It is so amusing to play the dandy! I prefer that to playing cards.
(The narrator of ‘Maryelle’, page 216)

This book contains 27 short stories, vignettes, squibs and satires. Someone online commented that they are not cruel tales at all, and certainly anyone expecting the thrill or horror of Edgar Allen Poe will on the whole be disappointed (with a handful of possible exceptions). Much more accurate is the title of used by a 1920s translation of the same collection, ‘Sardonic Stories’. They are more about irony, satire and sarcasm than anything cruel and macabre – in particular, satire of the Paris literary and theatrical worlds which de l’Isle-Adam tried all his life to break into with impressively consistent lack of success.

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) spent his entire life thinking his writings would make him famous and restore the fortunes of his aristocratic family, which he insisted was ancient and venerable. This didn’t happen. Instead he churned out novels and plays which nobody cared about while living in sometimes abject poverty, associating with a series of illiterate working class mistresses who bore him various children. Only in the last years of his life, with the publication of the ‘Cruel Tales’ in 1883, did he begin to garner some critical recognition.

Like so many French writers, de l’Isle-Adam despised his countrymen. As an aristocrat he was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, as a monarchist he was contemptuous of democracy (in 1881 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Legitimist party), and as a Catholic he was contemptuous of science and materialism. He was, in other words, a reactionary berk.

A reactionary berk convinced of his own ineffable superiority to the rest of the human race, on account of his aristocratic family and his superb talent, even if the rest of the human race was too ignorant to recognise it. Outraged pride and lofty superiority run through the stories like a silver thread. I liked A.W. Raitt’s note pointing out that de L’Isle-Adam was well known for stopping in his walks around Paris to admire himself from all angles in shop windows and mirrors. He fancied himself a great actor, a championship boxer, as well as a writer and playwright and exquisite soul.

1. The Bienfilâtre sisters (10 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam drolly paints a dry picture of a famous café on a Paris boulevard, habituated by eligible young men and packed with courtesans. Two leading figures among the latter are the Bienfilâtre sisters, Olympe and Henriette. They have been working girls since young in order to support their parents, poor concierges, which allows de L’Isle-Adam to ironically describe them as dutiful daughters who honoured their engagements and could hold their heads high.

With further irony he then describes how one of the sisters, Olympe, fell from the straight and narrow of her profession when she (gasp!) fell in love! With a poor student called Maxime. Her work went to pot. Her sister had to pick up the slack. Other courtesans at the café talk behind her back. Henriette is ashamed. The family who have always eaten together, are now reduced to three in Olympe’s absence. There’s a funny scene where Henriette confronts her sister in the café, while all the other habitués pretend not to be listening, and delivers a rhodomontade made up entirely of Daily Mail-style bourgeois clichés and recriminations: ‘should be ashamed…owes a duty to her class…running off with a youngster like that…you’re not in this world to enjoy yourself but to work, young lady…what about her poor parents…’ etc etc.

Finally her guilty conscience (at ceasing to be a prostitute, at throwing away a good honest living in order to ‘fall in love’) strikes her down with illness and she takes to her bed. She calls for a priest and confesses her’ sin’ of falling in love and so straying from the straight and narrow, the path of purity (all ironic terms applied to her previous career as a prostitute).

At that moment the door is flung open by Maxime who bursts in chinking coins in his hand. His parents have sent him the fees for his exams. Olympe feebly stretches out her hand to him. The priest takes this as a moving sign of her true repentance. In fact it is joy that her lover has come true and has coughed up some cash. And with this beatific knowledge filling her soul, she expires.

This is a genuinely funny ‘story’, the sustained irony of the premise maintained right till the end. It was originally published in 1871, 20 years before Oscar Wilde used the same kind of satirical irony in a story like Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891).

It establishes a major theme, in fact the fundamental worldview which underpins the stories, which is that de L’Isle-Adam assumes his readers to be as au fait with the cynical realities of Paris nightlife, with prostitutes and dissolute aristocrats and starving poets and so on as he is, so as not only not to show the conventional bourgeois horror at the subjects he tackles, but to take pleasure in his detached, ironic treatment of them.

In later stories he describes characters who are so blasé and over-familiar with every possible kind of ‘scandalous’ affair, with the plots of umpteen melodramatic novels, plays and operas that, when they actually find themselves in situations which could come from such productions, they not only feel they are acting a part, but observe themselves acting a part, and award themselves marks out of ten for their performances (most notable in ‘Sombre Tale, Sombre Teller’).

2. Véra (11 pages)

Powerful description of an aristocrat, the Comte d’Athol, whose wife passes away just six months after they were married, who leads the mourning and sees her body laid in the family tomb, returns to his grand apartments on the Faubourg Saint-Germain, tells his loyal retainer Raymond to dismiss the other servants, to refuse all invitations and visitors, and then immerses himself in a visionary state where he pretends his wife is still alive. It has the dreamlike intensity of Poe story but described in the sumptuous prose of late-Romanticism toppling over into the Decadence.

3. Vox populi (4 pages)

A prose poem designed to mock the fickleness and stupidity of the masses, the mob, ‘the people’. It zeroes in on three moments in recent French history – an 1868 review of Napoleon III’s birthday, the start of the Siege of Paris in 1870, the Commune of Paris March 1871 – on which the masses shouted the inane slogan of the times – Vive L’Empereur, Vive La Republique and Vive Le Marechal – all of which is counterpointed by the unchanging plea of an old blind beggar ‘Please take pity on a poor blind man’.

The moral being that the fickle face of politics and popular enthusiasms come and go, but the human condition remains the same. Or as Jesus said, the poor are always with you. Justifying de L’Isle-Adam’s lofty, aristocratic disdain for the people, the mob, the bourgeoisie, liberalism and all the other disgusting symptoms of the late-19th century world.

4. Two augurs (14 pages)

A satire on the press where a writer presents himself to the jaded philistine editor of a successful paper. The ironic twist is that the writer is proud of being a third-rate poetaster who’s produced a long-winded article bloated with complacency and bridles when the editor starts praising the quality of his work and then – horror of horrors – has the temerity to call him ‘a man of genius’, when all he’s aiming at is to churn out 5th rate bilge.

All this is a rather contrived satire on the world of the press, papers and magazines which, of course, de L’Isle-Adam himself occupied but which for so long refused to acknowledge what he considered his own genius. Sour grapes.

5. Celestial publicity (5 pages)

A satire which deadpan praises a magnificent new invention developed by M. Graves, which allows the projection of crude adverts onto the heavens. The satire is as much in the breathlessly enthusiastic tone, the tone of adverts and promotional bumf for the new technologies beginning to flood late-Victorian life, as in the (horrifying) plan to turn the heavens into advertising hoardings.

6. Antonie (2 pages)

Very short vignette describing a courtesan at a drinking party of men who, amid the drinking and banter, ask her who the locket she wears between her breasts is dedicated to. She opens it to show a lock of hair, teases the men for a minute who all want to know what heroic lover enjoys such devotion – before revealing that it is her own hair, which she wears as a gesture of fidelity (i.e. to herself). Very droll.

7. The glory machine (16 pages)

Similar to the machine which projects adverts into the sky, this satire takes the same excited tone about a new machine which produces glory. Unfortunately it then turns into a long tedious explanation of what ‘glory’ means in the world of poetry (alas) and explains the composition of ‘claques’ in Paris theatre. Laboured and boring.

A thing like this isn’t a story at all so much as a sustained expression of de L’Isle-Adam’s sour grapes and resentment.

8. The Duke of Portland (7 pages)

This is obviously intended to be one of the macabre stories. The Duke of Portland returns to his grand house by the sea, continues to host dinners and parties for all the best people but never attends them himself, sends a letter to Queen Victoria after reading which she gives him permission not to attend the House of Lords or carry out any official functions and a year later his fiancée arrives by boat on the beach at night to discover him dying and he dies as she is with him. His secret? On a trip to the Middle East he met a leper who gave him the disease, hence the letter to Victoria and his seclusion and the sadness of his fiancée.

It seemed obvious from this one that de L’Isle-Adam is much better at the wordy trappings of the Gothic tale and melodrama than he is at devising an actual plot.

9. Virginia and Paul (5 pages)

Many of de L’Isle-Adam’s pieces start with a sort of prologue describing the theme or subject of the story – Paris boulevards, the life of a courtesan, death and mourning – in general and poetic terms before finally arriving at t(often slender) plot.

Here there is over a page asking the reader to remember the emotions, the images and objects associated with their first love, before it finally arrives at the ‘story’ which concerns two young lovers, both aged just 15. They are cousins, he has slipped out of his parents’ house to climb over the wall into the grounds of her boarding school and they gushingly mix expressions of first love with clumsy talk of practicalities, like trying to conceal their love when they are with their families and how Paul can extract money from his father so they can run away.

Maybe the point isn’t the 3 or so pages devoted to their naive dialogue, but to the last paragraph which suddenly switches the perspective and reveals that the narrator (improbably enough) has been eavesdropping this little scene, which is not very likely in practical terms (how? if it’s happening on the other side of a high wall and, presumably, hidden in bushes) but is really just a pretext for him to deliver a little paean:

Oh youth, springtime of life! May God bless you, children, in your ecstasy – you whose souls are innocent as flowers, and whose words, evoking memories more or less similar to his first rendezvous, bring tears to the eyes of a passerby! (p.76)

10. The eleventh-hour guest (25 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam’s stories are 1) often barely stories at all, with very little narrative and 2) very contrived. He is proud of their contrivance. As far as I can make out, the show of contrivance is part of the aim. Their artificiality is to be prized.

The story is that one night he and his friend are in a box at the opera when, in the interval, three well-known ladies about town invite them out for dinner. At that moment the narrator spies a gentleman he recognises from somewhere, they get chatting and then, on a lordly aristocratic whim, they decide to invite him along. There follows an interesting description of what such an evening in a private room at a posh Parisian restaurant was like, with detailed descriptions of the meal, actions and banter of the six characters.

The last-minute guest is, as you might expect, mysterious, given to gnomic sayings, and insists on being referred to as Baron Saturn, which they playfully agree to. As the hour draws late he says he needs to leave as he has an urgent appointment in the morning. It’s only after he’s left, that another friend turns up and tells them who their mystery guest was. Turns out he is one of the most notorious unbalanced monomaniacs of the age and obsessed with public executions. Turns out h travelled widely in the East (Orientalism!) where he bribed his way to being allowed to carry out public executions and tortures. On his return to Europe he wrote to all the heads of state of the continent asking to be allowed to apply the exquisite tortures he had learned in the East to western criminals and condemned men.

In this he consistently failed but it is said that he quietly bribed executioners in some European countries in order to take their place. Still, he manages to get advance notice of executions across the Continent and then rushes to be present t the scene, at the foot of the scaffold soaking up the grisly thrill of the moment.

This puts a damper on the previously light-hearted party and as the hour of 6am approaches, when that morning’s execution is scheduled to be carried out, they all feel a ghost walking over their graves. Voodoo spooky.

The ‘story’, such as it is, is garnished with reflections about psychology, about perception and meaning, which feel pregnant with the Symbolist movement which was just about to be christened. (Symbolism was given its name when Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in the Paris newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ on 18 September 1886). It contains paragraphs like this:

The sound waves of the nervous system have mysterious vibrations…They deaden, so to speak, with their multiple echoes, the analysis of the initial blow which produced them. The memory makes out the atmosphere surrounding the object, but the object itself is lost in this general sensation and remains stubbornly indistinguishable. (p.83)

As the Wikipedia article on Symbolism explains:

Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to ‘plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description’ and that its goal instead was to ‘clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form’ whose ‘goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal.’… As Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, ‘to depict not the thing but the effect it produces’.

Or, as de L’Isle-Adam puts it:

Objects are transfigured according to the magnetism of the human beings who approach them. Things have no significance for people other than that which the latter are able to give them. (p.84)

The Naturalism of Émile Zola and his followers strives to depict the world and everything in it exactly as they are, with full realistic descriptions. Symbolism has the diametrically opposite aim of trying to capture the feelings and moods (sometimes verging on hallucinations) which the world, and especially particularly powerful objects or experiences, evoke in us.

11. The very image (4 pages)

A very short text which is a premonition of Kafka.

A man is hurrying through Paris ‘on business’ when he finds himself next to a hospitable-looking building and pops inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers around which sit blank-faced people, and realises that the hostess of the place is none other than Death (!).

He hears the rumble of cab wheels outside, exits, gets into the cab and announces his destination. He arrives at another building, goes inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers and the same blank-faced people i.e. a complete repetition of the first experience.

At this point you expect some kind of cunning payoff as you might have in Kafka or, especially, Borges, but instead the narrator goes out, gets into his cab which he asks to take him home, and (rather limply) vows to stop rushing around ‘on business’.

Is it an allegory implying that the ordinary bourgeois running round Paris on business is living a kind of living death? That ‘business’ is the death of the soul and the antithesis of the sensitive refined thoughts which de L’Isle-Adam is at such pains to show off in these stories?

12. The impatient mob (8 pages)

The title reflects de L’Isle-Adam’s (comical) contempt for the mob, the masses, the people, in all their forms. This is another tale long on atmosphere and looming symbolism and short on actual story. It describes the population of Sparta crowding to the city walls because rumour has reached them that the vast army of the Persian Empire under Xerxes I has crushed the Greek army sent to stop it at the Battle of Thermopylae. The story describes a sole Spartan warrior who is spied descending from the hills and staggering across the plains towards the city. The entire city starts booing and shouting insults because a Spartan soldier was meant to come back holding his shield or dead on it, while this one doesn’t carry a shield and is taken to be a coward. They throw stones at him and the city cook spits a gob of phlegm at him. Utterly exhausted, ashamed and humiliated the soldier lies down in the dirt and lets himself be attacked by the ominous flock of black crows flying overhead. In the morning nothing is left of his body except the bones picked clean. And so the city never gets to learn that the Spartans won and that this man had been stripped of his spear and shield by his generals all the better to run faster back to the city and tell his countrymen of their victory. Never trust the masses, you see.

This is such a cheesy reversal, such a heavy moralising twist, that it reminds me of the cheesy payoffs of lots of cheap science fiction stories.

13. The secret of the old music (5 pages)

The Paris orchestra prepares to play the new piece by an unnamed ‘modern’ composer (strongly hinted to be Wagner) but discovers it has a part for the Chinese pavilion, an instrument it doesn’t possess and nobody can recall having been played in their lifetimes. But some of the musicians think they know an old guy who might have one so they visit him in his apartment (surrounded by versions of the instrument and sheet music) and persuade him to come along to rehearsals the next morning. But he finds the new music so difficult he protests against it, halting the rehearsal to declaim that Music is finished and promptly falling into the bass drum. Maybe this is meant to be funny.

14. Sentimentality (9 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam was a member of the Parnassian group of poets:

Parnassianism was a group of French poets that began during the positivist period of the 19th century (1860s to 1890s), occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism … As a reaction to the less-disciplined types of romantic poetry and what they considered the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and (neo-)classical subjects that they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

This, then, explains the emotional detachment, the clinical approach, and the occasional classical subject matter of L’Isle-Adam’s ‘stories’.

This isn’t really a story but a dialogue designed to demonstrate and show off Parnassian values. The young poet, the Comte Maximilien de W– and the well-known beauty Lucienne Émery are sitting on the Champs Elysees. They are romantically involved. She asks him to explain why he, as a Parnassian poet, gives the impression of performing everything, of acting out feelings and emotions. Why can’t he be more like ordinary people? He explains that a poet and artist like himself feels things so deeply that he is lost for how to behave and so ‘acts’ feelings with the appropriate gestures which the ignorant masses would understand.

Very casually, she, also a devotee of this Parnassian way of living, informs him that this is their last hour together as she is leaving him for another man, who she’s meeting later the same night. True to his philosophy of deep feeling kept under clinical self-control, the Comte barely flickered an eyelid, possibly going just a shade paler before congratulating her on her choice. There’s a bit more explanation of art and feeling etc before he hails her a cab and she drives off. He walks home, files his nails, writes a few lines of verse, opens a new book, then calmly takes a small pistol from his cabinet and shoots himself through the heart. Émery has since that day worn mourning black.

15. The finest dinner in the world (9 pages)

I think de L’Isle-Adam’s obvious contempt for people would stop him being considered a major writer. In this little vignette two notables in an unnamed provincial town bet each other they can produce the finest dinner in the world. Maitre Percenoix goes first and produces a 13-course marvel which astonishes the 17 provincial worthies invited to enjoy it. At its climax his bitter rival, Maitre Lecastelier, stands up and says he will serve up one even better in exactly one year’s time.

The joke or gag or point of the story is that one year later Lecastelier serves the same bunch of (lampooned) provincial notables exactly the same dinner down to the last detail BUT…into each napkin he has slipped a 20 franc piece. These fall out as the guests open the napkins and each guest, in a provincial bourgeois way which de L’Isle-Adam mocks, hurriedly slips it into their pockets or purses, pretending they never saw it.

The joke is that, as they leave, and for days afterwards, all the guests for some reason feel that, although the menu was identical to the one laid on by Percenoix, the Lecastelier dinner really was better but, because of their bourgeois hypocrisy, none of them will admit why.

16. The desire to be a man (10 pages)

A variation on the Parnassian theme of ‘true’ feeling. The protagonist is Esprit Chaudval, the famous tragedian, getting on a bit now as he’s turning 50. Wandering the streets of Paris as the restaurants shut down he catches sight of himself in a mirror and poses and preens as he has done all his professional life. His hair is turning grey. It’s time to retire. In an incongruous and improbable development it turns out that he has applied to be a lighthouse keeper. He has just received a letter answering his application, now opens it and squeals with pleasure, then catches himself acting.

It dawns on him that he’s acted so many parts but, deep down, never really felt anything and he finds himself saying that he needs to be a man. Because of the histrionic way his (and de L’Isle-Adam’s) mind works, the old actor thinks the best way to really feel something is to commit a great crime and feel himself flooded with remorse, a genuine emotion which he can hold onto and feed off for the rest of his quiet life as a lighthouse keeper.

So he sets fire to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Paris full of warehouses of oil etc which goes up in a huge blaze, spreading to the nearby houses of the urban poor, some of whom are burned to death, many made homeless. He loiters long enough to enjoy the fruit of his labours – ‘At last I’m going to find out what it means to be “tortured with remorse”…I’m born again. I exist!‘ – then takes a cab with trunks of his belongings to the station whence he will travel to his lighthouse.

A small digression on outsider literary criminals

His grand arson puts Chaudval in the lineage linking Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s alienated student, Raskolnikov, in the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ (1867); with Albert Camus’s blank-minded murderer, Mersault, in ‘The Outsider’ (1942); via André Gide who invented the concept of the ‘acte gratuite’ (an utterly unmotivated behaviour that defies routine, custom, and normal explanations) in his novel ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ in 1914.

17. Flowers of darkness (2 pages)

A baleful little 2-page meditation on the trade in Paris whereby flowers and wreaths left at funerals, come nightfall, are scavenged, thrown into carts and taken to ateliers where they are reworked as attractive bouquets and handed to the sweet little flower girls who come out at night and loiter in front of theatres, restaurants etc so that men can impress their dates by buying them bouquets.

De L’Isle-Adam gives it a characteristically morbid and moralising turn by saying that these flowers of the dead are an apt emblem for the pale-faced ladies of the night who all-too-often hand out love which is death, by which I take it he means sexually transmitted diseases.

18. The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath (8 pages)

Like ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’, this is a heavy-handed satire on the unrelenting pace of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ which de L’Isle-Adam associates with unbridled technical innovation, commercialism and advertising. It isn’t a ‘story’ at all but more a satirical article about a fictional invention.

The narrator hails the invention of a device which can capture and analyse the last breaths of the dying. He goes on to say that children are now practicing on their parents when they fall asleep in front of the fire, getting used to the experience and feelings of death so it’ll seem boring when it actually happens. An extended satire on how the young will learn to be heartless, respect for the dead will vanish and good thing too, art and literature will lose their mystery which is just as well in an age when time is money, and other sarcastic sallies.

19. The brigands (7 pages)

A broad farcical satire on the provincial bourgeoisie. A beggar, an old fiddler from the Gascon town of Nayrac, stops the churchwarden of the neighbouring town of Pibrac on the highway and asks for some alms. Within hours rumour passes round both towns that a huge gang of ferocious brigands is at large. So the bourgeois landowners of both places nerve each other to assemble a posse and, armed with ancient muskets (and cough drops from anxious wives) set off on a tour of their lands during which they’ll collect all the rents owed them.

They see no sight of any brigands because there aren’t any but as night falls they become distinctly nervous. Then in the darkness the two wagons, one of nervous burgers from Pibrac, one of the same from Nayrac, surprise each other on the dark road. The moon disappears behind a cloud and a nervous landowner fires his gun by mistake. What follows is a general massacre in which everyone, even the horse, is slaughtered.

Some distance away the blind fiddler and his loose group of beggar friends hear all the shooting and decide to investigate. They arrive just at the moment that the last burger accidentally blows his brains out and to find a scene of mayhem and massacre.

And, as you might have predicted, seeing all these dead bodies and bags of coins scattered everywhere, the fiddler suggests to his mates that they steal all the swag and hot tail it out of the province, which is what they do.

20. Queen Ysabeau (8 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam wrote a biography of Ysabeau de Bavaria (who was a real historical personage) which was itself meant to be only part of a vast history of his aristocratic family which he insisted stretched back at least as far as the 1400s. In the event this grand history was never completed and even the biography of Ysabeau de Baviere was never published during his lifetime. This ‘story’ is an episode from the larger biography.

It is a deliciously cruel story, a kind of historical Roald Dahl story. It is 1404. Queen Ysabeau de Bavaria is the wife of King Charles VI of France. He has gone mad and she has taken a lover, Vidame de Maulle. One day, carousing with his aristocratic friends who are discussing the nubile women at court and in particular the daughter of the Court silversmith, Bérénice Escabala, de Maulle is foolish enough to bet that he can take her virtue before anyone else.

Now, among the mob of jesting courtiers is Louis d’Orléans, the Queen’s brother-in-law, who has an unhealthily incestuous passion for her. He doesn’t hesitate to report de Maulle’s boast to the Queen, who is not amused. Thus, the next time they are in bed together, having had the usual passionate sex (‘the abandoned delights of the most wonderful pleasures’), the following scene transpires. De Maulle wakes the drowsy Queen to say he can hear bells ringing and the sky is red, there must be a big fire somewhere. Yes, Ysabeau, drowsily says, yes she had her people set fire to the home of the court silversmith. The next day he (de Maulle) will be arrested on the charge of starting the fire in order to abduct the silversmith’s daughter and win his bet. He has only one alibi, that he was here with the Queen on the night in question, which his honour as an aristocrat will forbid him from using – and also the fact that admitting to having sex with the Queen is Treason, also punishable by death. So it’s death either way. In any case he will be tortured until he confesses whatever he’s told to.

Now, they are in bed together, naked, having just had sex, as the Queen lazily and sleepily tells de Maulle all this and he laughs nervously and embraces her again. Ha ha, you’re joking, right? But next morning he is arrested, taken off to the Grand Chatelet prison, and thoroughly tortured, as the Queen predicted.

There’s a final twist. De Maulle’s lawyer believes the young nobleman and makes the noble gesture of swapping places with him in prison, lending de Maulle his cloak so the latter can leave pretending to be the lawyer after a prison cell conference. But when the Queen hears of this, she doesn’t display the nobility you might expect in a more bourgeois story and free the noble lawyer. Instead she has the lawyer ‘broken on the wheel’ in de Maulle’s name so that the latter’s title can be struck from the register.

And the moral of the story is: If you’re having an affair with a medieval queen do not make a public bet to take another woman to bed. A lesson we can all take to heart.

21. Sombre tale, sombre teller (10 pages)

It might be me adapting to de L’Isle-Adam’s style and worldview but, with this run of 5 or 6 good stories, the collection seemed to significantly improve. A bunch of writers go for dinner to celebrate a playwright’s success. Food and drink make them talkative and the subject turns to duels. One of them is asked to explain more about the duel he’s recently taken part in. This writer certainly does describe, in detail, the duel he assisted at which involved an old schoolfriend seeking satisfaction for a bounder who insulted his mother. But the point of the story is that he is so imbrued with writing and playwriting that he assesses every situation, every step of the unfolding story, as if it was a fiction, awarding marks to his friend as he retells the story of the original insult, then comparing him to famous actors of the day for his restraint, nobility and then, after he’s been mortally wounded in the actual duel, the dignity of his death speech. So much can he only see it as a drama that as his old friend expires in his arms he bursts out applauding.

This story had a little of the delirious effect, the effect of dizzying paradox, of one of Borges’s short stories (a little).

22. The sign (19 pages)

The narrator and some writer friends are drinking tea round a friend’s house when this friend, as always a titled gent, Baron Xavier de la V— offers to tell a story about an uncanny coincidence. To start off he makes all the fashionable claims about being doomed by hereditary spleen, a morose and taciturn creature prey to crippling depression. And that’s why he decided to take a rest cure in the country.

He decides to go and visit the Abbé Maucombe in the town of Saint-Maur in Brittany. His journey there, the farm and the good Abbé are all described in adequate detail. What stands out is the Baron’s hallucinations. Everything looks calm and bucolic around the old house where the priest lives but then a cloud passes over the sun and he sees it all in a different way, rundown and crumbling and sinister. (It reminded me a bit of the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ where you see an innocent small town by day and then are shown the grim, overgrown derelict place it will become if They take control.)

They have philosophical talks about God and stuff but that night the Baron has a sinister dream in which he a creepy figure whose face is masked hands him a cloak. Long story short, several days letter the Baron has to return to Paris on business and the Abbé insists on walking him to the village where the stagecoach stops and it starts to rain, and the kind-hearted Abbé lends him his cloak, handing it over in a gesture which exactly matches what the Baron saw in his dream. With a certain inevitability, a couple of days later, in Paris, the Baron gets a letter saying the Abbé has died of a cold picked up in the rainstorm.

But these ‘facts’ barely matter. What matters is the tremendous atmosphere of ominous premonition which de L’Isle-Adam whips up, and especially the couple of genuinely creepy moments when he suddenly sees an alternative reality, the rundown haunted landscape behind the bright sunny one we see most of the time.

23. The unknown woman (14 pages)

The scene is a grand night at the opera, the farewell performance of noted soprano Maria Felicia Malibran, singing in Bellini’s Norma. The narrative singles out a handsome young man in the stalls, displaying a notable excitement and enthusiasm, explaining that he is the Comte Félician de la Vierge, a provincial aristocrat who only comes to Paris occasionally. This young man catches sight of a beautiful woman in a box and is bowled over by her beauty. Her image speaks to something inside him and he realises that he is in love.

He follows her outside, ignoring the flashy opera crowd, and when she dismisses her cab, he does the same to his and follows her on foot. Seized by a sudden premonition that he might lose her and never see her again, he overtake he, turns and bows and declares his undying love for her. So far, so melodramatic and overwrought and improbable. But all this is to set up what follows, for the pale beautiful young woman waits till the man has finished his speech then declares that she is…deaf!

This staggers the young man for a moment but then his love is reinforced by compassion, and he renews his assault, declaring her disability will make him love her even more. Whereupon the ‘story’ takes a turn, for the unnamed deaf woman delivers a series of long speeches. The gist is that their love can never work because he will, sooner or later, no matter what he promises now, get used to her deafness. Married life requires a lot of practical discussion and agreement and she won’t be able to hear him and eventually he will just mouth ‘I love you’ and write her practical notes and she couldn’t bear that.

Having reduced him to stricken silence, she turns, steps into the cab which has been following her all that time, and is whisked away. Next day the tragical young man packs his bags, returns to his estates in Brittany and is never heard from again, living in heart-broken solitude.

That’s what happens, but in reality the last 6 or so pages are a peg or pretext for de L’Isle-Adam to get his unnamed woman to deliver a series of lectures or addresses on a variety of topical themes. In fact I detected (or think I detected) in the 14 pages of the story a variety of tropes and styles from the period, including Realism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Romanticism, Decadence and Symbolism. If I have time, I’m thinking I might have a crack at analysing out all the different tones, registers and styles which thong this packed little text.

24. Maryelle (10 pages)

A well-known lady of easy virtue suddenly disappears from society and the narrator, from lordly aristocratic boredom, sets out to find out why. This isn’t very difficult since he bumps into her on the street, on the Avenue of the Opera, to be precise.

She is 25 and pale. He invites her to lunch at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne ‘so that we might get bored together’, striking the note of exquisitely aristocratic world weariness. He tells her a story ‘to break the ice’ which captures the cynicism of de l’Isle-Adam and his circle perfectly. It concerns a vengeful squire who arrives home to find his wife ‘in a questionable position’ and swiftly inflicts a mortal wound on the lover. As he lays dying in the unfaithful wife’s arms, the husband has the bright idea of tickling her feet with a feather so that she bursts out laughing in the face of her beloved!

It now appears that they had some days of passion a year or so ago but Maryelle makes it quite clear that that is not going to happen again, at which, like so many de L’Isle-Adam characters, the narrator acts the part.

I considered it incumbent on me to assume a somewhat melancholy expression, as the tribute any well-bred man must always pay to a pretty woman. (p.217)

Then she tells him a story. Last winter at the theatre she became the object of a naive young man up from the provinces. Maryelle has the gift of becoming whatever other people want her to be. Here, as in so many of the other stories, it’s about a person who plays at living or acts a role, for at least two reasons: 1) they are such experts at life, they have lived so thoroughly, that most scenes are just repeats of things they’ve experiences, so they’re just going through the motions; 2) from another perspective, their acting turns their lives into art, gives them an artful completeness and aesthetic finish which ‘real life’, alas, usually lacks.

Anyway, when Maryelle becomes aware of the youth’s interest she adopts the role of a respectable widow of a respected army officer, deceased, on a rare trip up to Paris. (She is a courtesan. This is all an act.)

She receives one then several letters (which she shows the narrator who is cynically amused at their naive innocence) but then something strange happened. As she agreed to meet the poor innocent lad she found herself…falling in love with him!

She plays the part of the chaste widow so well that she comes to believe it herself conveniently forgetting her entire previous existence as a lady of the night. And the narrator, with typically droll irony, praises this sweet and innocent love based, as it is, on all-round lies and deceit. The only slight snag is that, while being faithful in her heart to the young innocent she is, apparently, continuing to see and sleep with an impressive roster of other gentleman to which her response is the admirably practical: ‘Is it my fault if a girl has to live?’

She then delivers a page-long speech about the artificiality of modern life, whose gist is:

Haven’t the appearances of love become, for nearly everybody, preferable to love itself? (p.223)

The implication that he (the narrator) has never had a meaningful relationship with Maryelle infuriates the narrator who shouts at her to go back to her penniless lover, Raoul. She, by contrast, keeps her cool, rises, adjusts her veil, and disappears into the evening.

There’s a funny payoff. From the balcony of the restaurant the narrator looks out over the grass bright with the evening dew. Vexed and irritated, to try and calm his mood, in a petty gesture, he insouciantly tosses his dead cigar onto it. Which explains why, one billion cigars later, the world is dying.

25. Doctor Tristan’s treatment (5 pages)

Hurrah!…Hosannah! Progress sweeps us along on its torrential course. (p.225)

Another right-wing satire on ‘progress’ and ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ like ‘The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath’, ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’. In many ways it’s the best because the satirical premise is kept simple and punchy.

A Dr T. Chavassus has invented a treatment for anyone suffering from those troublesome voices in their head, such as: the voice of God a la Joan of Arc, the voice of conscience, the voice of patriotism, the voice of outraged honour etc etc a sarcastic list of all the right-wing shibboleths.

The doctor’s technique is to clamp the patient to a chair, then yell in their ear for 20 minutes the magic word HUMANITY, after which he slips an electric wire in each ear and sends such a voltage through it that it bursts the eardrums, and makes the patient permanently deaf. But no more irritating inner voices which detract from the citizen’s efficiency in the modern economy.

This is carried along by de L’Isle-Adam’s anger but, as with all the other science satires, you only have to reflect for a few seconds to realise that deafening someone won’t interfere in the slightest with the voice of conscience or God or outrage patriotism or whatever which continua assailing those who hear them. It’s a bravura comic performance for the 7 or 8 minutes it takes to read, then instantly revealed to be impossible and not even internally consistent and so, like so many of his stories, discarded.

26. Occult memories (5 pages)

Originally a prose poem and only just about converted into something approaching a ‘story’, a 5-page monologue by a proudly Celtic son of Brittany who describes the career of his ancestor, some kind of soldier-adventurer in France’s Indian colonies, which opens with a deliberately Gothic description of the Dead Cities, overgrown with foliage, into whose tombs his ancestor crept, having massacred all the guards, to steal ancestral treasure, until he was eventually betrayed by a fellow adventurer, an Irishman with the splendid name of Captain Sombre.

It is another variation on one of de L’Isle-Adam’s idées fixes – the descent from grand, wealthy ancestors, the lament for present poverty, the refusal to truckle to the degraded ‘values’ of the present age.

27. Epilogue: The messenger (23 pages)

This is the longest story in the collection and de L’Isle-Adam was particularly proud of it. It’s based on a story told in the Old Testament which the book’s editor, A. W. Raitt, quotes in the notes in its entirety before going on to comment that de L’Isle-Adam’s main achievement was to ‘overlay it with a veneer of pretentious erudition’ (Notes, p.285). A bit later Raitt comments that de L’Isle-Adam ‘optimistically claimed to know Hebrew’ when he very obviously didn’t. Raitt’s notes are a joy to read in their own right, especially for the more absurd moments of de L’Isle-Adam’s biography which he pulls out.

It’s set in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon and mostly consists of a long prose poem describing the layout and buildings and trees and canals and gilded decorations of the city as the narration, like a camera, pans over it and up to the great palace of Solomon himself. Here the text becomes clotted with descriptions of the exotic peoples who attend the court, in all their oriental variety, stuffed with Biblical placenames. It is striving for the same kind of gorgeous Biblical ornateness as Flaubert’s story, Hérodias‘, published just a few years before, in 1877, and anticipating Oscar Wilde’s play on the same subject, Salomé, published in 1891.

Almost the entire story is a gorgeous description of the celebrations of the Passover in the great palace of King Solomon at the height of which the sky goes ominously dark, heavy raindrops fall, a bolt of lighting demolishes a column and suddenly appears an angel of the Lord, Azrael. Initially Solomon thinks the angel of the Lord has come to take him away from this world of sorrow but he is disappointed because the Angel has, in fact, come to whisk away the King’s chief priest, Helcias.

This piece forms the deliberate climax of the collection, a spectacular cornucopia of Biblical names and descriptions rendered in a deliberately clotted, gorgeous poetic prose which you can imagine de L’Isle-Adam labouring over long and hard. It probably ought to be read aloud, recited or declaimed from a stage rather than silently read.

It prompted one simple thought, which is that, in a way I doubt de L’Isle-Adam intended, it shows how the entire edifice of Symbolism depends, ultimately, on the voodoo resonances of Judeo-Christianity. Symbolism piggybacks on Catholicism. It relies for its atmospheric effects on the most lurid and melodramatic aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition while ignoring the positive day-to-day practice of Judaism or the cheerful, ‘good news’ aspects of Christianity.

Conclusions

It took a while for me to adapt to de L’Isle-Adam’s tone and vibe and subject matter, but eventually, after an initial aversion due to their snobbery and melodrama, the sheer number of stories drew me in and I found myself enjoying them more and more, and rereading a number of them purely for pleasure of their arch, contrived, improbable, sometimes comic, but sometimes genuinely effective melodramatic appeal.

Purple prose

Here’s what de L’Isle-Adam regularly sounds like:

‘You, I thought to myself, who lack the refuge of your dreams, and for whom the land of Canaan, with its palm-trees and its living waters does not appear in the dawn after you have walked so far beneath the hard stars; traveller so joyful when you set off and now so gloomy; heart made for other exiles than those whose bitterness you now share with evil brethren – behold! Here you can sit on the stone of melancholy! Here dead dreams revive, anticipating the moment of the grave! If you wish to feel a real longing for death, approach: here the sight of the sky thrills to the point of forgetfulness.’ (Baron Xavier de la V— sounding off in ‘The Sign’)

Characteristic ingredients include:

• exotic location from the Bible (land of Canaan) or some Romantic source text
• melodramatic vocabulary (gloomy, dead dreams, grave and death death DEATH)
• long histrionic sentences, as if written not to be read but declaimed from the stage in some Gothic melodrama

A.W. Raitt’s notes

The notes in this 1985 Oxford University Press edition by de L’Isle-Adam scholar A.W. Raitt are a droll delight. Apart from annotating particular aspects of the text, his throwaway references to aspects of de L’Isle-Adam’s life create a kind of collage biography. Thus:

• Villiers (as Raitt calls him; much shorter and easier) was very proud of his skill as a boxer and at one time earned money as a sparring partner in a gymnasium (p.261)
• Villiers was a devoted monarchist and stood unsuccessfully as a royalist candidate in the 1881 elections to the Paris Municipal Council (p.262)
• the poet Stéphane Mallarmé was for many years Villiers’s best friend and wrote a mighty funeral oration for him (p.264)
• Villiers was an ardent Wagnerian and visited the great man in Switzerland in 1969 and 1870 (p.265)
• as a Breton, Villiers had a great love of the sea (p.266) [in which case it’s striking how few of his stories feature it; most are firmly wedged in Paris]
• Villiers had a morbid interest in the guillotine and was a regular attender at executions (p.270)
• Villiers was a member of the Parnassian group of poets who were routinely accused of being too cold and clinical in their approach (p.272)
• Villiers believed he had the makings of a great actor (p.273)
• Villiers was well-known for stopping in the street to gaze at his own reflection in mirrors and shop fronts (p.273)
• his uncle (his father’s younger brother) was a parish priest in Brittany for his entire life (p.278)
• Villiers was extremely suspicious and regularly took elaborate precautions to defend himself (p.279)
• towards the end of his life Villiers, obviously unwell, returned to his Catholic faith (p.281)

The funniest biographical snippet concerns Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury who succeeded Disraeli as the leader of the Tory Party in 1881. Villiers named a character in his novel ‘The New World’ Lord Cecil and sent a copy of the book to the Marquess along with a flattering letter. Having read Andrew Roberts’s vast and hugely enjoyable biography of Cecil, I’m not surprised that the Marquess a) was polite enough to write a reply which was b) studiedly distant. But it was enough to delude the ever-hopeful Villiers into believing he had at last found the wealthy patron who would make his name and fortune, and Villiers proceeded to bombard the Marquess with copies of each of his new works as they were published. Villiers did, in fact, finally meet the Marquess in Dieppe when the latter was on holiday there in 1888, but was intensely disappointed that nothing came of the encounter (p.286).

It is richly comic to imagine the response of the immensely wealthy, profoundly conservative, philistine and reactionary Cecil to the tactless importuning of a poverty-stricken, scandalously immoral Bohemian depicter of Paris’s high-class prostitutes and dissolute wastrels. Hard to imagine two more opposite types.

At one point he sums up Villiers’ profile in a snappy sentence:

Breton origins, illustrious forebears, present poverty, nostalgia for past glories. (p.284)

Credit

Contes Crueles by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam was published in France in 1883. Oxford University Press published an English translation, ‘Cruel Tales’, translated by Robert Baldick, in 1965. Extensive notes and a new introduction by Oxford academic A.W. Raitt were added in a revised edition published in 1985.

Related links

• Contes cruels in French

Related reviews

• Nineteenth century France