French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (8 page)

1895 Félix Faure elected President of the Republic. The CGT (general workers union) founded. Trial of Oscar Wilde. He is found guilty of ‘acts of gross indecency between men’ and sentenced to two years hard labour.
The Yellow Book
ceases publication. Lumière Brothers patent the first moving-picture
Cinématographe
; first motion picture presented to a public audience. William Röntgen discovers X-rays.
Huysmans,
En route
Lorrain,
Sensation et souvenirs
Symons,
London Nights
Valéry,
Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci
Wells,
The Time Machine
Wilde,
The Ideal Husband
;
The Importance of Being Earnest

1896 Tsar Nicholas II makes triumphant state visit to Paris. Kitchener’s expedition to the Sudan. Dreyfus family demand a retrial after the anonymous letter at the heart of the Affair is attributed to Esterhazy. Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity. Henry Ford builds his first car, the quadricycle. Freud coins the term ‘psychoanalysis’. First modern Olympic Games staged in Athens. The height of Art Nouveau.
Bergson,
Matière et mémoire
Gourmont,
Le Livre des masques
, illustrated by Vallotton.
Jarry,
Ubu Roi
(first performances in Paris)
Louÿs,
Aphrodite
Proust,
Les Plaisirs et les Jours
Schwob,
La Croisade des enfants
;
Spicilège
;
Vies imaginaires
Valéry, ‘La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste’

1897 Félix Faure returns visit to Tsar Nicholas, leading to a renewal of the Franco-Russian Alliance. A fire at the Bazar de la Charité claims 140 victims.
Barrès,
Les Déracinés
Bloy,
La Femme pauvre
Gide,
Les Nourritures terrestres
Lorrain,
Monsieur de Bougrelon
(a fictional portrait of Barbey d’Aurevilly);
Contes pour lire à la chandelle
;
Lorelei
Mallarmé,
Divagations
;
Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard
Rodenbach,
La Carillonneur
Rostand,
Cyrano de Bergerac
Stoker,
Dracula
Wells,
The Invisible Man

1898 Zola writes his pro-Dreyfus pamphlet
J’accuse
, published in
L’Aurore
, after the acquittal of Esterhazy. Zola is proscuted and forced to go into exile in England. Height of the ‘Affair’, France profoundly divided. Foundation of the League of the Rights of Man (pro-Dreyfus) and of the anti-Dreyfusard League of the French Fatherland. Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium. Anglo-French disputes in the Sudan (Fashoda Incident). Start of construction of the Paris Metro. Havelock Ellis publishes
Sexual Inversion
and faces
prosecution for outrage to public morals. Death of Beardsley, Mallarmé, Rodenbach, Moreau, Rops.
Gourmont,
D’un pays lointain
Huysmans,
La Cathédrale
Lorrain,
Ma petite ville
;
La dame turque
Louÿs,
La Femme et le pantin
Richepin,
Contes de la décadence romaine
Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

1899 Death of Félix Faure, election of Émile Loubet as President of the Republic. On the insistence of Clemenceau and Jaurès, Dreyfus is given a second trial, found guilty with ‘extenuating circumstances’, and offered a pardon by the government. Charles Maurras founds the Monarchist-Catholic movement Action Française. Start of the Boer War. Krafft-Ebing publishes
Psychopathia Sexualis
. Marconi’s wireless telegraphy transmits successfully across the Atlantic. Arthur Symons publishes his influential study
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
.
Bergson,
Le Rire
Gide,
Prométhée mal enchainé
Gourmont,
Le Songe d’une femme
;
L’Esthétique de la langue française
Lorrain,
Heures d’Afrique
;
Madame Baringhel
Mallarmé,
Poésies
(posthumous)
Mirbeau,
Le Jardin des supplices

1900 Universal Exhibition held in Paris, the most brilliant of its kind to date. Olympic Games held in Paris. Boxer Revolt in China. Reduction of the working week to sixty hours. Paris Metro Line 1 opens. Max Planck defines law of black-body radiation, the basis for quantum theory. Death of Wilde.
Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
Gourmont,
La Culture des idées
Lorrain,
Histoires de masques
;
Vingt femmes
Mirbeau,
Le Journal d’une femme de chambre
Conrad,
Lord Jim

1901 Second visit of Tsar and Tsarina of Russia to France. Founding of the Radical Socialist Party. Picasso’s first exhibition in Paris. Death of Queen Victoria.
Freud,
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Huysmans,
Saint Lydwine de Schiedam
Jarry,
Messaline
,
roman de l’ancienne Rome
;
Le Surmâle
Lorrain,
Monsieur de Phocas
Mirbeau,
Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique
Liane de Pougy,
L’Idylle sapphique
Rodenbach,
Le Rouet des brumes
(posthumous collection of stories)
Kipling,
Kim
Gauguin in the Marquesas Islands
Rodin illustrates Mirbeau’s
Le Jardin des supplices

Innocence is the devil’s choicest dish.

(A.)

‘I
S
he still alive, then, the old rogue?’

‘Dear God! Still alive, yes!—and by God’s command, Madame—I added, remembering her piety—of the parish of Sainte-Clotilde, the parish of dukes!—The King is dead! Long live the King! as they used to say under the old monarchy before it was broken, like a set of antique Sèvres porcelain. But Don Juan will survive all democracies, he is a monarch that no one will break.’

‘In any case, the devil is immortal!’ she said self-approvingly.

‘He even…’

‘Who?… the devil?…’

‘No, Don Juan… supped, three days ago, at a cabaret… Guess where?…’

‘At your frightful Maison-d’Or,
*
I suppose…’

‘By no means, Madame! Don Juan no longer sets foot in the place… there’s nothing there piquant enough for the taste of his Highness. The princely Don Juan has always rather resembled the famous monk D’Arnaud de Brescia
*
who, according to the chronicles, lived off nothing but the blood of souls. He likes to pink his champagne with it, and you can’t find liquor like that anymore among the cabaret
cocottes
!’

‘Indeed,’ she went on with irony, ‘so he supped at the Benedictine Convent, with the ladies…’

‘Of Perpetual Adoration, yes, Madame! For once he has inspired adoration, the old devil, it does tend to last forever.’

‘For a Catholic I find you full of profanity,’ she said slowly, but a little nettled, ‘and I beg you to spare me the details of your dissolute
suppers, if this is what you intend to impart to me by harping on so about Don Juan.’

‘I’m not inventing anything, Madame! The harlots at that particular supper, if harlots they were, are nothing to do with me… unfortunately…’

‘That’s enough, Monsieur!’

‘Allow me my modesty. They were…’

‘The
mille è tre
?…’
*
she broke in, curious now, altering her manner, almost friendly again.

‘O! Not all of them, Madame… Only a dozen. It’s quite enough, really, a respectable number…’

‘And not quite respectable, either,’ she put in.

‘Besides, you know as well as I do that you can’t fit many people into the boudoir of the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. It has seen great exploits, to be sure, but it
is
a very small boudoir…’

‘What?’ she exclaimed, sounding shocked. ‘They had supper in the boudoir?…’

‘Yes, Madame, in the boudoir. And why not? People have supper on the battlefield. They wanted to give a sumptuous supper to Don Juan, and where better to honour him than in the very theatre of his triumphs, the place where memories bloom in lieu of orange trees. It was a charming idea, both tender and melancholic. This was not the
victims’ ball
;
*
it was the
victims’ supper
.’

‘And Don Juan?’ she said, much as Orgon, in the play, says ‘And Tartuffe?’
*

‘Don Juan took it all in good heart, and ate an excellent supper,

…He, alone, in front of the women!

in the person of someone of your acquaintance… none other than the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès.’
*

‘
Him!
It’s true, he
is
Don Juan,’ she said.

And though she was too old for such daydreams—a pious bigot in beak and claw—she dreamed nevertheless of the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector—of the ancient and eternal race of Juan, to whom God did not give the world, but allowed the devil to do so instead.

W
HAT
I just recounted to the old Marquise Guy de Ruy was nothing less than the truth. Barely three days earlier, a dozen ladies, hailing from the irreproachably virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain
*
(let them rest easy, I shall not name names!), all twelve of whom, according to the dowagers of gossip,
had been honoured
(to use the piquant old expression) by the Comte Ravila de Ravilès, took it into their heads to hold a supper for him—
at which he was to be the only male present
—to celebrate… what? They didn’t say. Giving such a supper was an audacious enterprise; but women, cowardly when alone, become daring in numbers. Probably not one of them would have dared to invite the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector to a supper
en tête à tête
; but together, and using each other as moral support, they gladly formed a Mesmer chain,
*
bound by magnetic force to the compelling, to the dangerous, Ravila de Ravilès…

‘What a name!’

‘And a most fitting one, Madame…’

The Comte de Ravila de Ravilès, who incidentally had always obeyed the directive suggested by his imperious name, was indeed the incarnation in one man of every seducer ever evoked in history or in novels. Even the Marquise Guy de Ruy—who was an old malcontent, with cold, sharp blue eyes, if less cold than her heart, and less sharp than her wit—conceded that in an age when matters concerning women became daily less relevant, then if there
did
exist anyone who resembled Don Juan, it had to be him! Unfortunately, he was the Don of the fifth act. The witty Prince de Ligne
*
never fully accepted the fact that Alcibiades could ever get to be fifty years old. And by the same token, the Comte de Ravila went on acting like Alcibiades. Like the Comte d’Orsay,
*
that dandy cast in the bronze of Michelangelo, who was handsome to the day he died, Ravila had the sort of beauty particular to the race of Don Juan—that mysterious race which does not proceed from father to son, like everyone else, but which occurs here and there, at different intervals, within the families of humanity.

His beauty was the genuine article—insolent, joyous, imperious—in a word, it was
Juanesque
: the adjective says it all and needs no further elaboration; and what is more—had he made a pact with
the devil?—he possessed it still… Only, God had now started to stake his claim—the tiger claws of life had begun to furrow the superb forehead that had been so crowned with roses, and by scores of lips; and on his broad, insolent temples the first white hairs were visible, announcing the imminent arrival of the barbarians, and the end of the Empire… In truth, he bore them with the imperviousness that comes from pride magnified by potency; but the women who had loved him observed them with melancholy. Who knows? Did they see their own advancing age reflected in his countenance? Alas, for them as well as for him, the hour had come for that terrible supper with the cold and marble-white Commendatore,
*
after which there was nowhere left but hell—the hell of old age, waiting for the one to come! Which is why, perhaps, before they came to share with him the bitterness of that ultimate supper, they thought they would treat him to their own, and it would be a masterpiece.

A masterpiece it was indeed, of taste, delicacy, patrician luxury, of inventiveness and resource; it was to be the most delightful, delicious, generous, captivating, and above all the most original of suppers. Just imagine it! Normally, suppers are made of overflowing high spirits, intent on a good time; but this one was animated by memory, by regret, almost by despair, but despair dressed up, hidden behind smiles and laughter, and determined on this final feast or folly, on this last intoxicating return of youth, oh may it never end!…

The Amphitryons
*
who gave this unbelievable supper, so contrary to the insipid customs of the class to which they belonged, must have felt rather like Sardanapalus
*
on his pyre, which he heaped with his wives, slaves, horses, jewels, and every luxury he possessed, so they would perish with him. In the same way, these women heaped this blazing supper with every luxury they had. They brought to it everything they had of beauty, wit, resource, ornament, allure, and poured all of it all at once into this supreme conflagration.