Charles Baudelaire – { feuilleton }

Cocteau’s effects

Chez Cocteau.

“Effects” in the sense of possessions rather than aesthetic or creative effects. I’ve been reading Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being, an essay collection in which the author muses on a variety of subjects, from his own life, his work, and people he knew, to more general considerations of the human condition. In one of the chapters Cocteau describes his rooms at 36 rue de Montpensier, Paris, where he lived from 1940 to 1947, offering a list of the objects that occupied the shelves or decorated the walls of his apartment. I always enjoy accounts of this sort; the pictures (or objects) that people choose to hang on their walls tell you things about a person’s tastes and character which might not be so obvious otherwise. The same can’t always be said for published lists of favourite books or other artworks when these may be constructed with an eye to the approval of one’s peers. The pictures decorating your living space are more private and generally more honest as aesthetic choices.

I already knew what a couple of these items looked like: the Radiguet bust, for example, may be seen in documentary footage. This post is an attempt to find some of the others. If you know the identity of any of the unidentified pieces then please leave a comment.

The most engaging bits of such wreckage, thrown up on this little red beach, is without doubt the Gustave Doré group of which the Charles de Noailles gave me a plaster cast from which I had a bronze made. In it Perseus is to be seen mounted on the hippogryph, held in the air by means of a long spear planted in the gullet of the dragon, which dragon is winding its death throes round Andromeda.

“the Charles de Noailles” refers to Charles and his wife, Marie-Laure, a pair of wealthy art patrons who helped finance Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète. Doré’s illustration (showing Ruggerio from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso reenacting the heroic rescue) is very familiar to me but I was unable to find any sculptural copies of the work. In addition to decorating Cocteau’s room some of Doré’s illustrations also served as inspiration for the sets in La Belle et la Bête.

This group is on a column standing between the so-called castor window and a tall piece of slate that can be moved aside and that conceals a small room which is too cold to be used in winter. It was there that I wrote Renaud et Armide, away from everything, set free from telephone and door bells, in the summer of 1941, on an architect’s table above which one sees, saved from my room in the rue Vignon where it adorned the wall-paper, Christian Bérard’s large drawing in charcoal and red chalk representing the meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

Bérard’s drawing is large indeed (see the photo at the top of this post). The artist was a theatrical designer, also the designer of La Belle et la Bête, and one of several of Cocteau’s friends who died young.

On the right of my bed are two heads, one Roman, in marble, of a faun (this belonged to my Lecomte grandfather), the other of Antinoüs, under a glass dome, a painted terracotta, so fragile that only the steadiness of its enamel eyes can have led it here from the depths of centuries like a blind man’s white stick.

A third head adorns that of my bed: the terracotta of Raymond Radiguet, done by Lipschitz, in the year of his death.

And speaking of premature deaths… Antinous was the celebrated youth beloved of the emperor Hadrian whose death by drowning in the Nile caused Hadrian to establish a cult of Antinous that spread across the Roman Empire. Many busts and full-figure statues survive as a result, but I was unable to find a photo of the one owned by Cocteau. Raymond Radiguet, meanwhile, died of typhoid fever at the age of 20. Radiguet was a precocious talent who managed to write two novels before he died, including Le Diable au corps at the age of 16.

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Armand Rassenfosse’s Fleurs du Mal

It’s been a while since I found another illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s poems but there are still more of them out there. This surprises me a little considering the nature of Baudelaire’s writing, you can’t imagine Anglophone fin-de-siècle publishers lavishing such attention on poems which are morbid and erotic to this degree. Beresford Egan illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal but this was published in 1929 by which time Continental decadence was regarded in a more favourable light.

Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was a Belgian artist whose 1899 edition of Baudelaire is what the French would call the artist’s chef d’oeuvre, a limited reprint of Les Fleurs du Mal illustrated with colour etchings on nearly every page. Rassenfosse’s approach is much more Symbolist in tone than the near pornography of Manuel Orazi, presenting a succession of idealised figures (naked women for the most part) in nebulous spaces. I was hoping he might have produced more in this style but his other work tends to be poster design and painted studies of female dancers in various states of undress.

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The hashish eaters of Monte Cristo

Illustration by Pierre-Gustave-Eugène Staal.

I mentioned at the weekend that my current reading is the Dumas père doorstop The Count of Monte Cristo. One of the things I enjoy about reading novels like these that “everyone knows” (ie: everyone knows mostly from truncated film or television adaptations) is finding something surprising about the story that you’ve never seen mentioned before. The following passage from chapter 31 turns out to be quite well-known as it happens, but only to those who’ve read the original text, not the Reader’s Digest version.

The story so far: Baron Franz d’Épinay has hired a boat to take him to the uninhabited Mediterranean island of Monte Cristo where he hopes to do a spot of hunting. On reaching the island Franz and his crew discover a small group of bandits camped there, with a leader dressed in Arabian clothes. This man—our hero, Edmond Dantès—insists on concealing his identity with a pseudonym, “Sinbad the Sailor”, and suggests that Franz might wish to do the same. The latter chooses the name “Aladdin”, and the pair retire to a sumptuously decorated cave for an evening meal. When the meal is over “Sinbad” offers “Aladdin” a special treat:

“You cannot guess,” said he, “what there is in that small vase, can you?”

“No, I really cannot.”

“Well, then, that green preserve is nothing less than the ambrosia which Hebe served at the table of Jupiter.”

“But,” replied Franz, “this ambrosia, no doubt, in passing through mortal hands has lost its heavenly appellation and assumed a human name; in vulgar phrase, what may you term this composition, for which, to tell the truth, I do not feel any particular desire?”

“Ah, thus it is that our material origin is revealed,” cried Sinbad; “we frequently pass so near to happiness without seeing, without regarding it, or if we do see and regard it, yet without recognizing it. Are you a man for the substantials, and is gold your god? taste this, and the mines of Peru, Guzerat, and Golconda are opened to you. Are you a man of imagination—a poet? taste this, and the boundaries of possibility disappear; the fields of infinite space open to you, you advance free in heart, free in mind, into the boundless realms of unfettered reverie. Are you ambitious, and do you seek after the greatnesses of the earth? taste this, and in an hour you will be a king, not a king of a petty kingdom hidden in some corner of Europe like France, Spain, or England, but king of the world, king of the universe, king of creation; without bowing at the feet of Satan, you will be king and master of all the kingdoms of the earth. Is it not tempting what I offer you, and is it not an easy thing, since it is only to do thus? look!”

At these words he uncovered the small cup which contained the substance so lauded, took a teaspoonful of the magic sweetmeat, raised it to his lips, and swallowed it slowly with his eyes half shut and his head bent backwards. Franz did not disturb him whilst he absorbed his favourite sweetmeat, but when he had finished, he inquired:

“What, then, is this precious stuff?”

“Did you ever hear,” he replied, “of the Old Man of the Mountain, who attempted to assassinate Philippe Auguste?”

“Of course I have.”

“Well, you know he reigned over a rich valley which was overhung by the mountain whence he derived his picturesque name. In this valley were magnificent gardens planted by Hassen-ben-Sabah, and in these gardens isolated pavilions. Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which transported them to Paradise, in the midst of ever-blooming shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given them a slight foretaste.”

“Then,” cried Franz, “it is hashish! I know that—by name at least.”

“That is it precisely, Signor Aladdin; it is hashish—the purest and most unadulterated hashish of Alexandria—the hashish of Abou-Gor, the celebrated maker, the only man, the man to whom there should be built a palace, inscribed with these words, A grateful world to the dealer in happiness.”

“Do you know,” said Franz, “I have a very great inclination to judge for myself of the truth or exaggeration of your eulogies.”

“Judge for yourself, Signor Aladdin—judge, but do not confine yourself to one trial. Like everything else, we must habituate the senses to a fresh impression, gentle or violent, sad or joyous. There is a struggle in nature against this divine substance—in nature which is not made for joy and clings to pain. Nature subdued must yield in the combat, the dream must succeed to reality, and then the dream reigns supreme, then the dream becomes life, and life becomes the dream. But what changes occur! It is only by comparing the pains of actual being with the joys of the assumed existence, that you would desire to live no longer, but to dream thus forever. When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter—to quit paradise for earth—heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine—taste the hashish.”

Franz does as requested and thereafter passes the night in an erotic delirium. The whole sequence is an example of the personal preoccupations of the author entering his fiction, Dumas having been a member of the Club des Hashishins in Paris, whose monthly “séances” took place at a hotel on the Île Saint-Louis. Other members of the club included Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, and Honoré de Balzac. The “magic sweetmeat” which Franz is offered was just that, a greenish paste from Algeria known as Dawamesc which disguises the bitter taste of the hashish with honey, pistachio and spices. (This page has a recipe should you require it.) Reading about the history of the hashish club I see that the hotel was located on the Quay d’Anjou, the river-facing street which is also the location of Baroness Ungern’s occult library in The Dumas Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The Dumas thread in that novel (which is omitted from the film adaptation, The Ninth Gate) concerns rare manuscript pages of the “Anjou Wine” chapter from The Three Musketeers yet I don’t recall any mention of the Club des Hashishins in the story. I wish now I’d known all this before I spent a week in Paris; the Île Saint-Louis was one of my favourite places in the city, and I walked along the Quay d’Anjou one evening, photographing the river views.

Further reading: Franz d’Épinay’s night of dreams is recounted in The Green Jam of Doctor X, an essay by Mike Jay which explores the history of the literary hashish club.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More trip texts
• The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers

Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe

I’ve waited months to write about this book in the run-up to Halloween. Several years ago I wrote a series of pre-Halloween posts about the illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe, with the final entry containing a lone illustration for The Tell-Tale Heart by Martin van Maële (1863–1926). At the time van Maële’s book was unavailable online so I was left to wonder what the rest of his illustrations might be like. Dix contes d’Edgar Poe (1912) is the volume in question, a collection of moody full-page illustrations plus many small vignettes, all of them engraved on wood by Eugène Dété.

I’d been familiar with several other pieces from this book for many years without knowing their origin thanks to their appearance in the 1986 Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, an excellent guide edited by Jack Sullivan with a minor deficiency in that many of the illustrations are uncredited. (They did credit van Maële for two of his pictures but spelled his name as “van Moële” which doesn’t help.) The startling picture of a skeleton pushing a shrouded woman back into her tomb—which I now know is van Maële’s portrait of Madeline Usher—was one of the uncredited drawings, as was the vignette of another skeleton holding a heart like a ticking pendulum (The Tell-Tale Heart again). There are many more skeletons in this book. Van Maële’s illustrations oscillate between two pictorial extremes, from shadow-filled realism in the full-page drawings to Doré-like spot illustrations that suit Poe’s fatalism and macabre sense of humour. It’s a shame that many of these reproductions are darker than they should be, being from the old series of Gallica scans which remove all the grey tones from the images, but at least we can see the book as a whole. My thanks again to Mr TjZ for alerting me to this!

The Tell-Tale Heart.

Van Maële might be better known today if more of the books he illustrated had been suitable for a general audience. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs most of his illustrated editions are the classic works of erotic literature by Apuleius, Choderlos de Laclos, Anatole France et al, plus obscure works devoted to le vice Anglais, while his non-erotic titles by Poe and Conan Doyle are in the minority. If he had a flair for the erotic then he also had a flair for the macabre. Some of his erotic drawings manage to combine the two, notably in La Grande Danse Macabre des Vifs (1905), a portfolio which approaches Félicien Rops by bringing to erotic art a quality of imagination that would usually be rejected for distracting from the primary purpose of pornographic imagery. Wikipedia has this and many more of van Maële’s erotic illustrations.

The Tell-Tale Heart.

Hop-Frog.

Silence.

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The art of Jens Lund, 1871–1924

Sakuntala, 1900.

Jens Lund was a Danish artist and illustrator with an idiosyncratic drawing style that not only sets him apart from many of his contemporaries but looks forward to the stylisations of younger artists like Beresford Egan. Several of the examples here are illustrations and sketches for an unpublished edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems. Lund also illustrated Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (which he translated into Danish with his wife, Bolette) but copies of these aren’t as easy to find.

Anraabelse, 1906.

Scent that sings… Flames that laugh, 1903–04.

Fantasy Landscape with Palms, 1899.

Fireball, 1899.

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