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

‘The mind of manis capable of anything,’ and Maupassant’s stories here give us a fair sense of that.
    One of the less well-known writers of the period is Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926). A prolific short-story writer, Geffroy made his name as a brilliant and progressive art critic, a friend of Claude Monet and supporter of the Impressionists generally. He was actually an admirer of Zola, and the story here, ‘The Statue’, is a nicely turned fable about Idealism and Naturalism, transferred to the realm of sculpture. The story draws in part on the Pygmalion myth, though in reverse; here, the beautiful, well-bred heroine, wife to a fashionable but conventional Salon sculptor, poses for her husband (indeed, she bans from his studio any other female model), and her vanity is flattered when she finds her likeness in the naiad in the fountain or the marble nymph in the park. But then her husband, suffering a severe period of self-doubt, retires from the fashionable art world and devotes himself to becoming a ‘realist’ with a vengeance—a kind of Courbet of sculpture—insisting that his wife continue as his sole model … with complicated results.
    Jean Lorrain (1855–1906), who has been evoked already, is probably the most ostentatiously Decadent figure of the whole group—indeed, he did much to incarnate the type, cramming his figure into wasp-waisted evening-wear. He could appear as something like a dreadful caricature of Wilde (whom he met), with his eternal carnation in buttonhole, heavily made-up eyes and sensuous mouth set in a bulging head, and with a face resembling that of a ‘vicious hairdresser’, in Léon Daudet’s phrase, ‘his parting touched with patchouli and those globular, astonished and avid eyes’. With his ostentatious homosexuality, and his
penchant
for the low-life of the city, to which he introduced his friend Huysmans, he managed to transform all this experience into some of the most memorable and disturbing tales of the age. Lorrain was also a serious ether-addict (some elegant Parisian hostesses were rumoured to serve strawberry fruit salad soaked in the substance); the nightmare horrors and psychic disturbances caused by the drug recur in his work. He was fascinated by masks, and the freedom disguise allows; the mask permits the other side of the personality to emerge, with the risk that the mask will stick or—horribly, as in one of his stories—there is no face beneath the mask at all, just a gaping black hole. His controversial personality (he provoked several duels) and his rackety lifestyle infact repelled the other, more exquisite candidate for the perfect Decadent—the celebrated Comte Robert de Montesquiou, who was the model behind both Huysmans’s des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Lorrain is a fluent, accomplished stylist, and in the stories here—as in his important novel,
Monsieur de Phocas
(1901)—he reveals his mastery at grasping the ambivalent and the equivocal in human nature, in particular its attraction to cruelty and sadism, frequently attributes of the criminal mind.
    If ever there were an example of the ‘cerebral voluptuary’ it must be Remy de Gourmont (1855–1915). Gourmont was primarily an intellectual and (like Marcel Schwob) a man of enormous culture and ‘curious learning’. Indeed, a legend (perhaps too good to be true) has it that when he was cataloguing the section of the Bibliothèque Nationale known as ‘L’Enfer’ (‘The Hell’), which contained books placed on the index, often pornographic in nature, he contracted a kind of lupus that left him disfigured, and painfully self-conscious about his appearance and his attractiveness to women. His lifelong muse was the fiery and tyrannical Berthe de Courrière, though due to his disfigurement he spent much of his life cloistered in his study in the rue des Saint Pères. He was a distinguished critic—his notions concerning the dissociation of ideas and of impersonality in the