Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (43 page)

 

She is a strange, shocking, scabrous woman, a unique spirit, sphinxly solitary in these fin-de-siècle times. She is a curious and disturbing “case,” a writer who has published all her works under that pseudonym “Rachilde.”
³⁶
She is the satanic flower of decadence, piquantly perfumed, mysterious, enchanting, and as evil as sin.

Some years ago, in Belgium, she published a novel that attracted a great deal of attention and was, rumors say, condemned by the courts there. It was not one of those neurotic books that made the publisher Kistemaekers famous in the times of Naturalism, nor one of those boxes of aphrodisiac bonbons
à la
Mendès. It was a demonic book, impregnated with an unknown or forgotten lust, a book whose abysses had never been treated in those manuals used by confessors, a work that was complicated and refined—the triple-refined essence of perversity, in fact. It was an unprecedented book, for it burned with a different flame than the burning, bloody coals of the “divine Marquis,” and it was nothing like the prurient collections held hostage in the private reading rooms of libraries. This book’s title was
Monsieur Venus,
and it is the best-known of a series that contains the strangest and weirdest creations of a malignly female and outlandishly infamous brain.

Yes, a woman was the author of this book—a sweet, adorable nineteen-year-old virgin who seemed to Jean Lorrain (who went to visit her) to be a strange being with a pallor “like that of a studious schoolgirl, a true
jeune fille,
somewhat thin, somewhat frail, with small, restless hands and the grave profile of a Greek ephebe or a young Frenchman in love . . . and eyes—oh, what eyes!—big, big, big, water-clear eyes heavy with unreal-looking lashes, eyes that know nothing, so that one could almost believe that Rachilde sees not with those eyes, but with others, deep in her head, which seek out and discover the rabid peppers with which she spices her works.”

That woman, that “virginal schoolgirl,” that
child
was the planter of mandrake, the cultivator of venomous orchids, the decadent
jongleur,
the charmer of snakes and concocter of Spanish flies whose books, in times to come, will shock, as though with an incredible hallucination, the documentarians who write the moral history of our century. Powerful painters, says Barbey d’Aurevilly, can paint everything, and their painting is always moral, at least when it is tragic and shows us the horror of the things it portrays. The only immorality comes from the Impassive and the Mockers.

Rachilde is not impassive—how could that mass of nerves trembling in constant, contagious vibration be impassive! Nor is she a mocker: There is no room for laughter in those dark depths of Sin, or at the sight of the lamentable deformities, those cases of psychic teratology presented to us by the foremost immoralist of all times.

Imagine the sweet, pure dream of a virgin, filled with whiteness, delicacy, softness—a eucharistic celebration, an Easter of lilies and swans. Then a devil—Behemoth, perhaps, . . . the devil of black masses—appears. And into that chaste white dream he introduces the red flower of sexual aberration; essences and aromas that attract incubuses and succubuses; mad visions of unknown and devastating vices; poisonous, bewitched kisses; the mysterious twilight in which love, pain, and death mix and intermingle.

The virgin tempted or possessed by the Evil One writes down the visions she has seen in her dreams. And that is the origin of those books which should be read only by priests, physicians, and psychologists.

Maurice Barrès puts
Monsieur Venus
beside, for example,
Adolphe,
³⁷
Mlle. de Maupin,
³⁸
Crime d’Amour
³⁹
—in which certain rare phenomena of the sensibility of love have been studied. But Rachilde, examined closely, has no predecessors, unless it be
Justine,
⁴⁰
or perhaps certain old books whose names are never more than whispered by bibliophiles of love (or the Libido) such as that Englishman that animates D’Annunzio in his
Il Piacere.
⁴¹
. . .

The greatest attraction exerted by the works of Rachilde depends upon the reader’s pathological curiosity regarding the autobiographical part, the direct and noneuphemistic presentation by the observer of the soul of a woman, of a fin-de-siècle girl with all the complications that the
mal de siècle
has inflicted upon her. . . . How have such equivocal creations been born to that well-educated girl? That, indeed, is the curious, beguiling problem. One can only believe that distant influences have been at work in her; that atavistic forces afflicting this delicate being with generations-worth of perversity have inspired in her the awakening, discovery, or invention of ancient sins, utterly forgotten, erased from the face of the earth by the fires and waters of chastising skies.

A listing of the titles of her works may given some idea of the infernal jewels of this female Antichrist:
Monsieur de la
Nouveauté, La Femme du 199ème, Monsieur Venus, Queue de
Poisson, Histoires Bêtes, Nono, La Virginité de Diane, La Noise du Sang, A Mort, La Marquise de Sade, Le Tiroir de
Mimi-Corail,
Madame Adonis, L’Homme Roux, La Sanglante Ironie, Le Mordu, L’Animale.
They resemble nests of shining, brightly colored vipers, beautiful, red, poisonous fruits, jams that will drive a man mad, harsh peppers, fobidden gingers. I could not go into details here unless I did so in Latin, or better yet, in Greek, for Latin would be too transparent, and the Eleusian mysteries were not, most decidedly, brought into the light of the sun.

The
types
in her works are all exceptional.
La Sanglante Ironie,
for example, presents a young man deranged,
detraqué.
He has murdered his beloved in a moment of hallucination. Now in prison, he tells the story, explaining the succession of causes that led him to commit this act. The figure of Sylvain d’Hauterac, the madman, is one of Rachilde’s finest creations, but the critics have called it improbable, like nothing in nature. That does not prevent the work from presenting a life of intensity and a study of admirable psychological insight.

She has written a play called
Madame la Mort.
The action revolves around the main character’s desperate struggle between Life and Death. . . . Paul Gauguin has drawn this figure, a symbol for Madame la Mort: a spectral ghost against a dark background of shadows. One can just see the anatomy of a figure, a large head; the specter is holding one hand to its brow—the long, disproportionate, thin hand of a skeleton. One can clearly make out the bones of its jaw; its eyes are sunken into their orbits. The visionary artist has evoked the manifestations of certain nightmares in which we see corpses walking, approaching their victim, touching him, embracing him, and in that horrid dream we can feel the waxen flesh press against us and we breathe the familiar, horrendous smell of the tomb. . . .

Monsieur Venus
is the product of an incubus. Jacques Silvert is Sporus to the cruelly passionate female Nero—a vulgar, smiling, passive Sporus with soft lamblike eyes. Raoule de Vénerande, a sort of female Des Esseints, falls in love with this exquisite porcine creature—falls in love as in Shakespeare’s sonnet:
A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted.

Raoule de Vénerande is cousin to Nero and that legendary, terrible Gilles de Laval, the sire of kings, who died at the stake. . . . As for the castrated and detestable Jacques, a ridiculous Ganymede to his vampire lover, he is a curious clinical case, and could be a patient of Krafft-Ebing’s, or Molle’s, or Gley’s. The florist’s androgyny is explained by Aristophanes in Plato’s
Symposium,
⁴²
and Krafft-Ebing would classify him as a case of “eviration,” or
transmutatio sexus paranoia
. . . .

A woman, a delicate, intellectual, cerebral young woman reveals terrible secrets to us: that is the highest praise, and the most tempting of attractions. Yet note that in her works we enter a most hard and unknown country—unnatural, forbidden, perilous.

There is a portrait of Rachilde at twenty-five. In profile: her throat is naked to the swelling of her breasts; her hair is rolled up at the back, at the nape of her neck, like a black serpent, and upon her brow, it is cut in the fashion of some years ago, straight across, though covering her entire forehead. Her gaze—such a gaze!—and eyes that say everything and know everything. A delicate, slightly Jewish nose, and a mouth—oh, mouth! companion of the eyes. And in it all, the divine and terrible enigma of Woman:
Mysterium.
On her white bosom lies a spray of white rosebuds.

I know of one man who, while he was in Paris, refused to be presented to Rachilde, for fear of losing another youthful illusion. Today, Rachilde is Mme. Alfred Vallette; she has put on weight, and is not the enigmatic dominatrix of the portrait of twenty-five years ago, that adorable and fearsome god-daughter of Lilith.

Married to Alfred Vallette, she is the “lady of a house” today, but she has not stopped producing intellectual offspring. She writes novels, stories, reviews.

Rachilde has a quick critical sense, and with her woman’s swift and skillful perspicacity is able to discover in the works she analyzes the most hidden meanings. . . .

“In our days,” says Rachilde, “there are instigators of ideas (as before there were
meneurs de loups
),
⁴³
because in this ‘modern’ era of ours, a thousand times more sinister than the bloody Middle Ages, there is need of apparitions a thousand times more flagellant; and those
meneurs,
driving their murderous ideas to the murder of old theories, old principles, madly throwing open the eyes of the spirit, are also precursors of the Angel. Those who fail to understand that the time is coming when the herders of ideas shall come, one after another, with astonishing swiftness, over the shadowy horizon, are quite mad.” And am I not right, then, in calling Rachilde Mme. Antichrist? She understands, she knows, and she is also an omen, a portent. . . .

His real name is not known.
⁴⁴
“Comte de Lautréamont” is a pseudonym. He says he is from Montevideo, but who knows the truth of that shadowy life, which was perhaps a nightmare dreamt by some sad angel martyred in the empyrean by the memory of celestial Lucifer? He lived a life of misfortune and hard luck, and he died a madman. He wrote a book which would be unique, except for the prose pieces of Rimbaud—a diabolic, mocking, howling, cruel, terrible, strange book, a book in which one hears, at once, the groans of Pain and the sinister hissing of Madness.

León Bloy was the true discoverer of the Comte de Lautréamont. Furious St. John of God said of the sores on the soul of blasphemous Job, that they were filled with light. But today, in France and Belgium, no one outside a tiny group of initiates knows the poem called
Chants de Maldoror,
into which is poured all the horrific anguish of the wretched yet sublime poet, whose work it was my fortune to make known to Latin America in Montevideo. I will not advise our youth to drink from those black waters, however much they might see the marvels of the constellations reflected in their depths. It would not be prudent for young spirits to have much conversation with that spectral man, whether on account of his literary “dash” or in search of new delights. There is a very sensible piece of advice in the Kabbala: “There is no need to judge the specter, for soon enough one will be one.” And if there is a dangerous author in this regard, it is the Comte de Lautréamont. What hellish, rabid Cerberus bit that soul, down there in the regions of mystery and darkness, before it was incarnated in this world? The cries of the theophobe make all who hear them shiver. If I were to take my muse near the place where the madman is caged and shouting into the wind, I would put my hands over her ears.

Like Job, his sleep is tormented and he is tortured by visions. Like Job, he might exclaim: “My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.”
⁴⁵
But “Job” means “he who weeps”; Job wept, yet poor Lautréamont does not. His book is a satanic breviary, impregnated with sadness and melancholy. “The evil spirit,” says St. Francis de Sales in his
Introduction to the Devout Life,
“delights in sadness and melancholy because it is sad and melancholy, and will be so for all eternity.” Even more: the man who has written the
Chants de Maldoror
might very well have been possessed. We must recall that certain cases of madness, today classified by science with technical names and set down in the catalogue of nervous disorders, were and still are seen by the Holy Mother Church as cases of possession, and in need of exorcism. “Soul in ruins!” Bloy exclaims, with words moist with the tears of compassion.

Job: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.”

Lautréamont: “I am the son of man and woman, or so I am told. I find that strange. I thought I was more than that!”

The author with whom he has most points of contact is Edgar Allan Poe. Both had the vision of the supernatural; both were persecuted by terrible enemies of the spirit, infernal “hordes” that drive a man to alcohol, madness, or death; both felt an attraction toward mathematics, one of the three roads, with theology and poetry, that can lead a man to the Infinite. But Poe was celestial, while Lautréamont was infernal.

Listen to these bitter fragments:

“I dreamt that I had entered the body of a pig, that it was not easy to get out again, and that my feet were sunk into the most horrible of mudsties. Was this some recompense? Object of my desires: I no longer belonged to humanity! That was how I interpreted it, as I experienced the most profound joy. But I searched and searched, trying to remember what act of virtue I had committed to merit this wondrous gift of Providence. . . . But what man knows his innermost needs, or the cause of his pestilential delights? This metamorphosis never appeared to my eyes as anything but the high, magnificent repercussion of a perfect felicity that I had so long been waiting for. At last, the day had come when I was transformed into a pig! I tried out my teeth on the bark of a tree; I eyed my snout with delight. There was not the slightest particle of divinity in me; I was able to raise my soul to the immense height of this ineffable voluptuousness.” . . .