A visit to Proust's cork-lined room

Here it is, where genius labored, where the magic of the final parts of In Search of Lost Time was conjured, unless you are a heretic like me who finds that novel uneven and feels that the best parts had been written earlier:

Is this what you were expecting?  It threw me a little.  Seems a bit cramped, no?  A little more context might help:

I was in the Museé Carnavalet, a Paris museum on the subject of Paris, examining the reconstructions of writer’s rooms (the other writers airing the contents of their bedrooms are Anna de Noailles and Paul Léautaud, writers with no English reputation who I assume, bitterly, are as good as Proust).  The shell of the space is a replica but the contents are authentic, if I understand this text, which I doubt.  Follow that link to examine Proust’s furniture more closely, particularly that portrait.  I assume the storage closet-like dimensions are a liberty of the curators.

The Museé Carnavalet was itself once, surprise, surprise, a writer’s house, a residence of Madame de Sévigné, the favorite writer of the grandmother of Proust’s mirror-image narrator.  The pleasure and insight a visitor will receive from the museum will depend heavily on his taste for French furniture and curtains, but the building is a beauty, the collection of second-rate paintings take on greater meaning because of their common Paris theme, the old Paris shop signs are a delight, and then there’s this:

Why it is Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the French Poe!  Imagine the set of steps, the human effort, that was required to bring this magnificently insane artifact into existence.

The Museé Carnavalet is just a few steps away from the Place des Vosges and the Maison de Victor Hugo;  in between is this artistic wonder:

That is a crumble d’agneau, or lamb crumble, obtainable, along with many other pleasant things, at Chez Janou.  I certainly did not go to France to look at writer’s houses and 18^th century furniture, but one has to do something between meals.

Putrid Zola - don't read this post over lunch

It's the day after the murder.  The murderer was injured while committing the crime.  We're at the beginning of Chapter XIII.

Against the white of the neck, the bite stood out a deep and powerful brown; it was on the right, below the ear.  Laurent stooped forward and stretched his neck out to see, and the greenish mirror distorted his expression into an atrocious grimace.

I love that Laurent keeps a funhouse mirror in his room.  That's not my point.  My point is, the sentence just before this one contains a vivid, detailed, and disgusting description of the wound.  My method today is to not quote the relevant parts of Thérèse Raquin, on the grounds that some of it is too repellent.  I am charmed to observe that my readers have the sensitive nerves of young girls, and I want to protect them. 

Because Chapter XIII is really completely disgusting, I mean physically.  Don't read it over lunch, I say from experience.  The chapter is short, surprisingly short, only six pages.  But we spend five of them with Laurent in the Paris Morgue.  "Although it made him feel sick with repugnance and occasionally sent shivers down his spine, he went there regularly..." - and he has the advantage of being fictional.  My stomach is real!

In this chapter we get the smell of the morgue, the feel of the air dampness, and, mostly, the corpses, one after another, laid out on slabs, naked, "in patches of colour, green and yellow, white and red."  Laurent at first sees only the colors, but soon not only can see the bodies, but begins to revel in their deformity and decay.  Two bodies are presented in particularly graphic detail.  The one with the water running over it - okay, that's enough of that.

How about a list of words?  How disgusting can that be:  softened, mushy, greenish, grim, shuddering, entertaining, buxom, muddy, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.  Did you detect a hint of sex in that list?  "Laurent looked at her for a long time, running his eyes all over her body, absorbed in a kind of fearful lust."

The Paris Morgue was open to the public attracted spectators, so we spend some time with them.  They joke, whistle, and weep, and "go away well satisfied, declaring that the Morgue has certainly put on a good show that day."  Laborers with iron stomachs come in with "their tools and a loaf of bread under their arm."  Schoolboys come in to ogle the young female suicides.  I'm on pp. 76-7 of the Oxford World's Classics, the single most blatantly satirical page in the book, and a relief from the rotting corpses.

The funny thing is that I visited the Paris Morgue just last year, on the arm of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, in a story in his 1883 Cruel Tales.  The narrator wanders about Paris, observing the gray, death-like people, and when he stops in at the Morgue, there they all are.  Villiers, seventeen years later, seems merely quaint compared to Zola.

Evening All Afternoon Emily recently wrote about the literary use of disgust - please take a look.  The body-centered, animalistic literary tradition is prominent in French literature.  Rabelais sometimes seems to view us as little more than jolly ambulatory digestive tracts.  Voltaire delights in cutting pieces off of his characters.  I don't even want to know what goes on in the grisliest of the Marquis de Sade's books.  The Spanish tradition, back in the Golden Age, is similar.  In English, I can find plenty of memento mori, poor Yorick's skull among them, and Swift can revel in excrement and bodily decay.  The closest equivalent to what Zola is doing that I can think of is Francisco Goya's horrifying The Disasters of War (1810-20) prints, which protest the destruction of his country by emphasizing the physicality of death - the decay, the flesh, the wounds, the bones.

The Morgue chapter is the conceptually purest piece of the book.  No plot, minimal psychology, little story.  Just the human animal, up close and well lit, in a form we rarely see, lucky for us.

A curiosity:  I believe eight bloggers are reading Thérèse Raquin as part of the Classics Circuit (because, who are we kidding, it's short).  They've not all posted yet, and I may have missed one or two.  No one mentioned this chapter.  No one hinted at it.  I wonder why.  The novel contains cruelty to an animal, too (as well as cruelty to humans).  Fair warning.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is French

Yesterday I called Villers de l'Isle-Adam the French Poe, and then overemphasized the Poe part. Today, I'll put too much weight on the French piece.

What do I mean by French? The title characters of "The Bienfilâtre Sisters," "belonged, as people say, to the class of girls who 'work as day-labourers at night'." They are women with a vocation, responsible, "sensible creatures" who "shut up shop on Sunday." "Their motto was 'Speed, Safety, Discretion'; and on their visiting-cards they added: 'Specialties'." (all of this from p. 4).

Then the younger sister yields to temptation, "her first lapse." She falls in love with a poor student. She gives up her career. Her family tries to bring her back, but there's no hope, it's l'amour fou.

That's what I mean by French. Cynical, perverse, slightly smutty (although "Specialties" is probably the dirtiest single word in Cruel Tales).

"Flowers of Darkness," barely over a page long, is merely an observation that the cute little flower-girls on the promenades are peddling cast-offs from funerals, so the women ("spectral creatures" under the gaslight) "thus adorned with the flowers of Death, wear, without knowing it, the emblem of the love which they give and that which they receive."

Executions, duels, morgues, all quite French, Death appearing everywhere Villiers looks, but not always entirely seriously. I should mention that few, perhaps none, of the Cruel Tales actually describe physical cruelty. This ain't the Marquis de Sade. The title is more, let's say, attitudinal.

Some of the stories have what amounts to punchlines. A chef gives "The Finest Dinner in the World." His rival says he can top it, and does, cynically. In "Sentimentality," a woman accuses her lover of lack of feeling, of stoniness, and breaks with him. He is perfectly calm, yet proves her wrong, sincerely.

The author of the defensive Oxford World's Classics introduction, realizing that he's having trouble making his case for Villiers, ends by arguing - asserting - that above all, Villiers has a unique voice. This is not quite true. He does not always rise above his influences, Poe and Baudelaire and Flaubert and Mérimée and probably many others I don't know. But he's still surprising, witty, creepy, elegant, weird, all in this one short book.

This concludes my excursion into Weird France, at least until I discover that I have something to write about all of this Charles Baudelaire I've been reading.

I've found the French Poe - the Cruel Tales of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

And he's not Charles Baudelaire. He's Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Count of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a genuine impoverished French nobleman turned Bohemian writer. I just finished reading his collection Cruel Tales (1883), which I enjoyed a lot, even though its contents might not be quite as good as its title.

I'm just beginning to understand the extent of Baudelaire's role in creating the French Poe - he translated Poe, yes, but also championed him, privately and publicly. Baudelaire, by the time he discovered Poe, was already a mature artist. "I've found an American author who has aroused in me a sense of immense sympathy," Baudelaire wrote to his mother (Mar. 27, 1852). But it's hard to say that Baudelaire was much influenced by Poe. It was too late for that.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is sixteen years younger, and would have read Baudelaire's Poe in his teens. The impact was obviously profound. "The Sign," for example, about a premonitory vision of death, includes specific references to "The Fall of the House of Usher" ("Was this really the house I had just seen? What antiquity was revealed to me now by the long cracks between the pale leaves?").

More curious, more surprising, are the signs of the influence of Comic Poe on Villiers, seen most strongly in his tales of new inventions: "The Apparatus for the Cehmical Analysis of the Last Breath," "The Glory Machine" (designed for the theater, it includes not just a clapping machine, but "other tubes, containing laughing-ga and tear-gas"), and the brilliant "Celestial Publicity," about the Lampascope, a device that projects advertising slogans ("Heavens, how delicious!," "Are corsets necessary?") onto the constellations, or the moon. The author predicts that candidates for office will be particularly interested: "One might even add that, without [this] discovery, universal suffrage is a mockery."

A year or two ago, I did not even know that Comic Poe existed. His influence on English-language writers seems non-existent. But here he is in Villiers, alongside ghost stories, paradoxes, and weirdnesses that contain their own flavors of Poe. Villiers does have a strain or two that is not indebted to Poe. I don't want to exaggerate any of this, but I'd never seen such a thing.

If the Cruel Tales are not quite entirely original, that does not bother me much; they were easily worth reading. I hope to read more Villiers, in fact. Certainly his novel Tomorrow's Eve (1886), which is a Pygmalion story starring Thomas Edison, not even forty at the time of the novel's publication. The robot woman speaks by means of the phonograph. Also, at some point I put 2 and 7 together and got 16, as happens in Weird France, and realized that Villiers's play Axël (1890?) supplied the title to Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, so now Axël's on my list.

More on Villiers tomorrow, more of his own strengths. Many thanks to commenter tcheni for recommending Villiers.

Quotations from the Oxford World's Classics edition (1985), translated by Robert Baldick.