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

Decadents, steeped in Schopenhauer and Darwin). He described himself as the
enragévolontaire
(the willingly, or readily, enraged); certainly, there was nothing of the emotionally self-controlled dandy about him. If he belongs here, it is because of the venomous and hilarious treatment he metes out to his bourgeois victims, whom he admitted to treating pretty much as the fancy took him. In a preface he wrote to the stories he confesses: ‘I cannot remain calm. When I am not out to massacre, I have to be disobliging. It is my destiny. I am a fanatic of ingratitude.’ 17 Bloy was so inflammatory (he was a born pamphleteer) that he fell out not only with every editor but with all his friends as well. One of the glories of this writer, in the three nasty little tales of lust and cupidity included here, lies in his style, which has been much admired—a unique mixture of epigrammatic latinate concision and a blatant, almost bullying irony.
    No sooner are the palms awarded to Bloy than they have to be taken away again, possibly, and re-awarded to Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) for the sheer energy of his hatreds. Both writers came from backgrounds they grew to despise; and Mirbeau suffered from a brutal, even abusive, education at the hands of the Jesuits (if his novel
Sébastien Roch
is taken to be autobiographical). When they came to Paris from the provinces, both were obliged to take humiliating jobs—in Bloy’s case as an office clerk in the railways; Mirbeau spent years as secretary and general factotum to various conservative politicians, which did little to enamour him to the breed. When he later came out as a full-blown anarchist, defender of Fénéon and a supporter of Dreyfus, the Establishment as a whole became his target. Like so many others here, he also earned money as a prolific, and ferocious, journalist and critic. Mirbeau’s brand of anti-bourgeois satire, mixed with a sulphurous, entirely sadomasochistic vision of sexuality, in such novels as
Le Calvaire
,
Sébastien Roch
,
Le Journal d’une femme de chambre
(later made into a film with Jeanne Moreau), and
Le Jardin des Supplices
, have ensured his literary survival. The stories here reflect different facets of this complex personality; ‘The Little Summer-House’ shows Mirbeau’s fascination with crime and its ‘metaphysical’ consequences, and sketches a memorable portrait of the ordinary-looking personage, Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin, whose eyes are quite dead. ‘The Bath’ is a little fable about a complacent fool, who opts for marriage as a quick means to ensure his ownhome comfort. ‘The First Emotion’ is of interest in that it belongs to a particular type of satire, more Naturalistic than Decadent, which is really an early treatment of what, in the succeeding century, would become a major theme in a writer like Kafka, urban
angst
and alienation. Monsieur Isidore Buche (like Maupassant’s Monsieur Leras in ‘A Walk’, also included here) is an office-worker who has become, through grinding routine, an automaton; but here these figures are the butt of satire. Roger Fresselou, the protagonist of the powerful little story ‘On a Cure’, is again a type of the melancholic, decadent young man, who withdraws, not this time to a familial chateau, but to a remote mountain village, a victim, literally, of pessimism when adopted as a philosophical position. The narrator recoils from this, reminding us that Mirbeau is too energetic, too politically engaged, and too angry to conform entirely to the Decadent aesthetic; indeed, in some of his work he parodies the type.
    Jean Richepin (1849–1926) is possibly less familiar than many here, though he deserves to be known better. Richepin is an incisive, epigrammatic, and at his best an extremely funny writer. He is, so to speak, the joker in the pack. His natural talent is for satire, and few have targeted the dandyish type, and the ‘quest to be unpredictable’, as brilliantly as he does in his story