French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (6 page)

The anthology concludes with a comic, and frankly sulphurous, story by Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925), the youngest of the group. ‘A Case Without Precedent’ is a mixture of men’s talk and legal jargon, between Monsieur Barbeville, retired judge, bibliophile, and former ladies’ man, and his doctor. Louÿs was an erudite and civilized young man, who began his career writing Parnassian poetry in the circle of Lecomte de Lisle and José-Maria Hérédia; in 1891 he
founded the review,
La Conque
, in which he published Verlaine and Mallarmé and some early work by Paul Valéry, who, with André Gide, became a close friend. For better or worse, he made his name with erotic texts set in antiquity,
Les Chansons de Bilitis
(1894) and
Aphrodite
(1896). Louÿs was, in fact, what the French like to call an
érotomane
—he was sexually obsessed—and after his death a mass of pornographic writings (and drawings) were discovered among his papers, including intimate journals and lists recounting in minute detail his numerous and complicated liaisons. The most celebrated of these was with Hérédia’s beautiful daughter Marie, who was actually snatched from under Louÿs’s nose, so to speak, by a more senior writer, the distinguished
symboliste
Henri de Régnier, who married her. Marie, however, then claimed Louÿs as her lover, and the three of them went on holiday together to Amsterdam. Louÿs, who was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, snapped the married couple; but there existed also a ‘secret’ dossier of pictures showing Marie in various erotic poses, taken in the writer’s batchelor flat in Paris where they would meet.
²⁰

The dashing Louÿs was in many ways, given his interests and his style, the Ideal Decadent. His star declined in later life, because the literary age to which he belonged, that of the Symbolists and the Decadents, came to an abrupt end, though it had a last, glorious flowering in the
A la recherche du temps perdu
of Proust, a work that originates in the same era but which transcends it. Proust’s range is such that he comprehends—notably in the figure of the Baron de Charlus—both the magnificence and the vulnerability of the flawed dandy, with his
recherché
tastes. These are indeed those of Des Esseintes, but Proust’s psychological penetration goes far beyond Huysmans. As the age of Decadence came to an end, Proust and Gide between them, in the radical innovations of their fiction, were already forging a style for the new century.

I
N
a period teeming with short-story writers, working to supply the insatiable demand for copy of a whole array of newspapers and literary journals, anxious to amuse, divert, terrify, or titillate their readers, the anthologist of the
fin de siècle
is spoiled for choice. By the same token, however, the writers who supplied the copy are uneven in quality—even the best ones could turn out mediocre work—and today’s reader has every right to demand ‘quality control’ in a selection of this kind. It is to this end that I have, for example, avoided the stories set in exotic or classical settings. The Cleopatras in their baths of mare’s milk, the implacable Salomés, the sexually voracious Aphrodites—often associated with the painting of Gustave Moreau—I have chosen to avoid. They have become the stuff of cliché, and too much of the writing is over-orchestrated, when it isn’t frankly pornographic. I have made an exception for Laforgue, but his ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ is altogether superior and in a different tonal and stylistic register from the others. Instead, I have opted deliberately for the tales of recognizably ‘modern life’, because they are, to my mind, not only better but more likely to engage the reader of today, thoroughly versed in types of urban
angst
. Several of the names will be familiar—no anthology of this kind can do without Villiers or Maupassant, Mirbeau or Lorrain—but I have introduced some writers perhaps less familiar to the anglophone reader, such as Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, or Gustave Geffroy—for the sheer quality of their work. Surprise, mordant irony, and incisive economy of means are the qualities I have particularly sought out.

There are various ways of arranging an anthology of this kind: thematically, chronologically, or alphabetically. The chronological presentation by date of birth that has been chosen is advantageous in that the reader becomes more readily familiar with the style of a particular author when the stories are grouped together. Shifts of tone and emphasis become noticeable—there is a perceptible move from the stately, descriptive sentences of Barbey d’Aurevilly, to the acrid notations of Bloy or Mirbeau, to the cerebral dissociation of ideas in the fierce little tales of Remy de Gourmont. By starting with Barbey d’Aurevilly, who was a contemporary of Balzac and Hugo, and ending
with Pierre Louÿs, a contemporary of Valéry and Gide, I have attempted to cover the whole of the period that might reasonably be characterized as ‘Decadent’.

The vast majority of these stories were first published in newspapers and little magazines of all kinds; the authors would then collect them into individual volumes, though sometimes this would be done posthumously. The original source for each story is to be found in the Explanatory Notes at the back of the book. In our own time, several excellent and wide-ranging anthologies of the period have appeared in French, to which I am indebted; details are to be found in the Select Bibliography.

The Decadent writers revelled in
recherché
description and epithet, and in mixing high literary style with snatches of demotic slang, or
argot
. One of them, Marcel Schwob, actually compiled a dictionary of recondite
argot
. Jules Laforgue, on the other hand, pushes preciosity of style to the limit, while never quite (at least in the story here) forging neologisms. They are elegant stylists, especially Barbey or Villiers, whose long, rhythmic sentences contain carefully balanced sub-clauses. The syntax of prose fiction demands a particular kind of fidelity in a way that other genres do not—the freedoms available to the translator are not the same in all mediums. In translating these stories, I have had frequent recourse to the indispensable
Littré
dictionary, dated 1872, which is the one most appropriate to this period, and which the writers themselves would have known. While trying to keep a sprightly pace, I have retained as far as possible vocabulary and usage that would seem appropriate in stories from the same period in English. Nothing dates faster than inappropriate modernization in this kind of prose fiction.

Major Anthologies of the Period

Prince, Nathalie (ed.),
Petit Musée des Horreurs: nouvelles fantastiques, cruelles et macabres
(Paris: Bouquins/Robert Laffont, 2008). A full and informative anthology of
fin-de-siècle
short stories, including illuminating extracts from the newspapers of the time recounting
faits divers
and
curiosités
of different kinds.

Bancquart, Marie-Claire (ed.),
Écrivains fin-de-siècle
(Paris: Gallimard/folio, 2010).

Ducrey, Guy (ed.),
Romans fin-de-siècle, 1890–1900
(Paris: Laffont 1999).

Anthologies in English Translation

Hustvedt, Asti (ed.),
The Decadent Reader
:
Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from fin-de-siècle France
(New York: Zone Books, 1998). An important anthology with specialist essays by Charles Bernheimer, Peter Brooks, Philippe Lejeune, Barbara Spackman, and others.

Hale, Terry (ed.),
Dedalus Book of French Horror: The Nineteenth Century
, trans. Liz Hale (London: Dedalus, 1998).

Stableford, Brian (ed.),
Moral Ruins: The Dedalus Book of Decadence
(London: Dedalus, 2001). A selection of poetry and prose fiction.

Gourmont, Remy de (ed.),
The Book of Masks
, trans. Andrew Mangavite, Iain White, Stanley Chapman, and others, Atlas Arkhive 2 (London: Atlas Press, 1995). Gourmont’s original essays are supplemented by extracts from the writers he analyses.

Luckhurst, Roger (ed.),
Late Victorian Gothic Tales
(Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2005). Contains some French material (Jean Lorrain).

Classic Criticism of the Period

Huret, Jules,
Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire
(Paris: Charpentier, 1891; José Corti, 1999).

Kahn, Gustave,
Symbolistes et décadents
(Paris: Vanier, 1901; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977).

Praz, Mario,
The Romantic Agony
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Praz’s study (originally published in Italian in 1930) remains unsurpassed in its scope, an analysis of Romanticism (and its continuation in Decadence) from the point of view of the erotic sensibility.

Symons, Arthur,
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
, Introduction by Richard Ellmann (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958). Symons’s classic study, first published in 1899.

General Cultural and Literary Criticism

Baudelaire, Charles,
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
(London: Phaidon, 1995).

——
The Complete Verse
, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2012).

Benjamin, Walter,
The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 2002).

Bonnefoy, Yves,
Sous le signe de Baudelaire
(Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

Carter, A. E.,
The Idea of Decadence in French Literature
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968).

Citti, Pierre,
Contre la Décadence. Histoire de l’imagination française dans le roman 1890–1914
(Paris: PUF, 1987).

Colin, René-Pierre,
Schopenhauer: un mythe naturaliste
(Paris: PUL, 1979).

Constable, Liz (ed.), with D. Denisoff and M. Potolsky,
Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

Dijkstra, Bram,
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in fin-de-siècle Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Dowling, Linda,
Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Freud, Sigmund (with Josef Breuer),
Studies in Hysteria
(London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

Gourmont, Remy de,
La Culture des idées
(Paris: Union Générale d’Editions 10/18
fins de siècle
, 1983).

Hansen, Eric,
Disaffection and Decadence: A Crisis in French Intellectual Thought, 1848–1898
(Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

Hanson, Ellis,
Decadence and Catholicism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Henry, Anne (ed.),
Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1989).

Jacquette, Dale (ed.),
Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Juin, Herbert,
Écrivains de l’avant-siècle
(Paris: Seghers, 1972).

Jullian, Philippe,
Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1974).

Ledger, Sally, and Luckhurst, Roger (eds.),
The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Marquèze-Pouey, Louis,
Le Mouvement décadent en France
(Paris: PUF, 1986).

Michelet Jacquod, Valérie,
Le Roman symboliste: un art de l’extrême conscience
(Paris: Droz, 2008).

Nordau, Max,
Degeneration
(1892; Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

Pykett, Lynn (ed.),
Reading fin de siècle Fictions
(London: Longman, 1996).

Pierrot, Jean,
The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900
, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Showalter, Elaine,
Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle
(New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

Weir, David,
Decadence and the Making of Modernism
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, 1996).

A Rebours
and J.-K. Huysmans

Huysmans, J.-K.,
A Rebours
, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: Gallimard/folio, 1983).

——
Against Nature
, ed. Nicholas White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009).

——
Against Nature
, ed. Patrick McGuinness, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

Baldick, Robert,
The Life of J.-K. Huysmans
, foreword by Brendan King (London: Dedalus, 2006).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Mallarmé, Stéphane,
Collected Poems and Other Verse
, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore.

Maupassant, Guy de,
Bel-Ami
, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Robert Lethbridge.

——
A Day in the Country and Other Stories
, trans. David Coward.

——
A Life
, trans. Roger Pearson.

——
Pierre et Jean
, trans. Julie Mead, ed. Robert Lethbridge.

Rimbaud, Arthur,
Collected Poems
, trans. Martin Sorrell.

1870 Franco-Prussian War; defeat of the French at Sedan. The Emperor, Napoleon III, captured. End of the Second Empire, proclamation of the Third Republic, under Thiers and the Republicans.
Lautréamont,
Poems
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,
La Révolte
Wagner,
Die Walküre

1871 Defeat of France by the Prussians; armistice with Germany. Thiers becomes President of the Republic. Insurrection in Paris, start of the 73 days of the Commune. Violence on both sides, burning of the Tuileries Palace and destruction of the Vendôme Column. The insurrection is put down with terrible severity and bloody reprisal by the Republican government. Treaty of Frankfurt signed with Germany; France cedes Alsace-Lorraine and has to pay crippling war debt to Germany.
Mendès,
Soixante-treize journés de la commune
Rimbaud,
Lettre du voyant
;
Le Bateau ivre
Zola, first novel in his Rougon-Macquart cycle, subtitled
Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire