‘Yo soy que soy’ (I am what I am): this phrase, Borel’s motto, was also the last one uttered by Swift three years before his death, as he stared pityingly into a mirror and they hurriedly removed the knife within his reach. And Pétrus Borel, in the portrait used as the frontispiece to his volume of poems, Rhapsodies, is also holding a dagger pointed at his breast. His book of ‘bitter tales,’ Champavert, a ‘book without equal, a lugubrious hoax, a joke played by a terrible imagination,’ in which the ‘sinister, semi-farcical, semi-repugnant word’ holds sway (so says Jules Claretie), and his admirable Madame Putiphar, a work swept by one of the strongest revolutionary winds that ever blew (in Les Débats, the very hostile Jules Janin compared it to the writings of the Marquis de Sade), abound in situations that elicit laughter and tears at the same time, in strokes that blend the most painful sincerity with a keen sense of provocation and an irresistible need for defiance. ‘I’ve come to ask you a favour,’ one of Borel’s characters, Passereau the schoolboy, tells an executioner. ‘I’ve come to beg you humbly, and I would be most appreciative of your gentle indulgence, to do me the honour and the kindness of chopping off my head? …’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I would very much like you to chop off my head!’ The writer’s style, to which the epithet ‘frenetic’ applies as to no one else, as well as his attentively baroque spelling, indeed seem bent on inspiring in his reader a certain resistance to the very emotions he is trying to elicit – a resistance stemming from the extreme peculiarity of the author’s form, without which his inordinately alarming message would surpass all human ability to receive it.
A lithograph by Célestin Nanteuil, after Louis Boulanger, preserves the expression of those ‘large, sad, shining eyes’ that Théophile Gautier spoke of, adding: ‘We feel that he is not our contemporary, that nothing about him suggests modern man, but rather that he must come from the depths of the past.’ A certain ambiguity does indeed arise from the contrast between that expression and the spectral appearance of the man at full height, hand resting on the head of his dog, who would die from having shared his master’s poverty for too long. This poverty was so great that after the publication of Champavert, Borel had to force himself, in order to survive, to mass-produce speeches for scholastic awards ceremonies. In 1846, exhausted by his mercenary chores, physically aged and morally unrecognizable, he let Gautier request on his behalf the vacant post of colonial inspector in Mostaganem. Destitute soon after his arrival, then offered the same post in Constantine, he again found himself destitute and, utterly desperate, was forced to work the soil. Up to the end, this man, whom life spared so few hardships, never argued with the forces of nature. Under the broiling sun, he said: ‘I will not cover my head. Nature does what she does perfectly well, and it is not our place to correct her. If my hair falls out, it simply means that my forehead is now meant to go bare.’ Several days later, he died from sunstroke.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rhapsodies, 1831. Champavert, 1833. Madame Putiphar, 1839, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Champavert: Seven Bitter Tales.
Those who judge me by this book and despair will be mistaken; those who appoint me a great talent will be mistaken as well. I am not being modest: for those who accuse me of meta-quarrellizing I have my poetic convictions, and I will laugh at them.
I have nothing more to say, except that I could easily have made this preliminary into a paranymph, or my ethopoeia, or else a long treatise on art ex professo; but the thought of selling a preface revolts me. And besides, wouldn’t it be ridiculous to say so much about so little? And yet I cannot help thinking about it. I have a few pieces tainted by politics: won’t I be anathematized, won’t people yowl that I sound like a Republican? – To forestall any questions, I’ll say it very plainly: yes, I am a Republican! Just ask the Duc d’Orléans, senior, if he remembers, as he was being sworn in before the ex-Chamber on 9 August, if he remembers the voice that pursued him, throwing the cries of Liberty and Republic in his face, in the midst of applause from a stacked crowd? Yes! I am a Republican; but it is not the July sun that makes this lofty thought bloom in me. I have been a Republican since childhood, but not a Republican with a red or blue garter on my carmagnole,1 windy haranguer of warehouses and planter of poplars. I’m a Republican in the sense that a lynx would understand: my Republicanism is lycanthropy! – If I speak of the Republic, it is because for me the word represents the greatest independence that civilized association can allow. I’m a Republican because I cannot be a Caribbean. I need an enormous amount of liberty: will the Republic provide it? I haven’t had enough experience to judge. But when this hope is dashed like so many other illusions, I will still have Missouri! … When one is as divided as I am, when one has been embittered by so many evils – if one then dreams of equality and calls for agrarian reform, one would still deserve only applause.
There are those who say: This volume is the work of a lunatic, one of those pamphleteers who have put God and the soul back in fashion; who according to journalistic hacks eat children and mix their grogs in skulls. Those people I can avoid: I know who they are.
Forehead dented and crushed as if by forceps, stringy hair, on each cheek a strip of hairy hide, a shirt collar that buries the head and forms a double triangle of white cloth, stovepipe hat, clawhammer coat, and umbrella.
For those who will say, It’s the work of a Saint-Simoniac! … For those who say, It’s the work of a Republican, a king-eater: he must be killed! … For those, they will be shopkeepers without a clientele: hucksters without clients are tigers! …, notaries who would lose everything with one reform: the notary is as Philippist as a haberdasher! … They will be good people, equating the Republic with the guillotine and assignats.2 For them, the Republic is just head-chopping. They have understood nothing about Saint-Just’s great mission: they hold a few necessities against him, and then they admire the carnages of Buonaparte – Buonaparte! – and his eight million men killed.
To those who will say, This book has something revoltingly lower-class about it, the answer is that indeed the author does not sleep in a king’s bed.
Moreover, isn’t it appropriate for an era when our government consists of stupid discount brokers and arms merchants, and when we have as monarch a man whose legend and epigraph goes: ‘Praise be to God and to my shops, too!’
Luckily we can still take consolation in adultery! Maryland tobacco! and papel español por cigaritos.
* * *
A poor man who out of need takes the smallest object is thrown in jail; but privileged merchants open shops on the roadside to rob any passerby who strays in. These thieves have neither passkeys nor crowbars, but they do have scales, ledgers, boutiques, and no one can walk out again without feeling that he has just been fleeced. Little by little, over time, these thieves get rich and turn into landowners – brazen landowners, as they call themselves.
At the slightest political movement, they assemble and take up arms, screaming that someone’s trying to rob them, and they go massacre any generous heart who stands up against the tyranny.
Stupid junk dealers! You’ve got some nerve to talk about property, as you fall like plunderers onto the poor souls who come to your counters! … Go ahead, defend your property! evil boors! who, abandoning the country, have descended on the city like hordes of starving wolves and crows, to suck at the carcass. Go ahead, defend your property! … Filthy crooks, would you even have any if not for your barbarous pillaging? Would you! … if you didn’t sell brass for gold, dye for wine? Poisoners!
• • •
I do not believe that one can become rich without being a shark; a sensitive man will never amass wealth.
To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!
And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.
*
Big business robs the merchant, the merchant robs the retailer, the retailer robs the skilled labourer, the skilled labourer robs the worker, and the worker dies of starvation.
It isn’t those who labour with their hands who make good, it’s those who exploit their fellow men.
*
I will say nothing about the death penalty: there have been enough eloquent voices since Beccaria to condemn it. But I will stand in protest, I will call infamy down upon the head of the witness for the prosecution, I will cover him with shame! Can you imagine being a witness for the prosecution? … How horrible! Only humanity could come up with such monstrosities! Is any barbarity more refined, more civilized than the witness for the prosecution? …
*
In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.
– from Champavert
‘You’re enjoying a smoke with some friends and you’re waiting for refreshments, when – bang! bang! someone knocks at your door. “Who’s there?” – “It’s me, Sir, bringing your beer.” – “Is it light?” – “Yes, Sir.” – “Good. Leave it in the anteroom and come back for the empties tomorrow.” The man obeys and leaves. But imagine your surprise when, rushing out in his wake, you find yourself staring at a horrible can!’
… All joking, all antitheses aside, if old-fashioned French gaiety with its pot belly and its little kazoos still flourishes in any corner of the world, you can believe – and I’m telling you the truth – that it is surely in funerals. That is where the mountebank’s platform is still impounded. Only there does Momus still shake his little bells. – So it is that businessmen farmers (for, since the decree of the Year XII, the dead are farmed like tobacco), whom you imagine to be drenched in sorrow and chock-full of epitaphs regarding God and Honour!, are on the contrary good and joyful lugs, gay dogs all the way, grabbing the best of everything and heartily leading a merry life! They are pretty much all friendly song-and-dance men, all adorable vaudevillians! who can claim a monopoly at the same time over the boulevards, the Royal Palace, the fairs, and the catacombs. – And after having made us die laughing in the evening, they bury us the next day.
All Souls’ Day is the feast of Funerals, the carnival of the Undertaker! How short the day after All Saints’ Day seemed, but how brilliant! … Early in the morning, the entire corporation gathered in new clothes, and while these gentlemen farmers, dressed in their most elegant mourning outfits with cloaks nonchalantly thrown over their shoulders, spread their largesse about, while the glasses and pitchers circulated, they handily emptied a barrel. Then, a herald having sounded the boot-and-saddle, they rushed into their gear, headed off belly to the ground, triple time, and before long they reached the fires of hell, a dance hall that once enjoyed quite a reputation. There, in a solitary garden, under a magnificent catafalque, an enormous table was set (the tablecloth was black and littered with silver tears and embroidered crossbones), and everyone immediately took a seat. – They served the soup in a cenotaph, the salad in a sarcophagus, the anchovies in coffins! – Everyone slept on gravestones, – they sat on cypresses; – the goblets were urns; – they drank beer of every variety; – they ate crepes; and, under the names nature’s jelly moulds, embryos in béchamel, orphan hash, geezer stew, and cavalryman supremes, they consumed the most delicate and sumptuous dishes. – Everything was in abundance and in circulation! – Everything was served in mountains! – Compared to this, the wedding in Cana was like Lent, and Rubens’s kermesse but a desolate scene. – With spirits rising and growing more and more expansive, and with a thousand sparks flying from the shock, jokes finally overflowed from all sides – witticisms rained down – vaudeville acts were spawned by the bellyful. – They sang, they shouted, they drank the health of the departed and toasted Death, and soon the most hair-raising and dishevelled orgy was unleashed. Everything was knocked over! Everything was turned inside-out! Everything was demolished! Everything was topsy-turvy! It looked like a vast common grave jolted awake by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. – Then, when this first tumult had begun to die down, they lit the punch; and by its infernal glow – several undertakers having stretched ropes of intestines over empty caskets, made bows out of heads of hair and tibial flutes from leg bones – a horrific orchestra improvised. And as the multitude got ahold of itself, an immense round dance was organized and turned ceaselessly on itself, emitting blood-freezing howls like a round of the damned.
– first published in L’Artiste
1. A short jacket worn at the time of the French Revolution. [trans.]
2. Banknotes used during the Revolution. [trans.]