and Le Sourire in the first decades of the 20th century. The most popular humorist of the day, Alphonse Allais, was his friend and mentor, and often referred to him by name in his own humorous articles, many of which appeared regularly in newspapers. Because much humorous writing at that time was marketed for children, Lautrec did a good deal of work of that sort, and published several books for children, including both fiction and non-fiction. That was not, however, his initial ambition; just as most comic actor are reputed to yearn to play Hamlet, Lautrec originally wanted to be an earnest poet and a pillar of the Decadent Movement, which was just hitting its stride when he first arrived in Paris.

  The full range of Lautrec’s published works is therefore various. He supplemented his early poetry with earnestly erotic and mystical Baudelairean poems in prose, as many Decadent writers did, and soon began to expand those exercises into short stories modeled on Baudelaire’s hero, Edgar Allan Poe—whose works were, of course, known in French in Baudelaire’s translations. Like Jean Lorrain, Henri de Régnier and Marcel Schwob, all of whom he knew, he soon developed his own distinctive brand of Poesque fantasy, which not only used dreams as a literary device, but attempted to duplicate the inconsequentiality of dreams by means of a kind of “semi-automatic writing.” In the most extreme of his fiction in this vein, he used a calculatedly uncontrolled narrative flow to develop prose sequences that are undoubtedly rambling and sometimes quite incoherent, but sometimes have a peculiar dynamic thrust and mesmeric intensity. The comedy in most of his early humorous fantasies is black-edged, often tending toward the kind of conte cruel pioneered in the previous generation by the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1 and brought to a slick maturity by Lautrec’s contemporary, Maurice Level.

  Because the Decadent Movement overlapped to a considerable extent with the Symbolist Movement that replaced it after 1900, partly because the sense of an approaching historical terminus evaporated with the turn of the century, and partly because the latter was not so deliberately perverse a label, Lautrec always employed symbolism in his work, but his interest in the possibility that dreams contained symbolically-disguised meanings gave the technique a more crucial role in his dream-based and dream-simulating works. Partly for that reason, he was one of the Symbolists who became, alongside Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, a significant precursor of Surrealism. Although Jarry and Apollinaire were humorists too, they always retained a much higher reputation than Lautrec, and Lautrec has never been widely cited as a significant precursor of Surrealism, despite the sterling effort he put into such works as “Conte cubiste” (translated herein as “A Cubist Tale”).

  During his lifetime Lautrec contrived to publish three showcases of his short prose fiction. The first, Poèmes en prose (1898), collected his early work in a Baudelairean vein, and his earliest endeavors in surreal humor. The second, Les Histoires de Tom Joë [Tales of Tom Joe] (1920) was more heavily biased toward his commercial comedy—the stories that give the collection its title feature a drunken teller of tall tales somewhat reminiscent of Alphonse Allais’ Captain Cap—but also included comedies of a more esoteric kind, including “Conte cubiste” and the longest story in the book, “Le château hanté ou la vierge adultère: grand roman passionel et météorologique” (translated herein as “The Haunted Château; or, The Adulterous Virgin: A Great Passionate and Meteorological Romance”), which is reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s early exercises in the theater of the absurd in its calculated nonsensicality. The third, La Vengeance du portrait ovale (1922), whose entire contents are reproduced here, was evidently intended as a complementary volume to the second, providing a showcase of his fantastic fiction in which humor, where it is present, is of a distinctly blacker stripe.

  Les Histoires de Tom Joë reprinted one story from Poèmes en prose, “Monsieur House” (translated herein with the same title), while La Vengeance du portrait ovale reproduced five: “Le Bocal vert” (tr. as “The Green Jar”); “Conte bleu” (revised as “La Reine amoureuse”; tr. as “The Amorous Queen”); “Le Mur” (tr. as “The Wall); “Le Familial” (tr. as “A Family Matter”); and “Louange de la Lune” (tr. as “Eulogy to the Moon”). In this sampler, I have added a further selection of items from the first and second volumes, in order give the reader a better idea of the full spectrum of the author’s work.

  Gabriel de Lautrec was born in Béziers on February 21, 1867. His father owned a vineyard but that business was ruined by the phylloxera epidemic that devastated French wine-production between 1875 and 1889, and the elder Lautrec went to work in local government as an accountant. Gabriel made his own preparations for a career in teaching, although he had strong literary interests; he initially came to Paris to complete his teach qualifications, and alongside his unsteady literary career—sometimes sporadically—he taught Latin and Greek in various schools.

  Lautrec first appeared in Paris in the late 1880s, and immediately started hanging out in Le Chat Noir and other literary cafés, making contacts. The fact that Alphonse Allais immediately took him under his wing may well have something to do with the fact that Allais had recently lost his great friend Charles Cros, with whom he had long been accustomed to doing a sort of “comedy double act” in Le Chat Noir, much as Cros had once done a double act with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in Nina de Villard’s salon, and Lautrec appears to have become Cros’s replacement in improvised performances of that kind.

  Although his new friends, and subsequent commentators on his work, were enthusiastic to link Gabriel de Lautrec to the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the two men were completely unacquainted, and any family linkage was extremely remote. Lautrec’s entitlement to the particule in his name arose from his claim to be a Vicomte, but that too might have been a trifle dubious. At any rate, Allais, who was by then the executive editor of the periodical Le Chat Noir, made quite a fuss of his new discovery in its pages, where Lautrec’s literary career was launched in 1889.

  Lautrec also attended the soirées associated with Léon Deschamps’ literary periodical La Plume, in the basement of the Soleil d’Or in the Place St. Michel. Although he did not make any substantial contribution to the periodical, it was there that he met Paul Verlaine, and he became one of the group of young writers who looked after Verlaine in his dying days and maintained a vigil over his corpse. He was subsequently invited to the “Dimanches Gauthiers-Villars” hosted by “Willy” and Colette, where he met a further group of writers, more-or-less completing his acquaintance with the contemporary Parisian literary monde.

  Lautrec hosted a salon of his own in his apartment in the Rue Marceline-Desbordes-Valmore. According to Eric Dussert, who wrote the preface to a 1997 reprint of La Vengeance du portrait ovale, his guests not only included Jean Lorrain and Verlaine, but also Oscar Wilde, but the salon does not figure large in the memoirs of any of the writers of the day, and Lautrec always seems to have remained somewhat in the margins of the monde, regarded more as a flamboyant character than a man of conspicuous talent. Marcel Schwob, however, helped him land a commission to translate a selection of Mark Twain’s stories for an edition published in 1900 by the press associated with the Mercure de France, edited by Alfred Vallette, which presumably sold far better than any of his own books.

  Although he published, according
to his own count, some 200 items in various periodicals, Lautrec never achieved any conspicuous critical or commercial success, and his productions in volume form were a trifle thin. After publishing Poèmes en prose in 1898, eight years passed before he published a volume of poetry, Les Roses noires [Black Roses] in 1906. After that, he only published translations and 24-page children’s books in a series issued by La Lilliput Bibliothèque until Les Histoires de Tom Joë appeared in 1920. Although some of those chapbooks can still be found without overmuch difficulty—especially Le Bon Roi Dagobert [Good King Dagobert] (1912)—most of his work is extraordinarily hard to locate. Although all three of his prose collections were eventually reprinted, only Poèmes en prose remains readily available, especially now that it is available on-line. The other book that he published in 1922, La Semaine des quatre jeudis [A Week with Four Thursdays], is so rare that none of the commentators on his work seem to know what it contains (it is probably a novel for children; it was reprinted the following year as a serial in Gens qui rient). Although Pierre Versins, in his Encyclopédie de l’utopie et de la science-fiction (1972) includes a reference to Le Serpent de mer [The Sea Serpent] (1925), he evidently had not read it; again, it is probably a farce for children—it is notable that it bears the same mock-bombastic subtitle as “Le Château hanté ou la vierge adultère.”

  Versins was undoubtedly correct to observe that Lautrec is of some relevance to the history of French scientific romance, although that aspect of the work reproduced in his three collections is decidedly marginal, mainly because the principal use he makes of futuristic and other quasi-science fictional motifs is in the context of dream stories that are whimsically or surreally fantastic rather than speculative. He did, however, translate M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud for the periodical Je Sais Tout, and the sketchy bibliography compiled by Eric Dussert calls attention to a “petit roman pour enfants” entitled Le Roi des microbes [The Microbe King], serialized in Qui lit rit in 1905-06. Interestingly, that same bibliography also refers, without giving full details, to a novel for adults entitled Le Feu sacré [Sacred Fire], which allegedly appeared in the occult periodical L’Initiation, founded by Papus (Gérard Encausse). None of these works is as yet obtainable via gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s website.

  Although Lautrec published a volume of memoirs, Souvenirs des jours sans souci [Memories of Carefree Days] (1938), which is quoted by Dussert and by François Caradec, who wrote the preface to a 1989 reprint of Les Histoires de Tom Joë, it must be a trifle lacking in detail, since both commentators remain vague about many aspects of his life. Neither mentions Lautrec’s first wife, Dora, although Dussert notes that he was married for a second time in 1922, to Marcelle Husson, who was 32 years his junior.

  Lautrec retired from teaching seven years after that and moved to Marseilles, presumably in search of a kinder climate, but returned to Paris in direly poor health some years before his death on July 25, 1938. He put himself forward as a candidate for the Académie Française in 1923, unsuccessfully, but he was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1936. Dussert suggests, not very plausibly, that he might have been much prouder when his bust was placed in the Salon des Humoristes in 1920.

  Most of the items included in this collection speak for themselves without any further comment than the passing remarks already made, but it is worth calling particular attention to one of two items of exceptional interest.

  Some of the most unusual stories in La Vengeance du portrait ovale are, with one conspicuous exception, the pieces that first appeared in Poèmes en prose. It is arguable that the complexity of “Le Mur” and “Le Familial” is more than a trifle awkward, but the author’s intention in framing them as narratives was not to clarify or rationalize the dream-based elements on which they are manifestly based, but rather to amplify their quasi-oneiric qualities. “Cauchemar” (tr. as “Nightmare”) is a more extended, and more accomplished, exercise in the same vein, extrapolating the symptoms and side-effects of acrophobia in an interesting fashion by means of dreams-within-dreams. The most extreme of Lautrec’s exercises in that hallucinatory vein is, however, “La Terreur polaire” (here translated as “Polar Terror”) which first appeared in the prestigious Mercure de France in 1904.

  Although it is superficially represented as the tale of survivors of a ship trapped in the polar ice, whose descendants build an ill-fated city on the Antarctic continent, “La Terreur polaire” is actually a psychological study, which only begins to make sense if it regarded as a hallucinatory fantasy or a posthumous fantasy taking place entirely, or almost entirely, in “inner space.” Nothing that happens in the story, at least once the ship becomes trapped, can possibly be regarded as a record of adventures in the actual Antarctic, the location featured in the story being a place where darkness is eternal rather than seasonal. The story has something in common with Michel Bernanos’ surreal castaway fantasy La Montagne morte de la vie (1967; tr. as The Other Side of the Mountain). Although Lautrec did not translate The Purple Cloud until 1911, it is possible that he had first read it before writing “La Terreur polaire;” whether he had or not, there are interesting points of kinship between the two works.

  Of the stories imported from the other collections, the one requiring most comment is “Le Symbolisme Latin” (tr. as “Latin Symbolism”), which is not a story at all but a mock-essay, whose labeling as a poem in prose echoes Edgar Allan Poe’s labeling of Eureka and “The Imp of the Perverse,” although its closest kinship is with Poe’s tongue-in-cheek essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” which offers an obviously-fictitious satirical account of the composition of “The Raven.” Poe’s flights of fancy cast in mock-non-fictional form are sometimes called “hoaxes,” but they are not really intended to fool anyone, and Lautrec’s venture into the same exotic territory similarly assumes that the reader is in on the joke from the start. It is included here to illustrate the fact that Lautrec’s homage to Poe is more extensive than that offered by most of the America author’s other French imitators—although Baudelaire imported a similar sarcastic whimsy into some of his own prose pieces.

  The pieces reproduced from Les Histoires de Tom Joë are mostly straightforward, but the two items bracketing the selection from that volume, to which attention has already been called, are necessary illustrations of the manner in which Lautrec’s interest in dreams and their peculiar semi-coherence eventually led him to the deliberate cultivation of the surreally absurd. Although “Le Château hanté ou la vierge adultère” is the more extended of the two, mocking the clichés of popular melodrama, it is “Conte cubiste” that really attempts to extrapolates the method to its limit, carefully retaining one of the aspects of Decadent style that Baudelaire championed: the deliberate infection of literary prose with ideas drawn from other artistic sources, especially visual art. The story illustrates the fact that Lautrec never lost contact with his Baudelairean roots, even when he was being deliberately silly.

  The critics who refused to consider Lautrec as a writer of the first rank, less impressive as a neo-Poesque fantasist than Marcel Schwob or Henri de Régnier, and less significant as a proto-surrealist than Alfred Jarry or Guillaume Apollinaire, were correct in their estimation, but such crude linear comparisons cannot take into account the fact that Lautrec had distinct qualities of his own that are found nowhere else in the spectrum of fantastic literature. Even his most calculatedly conventional stories, written with commercial publication very obviously in mind, have wry twists to them that no other writer would have added in quite the same way, which lend interest even to his most trivial productions, and make him a writer well worth reading and savoring.

  The translation of La Vengeance du portrait ovale included herein was made from the 1997 reprint issued by L’Esprit des Péninsules in the Collection l’Alambic. The translations of items from Poèmes en prose were made from the electronic copy made by Harvard University and available for consultation at archive.org. The translations of items from Les Histoi
res de Tom Joë were made from the 1989 reprint issued by La Bougie du Sapeur.

  All these editions contain some obvious typos, and it is not impossible that some of the odd verbal formulations found in the translations arise from misprints; the vast majority, however, are undoubtedly deliberate contrivances on the author’s part. A significant part of the effect of these oddities, especially when they involve puns—as they frequently do—has inevitably been lost in translation, although I have tried to improvise English equivalents where possible. In general, I have made little or no attempt to reproduce the persistent peculiarities of Lautrec’s punctuation and grammar, except to give a slight flavor of their occasionally-extreme eccentricity.

  Brian Stableford

  THE VENGEANCE OF THE OVAL PORTRAIT

  The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

  The man in question, Don Arias d’Alilaya, lived in a ruined ancestral castle in Estremadura.2 For 20 years, he had lived alone. A bloody drama that had unfolded during his youth had infected his heart with a ferocious hatred for humanity, and women in particular.

  His father, the noble Count Pablo, had ruled his domain like a true king while he was alive. By virtue to feudal customs, he had the right of life and death over his subjects—but all of them, while fearing him, venerated him, for he was as just as he as strong. Having become a widower early in life, he had consoled himself rapidly for the death of Arias’ mother. Leading thereafter a dissolute and wandering life, he had confided the child to aged relatives who had lived him and pampered him, in a distant house in another province. The Count came to embrace him between voyages, but his soul was elsewhere.