The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (14 page)

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THE DOUBLE ROOM

by Charles Baudelaire

There is a room which resembles a daydream, a truly
spiritual
room, whose still, stale air is tinted with pink and blue.

Here the soul bathes in idleness, amid the aromas of regret and desire.
There is something of the twilight here, in its blueness and its rosiness; it is as though one dreams sensuously during an eclipse.

The furniture extends itself, languidly prostrate.
The furniture too seems to be dreaming, as if it existed in a state of permanent sleep, as all things vegetable and mineral do.
The fabrics speak a language of silence, as flowers and daylight skies do, and sunsets.

These walls are undefiled by ugly paintings.
Relative to the pure dream or the unanalysed impression, specific and assertive art is blasphemous.
Here the light is perfectly sufficient in itself, harmonising with the delicacy of the shadows.

An infinitesimal hint of fragrance, chosen with exquisite taste, which carries with it a faint vaporous humidity, floats upon the air, lulling the drowsy mind as if it were a hothouse.

Hectic showers of muslin fall across the window and from the canopy of the bed, displayed like cascades of snow.
Here upon this bed lies the Goddess, sovereign of dreams.
Why is she here?
Who brought her?
What magical power installed her on this throne of dreaming and delight?
What does it matter; she is here!
I know who she is.

Those are the eyes which burn bright in the twilight; subtle and terrifying mirrors of the soul whose fearful malice I know so well!
They draw, conquer and devour the unwary gaze of any who looks into them.
I have made a study of them, those dark stars which command such curiosity and admiration.

What benevolent demon must I thank for thus surrounding me with mystery, silence, peace and perfumes?
O bliss!
That which we ordinarily call life, even when it can encompass happiness, has nothing to compare with this life beyond life which I have come to understand, and which I savour minute by minute, second by second.

No!
There are no more minutes, there are no more seconds!
Time is banished; it is Eternity which rules this place: an Eternity of delights!

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But a heavy and terrible crash has thundered upon the door, and in nightmarish fashion I feel that I have been struck in the stomach by a pick-axe.

A Spectre has rudely intruded upon the feast.
It is some bailiff come to taunt me in the name of the law; or some shameless courtesan come to tell a tale of woe and add the trivia of her existence to the sorrows of my own; or perhaps some editor’s errand-boy come to demand a manuscript.

The heavenly room, the sovereign Goddess of Dreams – the Sylphide, as she was called by the great René – all their magic is dispelled by the crude hammering of the Spectre.

O horror!
I remember!
I remember!
Yes, this tawdry place of infinite tedium is indeed where I live.
There are the ridiculous furnishings, dusty and bumped; the hearth
devoid of flames and glowing embers; the sad windows where the raindrops have made patterns in the grime; the manuscripts scribbed-over or incomplete; the calendar marked with crayon to show the inauspicious passing of the days.

And that otherworldly perfume which exalted me with heightened sensibility is replaced, alas, by the stale odour of old tobacco, mingled with a sickening dampness.
The rankness of desolation lies upon everything here.

In this narrow world, full to the brim with disgust, only one familiar object makes me smile: the vial of laudanum; an old and terrible mistress.
Like all mistresses, alas, she gives too freely of her caresses and her treacheries.

Oh yes, Time has resumed control!
The sovereignty of that hideous ancient Time is now restored, and with him has come his demonic train of memories and regrets, fits and fears, anguishes and nightmares, angers and neuroses.

I can assure you that every passing second now carries a strong and solemn stress, and that each one, leaping from the clock, says: “I am Life: unbearable, implacable Life!”

There is but a single second in a man’s life whose mission is to bring good news –
the
good news, which strikes such inexplicable terror into everyone.

Yes, Time rules again; he has resumed his brutal tyranny.
And he drives me on, as if I were an ox, with his duplicate threat: “Get on with it, churl!
Sweat, slave!
Live, and be damned!”

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THE POSSESSED

by Jean Lorrain

“Yes,” Serge told me, “I must be ill.
I can no longer live here – and it isn’t because I’m still feverish in spite of all the blood which the doctors have given me.
My chest is much better, thank God!, and I can keep the bronchitis at bay if I’m careful – but I can’t spend the winter here, because as soon as the November weather sets in I begin to hallucinate and I become prey to a truly frightening obsession.
To put it bluntly, I’m too terrified to stay.”

He read the thought in my eyes, and was quick to contradict me.

“Oh, don’t blame it on the ether!
I’m cured of that habit – completely cured.
Besides which, it’s poisonous.
For two painful years it spread its poison through my being and filled me with I don’t know what delicious sensations, but we know nowadays what it can do to one’s arms and legs, and I began to notice an actual deformation in my limbs.
It’s been a year now since I last took ether.

“Anyway, why should I want to take it?
I don’t suffer from insomnia any more and my heart’s okay.
All that trouble with my lungs, and the atrocious pains which used to strike so suddenly in my left side while I lay in bed, making my flesh creep – all that is no more to me now than some far-off nightmare, like a vague memory of the Edgar Allan Poe stories which were read to me when I was a child.
Honestly, when I think about that awful period of my life it seems more as if I dreamed it than actually lived through it.

“Nevertheless, I do have to go away.
I’d be sure to
fall ill again as soon as November arrives, when Paris becomes fantastically haunted.
You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.”

“Reality?”
I was a little disconcerted by what he had said, and could not help but repeat that last word questioningly.

“Reality,” repeated Serge, stressing every syllable.
“It’s reality that haunts me now.
It’s the creatures of flesh and blood which I encounter every day in the street – the men and women who pass me by, all the anonymous faces in the hurrying crowds – which seem to me to be horrid apparitions.
It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.”

He perched himself on the corner of the table.

“You know, don’t you, how I used to be afflicted with visions?
When I was a miserable wretch addicted to ether, I changed my apartment three times in two years, trying to escape the persecution of my dreams.
I would literally fill my rooms with the phantoms of my mind; as soon as I found myself alone, behind closed doors, the air would be filled with the gibbering of ghosts.
It was as though I were looking down a microscope to see a drop of water seething with microbes and infusoria; I would see right through the curtains of shadow to behold the frightful faces of the invisible beings within.
That was the time when I couldn’t look around my study without seeing strange pale hands parting the curtains or hearing the patter of strange bare feet behind the door.
I was slowly being destroyed by my incessant struggle with things unknown: half-mad with anguish, dreadfully pale, cringing away from shadows and nervous of the slightest touch.

“But all that was long ago!
I’m cured, thank God!
I’ve recovered my appetite and I sleep as well as I did when I was twenty.
I sleep like a log and I eat like a horse, and I can run up hills with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy – and yet, despite that I feel so healthy, I must be ill – the victim of some vile neurosis which watches over and lies in wait for me.
I know only too well that the fear is still lurking inside me – and I am afraid of that fear!”

Serge stood up again; he began to pace back and forth across the room, taking great strides, with his hands crossed behind his back, his brow obstinately furrowed and his eyes fixed on the deep pile of the carpet.
Then, suddenly, he stopped.

“You’ve noticed, I suppose, the remarkable ugliness of the people one encounters in the street?
All the little people, openly going about their business: the petty clerks and their managers; the domestic servants.
You must have observed how absurdly exaggerated their mannerisms are, and how oddly fantastic they look, whenever they ride on a tram!
When the first chill of winter descends upon the city they become quite terrible.
Is it their everyday cares that make them so?
Is it the depressing weight of their tawdry preoccupations, or the anxiety they feel at the end of every month, when they cannot pay the debts which fall due, or the apathy of the penniless who feel trapped by a life which is stale and devoid of surprises?
Is it that they live with such troubles, without their minds being able to entertain a slightly more elevated thought or their hearts a slightly broader desire?
It always seems to me that I have never seen such wretched caricatures of the human features!
What gives them their hallucinatory quality, I wonder?
Does the sensation arise because one is brought abruptly face to face with their ugliness?
Is it because of some relaxation brought about in them by the warmness of the benches
or the deleterious influence of the stale air?
Whatever causes it, there’s a sudden increase in their evident bestiality: all the people huddled together on the seats; all those struggling against one another in the gangway; the fat women collapsed in the four corners; the old ones with pinched and green – tinged faces, and knotted fingers whose knuckles are turning white with the cold, and thinning hair, always looking meanly sideways at one another from beneath their flabby eyelids; the dubious characters with their coats buttoned up to the neck whose shirts one never sees…

“I ask you, could there possibly exist beneath the grey November sky any more dismal and repugnant spectacle than the passengers on board a tram?
When the cold outside has stiffened all their features, solidified all their characteristics, hardened their eyes and narrowed their brows beneath their caps, their glazed, empty expressions are those of lunatics or sleepwalkers.
If they are thinking anything at all, that only makes it all the worse, because their thoughts are always low and sordid and their sideways glances always thievish; if they dream at all they only dream of self-enrichment, and that by venal means – by cheating and stealing from their fellows.

“Modern life, whether lived in luxury or in hardship, has imbued men and women alike with the souls of bandits and blackguards.
Envy, hatred and the hopelessness of being poor are remaking people in new images, flattened about the head and sharpened about the features, like crocodiles or vipers; avarice and selfishness give others the snouts of old pigs or the jaws of sharks.
Whenever one boards a tram one steps into a bestiary where every base impulse has imprinted its brutal stigmata on the surrounding faces; it is as though one enters a cage where frogs and snakes and all manner
of repulsive creatures are together entrapped, grotesquely dressed up as if by some clever caricaturist, in trousers and coats.…and since the beginning of the month I have been forced to make such journeys daily!

“My salary, you see, is a mere twenty-five thousand francs, and I must take the tram just as my doorkeeper does.
Every day I must share the vehicle with the men who have pigs’ heads and the women with birdlike profiles, the lawyer’s clerks like black crows with a wolfish hunger in their eyes, and milliners’ errand-boys with the flat features of lizards.
I’m forced to mingle promiscuously with the ignoble and the unspeakable, unexpectedly reduced to their level.
It’s beyond my powers of endurance.
I’m afraid of it.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?
I’m terrified
.”

“The other day – it was Saturday, still quite early – the nightmarish impression was so very strong that it became quite insupportable.
I’d taken the tram from the Louvre to Sèvres, and the distressing effect of the suburban landscape, perhaps exacerbated by the desolation of the Avenue de Versailles, brought me to such a pitch of anguish while I watched all those ugly faces, that I had to get off near the Pont-du-Jour.
I couldn’t bear it any longer; I was possessed, so sharply that I could have cried out for merciful relief, by the conviction that all the people facing and sitting to either side of me were beings of some alien race, half-beast and half-man: the disgusting products of I don’t know what monstrous copulations, anthropoid creatures far closer to the animal than to the human, with every foul instinct and all the viciousness of wolves, snakes and rats incarnate in their filthy flesh.

“Sitting between two others of the same kind, rightin front of me, there was a cigarette-smoking hag with a long, mottled neck like a stork’s, and hard, widely-spaced
little teeth set in a mouth that gaped like the mouth of a fish.
The pupils of her staring, startled eyes were extraordinarily dilated.
That foolish woman seemed to me to be the archetype of an entire species, and as I looked at her, an unreasoning dread took hold of me that if she should open her mouth to speak, no human language would emerge, but only the clucking and cackling of a hen.
I knew that she was in truth a creature of the poultry-yard, and I was seized by a great sorrow and an infinite grief to think that a human being might degenerate so.
To cap it all, she wore a hat of purple velvet, secured by a cameo brooch.

“I had to get off!

“Every day on the tramway, inside the tram, in that same carriage, the horror of the faces of all those living spectres emerges, further increased in the evening by the harsh light of the streetlamps.
The same animal profiles are slowly set free from the glimpsed faces, for my eyes only, visible to no one except myself.

It is a kind of possession, do you see?

“But I know that I play my part too.
I make that dreadful hell myself; I, and I alone, provide its trappings.”

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