Claire Lenoir

Front matter

CLAIRE LENOIR

By VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM

Translated by ARTHUR SYMONS

Preface

I need not here dilate on the characteristics of Villiers de I’Isle Adam’s prose; however, a word should be said as to the reason why I have done these translations. In January, 1889, the year in which Villiers died, he gave me permission to translate any of his stories, not verbally, but by word of mouth to his friend and mine, Remy de Gourmont. After my return from Paris in 1894. I made versions of two of his short stories, which were printed; after that, certain circumstances prevented my carrying out my original intention. Those I have finally brought together were done at long intervals, in various years. I was asked twice to translate La Révolte (1870), but I refused. In that play Villiers for once handled the problem play with his characteristic disdain of mere reality (“As for living,” he said, “our servants will do that for us!) but with, for once, a keen sense of it. The play was acted at the Vaudeville on the 6th of May, 1870, and was a complete failure, partly through the “inexperience” (as Villiers afterwards admitted) of a “mute scene,” in which the clock strikes every half hour between one and four o’clock in the morning. About quarter of a century later it was revived at the Odéon; and when the curtain fell, and an outcry of applause broke out, the French poet, beside whom I was sitting, said to me: “I was in the theatre the first time it was acted; they shouted just the same then; but then it was to shout down Villiers.” But Villiers has said: “What does even Justice matter?”

“The life-blood of rhythmical translation,” said Rossetti, “is this commandment—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. Poetry not being an exact science literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief law. I say literality—not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing. When literality can be combined with what is thus the primary condition of success, the translator is fortunate, and must strive his utmost to unite them; when such an object can only be attained by paraphrase, that is his only path.”

In these translations from Villiers de l’Isle Adam, that is to say Claire Lenoir and some of the “Contes Cruels,” I have followed as closely as I could Rossetti’s wisdom. Literality is rarely possible in any translation, either from prose or from verse; and certainly not in the case of Villiers; for this man of passionate and lofty genius, who defined Claire Lenoir as bouffonerie énorme et sombre, colour du siècle, invented a style which is entirely of his own creation. There is the lacerating laughter of the idealist, there is a Parisian art, sharpened to a fine- ness of irony such as only wit which is also philosophy can attain; there is satire which becomes tragic, fantastic, macabre. It is part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. And, as he always sets his characters to exhibit themselves at this or that moment of crisis, between two temptations, this casuist of souls will drag forth some horribly stunted or horribly overgrown soul from under its obscure covering, setting it to dance naked before our eyes.

Hotel Vouillemont, Place de la Concorde, Paris. June 13, 1920.

Introduction

VILLIERS DE L’ISLE ADAM

In the literature of the fantastic there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam—a writer whose singular personality and work render him perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, as he says, somewhere, “par politesse,” ceaselessly experimenting upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic contrast. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more especially, of the bourgeois multitude of letters and of life:—it is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look for the source of that violent and voulu eccentricity which mars so much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers “les gens de sens commun” are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, “Genus irritabile vatum.” But he does not take the hint, and the common-sense people whom he despises have the satisfaction of viewing the contortions into which they provoke him.

In considering the work of Villiers we are brought face to face with a writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere, there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, contradicted and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions. And I cannot but be conscious that some things might have to be said differently if it were possible to unearth and take into consideration those œuvres de jeunesse of which the author himself has not a copy.

Villiers has written much; but practically it is little exaggeration to say that he is a man of one book. The volume of “Contes Cruels” (published in 1880) includes, I believe, work of many periods; it contains specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no other collection of tales in any language on which so various and finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The “Tales” of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the “Twice-Told Tales” of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the other volumes—all more or less imperfect, and at their best but as so many pages the more towards the single masterpiece. “La Revolte,” a drama in one act in prose, represented at the Vaudeville May 6, 1870, has something of the touch of certain “Contes Cruels,” it is at least not unworthy of a place near them. “L’Eve Future” (1886), that most immense and ferocious of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the “Contes” swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale “L’Amour Supreme,” attempts to be a second set of “Contes Cruels”; it has nothing of their distinction, except in “Akedysseril,” and though striking and clever, is little more than clever and striking. “Tribulat Bonhomet,” which appeared in 1887—“une bouffonnerie enorme et sombre, couleur du siècle,” as the author has called it—is largely made up of an “Etude physiologique” published in 1867; like “L’Eve Future,” it lacks all sense of proportion—any touch of the restraining hand. In the two later volumes, “Historie Insolites” (1888), and “Nouveaux Contes Cruels” (1889), there are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating horror of “La Torture par l’Esperance,” and the delicate cynicism of “Les Amies de Pension”; on the whole, however, they must be classed with the miscellaneous volume of 1886. As for the prose drama in five acts, “Le Nouveau Monde” (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize—“une medaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs meme, d’autres seductions encore”— there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; but what would you have of a “prize poem”? It was acted at one of the theatres at Paris in 1882 or 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante Comte d’Osmoy, and it had a very gratifying “literary” success. Such, omitting the early works, which are absolutely inaccessible, and the numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, are the works we have before us from which to study “peut-etre le seul des hommes de notre generation qui ait eu en leu l’etincelle du genie”—as Catulle Mendes, ever generous in his literary appreciation of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, “La Legende du Parnasse Contemporaine.” I shall speak chiefly of the “Contes Cruels,” for I believe it is by these that Villiers will live; and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach one after another the various sides of this multiform and many-sided genius.

First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. Frankly, I say this is a pity; but with such a nature this prodigality—a prodigality which is partly pure unconsciousness, partly sheer bravo—was no doubt inevitable. The consequence has been that we have to lament the comparatively small yield from what is unquestionably, to my way of thinking, the richest vein of ore. There are some half-dozen of tales—all contained in the “Contes Cruels”—which, for certain of the rarest qualities of writing—substleties, delicate perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern—can be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the “Petits Poemes en Prose” of Baudelaire. “Les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre,” “Maryelle,” “Sentimentalisme,” “Le Convive des Dernieres Fêtes,” “La Reine Ysabeau”—one might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the prose—these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of M. Villiers’ work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtle and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring a tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them all I think the masterpiece is “Les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre”; and it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony itself—the celestial, the elementary irony—a faint and sweet perfume as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the etcher’s needle. From beginning to end every word has been cal- culated, and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this supreme achievement; but in “Maryelle,” in “Sentimentalisme,” and the others, there is the same note, and a perfection often only less absolute. “Maryelle” and “Sentimentalisme” are both studies in a special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest precision, and, if I may say so, sympathy. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate lightness of the style—the gentle, well-bred, disengaged tone of a raconteur without reserve or afterthought, or with all that scrupulously hid—there is a sort of double irony, a crisscross and intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other side of cynicism. “La Reine Ysabeau” and “Le Convive des Dernieres Fêtes” sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, and fatality is unrolled before our eyes—the something enigmatical in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis of the first sentence to the “Priez pour eux,” every touch tells, and every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points akin to it, is the strange tale of “Le Convive des Dernieres Fêtes,” perhaps after the more epic chronicle of “La Reine Ysabeau,” the finest of Villiers’ tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the same frisson in the latter part of “Tribulat Bonhomet,” and in the marvellous little study in the supernatural, “L’Intersigne,” one of the most impressive of Villiers’ works. But here the sensation is not due to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror—distinct and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind—is but one among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the same bizarrerie—the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendree, Antoine Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C . . . , and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves—scenes which have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed with their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a sarcastic smile.

What is Villiers’ view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; we have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the fantastic edifice of his work.

The group of tales we have been considering reveals the humourist in his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose of pre-occupation. In the pseudoscientific burlesques, and the kindred satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic Muse has given place to “Laughter holding both his sides”; absurdity caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are barbed, and they fly not quite at random. “L’Esprit du siècle,” says Villiers, “ne l’oublions pas, est aux machines.” And it is in the mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means of comedy and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate plan of “an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh,” make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of advertisement (“Affichage Celeste”), and describe in all its detail and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius Bottom, “La Machine à Gloire,” a mechanical contrivance for obtaining dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces, a style under which the French language—the language of Bossuet and La Bruyere—almost collapses. Familiar words take new meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of the scientific burlesques, “L’Eve Future,” it is almost impossible to tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the “tres-illustre inventeur americain, M. Edison,” of an artificial woman! No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of “poor humanity,” has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls. The writer is no longer an artist, all sense of proportion is gone, and what would have been immortal as a tale of twenty pages is likely to perish, as I said, of plethora in its four hundred.

So far we have had the humourist, a humourist who appears to be cynic to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of “Les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre” and the scientific hilarity of “La Machine à Gloire.” But we have now to take account of one of those “exceptions” of which I spoke—work which has nothing of the humourist in it, work in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality and all the virtues. “Virginie et Paul” is an idyl of young love comparable only with that yet lovelier idyl, the magical chapter in “Richard Feverel.” This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their little moment of lovers’ chat, full of the poetry of the most homely and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses—per amica silentia lunæ—and there is not a false note in it, no exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and charming little romance of “L’Inconnue” is another of these tales of ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers’ hearts, and with a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated style. “L’Amour Supreme,” a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma of tender and etherealized affection—an adoring and almost mystic love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of “Vera,” which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem of “Akedysseril”—transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, for all its remoteness, with the human note—in this epic fragment, considered in France, I believe, to be, in style, at least, Villiers’ masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!—think for a moment of “Les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre,” of “L’Analyse chimique du Dernier Soupir”! What, then, are we to believe? Has Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irreconcilable opposites? Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in a word, is the true Villiers? “For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one’s devotion to the ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not exactly “rejoicing,” at least without positive discomfort. Here and there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic’s progress is various, and seldom in a straight line. It is significant to find that in the Ibsen-like drama, La Revolte, one of Villiers’ comparatively early works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight from life, a piece of the closest ac- tuality; there is no display, no exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter in it is the brokenhearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humourist there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate “Les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre” from “L’Inconnue” is after all nothing but a series of steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the “note,” the rarest quality, of this otherwise unballasted genius; it is as a cynic that he will live—a cynic who can be pitiless and tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically poetical, always.

Arthur Symons.

Chapter 1. Precautions and Confidences

Touched with pensiveness.

—Thomas de Quincey.

CHAPTER I

PRECAUTIONS AND CONFIDENCES

The chain of these tenebrous events I have decided to relate seeming to me (despite the greyness of my hair and my disdain of vain glory) to contain such insupportable doses of horror that they are certain to trouble many imaginations, even those of lawyers’, I must confess that if I ever have these pages printed, I shall have to give way to the desire of my devoted and experienced friends. Only, I fear that, more than once, I felt the sad necessity of attenuating (by the flowers of my style and the resources of a rich vocabulary) their suffocating and unprecedented hideousness.

I do not for one instant believe that Fear should be an universally profitable sensation: for, might it not be a madman’s desire to scatter broadcast sensations of the uttermost abomination to all the winds of the world? A profound discovery should not be immediately hurled into the profession of human thoughts. It demands to be rightly digested and seasoned by preparatory minds. Any new discovery, announced without circumspection, might charm, even terrify, certain sympathetic spirits, and over-excite the caustic faculties of scoundrels and reawaken, in the minds of the timorous, the lacerating neurasthenia of Possession.

To make people think is to expose oneself to the scruples of the credulous. So, having weighed this matter in the balance of Reason, I shall speak. Besides, my century reassures me; for certain immature minds that I might reach, there are besides these many strong-minded men I can edify. I have said “strong-minded men” and I do not speak at random. As for the veracity of my narrative, no one I’m certain, can find in it anything laughable. For, admitting that the following facts are radically wrong, the mere idea of their simple possibility is just as terrible as if their authenticity had been demonstrated. When one thinks of it, besides, what might not occur in our mysterious Universe? I have said “mysterious” and not “problematical.” All digressions on this subject written hastily would be useless.

All the same, it is needful for my Readers to be persuaded that it is not purely “literary” laurels that intrigue me. In truth, if there is any objective, any non-self, for which I feel a sense of contempt even beyond the expressions allowed to the tongue of a mortal snob, I can say that these are “Belles-Lettres” and their agents!—Ugh!

As I am obliged to present myself before the Public, it seems to me a matter of some urgency to describe myself, once and for all, morally and physically.

I have lost, in a fruitless fashion, part of my intelligence in asking myself why people who see me for the first time are convulsed with laughter and take on disconcerting attitudes. My aspect—not that I am proud of it—ought I imagine on the contrary to inspire certain thoughts, as, for instance, “He flatters himself because he is only one individual belonging to the human species.”

Physically, I am what is called in the scientific vocabulary “un Saturnien de la seconde époque.” I am tall and thin, and bony; the tormented form of my face shows the disturbances of my nerves; under heavy eyelids shine grey eyes, where shine, in their cavities, Saturn and Mercury, whose cavernous depths reveal penetration. My temples are bare at their summits: this indicates that their dead skin drinks the convictions of others: their provision is made. They are hollowed out at the sides of the head, like those of mathematicians. Hollow temples, crucibles! They distil ideas into my nose which judges them and pronounces on them. My nose is big—of a considerable dimension—it is a nose both grasping and vaporizing. It is sharply arched in the middle, like one’s instep, which, in anyone but myself, would indicate a tendency towards some dark monomania. This is why; the nose is the expression of man’s reasoning faculties; it is the organ which precedes, which shines, which announces, which smells and which indicates. The visible nose corresponds to the impalpable nose which everyone bears with himself when he enters the world. If, then, in the shape of a nose, one part becomes bigger—and so imprudently,—to the, prejudice of the other parts, it corresponds to some lack of judgment, to some thought one nourishes to the prejudice of the others. The corners of my mouth are pinched and pale like the folds of a shroud. It is placed so near the nose that it seems to take counsel with it before entering on some light discussion and, according to the proverb, like a crow who throws down nuts.

Without the shape of my chin, which betrays me, I should have been a man of action; but a lunatic and sceptical Saturn made it retreat in the form of ascythe. The colour and the quality of my skin is as hard as those of my symbolically contemporary peers. My ears, finely curved and long like those of the Chinese, notify the minuteness of my mind.

My hand is sterile; the Moon and Mercury dispute its base; the middle finger is knotted, spatulate, charged with wrinkles at the second phalanx. The horizon of my hand is sad and smoky; clouds, pursued by Venus and Apollo, have rarely disturbed its sky; the will of my thumb reposes on a hazardous hill: it is there that Venus indicates her wishes. The palm, only, is that of a hard worker: the fingers can turn back on themselves, like women’s, with a certain coquetry that reveals their perfect education. I am, besides, the only son of the little doctor Amour , known for his unlucky adventures in the mines.

Since I have known myself I have always had special clothes made, that are suitable to my person and to my way of walking; that is to say, a large felt hat, with wide borders, like those worn by the Quakers and the Lake Poets; a huge overcoat that I can fling over my shoulder, draped there, as it were, in much the same fashion as the grand phrases that are so habitually in my thought; an old stick with a vermilion handle; a huge diamond ring on my Saturnian finger. I like to be in rivalry with the old men in the romances in regard to the precious fineness and the delicious whiteness of my linen; I have the honour of possessing the exact feet of the King Charlemagne in my Russian Souwaroff boots, which trample the soil I despise; always, wherever I travel, I have with me my portmanteau, for I wander farther than the wandering Jew. A moi seul j'ai la physiognomonie de mon siècle, dont j'ai lieu de me croire l’Archétype. In one word, I am Doctor, philanthropist and man of the world.