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

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 endingwith 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.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
    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