French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) by Unknown Read Free Book Online

Schopenhauer by candlelight. Suddenly propelled into the implausible position of French Reader to the Empress Augusta of Germany, in her gloomy palace in Berlin, it was by developing this ironical persona, and by living his life as it were in front of a mirror—as Baudelaire said a true dandy must—that he survived. While there, he fell in love with an English governess with a name out of Poe—Leah Lee—and lived barely long enough to marry her and return to France, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven. Laforgue was primarily a poet, but his late prose pieces,
Les Moralités légendaires
(1887), show the same ironic style, beautifully modulated into the rhythms of prose. His ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ is the one story here with a ‘mythological’ setting; but Andromeda’s epic boredom in her island exile, and her growing sexual awareness, the Monster’s benign philosophical presence (he spends his days polishing stones, as Spinoza polished lenses), and Perseus’s fatuous vanity, are all thoroughly modern creations. In his
Moralités
, the omnipresence of Laforgue’s powerful, underlying pessimism, disguised by humour and a style in which Decadent neologism and sophistication reaches its apogee, announces the absurdist literature of the twentieth century.
    Seven years his junior, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was another highly strung individual whose short life was dogged by illness. He is also one of the most accomplished writers of the whole period. Born into a literary family (his father ran a local newspaper and his uncle was head of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris), Schwob was plunged early into adventure-and travel-fiction, and he wrote his first published critical notice (in his father’s journal) at the age of eleven. He read Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, a discovery that turned into a lifelong passion for the Scottish writer, whose reputation he championed in France. So great, indeed, was Schwob’s admiration that towards the end of his life, when he was already ailing, he followed in his master’s footsteps and journeyed to Samoa. Schwob had a mastery of English (like Paul Valéry, he visited George Meredith), and knew long passages of Shakespeare by heart. His second great passion was for François Villon, whom he researched in detail. A man of widelearning and tireless curiosity, Schwob was one of the great storytellers of the time, in construction and in range of setting—his tales range from antiquity to the brutish Middle Ages to the brothels and ‘retirement homes’ of contemporary Paris. He can suggest the spirit of time and place with elegance and concision—a master of the telling detail. This talent finds expression in perhaps his greatest single work, the
Vies imaginaires
(1896). In this text he casts his forensic, but voluntarily unhistorical eye upon a heterogeneous collection of lives, ranging from classical figures like Empedocles, Erostratus, and Lucretius, all the way through to (among others) the Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur, by way of Nicolas Loyseleur (a searing portrait of Joan of Arc’s murderous judge) and the painter of the
quattrocento
Paolo Uccello. Declaring in his preface that ‘art, opposed to general ideas, describes only the individual, desires only the unique’, 19 in these brief texts he concentrates his acids on the single, exceptional trait—taking his cue here from Giorgio Vasari and his
Lives of the Artists
(1550). Vasari describes, for example, Pontormo as being reclusive, ‘solitary and melancholy’, and Andrea del Sarto as exhibiting a certain ‘timidity of spirit’. Similarly, Schwob’s ‘Lucretius’, included here, struggles (and fails) to reconcile a hereditary gloom and
contemptus mundi
with the extremes of erotic attraction. His ‘Paolo Uccello’, picking up on Vasari’s account of a painter obsessed with the science of perspective, neglects human needs and comforts altogether. The stories with contemporary