The Decadent Cookbook (31 page)

The cream being whipt as usual, mingle it with half a spoonful of essence of roses, six ounces of pounded sugar, and a slight infusion of cochineal, carmine, or
rouge végétal
; but it may be served without; if served white, some large fine strawberries may be placed upon it.

by André Pieyre de Mandiargues

The shit was very tasty. I helped myself to as much of it as I had the fish sperm. I would have taken more if the negroes hadn’t carried it away. The next dish to arrive was stuffed cow’s vulva, so I was informed. From the gastronomic point of view, they were full of the most refined ingredients imaginable. Very white in colour and plump, they floated in a bone marrow sauce like little inflatable boats. To accompany them, we had giant asparagus. These Edmonde served to us one at a time with mock prudishness. Having consumed all that, the black waiters returned from the kitchen with two dishes of seabird brains. At first sight I was rather taken aback by their curious arrangement; for each brain, somewhere in size between a hazelnut and a walnut, had been stuck onto a beak. The idea was to pick up the little skull (which had been thoroughly cleaned), raise it to your lips and pull off the mouthful of brain which was crisp on the outside and a little raw in the middle.

“Go ahead, eat!” said Montcul, surprised by my reluctance. “They’re exceedingly rich in phosphorus, you know”.

I ignored his advice, however. The brains had an after-taste of fish oil which put me off. And then I began thinking, not without a certain unease, about the bloodbath this dish must have entailed — several hundred seagulls killed for just two plates! And yet, why hadn’t I considered that it must have required slaughter on a similar scale to provide one dish of vulvas? The reason, no doubt, was because I found the vulvas delicious, whereas the brains were disgusting. This opinion was not shared by the negroes. They polished off both plates of brains avidly.

When the dishes of seabird brains had been removed, Viola stuck her tongue out in such a way that made my balls tingle and informed me that dessert was about to appear. I assumed this meant fruit, gateaux and such like, but when I saw Gracchus and Publicola enter, staggering under the weight of an enormous dish, I wondered if I hadn’t become drunk without realising it, or perhaps I was having some sort of mystical hallucination. Their dish was piled high with lobster, langoustine, crab and prawns. At moments it looked as if they were about to drop the lot (if this was just play-acting, we were certainly taken in by it) but finally they succeeded in placing it on the table. Nothing could have provided a more elaborate adornment for the silver table than this monstrous prickly bush made up of claws, humps, antennae and spikes. However, an even greater delight awaited us. The chef had removed the salty meat from these crustaceans and replaced it with confectionery. So, when we tore off a limb or cracked open a shell, we found inside creme bavaroise, citron and rose jam, chestnut puree, walnut, vanilla and chocolate paste, praline or coffee fondant, pistachio marzipan and sugar flowers. The pleasures of the palate were mixed with the delight of unexpected and heedless destruction. After a while (during which time I had consumed the contents of a small lobster, an edible crab, two velvet swimming crabs and a handful of prawns) the serving dish was almost empty. Nobody spoke during this course, except to announce, like in a card game, what we had in our hand. It was a veritable feast — but then, the voice of our host returned us to other matters.

“Edmonde”, he stated, “If I were you I’d be stuffing myself less and thinking more about my arsehole. No matter that you have been put to the test by Caligula’s weapon and every other cock that’s visited this chateau! I tell you, taking a great prick made of ice in the arse is another matter. It’s been known to split a person’s guts.”

“Oh please no, anything but that!” she begged. “Punish me any way you wish, if you think I ought to be punished. Let me be buggered by everyone here, even the women, with those dreadful dildoes of yours. Have me beaten. Bring in the dog. Anything you want, but spare me the ice.”

“You will be spared nothing. Have the great penis brought in immediately.”

While Gracchus went out to the refrigerator, our host turned to me and said:

“My dearest Balthasar, you will carry out this operation. The honour is yours as it’s your first evening at Gamehuche. But above all, do not let this whore off lightly. I’ll be most put out if you do. I was exaggerating just now when I said she was almost indispensible. There is nobody here who couldn’t be replaced from one day to the next, if that’s our pleasure.”

It was a most gentlemanly offer, and I’d have liked to thank him in a similar fashion, but Gracchus had already returned with the great prick. My words were interrupted by cries of joy when this object appeared. It was lying in a long vessel lined with seal skin. This vessel in turn had been placed in a dish of crushed ice so there would be no reduction in its size during preparations for its use. Wearing woollen gloves, I took hold of the prick by the balls and felt the weight of it in my hands. It felt like one of those wild west Colts which could shatter an alligator’s eye as effectively as a rifle. Viola lent me a little tape measure which, no doubt for shameless reasons, she kept in her stocking. With this I measured the implement before returning it to its cold store. Thirty nine centimetres long, with a diameter of twenty four centimetres in the middle and twenty five at the glans! Its dimensions made it a formidable weapon.

Meanwhile, Edmonde, realising that tears were to no avail, handed herself over to our black waiters in preparation for the sacrifice.

From
L’Anglais décrit dans le château fermé

by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a prolific story-teller, novelist and art critic. His short stories ‘Clorinde’ and ‘Moon Walker’ are included in Michael Richardson’s two volume study of surrealism -
The Dedalus Book of Surrealism
(1993) and
The Myth of the World: Surrealism
2 (1994).
L’Anglais decrit dans le chateau fermé
is available from Dedalus in a translation by Jerome Fletcher.

Throughout
À Rebours
, the handbook of Decadence, the hero des Esseintes spends much time and effort exploring the more outlandish areas of experience and creating a new and artificial world out of his nervous sensibility. His customized aesthete’s paradise in Fontenay-aux-Roses is a hothouse full of rare flowers and scents, luxurious materials and precious stones, ‘a comfortable desert’ where he can take refuge ‘far from the interminable deluge of human stupidity’. But the world he creates lacks durability. His pleasures are all short-lived, his health breaks down, he can never find contentment or peace. The book ends with a kind of
de profundis
, a forlorn plea that this arch-aesthete might rediscover faith and hope.

The author’s personal odyssey took a similar turn. Huysmans was a civil servant, working in the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, compiling surveillance reports for the Sûreté on anarchists, political subversives, unwanted foreigners and illegal gambling clubs. He was a pillar of social hygiene, a modern bureaucrat-Inquisitor. In his private life, though, he was just the opposite: obsessed with all the things it was his job to keep a check on, he dabbled in satanism, spiritism and other occult practices, as well as enjoying straight, weird, casual and demonic sex. He never married, and preferred emotional independence. ‘In the end,’ he wrote in one weary letter, ‘there’s nothing real but the brothel. At least it’s all over when you come out.’ As he grew older, the weariness intensified, his health failed, and he turned his back on a sinful past. Never one for half-measures, he became a lay member of an order of Trappist monks.

Barbey d’Aurevilly predicted Huysmans’ conversion ten years before it happened. Reviewing
A Rebours
he wrote, ‘After a book like this, the author has only two choices: the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the Cross.’

This is a familiar dilemma for Decadents, who never walk quite as blithely into hell as they would like, and often have secret hopes of redemption. But whose side are they really on - the angels or the devils? Huysmans was painfully divided. So was his admirer Oscar Wilde, who managed to be both irreverent and deeply religious at the same time. For Baudelaire it didn’t seem to matter which side you ended up on. The important thing was simply to
go
- one way or the other. His poem
Le Voyage
ends with the following words:

O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!

Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!

Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l’encre,

Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?

Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!

(Death, old captain, the time has come! Let’s weigh

anchor! This country’s tedious, Death. Let’s set sail.

If the sky and the sea are as black as ink, our hearts,

which you know so well, are filled with light.

Pour out a dose of your poison for our comfort!

There’s such a fire burning in our heads that we

long to throw ourselves into the abyss - Heaven or

Hell, who cares? - into the unknown in

search of the
new
!)

When it comes to cooking, Heaven and Hell of course each have their own traditions. Angels, we are told, eat manna - although this was contradicted by a mayor of Naples in the 1930s, the Duke of Bovino, who was convinced that the angels in Paradise eat nothing but
vermicelli al pomidoro
. Either way, it tends to confirm one’s suspicions about the monotony of Paradise in general and the life of an angel in particular.

Information on what devils eat is more sketchy, although judging by images from Hieronymus Bosch and others, they probably snacked on slices of the damned. In fact Hell itself is often pictured as a gigantic kitchen, with roaring flames, spits, cauldrons, toasting forks, gridirons, etc. - all briskly cooking the carcasses of sinners while grinning fiends look on and prod them from time to time to see if they are done.

Looking at the choice of recipes from the two sides, it seems that, just as the Devil has all the best tunes, he probably comes off better in the kitchen as well. Devilled sauces are piquant, exciting, hot. Nothing as racy is attributed to Heaven. As Dr Kitchiner has it: ‘Every man must have experienced that, when he has got deep into his third bottle, his palate acquires a degree of torpidity and his stomach is seized with a certain craving which seems to demand a stimulant to the powers of both. The provocatives used on such an occasion an ungrateful world has combined to term devils’.