A Paradoxical Character
Samuel Cramer, who authored some of his Romantic follies as Manuela de Monteverde, – in the good old days of Romanticism, – is the contradictory product of a pallid German and a brown Chilean woman. Add to that double origin a French education and literary refinement, and you will be less surprised, – if not satisfied and edified, – by the weird complexities of that character. – Samuel has a noble and pure brow, eyes that glow like drops of coffee, a nose that tantalizes and taunts, impudent and sensual lips, a square and tyrannical chin, a pretentiously Raphaëlesque hairstyle. – He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.
Among those half-famous notables I have known in that horrifying Parisian existence, Samuel was, more than all the others, the man of failed works of beauty; – a fantastical and sickly creature, whose poetry shines forth much more in his person than in his works, and who, around one o’clock in the morning, between the dazzling of a coal fire and the clock’s tick-tock, always seemed to be the god of impotence, – a modern and hermaphrodite god, – so colossal an impotence, so enormous, reaching epic proportions!
How to make you aware, and make you understand quite clearly that murky nature, colored with lively flashes, – both idle and enterprising, – prolific in difficult plans and in ludicrous miscarriages; – the sort of mind in which paradox takes the shape of naïveté, and whose imagination was as vast as absolute solitude and absolute indolence? – One of Samuel’s most natural failings was to deem himself the equal of those he could admire; after an impassioned reading of a beautiful book, his unwitting conclusion was: now that is beautiful enough for me to have written! – and, in only the space of a dash, from there to think: therefore, I wrote it.
In today’s world, that sort of character is more widespread than we think; such beings teem on the streets, in public walkways, taverns, and all the refuges for strollers. They identify so well with the new pattern that they almost believe they invented it. – Here today they are painfully unraveling the mystical writings of Plotinus[1] or of Porphyrius[2]; tomorrow they will admire the fickle and French side of their character, expressed so well by Crébillon fils.[3] Yesterday they had casual conversations with Jérôme Cardin; now, here they are playing with Sterne or wallowing with Rabelais in all the gluttonies of hyperbole.[4] In fact they are so happy in each of their metamorphoses that they are not at all angry at those fine geniuses for being the first to win the esteem of posterity. – Naïve and respectable effrontery! Such was the unfortunate Samuel.
By birth a very respectable man and, something of a scoundrel in order to pass the time, – by temperament an actor – he staged unsurpassable tragedies, or, more exactly, tragicomedies, for himself and behind closed doors. It must be acknowledged that he felt touched and titillated by cheerfulness, and that our man practiced how to roar with laughter. When some memory would make a teardrop well up in the corner of his eye, he would go to the mirror and watch himself weep. If some woman, in a fit of childish and brutal jealousy, scratched him with a sewing needle or a pocket knife, Samuel boasted to himself that he had survived a dagger attack, and when he owed some poor wretches 20,000 francs, he shouted joyously: “What a sad and miserable destiny to be a genius plagued by a million debts!”
On the other hand, do not believe that he was unable to recognize genuine emotions, and that passion no more than brushed his epidermis. He would have sold his shirt for a man he hardly knew, and whom, just yesterday, he had established as his intimate friend after inspecting his brow and his hands. He brought to matters of mind and soul the idle contemplation of Germanic natures, – in matters of passion he brought his mother’s swift and fickle fervor, – and in practical life all the failings of French vanity. He would have fought a duel for an author or an artist who had been dead for two hundred years. Just as he had been fiercely devout, he was a passionate atheist. All at once he was every artist he had studied and every book he had read, and yet, despite that actor’s gift, he remained deeply original.
He was still the sweet, capricious, lazy, fearsome, learned, ignorant, slovenly, and well-dressed Samuel Cramer, the Romantic Manuela de Monteverde. He adored a male friend as he would a woman, loved a woman like a pal. He possessed the logic of finer feelings and knew all the intricacies of all sly tricks, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. – What’s astonishing about that? He was always in the process of conceiving it.
Madame de Cosmelly
One evening, Samuel had the idea to go out; the weather was pleasant and scented. – Following his natural taste for excess, he had equally violent and persistent habits of imprisonment and unruliness, and for a long time he had remained faithful to his abode. His mother’s laziness, the Creole indolence that flowed in his veins, prevented him from suffering from the mess of his room, his laundry, and his dirty and extremely snarled hair. So he combed his hair, washed, and in just a few minutes was able to take on the clothing and the composure of people for whom elegance is a daily thing; then he opened the window. – Hot, gilded daylight rushed into the dusty room. Samuel was astonished at how springtime had arrived so quickly in just a few days, and without giving any shouts of warning. Balmy air permeated with lovely aromas opened his nostrils, – some rising to his brain, filling it with reverie and desire, – some licentiously stirring his heart, stomach, and liver. – He resolutely snuffed out his two candles, one of which was still quivering on a volume of Swedenborg, and the other expiring on one of those shameful books beneficial only to minds possessed by an excessive taste for the truth.[5]
From the summit of his solitude, cluttered with paperwork, paved with books, and populated with his dreams, Samuel often noticed, as he walked on a path in the Luxembourg Gardens, a shape and a face he had loved yesteryear in the provinces, – at the age when you are in love for its own sake. – Her features, although matured and fattened by some years of practical life, had the deep and decent grace of a respectable woman; from time to time there still glowed in the depths of her eyes the moist reveries of a girl. She would walk back and forth, usually escorted by a rather elegant maid, and whose face and bearing suggested that she was a confidant or a lady’s companion instead of a domestic servant. She seemed to seek out forsaken places, and she would sit sadly with a widow’s bearing, sometimes holding in her distracted hand a book she didn’t read.
Samuel had known her in the vicinity of Lyons, young, quick-witted, playful, and thinner. By dint of watching her and thereby recognizing her, he had recovered one by one all the tiny memories associated with her in his imagination; he had recounted to himself, detail by detail, this whole young novel, which, since that time, had gotten lost in his life’s worries and in the labyrinth of his passions.
That particular evening, he greeted her, but more carefully and with more attention. As he passed in front of her, he heard this fragment of dialogue behind him:
– “Marietta, how do you like that young man?” [6]
But it was spoken with such a casual tone of voice, that the most mischievous observer would have found nothing in it to hold against the lady.
– “Well, Madame, I like him quite well. Does Madame know that he is Monsieur Samuel Cramer?”
And with a harsher tone of voice: “Marietta, how do you know that?”
* * *
That is why the next day Samuel took great care to bring her handkerchief and her book, which he found on a bench, and which she had not lost, since she was nearby, watching the sparrows fighting over crumbs, or appearing to contemplate the vegetation’s inner processes. As often happens between two beings whose conspiring destinies have elevated their souls to an equal harmony, – starting the conversation rather brusquely, – nevertheless he was weirdly lucky enough to find a person inclined to listen and to answer him.
“Madame, could I be fortunate enough to remain housed in a corner of your memory? Have I changed so much that you cannot recognize me as a childhood friend, with whom you condescended to play hide-and-seek and skip school?”
– “A woman,” – the lady answered with a half-smile, – “does not have the right to recognize people so easily; that is why I thank you, Monsieur, for first offering me the opportunity to bring me back to those lovely and cheerful memories. – And then. . . each year of life contains so many events and thoughts. . . and it really seems to me that many years ago. . . ?”
– “Years,” – replied Samuel, – “which for me have been sometimes quite slow, or quite ready to fly away, but all of them cruel in various ways!”
– “And poetry?. . .” said the lady with smiling eyes.
– “Always, Madame!” Samuel answered, laughing, – “But what are you reading there?”
– “A novel by Walter Scott.”[7]
– “Now that explains your frequent interruptions. – Oh! what a boring writer! – A dusty unearther of chronicles! – a tedious heap of bric-a-brac descriptions, – a pile of old things and cast-offs of all sorts: suits of armor, kitchen ware, furniture, Gothic inns and melodrama castles, where some mechanical mannequins walk around, clothed in jerkins and multicolored doublets; well-known types, which in ten years would no longer interest an eighteen-year-old plagiarist; impossible ladies of the castle and lovers perfectly irrelevant to today, – no truthfulness of the heart, no philosophy of feelings! How different from our good French novelists, where passion and analysis always prevail over the material description of objects! – Does it matter if the lady of the castle wears a ruff or petticoats, or crinolines by Oudinot, provided that she sobs or betrays appropriately?[8] Does the lover intrigue you more if he carries a dagger in his vest instead of calling cards, and does a despot dressed in black terrify you less poetically than a tyrant clad in buffalo leather and iron?”
Samuel, as can be seen, was entering the category of absorbing people, – unbearable and impassioned men, whose trade is to ruin conversations, and for whom any opportunity lends itself, even knowledge improvised next to a tree or on a street, – even if it is not that of a rag-picker, – to developing obstinately their ideas. – Among traveling salesmen, wandering industrialists, galvanizers of business partnerships, and absorbing poets the only difference is the one between an advertisement and a sermon; vices among the latter are completely unselfish.
Now the lady simply replied:
– “My dear Monsieur Cramer, I am merely the public, suffice it to say that my soul is innocent. So for me pleasure is the easiest thing in the world to find. – But let’s talk about you; – I would consider myself happy if you judge me worthy of reading some of your productions.”
– “But Madame, how is it that. . . ?” – replied the astonished poet’s huge vanity.
– “The manager of my lending library says that he doesn’t know you.”
And she smiled sweetly as if to dull the effect of this passing tease.
“Madame,” Samuel said sententiously, “in the nineteenth century the true public is women; your approval will make me greater than twenty academies.”
– “Well, Monsieur, I count on your promise.”
– “Marietta, be sure to take your parasol and scarf; someone might be losing patience at home. You know that Monsieur returns early.”
She gave him a graciously shortened good-bye, which contained nothing that would be considered compromising, and whose familiarity did not exclude dignity.
Samuel was not surprised to find a former love of his youth enslaved in conjugal obligations. In the universal history of feelings, it has proven its necessity. Her name was Madame de Cosmelly, and she lived on one of the most aristocratic streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.[9]
The next day he found her, with her head tilted in a gracious and almost affected manner toward the blossoms of a flowerbed, and he gave her his volume The Ospreys, a collection of sonnets, like those everyone has written and everyone has read, at the age when our judgment was so short and our hair so long.
Samuel was quite curious to know if his Ospreys had charmed the soul of this melancholy beauty, and if the shrieks of those ugly birds had given her a favorable impression; but a few days later, she told him with appalling candor and honesty:
“Monsieur, I am only a woman, and, consequently, my judgment does not count for much; but I find that the sorrows and love affairs of gentlemen authors hardly resemble the sorrows and love affairs of other men. You address amorous remarks, probably quite elegant and quite exquisitely well chosen, to ladies whom I respect enough to believe that sometimes they might be terrified. You celebrate the beauty of mothers in a style that might deprive you of their daughters’ approval. You inform the world that you are wild about the feet or hands of Madame So-and-So, who, let’s assume for the sake of her honor, spends less time reading you than knitting socks and mittens for the feet or hands of her children. By a most unusual contrast, and whose mysterious cause I still don’t know, you save your most mystical incense for weird creatures who read still less than the ladies, and you swoon platonically at lowlife Sultanas, who must, I think, at the sight of a poet’s fragile person, stare widely as cattle awakened amidst a conflagration. Moreover, I don’t know why you so cherish funereal subjects and anatomical descriptions. When we are young and like you, possessing a fine talent and all the conditions necessary for happiness, I think it much more natural to celebrate the good health and joys of a respectable man, than to practice cursing, and chatting with Ospreys.”
Here is what he answered:
– “Madame, pity me, or rather pity yourself, for I have many brothers of my kind; it is hatred of everyone and of ourselves that has led us toward these lies. It is from despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have so weirdly painted our faces. We have exerted so much effort trying to make our hearts more sophisticated, we have so misused the microscope in order to study hideous growths and shameful warts that cover them, and which we magnify at will, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other people. They live in order to live, and we, alas! we live in order to learn. Therein lies the whole mystery. Age changes only our voice and obliterates only our hair and our teeth; we have altered nature’s tone, we have extirpated one by one the virgin modesties that grew like bristles deep down in our hearts as respectable men. We have psychologized like madmen, which increases their madness by striving to understand it. The passing years have weakened only our limbs, we have distorted our passions. A curse, three curses on crippled fathers who created us with rickets and made us feel unwelcome, we are predestined to engender only the stillborn!”
– “Once again your Ospreys!” she said; “Look, give me your arm and let’s admire these unfortunate flowers that springtime makes so happy!”
Instead of admiring the flowers, Samuel Cramer, inspired to oratorical eloquence, began to put into prose and declaim some bad stanzas in his earliest manner. The lady let him go on.
– “What a difference, and how little remains of the same man, except for memory! Yet memory is but a new kind of suffering. What fine weather in which morning never roused our exhausted or sluggish knees from the weariness of dreams, in which our bright eyes rejoiced with all nature, in which our soul does not rationalize but lives and takes pleasure; in which our sighs gently flow noiselessly and without pride! How many times, in the leisures of imagination, have I recovered one of those beautiful autumn evenings in which young souls progress like trees that grow several cubits when struck by lightning.
“It is then that I see, I feel, I understand; the moon awakens large butterflies; the hot wind opens the beautiful night-flowers; the water of large pools becomes still. – Let your mind hear the abrupt waltzes of that mysterious piano. The storm’s aromas enter the windows; it is the moment when gardens are filled with pink and white dresses not afraid of getting wet. Obliging bushes catch onto flowing skirts, brown hair and blond curls whirl around entangled. – Do you still remember, Madame, the huge haystacks, that we could knock down so quickly, and the old nursemaid who ran after you so slowly, and the bell, in the large dining room, so ready to call you back under your aunt’s watchful eye?”
Madame de Cosmelly interrupted Samuel with a sigh, wanting to say something, probably a request for him to stop, but he had already resumed his speech.
– “What is most grievous,” he said, “is that all loves always end badly, so much the worse if more divine and more winged at their beginning. There is no dream, whatever its ideal, that we recover without a gluttonous plump baby hanging on her breast; there is no refuge, no cottage so delightful and so hidden, that the pickaxe does not come to knock it down. Still, that destruction is entirely material; but there is another kind that is more ruthless and more secretive, that attacks invisible things. Imagine that the moment you entrust yourself to the being of your choice, and you tell him: let’s fly away together and seek heaven’s depths! – a relentless and serious voice at your ear tells you that our passions lie, and that myopia is what makes faces beautiful, and our ignorance beautifies souls, and that a day will come when the idol, to a more clear-sighted eye, remains nothing more than an object, not of hatred, but one of contempt and astonishment!”
– “Please stop, Monsieur!” said Madame de Cosmelly.
She was obviously moved; Samuel noticed that he had put a sword to an old wound, and he cruelly pressed on.
“Madame,” he said, “the beneficial suffering that comes from memories has its charms, and sometimes relief can be found in the intoxication of pain. – At this gloomy warning, all loyal souls would cry out: ‘Lord, take me away with my dream, unbroken and pure: I want to give my passion back to nature in all its virginity, and wear somewhere else my unwilted wreath.’ – Moreover, the results of disillusionment are horrifying. – Sickly children of moribund love are woeful debauchery and hideous impotence: debauchery of the mind, impotence of the heart, which means that the former lives only through curiosity, and the latter dies of weariness each day.
“We are all more or less like a traveler who has passed through a very large country, and who each evening watches, on a flat horizon, the setting sun, which long ago wonderfully used to gild the road’s charms. With resignation he sits on dirty hills covered with unknown rubbish, and tells the odors of heather, that in vain do they rise to the empty heavens; to rare and unhappy seeds, that in vain do they germinate in the parched earth; to birds who believe their marriages are blessed by someone, that they are wrong to build nests in a land buffeted by cold and violent winds. The traveler sadly continues his journey toward a desert he knows to be similar to the one just crossed, guided by a pale phantom we call Reason, who illumines the aridity of his path with a pale lantern, and who, to slake the recurrent thirst of passion that seizes him from time to time, pours him the poison of ennui.”
Suddenly, hearing a deep sigh and a poorly stifled sob, he turned to Madame de Cosmelly; she was crying profusely and no longer had the strength to hide her tears.
He observed her silently for some time, with the most compassionate and unctuous look he could manage; this brutal and hypocritical actor was proud of those beautiful tears; he considered them to be his work and his literary property. He misjudged the intimate meaning of that distress, just as Madame de Cosmelly, drowned in her candid grief, misjudged the intention of his look. It was a remarkable game of misunderstandings, following which Samuel Cramer gave her a final double handshake, which she accepted with tender confidence.
“Madame,” continued Samuel, after a few moments of silence, – the classical silence of emotion, – “true wisdom consists less in cursing than in hoping. Without the purely divine gift of hope, how can we cross that hideous desert of ennui I have just described to you? The phantom that escorts us is truly a phantom of reason: we can get rid of it by sprinkling it with holy water from the first theological virtue.[10] An easygoing philosophy is able to find consolations in apparently the most unworthy objects. Just as virtue is worth more than innocence, and there is more merit in planting in a desert than gathering pollen heedlessly in a fruitful orchard, so it is truly worthy of a superior soul to purify itself and to purify its neighbors through direct contact. Just as there is no unforgivable betrayal, so there is no failing for which we cannot be absolved, no disregard we cannot compensate; there is a science of loving one’s neighbor and finding him pleasant, just as there is a science of good living. The more a mind is sensitive, the more it discovers original beauties; the more a soul is tender and open to divine hope, the more it finds reasons to love others, as stained as they may be; such is the work of charity, and we have seen more than one woman traveler, grieved and lost in the arid deserts of disillusionment, recapture her faith, and love more strongly what she had lost, with more rationality, now that she possesses the science of managing her passion and that of her beloved.”
Madame de Cosmelly’s face brightened bit by bit; her sorrow glowed with hope like an overcast sun, and Samuel had scarcely finished his speech when she asked vigorously and with the naïve fervor of a child:
– “Is it true, Monsieur, that this is possible, and are there branches for people in despair that are so easy to grasp?”
– “Most certainty, Madame.”
– “Oh! then you would make me the happiest of women, if you would deign to teach me your methods.”
– “Nothing easier,” he replied brutally.
In the midst of that sentimental banter, trust had arrived and actually joined the hands of these two players; so much so that, after some hesitation and some prudishness which Samuel took as a good omen, Madame de Cosmelly in turn confided in him and began thus:
– “I understand, Monsieur, everything that a soul can suffer as a result of that loneliness, and how a heartfelt ambition such as yours must be devoured so quickly in its solitude; but your sorrows, which are yours alone, as far as I can untangle from your pompous words, come from weird needs that remain unsatisfied and almost impossible to satisfy. It is true that you suffer; but it could be that your greatness lies in your sorrow and that it is as necessary for you as happiness is for other people. – Now, will you deign to listen and sympathize with griefs easier to understand, – a sorrow of the provinces? I expect from you, Monsieur Cramer, from you, the scholar, the clever man, some advice and perhaps the rescue of a friend.
“You understand that when you knew me, I was a good little girl, a little dreamy already like you, but shy and quite obedient; I observed myself in the mirror less than you, and I always hesitated to eat or put into my pockets the peaches and grapes you would daringly steal for me from our neighbors’ orchard. I never experienced pleasure as truly enjoyable and complete unless it was allowed, and I much preferred to kiss a good-looking boy like you in front of my old aunt rather than in the middle of fields. Only later did I develop the flirtatiousness and the concern for my appearance that every marriageable girl must have.
“When I learned more or less how to sing sentimental ballads at the piano, I was dressed with greater refinement, I was forced to stand straight; I was made to do exercises, and I was forbidden to ruin my hands by planting flowers or raising birds. I was allowed to read things other than Berquin, and I was taken in formal attire to the local theater to see bad operas.[11] When Monsieur de Cosmelly came to the castle, right then I felt a lively friendship for him; besides, comparing his youth with my aunt’s rather scolding old age, he seemed to be noble and honest, and he treated me with the most respectful gallantry. Then people brought up his finest features: an arm broken in a duel for a rather cowardly friend who had entrusted him with his sister’s honor, enormous sums of money lent to impoverished old classmates; and what else? He treated everyone with a commanding air that was both affable and irresistible, which subdued me as well. How did he live before his castle existence with us? Had he known pleasures other than taking me hunting or singing virtuous ballads on my bad piano? Had he had mistresses? I knew nothing of all that, and it didn’t occur to me to find out. I began to love him with all the gullibility of a young woman who didn’t have time to make comparisons, and I married him, – which gave my aunt the greatest pleasure.
“After I became his wife in the eyes of religion and then in the eyes of the law, I loved him even more. – I probably loved him much too much. – Was I wrong, was I right? Who could know? That love made me happy, I was wrong not to know that it might be troubled. – Did I know him well enough before marrying him? Probably not; but it seems that one cannot accuse a respectable girl who wants to get married of making a careless choice, more than a fallen woman for taking a despicable lover. The one and the other, – how unfortunate we are! – are equally ignorant. Those unfortunate victims, which we call marriageable girls, lack a shameful education, by that I mean a knowledge of men’s vices. I would want each one of those pitiful little girls, before being subjected to the conjugal bond, to hear in a secret place, and without being seen, two men chatting amongst themselves about life matters, and especially about women. After that first and fearsome ordeal, they could give themselves over to the horrible vagaries of marriage with less danger, knowing the strong and the weak points of their future tyrants.”
Samuel did not quite know what that charming victim was getting at; but he was beginning to notice that for a disillusioned woman she was speaking much too much about her husband.
After pausing for a few minutes, as if afraid to approach that fateful place, she continued thus:
“One day, Monsieur de Cosmelly decided to return to Paris; according to him, I had to shine in my daylight and have surroundings worthy of my qualities. ‘A beautiful and educated woman,’ he said, ‘deserves Paris.’ She must know how to pose in society and let a few beams of her light fall on her husband. – A noble-minded woman with common sense knows that the only renown she can expect here-below is the renown she shares with her travel companion, that she serves her husband’s strengths, and above all gains respect only insofar as she makes him respected.
– “That was probably the easiest and most reliable way to gain obedience almost joyously; to know that my efforts and my obedience would, quite certainly, embellish me in his eyes, I didn’t need much to make me resolve to approach that terrifying Paris, which I instinctively feared, and whose black and dazzling phantom lurking at the horizon of my dreams gripped my pitiful fiancée’s heart. – Such was the true goal of our trip, as I understood it. A husband’s vanity lies at the heart of the virtue of a woman in love. Perhaps he was lying to himself with a sort of good faith, and deceiving his conscience without noticing it much.
– “In Paris, we had certain days reserved for close friends who in the end bored Monsieur de Cosmelly, just as he became bored with his wife. Perhaps he got a bit sick of her, because she was too loving; she revealed her whole heart. He got sick of his friends for the opposite reason: they had nothing to give him but the monotonous pleasures of conversations devoid of passion. From then on, his activities went in other directions. After friends came the horses and gambling. Society’s buzzing, the sight of those who remained without limits and who endlessly recounted their memories of a crazy and continuously active youth, tore him from his hearth and from long conversations. As for him, who never had occupations other than his heart, he had occupations. Rich and without a profession, he could create lots of busying and frivolous activities that completely filled his time; – conjugal questions: – Where are you going? What time will we see each other? Come back quickly, – I had to stifle those questions in the depths of my bosom; since the life of the English, – that death of the heart, – the life of clubs and circles, absorbed him completely.
– “At first I was shocked by his excessive concern for his personal appearance and the dandyism he assumed; it was obviously not done for me. I tried to do as he did, be more than beautiful, that is, flirtatious, flirtatious for him, as he was for society; in the past, I offered everything, I gave everything; from then on I tried to have others beg me for it.
I wanted to reignite the embers of my extinguished happiness, by shaking them and stirring them up, but apparently I am quite inept at trickery and quite awkward in vice; he did not deign to notice it. – My aunt, cruel like all old and envious women, who are reduced to admiring a play when in the past they were the actresses, and to contemplating the pleasures denied to them, took great care to inform me, through the self-seeking meddling of a cousin of Monsieur de Cosmelly, that he had fallen in love with a very fashionable theater girl. I arranged to get escorted to all the shows, and at the sight of any woman a bit beautiful that I saw on stage, I dreaded to admire her as my rival.
“I finally learned, through the charity of the same cousin, that she was Fanfarlo, a dancer as stupid as she was beautiful. – You probably know her, since you are an author. – I am not very vain nor that proud of my face; but, I swear to you, Monsieur Cramer, that many times, at night, around three or four in the morning, wearied of waiting for my husband, eyes red with tears and insomnia, after long and beseeching prayers for his return to marital fidelity, I asked God, asked my conscience, asked my mirror, if I was as beautiful as that wretched Fanfarlo. My mirror and my conscience answered me: Yes. God forbade me to boast about it, but not to draw from it a legitimate victory. So why, among two equal beauties, do men often prefer the flower that everyone has inhaled to the one who always resisted those passers-by in the darkest paths of the conjugal garden? So why should women overly generous with their bodies, a treasure to which only one Sultan should have the key, possess more admirers than others, unfortunate martyrs of one love? What is the magical charm with which vice hallows certain creatures? What is the awkward and repulsive appearance virtue gives to others? So answer, you, by whose station in society know all of life’s feelings and their various purposes!”
Samuel had no time to answer, because she continued fervently:
– “Monsieur de Cosmelly has very serious things on his conscience, if the loss of a young and maidenly soul interests the God who created her for the happiness of another. If Monsieur de Cosmelly died this very evening, he would have to beg for a great many pardons; for, through his own fault, he has taught his wife horrible feelings: hatred, distrust of the object of her love, and a thirst for vengeance. – Oh! Monsieur, I endure very painful nights, very anxious insomnias; I pray, I curse, I blaspheme. The priest tells me that I have to bear my cross with resignation; but delusional love and shattered faith cannot submit to resignation. My confessor is not a woman, and I love my husband, I love him, Monsieur, with all the passion and all the pain of a mistress who has been beaten and trampled upon. There is nothing I have not tried. Instead of dark and simple fashions that seemed to please him in the past, I wore wild and sumptuous dresses like theater women. As for me, the chaste spouse he sought out deep within some poor castle, I paraded around him in a little girl’s dress; I acted witty and playful when my heart felt dead. I sequined my despair with sparkling smiles. Alas! he saw none of that. I put on rouge, Monsieur. I put on rouge! – You see, it’s a trivial story, the story of all unhappy women, – a novel of the provinces!”
While she was sobbing, Samuel looked like Tartuffe seized by Orgon, the husband unexpectedly leaping from his hiding place, like the virtuous sobs leaping from that lady’s heart, and coming to strangle our poet’s tottering hypocrisy.[12]
The complete surrender, the freedom and confidence of Madame de Cosmelly, had prodigiously emboldened him, – without astonishing him. Samuel Cramer, who often astonished society, was hardly astonished. His life seemed to put into practice and demonstrate the truth of Diderot’s saying: “Disbelief is sometimes a fool’s vice, and credulity the failing of a clever man. The clever man sees far into immense possibilities. The fool scarcely sees anything as possible apart from what exists. Perhaps that is what makes one pusillanimous and the other reckless.”[13] That explains everything.
A few scrupulous readers and lovers of plausible truth will probably find many failings in that story, in which, however, my sole task was to change names and highlight the details; they will ask: How could Samuel Cramer, a tasteless poet with bad morals, approach a woman like Madame de Cosmelly? So swiftly pour out to her, concerning a Walter Scott novel, a flood of banal Romantic poetry? And how could Madame de Cosmelly, the discreet and virtuous spouse, pour out to him just as swiftly, without reticence or distrust, the secret of her sorrows? To which I reply that Madame de Cosmelly was a simple beautiful soul, and that Samuel was as bold as butterflies, locusts, and poets; he threw himself into every flame and entered through all the windows. Diderot’s saying explains why she was so submissive and he so brusque and shameless. It also explains all the blunders Samuel had committed in his life, blunders that even a fool would not have committed. The pusillanimous part of the public will hardly understand the character Samuel, who was essentially gullible and imaginative, to the extent that as a poet he believed in his public, – as a man, in his own passions.
From then on, he realized that this woman was stronger, more arduous than she appeared to be, and that her forthright piety must not be challenged directly. He again paraded before her his Romantic jargon. Ashamed of being stupid, he tried to be a rake; he spoke with her a bit longer, in a seminarian’s vernacular, about wounds to heal or to cauterize by opening new bloody wounds that were painless for the most part. Anyone who has tried to possess a respectable woman who hardly cares, without the absolutist pressure of Valmont and Lovelace, knows that each of them, with laughable and exaggerated awkwardness, says while displaying his heart: Take my teddy-bear; – so that will spare me the trouble of explaining to you how stupid Samuel was.[14]
– Madame de Cosmelly, that affable Elmira with the clear and prudent glance of virtue, immediately saw the advantage she could gain from this neophyte scoundrel, for the sake of her happiness and her husband’s honor.* So she paid him in the same currency; she let him squeeze her hands; they spoke of friendship and Platonic things. She murmured the word vengeance; she said that, in the painful crises of a woman’s life, one would willingly give her an avenger who could easily win over the remainder of the heart that the traitor was willing to leave behind, and other such nonsense and dramatic banter. In short, she flirted for a good purpose, and our young rake, who was simpler than a scholar, promised to tear Fanfarlo away from Monsieur de Cosmelly, and rid him of the courtesan, – hoping to find in the respectable woman’s arms compensation for the commendable deed. – Only poets are innocent enough to invent such monstrosities.
Fanfarlo
A rather comical detail of this story, and which like an interlude in the painful drama about to be played out with these four characters, was the quid pro quo of Samuel’s sonnets; for, regarding his sonnets, he was incorrigible, – one for Madame de Cosmelly, in which his mystical style praised her Beatrice-like beauty,[15] her voice, the angelic purity of her eyes, the chastity of her walk, etc. . . , the other for Fanfarlo, in which he served up a stew of gallantries so spicy as to bring blood to the most experienced palate, a type of poetry, moreover, which, quite early on, had surpassed all the possible Andalouseries. The first item arrived at the home of the creature who threw that dish of cucumbers into the cigar box; the second at the home of the unfortunate abandoned one, who at first stared, finally understood, and, despite her sorrows, could not keep from bursting out laughing, as in better days.
Samuel went to the theater and began to study Fanfarlo onstage. He found her to be light, magnificent, vigorous, and quite tasteful in her costumes, and he judged Monsieur de Cosmelly quite lucky to be able to abandon everything for such an item.
Twice he went to her home, – a cottage with a velvety-smooth staircase, filled with drapes and carpets, in a brand-new and verdant neighborhood; but, whatever his reasonable pretext, he could not get in. A declaration of love was profoundly useless and even dangerous. Failure would prohibit him from ever returning. As for having himself introduced, he learned that Fanfarlo received no one. A few close friends saw her from time to time. What could he say or do at the home of a dancer magnificently salaried and kept, and adored by her lover? What could he bring, he who was neither tailor, nor dressmaker, nor ballet master, nor millionaire? – He thus made a simple and brutal decision; Fanfarlo must come to him. In that era, laudatory or critical articles were worth much more than now. As a fine lawyer said in those days at an unfortunately famous trial, at that time the ease of writing newspaper serials was much greater than it is today; a few talented men having capitulated with journalists, the brashness of those scatter-brained and adventurous youth no longer knew any bounds. So Samuel decided, – he who knew not a word about music, – to specialize in lyrical theater.
Henceforth Fanfarlo was panned on a weekly basis in the bottom column of an important newspaper. It couldn’t be said nor even hinted that she had poorly shaped legs, ankles, or knees; if her muscles rippled under her stockings, all those with opera glasses would have shouted blasphemy. She was accused of being rough, common, devoid of taste, seeking to import into the French theater some props from beyond the Rhine and the Pyrenees, such as castanets, spurs, boot heels, – not to mention that she drank like a grenadier, loved too much little dogs and the concierge’s daughter, – and other such dirty laundry of private life, which are the daily fodder and sweet delicacies of certain minor papers. With that tactic specific to journalists, which consists of comparing dissimilar things, she was contrasted with an ethereal dancer, always dressed in white, whose chaste movements left consciences relaxed. Sometimes Fanfarlo shouted and laughed quite loudly at the audience in the stalls as she completed a leap to the footlights; she dared to walk while she danced. She never wore those insipid gauze dresses that reveal everything and hint at nothing. She loved noisy fabrics, long, crinkly skirts, sequined, laminated with tin that must be lifted quite high by an energetic knee, acrobats’ blouses; she danced, not with earrings, but with pendants, I dare say chandeliers. She would have been quite happy to fasten a bunch of weird little dolls to the hem of her skirts, like old gypsy women who tell your fortune in a threatening tone, and whom you meet at high noon beneath the arches of Roman ruins; moreover, all this silliness was exactly what the Romantic Samuel, one of the last Romantics of France, was wild about.
So much so that after denigrating Fanfarlo for three months, he fell madly in love with her, and she finally tried to find out who that monster was, that heart of bronze, that pedant, that pitiful mind who denied so stubbornly the royalty of her genius.
To be fair to Fanfarlo, she was only vaguely curious, nothing more. Did such a man really have a nose in the middle of his face and was he built completely the same as his peers? When she received one or two bits of information about Samuel Cramer, she learned that he was a man like any other, with some good sense and some talent, and she vaguely understood that something there was not quite as it appeared, and that Monday’s horrible article could very well be but a distinctive type of weekly bouquet, or the calling card of a stubborn supplicant.
One evening he met her in her dressing room. The light of two huge candles and a wide fire trembled on the multicolored costumes that lay about her boudoir.
The queen of the place, as she was leaving the theater, put on the clothing of a simple mortal, and, squatting on a chair, without modesty she was putting boots on her adorable legs; her hands, plumply slender, made the laces fit through the eyes of the boot, like an agile shuttle, without thinking about the skirt to be pulled down. Already that leg, for Samuel, was the object of eternal desire. Her leg, at once long, thin, strong, plump, and muscular, possessed all the propriety of the beautiful and all the licentious attraction of the pretty. Sliced perpendicularly at its widest spot that leg would have marked a sort of triangle the top of which would be located on the tibia, and the calf’s rounded line would have provided the convex base. A truly male leg is too stiff, female legs sketched by Devéria are too soft to give an idea.[16]
Her head, in that pleasing position, tilted toward her foot, displayed a proconsul’s neck, wide and strong, showing a glimpse of the furrows of her shoulder blades, enveloped in her brown and abundant flesh. Her heavy, dense hair tumbled forward on both sides, tickling her breast, and blocking her eyes so that constantly she had to ruffle it and throw it back. A charming and mischievous impatience, like that of an entitled child for whom things don’t go fast enough, energized the whole creature and her clothing, and every instant revealed new perspectives, new effects of line and color.
Samuel stopped respectfully, or pretended to stop respectfully; because, with that infernal man, the great problem is always to know where the actor begins.
– “Oh! there you are, Monsieur!” she said to him without moving, although a few moments before she had been alerted to Samuel’s visit. – “Don’t you have something to ask me?” The sublime insolence of that phrase went straight to poor Samuel’s heart; for a week he had chatted like a Romantic magpie with Madame de Cosmelly; here, he answered calmly: “Yes, Madame.” And tears filled his eyes.
It was enormously successful; Fanfarlo smiled.
“But what insect has thus stung you, Monsieur, to chew me to the bone? What a ghastly job. . .”
– “Ghastly, indeed, Madame. . . It’s because I adore you.”
– “I suspected as much,” Fanfarlo replied. “But you’re a monster; that’s a revolting tactic.” – She added, laughing, “We girls are to be pitied! – Flora, my bracelet. – Walk me to my carriage, and tell me if you thought I played well this evening.”
Thus they went, arm in arm, like two old friends; Samuel was in love, or at least he felt his heart beating hard. – Perhaps he was unusual, but surely this time he was not ridiculous.
His joy almost made him forget to inform Madame de Cosmelly of his success and bring some hope into her deserted home.
Some days later, Fanfarlo was playing the role of Columbina in a vast pantomime created for her by some witty people. There she appeared in an enjoyable sequence of metamorphoses as the characters of Columbina, Marguerite, Elvira, and Zéphyrina, and she received, most cheerfully, the kisses of several generations of characters drawn from different countries and different literatures.[17] A great musician had the pleasure of writing a fantastical score as befitting the weirdness of the subject. Fanfarlo was in turn decent, magical, crazy, playful; she was sublime in her art, as much an actress with her legs as a dancer with her eyes.
In France, by the way, we should admit, there is too much contempt for the art of dance. All the great peoples have cultivated dance as equal to poetry, starting with the peoples of Antiquity, those of India and Arabia. For certain pagan cultures, however, dance is as much above music as the visible and the created are above the invisible and the uncreated. – Only those for whom music evokes ideas of painting can understand me. – Dance can reveal everything mysterious that music conceals, and, moreover, dance has the quality of being human and palpable. Dance is poetry with arms and legs, it is material, gracious and horrifying, lively, embellished by movement. – Terpsichore[18] is a Muse of the South; I assume she was very dark, and that she often ran through golden wheat fields; her movements, imbued with precise cadences, resemble divine motifs for the sculptor.
But Fanfarlo the Catholic, not satisfied to rival Terpsichore, called for help from the art of more modern divinities. Foggy clouds mix the forms of fairies and Ondines, that are less misty, less indifferent.[19] She was at once a Shakespearean caprice and an Italian clown show.
The poet was delighted; he believed that the dream of his most ancient days was appearing before his eyes. Overcome by the mad intoxication, he would have quite gladly leaped about in his box seat, ridiculous, and smashed his head against something. A low and tightly closed carriage quickly took the poet and the dancer to the cottage of which I have spoken.
Our man expressed his admiration by silent kisses he applied with fervor to her feet and her hands. – She too admired him greatly, not that she was unaware of the power of his charms, but never had she seen such a weird man nor a passion so electric.
The weather was as black as a tomb, and the jolting wind which roiled up heaps of clouds caused hail and rain to pour. A huge storm made attics tremble and belfries moan; the turbulent street gutter, funereal riverbed where love letters and yesterday’s orgies depart, swept its thousand secrets into the sewers; mortality swooped joyously onto the hospitals, and men of the Rue Saint-Jacques like Chatterton and Savage clenched their frozen fingers on their writing stands, – when the man who was the most false, the most egotistical, the most sensual, the most gluttonous, the most witty of our friends arrived for a fine supper and an abundant meal, accompanied by one of the most beautiful women formed by nature to please the eyes.[20] Samuel wanted to open the window to throw a victorious glance at the accursed city; then, lowering his eyes to the various delights at his side, he hastened to enjoy them.
In the presence of such things, he was expected to be eloquent: therefore, despite his excessively high brow, his virgin-forest hairdo, and his nose of a snuff taker, Fanfarlo found him almost good-looking.
Samuel and Fanfarlo had exactly the same ideas about food and the dietary system obligatory for elite creatures. Inane meats and tasteless fish were excluded from this siren’s dinners. Rarely did champagne dishonor her table. The most famous and the most savory Bordeaux wines gave way to a heavy and dense battalion of Burgundies, wines of Auvergne, Anjou, and Southern France, and foreign wines, German, Greek, Spanish. Samuel had the habit of saying that a glass of real wine should be like a bunch of black grapes, that it provided as much to eat in it as to drink. – Fanfarlo loved meats cooked rare and wines that made you drunk. – Besides, she never got tipsy. – The two of them proclaimed a sincere and profound esteem for truffles. – The truffle, the muted and mysterious vegetation of Cybele, that savory illness she hid in her womb longer than the most precious metal, that exquisite material that challenges Agronomical science, as does gold the science of Paracelsus; the truffle, which creates the refinement of the ancient and modern worlds,[21] and which, before drinking a glass of Chio wine, produces the effect of several zeros following one number.[22]
As for the question of sauces, stews, and seasonings, a serious question which would require a serious chapter like a serialized scientific essay, I can assure you that they agreed perfectly, especially on the necessity of summoning the entire pharmacy of nature to support their cooking. Peppers, English powders, saffrons, colonial substances, exotic dusts; everything was good, indeed, even musk and incense. If Cleopatra were still alive, I’m sure she would have prepared her filets of beef or venison with the savors of Arabia. Admittedly, it is deplorable that today’s cordons bleus are not constrained by a specific and voluptuary law to learn the chemical properties of materials, and they don’t know how to discover, in requisite cases, such as a lovers’ celebration, almost inflammable culinary elements, quickly passing through the organ system, like Prussic acid, to vaporize like ether.
Strangely, their harmony of opinions on the good life, and similarity of tastes, bound them together vigorously; that deep agreement on the sensual life, which glowed in Samuel’s every glance and every spoken word, greatly impressed Fanfarlo. His speech, sometimes as blunt as a number, at other times sensitive and savory as a flower or an herb sachet, that strange chatting, whose secret only he understood, eventually earned him the good graces of that charming woman. Furthermore, with lively and deep gratification, as he inspected the bedroom, he recognized a perfect fellowship of tastes and feelings pertaining to the furniture and interior structures. Cramer profoundly hated – and he was perfectly right, in my opinion – apartments built in long straight lines and architecture imported into family homes. The vast rooms of old castles frighten me, and I pity those castle ladies compelled to make love in large dormitories that seem like cemeteries, on vast chapel platforms which are called beds, on heavy monuments whose pseudonym is armchairs. The private apartments of Pompeii are as large as your hand; Indian ruins covering the coast of Malabar attest to the same system. Those great voluptuous and learned peoples understood this question perfectly. Only very narrow spaces allow the leisurely meditation of intimate feelings.
Fanfarlo’s bedroom was thus very small, very low, cluttered with soft things, perfumed and dangerous to touch; the air was saturated with weird fumes, provoking a longing to die there slowly, as in a hothouse. Her lamplight projected onto a jumble of lace and fabrics of a violent but dubious quality. Here and there, on the wall, the lamp illumined paintings brimming with a Spanish voluptuousness: very white flesh on very black backgrounds. Deep within that ravishing hovel, both like a brothel and a sanctuary, Samuel saw advancing toward him the new goddess of his heart, in the radiant and sacred splendor of her nudity.
What man would not desire, even at the price of half his life, to see his dream, his true dream, pose for him unveiled, and the phantom of his imagination take off one by one clothing meant to shield it from common eyes? But here Samuel, seized by a weird caprice, started to scream like a spoiled child: – “I want Columbina, give me Columbina; give her to me just as she appeared that evening when she drove me crazy with her fantastical getup and her acrobat’s blouse!”
Fanfarlo, at first astonished, wanted to go along with the eccentricity of this man she had chosen, and she rang for Flora; the latter tried to explain that it was three o’clock in the morning, that the theater was completely closed, the concierge asleep, – and the weather horrible, – the storm continued its racket, – she had to obey the woman who herself was obedient, and the chambermaid went out; when Cramer, seized by a new idea, pulled the bell and exclaimed in a thunderous voice:
“Hey, there! don’t forget the rouge!”
That characteristic detail, related by Fanfarlo herself, one evening when her friends asked her about the beginning of her affair with Samuel, did not at all surprise me; I certainly recognized in it the author of The Ospreys. He will always love rouge and white paint, imitation gold and all kinds of silvery rags. He would gladly repaint the trees and the sky, and if God had entrusted him with the blueprint of nature, he would perhaps have spoiled it.
Although Samuel was a depraved imagination, and perhaps even because of that, for him love was less a matter of the senses than of rationality. It was above all an admiration and a hunger for the beautiful; he considered reproduction as a vice of love, pregnancy a spider’s disease. He wrote somewhere: Angels are hermaphrodites and sterile. – He loved the human body as though it were a material harmony, as beautiful architecture, plus movement; and that absolute materialism was not far from the purest idealism. But according to him, just as in beauty, which is the cause of love, there are two elements: line and attraction, – and all that concerns only the line, – the attraction for him, at least that evening, was the rouge.
Fanfarlo thus epitomized for him line and attraction; and when he watched her, seated on the edge of the bed carefree and with the triumphal calm of a loved woman, her hands delicately touching him, he seemed to see infinity behind the bright eyes of that beauty, and his own eyes eventually glided along immense horizons. Moreover, as happens to exceptional men, he was frequently alone in his paradise, no one being able to live there with him; and if, by chance, he abducted and dragged her there almost by force, she always remained behind: so that, in the heaven where he reigned, his love started to sadden and sicken from this blue melancholy, like a lonely royal.
However, he was never bored by her; never, as he left her love nest, padding nimbly down the sidewalk, in the cool morning air, never did he feel that egotistical delight of a cigar and of his hands in his pockets, of which our great modern novelist speaks somewhere.[23]
Because he lacked heart, Samuel’s intelligence was noble, and, instead of ingratitude, delight had produced in him that delicious satisfaction, that sensual reverie, which is perhaps worth more than love as understood by the common herd. Moreover, Fanfarlo, noticing that the man was worth it, had done her best and expended her most skillful caresses: she got used to that mystical language, spangled with enormous impurities and coarseness. – For her at least, it had the attraction of novelty.
Conclusion
News of the dancer’s madness got around. Several cancellations were announced; she had neglected the rehearsals; many people were jealous of Samuel.
One evening when chance, or Monsieur de Cosmelly’s ennui or complications due to his wife’s maneuvers, brought them together at the fireplace, – after one of those long silences occurring in households where there is nothing left to say and much to hide, – after having served him the world’s best tea, in a very modest and quite cracked teapot, perhaps even the teapot of her aunt’s castle, – after singing at the piano several pieces in vogue ten years ago, she told him in a voice of sweet and careful virtue, trying to be friendly and afraid of terrifying the object of her affection, – that she felt very sorry for him, that she had cried a lot, more for him than for herself; that she had at least hoped, completely submissive in her resignation and complete devotion, that he could find elsewhere the love he no longer sought with his wife; that she had suffered more to see him cheated on than herself to be abandoned; that, besides, she was much to blame, that she had forgotten her duties as a loving wife, in not warning her husband of the danger; that, moreover, she was quite ready to close that bleeding wound and herself alone rectify the foolishness committed by the two of them, etc., – and everything that honeyed words can suggest of a ruse authorized by affection. – She wept and wept well; the fire brightened her tears and her face embellished by sorrow.
Monsieur de Cosmelly left without saying a word. Men caught in a trap of their misdeeds do not like to offer their remorse as a price for mercy. If he had gone to Fanfarlo’s home, he probably would have found there traces of chaos, cigar butts, and newspaper articles.
One morning, Samuel was awakened by Fanfarlo’s mischievous voice, and he slowly lifted his weary head from the pillow where she was resting, to read a letter she handed to him:
“Thank you, Monsieur, a thousand times thanks; my happiness and my gratitude will be repaid to you in a better world. I accept. I am taking my husband back, and this evening I am transporting him to our property at C—–, where I will recover my health and the life I owe to you. Please accept, Monsieur, the promise of my eternal friendship. I always believed you to be so respectable as not to prefer any reward other than one more friendship.”
Samuel, lounging on the lace coverlet, and touching one of the most youthful and most beautiful shoulders ever to be seen, had the vague impression that he had been tricked, and he had some trouble gathering in his memory elements of the plot he had brought to this conclusion; but he reflected calmly: Are our passions really sincere? Who can discover for sure what he wants and read exactly the barometer of his heart?
“What are you mumbling there? What is that? I want to see,” said Fanfarlo.
– “Oh, nothing!” said Samuel. – “A letter from a respectable woman to whom I had promised to make you love me.”
“You’ll pay for this,” she said clenching her teeth.
Fanfarlo was probably in love with Samuel, but with a love known by few souls, with an underlying bitterness. As for him, he was punished where he had sinned. He had often feigned passion; now he was forced to know it; but this was not a calm love, quiet and strong, inspired by a respectable woman; it was a terrifying love, anguished and shameful, the unhealthy love of courtesans. Samuel knew all the torments of jealousy, and the degradation and sadness conjured up by the awareness of an incurable and elemental affliction, – in brief, all the horrors of that vicious marriage called concubinage.
As for her, she grows chubbier every day. She has become a plump beauty, clean, sleek, and cunning, a sort of ministerial girl of easy virtue. – One of these days she will fast for Lent and bless the bread at her parish. At that time, perhaps, Samuel, dead in captivity, will be nailed under a tombstone, as he used to say in the good old days, and Fanfarlo, with her nun-like manner, will catch the eye of a young heir. – Meanwhile, she is learning how to have children; she has just succeeded in giving birth to twins. – Samuel gave birth to four scholarly books: a book on the four Evangelists, – another on the symbolism of colors, – a memoir on a new advertising system, – and a fourth whose title I don’t want to remember. – What is most horrifying about the latter, is that it’s full of zest, energy, and oddities. Samuel had the nerve to put as epigraph: Auri sacra fames! – the accursed lust for gold! – Fanfarlo wants her lover to be elected to the French Institute, and she schemes in the government Ministry to get him a medal.[24]
Pitiful singer of The Ospreys! Pitiful Manuela de Monteverde! – He has fallen quite low. – Recently I learned that he was founding a Socialist newspaper and wanted to get involved in politics. – Dishonest intelligence! – in the words of that respectable Monsieur Nisard.[25]
[1]Plotinus (205–270 CE), third-century mystic and neo-Platonic philosopher
[2]Porphyrius (232–304 CE), philosopher and disciple of Plotinus
[3]Crébillon fils, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777), author of licentious stories and novels, son of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674–1762), the tragic playwright
[4] Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), novelist, satirist, and author of Tristram Shandy
François Rabelais (1494–1554), great comic writer of the Renaissance, known for verbal richness and sometimes obscene humor, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel
Jérôme Cardin [Jérôme (Girolano) Cardano] (1501–1576), Italian mathematician, doctor, astrologer, philosopher, accused of atheism
[5]Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and mystical visionary
[6]Marietta, the name of Baudelaire’s childhood nurse-maid
[7]Walter Scott (1771–1832), Scottish novelist, extremely popular in France in the 1820s and ’30s, model of Romanticism
[8]Oudinot petticoat, Achille Oudinot, highly fashionable designer of undergarments and crinoline
[9]Faubourg Saint-Germain, district in Paris known for wealth and aristocracy
[10]Three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity (love)
[11]Armand Berquin (1747–1791), writer of popular, moralistic and conventional children books
[12]Tartuffe, main character in Molière’s play of the same name. Orgon is the credulous husband who hides and then catches Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite, trying to seduce his virtuous wife, Elmira. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière (1622–1673)
[13]Denis Diderot (1713–1784), French philosopher and writer, co-editor of the Encyclopédie
[14]Valmont, the amoral seducer in the scandalous novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803)
Lovelace, the seducer in Clarissa Harlowe by Samuel Richardson (1747–1748), epitome of the rake or roué
[15]Beatrice, Dante’s sacred muse in The Divine Comedy
[16]Achille Devéria (1800–1857), French painter, known for illustrations of romantic novels, lithographs, engravings, and erotic pictures
[17]Columbina, Marguerite, Elvira, and Zéphyrina. Columbina, the lover of Pierrot in Italian commedia dell’arte plays; Marguerite, the innocent woman in Goethe’s Faust; Elvira is abandoned by Don Juan in Molière’s play and Mozart’s opera; Zéphyrina, a character in the popular vaudeville comedy Les Saltimbanques (The Acrobats, 1831) by Domerson and Varin
[18]Terpsichore, classical muse of dance and song.
[19]Ondines, mythological water sprites or nymphs
[20]Chatterton and Savage. Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) and Richard Savage (1698–1743), two misunderstood, persecuted, and suicidal poets
[21]The Romans’ truffles were white and of a different species than ours. [Baudelaire’s note]
[22]Cybele, goddess of the earth
Paracelsus, pseudonym of Theophrastus von Hohenhein (?1493–1541), Swiss chemist, alchemist, founder of hermetic medicine
[23]The author of La fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) by Balzac. [Baudelaire’s note]
[24]Auri sacra fames, the accursed thirst [or lust] for gold, from Virgil, The Aeneid III.57
The French Institute, Institut de France, a governmental learned institution established in the late eighteenth century, it oversees five academies, including the Académie française
[25]Désiré Nisard (1806–1888), journalist and neo-classic critic, ardent adversary of the Romantics, symbol of the conventional bourgeois mentality