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

generation, Barbey has much in common with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89). Villiers was also of noble extraction, from a Breton family that had fallen on hard times. Bad luck, inflexible patrician pride, and hopeless idealism in love ensured he would be lonely and penniless in an age whose scientific positivism he particularly abhorred. Neglected by the general public, he was, however, the centre of a very exclusive clique of distinguished writers, including Mallarmé, Bloy, and Gourmont, who treasured his eccentricities and between them helped to ensure his literary immortality. Villiers was cruelly rebuffed by an English heiress, whose beauty was only matched by her vulgarity. There is a legendary, tragi-comic adventure in which Villiers travels to London in astrakhan coat and new dentures—neither of which were paid for—to claim his new bride. The lady in question, perhaps understandably, took fright at the peculiar Frenchman, and fled. Coat and teeth then had to be returned. This episode probably explains the tinge of misogyny in the story ‘Sentimentalism’, which is in part a meditation on the ‘artistic sensibility’. It involves the dandified notion of strictly controlling emotion: such is the explanation of the young Count Maximilien de W***, when confronted about his lack of ‘reactivity’ and unbending elitism by his companion Lucienne Emery. This is one of Villiers’s most realistic and subtle stories, in its setting andpsychology, and it reads like a sincere attempt on the author’s part to ‘explain’ his own reactions and behaviour. As such, it is a valuable addition to our picture of the
fin-de-siècle
dandy. ‘The Presentiment’ is a more classical ghost story in the tradition of Poe, while ‘The Desire To Be a Man’, despite the dreadful, gratuitous crime it recounts, is more in the vein of Maupassant, dwelling on fears and insecurities that are bred in the mind, and feed off the mind.
    ‘What the Shadow Demands’ by Catulle Mendès (1841–1909) is a tour de force in the same vein, in which a terrible crime is committed not through any easily recognizable, externally driven motive like jealousy or greed, but through a type of obsession (we would probably call it a psychosis today) that comes to haunt the afflicted narrator, who in everything else is a respectable, orderly petty-bourgeois in the haberdashery business. Mendès, who resembled, in one account, ‘a debauched Christ’, was a prolific writer in every genre, and a prodigious ‘networker’, at the literary epicentre of our period. His star has mysteriously been eclipsed, partly through his own derivative and often torrid style, sometimes verging on the pornographic, and partly, one suspects, through the malign agency of others (like Maupassant and Bloy) who mistrusted him, and later on André Gide, who dismissed his work. In this story, however, which becomes apocalyptic in its monomania, Mendès manages an extended, finely modulated dramatic monologue in which comedy and terror are curiously blended.
    Comedy is also to be found in the astonishing
Histoires désobligeantes
by Léon Bloy (1846–1917), but it is of the blackest kind. Bloy is a fascinating figure, possibly the most difficult, touchy, reactive, and reactionary figure in the whole writhing snake-pit; a fundamentalist dogmatic Catholic, the protégé of Barbey, to whom he was attached with almost filial devotion. His hatred of ‘filthy lucre’ and his championing of the poor and downtrodden (he ‘saved’ and had a relationship with a young prostitute he picked up off the streets) remind one more of Dostoevsky than of any of the other writers represented here. Bloy’s faith was of the most intransigent kind: convinced of man’s fallen nature, and seeing evidence of this all around him, Bloy believed that only intense suffering could bring him to salvation (but he did believe in salvation, which was not an option for the ‘pessimists’ among the