An Oasis of Horror

AN OASIS OF HORROR-2

Charles preserved that fantasy jealously, even after discovering, somewhat to his dismay, that undeath had not rendered him immune to aging, disease or death. He wanted to believe, even then, that Jeanne was different, and that her undeath really was undying. His friends, who had never been able to comprehend his interest in her, could not comprehend now why he maintained his relationship with her even though she was no longer his mistress.

“She is beautiful in her fashion,” Banville told him, after encountering her in his presence in January 1848, “but beyond her relentless irritability she is remote and indifferent. There is no feeling in her for other human beings, no reward for attention paid to her. She might have amused you once, but I cannot understand your continued fascination.”

Nadar, who was also present, concurred. “She’s seductive, but insubstantial. She’s long accustomed and inured to the fact that the men she fascinates move on. She understands that there is no future in any of her dalliances, and expects no more than desertion. In this instance, at least, you should indulge her. You’d do far better to let her alone, now that she’s of no further use to you in bed.”

“There is a sense in which she is my only true companion,” Charles told them, “and always will be. There may be others like me, but I do not intend to seek them out; she is different, because she knew me before, and made me what I am.”

“I know that you can never hear two men agree without wanting to argue the opposite case,” Banville pressed him, “but I can see that there is more to your interest in Jeanne than a simple desire for dissent. Alas, your explanations make no sense.”

“I can see the goddess in her,” Charles told them. “I can see the sublimity of her conduct as well as the beauty in her face. There is always an element of horror in sublimity, as there is always an element of pain in beauty, but it only serves to sharpen the sensation for the connoisseur. Art comes from the Devil as well as from God, Theo, and the true artist must love and fear both virtue and its opposite.”

“Now that is sheer perversity,” Nadar opined.

Charles made no attempt to deny it. “When I call Jeanne my dark Venus,” he said, instead, “I do not mean by that that I ever worshipped her, or ever desired to do so—but I always knew that there was something in her more or less than human. There is nothing that she can teach me about what I desire to become, but that does not alter what she is.”

He said no more, because he was committed to playing the part of a living man, even with such friends as Banville and Nadar, let alone Murger and the Brasserie crowd.

Charles continued to see Jeanne, not to interrogate her or to worship her, let alone to sleep with her, but to study her as a specimen of his own kind and to imagine her as the better Eve. There was, however, one thing that did intrigue him, almost to the point of asking her a question—one matter relative to which the products of his imagination seemed vaguely imperfect.

Obviously, she did not kiss all her lovers in the way that she had kissed him. Very few of those she took to her bed, he had to suppose, had ever seen her metamorphosis or calculated its significance. For the majority, she remained forever flesh, although she presumably drank their infant blood from its marrowbone cradle as thirstily as she had drunk his. He did not know whether it was her generosity that granted him the sight of her true self, or whether there had been some special capacity for sight in him. She had seen that he had seen and had known that he had known—and had seen and known, too, that when he saw and knew her as a snake and as a skeleton, he did not recoil, being entirely content with the confirmation of his fascination—but that in itself did not explain why she had kissed him in the serpentine fashion that had allowed him to survive the dagger’s penetration of his heart.

Sometimes, he wondered whether she had actually intended it at all, or whether she was as helpless to determine the inheritance of her legacy as she was to determine so much else in her life.

Either way, he did not want to learn the secret of the kiss from her, because he had no intention of communicating it to any of his own lovers.

3. L’invitation au voyage: 1848-1855

As Charles watched the barricade being constructed from his window, on the morning of the 15th, his first thought was: This is nothing to do with me. Mine is only a pretense of life, a mere masquerade. Then the National Guardsmen came, and tried to tear down the incomplete barricade. He saw one of the defenders run through with a bayonet—a man whose blood was all too ready to flow and flood, and whose flesh was entirely unresistant to the shock of fatality—and he went downstairs.

He took his place at the barricade, consenting to be armed with a rifle that had not been fired since July 1830, because he had something to defend, not on his own behalf, but on behalf of his fellow men, to whom injustice had been done. When he heard from Nadar that the rumor had been put about the Brasserie that he had donned a workman’s blouse and run from barricade to barricade trying to raise a mob to assassinate General Aupick he was momentarily annoyed, but then consented to laugh, and even to wonder why he had not thought of doing exactly that. He left the barricade, though, when he concluded that it was doing more harm than good to those whose interests he desired to represent.

“You did the right thing,” Banville told him, “not simply because the revolution has soured, as revolutions inevitably do, but because ours is a different and more effective path of rebellion.”

“Not if it leads to your Parnassus or Gautier’s art pour l’art,” Charles told him, risking a quarrel. “I am pioneering a different way.”

“By imagining yourself in love with my mistress?” Banville retorted, although Charles knew that he was far more intent on defending the New Parnassus than Marie Daubrun. “I wish now that I had never counseled you to abandon Jeanne Duval.”

“All my life,” Charles told him, pointing to the window so that his friend would know that he was referring to the barricade rather than Marie, “I have sought oases of horror in the vast desert of ennui, but when civil order disintegrates and human society is reduced to chaos there is no relief in horror—quite the opposite, in fact. The horror of the sublime requires a very different mise-en-scène. I require nothing of your mistress that need occasion your jealousy. She is a merely an example, an actress cast in a role; I view her as a writer, not as a seducer.”

“Sometimes,” Banville told him, “I think the Brasserie rabble might be right, and that you might be going mad.”

Sometimes, as he dreamed while he was wide awake, Charles thought that might be possible, and he was not so foolish as to believe that undeath was any insulation against the dangers of madness. He had been undead long enough, by the Year of Revolutions, to know how imperfect its insulation was even against the diseases of the living.

The repression that followed the revolution did not please him any more than the monster the revolution had become, and such order as it restored seemed to him to have been bought at a terrible price. He had had to leave Paris behind to go to Dijon; he had work to do, not merely for the support of his remaining appetites, but in pursuit of the only utility left to him. Alas, he was ill, and found it as difficult to work, even in more pleasant circumstances, as he had often found it while he was alive.

“Those who are brought back reluctant from the tomb,” he said, to the absent Jeanne, “rudely wrenched from the oblivion they would have preferred, are doubtless conformists in undeath as they were in life. It is small wonder that they often become angry and wretched when they discover that they have no more won immunity from pain and terror than they have won immunity from original sin. Legend doubtless speaks the truth when it portrays vampires pursuing what ends they may still find, by stake or fire or the guillotine, shunning daylight in the meantime as if it were the unquenching fire of hell.”

Charles had never been overfond of daylight before he left life behind, but he found it just as endurable afterwards as he had before, even in Dijon, where the sun shone far more fiercely than in smoke-cloaked Paris. He did not seek it out, but nor did he live in fear of it. He dedicated himself to his learning, and his work, in spite of his fevers and his aches, and in spite of the deliria that disturbed his waking dreams.

He knew that the delirium was not caused by the venom that Jeanne Duval’s vampire kiss had injected into his flesh and his soul, but he suspected that she might have communicated another poison to him as well: the poison of the pox. He did not blame her for that any more than he blamed her for the other—indeed, he blamed her less, for he had been warned of that sort of danger attendant on sleeping with whores.

“A voyage to Cythera must be taken at the pace granted by the wind,” he told his father’s ghost, “and whether there are gallows-trees standing on the shore or not, dream-vision will provide them. Dreams are essentially morbid as well as wayward, although they can be enlivened as well as tamed by rhyme and metre, shaped for the sympathy as well as the comprehension of the ear. I shall not mind their morbidity, any more than I mind their waywardness, because I know that it will merely be the dark component of their oxymoronic mask. I shall welcome them, for what they make of me. As my living body was once sculpted by disease and death, so my undying mind shall be etched by disease and dreams. I am content.”

Even so, the first thing he did on his return to Paris was to visit Jeanne Duval. He did not question her directly, but he did go fishing for enlightenment “Undeath has spared me once” he told her, “but I do not believe that it can spare me forever. The interval it has purchased might be thirty years, or it might be a dozen, but the pox is within me, and is consuming me still You and I shall not be companions for all eternity.”

“I never expected that,” she told him. “The pox won’t kill you, if you don’t yield to it, but I don’t think you have the capacity to resist. I never did think so.”

Charles told himself that she could not know that, but he knew that she could and did. There were many things that she probably did not know—including her given name and how old she was—but she did know how to live with the pox inside her. She knew how to carry the disease without injury to herself, and she knew how to recognize those who could not.

There was no alternative for Charles but to race against time: to work, in spite of his deliria. He had worked even before committing suicide, but not as he worked thereafter. That was partly because the undead had to sustain themselves just as the living did, whether they pretended to breathe or not, and he could not have lived on the pittance doled out to him by Ancelle even if he had been prepared to abandon to the ideals of dandyism, but it was mainly because he had a far greater sense of vocation. He was, after all, the Lavoisier of undeath. As soon as he had become a vampire he had announced the imminent publication of his book of verses in 1845, and he had continued to advertise it ever since. It had begun its imaginative existence as Les Lebiennes, had been transmuted into Les Limbes, and was now Les Fleurs du mal, growing all the while in its actual substance as he wrote poem after poem. In the meantime, he supported himself by publishing prose, commemorating the life he might have lived, had he not left life behind, in La Fanfarlo and encouraging his fellow artists as best he could in his essays on the Salons and other ephemerae.