French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

Verlaine captures here the trappings and ornamentation of a certain Decadence, both in style and content, but the tales collected here cover a wider range, and have more satiric bite and acrid energy than the term denotes. Also, by far the majority of them are tales of ‘Modern Life’ in the Baudelairean sense, where however disturbing or horrible the events, they take place in a recognizable, urban setting, of boulevards and gaslight, hansom cabs and frock-coats. Some of the
stories belong to the genre defined in French as
le fantastique
, constituted by ‘the abrupt intrusion of the mysterious within the framework of real life’, and by ‘the hesitation of a being who recognizes only the laws of nature, confronted with an apparently supernatural event’.
²
Hence, in one tale, the dreadful pall of apparently interminable darkness that falls upon Paris, when the protagonist is out enjoying an evening stroll. Frequently, a predisposition to nervous excitement, exacerbated by stress, breeds its own psychological terrors.

‘La Décadence’

Verlaine is right in his graphic, late-imperial imaginings, for the Decadent style modelled itself (or so it was given out) on the late Latin literature which the classical scholar from the Sorbonne, Désiré Nisard, in his voluminous study
Études de mœurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence
(1834) had brought to light. It was Nisard, in fact, who put the term
décadence
into circulation; but he meant it pejoratively, as pertaining to works in which mere description, from being an ornament, becomes an end in itself. He notes also that decadent art is extremely erudite, even recondite; it is a literature of exhaustion, weighed down by the weight of past masterpieces, and it therefore has to seek ‘extreme’ effects in the quest for originality. As we shall see, this is highly relevant to this period, the tail-end of the nineteenth century. It is an elaborate, descriptive,
recherché
author like Petronius that holds the most appeal: his
Satyricon
, gleaming in its rich, gold-tooled leather binding, has its place on the shelves of the blue-and-orange
cabinet de lecture
lovingly decorated by the Duc Jean de Floressas des Esseintes, the seminal creation, or rather confection, of Joris-Karl Huysmans in his celebrated novel
A Rebours
(1884). We shall have occasion to return to this book, the ‘Bible of Decadence’, which provided, among other things, the model for Dorian Gray. In the long disquisition on the Latin authors, Des Esseintes professes an allergy to the poets of the Augustan Age—Virgil, ‘one of the most sinister bores the ancient world ever produced’—and Horace, with his ‘elephantine grace’ and (hardly a quality for our writers) his good sense. The richness of the style—inlaid with precious and false stones, with silvery flights and terse barbarisms—that could carve
out a vivid slice of Roman life and present it whole, without moralizing or satiric intent, was what appealed to the dandy, and through him to Huysmans and to other major writers of the school, like Barbey d’Aurevilly or Remy de Gourmont, who translated from the poets of the Latin Decadence. It would be an error, however, to look too closely to Lucan or Tertullian, Ausonius, Rutilius or Claudian, St Ambrose or Prudentius for genuine analogies with our period. Remy de Gourmont, who emerges as the most perspicacious critical intellect of the time, hints that the whole of
chapter 3
of
A Rebours
was an elaborate hoax on the part of Huysmans, to send the critics baffled by his style scuttling off to Latin poets they had never read.
³

One definition of Decadence (the painter Braque puts it finely, when criticizing the academic work of the
pompiers
, painters like Bouguereau or Cabanel) is a complete facility of technique, that sets no limits to its material, and imposes upon itself no constraints. Huysmans’s fertile neologisms and preposterously
recherché
descriptions actually earned praise from the Surrealists. A sentence like ‘Shrunken by the shadow that had fallen from the hills, the plain appeared, at its middle, to be powdered with starch and glazed with the white of cold cream’ (…
poudrée de farine d’amidon et enduite de blanc cold-cream
)
⁴
is a prize example of this Decadent straining for effect. The implacable Byzantine despots of Gustave Moreau, or Petronius Arbiter organizing, with dandified elegance, to tickle the taste of Nero, carnal and gustatory orgies, fuelled the imagination of Des Esseintes more than any genuine engagement with the literature of the Latin Decadence.

Symptomatology and the Dissociation of Ideas

If there is one quality that these Decadent Tales share on every level, it is that of self-consciousness.
A Rebours
, with its vertiginous intertextuality, is a case in point. But it is a self-consciousness so developed that it comes to resemble a set of symptoms. The nature of the illness is unclear, the prognosis uncertain, and there seems little hope of a cure. Is the consciousness itself diseased? Or is it infected by something rotten outside of it? What is the nature of the mysterious
mal du siècle
, whose genealogy really begins with Chateaubriand’s pale young aristocrat René, and descends through Byron’s Manfred and Childe Harold, through the ascetic, hysteric dandyism of Baudelaire, down to the authors of the Decadent
fin de siècle
? Remy de Gourmont, whose stories were described by Marcel Schwob as small spinning-tops reaching their final, convulsive circuits, also wrote
Sixtine
(1890), with its subtitle, ‘novel of the cerebral life’. The hero of this novel, Hubert d’Entragues, is the type of many of the protagonists gathered here, an intelligent, vaguely aristocratic young man, paralysed by inaction, fascinated by his own incapacity to function, and yet who experiences sufficient vestigial ‘drives’ to woo a woman, Sixtine, who is as much an extension of his own idealization as she is a being of flesh and blood. He loses her, of course, to a passionate, hot-blooded, and practical-minded Russian, who sweeps her off, leaving d’Entragues to his sepulchral solitude, where he ‘resurrects’ her in literature. One useful definition of the term Decadence may be drawn from this, and it is contained in the word ‘effete’, which means, literally, exhaustion from childbearing. These melancholy individuals are the fruit of exhausted loins, they are sapped of vital energies. They are also, like d’Entragues, or Huysmans’s hero Des Esseintes,
sated
by cerebral and sensual experience. They are effete, and they are sated. Above all, they are the victims of an inexplicable boredom or, to use the august French word,
ennui
, and its Baudelairean variant,
spleen
.

Writing of Des Esseintes and his kind, Marc Fumaroli has described the
fin-de-siècle
hero as being ‘afflicted by a schizophrenia which spares nothing and which dissociates everything: his soul, his sexuality, but also his bodily health. He feels death corroding and working away at his mortal tatters.’
⁵
Fumaroli risks the clinical term schizophrenia (itself notoriously slippery and open to diagnostic error), but it did not exist in the vocabulary of the time. Instead we find terminology like hysteria, neurosis, neurasthenia, and madness, which may be generally subsumed today under the rubrics depression and psychosis. One shorthand way of delimiting our complex period is to say that it succeeds Baudelaire who, with his usual pitiless insight, describes his own moral state on a particular day, thus: ‘I have cultivated my hysteria with voluptuousness and terror. Now I feel perpetually dizzy, and on the brink, and today, 23 January 1862,
I have received a singular warning, I have felt upon me
a breath from the wing of imbecility
.’
⁶
As we shall see, in
Les Fleurs du mal
(1857), Baudelaire was the first modern poet deliberately to
dissociate ideas
, that is, he broke apart their perennial pairings: virtue–reward, vice–punishment, God–goodness, crime–remorse, effort–reward, future–progress, artifice–ugliness, nature–beauty; and it was the new configurations he found for them that made him (and makes him still) such a scandal. The ‘schizophrenia’ of the Decadent protagonist is in fact related to dissociation of this kind—a condition T. S. Eliot came to call, in a famous phrase, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’.
⁷

The period is also contemporaneous with Charcot’s studies of neurotics and the symptomatology of hysteria at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where in 1895 he was assisted by one Sigmund Freud, who published (with Breuer) his
Studies in Hysteria
in the same year. Given Freud’s eminence, and his incalculable contribution to our notion of modernity, it is tempting, if too reductive, to describe the literature of the
fin de siècle
as a kind of raw material awaiting analysis and the talking cure. Adam Phillips has remarked, in the context of Freud’s work, how ‘a more-or-less secular capitalism produces its own counter-culture of symptoms’,
⁸
and it was as true of the mid-to-late nineteenth century as it is now. Several of the stories here describe symptoms that might have come from the clinical casebook of the Salpêtrière, and indeed Maupassant, great psychologist that he was, followed the work of Charcot and carried out his own investigations (see in this collection his story ‘Night’ and, in particular, the fetishistic case study ‘The Tresses’). Maupassant’s curiosity, and his compassion (which reminds one of Freud’s urge to explore motive, and to listen to the sufferer rather than dismiss him or her as ‘mad’ or ‘degenerate’) led him to explore what ‘fetishism’ might be, even before the term had been invented.
⁹

Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, and Huysmans

The Decadent writers, and their commentators, invariably cite two authors or rather two texts, that are indispensable to understanding the period. The first is Baudelaire, already evoked, and his
Fleurs du mal
; the second, which hails Baudelaire as an almost divine precursor, is of course Huysmans’s
A Rebours
(
Against Nature
) (1884). These are the immediate sources, and behind them is the surging pessimism of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and the blind, biological necessity of Darwinism, and of Social Darwinism, as revealed in the tooth and claw of High Capitalism. Schopenhauer precedes Darwin, and his rigorous atheism, combined with his eloquent account of the automatic, necessary nature of human will, bent solely upon its own perpetuation (by means of biological reproduction) in the context of a meaningless universe, proved irresistible and even comforting to the writers of the time. For
progress
—mocked as a delusion by Schopenhauer—whether in the social, economic, scientific, or political sphere, is a term universally derided by this group of writers, who are in shock and recoil at the homogenizing effects of what Flaubert called
la démocrasserie
, and the banalization of the sacred mysteries wrought by scientific positivism. For the German philosopher, it was art, and notably music, which alone could provide some consolation, being in itself disinterested and freed from the chain of biological necessity and blind cosmic Will. In this feckless retinue of disabused young men, seeking to lose themselves in art and novel experience, the influence of Schopenhauer is all-pervasive.

Politically, our period falls within that of the Third Republic of Thiers and the bourgeois republicans, which was one of social reform and middle-class enrichment, following the traumas of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and the Commune (1871). It was a period which saw, in no particular order, Bell’s telephone, Edison’s incandescent light-bulb, Pasteur’s vaccines, the Eiffel Tower, the Universal Exhibition (1878), the first great department stores, free secular primary education for all, the legalization of divorce, the French
cancan
, child labour laws, anarchy, and the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), that
cause célèbre
which divided France into (essentially) radical anti-militarist Left and nationalist, anti-Semitic Right.
L’Affaire
, in which the Jewish Captain Dreyfus was accused (falsely, it turned out) of spying for the Prussians, crystallized two opposed visions of France,
and it exercised the best minds of the period. This divided vision of France can be traced in the writers here; on the one hand there is a man like Mirbeau, who was drawn to anarchy, and on the other, craggy Catholic aristocrats, like Barbey d’Aurevilly and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who were the penurious scions of noble if etiolated lineage. The latter were unashamed elitists and monarchists, and in their writing they wage a ferocious rearguard action (and here they find common cause with Mirbeau) against everything that may be summed up by the word
bourgeois
: new money, complacency, positivism, optimism, and vulgarity. Léon Bloy, whose satirical flair and misanthropic rage rises to epic heights in his
Histoires désobligeantes
(1894), admitted to disposing of his bourgeois protagonists exactly as the fancy took him—he treats them like marionettes or even voodoo dolls.

The Victorian prophets, men like Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and John Ruskin, were equally on their guard against triumphalist capitalism and industrial ‘progress’; but they were none of them voluptuaries of vice; and the contrast between their antidotes—touchstones of poetry, muscular Christianity, artisanship, and socialism—and the heady, decidedly
anti-social
attitudinizing of the Decadents over the Channel is instructive. Rather than the Victorian sages, it was the Oxford aesthete Walter Pater who begat Oscar Wilde. Pater’s
Marius the Epicurean
, and the sensual conclusion to his
The Renaissance
(1868), which he originally refrained from publishing ‘because it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall’, have the makings of another Decadent bible: ‘While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.’
¹⁰
This can be read as a sublime contribution to the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, whose leaders in France were Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire; and Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ was fated to fall into the hands of Oscar Wilde, who span out of it his witty, dangerous paradoxes. The stark symbolism of Wilde’s downfall and public humiliation was only the most spectacular backlash of bourgeois respectability. In private, such torments were ubiquitous: Baudelaire, whose late notes in his private
journals, with headings like ‘Hygiene. Conduct. Morale’, read like a set of spiritual memoranda to the self—to a self now terrified by the spectres it has called up—provides the crucial ‘reality check’ which a life of assiduous dandyism must incur. Huysmans, in his 1903 preface to
A Rebours
, and writing now as a Catholic convert, is similarly eloquent, the book having come to represent for its author a staging-post on the mysterious progress of Grace within his soul. ‘Only slowly did I start to become detached from my shell of impurity; I began to feel disgust with myself… […] I found myself praying for the first time, and the revelation happened.’
¹¹
Barbey’s brilliant insight, when reviewing Huysmans’s book (the two did not yet know each other), that ‘after such a book, the author has no alternative but to choose the muzzle of a pistol, or the foot of the Cross’, is a reminder that ‘Decadence’, understood as a congeries of attitudes, opinions, and ‘dissociations’, when pushed as far as it was by the writers gathered here—in particular by Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, or Mirbeau—could be a game with deadly serious consequences.