French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (23 page)

In this he was wrong, for it was doubtless in large part his name, and the banalities associated with it, that led to his singular obsession with being original.

He was indeed, as far as originality goes, a species apart, rare and whole.

Having dabbled in nearly everything—arts, letters, pleasures—he had forged for himself an ideal, that consisted in being
unpredictable
in everything.

At first sight, this wasn’t anything strange, the theory merely indicating a curious soul, the enemy of the commonplace, a seeker of the new—in common with all true creators. But where things became unusual was that Deshoulières made of this theory a rule of conduct in his daily life and in his dealings with the world, pushing it to the point of extreme eccentricity.

He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.

* * *

So it was that, finding originality only in change, he invented the following axiom: one should never look like oneself, physically, especially. It is this that explains his extraordinarily varied clothes, manners, voice, and even physiognomy. Making ample use of make-up and false hair, he emerged each day with a different head, and lived like a veritable Proteus.
*

His mind was as various as a kaleidoscope, showing up paradoxes like coloured glass, mingled with the most monstrous truisms, which made in reality for a dazzle of words, ideas, images, arguments, quite blinding for those who wanted to take the measure of this fantasmagorical intelligence.

* * *

He was, moreover, extremely gifted.

Robust and well-built, he was two feet longer than the verses of his deplorable homonym,
*
and one could discern a modern beauty under all his borrowed facets. He had marvellous facility in assimilating every virtue and every vice, all the sciences and all the arts. He was known for his acts of heroism and his acts of cowardice, for his
tours de force
and his swoonings, for incomparable fragments of verse and prose, for snatches of novel melody, for sketches which showed the marks of a future master. Potentially, he possessed every human genius.

But he never took anything further, claiming that it would be too banal to do so. It sufficed him to say that he had all the power necessary to become a great man, poet, musician, painter—but he renounced such things, such grandeurs being altogether too vulgar and below him.

It’s all as old as the hills, he would say. There is no point in my being the god of my century, since I already am. It might amuse me to be that god, if I were a mere brute! But even that has been done before!

Mostly, people wrote him off as a lunatic. But some men thought of him as a kind of Antichrist.

But this Antichrist was much too subtly eccentric to believe in himself.

If God did exist, he said one day, and if I were He, I wouldn’t be so stupid as not to prove to myself I did not exist.

* * *

Holding such theories, it is obvious that Deshoulières could exist only in Paris, and only in our own times; and he would surely have lived on there quietly, for many years to come, a source of anxiety to a few friends, but mostly an amusement to the crowd, no more nor less than a simple clown, had he not in fact been the man of genius that he was.

An ordinary original would not have had the idea of carrying out the extreme eccentricity that cost him his life.

He contrived to murder his mistress, have her embalmed, and to continue as her lover.

The crime was carried out with such skill, and with such
novelty
in the manner of concealing it, that it remained undetected.

But it was the fact that this monstrously sadistic crime was a secret, this is what seemed banal to Deshoulières. He considered that there was no great originality in being a monster and escaping the exactions of the law. He confessed to the crime himself, showing not the slightest remorse, which was, indeed, essentially
unpredictable
.

The whole of Paris cried out in horror, and every eye was riveted upon Deshoulières.

* * *

This was the moment, if ever, to be unusual, and his task now was to find a way of being
unpredictable
, while surrounded by the vulgarities of prison, the assize court, and the guillotine. Deshoulières remained true to his
mission
.

In prison, he busied himself not with his defence, nor with his notoriety, but with classifying and codifying the mysteries of animal magnetism, and of transforming this dense philosophical treatise into a sequence of monosyllabic sonnets. After writing three he gave up, having satisfied himself that the thing was
possible
.

* * *

In the dock, he was magnificent.

His barrister, an illustrious member of the profession, was tickled by the challenge presented by the difficulty of the case and the indifference of his client; his speech for the defence was extraordinary, and he succeeded in shaking the jury and wrong-footing the public prosecutor. Numerous irrefutable proofs, a powerful current of pity, and a winning eloquence combined to establish Deshoulière’s innocence and ensure his acquittal.

The judge had tears in his eyes when he asked the accused if he had anything else to say in his own defence.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Deshoulières, ‘I should first of all like to offer sincere congratulations to my lawyer for his masterly piece of
eloquence in the tradition of French justice. There is only one passage I could perhaps improve upon.’

And he commenced to rework one of his advocate’s arguments, in a way that shed new light and conquered the sympathy of the court.

‘Alas,’ he went on, ‘I cannot say the same of the honourable gentleman the Public Prosecutor, who seems unfit for the grave task entrusted him by the Republic.’

The judges looked startled, the prosecutor furious, the jury baffled.

But this was as nothing to the effect produced when Deshoulières, having enumerated all the weak links in the Prosecutor’s argument, undertook to rebuild from the beginning the case for the prosecution. And he did so with such fire, such energy, such power! He showed in their true light all the hideousnesses of his crime, he took the defence apart brick by brick, and concluded by proving his own guilt so comprehensively that no possible doubt could remain. The verdict that had seemed so certain was reversed by him like a glove, and he obtained what he wanted: the
unpredictable
result of having himself, by his own volition, condemned to death.

* * *

He spent the last hours of his life inventing a new dance-step and an oyster sauce.

When the prison chaplain came to hear his confession, as his final hour drew near, Deshoulières refused to comply, unless the priest first confessed to him. That done, he confessed nothing, but rather spoke to the priest thus:

‘In your speech just now, you quoted a phrase of St Augustine’s. It is from Tertullian, the ninth paragraph of his
De cultu foeminarum
.
*
Go in peace, my son, and quote no more!’

In spite of these capricious attitudes and his force of character, Deshoulières grew anxious when he saw the guillotine.

Not that he was afraid! But he dreaded coming to a banal end after a life of unremitting eccentricity. It displeased him to think that he was to have his neck severed like any Tom, Dick, and Harry. So he contrived a way of being guillotined in an
unpredictable
fashion.

He must have found one. For his face, as he mounted the scaffold leading to the Widow,
*
was lit up by a smile of joy.

And he offered no resistance when they strapped him down on the sinister plank.

But at the instant it tilted into place, he made a gigantic effort, broke his bonds with his Herculean strength, and thrust himself backwards so his head was no longer engaged up to the neck in the lunette of the machine.

The spring was released, nothing could stop the blade, and Deshoulières had his skull topped like a boiled egg.

* * *

He was
unpredictable
on the guillotine.

It chopped his head,
page-boy style
.
*

O
NCE
upon a time, exactly where I could not say (for in truth, the land has been called by every name and exists at all times), lived a woman whose exact appearance I cannot sketch either.

Every man saw her differently and each was right, because he found her appealing like that.

To which must be added the fact that she herself did nothing to try and appear in a certain light. She was content to be in reality everything that people thought she was, not knowing herself exactly what she was.

Some wise heads implied that she was in fact nothing; others, wiser still, added that this was precisely the source of her charm. They compared her to the clouds, whose magic depends on the dreamer that contemplates them, and to the symphonies of the sea, whose music is governed by the music one sings to oneself.

Certainly the said wise heads were not far wrong in their comparisons. But like all great sages, they were quite wrong. For this nothing, that they treated so disdainfully as nothing, was indeed something. The proof being that they were unable to let it alone, and kept trying to explain the reason for it.

Wiser still perhaps were the self-confessed madmen who did not seek to understand, and who simply took the mysterious woman for what she was, or at least for what they believed her to be. Thus they would live through her and within her.

Live, yes, and die too, alas! And they would die having first suffered the thousand deaths known as broken trust, shattered hope, sexual jealousy, and love betrayed.

But why say,
alas
? Do not these thousand deaths constitute what is called life? And the lovers went gaily to their doom, and savoured it, as if they had the poet’s words for a motto:

Come, take my life; it is yours, I give it you.
Write what you will on the great white sheet.
Tear, if you will, every page of the book.
Eat my flesh, pierce my side, drink my spirit.

But this is life! It is living still
To watch your own life-blood spill.

It must be said in favour of the mysterious woman that she never once made them suffer out of deliberate cruelty.

She was no more wicked than she was, in particular, anything else. She was even, on occasion, prone to accesses of tenderness and compassion. She felt sincerely sorry for those she was about to make unhappy. She would often warn them, in all honesty, by saying:

‘You know that I am not in love with you.’

To which nearly everyone replied:

‘So what? I adore you.’

Well, and after that, what right did the men she betrayed and tortured have to complain?

To others, assuredly, she would sigh breathlessly:

‘I love you!’

Then she would betray them too, using this excuse:

‘I made a mistake. I thought I loved him. It’s not my fault. And now I am paying for my mistake!’

And she would say this so gently, and so reasonably, that anyone not biased would be sure to agree with her.

What is more, she would end by turning everything into a joke, her own sufferings, and those of others even more. The basis of her philosophy (for this
nothing
, despite what the wise heads thought, had her own philosophy) was that one should never attach too much importance to anything whatsoever.

She was not hard-hearted, and she did have a heart, and sometimes she would cry; but once she had turned her back she thought no more
of her suffering, shrugged her shoulders, and
moved on to other things
, making a little noise with a winning pout of her lips:

‘Pft! Pft!’

She did this so often that a sharp-tongued wag ended by calling her
Madame Pft! Pft!

She wasn’t angry. On the contrary, it tickled her vanity. The nickname amused her. She even, on reflection (for this
nothing
also engaged in reflection), found it could come in useful.

Now, instead of trying to find excuses for her conduct, and explanations to those who questioned her like the sphinx, she answered simply:

‘Pft! Pft!’

At which the wag with the sharp tongue scratched his head and congratulated himself on his inventive genius:

‘Ye gods! Have I made a huge discovery? Have I stumbled upon the answer to the riddle?’

He thought, and then thought some more, so much so that he ended falling head over heels in love with the mysterious woman, whose mystery he thought he had solved.

To tell the truth, since he was a wise and learned man,
id est
one of those proud souls who are cleverest at deceiving themselves, he would not admit that he was in love, but nursed the fantasy rather that he was undertaking a scientific inquiry.

‘No,’ he would remind himself complacently, ‘I have not been seduced by this doll. I just want to study her, that is all.’

So, exactly like the commonest of mortals, he set about studying her by courting her, desiring her, thirsting for her; and with the pretext that he was examining her soul in the crucible, he in fact contrived quite naively to melt into the depths of her bed, as so many others had melted before him.

And melt the poor sage did, no more nor less than other men. And the experience of melting thus taught the incompetent sage absolutely nothing at all.

He did not even know if he was loved.

She could have told him that he was not, as she had, with admirable frankness, others before him. But in his case, because he affected to be so haughty and knowing, she allowed herself to be a little less than honest. When he questioned her, out of his wits with passion, she would reply with a little smile, looking away:

‘Pft! Pft!’

It goes without saying that she was unfaithful to him. But this time she put a little malice and cruelty into it, or so one might believe. The man she chose to be his lucky rival was a complete imbecile.

The learned man was coward enough to promise he would forgive her, if only she would admit her faithlessness. If need be he would have analysed this depravity in her taste, his thorough understanding would itself have led to forgiveness and absolution. Is it not natural for a woman to want to alternate between a brute and a man of refinement? To please her, he would have given her a dazzling lecture to demonstrate the matter.