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

settings show different powers: ‘The Brothel’ is a disturbing description of a silent, sealed house, while ‘The
Sans-Gueule
’ (surely written with the Franco-Prussian War in mind, but frighteningly prophetic of the Great War lying ahead), and ‘52 and 53 Orfila’ are incisive studies in a type of sadism, conscious or otherwise, with a veneer of black comedy, that little can match for sheer cruelty, before or since.
    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 hefounded 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.

NOTE ON THE SELECTION
    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