French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘spoilers’, but the reader may care to read the stories first, and then return to this section of the Introduction
.)
    This selection of thirty-six tales by fourteen authors aims to showseveral facets of French
fin-de-siècle
writing, from the richly orchestrated addition to the literature of Don Juan by Barbey d’Aurevilly, through the more traditional ghost story by Villiers, and the inner psychic terrors described by Maupassant, to the savage anti-bourgeois satire of Bloy and Mirbeau. Aspects of the French Decadent movement described above infiltrate these stories to a greater or lesser degree; but any idea that decadence implies a lack of
stylistic
energy should be immediately expelled. They have been chosen not only for their sumptuous powers of description, but also for their verve and bite, and for their fearlessness: the common sobriquet
contes cruels
is, after all, an apt one. It is probably these aspects of the
fin-de-siècle
tale—its energy and, often, its violence that still has the capacity to shock—which strike the first-time reader.
    These writers were in fact a close-knit group, so mutual influence, admiration, affection—followed not infrequently by a cooling of affections, if not execration—was common. It was also an age in which writers used the dedication ubiquitously and pointedly. Villiers, Richepin, Schwob, and others dedicate every single story to a
confrère
. Many of them dedicate to Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, with whom this selection opens. Barbey was born in 1808, in the Premier Empire under Napoleon, so belonged to an earlier generation entirely than the
décadents
, and indeed he was of the same generation as Victor Hugo, the one preceding Baudelaire. Dubbed by his peers
le Connétable des Lettres
(the High Constable of Letters), Barbey was a great writer and a grand
personnage
, descended from the nobility, a monarchist and a staunch Catholic reactionary. It is his well-documented loathing of the growing mercantilism, democratization, and general secularization of the age that served to rally the Decadents around him. Above all, he loathed Zola (the feeling was mutual), and one of his final critical acts was to recognize the genius of
A Rebours
and hail Huysmans’s escape from the ‘sordid toils’ of Naturalism. The story selected here is taken from his most famous collection,
Les Diaboliques
, published when he was sixty-six, in 1874. Part of the print-run was seized by the public prosecutor, and Barbey only avoided a trial for assault on public morals by settling out of court, unlike Flaubert and Baudelaire before him. ‘Don Juan’s Crowning Love-Affair’ prolongs the august lineage of the Don, who takes, this time, the aristocratic form of the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès. In a sumptuous set-piece description, the Comte isinvited by a group of female society hostesses to a very private dinner, in the peach boudoir of the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. Barbey relishes the kind of baroque description—of decor, costume, and of the sumptuous forms of mature women—in a vocabulary that becomes a stock feature of Decadent writing. There is in Barbey a genuine love of, and an almost chivalric respect for, women, even, or perhaps especially, when they are at their most perverse or capricious—a quality that fades out with the later writers. Barbey was one of the great French dandies: he sported ruffles on his shirts, and wore sleeves hemmed with lace. He wrote on Beau Brummel and Byron, and along with Baudelaire he attempted a theory of dandysim. The elegant, feline pasha of this story, Ravila, is one of its purest expressions. His charms may be ‘satanic’ and fatal to women, but it is worth noting the plangent, elegiac note that sounds through the story—Ravila is described as the Don Giovanni of the fifth act: he and his elegant listeners are a breed threatened with extinction, they are passing into history before our eyes.
    Although of a different