‘A considerable number of years ago…’
(First words of the first story which set the tone of backward-looking nostalgia which characterises the whole book)

‘By Jove I was young then, and the disturbance of the molecules in the organisation, which is called the violence of emotion, seemed to me the only thing worth living for…’
(Dr Torty in ‘Happiness in Crime’, page 107)

‘Stop him, mother!… Don’t let him tell us these horrid, creepy tales!’
(Little girl Sybil in ‘Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist’, page 130)

From his Wikipedia article:

Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808 to 1889) was a French novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary critic. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henry James, Leon Bloy, and Marcel Proust.

His greatest successes as a literary writer date from 1852 onwards, when he became an influential literary critic at the Bonapartist paper Le Pays, helping to rehabilitate Balzac and effectually promoting Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Paul Bourget describes Barbey as an idealist, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial ordinary world. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary opinions, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.

Beloved of fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d’Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism.

Les Diaboliques (‘The She-Devils’) published in 1874, is a collection of short stories, each about a woman who commits an act of violence or revenge, or other crime. On publication it caused an uproar with the French public, was declared a danger to public morality and the Public Prosecutor issued orders for its seizure on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity, thus guaranteeing it would become a succès de scandale, a particularly French phenomenon. It was defended by the prominent politician, Leon Gambetta. It is generally considered d’Aurevilly’s masterpiece.

My view

The blurb on the back of the Dedalus paperback edition and the introduction by Robert Irwin both claim the book is drenched with the late Romantic taste for the melodramatic – all satanism, vampires and lurid crime – which revived in the 1870s and 80s as the Decadent movement, intensifying into the dark symbolism of the 1890s. To quote the blurb:

Les Diaboliques are six tales of female temptresses – she-devils – in which horror and the wild Normandy countryside combine to send a shiver down the spine of the reader.

This, quite frankly, is rubbish. The stories are nowhere near as intense and spooky as, say, Dickens’s most intense moments. They completely failed to create any sense of suspense or drama for me. There is nothing supernatural, ghostly, spooky or scary about any of them. On the contrary, they are above all garrulous. They consist of middle-aged men of the world telling long yarns – long, long yarns full of leisurely circumstantial detail, about some incident from their long-lost youth or things they once witnessed 25 or 30 years ago. The effect, for me, was reassuringly old fashioned and comforting, like listening to an old uncle telling a long-winded story from his youth.

The lack of dramatic impact is heightened by the way all the stories are examples of récit which, Wikipedia tells us, ‘is a subgenre of the French novel, in which the narrative calls attention to itself’. It certainly does, with the narrator sedately setting the scene, introducing the secondary figure who is going to tell the actual story, and that person, in telling their story, often handing over to yet another narrator or, frequently, retailing conversations and dialogue from 30 years ago as if he was there and so, by extension, as if we, the readers, were there.

For it all happened a long time ago. ‘The Crimson Curtain’ was written in 1866 and concerns a seasoned, middle-aged roué recalling his first love affair when he was a young soldier in the generation immediately following Napoleon i.e. the 1820s. ‘Happiness in Crime’ talks about the impact on his character of the 1830 revolution in France. They were written while Dickens was still alive, before Thomas Hardy had published anything, and generally set a generation before that.

And whereas the Decadence is associated with the City, with dark sins in sordid slums or perversions in locked garrets, the overall vibe of these stories is rural. ‘The Crimson Curtain’ is set in a small town in Normandy and so is ‘Happiness in Crime’, in small Normandy towns which, compared to the inner City London I inhabit with its stabbings, shootings and street crime, instead of ‘sinister’ and ‘wild’ has the bucolic innocence of Thomas Hardy’s lighter Wessex stories.

This récit is a very artificial technique which calls attention to itself but not in a modern, disorientating kind of way. On the contrary, it feels, like so many aspects of the stories (the long ago settings, the atmosphere of nostalgia, the courtly manners of all concerned) very calming and reassuring. Cosy. Fireside stories.

This is why I realised they’re best experienced read aloud. Their slow stately pace is a bit frustrating to read to yourself but makes much more sense if you snuggle up with someone and read them aloud.

The stories

1. The Crimson Curtain
2. The Greatest Love of Don Juan
3. Happiness in Crime
4. Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist
5. At a Dinner of Atheists
6. A Woman’s Revenge

1. The Crimson Curtain (40 pages)

The narrator takes a stage coach for Normandy. There is one other passenger who he names as the Vicomte de Brassand, though that is an alias. The narrator goes out of his way to describe the Vicomte as a famous dandy, an ‘old beau’, although the story concerns his early life as a soldier. For night falls and after rattling through a succession of small towns they arrive in one where they have to stop to get one of the wheels of the coach fixed. As it happens they park in such a way as to see the a light in the third floor window of a house and the Vicomte says there’s a story behind that window.

And then he sets off telling, in long rambling style, the story of his first love. For it was in this town that he was first posted as a young soldier (very young, aged 17) and in this house that he was billeted. It was owned by a middle-aged bourgeois couple and they had a beautiful daughter, aged 18. But she was cold as ice, rigid and aloof. At mealtimes and around the house she completely ignored our hero. She is named Albertine but the parents call her Alberte.

Imagine his astonishment, then, one mealtime when, for once she is not placed between her parents but next to him and he fells her suddenly touch his hand under the table. It takes all his self-possession not to flinch or hive himself away etc etc. Over succeeding weeks she takes his hand secretly while they’re all eating together. Then she is placed back between her parents and she gives no sign of ever having been friendly. Until one night his bedroom door opens and she is standing there in her nightwear i.e. scandalously undressed for the era: ‘she was half naked’ (p.45).

And here commences one of the most characteristic aspects of these stories which are supposed to be so full of sex and melodrama which is their extraordinary reticence about things of the flesh. The daughter tiptoes to his room every other night at the same hour but all they appear to do is lie on the sofa together, her head on his chest. That’s it, that’s as crazy, lurid and debauched as it gets. Maybe I’m being slow and that’s as crazy and debauched as D’Aurevilly was allowed to write in his day and age (the late 1860s). Maybe the intelligent reader was meant to imagine the rest.

One night she comes barefoot along the cold brick corridor from her room to his and he notices her feet are icy cold and tries to warm them up by, I think, kissing them, then taking her in another of his sexless embraces. Then she falls into one of the swoons she is apt to give way to and he initially thinks it’s another one, as usual (which is itself odd). But no, she’s dead! The cold ascends from her feet through her body then he realises her heart has stopped!

a) He is upset but he is then b) thrown into a terror because he has a dead girl in his bedroom. As and when it comes to light he will be accused of a) taking advantage of her b) murder. Initially he considers trying to sneak her back to her room and picks up her corpse for the purpose but, in a peculiar detail, the only way to her bedroom is through the bedroom of her parents. If either of them wake up to discover him carrying the corpse of their daughter through their bedroom…

He goes on at length about how he is seized by ‘a terrible dread’ and ‘deadly fear’ and his hair stands up like quills, and the dread of the black doorway to the parents’ room etc etc, but, to be honest, the situation has none of the genuine terror of an Edgar Allen Poe story. It just seemed odd, inexplicable and contrived that this woman had died of nothing at all, and embarrassing that he had to do something with the body. More farce than horror.

In the end it is resolved in a very practical way. Chickening out of trying to sneak through the parents’ bedroom, he places the corpse back on the sofa, sneaks out of the house and goes to the house where the Colonel of his regiment is boarding, bangs on the door and wakes him up. And the Colonel gives him the gruff practical advice to clear out of town. Loans him some money and tells him to catch the diligence to a nearby town where he will write to him. And that’s it. Ten minutes later the coach pulls into the town inn, the young Vicomte is waiting and climbs aboard, and off he rides.

A month later he receives a letter to report to his regiment as they are heading off on campaign. Years pass and his curiosity about what happened slowly fades. There are more military adventures, many more women (of course) and he had virtually forgotten that bizarre episode of his first love.

Then, in one final touch, as they are both looking up at the window of the room in question, they see a woman’s outline appear at it just for a moment, and the captain exclaims that it is the ghost of Alberte mocking him. Then the coach wheel is fixed, the horses paw the ground, and the stage drives off, and that is the end of the tale.

Comment

Early on the narrator tells us the Vicomte is ‘the most magnificent dandy I have ever known’ (p.18), ‘the most stolid and majestic of the dandies I have known’ (p.26) but, as you can tell from my summary, this much vaunted dandyism has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual story which concerns a boy soldier and the bizarre story of his quiet, retiring first love simply dying in his arms. You could stretch it and claim the story somehow accounts for his later alleged dandyism but I don’t think so. In my opinion the word ‘dandyism’ is slapped onto a story which has precious little to do with it. It is fake. It is factitious. You could delete all the spurious references to dandyism from the start of the story and it wouldn’t affect it in the slightest. It’s almost like dandyism was a buzzword and fashion of the 1860s and so D’Aurevilly tacked it onto this otherwise odd but straightforward story of a young soldier.

In the same way, the Vicomte prepares the narrator for the story with big words about its huge significance – ‘the story of an event which bit into my life as acid bites into steel and which has left a dark stain on the page of my libertine pleasures’ (p.28) but once you’ve read the thing, it feels much less than that – as does the fact he states, at the end, that years passed and he almost forgot about Alberte.

At one point the narrator says he thought the whole thing was going to turn into ‘a mere history of a garrison love affair’ (p.39) and, although the girl dying suddenly in his arms is, apparently intended to give it a weird voodoo power, in fact, despite all the persiflage about dandies and souls, that is pretty much what it seemed to me to be: young soldier has an affair with the pretty daughter of the family he was billeted on.

If this is the first story in order to set the tone, the tone looks like it’s going to be one of disappointment at stories which are odd but not quite the earth-shattering scandals I was led to believe.

2. The Greatest Love of Don Juan (20 pages)

‘For a good Catholic you are a trifle profane and I must beg you to spare me the details of your naughty suppers.’ (p.59)

The unnamed narrator is chatting to the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. He is describing the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés who is widely held (i.e. among their aristocratic circle) as the greatest Don Juan i.e. lover of woman or philanderer, of the age. OK, if you say so.

The narrator proceeds to tell the Comtesse that just a few days earlier, to celebrate the Comte’s mature years, twelve of his greatest conquests from the finest aristocratic ladies in Paris decided to hold a grand feast to celebrate his career. Obviously this is described in sumptuous detail but the heart of the matter is that one of the ladies suggests that the Great Man recounts the story of his greatest love, his greatest conquest, which, with very little encouragement, he proceeds to do.

Now remember that the narrator wasn’t present at this great supper, only 12 posh ladies and their Don Juan. So he must have been told the story by one of the twelve. So what we’re reading is the narrator’s version of this woman’s version of the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés’ version of events. From reading around the book (Wikipedia, the introduction, the introductions to related books) it seems that it was this technical expertise (a narrator relating a narration of a narration) which had most impact on other writers, not the silly superficial posing of the subject matter.

Long story short: all 12 fine ladies are disappointed because the Comte reveals that his greatest conquest wasn’t any of them, it was some other aristocratic lady, or at least it initially seems like it. Until the Comte starts talking about her daughter, a fussy, cold, over-religious little girl of 13 who is studiedly indifferent to him and who, after making initial efforts to befriend, he gives up and ignores.

The climax of the story comes when the family priest comes to visit the Comte’s lover in a passion of bewilderment and quickly tells the woman that her 13-year-old daughter has just been to confession at his church and confessed that she is pregnant! The posh lady runs upstairs and finds her (morbidly religious) daughter prostrate in front of a crucifix crying her eyes out. When the mother calms her down and gets her to speak the girl says that the other day she and the Comte were in the same room, he reading quietly and completely ignoring her until he eventually got up and left the room without a word. At which point the daughter went and sat in the chair because it was nice and warm by the fire and felt ‘as if I had fallen into a flame of fire’, couldn’t move, felt as if her heart had stopped and the only explanation she could think of was that…she was pregnant and she bursts into tears on her mother’s shoulder.

Cut back to the dinner party and the 12 fine ladies listening agog as the Comte concludes his tale:

‘And this, ladies, believe me or not, as you please, I consider the greatest triumph of my life, the passion I am proudest of having inspired.’ (p.78)

Comment

When I summarised this story to my wife she thought it was ‘sweet’ because she focused on the poor 13-year-old girl’s innocent panic. Now ‘sweet’ is pretty much the opposite of the lurid, melodramatic, decadent qualities which the book’s reputation, back cover blurb and introduction all talk about, but I agree. It is a sweet and almost whimsical tale and its sweetness far eclipses the stagey setting of the feast of the twelve ladies with its (if you care about such things) risqué parody of the Last Supper. Far from shivering with some kind of Grand Guignol, it made me smile.

3. Happiness in Crime (41 pages)

‘One morning last autumn I was walking in the zoological gardens with Doctor Torty…’ (p.83)

It is these relaxed, sunny openings with their amiable civilised tone of voice which completely belie the book’s reputation for ‘satanism, vampires and lurid crime’. A crime is eventually committed but a very banal and ordinary one and the image which stayed with me was of these two mature chaps enjoying a Sunday afternoon stroll.

Anyway, whilst in the park they behold a little scene. An impressively tall and stately couple saunter up to the little zoo in the park. They stand in front of the cage holding a panther. The woman slowly unbuttons her elegant glove, puts her hand through the bars and slaps the panther. The panther snaps at her and for a second it looks as if it has her hand in its toothy grip but then onlookers realise it’s just the glove and the woman has withdrawn her hand. Her tall elegant companion chides her for being so foolish and they saunter off with aristocratic nonchalance.

Turns out that Doctor Torty knows the couple very well, indeed he delivered the elegant woman 20-something years ago. (The tales are always set a generation earlier). So, with a little prompting from the narrator, he proceeds to tell the tale.

An ex-army fencing instructor named Stassin came to the sleepy Normandy village which the narrator, very annoyingly, only names as V. Here he builds up a practice among the aristocrats of the neighbourhood who want to acquire this noble art. In his fifties he marries, gets his wife pregnant and the local doctor, Dr Torty, delivers a bouncing baby girl. On a suggestion from a posh client Stassin names her Hauteclair.

Dr Torty watches her grow up, tended by a besotted father who teaches her his craft so that by the time she’s a teenager, she is a supreme and expert fencer. (The narrator tells us that the 1830 revolution demoralised Stassin and also undermined his trade. The girl was about 17 then so the origins of the story – Stassin coming to V – must have been just at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815. Long, long time ago.)

One day at V arrives the Comte Serlon de Savigny who has been absent being educated but, his father just having died, has returned to take up residence in the family chateau. He has heard about the local fencing master and his legendary daughter, the beautiful, haughty and extremely skilled Hauteclaire and so he immediately signs up for lessons and comes every day.

With vast inevitability he falls in love with his strict, stern teacher. But there’s a catch. Years ago he had been engaged by his family to the daughter of another local noble family, Mademoiselle Delphine de Cantor. Duty calls so he marries her, she moves into the ancestral chateau, married life is established, but the Comte continues to come to his fencing lessons.

Then one day Hauteclaire disappears, vanishes off the face of the earth with no explanation. The townspeople gossip about a mystery elopement or any other story they can cook up but nobody knows for sure. Only the doctor discovers the secret, by accident. He goes to treat the new wife, now titled the Comtesse de Savigny, and realises that Hauteclair is living at the chateau, masquerading as a servant under the name of Eulalie.

Rather than elope with her, the Comte has installed her in his own house, given her a disguise and a false name, where she now has to wait on and serve the very woman whose husband she is having an adulterous affair with!

Again, as in ‘The Crimson Curtain’, this doesn’t send a shiver up my spine, it just feels like an eccentric variation on a very tired theme (adulterous husband takes a lover). During his periodic visits Dr Torty drops in a few questions about the new maid but the Comtesse’s replies make it quite clear she hasn’t a clue that her new maid is her husband’s lover.

Then the Comtesse falls ill, with what doctors of the time called anemia and so the doctor starts to visit more regularly until he is a regular visitor at the chateau. One day he’s passing by the estate past midnight when he hears the sound of fabric being beaten. He sneaks closer and realises he’s hearing the sound of the Comte and Hauteclair dressed in full fencing outfits, fencing in one of the chateau’s more remote rooms. So this fencing is a crucial aspect of the affair.

Long story short, next thing we know is that the countess is dying of poisoning. The story is given out that her faithful servant Eulalie mixed up a medicine the doctor had prescribed with ‘some copying ink’. The doctor goes to attend her on her deathbed and hears her deathbed confession or last thoughts. These are that she knows that Eulalie is her husband’s lover and knows that she’s been poisoned and is consumed by hatred for both of them, but … noblesse oblige, meaning that although justice demands they be punished, she doesn’t want the Savigny name which she now bears to be dragged through the courts and the public scandal. And so she will take her secret to the grave and demands that the doctor does the same. And he promises.

The Comtesse dies and the Comte observes the customary two years of mourning. Then he marries Hauteclaire. The entire neighbourhood is scandalised by an aristocrat marrying a servant but still nobody even knew that she was the former Hauteclair and there was no whisper of scandal about the Comtesse’s death. Anyway, they keep entirely to themselves, locked away in their rural chateau, never mixing with the outside world.

The doctor still visits, has become a family retainer, discovers Hauteclaire has thrown off the disguise of Eulalie and now lords it as the haughty lady of the house. Discovers they are still absolutely besotted with each other, with no falling off due to familiarity. Indeed their happiness puts other married couples he knows to shame.

Being a cynical atheist, the doctor can’t help commenting that the adulterous and murderous couple’s ongoing happiness, which shows no sign of flagging with familiarity, conclusively disproves moralists with their fairy tale notions of vice punished and virtue rewarded (p.121). (You can’t help suspecting that it’s cynical comments like this which caused the outcry against the book, rather than the fairly tame stories themselves.)

Comment

At the end D’Aurevilly tries to jazz the story up by describing the chateau as ‘the theatre of a crime of which they have perhaps forgotten the memory in the bottomless abyss of their hearts‘ but here, as in all the other stories, you feel he is trying to dress up what is a fairly mundane tale (husband and lover poison wife) in the trappings of fashionable amorality and cynicism and decadence which it doesn’t really merit. All the way through he deploys this hyperbole.

4. Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist (44 pages)

The opening page and a half are an extended statement of the world-going-to-the-dogs trope (see separate section, below):

[She was] one of the most faithful admirers of the now almost lost art of witty conversation, a lady always ready to keep her doors open to the few exponents of it still spared us … [since] in these later days wit has been entirely superseded by a pretentious nondescript called Intelligence…(p.127)

If you say it in the right upper-class twit voice, this is more P.G. Wodehouse than Marquis de Sade and almost all of D’Aurevilly’s attitudinising comes over as pompous and silly rather than in any way menacing or sinister.

The narrator pops into the salon of Madame de Mascranny which, he ludicrously claims, is the last redoubt of the Art of Conversation which is being crushed by the vulgar world of newspapers, by ‘the busy, utilitarian habits of the age’ (p.127). In statements like this you hear the embattled tones of the bourgeois intellectual who rebels against the triumph of his own class on the back of the industrial revolution, and allies himself, in wistful nostalgia, for what he describes as the last, expiring examples of the once-great aristocracy with all its fine manners and conversational style.

Anyway he arrives just as some aristocrat who the narrator claims is ‘the most brilliantly successful talker in this kingdom of brilliant talk’ is talking about ‘Romance’ and suggesting that it is in fact, all around us, but that we only ever glimpse fragments of it. At which he settles down to tell a yarn to prove this proposition.

He takes a long time to paint a picture of the ‘most profoundly, ferociously aristocratic town in all France’ (p.131), the same title given to the town in the previous story and, like it, in Normandy. It is some time in the 1820s and the aristocrats have been restored after the fall of Napoleon but have found themselves increasingly rendered redundant by the new class of rising bourgeoisie.

Ruined. Futile. In vain. Melancholy. Stagnation. Monotony. Smothered. World-weariness. Exhaustion. These are the keywords of the superseded aristocracy, clinging on to its values and self importance despite the growing realisation of its redundancy. In this society it is considered ‘a sublime axiom’ to say that ‘the best happiness of life is to win at cards, and the next best, to lose’, which is pretty pathetic, neither witty nor profound (p.137).

The story, such as it is, concerns a handful of superior aristocratic personages in this town on the Normandy coast. There is a profound paradox at work here, which runs through the other stories, too. This is that D’Aurevilly’s entire schtick is based on the notion that his characters are the grandest acmes and perfections of aristocratic superiority, nonchalance, wit and good manners in all of France – and yet, at the same time, they are all depicted as living in a stiflingly dull, melancholy provincial little town on the Normandy coast. It is as if D’Aurevilly has mashed together two completely different genres – tales of the highest aristocratic circles (which really ought to be located in Paris) and life in dull provincialdom, in the manner of Flaubert, another Norman addicted to describing in fiction how dull and tedious life in his province was.

Anyway it concerns a Marquis de Saint-Albans. He hosts regular whist evenings. A regular guest is an Englishman, Monsieur Hartford. One evening he is late but arrives with a friend from Scotland, born in the Hebrides (which triggers many references to characters in the novels of Walter Scott) and named Marmor de Karkoel (a very unscottish name). On that first evening the fourth player is the Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville. The text then turns into an extremely drawn-out description of the characters of these two people and here, again, I thought D’Aurevilly’s influence on other writers must surely not be for the voodoo, spooky supernatural aspect of his writings of which there is, in fact, nothing; surely much more for the insane detail which he goes into in describing all these posh people. I imagine this is what Proust is like, page after page after page of carefully limning every facet of the characters of his exquisites. Something D’Aurevilly himself seems perfectly aware of, for he comments of the old boy telling this particular yarn:

It may be the whole merit of the story lay in his manner of telling it… (p.163)

In fact the plot is a bit convoluted: one night in his uncle’s house (the narrator still being only a teenager) he witnessed yet another game of whist during which the Comtesse’s green ring happened to let loose a flash of light. The man partnering her, the Chevalier de Tharsis, asked to take a look at it. At that moment Madame Herminie de Stasseville, standing by the open window, coughed piteously. And this recalled to the narrator a pretty important event which he had up till this moment concealed, which is that a few days previously he (the narrator) had entered the room of M. de Karkoel without properly knocking and discovered the latter bending over a desk concentrating. When quizzed, he explained that he was handling an extremely toxic poison which a brother officer serving in India had sent him at his request. He was decanting some from the vial it arrived in into a ring with a removeable diamond. Surely a moment and a far-fetched explanation anyone wouldn’t easily forget.

Anyway, weeks later, on this evening of whist playing at his uncle’s, the coincidence of the Comtesse handing her partner her exquisite green ring to inspect with her daughter’s sudden hacking cough at the window, brought the scene back to the narrator’s mind and made him wonder whether the Comtesse was poisoning her daughter.

Then his narrative takes a huge leap, he has been sent off to college and two years later he hears news that Herminie has died of a wasting disease (tuberculosis?). In the meantime the revolution of 1830 had taken place and hit the little Norman town hard. All the English tourists who used to come across for the season have abandoned it.

The narrator returns to the town to find it much changed and almost immediately bumps into the Chevalier de Tharsis who is only too keen to tell him the scandalous gossip: for not only Herminie is dead but so is her mother, the Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville, who outlived her by barely a month. As for Marmor de Karkoel, he was soon after summoned to rejoin his regiment in India.

But the point is, everyone now realises that Marmor and the Comtesse were lovers, but not just this, this would be pretty banal (witty lady has affair with dashing soldier); no, the scandal is that her daughter was in love with him too. And their rivalry led the Comtesse to hate her daughter and persecute her.

But even that isn’t all, because the story has the first really atrocious ending of the collection: for the Comtesse had taken, on her social visits, to wearing a spray of mignonette in her waistband and, when she played whist or became nervous, breaking petals off the flowers and chewing them. So far, so eccentric. But after the died they cleared out her rooms, including the big mignonette in a pot and when they went to replant it discovered the corpse of a newborn baby buried in it. What?

The Chevalier de Tharsis delights in the visceral impact this has on the narrator who is stunned. What? Was the baby stillborn? Was it murdered? Whose baby? The Comtesse’s? Her daughter’s? By Marmor?

Nobody knows and nobody will ever know because Marmor is now far away in India and the priest who received the Comtesse’s last rites is bound by the rules of the blah blah.

Comment

This is the first story which featured something uncanny or weird i.e. the baby in the flower pot. But what strikes me as more ‘literary’ about it is the way it ends with mystery, mystery upon mystery. So I can imagine D’Aurevilly’s influence being twofold: 1) the long wordy pen portraits of these aristocrats who all regard each other as blessed, special, the old warrior, the great Don Juan, the best whist player in France, the sharpest wit in Paris, and so on, each one a legend in their little social circle, and 2) the deliberate irresolution of many of the stories, which have endings of sorts but leave you with a strong sense of the deeper mysteriousness of life or, less pompously, of other people. Despite all our tale-telling about them, other people remain, in the end, a mystery.

5. At a Dinner of Atheists (48 pages)

Contains the only witty line in the book. Mesnil says to a fellow soldier who doesn’t understand what he’s doing:

‘My good fellow, ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men like you.’ (p.176)

Like the other chapters this is less a story than an extended profile of a handful of characters, in this case the Chevalier de Mesnilgrand. This fellow served in the Army of the Emperor (Napoleon) and returned to him on his return from Elba, and fought at Waterloo, but the defeat ruined him. His loyalty meant he was kicked out of the Restoration army. And then a profile of his father, of the previous generation, who the Revolution and then war made into a hardened atheist. So hardened that he holds regular Friday night dinners for all the old soldiers, atheists and blasphemers of the neighbourhood, including some ex-monks and ex-priests.

The long deep profiles the narrator gives of Mesnilgrand father and son make it all the more surprising that one Sunday his military junior but more impetuous ex-officer friend, Captain Rançonnet of the 8th Dragoons, spies him coming out of a church of all places and accosts him. Mesnilgrand refuses to say what he was doing there. Now, in the middle of the dinner of atheists, Rançonnet brings up the incident again and demands that Mesnilgrand explains to the whole room of 25 or so dinner guests, what he was doing there.

Mesnilgrand good-humouredly agrees but this, of course, as in all the other tales, requires him to start a new narrative, a story within a story. So he reminds the old soldiers there of the days of the Spanish campaign of 1808, in particular the arrival of a Major Ydow who brings with him his mistress, who calls herself Rosalba or La Pudica. She is, of course, a phenomenon of debauchery who, at the same time, maintains an absurd modesty. In a short time all the other officers in the regiment are besotted with her. Mesnilgrand describes how he himself made love to her once when she received him wearing only a transparent muslin gown revealing her full voluptuousness.

Eventually Mesnilgrand breaks off his liaison with Rosabla, realising that she doesn’t love him, she doesn’t love anyone. Shortly afterwards Major Ydow announces to everyone that his wife is pregnant, leading half a dozen officers to wonder whether they might be the father. Soon after follows the Battle of Talavera (28 July 1809) and then Rosabla had her baby in the carriage train of the army on the move. A few months later it died and Ydow was distraught and widely sympathised with. Because they’re on the move he quickly buries the body but has the heart embalmed and placed in a glass container to carry about with him (unusual and ghoulish).

The end of the story is first farcical, then atrocious. Mesnilgrand goes round to see Rosalba, knowing Major Ydow is playing billiards in the officers’ mess. He finds her half-dressed as usual, but just putting the finishing touches to a letter to yet another lover. He starts kissing her back but then she stiffens, she can hear the Major coming up the stairs. So she hurriedly bundles Mesnilgrand into the cupboard where he has to hide and stay still, a scene from a thousand bedroom farces.

What happens next is not so funny. Ydow is in a filthy mood and when he discovers the letter he tears it open and reads it and proceeds to yell all kinds of abuse at Rosalba. She gives as good as she gets, yelling that she has a hundred lovers and then twisting the knife by claiming that the baby, which Ydow genuinely loved and grieved over, wasn’t his. When Ydow demands to know whose it is, Rosalba, either truthfully or just to taunt him, and to taunt Mesnilgrand who she knows is listening, claims it is Mesnilgrand’s.

At that Mesnilgrand hears the sound of breaking glass and realises Ydow has thrown to the floor the glass container which held the embalmed heart of his dead baby. Now the wild couple proceed to throw the baby’s heart at each other. Not so much horrific as macabre. Then Mesnilgrand hears shrieks and can put up with no more, bursting out of the cupboard like the lover in a Whitehall farce.

He sees that in all the fighting Rosalba has been stripped naked (of course) and that Ydow is holding her pinned to the table and…that Ydow is melting the wax Rosalba had been using to seal her letter over the candle she was using and is going to seal her up. To be precise:

He was sealing his wife as she had sealed the letter…’Be punished where you have sinned, miserable woman,’ he cried. (p.218)

Does this mean what I think it means, that Ydow is dripping molten wax onto Rosalba’s vulva? That he is sealing up her genitals?? If so, then this is easily the most outrageous and scandalous idea in the book and you can see that it would probably trigger an outcry today, let alone in nineteenth century France.

Mesnilgrand springs forward and, without a second thought, plunges his sabre right through Ydow’s body, who falls to the ground dead. All the racket had brought a maid to the door who Mesnilgrand now orders to run and fetch the regimental surgeon, who will have, presumably, to treat the burns on her pudenda.

But D’Aurevilly neatly gets round having to deal with the aftermath of this appalling scene by having Mesnilgrand declare that at this exact moment the enemy (the British or Spanish) launch a surprise attack on the garrison. Mesnilgrand picks up the trampled heart of the baby Rosalba claimed was his, tucked it in a pocket of his tunic, sprang onto his horse and went off to fight. In the chaos following the surprise battle, he not only never saw Rosalba again, he couldn’t even find the regimental surgeon who, like so many others, disappeared. In other words, D’Aurevilly simply dispenses with the problem of any aftermath or repercussions.

Having given the full background, Mesnilgrand ends his story with a simple explanation that, after Waterloo he carried the baby’s heart around with him but slowly came to feel that he didn’t want to profane the poor mite’s soul any more than it had already suffered. And so he had finally nerved himself to take the heart to a priest and ask that it be given a decent burial. It was coming out of the side aisle where he handed it over that Captain Rançonnet collared him and accused him of giving in to Christian belief.

You can see why conventional opinion would have been outraged by this atrocious story. And yet D’Aurevilly goes out of his way to tack on a pious moral. Addressing the entire gathering of atheists and renegades, the narrator says:

Did these atheists at last understand that even if the Church had been established for nothing else but to receive those hearts – dead or alive – with which we no longer know what to do, it would be accomplishing a good work? (p.220)

When he was threatened with prosecution it was comments like this which allowed his defender, Gambetta, to claim that underlying the cynicism and shocking content of the book, lay a profoundly moral and Christian sensibility…

6. A Woman’s Revenge (32 pages)

The final story starts with an interesting prologue arguing that contemporary (1860s and 70s) French critics, journalists etc lambast contemporary literature for being ‘immoral’ when it isn’t at all, when it is nowhere near as ‘immoral’ as behaviour reported in newspapers every day, let alone the scandalous behaviour described in the ancient historians (and he cites Tacitus and Suteonius). Far from being ‘immoral’, contemporary literature is nowhere near immoral enough! Interestingly he cites the widespread practice of incest, which he claims is commonplace among the French lower and upper classes as he writes, but which no novelist dare go anywhere near.

Anyway this little essay morphs into the thought that modern ‘immorality’ or crime is more sophisticated than the kind described in older literatures because, as society has developed, it has become more psychological: the worst modern crimes often entail no physical harm at all but forms of psychological torture. And he sets about proving it with the following story:

As this thoughtful prologue indicates, this is one of the best stories. Maybe it was written last. Certainly the description of the young protagonist, Robert de Fressignies, feels more modern, that’s to say, less backward looking and nostalgic and socialised than the protagonists in the previous stories, who tend to function amid salons and soirées which just feel like assemblies of snobbery.

De Fressignies is much more the Baudelaire-Des Esseintes flavour of ‘dandy’, solitary, intellectual, in control of his appetites but always open to the lure of a new sensation.

He had outlived that first youth of folly which makes man the buffoon of his own senses, and during which any woman exerts a magnetic influence over him. He was long past that. He was a libertine of the cold and calculating sort of that positive age – an intellectual libertine who had thought about those feelings of which he was no longer the dupe, and was neither afraid nor ashamed of any of them. (p.226)

Almost a scientist of sensations, then. Anyway, he’s loitering on the balcony of Tortoni’s (presumably a smart restaurant) when he sees a brightly-dressed woman walk past, then back the other way, then past again, clearly flagging that she is a prostitute. He is intrigued because she reminds him of a former love and so steps down into the street and follows her. So he follows her through the streets back to her dingy lodgings, typical of her type, up the winding stairs and into her sordid room, clothes scattered everywhere, unstoppered vials of perfume, the big rumpled bed taking centre stage with a mirror behind the headboard and on the ceiling (this kind of thing was considered risqué when it appeared in movies of the 1960s yet here it is calmly described in a novel of the 1860s).

Anyway, the appeal of the story is in the slow pace and the lingering descriptions. De Fressignies sits on the sofa and takes her between his knees to assess her shape, which is outstanding. D’Aurevilly throws in that de Fressignies has been in Turkey and so is experienced at sizing up and buying women for sex. Then she slips behind a screen, strips off and re-emerges wearing only a see-through slip, walks right over and presses her breast against his mouth and then the text dissolves into generalisations about the sex that followed, in which she justified the nickname of ‘panther’ which Parisian prostitutes of the time were assigning themselves, what with her biting and scratching. She is the best lay he’s ever had.

So far the story has been all of a piece, a lengthy, wordy description of a fairly commonplace event (posh man on a whim follows prostitute to her lodgings, she strips they have mad sex). Now it takes a sudden turn to the melodramatic and stagey. During all this sex he notices her looking at a bracelet on her arm (?) and suddenly realises the is maybe having sex with him as a substitute for an old love etc. So he demands to see the bracelet which, sure enough, contains the portrait of an ugly Spanish man.

The story now takes a turn for the ridiculous as the woman reveals that 1) the portrait is of her husband 2) he is one of the greatest nobles in Spain 3) she hates him 4) she herself is none other than the Duchess of Arcos de Sierra Leone. And now she mentions it, de Fressignies realises that he met her once, years ago, when he was holidaying in Spain just on the French border and she was holding a magnificent court. He had tried to get an introduction to her but had failed and only glimpsed her from a distance. This explains what attracted him to her when she sauntered past Tortoni’s.

De Fressignies is appalled at how low this grand personage has fallen. Predictably enough, the Duchess explains that she is taking revenge and asks if he would like to hear his story? And so, once again, we get a story-within-a-story as the Duchess tells her tale.

She comes from an ancient Italian family, the Turre-Crematas. It was an arranged marriage to the head of one of the oldest Spanish families, Don Christoval d’Arcos, Due of Sierra Leone. He takes her off to his remote estates where she is locked up with her maids and servants, living a life of stifled boredom. Until the Duke’s cousin, handsome Don Estaban, Marquis of Vaconcellos, comes to stay. Guess what? They fall in love. Suddenly it has stopped being modern but collapsed back into a late-Romantic melodrama, like hundreds of forgotten Victorian plays and a handful of operas about soaring aristocratic love.

For their love is utterly chaste, far superior to physical love, the adoration of Saint Theresa for Jesus etc. Except one day, as Don Estaban sits at her feet adoring her, her husband enters with some Negroes from the colonies who proceed to strangle Esteban to death, then cut out his heart! Not just that, but the Duke whistles for two savage dogs and prepares to throw Estaban’s heart to them but the Duchess begs to be allowed to eat her lover’s heart. Precisely because she wants to, the Duke throws it to the dogs, but the Duchess then fights with the dogs to get scraps of the still warm heart!

She realised there was nothing physical she could do to the Duke she hated, he was not afraid of death. So she would hurt him in his wretched pride: she would become a common prostitute and drag his name through the mud. And so here she is, and here is de Fressignies, suitably harrowed and chastened by her story, and here is the reader, disappointed that a tale that began with reasonable subtlety and interest has exploded into the wildest overblown Gothic melodrama.

She describes her secret escape, after some months of silent seething hatred. She explains coming to Paris, as anywhere in Spain she would be captured and returned to the Duke. She explains taking up the career of streetwalker and why she wears the bracelet with the image of her hated husband, for every time she has sex she looks at the picture and delights in his debasement.

She explains that she wants not to drag his name through the mud but bury it under a pyramid of mud. She explains that she wants to catch syphilis and die horribly in a Paris hospital and to spread the word of her fate in order to drag the Duke’s name into the gutter. She is an artiste of vengeance.

But there’s more. De Fressignies goes back to his rooms and spends days locked away by himself mulling over this extraordinary tale. When he eventually returns to the salons he comes over as depressed and anti-social. Then he packs his bags and disappears for a year, gone nobody knows where. At a reception of the Spanish ambassador’s another Frenchman asks after the Duke d’Arcos de Sierra Leone, and after receiving a summary of the mysterious disappearance of his wife a few years ago, stuns the company by telling them that he just today was passing the church of Salpetriere where he noticed that she had just been buried, after dying of a wasting illness in the adjacent hospital. And on her tombstone it mentions that she was a ‘harlot’ i.e. she has her public revenge on the Duke.

Next day Fressignies goes to see the priest who tells him it is true, that the Duchess contracted a terrible venereal disease and quickly wasted away and died. She gave her considerable fortune to the other inmates of the hospital.

The French attitude to sex

The attitude of nineteenth-century French literature to sex is a universe away from the British. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Collins, none of them would dream of even hinting at sex, not a breath or whisper, whereas the French routinely described mistresses and infidelity and, as here, in a military context, happily accepted that army officers took mistresses or grisettes for sex in every town where they were billeted. When characters in nineteenth century British novels are referred to as reading French novels it always means stories which are far more open about sex, sexual motivation, sexual infidelity and sex crimes than the British dared to be until well into the twentieth century.

Having acknowledge the existence of sex in a way British writers simply couldn’t, French writers were able to investigate its impact and effects, its themes and variations, its role in obvious events like falling in love, marriage, infidelity, adultery and so on, in a wide range of colours and tones. All of this was undeveloped and unexplored in British fiction, which in its place has snobbery and all the aspects of a repressive class system as its central theme (see, for example, the novels of E.M. Forster).

What this meant is that the French, to put it crudely, had a head start in dealing with grown-up themes in a grown-up way in literature, a frankness and honesty about sex which British writers have still, arguably, not caught up with.

Dandyism and its fans

The book is disappointing for a number of reasons. No chills went up my spine, just a handful of occasions when I was nauseated (dead babies). One of the disillusioning things is how it, inadvertently reveals the origins of the quite appealing notion of ‘the dandy’ in the banal nostalgia and embattled elitism of an outworn aristocracy. The stories are so old, set against the Napoleonic Wars or the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815, harking back back back to fops and beaux of the Regency period (1811 to 1820), repeatedly citing Beau Brummell (1778 to 1840) as the archetypal dandy.

Leaving aside what a dandy is or thinks he is, what the use of récit – i.e. a framing device of a first-level or initial narrator who then hands over the telling of the story to a second narrator, to someone within his framing story – really brings home is how the essence of dandyism is having fans, having devotees who acknowledge your superiority. A ‘dandy’ is only really a dandy because his fans say he is.

Thus in the first two stories there is no real evidence that either the Vicomte de Brassand or Comte de Ravila de Ravilés are particularly well dressed and they certainly don’t say anything at all witty or memorable (nothing at all) but what they both have is fans. The narrator of ‘The Crimson Curtain’ in particular is unable to contain his gushing adulation of the Vicomte who, in fact, just comes over to the reader as a tired old man with an odd story from his youth. All this is treated as if it is some spectral spooky story of Edgar Allen Poe intensity but it really isn’t. Dandyism is in the eye of the beholder.

To experience the full effect you have to buy into the mystique, you have to accept the premise that there are only a few hundred people ‘who matter’ in Paris and that this or that hard-drinking old geezer is the Greatest Dandy of the Age. If you don’t buy into this fantastically narrow, blinkered and elitist view of the world then the narrator and his small clique instead come over as shabby self-deceiving relics of a bygone age, left behind by the dynamism and transformations of nineteenth century industry and technology, complaining about ‘Liberalism’ and ‘industry’ and the new ‘bourgeoisie’, harking back to a vanished golden age… The Daily Mail mindset with cravats.

Old soldiers

I wrote the above after reading the first three stories but as I read on I realised a simple truth: although D’Aurevilly uses the word ‘dandy’ about his protagonists it’s just a word applied to what are, in reality, old soldiers. These are soldiers’ stories.

• The Crimson Curtain’ is a story about a young soldier billeted on a local family
• ‘Happiness in Crime’ centres on the figure of Hauteclaire Stassin but before the love story gets going there’s a lot about the military experiences of her father, the army fencing instructor
• ‘At a Dinner of Atheists’ sounds as if it’s going to be bracingly modern but turns out to be a a very long story (the longest in the book) about officers in the French Army during the Peninsular War

The repeated descriptions of or references to the French Army of the Napoleonic Wars reminded me much more of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories than of anything which came after D’Aurevilly (Aestheticism, the Decadence, Symbolism).

‘World going to the dogs’ trope

Believing that the world is going to the dogs and everything is going down the drain may be the most tiresome and suburban of prejudices, a Daily Mail-level cliché, the belief of long-suffering old codgers that young people these days don’t know they’re born, in the old days you could leave your front door unlocked, people had respect for the law blah blah blah.

D’Aurevilly’s stories are full of this slack slagging-off of the contemporary world, lamentations about how its protagonists are the last true this or the end of that noble tradition etc. He and his characters marinade in this utterly negative, blocked and futile worldview. It’s enervating and pointless.

These days when strength is continually diminishing and is no longer much thought of… (p.21)

… a man who belonged to our time and yet differed so much from the men of our time… (p.22)

‘…that is a feeling of which your generation, with its peace conferences and philosophical and humanitarian clowning will soon have no idea…’ (p.31)

…’physiologically, if I may employ that pedantic word which belongs to your days and not to mine…’ (p.34)

…he flourished aloft his champagne glass, not the silly, shallow cup fashionable in these pagan days but the true champagne glass, the glass our fathers drank from…(p.66)

‘The Comte de Savigny was certainly one of the most distinguished of the swell youth of the locality. There are none of them left now.’ (p.94)

‘She showed more and more all the symptoms of that debility which is so common now, and which the medical men of this enervated age call anaemia…’ (p.108)

‘If we were still what we ought to be, I should have thrown Eulalie into one of the dungeons of the Chateau de Savigny, and there would have been no more said about her. But we are no longer masters in our own houses. We have no longer our expeditious and silent justice…’ (p.115)

She would die as befitted V., the last aristocratic town in France… (p.116)

Nowadays, unfortunately, the sovereigns of Europe have quite other matters of greater urgency to attend to… [than] the expiring art of conversation, that doomed child of aristocratic leisure and monarchical absolutism…’ (p.127)

‘…that stern spirit, better worthy of sixteenth century Italy than of our puny days…’ (p.169)

‘What a piece of good fortune for me in these empty, hollow-hearted days…’ (p.231)

‘He prides himself on having nothing but ‘blue blood’ in his veins whilst even the oldest families, degraded by misalliances, have now only a few drops.’ (p.238)

After I’d picked out so many of these lachrymose laments for the good old days, it occurred to me that this whole attitude is a form of self pity. The world changes, as it must, and some people are sad or devastated that it has changed and this feeling is self-pity dressed up as opinion. It’s an extremely commonplace sentiment.

The only way to avoid falling into this suburban prejudice is to embrace change, to acknowledge that your times and values and everything you hold dear will diminish, disappear, be swept away – and embrace it.

As I tried to explain in my review of Edward Burtynsky‘s dazzling photos of a world gone to hell, you can either 1) ignore it, turn away, reject it, or 2) acknowledge it and collapse into endless tears and lamentation over what is lost or 3) you can embrace the change, the loss of the old, the continual arrival of the new. Human beings will certainly endure but on a planet, in ecosystems, in social structures, with languages and norms, beyond our imagining. Good!

A few years after ‘Les Diaboliques’ was published, in 1873, the boy wonder poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote in his prose poem ‘A Season in Hell’ that ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’. Rimbaud’s virile embrace of the future shows up D’Aurevilly’s nostalgic ‘dandies’ and lachrymose ex-soldiers for the backward-looking, drink-sodden, self-pitying conservatives that they are.

Credit

Les Diaboliques by Barbey D’Aurevilly was first published in 1874. It was first published in English in 1926. Page references are to the 1996 New Dedalus paperback edition.

Related links

• Les Diaboliques online
• Nineteenth century France reviews