Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Read online

  Rachilde

  translated by Liz Heron

  with a preface by Maurice Barres and an afterword by Madeleine Johnston

  supported by the European Arts Festival

  July-December 1992

  At the end of 1992 the 12 Member States of the EEC will inaugurate an open market which Dedalus is celebrating with a major programme of new translations from the 8 languages of the EEC. The new translations will reflect the whole range of Dedalus' publishing programme: classics, literary fantasy and contemporary fiction.

  From Danish:

  The Black Cauldron - William Heinesen

  From Dutch:

  The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy - editor Richard Huijing

  From Dutch/French:

  The Dedalus Book of Belgian Fantasy - editor Richard Huijing

  From French:

  The Devil in Love -Jacques Cazotte

  Angels of Perversity - Remy de Gourmont

  The Dedalus Book of French Fantasy - editor Christine Donougher

  The Book of Nights - Sylvie Germain

  Night of Amber - Sylvie Germain

  Le Calvaire - Octave Mirbeau

  Smarra & Trilby - Charles Nodier

  Monsieur Venus - Rachilde

  The Marquise de Sade - Rachilde

  From German:

  The Angel of the West Window - Gustav Meyrink

  The Green Face - Gustav Meyrink

  The Opal (and other stories) - Gustav Meyrink

  The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: the Meyrink

  Years 1890-1930 - editor Mike Mitchell

  The Dedalus Book of Germain Fantasy: the Romantics and Beyond - editor Maurice Raraty

  The Architect of Ruins - Herbert Rosendorfer

  From Greek

  The History of a Vendetta - Yorgi Yatromanolakis

  From Italian:

  Senso (and other stories) - Camillo Boito

  From Portuguese:

  The Mandarin - Eca de Queiroz

  The Relic - Eca de Queiroz

  The Confessions of Lucio - Mario de Sa-Carneiro

  From Spanish:

  The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy - editor A. R. Tulloch

  Further titles will be announced shortly.

  Rachilde (1860-1953) was born Marguerite Eymery. She wrote Monsieur Venus when she was only twenty. Its publication in 1884 caused outrage and moral indignation in France, but was defended by the novelists Maurice Barres and Jean Lorrain as an important work of literature.

  Rachilde became a prolific author of decadent fiction, exploring the perverse areas of human sexuality. Les Hors Nature (1897) deals with incest, while L'Heure Sexuelle (1898) mixes psychiatry and obsessive love. Like her heroine Raoule in Monsieur Venus she often wore men's clothing and called herself `a man of letters.' She is the only female Decadent author.

  Dedalus has featured her stories in The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins) - editor Brian Stableford and will publish La Marquise de Sade (1887), a novel of orgiastic sadism, in 1994.

  THE TRANSLATOR

  Liz Heron was born in Glasgow and read Modern Languages at Glasgow University. She settled in London in 1976 and is a freelance writer and translator. She is the author of one non-fiction book, Changes of Heart (1986) and the editor of a collection of childhood autobiographies, Truth, Dare or Promise (1985). She is currently preparing an anthology of 20th century women's writing to be published in 1993.

  Her translations include novels and stories by Nanni Balestrini, Didier Daeninckx, Anna Maria Cortese and Daniele del Giudice, essays by Umberto Eco and Eduardo Galeano, and film criticism from Cahiers du Cinema.

  The Complications of Love 1

  Translator's Notes 9

  Monsieur Venus by Rachilde 11

  Afterword by Madeleine Johnston 147

  This book is somewhat abhorrent, but I cannot say that it shocks me. Nor were some very serious people any more shocked by it, but instead amused, astonished and interested; they placed Monsieur Venus in the nether regions of their library, along with certain books from the last century which horrify good taste and prompt people's fancies.

  Monsieur Venus describes the sensibility of a very extraordinary young woman. I ask you to look upon this work as an anatomy. Those merely in search of some elegantly phrased niceties have no business with these pages; but the books that they like will perhaps have long since disappeared while people are still turning to this one to find the powerful emotions always provoked in curious and discerning minds by the sight of unwonted perversity.

  The supreme refinement of this book's perversity is that it was written by a young girl of twenty. What a wonderful masterpiece! Printed in Belgium, this volume revolted public opinion at first and was read only by the prurient and a few of the serious-minded; all this tender, wicked frenzy and love in those guises redolent of death are the work of a child, a child most gentle and retiring! That is its extreme charm for true dandies. I have never known anything more mysterious than this knowing depravity that erupts in the dreams of a virgin - as mysterious as crime, as genius, or as the temerity of a child, and with something of all three.

  Rachilde was born with a somewhat squalid cast of mind, squalid and coquettish. Let all those who are fond of the uncommon look upon it with disquiet. Jean Lorrain,' who must have been well taken with it, has given us an elegant sketch of his visit to Rachilde: "I encountered a schoolgirl of sober and reserved demeanour, very pale, it's true, but her paleness was that of a studious schoolgirl, a girl in all senses, somewhat slender, somewhat frail, with tiny restless hands and the earnest profile of a Greek youth or a young Frenchman in love ... And her eyes - oh, her eyes! Wide, wide eyes with heavy unbelievable lashes, they were clear as water, eyes innocent of everything, so one might believe that those are not the eyes with which Rachilde sees, but that she has other eyes in the back of her head with which to seek out and find those red hot peppers with which she spices her works." And there, expressed with all the succinctness of a Whistler,2 the gravity and pallor of this febrile creature is summed up.

  But we, who are usually repelled by obscenity, would not write of this book were it only to praise a wrongheaded child. We like Monsieur Venus because it analyses one of the strangest cases of self-love ever produced by this overweening century of ours. These pages feverishly written by a minor, with all the artistic defects one can point out, are of psychological interest in the same degree as Adolphe,' or Mademoiselle de Maupin,4 or Crime d'Amour,5 which examine certain strange phenomena of the amorous sensibility.

  Truly, the little girl who wrote this wonderful Monsieur Venus was not privy to this aesthetic. Was it in her mind to give us one of the most excessive monographs on the mal du siecle? It was merely that she had certain base impulses, and she acknowledged them with an archness never seen hitherto. She was always very indecorous. Madcap, generous and full of strange enthusiasms, at a very young age she scared the wits out of her parents, the gentlest parents in the world; she was the amazement of Perigord. When she took up her pen to describe those extraordinary maidenly excitements of hers it was out of instinct. Neatly tucking her petticoats between her legs, this little girl happily let herself roll down the overheated slope that runs from Joseph Delormeb to Les Fleurs du mal and yet deeper - she rolled down happily, recklessly, just as if, less highminded and not so well brought up, she had taken a seat on a rollercoaster at the fairground.

  We have the impression that young girls are very complicated, because we cannot grasp the fact that they are governed solely by instinct, being sly, self-centred and passionate little beasts. Rachilde at twenty could write a book that makes everyone dream a little without
scarcely having thought about anything; her pen ran away with her, in pursuit of her instincts. The wonder of it is that such instincts as those were hers for the having. In her entire works, which are now considerable, Rachilde has scarcely done anything but write about herself.

  I don't mean to define what is true or false in Monsieur Venus; any reader with some idea of the flights of fictional fancy in a twenty-year-old mind will easily draw a line between the author's embellishments and the authentically felt detail. It seems to me that if one discounts the childishness of the decor and the tragic side of the tale, while retaining the essential features of Raoule de Venerande and the ghastly Jacques Silvert, one will come very close to understanding one of the most extraordinary distortions of love that the mal du siecle has produced in the soul of a young woman.

  But here is a summary of this little masterpiece:

  Mademoiselle Raoule de Venerande is a refined young girl; she is of a very nervous disposition, is thin-lipped, and of somewhat unpleasant mien. In the studio of her florist she notices a young workman. Crowned with the roses with which his nimble fingers are fashioning a garland, this auburn-haired boy enchants her with his dimpled chin, his smooth, childlike flesh, and the little crease in his neck, the crease of a plump newborn baby. Then he looks at her in the way of sick dogs, with a touch of moistness on his pupils. The whole portrait is ably done, genuinely lowlife and natural in tone. Raoule instals this fleshy pretty boy in a highly gothic interior; she comes upon him licking the very castors of the furniture through their multicoloured fringes, rapt in the transports of a fiancee amid her trousseau. With a very witty brand of cynicism, she disconcerts him when he thinks to be agreeable; the lout she has taken in on the pretext of charity is pushed into a dressing room and made to blush at her boldness in inspecting his attributes and paying him compliments. And the poor humiliated male kneels on the train of Raoule's dress and sobs. For, as Rachilde puts it so well, he was the son of a drunkard and a whore, and his honour knew naught but to weep. This Monsieur Venus has his nature thoroughly desexed by a series of ingenious procedures and becomes Raoule's mistress. What I mean is that she loves him, pays his keep and gives him caresses, that he prompts her to irritation and to tenderness, without her ever yielding to the desire that would make her the lout's base equal, and though she enjoys the trembling he excites in her, she scorns him. She sums up this taste for him admirably; "I shall love Jacques as a fiance hopelessly loves his dead fiancee."

  That is this novel's subject and what I find to admire in it once it is stripped of the confusions which only diminish the work and which have too much a whiff of virginal ignorance - a virgin who was I believe quite out of her depth. It assures Rachilde a very particular place as an astute talent.

  She is quite evidently not a moralist, and, at twenty, it would be truly insufferable were she to aspire to that role. It even seems that from every point of view Rachilde admires Raoule de Venerande.

  Nor is she a psychologist impelled by complications for their own fine sake. She describes the very specific actions of an arrogant young woman; but she gives us no hints about the development of this sensibility. Having read the book we still do not know what combination of influences on the mind or the senses could, in a society as rigid as ours, in the bosom of a respectable family, have produced such a monster.

  All in all, Rachilde possesses much wit and a teasing lightness of touch, but she scarcely puts any effort into refining the form of her work. Neither a moralist, although she delineates a theory of love, nor a psychologist, albeit an occasional analyst, nor an artist, despite her sparkle. Rachilde belongs to that category which very superior and somewhat fastidious minds deem most interesting of all. She writes authentically and solely to quicken and excite her own senses. Her book is but an extension of her life. For writers of this stamp, the novel is but a means of manifesting sentiments which ordinary life compels them to restrain or at least to refrain from divulging.

  Perhaps Monsieur Venus is really a very true story; but even were it a dream it would testify to a very particular state of mind. I hasten to add that such dreams are extremely powerful. The woman who dreams, who weeps, who tells of a love she would like to have, sooner or later creates it. This inversion of the instincts, this worshipping of a base creature as pretty as a child, as plump and puny as a woman but of male sex, already has precedence in human experience. By some law beyond our grasp, these disordered desires sometimes rise to the surface of our souls, where they were laid by remote forebears. Raoule de Venerande, this pallid-faced, thin-lipped madwoman who washes the ambiguous body of Jacques Silvert, harks back - for all the differences of climate, time and culture - to the frenzied rites of Phrygia, when women wept over Atys, the little plump, pink male. These dark complications of love are not merely a matter of overstimulation; their lewdness is mingled with a disturbing mysticism. The novel's Raoule de Venerande has as her guardian a relative who is thoroughly pious while never ceasing to stigmatise baser humanity. Rachilde writes: "God should have made love as something separate from the senses. Real love ought only to consist of warm friendship. Let us sacrifice the senses, the beast."

  These tender though impure dreams have always tempted the most lofty minds. One Catholic novelist, Josephin Madan, thought he could indulge in these unhealthy manias without offence to his religion. Yet anyone who aspired through satisfaction of the senses to fulfil his whole being, and his noble desires for justice, tenderness and beauty, is on a sordid downhill slope. Love which is extended to others becomes embroiled in very murky complications if it lacks benevolence. The superior man swiftly discovers that he can expect nothing from a woman. He retreats from whatever goodness he might discern in the eyes of these creatures; it is youth alone which beautifies their candid looks; at their first words he would discover the humiliation of having been drawn to a lower being. For her part woman has followed the same thinking; she will not bend before a man so brutal, whose embrace can only faintly stir what she insatiably seeks.

  To what mysterious cults will these women and these men devote themselves whom love of self so separates! In what singular practices will they demand caresses, they who complicate their moral susceptibility by a frequency of overstimulation?

  The mal du siecle, to which we must always return and of which Monsieur Venus represents a most interesting aspect in woman, is precisely the product of an excessive neurasthenia and an arrogance unparalleled hitherto. Until this book nothing had indicated its specific manifestations in the amorous sensibility. Without placing too much emphasis on that divine and so disturbing elegy which we find in Rene,' it is largely in the works of Monsieur du Custine, a great and little known novelist, and in the works of Baudelaire that we must look for ideas (though of course not explicit ones) about complicated love, complicated by an excessive belief in degradation. Just as Monsieur Venus proclaims its hatred of masculine strength, so there is the fearsome prospect of an eventual distaste for feminine grace.

  Complications of great import! Distaste for womanliness! Hatred of male strength! This notion of an unsexed being is what certain minds dream of. Such imaginations have a whiff of death about them. On the final pages of this book, when Monsieur Venus is dead, we see Raoule de Venerande keep watch and grieve before a waxen image! The image of her base Adonis!

  The lachrymose fantasy of an isolated mind, a piece of cerebral eccentricity, but one of interest to the psychologist, the moralist and the artist. Monsieur Venus is a very significant symptom, so long as one readily distinguishes, I repeat, between what is novelistic flight of fancy and the product of an increasingly common neurasthenic excitement in both of the sexes.

  No, this autobiography of the strangest of young women is not depraved. In spite of those pages which mean I think to be sadistic and which are merely quite naive and confused, I am of the opinion that this book can be considered as a curiosity by the same token as certain books from the last century which we still read after more polished works have d
isappeared. Modern criticism does not baulk at replacing literary curiosity with pathological curiosity; it is the author who seeks the most illustrious minds for his work. You know what a thoroughly gentle and refined young woman this author is, and what a frenzy of sensuality and mysticism you find in her book. Does it not appear that, in addition to the light it casts on certain of this period's depravities in love, Monsieur Venus is an infinitely fascinating example for anyone interested in the elusive relationship between a work of art and the mind that brought it forth?

  How can it have come about that Rachilde conjured up before her Raoule de Venerande and Jacques Silvert? How did this child with her wholesome upbringing produce these ambiguous creations? The question is an enthralling one.

  Monsieur Jules Soury, an eminent psychologist who takes a systematic interest in the curious diversities of human sensibility, said one day of Restif8: "One who composes such books is perhaps no more in possession of himself than a two-headed monster; it is too nice a case of teratology. The grave and oblivion are only for the commonplace. He however has the memorial of the dissection room and the Dupuytren museum." I would judiciously apply the same words to the colleague whom I have the honour of regarding, if I did not fear I should seem to her a little earnest.

  Maurice Barres

  1889

  1 Jean Lorrain (1856-1906), a central figure in the French Decadent movement, the author of numerous short stories and the novel Monsieur de Phocas.

  2 James Whistler (1834-1903). The American painter was an intimate in Decadent circles and renowned as a wit.

  3 Adolphe, a novel by Benjamin Constant, pub. 1816.

  4 Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novel by Theophile Gautier, pub. 1835.

  5 Crime d'Amour, a novel by Paul Bourget, pub. 1886.

  6 Vie, poesies et pensees de Joseph Delorme was written supposedly by a deceased friend of Saint-Beuve, and published in 1829. It was subsequently discovered to have been the work of Saint-Beuve himself. In a prefatory memoir Delorme is described as a melancholy romantic who died young in obscure poverty, suffering a typically Decadent fate.