French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (30 page)

In one of those cities dear to Baudelaire’s muse:

Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
,
Encor tout fatigués par la vague marine…
*

Barcelona, Bilbao, Antwerp, Saigon, or Marseilles, as the traveller strolls at leisure through the popular district of the town, he lets himself be distracted by a pretty, childlike head leaning out of the skylight
of a squalid house. No sooner has he entered than the story, boldly sketched in, introduces some romantic characters: a negress with a yellow madras on her head welcomes the young man and leads him in; on the first-floor landing there’s a white parrot, a monstrous pink-crested macaw that watches him from his perch; on the fifth floor the staircase gleams under a covering of splendid rugs, and at last he is introduced to the attic room, which is done out like the boudoir of an oriental princess, all in silk, lacquer, and soft, silvered furs; inside is a Sicilian Greek, her profile could be struck on a medal, her bronze nakedness statuesque, she’s a child-bride, scarcely fourteen years old; and all shivering and swooning, she offers him her supple body… They make love on white and yellow cushions; they drink wine from Samos out of cups of jade, and to the intoxication of their kisses is added that of burning perfumes rising from old silver tripods… Silks and spices, the style is one of sparkling goldwork, vision of an artificial paradise, the dream of an opium addict or an
habitué
of the Hôtel Pimodan:
*
the whole Baudelairean aesthetic is brought to life again. But it’s only a dream, because when the traveller comes to his senses and wakes up, he is outside a bar full of sailors. He tries to find the enchanted house; he wanders for nights and days! All to no avail. Then he leaves, quitting the town of masts and yardarms, and sets off on his travels once more. Ten years pass, when suddenly, in some port or other, he recognizes the long-desired doorway. The negress in her madras is standing in the hall, and the giant parrot on his perch. The staircase is still as slippery in its cage of damp walls, the Asian carpets blaze as before on the final steps up, and the ebony-faced madame opens the door to the tiny room… but, alas! The Greek has aged… Deformed, coarsened, enormous, her breasts hang ripe, her belly is slack, and through the stink of creams and unguents, the spectre of his love proffers slavering, gap-toothed kisses. The stew is covered in rags, the velvet cushions are falling to pieces, the perfume-pans have gone out… Deeply distressed, his nausea rising in his gorge, the traveller comes clattering and stumbling down the stairs of the vile house. Sick to his stomach, he laments his lost dream and swears never ever to return. But as he falls through the door, ‘You will return,’ cries a harsh, strident voice.
You will return
, and the shattered man bows his head, for he knows inside him that he will return to the hideous sink, and that he will do so despite the slack flesh, the rancid lips, and the shapeless bust all oily with waxes.

For the giant parrot knows the heart of men, and he has known it these hundred years, ever since he first saw them filing up and down that staircase; and what he cries out on that threshold is the very form of their destinies:
You will return
, and they do indeed all return, since we return to our vice, as the dog in the scriptures returns to its vomit. Once we have met the fourteen-year-old Greek, with her cool, firm flesh, we never stop returning to the house of ill-fame, knowing that we shall meet none other than the aged tart with the drooping breasts; but the illusion, the hope that we might once again recover the Greek we encountered first, draws us inexorably back. We are always hooked, and always ready to be so, because what compels us is lust.

Ah! malheur à celui qui laisse la débauche
Se planter comme un clou sous sa mamelle gauche!
*

sobbed Alfred de Musset in two of his finest lines; and as he knew about Vice, and about the vicious with their complex, credulous, and quivering souls, the terrible
man with the bracelet
is the one fantastical and criminal shadow missing from Canler’s
Memoirs
.
*

In one of the most frequented streets of Paris, not far from the Wagram dance-hall,
*
a meeting point for thieves, cut-throats, and pimps, some twenty years ago the police managed in the end to see through the racket—simple and complex at once—of one particular lady at her window. She never appeared entirely, but from four in the afternoon in winter, and seven in summer, a bare arm, a very white bare arm, beautifully modelled, emerged from behind a curtain and swayed like a swan’s neck; it would remain there for hours on end, either folded so as to show a glimpse of the soft down of the armpit, or else it dangled down, languid and supple, reaching with desire towards the street. The arm and nothing more. The woman never showed herself. No one had ever seen her face; a gold bracelet encircled the wrist, and passers-by would stop and gaze up at the motionless arm, that moved very occasionally, and languidly when it did so, a hairless, powdered arm, so cold and white it seemed to be carved from marble. Men went up, mostly elderly men, and wealthy men, serious clients with refined requirements, and they came down again almost immediately, terrible-eyed and staggering; this went on for nearly ten months, when vague rumours started to circulate in the locality. Rumours of traps to snare old libertines for their salacity; eminent
names were bruited, the names of captains of industry and landed gentry, who had all been lured into a room and then threatened and robbed. But since no formal complaint had ever been made to the police, the vice-squad itself began its own enquiry. When the time came for a census to be taken of the girls living in the house, they found that the room belonging to the bare arm was inhabited by a painter, a young man who had won a Prix de Rome, who had now been back from Italy for a year-and-a-half, and who was living in considerable comfort on undeclared resources. The very evening of this discovery, when the bare arm was already deployed from behind the red curtain, a policeman disguised and made up as an old man rang discreetly at the studio door. After some whispered negotiations through the keyhole, and a few lascivious words pronounced by a feminine voice, the door half-opened, to be slammed shut instantly behind the speechless detective: a turn of the key in the lock, and the agent found himself face to face with a vigorous young man in shirt-sleeves, with one sleeve drawn right up to the shoulder. He grabbed the policeman’s throat with one hand, and with the other brandished a long butcher’s knife: ‘Let’s be having you, you dirty old wretch, and no nonsense… Your watch, your jewellery, and everything you have on you or I’ll have you arrested! You have the effrontery to come calling on a man! So come! Your money, your rings, or I’ll turn you in!’

It was the man with the bracelet, who was detained that evening by the police. For ten months he had been operating with impunity. Out of perhaps two hundred victims, not one had dared report him. The fear of ridicule, fear of the police, the thought of the scandal that might ensue as a result of a suspect liaison—all these had made them hold their tongues:

Ah! malheur à celui qui laisse la débauche
Se planter comme un clou sous la mamelle gauche!…

‘A
H
, here’s a new one!’ said an elegant black suit sitting in front of me in the orchestra stalls, during the second act of Legendre’s play.
*
Smiling into his moustache, he trained his glass on a box to the side,
where a slender young woman had just taken her place, extremely pale, in a beautiful dress of light blue tulle which made her look even paler.

It was the middle of the second act, the scene in the chapel, during which Lord Claudio, frowning craggily, his hand on the pommel of his sword, insults Leonato and the candid Hero in the famous Shakespearean apostrophe:

Garde ta fille, elle est trop chère!
*

Rapt as the audience was by the drama of the scene, and by the dazzling Roybet costumes against the wonderful Ziem watercolour that Porel
*
had mingled with the set design, every eye, and every lorgnette, followed the lead given by the opera-glass, so that the fragile creature, leaning now on the red velvet of the box, seemed to reflect, in her disturbing and spectral pallor, the gaze of all the men and women that had turned their eyes upon her.

Her face was oval, but drawn, with a languid, suffering expression: her eyes, that seemed enlarged, were ultramarine bordering on black. They were unnaturally bright, deep-set in their bruised and blueish rings, spotted with pearl: her delicate nose, with its arched and quivering nostrils, breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if in an atmosphere too thin to sustain her in life, and with her great feathered fan resting against her flat chest, from time to time, with her teeth that shone bright against the red of her mouth, she would bite at the burning purple of her lips, hard enough to draw blood. A man had now taken his place next to her; he was tall and strongly built, flourishing in the prime of health, and very smartly dressed; with the wide silk ribbon of his opera-glass threaded through his white evening waistcoat, his sartorial elegance was reminiscent of the Prince de Sagan. He leant towards the pale, fragile woman, whispering in her ear, and now and again offering her, from a soft silk bag, crystallized Parma violets, which she would nibble at, half-smiling, half-choking.

‘She’s not long for this world,’ sniggered my black-clad neighbour. ‘Two months at the outside. That little woman is suffocating, she must be coughing up lungfuls of blood, but I bet she’s fired up with fever between midnight and two. She’s extremely pretty too, if a little on the thin side.’

He took the lorgnette from his friend’s hands, and with both lenses fixed on the box, he described every contraction of the pale blue dress, and every attention proffered by the large white waistcoat.

‘All the same, he’s got damned strange taste,’ the lorgnette went on, ‘going for skeletal women; he’s a fervent adherent of love’s funeral rites.’

‘Good old Fauras, I never see him except with funereal Venuses, and they’re always different. How many mistresses has he expedited by now?’

‘At least three or four in the last two years. It’s a kind of monomania, almost as if he collects them from the hospital; illness excites him, especially consumption. We have seen the
hangman’s mistress
, now we have the
lover of doomed ladies
; in love with tears and the elegiac, the excellent Fauras, who keeps himself in such good trim, loves only those who are close to death. The frailty of their existence makes them all the dearer and more precious to him. He chokes with their spasms, shivers with their fevers, and listens out for the slightest sigh; attending to their stifling, he spies, like a broken voluptuary, on the progress of their disease, and lives their dying agonies—he’s a sybarite, that’s what he is!’

‘Yes, I know. He’s a beast, a kind of sadist, prey to macabre ideas, the next thing to a necrophiliac, seeking the last warmth in a cadaver, and in death the last piquancy of love. The Saint-Ouen horror crime
*
relived every evening in the privacy of the boudoir. The quest for novel sensations, proof from the sanction of the law because the victim is still just alive.’

‘My dear fellow, you could hardly be more wrong! Fauras is a tender-hearted, elegiac soul, obsessed with the exquisite manifestations of sadness, besotted with mourning; he wears black crêpe in his thoughts and has a funeral urn in place of a heart. Deliciously distressed, and delighted to be so, he is forever fingering the evergreen cypress of his regrets above his latest loves—a phoenix eternally rising from the ashes!’

‘I must confess, I am completely lost.’

‘What a lumpish man you are! To love a woman who is doomed to die, to know that with every kiss and caress time is running out, to feel with the rasping of her breath everything ebbing away forever; to know oneself condemned to despair and yet exalted, to be aware that each fresh pleasure is one step closer to the grave, and that with one’s own hands, shaking with horror and desire, one is hollowing out within the love-nest the pit wherein you will lay your love to rest,
that
is the piquancy of the thing! A man can never have known the
bitter appeal of stolen assignations which may never be repeated, not to understand a passion of this type, with its piercing melancholy, hatched in relationships like this, marked indelibly by Pleasure and Sin!’

‘But that’s monstrous!’

‘And yet absolutely true. Frailty is the great appeal of beings and things, the flower would scarcely move us if it never faded; the faster it perishes, the sweeter the scent, its life is exhaled with its fragrance! The doomed woman is exactly the same; dying, she abandons herself frenziedly to pleasures that fill her with burning life even as they hasten her death; her time is running out; her thirst for love, her need to suffer burns and flames within her, and she clings to love with the final convulsions of the drowning; and desiring still, she redoubles the force behind her last kiss. Twisted under the hand of Death, she would kill the object of her desperate adoration, were she not expiring herself; and his long, crushing, and furious embrace makes her swoon, and die.’

‘Voluptuous!’

‘Voluptuous, indeed! And Fauras has another advantage; with these consumptive women of his the relationship is never broken off brutally, there are no disagreeable scenes, unavoidable even for a gentleman, there is no vitriolic and sordid settling of accounts: tactful and clear-sighted, Fauras escapes all the predictable disgust and lassitude at the end of such affairs, the dull and wretched conclusion to all such liaisons in which satiety and boredom succeeds passion. His love affairs come to an end with the clean white, silver-threaded winding-sheet in a young woman’s coffin, amidst violets and roses in clusters, by candlelight, to the sound of anthems and organ music, with the dead girl laid out like Ophelia. A modern Hamlet, he follows the procession of his own love, and if his heart is wrung, at least it is so within a beautiful setting, with flowers and incense, with music and priestly psalms, in an uplifting scene of apotheosis. His is an artist’s grief, in short, but an artist who is also practical and clear-headed, for he has taken death as his notary and his counsel, and he charges the keeper of Montparnasse cemetery with the disposal of his feelings. What is more, the tears he sheds for his mistress are real; now she is dead, he brings her favourite flower to the graveside, and arranges it carefully, and wins the hearts of the family standing by; and so, with a sweet melancholy, embellished with the adored images
and the light ghosts of women, his life flows on, between the beloved friend of yesterday and
the one who is to come
, already perfumed with regret, trembling with echoes, beating with hope, nuanced with memories!’