The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

by Gabriel de Lautrec

  Jean Loiseleur had spent the evening with occultists and had heard things said that had disturbed him. Jacobus Duboisius had talked about formulae that rendered people invisible. What mysterious power would someone possessed of that gift have! A priest of Pythagoras would spend the night in the cave of Trophonius. Before he went to sleep he would put a small gold plate under his tongue, on which mysterious sins were engraved. Before putting it under his tongue he purified it in the altar fire. In the morning, he woke up invisible for the whole day, and undertook a very interesting excursion through the shops of goldsmiths, money-changers and bankers.

  I want to be invisible, Jean Loiseleur said to himself. I want that.

  He searched the room for a gold plate, or, by default, a gold coin. A fruitless search. He rummaged in his pockets. No money. He remembered, dolorously, that he must have given his last fifty-centime piece as a tip to a waiter who also had no money. All he found in his waistcoat was a five franc bill, payable in gold on presentation at the Banque de France.

  After all, he said to himself, very aptly, it’s only faith that saves. A banknote is a fiduciary coin. I have only to imagine, sincerely, that it’s gold.

  So he took the banknote, purified it according to the rites by holding it, for want of sacred fire, in a candle-flame, then went to bed with the talisman under his tongue, pronounced the magic formula, and, after a little while, went to sleep.

  His slumber was peaceful and dreamless. He woke up early and was suddenly on his feet. The banknote had melted in his mouth during the night. That was five francs down the drain—or, rather, the gullet. But that was unimportant. He raced to the mirror. Alas, he could see himself distinctly in the mirror. The banknote did not have the same value as gold!

  All day long he was peevish, sulking in the office and the restaurant, and consigned all occultists to their patron, the Devil. That evening he got home early, disgusted with life, took his key from the rack and went into his room. To make the situation even more charming, there happened to be a power cut. He did not even light his candle. He undressed in the dark and, after having commended his soul to God, went to bed and went to sleep.

  Rosy-fingered dawn had just reopened the gates of the Orient once more, after having carefully closed the gates of the Occident in order to avoid draughts. Jean Loiseleur got up nonchalantly. His life had once again become as banal as that of a fish. He dressed unhurriedly, having nothing urgent to do except go to the office.

  Suddenly, in the course of his peregrinations through the room, he passed in front of the mirror. Amazement! He put his hand to his heart, weak at the knees. “And I still asleep?” he exclaimed. “Or am I awake?” He was directly in front of the mirror, but he could see nothing therein but the image of the opposite wall, and the wallpaper whose vertical lines were parallel to those on both sides of the glass. There was no other image in the mirror but that of the facing wall. His reflection was no longer there!

  He was looking at himself in the mirror, and could not see himself. Thus are destinies accomplished. Certainly, on looking down at his own person, he did not observe anything abnormal. Al his limbs were directly visible. But that was all. Like the man in the German folktale who had lost his shadow,57 he had lost his reflection.

  And surely, without a doubt, if the mirror could not see him, other people would not be able to see him. The success was complete. What glory, when renown publicized the event! He sat down at his table to write, with a feverish hand, to all the newspapers—and to the Academy of Sciences, to solicit the first available seat.

  As he leaned over the table, with his head in his hands, reflecting, and gradually feeling overwhelmed by an immense pride, he heard heavy footsteps on the staircase. Someone knocked at the door of the rom. He got to his feet, enjoying in advance the amazement of the visitor who would hear him without seeing him. He opened the door. It was the house attendant. He was carrying, with some difficulty, a large mirror with a superb gilded frame.

  “It was the landlady who said that the mirror in your room was a souvenir of her husband, who had been a zouave on the Pont de l’Alma.58 So, yesterday afternoon, we came to take it, to put it in her room, and she told me to bring you the best one she had in the house as a replacement. You won’t lose by the swap. Look how handsome you are in it!”

  A Cubist Tale

  At the exit from the stable the horse whinnied slowly and darted a distracted glance over things. Then it headed at a brisk pace toward the road, which led between two rows of poplars to the administrative center of the arrondissement.

  It was a superb horse, the last representative of a long-vanished species. It had a green belly, a curly tail like that of a billiard ball, and eyes shaped like little sausages. As soon as the majordomos besotted with the ideal had introduced it into the vast hall draped with funerary candles where the plenipotentiaries playing bouchon59 were awaiting the opening of hostilities, there was nothing but a cry of admiration—admiration tempered, nevertheless, with a slight bitterness, at the heartbreaking observation that, if one needs eggs to make an omelet, to open a tin of sardines one must at least have, all other things being equal, a winding mechanism But the eyes of the young woman were of a beauty more than human. Her gaze evoked that of the frail heroines of Edgar Poe: Ligeia, Morella, Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine, who died, jealously taking their secrets to the grave. And her flowery abdomen resembled, and might have been mistaken for, the hanging gardens of Babylon built by Semiramis.

  As soon as the marine trumpets had announced the opening of the Olympic games, the gladiators, holding sticks of sealing-wax—the emblems of legislative power—in their hands, went into the arena two by two.

  Nero, meanwhile, was getting impatient. The lampreys that he had eaten voraciously at midday lunch were beginning to stir in his stomach in a disquieting fashion. A little while ago, to appease them, he had thrown them a Thracian salve and a Christian to eat, but in vain. With a feverish gesture, he made sure that his emerald left eye, the color of a fleur de pêcher,60 the ancestor of future monocles, was in place, but in vain. Further away than the circus strewn with cadavers, where the Numidian lions were bounding, he perceived, in a fabulous and monotonous future, the ironic face of Renan, the simoniac exegete and prevaricator.61

  Meanwhile, the crocodiles were advancing in silence, holding puce silk umbrellas over their heads with firm hands in order not to moisten their crushed velvet stocking-tops and Russian leather boots with their hypocritical tears.

  It was at that precise moment that the publican’s door suddenly opened. A man came out, his face illuminated by all the fumes of drunkenness. His glabrous rictus could not conceal the mark of infamy inflicted by a red-hot iron that he bore on his left shoulder and which, from time to time, wearied by the weight, he shifted to the other shoulder with a familiar movement. All the stigmata of debauchery were legible in his thin face. In one hand he was holding a woman’s leg, admirably beautiful, severed at the knee with a razor; in the other, a deaf-mute lantern, whose light was hidden under a bushel of black wheat. He walked with the haste of a man hastening toward destiny—but when he arrived at the crossroads of the Thirteen Myopic Foxes he stopped and, placing the leg he had in his hand on a milestone, he rummaged in his fob-pocket, from which emerged, successively, a pitch-pine rope-ladder, a bois de justice pipe,62 the complete works of Henri Ner63 bound in calfskin, an admirably-sculpted Renaissance sideboard and a massive gold watch, which the man, in the midst of profound obscurity, sniffed interrogatively. “Quarter to midnight,” he murmured. “I have time. The train doesn’t leave for six months.”

  But he suddenly paused, immobilized by the frightful spectacle that unfolded before his eyes.

  Cutting through the canvas background, even though it represented a delightful Watteau landscape, an obscene triangle appeared at the biconvex window of the giant anteater. The pilot of the fly-boat suddenly found himself transported into a landscape of that fabulous India where the camels, either by virtu
e of insouciance or calculation, have three green knees and a fourth in the form of a truncated cone. At sunset the Moon rose, bewildered and in despair at the death of Endymion. Old Theodosius got up. He was bereft of his illusions, since the day when, taking advantage of the Comte’s absence, the perfidious steward had taken possession of the cardinal’s papers. Theodosius, a stillborn child, had known all the bitterness that life reserves for those who live in the margins of laws. But that evening, to the perfume of Aristolochias, the weight of days gone by seemed heavier than usual on his shoulders. He remained pensive momentarily, listening to the hairs of his beard grow. Then, with the energy of despair, he headed for the beach where, every evening, for countless moons, he took his flock of jabirus64 to graze the marine algae…

  Notes

  1 Two collections of Villiers’ contes cruels are available in Black Coat Press editions as The Scaffold (ISBN 9781932983012) and The Vampire Soul (ISBN 9781932983029).

  2 One of the six Medieval provinces of Portugal, and one of Lautrec’s favorite locations for exotic stories.

  3 The principal pseudonym of Marguerite d’Eymery (1860-1953), one of the pillars of the Decadent Movement in the 1890s. She married Alfred Vallette, the editor of the Mercure de Paris and became the magazine’s leading book-reviewer.

  4 Edgar Allan Poe, “Loss of Breath” (1832).

  5 One of the very few references identifiable via Google Books that is not to Bruneau’s more famous namesake identifies him as a book-collector with a special interest in Tahiti.

  6 Henri Duvernois (1875-1937) was a prolific journalist, playwright and novelist who developed a considerable reputation as a conteur but mostly stayed clear of the supernatural themes favored by Lautrec; a translation of his only significant fantasy novel was published by Black Coat Press as The Man Who Found Himself, ISBN 9781935558040.

  7 Lautrec expects his readers to recognize this reference to one of the great causes célèbres of French legal history. On April 27, 1796 the diligence on which a courier was travelling from Lyons to Paris, in charge of an enormous sum of money in cash and securities destined for the army fighting in Italy, was robbed by bandits south-east of the capital. The courier and the coach’s postillion were killed. Several members of the gang were soon rounded up, and among the suspects put on trial was Joseph Lesurques, who had been arrested because of his distinctive blond hair and identified by several eye-witnesses as one of the bandits. After the conviction, one of the actual robbers admitted his own guilt, but swore that Lesurques was innocent, and that he had been mistaken for a man named Dubosc. Lesurques was guillotined anyway, but the guilty party really had been Dubosc (in a blond wig); he, too, was subsequently convicted and guillotined in 1800. The case became the most famous miscarriage of justice of its era, and is referenced incessantly in early French crime fiction—notably that of Paul Féval, who took considerable inspiration from the case in designing the Blackcoats’ strategy of framing victims for their crimes.

  8 The author’s first wife. He married again in the year that La Vengeance du portrait ovale was published, but I cannot find any information as to what had become of Dora.

  9 In the version of this story contained in Poèmes en prose, “Conte bleu,” the jester’s name is Mangetout. The reason for the change remains mysterious.

  10 The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is Paris is reputed to be one of the most demanding French secondary schools. Its alumni include Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade and Victor Hugo.

  11 Henri de Régnier (1864-1936) was a regular at Le Chat Noir, where Lautrec presumably met him, and he became a leading light of the Symbolist Movement. He produced two collections of fantastic short stories somewhat akin to Lautrec’s, La Canne de jaspe (1897) and Histoires incertaines (1919).

  12 This image is appropriated from Hugo’s unfinished epic La Fin de Satan, begun in 1854. with which he became disenchanted after an excerpt was rejected by his publisher in 1857; he added more text at intervals, but probably thought that it had been superseded by La Légende des siècles; the existing text was published posthumously in 1888. Because Satan’s fall is endless, the role of humankind’s tempter is taken in the poem by Lilith.

  13 Gauri Sankar, a mountain in the Himalayas, was still unclimbed when Lautrec wrote this story, and remained so for many years thereafter.

  14 Claude Frollo, in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris.

  15 Albert Lenoir (1801-1891) was a famous architect.

  16 The reference is to an episode in the Odyssey where Teiresias carries a golden staff while serving as a guide in the Underworld.

  17 Herostratus burned down a temple of Artemis, claiming that he did so in order to immortalize his name. His judges attempted to frustrate his ambition by forbidding further mention of his name, but it leaked into histories anyway. He thus became a symbolic figurehead of the cult of celebrity: someone famous for doing something stupid and wicked in order to become famous.

  18 Georges Geiger was a friend of Lautrec’s who had some small reputation as a humorous writer; he might or might not have been the same person as a similarly-named physician from Ulm who published several medical treatises in the early decades of the 20th century.

  19 The wedding in question is an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose legendary status was further augmented in France by a famous painting of the scene by Henri-Charles Baron, first exhibited in 1849.

  20 Another of Lautrec’s less famous friends; he was an engineer.

  21 Hymettus was a mountain ridge near Athens celebrated in Classical literature for the quality of the honey produced there.

  22 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711), who harshly criticized any departure from nature and reason in literary works, disapproving of the fantastic, except in the context of moralizing fables like those of his friend Jean de La Fontaine.

  23 Joseph Hémard (1880-1961) was a prolific illustrator; he illustrated Lautrec’s La Semaine des quatre jeudis [A Week with Four Thursdays], which appeared in the same year as La Vengeance du portrait ovale.

  24 New Year’s Eve.

  25 There is a punning reference to sabots here that cannot be translated—the word is used in French to refer to metal horseshoes as well as clogs worn by humans.

  26 This wordplay, fundamental to the story, does not translate as well as it might; the phrase I have rendered here, in its usual conventional sense, as “trading name” is raison sociale, which obviously carries more plangent echoes of general and wide-ranging relationship than its English equivalent.

  27 Ciboire is the French form of the Latin ciborium, whose original literal reference was to a kind of seed-pod, but was appropriated into the terminology of the church to refer to a canopy over an altar or, more commonly, a goblet with a lid in which communion wafers are kept.

  28 Anatole France (1844-1924) was the most prestigious writer and critic in France while Lautrec was active; he published several classic collections of fantastic stories, but nothing remotely resembling this one.

  29 Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), who only used her surname, became notorious after divorcing her first husband, Henri Gauthier-Villars, alias “Willy,” who had published her early novels under his name; she became one of the most flamboyant figures in the Parisian literary monde.

  30 Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) became one of the central figures of the Decadent Movement, famous for the lavish eroticism of his novels; this story bears no resemblance to his work.

  31 As the reader will notice, time has an extraordinary elasticity in many of Lautrec’s dream-fantasies and farces, but the bizarre alternation of tenses in the following paragraphs is unusual even for him; it may be intended to signal a transitional phase in which the story becomes a posthumous fantasy, and certainly moves its hallucinatory quality into a new phase.

  32 Theocrates and Anacreon were Greek lyric poets.

  33 All these names derive from Charles Perrault’s classic collection of Contes, the first two [Bluebeard and Donkey-Skin] serving there as titles
, while the last two are the names of the children born to the heroine of “La Belle au bois dormant” [The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood]. There is no wicked stepmother in Perrault’s version, however, and the reference might be to Lautrec’s own sequel, Le Mariage de la Belle au bois dormant (1912).

  34 Comte Georges Aubault de la Haulte-Chambre (?-1935) was one of the most flamboyant figures of the Decadent Movement, far more renowned for his exotic costumes than anything he wrote, although his memoir of his friendship with Joris-Karl Huysmans is fascinating.

  35 René Chaillié was a sociologist associated with the school that formed around Émile Durkheim, and a notorious Freemason.

  36 Empedocles of Agrigentum was a philosopher/poet active in the mid-5th century B. C. Exiled from Sicily for his political activities, he traveled extensively in Greece and Italy. He acquired a posthumous reputation as a magician and miracle-worker, and was said to have committed suicide by throwing himself into Mount Etna, which was then alleged to have coughed up one of his sandals by way of evidence. He was the first person to popularize the notion of the four elements. I shall not annotate the names of all the earlier philosophers with whose ideas Lautrec alleges that he must have been acquainted, lest the notes threaten to exceed the text in volume.

  37 These four names are given to the horses pulling the chariot of the god of the Underworld in the unfinished epic De Raptu Proserpinae by the Roman poet Claudian (where the god in question is called Pluto rather than Hades).

  38 This identification of Anteros as a “demon” and a sort of “anti-Eros” is unorthodox; in Greek myth Anteros was Eros’ brother, identical in form, and the god of requited love.

  39 Thomas Aquinas

  40 The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was reputed to be a very persuasive orator, highly skilled in the art of rhetoric.

  41 In English, of course, this faculty would normally be called “Will,” but that would spoil the symbolism. What Lautrec does not mention, however, is that the Latin alphabet originally had 23 letters, lacking the English j, v and w; V was originally the capital form of u, but was subsequently adapted as the consonantal form of that letter and is used in that way in modern versions of Latin texts. Some scholars think that the consonantal form is question was pronounced as we usually pronounce the letter w and still pronounce u in such words as “suave”—a situation further confused by the fact that German speakers pronounce w as we pronounce v.