The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature and the French Revolution 9780708325728, 9780708325735

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Gothic Literary Studies

The Fantastic and European Gothic History, Literature and the French Revolution

Matthew Gibson

University of Wales Press

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THE FANTASTIC AND EUROPEAN GOTHIC

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SERIES PREFACE Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film.The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol Chris Baldick, University of London Angela Wright, University of Sheffield Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

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The Fantastic and European Gothic History, Literature and the French Revolution

Matthew Gibson

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2013

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© Matthew Gibson, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-2572-8 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2573-5

The right of Matthew Gibson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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In memory of my sister-in-law, Sophie Arabella Gibson (1964–2011), a truly wonderful person, who is greatly missed by us all.

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Contents

Acknowledgementsix Introduction1 1 Fantasy and Counter-Revolution in the Theory and Fiction of Charles Nodier

18

2 History and Politics in the Fantastic Fiction of Hoffmann, and his Reception in France 48 3 The Double Life of the Artist in the Récits fantastiques of Théophile Gautier, and the Rejection of Bourgeois Life under the July Monarchy

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4 ‘A Life in Death a Death in Life’: the Legitimist Novels of Paul Féval and the Catastrophe of the Second Empire 108 5 Paul Féval’s Le Chevalier Ténèbre and Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’: the Failures of the Bourbon Restoration

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6 Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Refutation of Utilitarian Morality

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Conclusion189 Notes191 Short Chronology of Relevant Events

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Contents

Bibliography223 Index231

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude firstly to Terry Hale for his constant support and numerous illuminating conversations, without which the book could not have been written. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Neil Mann for letting me draw upon his vast knowledge of occult and esoteric literature. Conversations with Madame de Staël (aka Anne Janowitz) at her salon in the British Library were also most stimulating in preparing this book. Finally, I would like to thank the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the British Library for their courteous assistance when I was researching this work.

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1 Introduction Fantastique, Frénétique and European Gothic  The following book is less a corrective to existing theories of the Fantastic in literature than a complement to them. It has struck me for some time that Todorov’s formalist definition of the ‘Fantastic’, which draws from a kind of isotopic examination of a whole raft of Fantastic or Gothic novels (to use the accepted English term), repre­ sents a developed understanding of the generic features of this type of literature which does not apply at all in the original applications of the term Fantastic/fantastique. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, there arose quite self-consciously in France the movement known as le ‘Romantisme’. This movement blended the fruits of the German Sturm und Drang movement of Schiller and Goethe with the couleur locale, picaresque adventure and ‘merveilleux’ provided by writers such as Scott, Byron, Lewis and Maturin (Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth were not remotely considered by French critics until many decades later). Such a refreshing literary trend provided a ground for theorists like Amédée Pichot and Charles Nodier to proselytize for a new type of literature that broke with the conventions of French classicism and the unities of time, space and action, and which stretched the boundaries of the imagination. Interestingly enough, in France at least this type of literature, le ‘Romantisme’, appears to have been equated more with the ‘roman’ or novel than with poetry or drama, partly due to the ease with which the novel could break classical,

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Aristotelian strictures of taste.1 The French development of le Roman­ tisme thus differs somewhat subtly from the conventional AngloAmerican description of Romanticism, and this difference is also manifested through descriptions of that part of Romantic literature which British critics usually call the Gothic, but which in France is the somewhat different, although convergent form, known as the fantastique and in certain instances the frénétique. These latter two terms are themselves not entirely congruent, since the frénétique tends to be linked more to the macabre, but are by no means hard and fast in their definitions or differences. The French reading public had for some time been aware of the roman noir genre, which largely consisted of translations of Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve Gothic novels into French.2 Anthony Glinoer has argued, in tune with the Marquis de Sade, that trans­ lations of novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho in the mid 1790s reflected the macabre nature of the times in which the French public found itself then,3 a factor compounded, as Terry Hale has shown, by the falling standards of education caused by the murder of Catholic priests from teaching orders, which allowed the general French population to become more superstitious than rational in the era of Reason and the cult of the Supreme Being.4 With the fall of Napoleon there appears to have been a new market for imaginative literature, and hence there was a readiness to embrace the exotic. Attempts to break with the classical past, chiefly spearheaded by Nodier and his acolytes at L’Arsenal salon, were accompanied by his various attempts to either praise or distance himself from the more extreme types of this literature. Initial condemnations of the ‘frénétique’, which school consisted of an over-indulgence in the macabre and violation of natural laws,5 may have been an attempt on Nodier’s part to make the residue of the ‘romantique’ more palat­able to the Classicists, but Nodier’s own art and ideas increasingly verged towards excessive indulgence of the imagination, including an acceptance of the supernatural and portrayals of the horrific. The publication of Hoffmann’s work into French at the end of the Restor­ ation period, and Sir Walter Scott’s failed attempt to condemn his work and that of the recent German school (of which Hoffmann was the foremost exponent), led to the French critics identifying a new school of literature: the ‘fantastique’. This same term has been made 2

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famous in recent years through the work of Todorov, Brooke-Rose, Cornwell and others, and is now most closely identified in British literature with the Gothic. It should be stressed that while Todorov’s own definition of the fantastique is an indispensible aspect of the British Gothic novel (and of some later French fantastique and frénétique novels), it in fact has little to do with the initial descriptions of the fantastique in France and celebrations of Hoffmann’s writing. The bizarreness and absurdity which Scott identified in Hoff­ mann’s work was interpreted as a great advantage by Nodier, J. J. Ampère and other enthusiasts. These critics particularly appreciated the German writer’s ability to create works that are ‘by turns mystical or familiar, pathetic or buffoonish’.6 It is in this feature that we see an understanding of the Fantastic that is entirely at odds with the Todorovian definition. For Todorov the crucial feature of the Fantastic is the prolonged tension between an ‘uncanny’ and a ‘marvellous’ explanation for events that break the naturalist assumptions of the reader, causing a ‘hesitation’ that is felt by the reader but frequently channelled through the perspective of a central character.7 Such an understanding depends upon an Enlightenment perception of nature as material, regular, and as excluding the possibility of the age-old beliefs which had crowded medieval literature. What appears, how­ ever, to have impressed Nodier and other critics so much about Hoffmann’s writing was his ability to move imperceptibly, without the marked foregrounding of a hesitation, between a naturalist and supernatural mode. As I argued in Dracula and the Eastern Question, one of the central features of British Gothic writing is the often divergent mixture of literal and allegorical signification which is presented to the reader once the initial shock effect of the potentially supernatural has been absorbed. This mixture provides the Gothic or Fantastic writer with a much wider range of symbolic possibilities for expressing multi­ layered and often contradictory themes than is available to the novelist limited by the laws of nature and a perceived ‘realism’.8 Such is also certainly the case with Hoffmann, whose use of the marvellous or uncanny is usually an attempt to present political, aesthetic and ethical ideas metaphorically. It is thus one of the reasons why his work was so popular, but critics especially enjoyed reading it because they felt they were being led into the fantastic quickly 3

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and without reflection over causes for the absurd, revelling more in the vast range of devices used than in suspense, or the ‘hesitation’ so prevalent in British Gothic novels. As Neil Cornwell has shown, Hoffmann is one of the few writers of the ‘pure Fantastic’, whose works like ‘Ritter Gluck’, ‘The Sandman’ and ‘The Mines at Falun’ provide absolutely no possibility of an ultimate explication of caus­ ation.9 This makes speculation quite obviously pointless, and the immediate importance of these tales always lies in the psychological effects exhibited by the main characters, and in the metaphorical meanings which the absurd events generate. While the critic Germán Gil Curiel has most perceptively noted and described the ‘blurred’ effect between supernatural and naturalist modes in the works of Hoffmann and Gautier, hence implicitly recognizing the lack of either hesitation or surprise between the clash of these merged types of reality, the scope of his work has not led him to examine this element in relation to the historical definition of the Fantastic, and thus to challenge the Todorovian notion.10 Following from my own and Gil Curiel’s observations, this is exactly what I intend to do in the following chapters. For Charles Nodier the Fantastic was not only a literary genre but a form of philosophical enquiry that replaced science, rationalism and religion, for a generation that had been betrayed by all three and could now only trust the free rein of their imaginations. For a man who had initially attempted to provide an exhaustive bibliography to guide the uninitiated through works of entomology, but who by the end of his life was declaring that science was not developed enough to discount the supernatural,11 the Fantastic, as both a form of art and a mode of enquiry, became a means of redressing the wrongs caused by the abstract philosophies that had wreaked havoc in his own time. In practising the Fantastic he hoped to employ the ‘mensonges’ (‘lies’) of the Fantastic to discover a deeper reality than was possible with either rationalism or science. While the balance between scepticism and belief which is foregrounded in the works of Radcliffe and Potocki is certainly used on occasions by Nodier as a generic feature, this is not the major purpose of the ‘lies’ in works which give vent to the imagination like ‘Trilby’ (1822) and ‘La Fée aux miettes’ (‘The Crumb Fairy’) (1832): rather, the Fantastic’s purpose is to divine truth and assuage the wrongs created by real life. 4

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Slowly but surely, however, the Todorovian division between natural and supernatural explication becomes more important in the description and practice of the fantastique, and it is at this point that we may want to begin talking of a French or European Gothic, particularly in the works of Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas and Paul Féval – although the divisions between the Fantastic and the Gothic in continental writing are by no means rigid. That later writers became more aware of the sense of suspense and hesitation involved in fantastique and frénétique writing (which was the term that Féval himself used to describe his novels, and is in any case more closely linked to terror and horror),12 owes much to the growth of the Press in Louis-Philippe’s time,13 and the rise of a popular audience which wished to be entertained rather than in­ structed. A later critic and writer of contes fantastiques, Gautier, noted the potential for hesitation and terror in Hoffmann’s work,14 although he himself concentrated less on the potential reality of the marvellous in his own tales, like ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (1836), and preferred instead to use dream-life, ghouls and vampires to explore the political and social problems of his own day. Paul Féval, on the other hand, high­lights both a marvellous and an uncanny resolution to the same problem in his stories, mixing criminal subterfuge with its meta­ phorical representative of vampirism in order to present political allegories in this form. In using the Fantastic, both Gautier and Féval were still capable of showing how the ills of modern times were the result of underlying political problems implied through allegory. In Gautier’s case, the political target is a mixture of religiosity and excessive carnality, caused by Catholicism and the bourgeois acquisitiveness of his own day. In Féval’s case, the terror of the vampire and the supernatural events in his novels arise not from the reprisal of a more superstitious order issuing from a Catholic past, as is the case in many English anti-Catholic, Gothic novels like Lewis’s The Monk, but the reverse: the vampire stalks Paris entirely because the French have abrogated their responsibility due to the suspension of a spiritual world-view, the denial of Catholic morality and the rise of materialist science. This innovation, which now surfaces as a challenge to the views of the majority of postTodorovian critics of the Gothic, and is manifested through play with allegory, is perhaps the greatest achievement of the French 5

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frénétique or Gothic, since it completely subverts the values and gen­ eric expectations represented in the British Gothic novel or earlier ‘roman noir’. Terror and horror result not from the resurgence of an older, less rational order that challenges Enlightenment, but from Enlightenment’s very implementation. It is the return to a spiritual order, and away from materialism, which would dissolve the demons. Thus the tradition established by Nodier’s use and promotion of the Fantastic as a means of scepticism towards science ultimately finds its apogee in Féval’s practice, in a type of European ‘Gothic’ novel that inverts the British Gothic novel entirely. I would argue further that in Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’ and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we can observe a further resumption of this type of French frénétique/Gothic novel, since these stories demonstrate the terror and horror which result from abandoning religious forms of morality in favour of atheistic, Utilitarian ethics. All in all we shall see that the nineteenth-century European Fantastic in its earliest manifestation often evades entirely the definitions of the Fantastic provided by Todorov and his followers, because it challenges the scientific and naturalist assumptions presented by the realist novel and allows the absurd to lie alongside the accepted, and the allegorical alongside the literal. Furthermore, the frénétique or French Gothic novel, even when it uses the Radcliffean terror and Todorov-described hesitation – staples of the British Gothic15 – can also employ allegory to invert the usual understanding of the Gothic proposed by critics such as Punter and Botting. Therefore, rather than assuming rational expectations which are then threatened and challenged by irrational terror, these narratives instead present terror as arising from modern science, rationalism and the end of the age of faith.16 It is this last factor which encouraged Féval to com­ bine the theme of vampirism with Faust, and so to warn against the technology of a new age as harbouring terror along with a vam­ piric materialism: a theme later reprised by Stevenson. Therefore, while these European fantastique and frénétique works share features with the British Gothic novel, they often entirely subvert the generic assump­tions therein.

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The Historical Novel Another feature of the European ‘Gothic’ in this era is its ability to address history, in a way foreseen by David Punter but largely ignored or dismissed by Lukács in his famous book on the historical novel.17 Unlike Scott’s novels, however, the fantastique or frénétique tale shows little sign of progress or of resolution in the ‘“middle way”’ that Lukács discerned in the Scottish writer’s work.18 The allegorical mean­ing of the vampire allows certain writers, notably Féval and Gautier (the latter of whom Lukács understood as being a reactionary (p. 174)) to portray history not as a progress but as a recurrence of particular vices that cannot be eradicated easily. However, a crucial feature of the European Fantastic novel or short story’s engagement with history is the use of anachronism, particularly through allusion to either contemporary or more recent times. Thus Hoffmann sets his tale Das Fräulein von Scuderi in 1682, but through allusion also allegorizes the events of the Revolution itself; thus Féval sets his La Vampire in 1804, but through contemporary allusion also refers to his own time. The vampire therefore can become a convenient allegorical theme for portraying the resurgence of features in history in a way that creates the potential for seeing these novels as Legitimist, in the Lukácsian sense of showing an unchanging moral reality: one which serves the interests of the ancien régime (p. 26). This is occasionally true, particularly in relation to Féval, who was an unrepentant Légitimiste and supporter of the Bourbons. How­ ever, an examination of Lukács’s arguments reveals the Hungarian critic’s failure to understand the full range of historical works which were available to nineteenth-century readers, partly on account of his refusal to look at more popular types of novel. In Lukács’s view the illustrious year of 1848 was a negative watershed in the history of realism and the historical novel as well, since at this time there was a crisis in bourgeois identity, coupled with a decline in interest in Hegel’s ideas. This dual problem caused writers of the new Natural­ ism to stop portraying the concrete and mobile conditions of past existence and simply to project the feelings and attitudes of the present on the past in a form of escapism (pp. 172–83). In Lukács’s opinion a taste for the exotic and couleur locale prompted writers like Flaubert to write a work like Salammbô, whose goal was nothing 7

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more than to escape the bourgeois conditions of his own age and yet simultaneously to impose the recognizable character-types of his time upon the past (pp. 184–6). Such a view ignores, however, the fact that the impression of the present on the past had already occurred in the sensational Romances of George Sand (such as Consuelo (1842): a tale of late eighteenth century Venice about a virtuous opera-singer with an 1830s mindset), and that even in Balzac’s more historical novels elements of the Romantic and burlesque predominate to assuage the contemporary reader’s need for selfindulgence. Above all, however, Lukács – like Scott himself, who inexplicably argued that Hoffmann had never attempted to write a historical work19 – refused to look at the Fantastic or Gothic and see that these, too, were historical in design, but that they used the merging of naturalism and fantasy to create parallels between different ages, although with serious intent. Most of all, Lukács failed to realize the importance of censorship to the growth of the novel. For Féval, in particular, the Fantastic was a fertile ground for attacking Napoleon III’s regime with impunity, the allegory of the vampire and the Potocki-style embedding of stories within stories allowing a sufficient distancing from the prying eyes of a regime that applied censorship excessively. The same could be said of Gautier, although his criticism of the age he was writing in (the July Monarchy) was more direct. Nevertheless, his strategies of concealment beneath an acquired ‘apoliticism’ and use of fantasy were effective means of portraying the problems involved in the bourgeois court under whose influence he wrote, while deflecting political attention from himself. Fantastique, frénétique or Gothic narratives, using both terror and the supernatural, create allegorical and anachronistic methods of representing history that are quite differ­ ent to those employed by Scott, but in every way as sophisticated, since they frequently site the diachronic process of cause and effect throughout history in a scenario which is limited more literally to a short period of time that is similar to the contemporary reader’s own. One technique used by these writers is of course the vampire theme, which is deployed variously to symbolize either the in­eradic­ able resurgence of history (as in the case of Féval), or the growth of carnality due to the embedding of bourgeois values within the aristocracy (as in the work of Féval, Gautier and Le Fanu). Another 8

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method is anachronism, in which events from earlier or later times are alluded to in order to portray either process or resurgence through­ out history. Another is the double, or Doppelgänger, a figure that frequently symbolizes the repressed or compensatory aspect of the self, but which in various of these novels and novellas is used to portray unacknowledged moral or political realities. Both the vampire and the double are relatively new innovations as literary devices. While ghosts, demons and stryges (precursors to the vampire, although not the same) run their course back to an­ tiquity or the Middle Ages, the vampire was a folkloric figure only made readily known to Western readers from the 1730s onwards, culminating in Dom Augustin Calmet’s collection of 1743, and the first vampire poems soon afterwards. The double’s progeny is more complicated, since the concept of two characters in a work of litera­ ture forming two compensatory halves of a complete character – in whatever way – is as old as Gilgamesh and Enkidu: a point made by Clifford Hallam in his famous and exhaustive essay ‘The Double as Incomplete Self’.20 However, the idea of the double as presented in works like Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ (1839) or Dostoeyvsky’s ‘The Double’ (1846) is altogether different, since here the reunited self is presented through the bewildered and frequently terrified perspective of the central character encountering completion, and normally occurs as a result of some uncanny and finally supernatural action. This presentation of the uncanny double, or familiar repressed – the self perceived in an alien form – occurs first in Gothic and Fantastic works of fiction, and is thus as modern a literary feature as the Vampire. Frequently vampire and double may combine, as arguably takes place in Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’ (1895), and certainly occurs in Féval’s La Vampire (1819), but the two have no necessary connection. While the double may anticipate the familiar repressed of Freud, or the Archetypes of Jung’s Collective Unconscious, it can also be used to symbolize unacknowledged moral and political failings, as in the case of Féval’s and Stevenson’s work. Furthermore, while twentieth century psycholanalytic theories may explain with hind­ sight the teleology attendant upon nineteenth century manifestations of the theme, in fact wholly conscious understandings of its cause (or of the conditions that it can be made to represent) were prevalent in the work of Gautier (who traced it to repression of the body), 9

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Féval (who used it to illustrate Hahnemann’s theory of the universe) and Stevenson (who understood the doubleness of man, but con­ doned rather than condemned repression). Both the vampire, with its emphasis on carnality and the ineradicable processes of history, and the double, with its emphasis on the divisions created between private and public life and the unacknowledged consequences of immoral actions, are motifs and themes which illustrate nineteenth century modernity’s relation to the past, and are the fitting devices for a new literature that wishes to discuss that past in a way that is neither cheerily naive, as in Lukács’s portrayal of the Legitimist historical novel, nor progressively Hegelian, as in Scott’s work, but cyclical and causative. Hence, not only do French writers of the fantastique, frénétique and Gothic use their forms to question science and Enlightenment, and to subvert the conventions of the British Gothic novel by making reason rather than irrationalism the cause of terror, but they also probe and question history in unusual ways, using allegory, symbolism and anachronisms to present a recurrent and non-progressive view of history, which poses a challenge to the view promoted by Sir Walter Scott. The French Revolution Most of this book deals with literature written after the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. However, most of the literature discussed herein is set either during the Napoleonic era or just after­ wards during the Restoration, and is entirely implicit with that past. As such, a consideration of the events of French history from 1789 until 1870 is necessary, as it can explain the ‘episteme’ in which these novels were written: an episteme which, it is fair to say, changed remarkably throughout the nineteenth century, despite Foucault’s belief that the discourse and the episteme can only change with the more radical collapse of an order. A review of the period’s contexts and central ideas tells us much about the shape taken by literary genres in the post-Napoleonic era. Debate still rages as to what the central causes of the French Revo­lution actually were: whether opportunism on the part of the 10

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bourgeoisie, a resentment of the Catholic Church, the hatred of the aristocracy on the part of the peasantry, the lack of social mobility due to the closed nature of tradesmen’s guilds, the triumph of Vol­ tairean rationalism aided and abetted by the growth of Freemasonry, and so on. Whatever the fundamental causes, the trigger is beyond doubt. The Revolution began when the Estates General met from May to July of 1789 and attempted to find a resolution to the parlous state of the exchequer. Long wars had ruined the Crown’s finances, and attempts at gaining loans through imposing higher taxes had been rejected by most of the legislative assemblies or parlements from 1787 onwards, leading Louis XVI to exile certain of their members. In a crowd-pleasing gesture, he reappointed the hugely popular Swiss Protestant Jacques Necker to take charge of the government and treasury,21 and called the three estates, Nobility, Clergy, and the Nation (the bourgeoisie downwards) to Versailles. Necker urged an increase in taxation for Clergy and Nobility, to ease the pain on the rest of France, and was fired after publishing a wildly inaccurate plan about how to pay the deficit on 11 July 1789 (pp. 108–9). The enraged populace saw this as royal interference and stormed the Bastille three days later. The Revolution had begun. Meanwhile, deputies of the Third Estate, banished to a nearby real tennis court since 20 June, had already drawn up a new con­ stitution and had instituted a National Assembly, later renaming this the National Legislative Assembly, which made Louis a powerless figurehead rather than the absolute ruler he had been before. This was perhaps a temporary victory for the Feuillant faction in the National Assembly (who advocated the institution of a constitutional monarchy), in the face of the other two factions which were to domin­ate the Assembly later: the Girondins (moderate Republicans) and the Jacobins (radical Republicans). In 1792, however, the Jacobin deputies – devotees of Rousseau who were anti-religious, antiaristocracy, and in some extreme cases (like Hébert) against private property – got their way. A Republic was declared, a new National Convention was instituted in place of the Assembly, and its members promptly voted in favour of Louis’s execution (23 January 1793). In the following period the Commission for Public Safety, headed by Maximilien Robespierre, instituted the Official Terror (1793–4), which consisted of a form of revolutionary purification, when many 11

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people were guillotined merely on the grounds of suspicion. The Catholic Church was dislodged, and in its place the Jacobins instituted a cult of the Supreme Being. Thus the establishment of a rational, Voltairean godhead finally occurred during the most hysterical and irrational period of French history. The Thermidorean Reaction of 1794, consisting mainly of more flexible Girondins, put paid to this period with the arrest and execution of Robespierre. A more stable government in Paris now allowed the government to quash a Royalist revolt in La Vendée, and to repel continuing insurrections by Breton Royalist bandits, or ‘Chouans’. In 1795 the National Convention was abolished in favour of a five-man Directory. The success of the French armies under the Republican Directory in Austria, the Netherlands, Italy and North Africa meant the rise of many young officers to unprecedentedly high rank. Chief among these was the Jacobin-leaning Napoleon Bonaparte, who effected the Brumaire coup of 1799 with other army officers, and became First Consul, in what was effectively a new dictatorship. Victories abroad in Italy and Central Europe led to his declaring himself Emperor in 1804, and marrying MarieThérèse of Austria. As Emperor he instituted La Grande Empire over France and many of its conquests, giving areas as far flung as Illyria (modern Dalmatia) the constitution and Code Napoléon of France. The Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, after the check of Napoleon’s hundred-day return and the Battle of Waterloo, restored absolutism and legitimism to many parts of Europe, and was instru­ mental in the creation of a rather bizarre ‘Holy Alliance’ between the Austrian, Russian and Prussian Crowns, which supported the religious and anti-democratic principle. Germany, as a loose con­ federation of States including the (Catholic) Austrian Empire and (Protestant) Prussia (under whose aegis Hoffmann lived), and such small absolute Duchies as Wurtemberg, maintained an uneasy equi­ librium. France had been returned to Bourbon rule, and benefitted from a relatively benign or at least outwardly more genial rule under Louis XVIII, brother of the former king. This was replaced by a more austere and absolutist rule in 1825 by Charles X, who closed down many presses and refused to devolve any power to local as­ semblies. Eventually, the July Revolution of 1830 ushered in a new constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, whose 12

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government created a bourgeois democracy with very limited suffrage, and which was widely seen to be controlled by a few industrialists around the first minister Guizot, who believed that 200 franc-taxpayers (i.e. eligible voters) represented all those beneath them in wealth.22 In 1848 revolution returned to the streets of Paris and much of the town was burnt down, leading eventually to an election in which Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon, was elected by a huge majority, becoming first a dictator, and then from 1852 the second Emperor, Napoleon III, reinstating the Imperial Constitution that had first been created by his uncle. Massive financial speculation, the Crimean War, the expansion of the railways and support for the new nations – in the face of Austria, Russia and the Ottomans – characterize his controversial rule, which was brought to a catastrophic end with the Prussian invasion of 1870.23 The New Republic that was created at this time was itself a compromise between different factions, but lasted effect­ ively until the Second World War. Ultimately the values enshrined in the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ in August 1789, which issued from the National Assembly created by deputies of the Third Estate, still maintains to this day: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – ideals issuing from Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract. They were not upheld during the Restoration and were only paid lip-service to in the regimes that followed the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. However, modern questioning of the Revolution has frequently been muted. When the veteran film-maker Eric Rohmer made a film, L’Anglaise et le Duc (2001), based on the account of the Royalist Grace Dalrymple, French critics were horrified to see him portray revolutionaries as ignoble and blood-thirsty, with one headline in Le Figaro even asking (one hopes ironically) whether he should not be guillotined.24 The Revolution has become an ‘Ark of the Covenant’ for most Frenchmen since the Second World War, perhaps as a reaction to the humiliation of the occupation. This is somewhat paradoxical, since in their own eras Nodier, Hoffmann and Féval all condemned the revolutionary mob and the spectacle of the guillo­ tine, either directly or obliquely, and questioned the fruits of the Enlighten­ment ideals that led, as has already been noted, to the most irrational events in French history: events that Edmund Burke 13

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understood as resulting from too quick a divorce between France and its traditions. Counter-Revolution This book therefore veers mainly towards observing the works of those writers who in different ways reject the Revolution, and use the fantastic, frénétique or Gothic form to do so: whether like Nodier they attack its rational foundation, or like Hoffmann expose the death of a more spiritual and sacerdotal understanding of property, or like Gautier attack the contemporary bourgeoisie, or like Féval attack the Revolution wholeheartedly from an entirely pro-Catholic, pro-Legitimist background, or like Le Fanu from the perspective of an Irish Tory. I have not looked in any detail at Eugène Sue, an anti-Catholic, socialist writer, in whose novels the frénétique details are, as in the earlier ‘romans noirs’ of Maturin and others, mainly indicative of Catholic oppression or the viciousness of the ancien régime. Nor have I looked at other, later French writers like Baudelaire and Isadore Ducasse, whose vampires are more consonant with a later stage in the history of the Gothic, which is the vampire as dandy, poète maudit or flâneur, ambivalent and detached from bourgeois life. The examination of the vampire here is also far removed from Judith Barbour and David Punter’s understanding of it as the bourgeois fear of the return of the old order after the restoration of autocratic powers in 1815,25 while the double is interpreted as being far more of a political and ethical motif than the psychological figure it is usually understood to be. European Fantastic and Gothic narratives have their origins in the rejection of Enlightenment Rationalism, and frequently in promul­ gating the return to a more spiritual and less sceptical era. Tranquillity and happiness occasionally depend upon accepting the strictures of the Catholic, Pascalian world view. As Maria Purves has shown, a whole group of Gothic novels written in England during the 1790s presented Catholicism in a positive light, in keeping with Burke’s belief that the Revolution was not wrong in itself, but simply in its denial of the nation’s past.26 Paul Féval also attacks the Revolution’s atheism, but rather than depicting heroic nuns and benevolent priests, 14

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his discourse is more obviously about the death of the spiritual order in his own society and the perversion it had caused. Likewise Stevenson portrays a respect for religious attitudes to morality, including Catholic­ ism, if only as an antidote to Utilitarianism. All in all, this book concerns itself with the following main themes: with redefining the Fantastic in France against the Todorovian de­ scrip­tion; with showing that the Gothic and Fantastic may be used to pursue ‘truth’ beyond the confines of both rationalism and science; with opposing the common belief that terror and horror in the European Gothic novel is due to the resurgence of a pre-Enlighten­ ment order, and with affirming that frequently the opposite is the case; with showing that the European Gothic is most definitely about history, and uses methods which elude the categories described by Lukács; with presenting, in keeping with Maria Purves’s argument, the possibility of seeing the Gothic novel as pro-Catholic and proChristian; with presenting the frénétique and Gothic novel as a form of Faustian warning against the excesses of science and technology. The importance of this book will hopefully be self-evident, since it fills an important gap in nineteenth-century Gothic studies. With the exception of a few scholars such as Terry Hale, Anthony Glinoer and Ada Myriam Scanu, no one has examined the trajectory of the frénétique to the fantastique in post-Napoleonic France, and only Elizabeth Teichmann, Anthony Glinoer, Andrea Hübener and Germán Gil Curiel have ever looked seriously at the influence of Hoffmann on French writers. Furthermore, from this group Terry Hale and Gil Curiel alone have written in English. While Gil Curiel has certainly observed the influence of Hoffmann on Nodier and Gautier, the emphasis of his work is far more upon motifs rather than the actual nature and basis of the Fantastic and does not actively challenge the Todorovian description. This is despite the fact that he notes the importance of the imperceptible ‘glide’ between the natural and supernatural in Hoffmann’s and Gautier’s work, which in this study will be highlighted to challenge the Todorovian emphasis on ‘hesitation’.27 Daniel Compère and Dorothee Fritz-el Ahmad are the only previous critics to have even observed the vampire novels of Paul Féval, and Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ has evaded serious attention compared to other tales, particularly in relation to its historical context. While there has been much criticism 15

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of Stevenson in recent years, particularly of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there has been relatively little related to ‘Olalla’, a vampire story that Stevenson wrote simultaneously with it and which shares its themes. Finally, no scholars have as yet examined the Fantastic and European Gothic in relation to their counterrevolutionary potential, which in this book will constitute a major theme. Thus, my analyses will hopefully open up entirely new vistas. Two points remain to be made. Firstly, I should like to make it clear that I have translated all quoted text myself, whether French or German, and have not used published translations. The strategy has been to provide the original text in either parentheses or in end­ note form afterwards, depending upon the length of the text quoted. The only exception to this rule has been the quotation of con­ temporary criticism, which I have simply translated without deeming it necessary to provide the original. Obviously much of the criticism available has been in German or French rather than English, but it was felt that certain elisions had to be made, where necessary, so as not to overburden the text with quotations. Secondly, the chronology of this work is relatively complex, since in the case of almost every author it charts the literary portrayals of events that were historical to the times when they were written, which times are themselves now historical to our own time. Hence in the first chapter there is a discussion of Charles Nodier’s ‘Inès de las Sierras’ (1837), which presents events that had happened twentyfour years previously in the Napoleonic era. In the fourth chapter we observe Paul Féval writing about the events of 1787 and then 1804 (La Chambre des Amours; La Vampire), but from the vantage point of 1856, during the Second Empire. The changed material conditions of the different epochs in which both men were writing are as important as the epochs of the events they portray, and indeed help to govern the way in which they interpret the past. In the second and third chapters we see even more complicated elements, as Hoffmann, writing just after the fall of Napoleon (1816), creates a tale of Louis XIV’s reign set in 1680 (Das Fräulein von Scuderi), but also overlays it with allusions to events that happened in 1785, just before the Revolution. Similarly, in 1836, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, Gautier writes a short story that would appear to be set in late eighteenth-century Venice (‘La Morte amoureuse’), 16

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but which also alludes covertly to events that took place in France in 1615; and in doing so makes oblique comment on the France of 1836. The European Fantastic writer interprets history from his own historical position, but unlike the more traditional historical novelist weaves in and out of history to make comparisons between the past, the nearer past, and his own contemporary day (which is never­ theless still past to us, his twenty-first century readership). For these reasons a sense of chronology must always be kept in mind when reading this work, which is why there is a list of chronological events at the back of the book. My main hope is that this study will go some way towards re­ suscitating the status of writers who have perhaps been neglected for some time and have certainly not been awarded the attention that they deserve within the area of Gothic Studies. Furthermore, I hope that the field of influence which is normally considered in relation to the British Gothic writers will extend to include a more serious consideration of writers like Hoffmann, Nodier and Féval. It is with this objective in mind that the first chapter begins by discussing France’s architect of ‘Le Romantisme’ and major theorist of both the frénétique and the fantastique, Charles Nodier.

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1 Fantasy and Counter-Revolution in the Theory and Fiction of Charles Nodier  While Charles Nodier (1780–1844) may not be as well-known as either Hugo or Lamartine, his role in shaping, naming and directing both Romanticism and the rise of the Fantastic in France is too important to ignore. As regular contributor to Journal des débats and Revue de Paris, and as librarian at L’Arsenal in the Restoration period, where he held a small salon that included Hugo and Delacroix, he did much to define and defend the new literary trends which became popular in France after the fall of the Voltairean-minded Napoleon. He popularized the works of Byron in his stage-play co-authored with Albert Jouffroy, Le Vampire (1819) (not realizing that he was really working from Polidori’s text), and published Cyprien Bérard’s novel based on the same tale a year later.1 Nodier wrote in defence of the Fantastic, seeing it as the literature of a third age in which men began to rely upon sensation once again and to forget the abstractions of organized religion and science. Above all, however, he also wrote many Fantastic tales, including ‘Smarra’ (1821), a reworking of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass based on his time spent in Dalmatia, ‘La Fée aux miettes’ (‘The Crumb Fairy’) (1832), in which he blends Celtic mystery with plots similar to the Arabian Nights, and ‘Inès de las Sierras’ (1838): a work inspired by Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, where, in more classically Gothic style, he prolongs the reader’s hesitation between an uncanny and marvellous ending.

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Like many of his generation, Nodier found himself afloat upon the tide of an ever-changing political situation, whose futility, as Laurence Porter once noted, disposed him and other members of his generation towards the supernatural and non-natural as a method for divining truth when reason had failed in explaining the world.2 Born to a petty-bourgeois family of masons, Nodier’s father Antoine was an extremist Jacobin magistrate in Besançon, who presided over the local tribunal during the Reign of Terror until the fall of Robes­ pierre in 1794,3 on several occasions forcing his son to watch exe­ cutions. Nodier senior was then reappointed to the tribunal after Napoleon’s Brumaire coup of 1799.4 Despite being introduced to the local Jacobin club as a twelve-year-old, Charles formed his own club called the Philadelphes in 1797, with his friends Charles Weiss and Gabriel-Joseph Oudet. According to Marguérite Henry-Rosier the club was quasi-mystical and quasi-political (p. 49), and once staged a satirical play against the Jacobins, indicating a political distancing from his father on Nodier’s part (p. 63). In 1800, after Napoleon had become First Consul, Nodier was asked by the local prefect Marsan to help edit Bulletin Politique et Littéraire du Doubs, which paper exe­crated the earlier Jacobin administration and was loyal to the Consulate. Bored by provincial life, Nodier set out for Paris, where he began a literary career, and mingled with both Bonapartists and Chouans. In 1804 he wrote and published a ballad called Napoléone, which criticized the first consul just as he was about to declare himself Emperor (p. 105).5 Imprisoned for some few weeks and then pardoned due to his father’s intercession,6 Nodier returned to Franche-Comté and spent time in Amiens until 1812 (where he was librarian and factotum to the English scholar Sir Henry Croft),7 after which he was sent to the new Illyrian Republic and was charged with taking care of the library at Laybach in Carniola (modern Slovenia), and with editing the Télégraphe Illyrien: a period which formed the inspiration for his later works, Jean Sbogar (1818) and ‘Smarra’ (1821). After the second Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1815, Nodier quickly regretted having been a ‘lackey’ of the Empire under the dreaded Bonaparte, and published a work which, although ini­ tially anonymous, did much to rehabilitate him.8 In The History of the Secret Societies of the Army and of the Military Conspiracies which had for Object the Destruction of Bonaparte’s Government, Nodier literally 19

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changed his reality, as Rogers demonstrates, by creating a false past (p. 45), a feature he would continue in many other ‘Souvenirs’ (which were often written in article form for journals before being published in volumes).9 Hélène Lowe-Dupas argues that Nodier uses the language of theatricalization in many of these ‘souvenirs’ in order to distance himself from his real-life traumatic experiences, which simultaneously allows him to recall some of the violent events as part of an unconscious wish-fulfillment.10 However, according to Brian Rogers, Nodier’s deviations from the truth served a genuinely heartfelt need. Rather than being a simple, expedient obfuscation, these ‘souvenirs sycophantes’ were a means of redressing the wrongs of his life, and of creating a parallel reality which expresses a truth superior to lived experience by being a part of an ideally transformed reality.11 Rogers goes so far as to show the technical parallels between Nodier’s memoirs and his Fantastic fiction, such as moments of madness and reverie acting as revelations to the central character: a feature prominent in works like Jean Sbogar and his memoir ‘Suites d’un mandat d’arrêt’ (1832). Certainly, it is no small coincidence that Nodier’s promulgation of the Fantastic and the irrational in the post-Napoleonic period should coincide with his attempt to reconstruct his life and create an alternate reality. The lies in his souvenirs are frequently attempts to create a compensatory double for the real self that the vicissitudes of the age, political and philo­ sophical, had forced upon him, and are a defiant promotion of the imaginary and fantastic over the literal and verifiable truths which both rationalists and empiricists had imposed upon the era. His fictions do the same, although more thoroughly, by attempting to divine truth far from the limitations of post-Enlightenment phil­ osophy and to present his characters with a self-realization beyond the con­straints of the times and ideologies through which they lived. Indeed, some of his later contes, including ‘Inès de las Sierras’ (1837), demon­strate the extent to which fantasy, including supernatural experience, can be used to create reality, and that ‘reality’ itself can become the part of life which is reserved for a fictional self. In the following chapter I shall explore the development of Nodier’s frénétique and fantastique fiction alongside the maturity of his ideas on the Fantastic; the basis of his notion of the Fantastic as an anti20

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Enlightement and counter-revolutionary discourse and its funda­ mental divergence from the Todorovian definition; and then finally observe his use of the Fantastic in his later fiction to challenge science and to replace the real lives of characters like Michel in ‘La Fée aux miettes’, and Inès in ‘Inès de las Sierras’, with a compensatory reality which copies the project of his memoirs. Frénétique et fantastique Nodier’s understanding of the ‘fantastique’, which he also char­ acter­ized as ‘mensonges’ (lies), is certainly different to either Tzvetan Todorov’s definition or to Radcliffe’s literature of terror. For Nodier the fantastique – a term he only began to use in 1830 – involves not simply a tenuous relation to the supernatural, but more fundamentally deviations from reason and accepted dogmas in an act of rebellion against the age. As well as being one of France’s most successful expo­nents of the conte fantastique, he was also one of its most import­ ant theorists, characterizing it in various essays – introductory and otherwise – as a necessary form of inquiry for the epoch. Thus in the following section I shall be analysing the development of his theories of the frénétique and then the fantastique alongside the sym­ biotic practice of his fiction. After the reinstatement of the Monarchy in 1815, Nodier worked for various journals with a great degree of success, and effectively proselytized for the new literature by authors like Byron and Goethe, which had recently arrived from England and Germany. Apart from his first souvenir, his earliest success after the Restoration – in fact his first major success in the art of fiction – was a Romance which drew upon his experience of working in the Illyrian Provinces, and his acquaintance with the geography and mores of the region: Jean Sbogar (1818). This Romance tells the story of a wealthy Breton orphan, Antonia, who comes and stays at Casa Monteléone during the Napoleonic era, when the Dalmatian region is full of gossip about the brigand Jean Sbogar. Her own interest is piqued by this, and one day, while pretending to be asleep, she becomes aware of two men discussing her, one of whom she hears professing his love, calling Antonia his ‘wife before God’ (‘mon épouse devant Dieu’).12 21

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Later she and her sister leave the region in order to attend the party season in Venice, where they meet a young and gifted philan­ thropist called Lothario, who espouses nihilist political views (p. 150), and who defends Sbogar on the grounds that many founders of civilization have been brigands. Despite the obvious love between the two, Lothario runs off, leaving Antonia a set of tablets which betray highly left-wing, Jacobin views. Returning to Casa Monteléone, she and her sister are captured and spend time in Castle Duino, where she becomes mad, and accepts Sbogar’s hand in marriage in a confused mental state (p. 192). The castle is overrun by Napoleon’s army, which captures Sbogar and his men but frees Antonia. Placed at the site of his execution, she sees him and screams ‘Lothario’ as he is led in, falling and dying in a swoon. He, meanwhile, merely shouts ‘Marchons!’ to the others, and walks indifferently to his own death. Reports that Jean Sbogar was being read by the famous occupant of St Helena just after its publication contributed to the tale’s fame. At the time critics remarked on its similarity to Byron’s The Corsair, and made a somewhat unfavourable comparison with Ann Radcliffe’s novels.13 More recently, the critic Hélène Lowe-Dupas has seen it as continuing what she describes as Nodier’s poetics of ‘coupure’, or the ‘cut’, extending this metaphor of contradiction to the sociopolitical. While she notes that Rioux saw the romance as conservative in tendency, she understands it more as exposing the irreconcilably ambivalent attitude which Nodier held towards revolutionary politics, both idealizing them but presenting their inevitable debasement through violence: a point supported by the fact that the tale was instrumental in preventing Nodier from being granted a visa to Russia by Tsarists fearful of revolutionary agitators.14 The work certainly owes some debt to Ann Radcliffe in its use of an uncertain, terrified female protagonist and nightmarish castles, as Bryan Rogers has noted, although the ‘hesitation’ and uncertainty experienced by the heroine does not concern the potentially super­ natural but rather the ambiguity of Sbogar’s identity and the unreal nature of her own experience. It further exemplifies the bifurcation between the surface self created by external events and the com­ pensatory reality of the self revealed in dreams and imagination, which division formed an integral part of the rationale used by Nodier for rewriting the factual events of his memoirs.15 Hence, as 22

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Rogers remarks, Antonia only perceives the real Jean Sbogar and hears his confession of love when in a state of la folie.16 Similarly, Jean Sbogar can only be accepted by the sane Antonia when he is pretending to be someone else, Lothario. Just as Nodier happily distinguishes between the ideal self of his recreated truth and the pernicious reality forced upon him by history when recounting the events of his life in his memoirs, so he divides the hard-nosed brigand Jean Sbogar, who marches curtly to his death after his beloved has died, from the idealist Lothario, who adores the Hébertiste com­ munism of the Montenegrins.17 Fantasy, if not quite the Fantastic, is thus a means of divining truth and facilitating self-realization beyond the vicissitudes of reality in both Nodier’s memoirs and his fiction, and is indicative of a stance that was to develop throughout his later frénétique and fantastique fiction. A year later Nodier followed up this success by collaborating with Alfred Jouffroy on a stage-play ‘Le Vampire’ (1819), based on Byron’s (really Polidori’s) tale. In this version of the story, involving the death of Ruthwen, the solemn promise by Aubray not to reveal it and Ruthwen’s subsequent duping of Aubray’s sister, the action is moved to the Scottish islands and the villain is dispatched with poetic justice by a deus ex machina. While emulating the new literature issuing from Britain and Germany, Nodier also began to contribute many pieces to the Revue de Paris, the Journal des débats and other periodicals in order to proselytize on its behalf. He gathered a group of younger writers around himself, who would slowly leave the classical strictures of unity behind them and create a new literature which involved the ‘féerique’, but without being too extreme in its divergences. Aware of the charges that could be levelled by Classicists at the more grotesque forms of the ‘littérature romantique’, as he called it, he devised the name for a more extreme school – which, as Anthony Glinoer has shown, was more an attempt at exculpating other Romantic writers from the charge of sensationalism.18 In a review of a translation of the German writer Spiess’s poem Le Petit Pierre, Nodier claimed that: ‘It is absurd to believe that there might be a war of schools between Classics and Romantics’, before admitting that there does exist a literature of ‘monstrous extrava­ gances where all the laws are violated’. He then declares that while the age has been deadly, ‘it does not explain the too easy audacity of 23

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the poet and novelist who drags atheism, rage and despair across the tombs; who exhumes the dead to test the living, and who torments the imagination with horrible scenes’. This literature Nodier himself names the ‘frénétique’.19 The objection to a literature that violates all the rules suggests firstly a rejection of the excessively supernatural, although Nodier’s main complaint against the ‘frénétique’ seems to concern its use of the macabre and the horrific, given the tendencies he lists (which include atheism). We may thus presume that the ‘frénétique’ consists of mainly two features: violation of rules (of nature) and the horrific. Thus Nodier, as Glinoer notes, was really attempting to salvage the reputation of Romanticism through differentiating it from this supposed ‘school’.20 Thanks to the proximity in French between the word ‘roman’ (novel) and ‘romantique’, Nodier equated the imagin­ ation of the new literature with the novel form itself, declaring in his preface to Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen that the new form, ‘this romantic genre . . . [t]he very name of novel [roman] which recalls a modern language . . . excludes the obligation of this servile imitation of antiquity’. At the same time he declares that he does not like ‘these superstitions which . . . offer only scenes of terror to thought’, but feels justified in prefacing this particular vampire novel because the theme is so well established in European literature, especially in the work of Lord Byron.21 Indeed, while there are elements of the ghoul­ ish and thus the frénétique in Le Vampire (1819) and Lord Ruthwen (1820) (which Nodier may have in fact written himself), in neither work are there representations of horror or the macabre, with the violent acts, as in a Voltairean tragedy, being all ‘offstage’. Such denial of the macabre did not last long. In 1821 Nodier published his ‘translation’ of a tale by an Illyrian nobleman called ‘Maxime Odin’, ‘Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit’, together with three ‘Illyrian’ poems (one of which, like ‘Smarra’, was in fact an original composition). The tale is a dream fantasy, involving the nightmare of an eighteenth-century Piedmontese Lorenzo, who has just bedded down with his Greek beloved Lisidis. In the dream he becomes the Roman Lucius, a student at Larissa, Thessaly, who is returning home to his palace where he will feast and be waited on by his beautiful slave Myrthé.22 His friend Polémon then arrives at the palace. Polémon, like Lucius, is a veteran of the siege of 24

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Corinth, and now begins to describe his recent suffering at the hands of the witch Méroé. She cast a paralysis over Polémon’s body and opened up a column at her house to reveal demons of the night, who were eating children (pp. 81–2). When Polémon appealed for pity on their behalf she accused him of violating the enchantments of sleep, and opened a rhomboid from which emerged a slowgrowing stryge called Smarra that attacked his heart. When this was finished she took him high above the city to a sepulchre full of ghouls who were exhuming and tearing corpses, which she then forced Polémon to do as well (p. 87). At this point Lucius falls asleep, and finds a group accusing him of murdering Polémon and Myrthé. He is led to an execution block and beheaded, his head rolling later back onto his trunk (p. 92). Then Méroé takes him and Myrthé (who is really alive) up to the outer reaches of the sky, and sets the Smarra upon him. He then finds himself outside Polémon’s funeral tent at the Siege of Corinth, his friend really being dead all along (p. 95). Now Lorenzo wakes up and questions Lisidis about her loyalty to him. The tale draws from Nodier’s reading of Abbé Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia (1776), which details the story of a monk being attacked by a stryge:23 the classical precursor of the vampire, a half-owl, half-human creature, which, according to Pliny, attacks the heart. While the story may well have existed on the Dalmatian coast in folklore form, its basis is Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, which begins with Aristomenus seeing his friend Socrates attacked by witches and being powerless to intervene. In this sense the tale ‘Smarra’ continues the trends that Nodier first noticed in Illyria, when he observed the inherence of classical traditions in the primitivism of Dalmatia’s ‘Morlacks’.24 This in turn helped Nodier to re-envisage the traditions of the classical era as being more imaginative and less bound by Aristotelian principles of mimesis than was insisted upon by Voltaire and others. To reinforce this fact, the narrative is divided into a pro­ logue, récit, episode, epode and epilogue: Classical Greek structures around an otherwise wholly non-mimetic and fantastical story. The tale is full of the feel­ing of displacement, as the underlying relation between Lucius and Polémon as former comrades-in-arms is alluded to throughout the tale with comparative descriptions, and the scene keeps on shifting with little mitigation. 25

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Like Nodier’s earlier works the tale uses dream to explore the concealed reality of Lorenzo’s own self, and in doing so continues Nodier’s growing tendency to use fantasy to reveal a less obvious reality. ‘Smarra’, according to the original prologue, is the Illyrian word for a powerful spirit of nightmare (p. 55), and indeed the stryge is not only a nightmarish detail but is also an allegory of night­ mare itself, since Méroé is informing Polémon that his protestation is a violation of the ‘enchantments of sleep’ (‘les enchantements du sommeil’) for which he must be punished. Laurence Porter under­ stands the characters and the monster as representing aspects of the protagonist’s own self, and also interprets the female characters Lisidis, Méroé and Myrthé as being elements of the repressed Jungian anima.25 The framing and the potential allegory aside, the descriptive details are frequently horrific and macabre, with Polémon witnessing ghouls ‘[who] were breaking the sides of the coffins, tearing the sacred vestments, the last vestments of the corpse’,26 and sharing out the debris. Nodier’s own rejection of such details in his condemnation of the frénétique has clearly been ignored, although Gil Curiel cautions that the use of the dream itself helps to soften the effect of frénétique detail.27 In 1822 Nodier published Infernaliana, in which he culled and adapted many macabre pieces about the vampire from Calmet and other sources, while at the same time prefacing and epiloguing the tales with admonitions as to the absurdity of the superstition, asserting that ‘people of a somewhat solid spirit have never seen anything of this sort.’28 Thus he both warned against the absurdity of these tales, but also had few qualms in delighting readers with the gruesome stories of vampires like the Hungarian Arnold Paul, happily exploit­ ing what he had dismissed as ‘terreur’ (more horror, than terror, in the Radcliffe sense)29 and the ‘effrayante’ (terrifying) in his preface to Lord Ruthwen.30 It is small wonder that despite his early prot­ estations about not condoning such literature, he was later identified as an exponent of ‘littérature sanglante’ (‘bloody literature’) by A. Buchez.31 A year later, he appears to have moved ideologically further towards the ‘new literature’, not only in relation to breaking classical con­ vention, but in the acceptance of imaginative excess and the super­ natural as being expressions of truth. His preface to Amédée Pichot’s 26

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Essay on the Genius and Character of Lord Byron (1823), shows the first signs of this bolder attitude. Nodier declared that Byron was not so much the creator of a new kind of poetry as was the ‘state of affairs’ in which he found himself. ‘He revealed it’ (‘il l’a revélé’), rather than created it, being the witness to the end of one civilization and the birth of another, and its attendant ‘frénésies’.32 As Nodier understood it, the age had been ‘betrayed by a keen and cruel phil­ osophy’ (p. 6),33 and thus poets needed to ‘dare’ in figuring forth new fantasies and to reject the governing ideas of the time. Nodier further attributes to Byron and writers of this ‘movement’ a return to both the primeval sense of the marvellous (p. 9), and ‘an unbelievable deviation from human reason’ (p. 11),34 after the break-up of both religion and Enlightenment ideas. In this new world poets are free to question and challenge truths like no poets before, their imagin­ ations now pulled ‘beyond all limits’ by a desire to penetrate reality (pp. 12–13). Judging by the essay, one can see that Nodier saw a world plunged into chaos by the Revolution and its failure, and in particular by those thinkers who had trusted in reason and in the material world: The Sophists had materialized everything up to thought itself. Thought exalted everything up to matter itself; it invented in some way the descriptive mode by giving it an extension completely unknown to the ancients, who saw in the material merely an ornament, and who did not appear to be of the opinion, at least in the rare examples which remain to us, of attributing the impression of facts of nature to the moral ideas of a serious order. (Les sophistes avaient tout matérialisé jusqu’à la pensée. Elle divinisa tout jusqu’à la matière; elle inventa en quelque sorte le genre descriptif en lui donnant une extension tout-à-fait inconnue des anciens, qui n’y voyaient qu’un ornement, et qui ne paraissaient pas s’être avisés, du moins dans les rares exemples qui nous en restent, de coordonner l’impression des faits naturels à des idées morales d’un ordre sérieux.) (pp. 6–7)

This reads like a very strong rejection not only of Voltairean classic­ ism, but also of Voltaire’s own brand of rationalism, which rejected every possibility of the supernatural. Flying in the face of Voltaire’s 27

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Dictionnaire Philosophique (1766), which had scorned the vampire craze of the 1730s, Nodier appears to be promoting full-heartedly a return to the marvellous – and also, in his references to ‘frénésies’ and the ‘frénétique character of the age’ (‘caractère frénétique de l’age’), appears to promote the excesses of a type of literature from which he had previously distanced himself. Later essays temper the view that the reader should accept whole­ heartedly the ‘deviation from reason’ and overthrow of materialism presented in this type of literature, urging readers to enjoy the vicari­ ous pleasure of suspending disbelief and seeing through the eyes of primitives. Indeed, in his later piece Du Fantastique en littérature (1830) Nodier calls the Fantastic ‘mensonges’ – lies.35 This last essay, his most important one on the subject, explains literary history in a unique way. As Ada Myriam Scanu has demonstrated, while it does not use the term ‘merveilleux’ to describe the new literature, it still has parallels with his Preface to Pichot’s essay, not least in the purpose it attributes to fantasy in the contemporary period. As she further explains, it was also almost certainly a reaction against Scott’s essay ‘Du merveilleux dans le roman’, published a year earlier:36 a belief that is probably correct, since Nodier only began to use the term ‘fantastique’ from this point onwards,37 and Scott had singled out the Fantastic school.38 Scott had argued that while the ‘marvellous’ (‘merveilleux’), being the presentation of a historical set of beliefs, was acceptable, the new school of the Fantastic, hailing from Germany and epitomized by Hoffmann, was bizarre and self-indulgent, and unlike the ‘marvellous’ did not follow ‘some rule or other’ (p. 33). Scott’s historical pattern is taken up by Nodier, but completely inverted and reinterpreted. As Scanu rightly observes, Du Fantastique en littérature describes three ages working in the history of literature.39 In the early stages of a civilization, poetry is primitive and full of wonder, since man only trusts in what he sees, and what he sees he cannot explain. After this phase man moves to a questioning of the occult laws of nature and ‘from the seen to the unseen’, developing universal laws. Poetry then begins to reflect the ‘ordinary world’ and the ‘positivist world.’ However, man’s penchant for the Fantastic still remains and is important: thus, despite living in a world that is explained for him, man allows the fantastical to return with ‘lies’ (‘mensonges’). 28

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The three stages, which encompass all of human knowledge, he characterizes in the following passage: From these three successive operations, that of the inexplicable intel­ ligence which founded the material world, that of divinely inspired genius which had guessed at the spiritual world, and that of the imagin­ ation which had created the fantastic world, the vast empire of human thought was constituted. (De ces trois opérations successives, celle de l’intelligence inexplicable qui avoit fondé le monde matériel, celle du génie divinement inspiré qui avoit deviné le monde spirituel, celle de l’imagination qui avoit créé le monde fantastique, se composa le vaste empire de la pensée humaine.)40

This process appears to have been cyclical, since Nodier shows how the ‘first social order of things’ (‘premier ordre de choses sociale’), based on slavery and mythology (p. 15), began with an oriental in­ fusion that led to the epic works of Homer, for whom Scylla and Charybdis were real creatures (p. 13), then replaced this with phil­ osophy, only to find fantasy and ‘lies’ (‘mensonges’) again when people tired of the civilization’s governing ideas. The Moorish in­vasion reinjected the ‘lively and fruitful genius of young poetries’ (‘le génie vivace et producteur des jeunes poésies’) into the medieval world (p. 16), only for there to be a slow diminution in the Fantastic through the ages with the arrival of positivistic science, before the works of Hoffmann, Byron and others heralded a new dawn of loosened imagination. He finally urges his readers to break ‘the positivist world’ (p. 37), arguing that it is not sufficient, and further understands that the world is once again ripe for a new era of the Fantastic. The essay is distinguished not only by its illustration of a tripartite structure to the evolution of artistic creation, but also by the import­ ance it places upon fantasy for divining the abstract laws of any society. Furthermore, while Nodier does not see the use of imagination as a return to ‘sensation’ and the ‘known’, his description of the Fan­ tastic, as opposed to the positivistic, makes it clear that it involves a re­invigoration of the sensory in art even if it is not necessarily accompanied by literal belief in what the imagination sees. Nodier’s contrast between the Fantastic and material reality still demonstrates 29

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the importance of fantasy in divining either religious or positive truth, and also promotes the necessity of imagination in societies that have been over-encumbered by materialism, as exemplified by the Germans, who, despite being so scientific, nevertheless harbour ‘a pronounced repugnance for purely material innovations’, and so have a penchant for the Fantastic (p. 35).41 Nodier, therefore, makes the following ironic observation: that the interest in materialism and suppression of the supernatural only occurs because man has ceased to observe the external world properly, and has assumed that it is governed by abstract laws. The Fantastic heralds a new, third era because men find the abstract dogmas which they have conjured insufficient and need to surrender their minds to the sensory experiences of their imagination, which they really see, even if they cannot explain them. Attributing realism to an interest in the unseen may certainly seem at odds with Johnson’s famous definition of copying nature in the Preface to his Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, in which he calls ‘the poet of nature . . . the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life’.42 Nevertheless, Nodier’s attribution helps us to define what he means by the ‘materialism’ he had also conspicuously rejected in the Preface to Pichot’s essay. The three main philosophers of the French Enlightenment were Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, and the only one for whose ideas Nodier ever expressed any respect was Rousseau.43 Voltaire had con­stantly ridiculed the supernatural and argued for an abstract Supreme Being. Diderot, by contrast, refined the empirical method of discovery by insisting that the impressions of the senses could easily cloud the ability to apprehend the governing abstract forms of the world. In his famous Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les Aveugles, 1769), he detailed the mathematical skills of the blind-born Saounderson, a Cambridge mathematician who used a number symbolism based upon touch,44 the purest of the senses when it comes to measurement since it cannot be deceived (pp. 92–4). Unlike Voltaire, who believed in a Supreme Being, Diderot’s Saounderson saw no order at all: order in the universe was a momentary arrangement between opposed factions in material forces that would always disperse with time (pp. 125–6). Where both thinkers were united, however, was in scotching the supernatural. 30

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Thus when Nodier criticized the reduction of all phenomena to matter in his Preface to Pichot’s essay, and when he later claimed that the age of materialism was one in which men gave themselves over to the ‘unknown’ and its ‘occult laws’, ceasing to use their eyes, both objections could have been levelled at either Voltaire or Diderot: the one for his refusal to admit that the marvellous exists and for seeing the world as being regulated by reason; the other for his assertion of a material and chaotic universe which is devoid of all spirituality, and for not trusting the visual as a conduit for truth in his attempt to purify Lockean empiricism through touch.45 It would appear that Nodier wished to at least offer the possibility of both the supernatural and incarnatory as being real, and to challenge both reason and materialism in doing so. As such he was rejecting the views of the two most important philosophers of the French Enlightenment, whose ideas augured the Revolution: a position which he reinforced by espousing the neo-Platonic doctrine of Pallin­ genesis around this time.46 Gil Curiel, like Porter, has also noted Nodier’s tendency to mock science, in ‘a very particular kind of humour . . . full of surreptitious irony’, which allows the writer to ‘highlight the fragility of con­ ventional reality.’47 However, I would argue that Nodier’s questioning of science is the major and most serious cause and effect of the Fantastic in his later contes, and that it has its antecedents in his earlier work as a scientist. This early apprenticeship also helps to explain Du Fantastique en littérature’s odd promulgation of the sensory, rejection of materialism, and belief that the fantastic may divine truths superior to reason in advancing science itself. For Nodier’s first published works, based around his studies under his tutor Gidot, were works on entomology. A treatise on insects’ antennae, published when he was only seventeen,48 was followed by a Bibliographie entomologique in 1801, when he was barely twenty-one, which comprised six years of patient research. An examination of the latter shows why he may have developed a near-belief in the supernatural. The bibliography was meant to be a guide through all the avail­ able classificatory and explanatory literature on entomology, and con­tained a short description and opinion about each work. In the Preface the young Nodier details why his work is so badly needed. The world of entomology is vast, meaning that the work 31

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of most scholars is purely partial. Thus a bibliography is required, because: Who will establish rules from it over the choice and the inclination? What will be the guide in this maze of confused ideas and contradictory judgments? Who will teach him to discern the true amid the false, and in accordance with which disposition will he be able to forge a method for himself? It is the work of the bibliographer. The latter collects the results of observation and taste, points out the errors, reconciles opinions, and holds the yarn of Ariadne in the labyrinth of the sciences. (Mais, qui en réglera le choix et la disposition? Quel sera le guide du commençant dans ce dédale d’idées confuses et de jugemens contra­ dictoires? Qui lui apprendra à discerner le vrai d’avec le faux, et d’après quel sentiment pourra-t-il se former une méthode? C’est l’ouvrage du Bibliographe. Celui-ci receuille les arrêts de l’observation et du goût, élague les erreurs, concilie les opinions, et tient le fil d’Ariane dans le labyrinthe des sciences.)49

His work, he hopes, will show them where to begin, and will be as exhaustive a bibliography of the subject area as de Haller’s similar work on botany. Soon, however, he is detailing the merits and opin­ ions of the two most important entomologists of his era, Linnaeus and his student Fabricius. Linnaeus, the ‘taxonomist’ who founded modern naturalism, had identified many different types of insect by cataloguing species through wing-type, while his student Fabricius had performed the same task and discovered thirteen different ‘columns’ of insect-type by observing the shapes of the mouth (pp. 11–12). Thus the two most important entomologists of the era, whose books are listed consecutively in Nodier’s short bibliography, had provided com­ pletely different forms of classification, and with them the possibility of two different models of evolutionary theory: an explanation for natural development which was already being mooted in entomo­ logical circles, and had been proposed by the naturalist J.-B. Lamarck.50 At this early age, and just twelve years after the Revolution had begun, we already see examples of the scientist and the fantasist 32

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colliding in Nodier’s private correspondence. In a letter written to C.-F. Mandran, a Besançon scholar, in which Nodier enclosed a copy of his preface, he declared that it was the most complete of its kind, and urged Mandran to hand it on to Lamarck.51 Only two days later he writes a letter to his sister Elise, in which he details his experiences in the Salle de la Fantasmagorie, an ex-house of worship that had been turned into a palace of optical illusions. In this house: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Abbey of St Clair and The Caverns of Mazzini are no longer novels. I saw ghosts, shades of every kind wander around me and dissolve beneath my hand . . . one’s emotions are so energized at this terrible spectacle which one can scarcely cope with, that despite the frequent remarks of the physicist who directs and explains it, in spite of oneself one believes in revenants and magic. (Les Mystères d’Udolphe, l’Abbaye de Saint-Clair, et les Souterrains de Mazzini ne sont plus des romans. J’ai vu des fantômes, des ombres de toute espèce errer autour de moi et se dissoudre sous ma main . . . et les emotions sont tellement vives à ce spectacle terrible, qu’on peut, à peine, y suffire, et que malgré les fréquentes observations du phisicien qui le dirige et l’explique, on croit, en dépit de soi, aux revenans et à la magie.) (15 January 1801; I 143)

This letter is interesting for two major reasons: firstly, in that it demonstrates the impact which the ‘romans noirs’ of the 1790s, in this case the translations of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, had already exerted on the young Charles Nodier. The second reason is his attitude towards the supernatural. A young man who has just finished an ex­ haustive work on the natural sciences and makes bold claim to his rigour is two days later delightedly seeking escape from the material sciences in seeing the creatures of Gothic novels come to life. This tendency to doubt the material sciences and place faith for truth in the imaginary continued when he became a forceful promoter of Fantastic fiction. Thus Nodier’s later scorn for materialism and rationalism in favour of trusting sensory experience may have had deep roots in his scientific studies and realization that the confident optimism of Voltaire and Diderot in reason and materialism was mis­placed. Or it could equally have been caused by the need for a simple release from the rigours of scientific method, such as he 33

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shows in this evocative and indulgent letter to his sister. As shall be shown, attacking science through fantasy becomes a more and more prevalent theme in his later fiction. However, a further reason for Nodier’s insistence on fantasy is the one noted by Scanu: the ‘ruin’ which the views of the age had exerted upon revolutionary and Napoleonic France.52 The Reign of Terror had taken place in the same era when religious celebrations had been replaced with celebrations of the (Voltairean) Supreme Being: a deity of order and rationalism under whose gaze France had turned into an unjust mayhem where thousands were guillotined in a supposed act of ‘purification’. Despite the worship of an om­ nipo­tent, abstract deity, the atheistical ideas of Diderot, who had entered Religion next to Black Magic in his Encyclopédie, had also contributed to the callous witch hunt and execution of Catholic Priests in the name of reason. The later Napoleonic code, which had harmonized and ratiocinated the French justice system around enlightened ideas, had constituted the cause for the Grande Empire and the fruitless wars which had claimed the lives of friends like Oudet. Clearly Enlightenment philosophy did not achieve its goals, and it was this crisis which led Nodier towards the Fantastic. Nodier’s own generation had been genuinely ‘betrayed by a keen and cruel philosophy’: not least himself in the odd and enforced byways his life had taken up until 1813. All in all, therefore, despite having originally condemned the excesses of what he termed the ‘frénétique’ school, which involves gross violations of natural laws and the macabre, Nodier himself more and more practised and later condoned deviations from reason and ‘lies’ in his fiction and essays, and eventually developed a theory of what he now called the fantastique, which saw this same overimaginative literature as both contributing to knowledge and as fly­ ing in the face of the failures of the Enlightenment. Nodier’s theory was spurred not only by the rejection of Scott but by his realization that the science promulgated by Voltaire and Diderot had failed to explain nature properly, and had also ushered in political obscenities. This theory of the ‘Fantastic’ is very different to that described by Todorov, since the supernatural has a curative and political effect in it which may improve our understanding of the very ‘laws of nature’ that Todorov takes as a given, and which apply far more to 34

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the assumptions within the British Gothic.53 Finally, the power of the self to intuit truth through imagination and ‘mensonges’ in Nodier’s fiction was linked to his promotion of fantasy in relation to his own life and experience, since both his fiction and his memoirs depend upon a rejection of Enlightenment principles and their effects. In his later contes fantastiques, the use of the supernatural in the Fantastic and the quest for a fictional, compensatory reality for the self, ultim­ately find a perfect union. In the following section I will demonstrate how Nodier refined his understanding of the Fantastic through the contes ‘Histoire d’Hélène Gillet’ (1832), ‘La Fée aux miettes’ (‘The Crumb Fairy’) (1832) and ‘Inès de las Sierras’ (1837) in order to challenge science, and thus paved the way for a later Gothic and frénétique literature that is counterrevolutionary in spirit, and which lays the blame for terror and horror upon the Enlightenment. Later Fantastic Fiction ‘L’Histoire d’Hélène Gillet’ purports from the very beginning to be a true story based upon an event that took place during the reign of Louis XIII. A young and virtuous aristocratic woman of Dijon is suborned by a violent lover, by whom she bears a child. The fact is kept secret, until one day a student breaks into her house and steals her infant.54 Later a soldier discovers the body of her child wrapped in a shawl bearing her name and she is put on trial and found guilty of murder (pp. 264–7). When her daughter is sentenced to death, Hélène’s mother has already retreated to a nunnery, having believed her daughter will be cleared, but hears her execution pro­ cession from within the walls. The executioner arrives with his wife, but he is mortified when he sees the beautiful girl, and does not want to behead her. The crowd jeer him on, and he cuts her left shoulder instead. At this point the crowd turn on the executioner and kill him (p. 272), taking Hélène herself to a nearby convent. She is pardoned due to the good mood of Louis XIII, and the story ends with the narrator excoriating the readers, who have had so many revolutions, for not having a revolution against the penalty of death (p. 278). 35

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The conte is full of self-conscious allusions to the act of storytelling and the distance in time between the events narrated and the epoch in which the actual narration is taking place. At the beginning the narrator tells the reader that they may need to hear a story since ‘The winter will be long and sad’ (‘L’hiver sera long et triste’) (p. 259). When asking the reader to imagine the scene, he asks them ‘if you want to lend me for a moment the magic wand of Hugo or Dumas, I shall transport the scene to another place.’55 He frequently refers to the fact that he is not to blame for the ‘cruel details’ of the execution scene, exonerating himself as narrator, since unlike in a tragedy his role is negligible due to the historical reality of the events. The effect of this self-consciousness is either to distance the reader from the frénétique details or else to exonerate the writer from the charge of prurience in preparation for the sudden moral excoriation of the audience at the end. The narrator’s relation to his material and to the telling of the tale is alternatively and paradoxically one which underlines the reality of the events and the imagination involved in the telling. This simultaneous underlining of the artistic and historical ele­ ments of the tale is predicated by the bizarre genre to which the tale belongs, according to the narrator’s own delineation. Unlike the histoire fantastique fausse, whose charm results from the credulity of the teller and listener, or the histoire fantastique vague, which ‘leaves the soul suspended in a dreamlike and the melancholic doubt’, the histoire fantastique vraie is the ‘relation of a fact held as being materially impossible, which has nevertheless been accomplished in the know­ ledge of the whole world’.56 In keeping with his earlier discussion of the Fantastic as an important mode of enquiry after the failure of Enlighten­ment philosophy and science, Nodier expands the genre along onto­logical rather than formal lines: the Fantastic tale which involves a simple suspension of disbelief in Coleridgean terms (fausse or false), the Fantastic tale along potentially true lines (vague) whose cause is not resolved, and the Fantastic as something which defies all reason and yet is a genuine historical account (vraie or true), recalled without embellishment by the narrator. Such a story he admits is rare, so rare that it is also important. While Scanu has noticed that Todorov’s ideas are certainly not applicable to the conte fantastique fausse, since the critic has banished 36

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the allegorical and fairy tales from the modern pantheon of the Fantastic,57 it is fair to say that the fantastique vraie is an even greater challenge to Todorov’s ideas. The intellectual lesson which the narrator draws from the latter is to doubt the same expectations con­ cerning ‘the laws of nature’ which Todorov sees as implicit to the assumptions made by the reader,58 and to understand the Fantastic as opening up new potential vistas on science. Castex sees the possibility of the Fantastic in the tale through the potential gift of prophecy exhibited by one of the nuns, who believes that the people are celebrating Hélène’s release when their noise indicates the arrival at her execution.59 However, the narrator himself would appear to locate it far more in medieval Providence, when he juxtaposes the belief of an earlier era against those of his own day: It was the age of candour and of faith, in which it was not supposed that the natural human order of things could turn upside down against all probability without some secret design from Providence; and I am one of those who would still hold this opinion as reasonable, in this era of intellectual perfection and of immense social improve­ ment at which we have had the good fortune to arrive . . . (C’était alors un âge de candeur et de foi, où l’on ne supposait pas que l’ordre naturel des choses humaine s’intervertît contre toute probabilité sans quelque dessein sécret de la Providence; et je suis de ceux qui tiendraient encore cette opinion pour raisonnable, à l’époque de perfectionnement intellectuel et d’immense amélioration sociale où nous avons eu le Bonheur de parvenir. . .) (p. 274)

While he admits earlier that this is the only example of the fantastique vraie that he knows, its ability to challenge Enlightenment philosophy indicates that Nodier is keeping to his earlier discussion of the Fantastic as a means of casting doubt on the accepted laws of the ‘unseen’ in his own, rationalist age. Thus the story serves a philosophical rather than a purely literary purpose, and its features serve to challenge scientific norms rather than confirm them, as is the case with all other definitions of the Fantastic and of the Gothic. Lowe-Dupas argues that the conte works through displacement: the narrator begins by fabricating the instance of narration through 37

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inviting his imaginary listeners in, only to then turn round and castigate them at the end for continuing to accept the modern-day type of beheading, the guillotine. Similarly, she sees the real pro­ tagonist of the story as being the unspoken guillotine, since Hélène herself is an undeveloped character while the execution site bears similarities to the more contemporary scaffold to which Nodier’s narrator refers so openly and so passionately at the end. The story is one of many which contains a beheading scene: a re­cur­ring feature, which Lowe-Dupas, in her discussion of the ‘poétique de la coupure’ in Nodier’s work, believes to result from both a fascination and a repulsion towards earlier traumatic witnessings, and which may even issue from a repressed castration anxiety (a point which makes sense given that Nodier’s father had been personally responsible for order­ ing executions during the Reign of Terror).60 Within this displacement, however, we see a further feature of the Fantastic as practised by Hoffmann and Gautier as well: using the historical anachronistically to present not the progress of Scott, but the recurrence of history in keeping with either Legitimism or simple pessimism. The main reason for telling the story of Hélène Gillet is to demonstrate not only the insufficiency of Enlightenment views, but also the lack of progress since the early seventeenth century: that the state-sponsored murder of Hélène is no different to what occurs in Nodier’s own day. This ability to describe the past while alluding to the present is another feature of the continental Fantastic tale, one employed by Hoffmann and adapted by the likes of Gautier and Féval, although in all their cases the compression of historical era is facilitated more by careful allusion than by a more open com­ parison. Nodier also published another Fantastic tale in 1832, the quite long novella ‘La Fée aux miettes’, which once again dramatizes the advisability of creating an alternative reality and questions the veracity of science. The story begins with the unnamed narrator asking his Scottish servant Daniel about the lunatics held in Glasgow, and argu­ing that the lunatic is not truly mad, simply in a special place on the Great Chain of Being that is not yet understood.61 They arrive at the Glasgow asylum, and meet Michel, a scholar and carpenter, who is searching for the singing mandrake so that he may transform his beloved, the crumb fairy, into Belkiss, the Queen of Sheba and 38

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widow of Solomon. He tells how in Normandy he was raised by his uncle since his father had disappeared, and was told to become a carpenter when he left school, despite his love for the classics (pp. 75–6). At school he and his friends knew a beggar-woman called the crumb fairy, whom they all liked despite the approbation of the teachers, since she was a fountain of knowledge. Some few feet high, she was reputed to be many years old. One day at Mont St-Michel she confessed her love to the young scholar, and he prom­ ised to marry her, giving her twenty louis before she returned to her home in Libya (although she also hails from Greenock in Scotland). Michel leaves school and works as a carpenter, his uncle abandon­ ing him to look for Michel’s father. After a while he works where he can, and saves the crumb fairy from drowning at the anniversary of their previous meeting at Mont St-Michel (pp. 91–2). He takes her advice and works from place to place, eventually ending up at Pontorson. There he leaves for Le Havre, and boards a ship called the Queen of Sheba, whose destination is unknown until it sets out to sea. The ship is wrecked off the coast of Scotland, and Michel salvages a bag which contains the crumb fairy (pp. 100–2). She gives him a medallion possessing a picture of the queen of the country where she has been (who is later acknowledged as the Queen of Greenock as well), Belkiss. Michel travels to Greenock, where he meets the refined dogs of the Isle of Man, and works for Master Finewood as a carpenter (pp. 106–8). He dreams of searching for Belkiss once again, but finds himself accused and tried for killing the ‘Bailli’ of the Isle of Man, the highlyeducated dog, Sir Jap Muzzleburn (p. 122). Sentenced to death, and forced to forfeit the medallion with the image of Belkiss, he is saved from execution at the last moment by the fairy, who reveals that Sir Jap is not really dead and that he wishes to reward Michel for defending him. Michel retires to a croft and makes good his prom­ise to marry the fairy (p. 141). He then has dreams in which the fairy and Belkiss blend into one, and after a long lecture on the real nature of happiness and the failures of science, the fairy tells him that she is Belkiss, but that if he wants the image of Belkiss to merge finally with her bodily form, he must find the singing mandrake (p. 171). This takes him eventually to the asylum in Glasgow where he is treated as a madman, surrounded by mandrakes. A scientist 39

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assures the narrator that a mandrake cannot sing (pp. 176–8). The story ends with an epilogue that has the narrator in Venice meet­ ing one of the the lunatici of Sienna, who gives the narrator a book explaining how Michel was eventually lifted from his prison by the fairy, and married the Queen of Sheba (p. 182). Laurence Porter sees the tale as a self-actualization towards maturity, in which the characters are all elements of Michel’s own psyche. He further notices that many of the grotesque details arise from ‘La Fée Urgèle’ by Favart, while also commenting on the oriental element in the tale.62 We might also add that the story draws partly from the Arabian Nights, with its shipwrecks and sudden transformations of fortune, and partly from Gulliver’s Travels, in that there are long comparisons between the civilized, talking dogs of the Isle of Man, including the rational and benevolent Sir Jap Muzzleburn, and the bestial nature of the people of Greenock, who put Michel on trial for a crime he did not commit. As in other, earlier stories we have the presentation of madness as a better and compensatory reality, a point developed by Rogers, who remarks on the diminishing import­ ance of time and geographical space with each significant stage in the journey, and relates it to comments recently made by Nodier in his open avowal of pallingenesis, and the belief that imagination restores man to the complete soul, which must otherwise reveal itself over many lives.63 Indeed, while the narrative here does involve a hesitation between an uncanny and a marvellous ending, it is never­ theless the attitude to wisdom and science that is most foregrounded. The fairy, as Belkiss/Sheba, the widow of Solomon, represents wisdom. When Michel is mocked by the crowd for renewing his betrothal to the hideous crumb fairy, she assures him that it is wisdom, and not beauty, that is important, but he finds her beautiful anyway, re­ affirming that wisdom, real wisdom, can transform anything. During their philosophical discussion of happiness, in which Michel himself berates the philosophers of the age, she assures him of the importance of madness for finding truth, echoing the sceptical views of Nodier himself: Have you not noticed that the vain wisdoms of man sometimes drive him to madness? And who is preventing this indefinable state of the spirit, which ignorance calls madness, from driving it in its turn 40

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Fantasy and Counter-Revolution towards the supreme wisdom through some unknown route which is not yet marked out on the primitive map of your imperfect sciences? There are enigmas in your life; but what is life itself if it is not an enigma? (N’as-tu pas remarqué que les vaines sagesses de l’homme le conduisent quelquefois à la folie? Et qui empêche que cet état indéfinissable de l’esprit, que l’ignorance appelle folie, ne le conduise à son tour à la suprême sagesse par quelque route inconnue qui n’est pas encore marquée dans la carte grossière de vos sciences imparfaites? Il y a des énigmes dans ta vie; mais qu’est-ce que la vie elle-même si ce n’est une énigme?) (p. 168)

The importance of leaving reason behind to divine truth is evident here, echoing Nodier’s own scepticism towards science. Earlier, Michel expresses his beliefs in the possibility of extending science to include elements discussed by the Ancients when describing the wedding ceremony of the dog-people, as he admits that although he had heard of the race of ‘cynephal’ [doglike] men mentioned by Herodotus, Strab, Plutarch and others, he had never had faith in this description until that day (p. 107). Indeed, the narrator even reproduces the image Nodier himself had used to describe the tangle left by several centuries of entomological study in his early bibli­ ography when, describing the minds of madmen, he declares that we approach things purely from the limit of our knowledge, and that to understand the mind of the madman we must simply find the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ to take us through the maze (p. 70). Here, the resoluble contradictions of the madman are symbolized with a metaphor earlier used by Nodier to present the same contradictions and solubility to a post-Enlightenment science, entomology:64 a science which Nodier appears through his Bibliography entries to have acknow­ledged tacitly as having been insoluble, unlike the wisdom of the madman who transcends such methods. Above all, however, the transformative power of the singing man­ drake corresponds to the threat to rationalism and materialist science represented by an event like the true story of Hélène Gillet: the fantastique vraie is ‘rare, si rare’, and yet it does exist in its anomal­ ous­ness. The singing mandrake is singular, but in the madman’s view 41

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can be shown to exist. Its rareness is less important than its actual existence, which can threaten the certainties of the Enlightenment, and justify madness. ‘Inès de las Sierras’(1837) is one of Nodier’s less examined contes fantastiques, partly because it is ostensibly less inventive than works like ‘Trilby’ and ‘La Fée aux miettes’, and partly because its dénoue­ ment is so fantastical that, as Todorov has written, it is less believable than a genuinely marvellous dénouement would be.65 Nevertheless, despite its obvious debts to the romans noirs of Ann Radcliffe, remarked on by Rogers,66 which include the mythical castle and constant suspense between an uncanny and a marvellous ending, it continues the Nodier theme of the Fantastic as compensatory reality and also, perhaps more than any other of his tales, illustrates his ideas on the progress of science and scepticism towards scientific know­ledge in his own day. The story begins with the unnamed narrator recounting how he once told a story from his own life to his two female friends Eudoxie and Anastase. The original story concerns the time when he was an officer in Napoleon’s army travelling from Girona to Barcelona with two fellow officers: Sergy, an incurable Romantic, who is credu­ lous towards the supernatural, and Boutraix, a big drinker, who is a sceptic and constantly cites Voltaire and Piron, the epigram­matist, to buttress his atheistical views.67 Travelling with them is Bascara, a superstitious actor-manager who has just joined them, and an arierro (muleteer) called Estevan, who will take them to Barcelona. On the way they are waylaid by snow, forcing them to replenish at a local inn and then take refuge in the deserted Castle of Ghismondo. Bascara says it is a place where one must ‘make a prior pact with the spirit of malice’ before entering (p. 201),68 and Estevan recounts its miserable history. Many years ago the Count Ghismondo became a wicked highwayman, plundering passing travellers and committing outrages. On Christmas Eve, as he was revelling with two accom­ plices, his niece, Inès de las Sierras, whom he had shamefully kid­ napped to be ‘une compagne’, came to castigate him for his crimes, and he pierced her breast with his sword.69 Later, the ghost of Inès appeared before him and laid her burning hand on his heart. From then on the ghost has reappeared every Christmas Eve to meet whom­soever might be there. Estevan’s father has also seen her. 42

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Boutraix is sceptical and Sergy enthralled. They move on into the castle and into Ghismondo’s dining-room, which is well-lit despite possessing a forbidding ‘darkness’, like ‘the darkness visible of the poet’ (p. 210). They find clothes from an earlier era, which they dress up in for the sake of their own amusement, believing them to have been left by actors, and then drink wine. As they toast Inès they hear ‘Me voilà’ (p. 212). On the stroke of midnight Inès has arrived. She eats and drinks with them, and when challenged shows the wound in her breast and a bracelet with her name engraved on it to prove she is indeed ‘Inès’(p. 215), begging them to pity a girl thrown amongst the dead by the man she loved. She puts her arm round Sergy, toasts them and sings the song nina matada (p. 217) before dancing with castanets. Attracted to Sergy, she begs him to follow her, but he is held back by the narrator, who believes she may be a bandit’s decoy (pp. 219–20). The narrator now claims Bascara may have contrived the event, but Bascara reminds him of the accident by which they met and of the unforeseen nature of their journey (p. 222). Indeed Bascara declares that she must be a soul in purgatory (p. 223). The narrator makes the three other men swear that they will never recount the story to others, in case they are considered to be mad. Later he, Sergy and Boutraix are called to fight in defence of Napoleon at the Battle of Lutzen, in which Sergy falls fighting, uttering ‘Inès, I will join you’ as his last words.70 Boutraix later becomes a monk and goes to a cloister, converted by the experience. The narrator returns to his ancestral home, where he is now to be found. He breaks his story at this point, refusing to provide any reason for the phenomenon to his audience, only to return a month later and complete the tale. After the first Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 he was allowed to visit a friend in Barcelona, Pablo de Klauza, who was about to marry the beautiful Leonora. Striking up an overly warm relationship with the fiancée’s beautiful sister, Estelle, the narrator and his friends attend the opera that night, where they are entertained by La Pedrina, who is ‘possessed of a sublime frenzy’.71 She is the same woman who had sung and danced at Ghismondo. Shocked and amazed, he asks his host for her story. She is really a beautiful Mexican woman called Inès, who ran away with her Sicilian lover to Spain after her father was murdered by a jealous love-rival 43

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for his new wife (pp. 229–30). Once there she became estranged from her lover, seeing his fundamental badness, while she herself became a sensation on the stage at Madrid (p. 232). Back in Sicily the lover managed to persuade his mother into allowing his marriage to Inès. He wooed Inès once more, and took her with him onto a boat to depart, where he stabbed her and stole her necklace (p. 234). The wound was not fatal, but enough to cause deliriousness and bouts of madness. She disappeared not long before Christmas and was presumed dead. Around this time there were disturbances during a storm near the Château de Ghismondo. This same place enjoyed a supernatural reputation regarding the night of Christmas Eve; however, the stories of noises from a banquet emanating from the castle that night in­ trigued the local police, who thought some enemies of Napoleon might be lodging there. When they arrived they found evidence of much drinking, due to the empty casks left, but also found Inès wandering around, who rushed towards them crying ‘Is it you? . . . What a long time you have made yourself wait!’ (‘Est-ce toi . . . Combien tu t’es fait attendre!’) (p. 237), and then burst into tears as soon as she saw it was not the man she expected. Afterwards she claimed that she had lodged in this manor with certain provisions, a refuge which she claimed by right of her forefathers, ‘seigneurs de Las Sierras’. Her memories were now confused, but she recalled meeting people dressed in clothes from another era, one of whom – a young man – made a profound impact upon her. She has since improved, says Pablo, and is now about to join the troupe of Bascara. At this point, the narrator tells his guests, he broke his pact never to relate his story and explained his own experience to Pablo, since Inès was bound to discover the truth herself. His current listeners, in the main diegesis of the narrative (which is his own interrupted telling of the tale to the listeners, which ‘telling’ he is now recounting subsequently to the reader), declare that it proves the falsity of the supernatural and the need to banish credulousness. He, on the other hand, assures them of the opposite: that it is a cautionary tale on how we should never dismiss the reality of the supernatural, since man is not capable of inventing anything, or rather that ‘invention is in him only an inner perception of real facts’ (p. 239).72 He finishes by excoriating science for its inconsistencies: ‘What is science doing 44

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today? At each new discovery it justifies, it authenticates . . . one of the presumed lies (‘mensonges’) of Herodotus and of Pliny’ (pp. 239–40).73 He was about to discuss apparitions, but now saw that his audience was asleep. The tale obviously shares much with Radcliffe’s novels, including its seventeenth-century castle and induced hesitation between a marvellous and an uncanny resolution. Here, the choice between the marvellous and uncanny explications is in fact dramatized in the opinions of Sergy and Boutraix, who give voice to the alternatives which the reader and the other characters have to choose between. The seventeenth-century setting is also contrived, the result of reach­ ing an abandoned castle and donning costumes from an earlier era in the spirit of play-acting, and of the two parties – Inès and the French soldiers – being mistaken as to each other’s identities. The idea of acting and pretence is important, however, since the story depends upon a subtle inversion of the real and the imagined. For here the fantastic becomes real for all the characters involved, while the real is concealed by the unreal, in the form of Inès’s stage name, ‘La Pedrina’, through which the Barcelona crowds know her after her return from the castle. Ironically, her real name, Inès, becomes immersed in the identity of an earlier ancestor and that of a fabled ghost, through the mistakes and coincidences. While the story certainly draws from the roman noir, and the Fantastic-Uncanny structure later described by Todorov, in which the promise of the supernatural, augured by the heroine’s intense terror, is ultimately thwarted, this itself is no more than a convenient device for portraying the role of fantasy in altering reality: more importantly, how the supernatural, if believed in, can alter the iden­ tity of an individual and reveal the compensatory reality of an imagined life. Or rather, how the fantastical can help another to find satiation in an unreal and ethereal world. For Inès says nothing to Sergy that is not true: as Inès, the beloved of Gaetano, she was wounded in the breast, just as was the earlier Inès (although we cannot know if the later Inès was aware of this). To him, as for the others who know the fable, she can only appear as a phantom woman, divorced from the mundane reality which later destroys him. To the sceptic but hard-drinking Boutraix, she is also clearly a phantom, curing him of his scepticism (and presumably also of his drinking – a metonym 45

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for his spiritual barrenness), once he enters the cloister as a monk. For Inès, too, these men, including Sergy, with whom she falls in love during her delirium, are either preternatural or unexplained due to their historical costumes. The two ‘lovers’ collide quite innocently and present false identities to each other without any intention of doing so, and yet provide a sense of completion to their own desires. As proof that the supernatural experience has provided her with the sense of completion which life itself cannot, she takes a fictional, false name for her remaining reality, when she has ‘returned to reason’ (p. 238), the real name dying with the exhilaration of meeting the ‘phantom’ Sergy at Ghismondo’s castle. In this sense ‘Inès de las Sierras’ is the most unusual of Nodier’s tales: other stories like ‘Trilby’ or ‘La Fée aux miettes’ present char­ acters whose reality changes through madness, in which the perceptual adjustment which allows them to recreate fiction occurs in the mind. Here, the perceptual adjustment is caused by mistaken identity of the other, inducing both parties to believe they are taking part in an exhilarating, fantastic experience. The story is nevertheless only revealed to us because the narrator, the sole witness to remain mildly sceptical after her departure, has broken his vow and has revealed the events, three times at least (once to Pablo, once to his provincial audience, to whom he relates the whole process of discovery, and once again to the reader of the current tale). The only reason why he can break this vow is because the event was not what it seemed: not a supernatural mystery, but an unexpected set of haphazard events resulting in mistaken identity. Despite this, he shows immense shrewdness when countering the claims that ‘the surest thing is to doubt’ and that there can be no apparitions, with the suggestion that phantoms may exist since ‘invention is only a perception of real things’. While he has been presented a full perception, the perception of all the others was partial: hence, like the earliest stage of Nodier’s theory of literary history, the characters were simply trusting the impressions of their senses, without access to the rational causes which explain them. Therefore, the narrator seems to conclude, all imaginative invention is really no more than honest perception under certain conditions determined by the limits of the perceiver. In this sense, it is not really different to science itself, which is still evolving: hence why one 46

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should not dismiss the supernatural. This factor, like the cynephal men observed by Michel in ‘La Fée aux miettes’, leads the narrator to declare that certain species described by pre-Enlightenment scientists may well turn out to be true: another inflection from Nodier’s earlier attempts at categorizing insects. Above all, however, the fantastic experience leads the two lovers to a sense of completion in the presumed supernatural, which makes reality itself a falsehood in relation to their own ideal selves. The fact that the narrator refuses to banish the possibility of the super­natural also indicates Nodier’s own acceptance of an ideal selfhood forged far from the philosophy of Voltaire: the compensation for a cruel reality that was prepared for by the Enlightenment, enacted through the Revolution, and culminated in the grim wars of Napoleon’s expansionist enterprise which claim Sergy’s life. Nodier’s promotion of the Fantastic and of self-fiction have thus completely entwined in this work. In conclusion, Nodier’s articles theorizing the frénétique and finally the fantastique describe this type of literature as providing an antidote to the abstract doctrines which had led to the Revolution and had created an imperfect physical science. This was because Enlighten­ ment phil­osophy and science were flawed and had also betrayed his generation, leaving intense imagination as the only worthwhile in­ vesti­gative discipline: capable of both creating a compensatory and fuller reality for the self, and also of actually extending and improving science. Nodier’s theory and practice of the Fantastic contradicts the naturalist assumptions of Todorov and of later critics like Punter and Botting, by promoting fantasy as the means of discovering a new reality that challenges post-Enlightenment assumptions. Finally, Nodier’s theory and practice of the frénétique and fantastique was the preparation for a type of European Gothic literature, prevalent in the work of Féval and Stevenson, which, as I shall show later, entirely derides the Enlightenment and the Revolution by casting reason, rather than the ‘irrational’, as the main cause of terror and horror in society.

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2 History and Politics in the Fantastic Fiction of Hoffmann, and his Reception in France  As Ada Myriam Scanu has shown, the publication in France of a translation (and in many cases adaptation) of Scott’s inflammatory ‘On the supernatural element of fictitious composition, and particu­ larly on the Works of Ernest Theodore Hoffmann’ (1827),1 was an important factor in both the promotion of Hoffmann’s work and the definition of the ‘Fantastic’ genre thereafter. Not only did Nodier himself forge an antithetical reaction to the Scotsman’s words, but a whole host of critics and readers queued up to defend the German’s art and devour translations of his writing, to the point where even Théophile Gautier expressed amazement at Hoffman’s popularity in France.2 The first third of Scott’s essay, which considers the difference between the marvellous and the Fantastic, and the credibility of using the supernatural in modern literature when people have ceased to believe in the phenomenon, was published 27 March 1829 under the title ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’ in Revue de Paris. The last part of the essay, which constitutes an assault on Hoffmann and praise for Scott’s own Waverley novels, was published at the end of that year as the ironic preface to Latouche Loève-Veimar’s first translated book of Hoffmann’s Contes fantastiques, and was repeated in subsequent volumes of translations. This part was less theoretical and centred mainly on demolishing Hoffmann’s work as being too extreme and too wayward, attacking the over-sensitive nature of the German’s mind. Scott also, oddly enough, castigated Hoffmann

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for never attempting historical fiction:3 a view which is most de­ bateable, as I shall show subsequently. Scott’s derision of Hoffmann for a French audience was thus a complete failure, as both these parts of his original essay heralded a flurry of interest in the German writer’s work. A closer examination of Scott’s essay, as presented in Revue de Paris, is thus in order, since it can explain the features in Hoffmann’s work to which Scott object­ ed, and the important features of his argument that spurred French critics into a hostile defence of both Hoffmann and the new Fantastic genre. In the essay ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’ Scott noted with some relish Dr Johnson’s statement that many who denied super­ natural appar­itions ‘with their lips, still attest to them with their fear’.4 Despite this wry observation, he still urged that the supernatural in the novel be used sparingly since its effect diminished each time it was introduced, as ‘the imagination must be stimulated but never satisfied’.5 He also praised the ‘merveilleux’ or marvellous when included in works like the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tales, and other collections of ‘the old sources of popular legends’ (p. 30), seeing in these a form of antiquarianism in collecting the beliefs of an earlier time, which perhaps could be used to prove an original ‘common tradition’ between different cultures (p. 31). What he could not accept, however, was the new school of the Fantastic, hailing from Germany, which broke rules that should be established between the writer and the reader. In this new literature the imagination abandons itself to all the irregularities of its whims . . . In the other fictions where the marvellous is admitted, some rule or other is followed; here, the imagination only stops when it is exhausted. This novel is to the more regular novel, serious or comic, what the farce or parodies and pantomime are to tragedy and comedy. The most unforeseen and extraordinary transformations take place through the most improbable means. Nothing attempts to modify the absurdity. (‘l’imagination s’abondonne à toute l’irregularité de ses caprices . . . Dans les autres fictions ou le merveilleux est admis, on suit une règle quelconque; ici, l’imagination ne s’arrête que lorsqu’elle est épuisée. Ce genre est au roman plus régulier, sérieux ou comique, ce que la 49

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The Fantastic and European Gothic farce, ou plutôt les parodies et la pantomime sont à la tragedie et à la comédie. Les transformations les plus imprévues et les plus extra­ ordinaires ont lieu par les moyens les plus improbables. Rien ne tend à modifier l’absurdité.) (p. 33)

He ends by blaming Hoffmann for this new literature that is full of the most bizarre and burlesque writing. Scott’s description of the merveilleux and the fantastique betrays his implicit assumptions about the duties of the author to his or her readership. Firstly, the admissibility of the supernatural in literature when used sparingly indicates his acceptance that literature should entertain, as well as the feasibility of promoting terror in the Radcliff­ ean sense, since he is judging the literary work in terms of its effect.6 Secondly, the praise for modern works of the marvellous, like the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and Nodier’s ‘Trilby’ (based in the High­ lands of Scotland) is a sure symptom of his penchant for the historic­ ally educative potential of fiction, since he believes that a literary work can also embrace the supernatural if it illustrates the older, mytho­logical mind of a civilization. Here Scott the historical novelist also resurfaces in his criticism of other works. Just as his own Waverley novels portrayed and explained the judgements and reactions of people in the past, so too it would appear that the presentation of unreal superstitions is quite acceptable if there is ‘some rule or other’, through which the readers are reminded that the consciousness they are shown is different from that of their own day or from that of more rational people. Thus the supernatural is acceptable if used briefly for effect, or if illustrating a set of historical or local beliefs. However, Scott’s opinion that the Fantastic is unacceptable and full of absurdity, because there isn’t ‘some rule or other’, and because there is no attempt ‘to modify the absurdity’, betrays certain unvoiced observations he has made about the work of Hoffmann and his ilk. One is that the new German school is a hybrid, mixing naturalist and rationalist expectations with sudden shifts to the supernatural and irrational, since the absurd can only occur once naturalist cause/effect assumptions have been established in the relation between the nar­ rator and the reader. The other observation is that unlike the marvel­ lous, which in his examples is closely based on folk superstitions, the range of absurdities used may well be drawn from many different 50

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modes, rather than from a consistent set of historically acknowledged superstitions. Of these two observations the first is the most important, since Scott has correctly recognized that Hoffmann’s work begins, like the work of the ‘more regular novels’, in a certain naturalistic set of views about the life-world and in modernity, that is then broken with seemingly no moment for pause at the absurdity and no moment for ‘hesitation’ as the laws of nature are broken – the central feature of Todorov’s description of the Fantastic.7 That Scott does not mention Lewis, Maturin or Radcliffe in this light may itself be predicated on the fact that he recognizes in their work a foregrounded challenge of naturalist assumptions through the central characters’ hesitation over uncanny events – something which does attempt ‘to modify the absurdity’. In Hoffmann’s work, however, the ‘some rule or other’, which governs a set of expectations for the reader of a novel, is broken entirely, as the narrator and the central characters often freely and with no sense of astonishment move their focus from a natural, mi­metic life-world to the supernatural and irrational, as in the Die Bergwerke zu Falun, where the introduction of the ghostly miner Torbern into a tale otherwise set in a historically real Norway elicits no surprise from either the main character or from those with whom he discusses the apparition. Even when the foreman presents the possibility for scepticism, by telling the other miners ‘Do not believe such miners’ tales’,8 this has little effect on either the reading or interpret­ation of the tale, whose end is unresolved, and meaning allegorical. As was demonstrated earlier, Nodier reacted against Scott’s defin­ itions of the Marvellous and the Fantastic by discerning in both genres an acceptance of the seen over the unseen, with the Fantastic representing a necessary promotion of the uncanny and supernatural in an age when abstract laws were no longer sufficient to explain nature. In casting the Fantastic thus, Nodier defined it as a form of literature which imaginatively transforms a world that is rationally and scientifically conceived but inadequate in itself. Nodier’s delineation of the virtues in the work of Hoffmann and other German writers, which issue from the mind of a people who wish to reject the material and scientific advances they have made for the ‘innocent and sensible taste of tales for children’, itself inverts the scorn heaped on their work by Scott: 51

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Thanks should be given to Musoeus, to Tieck, to Hoffmann, whose joyful [heureux] whims, by turns mystical or familiar, pathetic or buffoonish, simple to the point of triviality, exalted to the point of extravagance, but filled everywhere with originality, with feeling and with grace, renew for the old days of our decrepitude the fresh and brilliant illusions of our cradle. (Grâces soient rendues à Musoeus, à Tieck, à Hoffmann, dont les heureux caprices, tour à tour mystiques ou familiers, pathétiques ou bouffons, simples jusqu’à la trivialité, exaltés jusqu’à l’extravagance, mais remplis partout d’originalité, de sensibilité et de grâce, renouvellent pour les vieux jours de notre décrépitude les fraîches et brillantes illusions de notre berceau.)9

Clearly disagreeing with Scott as to the quality of the German Fantastic school, Nodier still notices the same use of ‘whim’ [caprices] and range of technique and emotion employed by these German writers, in a literature where there is not ‘some rule or other’ that operates and which reacts against the certainties of the rational world. The boundary-breaking and contrasting elements inherent in Hoffmann’s fantastic literature had already found an audience in France before the November 1830 publication of Nodier’s essay for Revue de Paris. The very first introduction to Hoffmann was through the mediated form of Henri La Touche’s novel, Olivier Brusson (1824), which was closely based on Das Fräulein von Scuderi. This was immedi­ately turned into the melodrama Cardillac.10 In reviews and encyclopedias, the first, brief mention of Hoffmann’s work appears, according to Elisabeth Teichmann, in a short article ‘Manuel de la langue et de la littérature allemandes depuis Lessing’ for Bibliothèque Allemande (Kunitsch 1826). In 1827 Fanny Seymour comments on Hoffmann in a review of the volume ‘German Stories’ for ‘Bulletin Bibliographique’ of Revue Encyclopédique, which had been published that year in Edinburgh. Seymour noted that while much of Hoffmann’s work is full of ‘extravagant adventures’ and with characters ‘contradictory to human nature’, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’ was different, ‘all the details’ being ‘exempted from exagger­ ation . . . This narrative is arranged with infinite skill, and could furnish the subject for a most interesting drama’.11 As Teichmann 52

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notes, Fanny Seymour was unaware of the existing French melo­ drama, Cardillac (p. 18). The original translations of Hoffmann into the French language were published in Geneva: the first was ‘Mlle de Scudery’, in the January and February editions of Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, and the ‘Ecarts d’un homme d’imagination’, published from March to April: both were published in digested form.12 The young Honoré de Balzac also published a translation under the title ‘L’archet du Baron de B’ in his own periodical, Le Gymnase later in 1828.13 The first full appreciation of Hoffmann’s work appeared in J. J. Ampère’s review of Hitzig’s biography of Hoffmann for Le Globe, on 2 August 1828. Ampère’s praise for the Prussian writer was fulsome, and like Nodier after him, it is the range of possibilities, emotions and ideas that he admires most in the Fantastic: His innovations resemble nothing else. I know of no other work where the bizarre and the true, the touching and the frightening, the monstrous and the burlesque, collide in a stronger, more vivid and more unexpected manner: no work that, on a first reading, can seize and trouble more. Conceive of a vigorous imagination and a perfectly clear spirit, a bitter melancholy and an unweakening verve for buffoonery and extravagance: imagine a man . . . who composes like Callot, invents like the Thousand and One Nights, narrates like Walter Scott, and you will have an idea of Hoffmann. (Ses nouvelles ne ressemblent à rien. Je ne connais aucun ouvrage où le bizarre et le vrai, le touchant et l’effroyable, le monstreux et le burlesque, se heurtent d’une manière plus forte, plus vive, plus inattendue; aucun ouvrage qui, à la première lecture, saisisse et trouble davantage. Concevez une imagination vigoreuse et un esprit parfaitement clair, une amère mélancolie et une verve intarissable de bouffonerie et d’extravagance; supposez un homme . . . qui compose comme Callot, invente comme Les Mille et une nuits, raconte comme Walter Scott, et vous aurez une idée d’ Hoffmann.)14

This ability to make contrasts that collide and yet work in fiction is what impresses Ampère, and bears great affinities with Nodier. Other works by Hoffmann, like Doge und Dogaressa (as ‘Marino 53

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Faliero’) and Ritter Gluck, were soon translated and appeared in journals from 1829–30. Soon booksellers like Renduel were publishing translations of his tales. The first translated volume of Hoffmann’s contes appeared in late 1829, with the translator, Loève-Veimars, cannily translating and reprinting the later sections of Scott’s original rejection of Hoff­ mann from ‘On the Supernatural Element of Fictitious Composition’. In the January 1830 edition of Revue française an unnamed reviewer praised Hoffmann’s range, stating that he was both ‘Satirist and enthusiast, poet and moralist, changing the tone at every moment and staying the same at bottom.’15 In a notice from Le Figaro publicizing the imminent appearance of Loève-Veimar’s second volume of translations from Hoffmann, published on 30 January that month, the reviewer again presented the virtues in Hoffmann’s work as a set of paradoxical contrasts, writing that Hoffmann ‘has opened an order of ideas simultaneously simple and marvellous, natural and unusual [fantasques], sublime and grotesque’.16 Thus Nodier’s fascination with the elasticity and inclusiveness of Hoffmann’s brand of the Fantastic was shared by other French critics and translators of the time, and particularly by those working for periodicals like Le Globe and Journal des Débats, whose political differ­ ences (the former Liberal, the latter Royalist) did not extend to rival positions on the new literature. Above all, the praise always follows a set pattern which involves the grouping of contrasting qualities, such as the ‘mystical’ and ‘familiar’ (natural and unusual), ‘pathetic and buffoonish’ (almost ‘satirist and enthusiast’), triviality and extravagance. In the emotional tenor, mode of representation and content of Hoffmann’s fiction, French critics and writers found a release and potential for breaking stylistic boundaries that was probably not fully effected in poetry until Baudelaire’s ironic odes and love poems.17 It was above all the speed at which the mode and tenor changed (‘by turns’ ‘at every moment’) which helped impress this range upon them. Thus the ability to combine real-life settings and naturalistic indices imperceptibly with the extravagant and absurd, seemingly without giving pause for the hesitation which Todorov has subsequently seen as important to the Fantastic, certainly appears to have appealed not simply to the nihilist and anti-scientist in Nodier, but to many other critics of his era. 54

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That said, as Fanny Seymour noted, not all of Hoffmann’s work was heavily supernatural in detail. Das Fräulein von Scuderi, set in 1680, is primarily a historical novella, with real life characters in­ volved in the plot, containing only a faint trace of the potentially marvellous in the mysterious disappearances of the murderer and the wild super­stitions of the crowd. Indeed, despite its realism it is this tale, rather than the wholly Fantastic Der Sandmann – the Hoffmann piece most familiar to British and American audiences – which gained so much attention from French audiences at the time. However, Das Fräulein von Scuderi is still a work that embodies many of the qualities of the Fantastic as it was to emerge in France, not least the ability to com­bine the literal with the allegorical and to use an extravagant plot to illustrate the problems of contemporary society. In the bizarre story of a goldsmith who covets his own creations, committing murder in order to regain them, we see a most perceptive interpretation of the waning of aristocratic society before a new, bourgeois understanding of capital as later described by Marx, and an explanation for the motiv­ation behind the French Revolution. Hoff­mann’s capricious plot, with its unlikely, self-exculpating mur­ derer, prefigures the Revolution in Paris and the barbarous change to a new, godless order. Das Fräulein von Scuderi Das Fräulein von Scuderi is one of Hoffmann’s longest and most com­ plex tales in terms of both narrative technique and characterization. It is also one of only several works in which he appears to borrow the techniques of Walter Scott, creating a historical novella which uses real people and pays careful attention to historical detail.18 The scene begins in the house of the famous author and court wit, Fräulein von Scuderi, in the year 1680, at a time when a group of murderous thieves appear to be killing aristocrats and then stealing their jewellery off them as they embark on nocturnal trysts to leave gifts to their be­loveds. A banging is heard on the front door, and the housemaid, Martinière, alone in the house except for her sleeping mistress, eventually opens it. A young man enters and leaves a box for von Scuderi to open the next day.19 55

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We are then given some important background to the events, which includes the recent rise of casual deaths due to the work of an Italian alchemist called Exili, who, having become the student of the alchemist Glaser, has been using his art to create imperceptible poisons rather than gold. The skills were passed on to various people, including Exili’s fellow prisoner Sainte-Croix and his mistress, the Marquise von Brinvilliers, who kill paupers for thrills. These two are eventually caught by the artful policeman Desgrais, who employs disguises and decoys to trap his prey (pp. 55–6). Finally another poisoner, Madame la Voisin, is caught after offering her services for money. The king has set up the Chambre Ardente to combat this under the diabolical commissioner La Regnie, who behaves over­ zealously, imprisoning and executing various innocent people. At the same time a band of murderous thieves have begun to roam the streets, and Argenson, the Police minister, has once again sent out the wily policeman Desgrais to track the offenders, who finds that one of the attackers literally disappears into a wall. The strange events are discussed at the house of the Marquise de Maintenon before her lover, Louis XIV, who is listening to a poem which extols him as Hercules and Theseus, and urges him to rid Paris of the murderers: their acts are indeed preventing amorous and chivalric courtiers from bestowing the expensive gifts intended for their beloveds. Fräulein von Scuderi states more succinctly a different attitude to that expressed in the poem: A lover who is scared of robbers/ Is not worthy of love. (‘Un amant qui craint les voleurs/ n’est point digne d’amour’)

The king adores this couplet, and commends her, seeing in the verse an opportunity to excuse himself from direct action (pp. 63–4). The next morning she is presented with the box left while she was sleeping, and opens it to find a beautiful gold necklace set with diamonds. There is also a note quoting these lines and then stating that they justify the senders’ actions: meaning the murders. To her horror she sees that her words have been used to justify crime, and as she holds the jewels up to the sunlight fancies that she sees them tinged with blood (pp. 65–6). She visits the King’s mistress, the 56

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beautiful Mme de Maintenon, who declares that they can only be the work of René Cardillac, the goldsmith who now hates to work to order and part with his creations, and who has begged the king to not commission his work any further (p. 70). They visit Cardillac, who confirms that they are indeed his work, and that she may keep them, regardless of how they may have been procured. De Maintenon jokes with the old maid that Cardillac is wooing her, and that they will adorn her for her wedding. Crossing the Seine in a new coach some months later, a young man approaches her and throws a note which tells her that for fear of her life she must now return the jewels to the jeweller (p. 75–6). This she does, only to find that the jeweller has been killed, and that Desgrais has arrested the apprentice, Olivier Brusson, and fiancé to Cardillac’s daughter, Madelon. Despite initially believing Olivier must be inno­ cent due to filial ties, which belief she expresses to the sceptical La Regnie (pp. 83–4), when she sees the suspect she realizes he must be guilty as it is the same man who threw the note into her coach (p. 86). Later, however, Brusson is brought to her at his own request, and reveals himself to be the son of an impoverished Swiss watch­ maker who had lived with her as a child (p. 90). He had later been apprenticed to Cardillac, who distanced himself the minute he realized that Brusson wanted to marry his daughter. One night, however, Brusson discovered Cardillac killing and robbing a man, and the two had registered tacit recognition. From this point onwards Cardillac was extremely generous to Brusson and encouraged the young man’s advances to his daughter (p. 96), until, unable to bear the pretence, he told Brusson everything he had done. Cardillac’s story within a story within a story – similar in use of narratorial level to the Arabian Nights – reveals how he possesses an ‘evil star’ (‘böse Stern’), which is covetousness towards gold and jewel­lery, caused by his mother embracing a man bedecked in jewel­ lery when she was pregnant, only to have the lover die in her embrace. He himself always coveted beautiful things and took to stealing jewellery until he was able to make it himself. However, after a while his evil star had returned and he felt hatred for whomsoever he made jewels, spending long periods of time perfecting his work, attempting to put off buyers, and eventually resorting to killing his clients and stealing the works back off them, unable to resist ‘the 57

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voice of Satan’ (‘die Stimme des Satans’(p. 102)). He even solved the mystery of the sudden disappearance witnessed by Desgrais, by showing Brusson a hidden door in the wall of his house, and revealed the vault that stores all his reclaimed artefacts, each bearing a tag with the date of reclamation and name of the murder victim (p. 103). One evening, however, Cardillac returned in a good mood, having overheard Fräulein von Scuderi’s comments on the worthlessness of those too scared to defend their jewels, and he was so enraptured by this that he was reminded of the Holy Virgin at St Eustace, and sent Brusson round to deliver the necklace as a token of esteem to the famous writer (p. 105). However, he quickly regretted this and began to wonder whether the jewels might not look better around the neck of Henrietta of England. At this point Brusson realized the danger in which his former patroness found herself and resolved to warn her. On the way back he witnessed a man return Cardillac’s brutality to him fatally, was then himself caught over the body, and is now wanted for a crime he has not committed, but dares not reveal the criminal nature of the goldsmith for fear of upsetting the daughter. Once he has left, Scuderi visits the lawyer Pierre Arnaud d’Andilly to see if there can be a way of preventing torture, but is assured that only Brusson himself can stop this (pp. 109–10).20 Back home, however, she is visited by another aristocrat, Count de Miossens, who confides that he himself killed Cardillac in self-defence and saw Brusson arrive after him, but did not wish to admit this for fear of rough justice from the Chambre Ardente. Fräulein von Scuderi goes with Madame de Maintenon to the king, bedecked as ‘our beautiful bride betrothed to her bridegroom’, to tell him what has happened.21 He is initially struck with the story, not so much because of any convincing evidence but because of von Scuderi’s verbal skills. Further struck by the appearance of Cardillac’s daughter Madelon, he takes up his own investigation. Having dismissed the Chambre Ardente and finally taken charge him­ self, Louis/ Ludwig, the only real arbiter of justice, becomes aware of Brusson’s innocence and frees him. Brusson is now able to marry Cardillac’s daughter, without ever having to inform her of the murder­ ous turn taken by her father. Das Fräulein von Scuderi is not as well known in Britain and the USA as Der Sandmann, a work made famous by Freud’s analysis of 58

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the double and uncanny in the unfortunate Nathanael’s reaction to the mechanical marvel Olimpia, and the constant thwarting by his nemesis Coppelius. However, there are certain parallels to be drawn with the more famous tale, since both concern the work of wondrous artisans, and both, as Hilda M. Brown has highlighted, detail a mania or mental fragility caused by an event in youth, or, in Cardillac’s case, when he was still in the womb.22 The similarity of themes should not obscure the fact that they are very different types of tale. Whereas Der Sandmann is an example of the pure Fantastic in the Todorovian sense, with no resolution as to the cause but centring heavily on the mental state of the protagonist, Das Fräulein von Scuderi is at best Fantastic-uncanny, with little truly supernatural potential. It is also a work of historical fiction, with the vices of Cardillac relating mainly to a political opinion and set of ideas. However, in one important way it is thoroughly in keeping with Hoffmann’s use of the Fantastic and others’ own adaptations of his work, which is in the use of allegorical and historical overlaying. The story was first published in 1819, in Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1820 der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmit, an annual collection of short stories published in Berlin,23 and was quickly included in the second volume of Hoffmann’s ongoing publication of his short stories, Die Serapion Bruder (1820), with ‘Sylvester’ as the framing narrator. The story has attracted various different types of interpretation. Some see it as a very early detective novella due to the crime mystery. Critics like Himmel have remarked on the unusual structure of the piece, which involves anachronisms and narratives within narratives, and an essentially tripartite structure of mystery, confession and resolution.24 Most recently, Birgit Röder has interpreted the tale in relation to Hoffmann’s own views on both art and justice. She notes Hoffmann’s roots in the Sturm und Drang movement and the ideas of Schlegel.25 She notes further the essentially Kantian ideas under which Hoffmann worked in his capacity as judge, and thus the belief in freedom and rationality in the exercise of will, despite the obviously irrational behaviour of many of his characters. Above all, she notices his frequent condemnation of the bourgeoisie, who collected works of art and formed the majority of his readership (pp. 22–3). This leads her to interpret Das Fräulein von Scuderi as a story which condemns both the justice system of Louis XIV’s reign, and the 59

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frivolity of his court, full of flippant poets and epigrammists: a frivol­ ity which effectively allows La Regnie and the Chambre Ardente to impose an overly harsh system on Louis/Ludwig’s subjects. She further­ more understands the story as epitomizing the serious artist’s rejection of the acquisitive attitude towards art, in which the ‘bourgeois philis­ tines’ (p. 44) have little appreciation of Cardillac’s perfection, causing him to reject them and reclaim his inventions through murder (p. 44). Throughout she sees tensions between art and its audience, between the flippant poetry of von Scuderi and the serious, content-based art of Cardillac (p. 49), between rationality and emotion (Brusson’s original reprieve depending upon the feelings of the king rather than a close examination of the facts), and especially the in­ability of the criminal to balance rationality and emotion in himself (pp. 51–3). This reading depends upon considering Hoffmann’s known views on art, morality and justice. However, despite its thoroughness I would take issue with it on several grounds. Firstly, the people for whom Cardillac is creating jewellery are not the bourgeoisie but the aristocracy. The court of Louis XIV was one of the last great courts belonging to an absolute monarch, who held sway over a Catholic dominion still ruled by hereditary principle. The closer representative of the bourgeoisie is in fact Cardillac himself, whose ability to invest metals with high value thanks to his skill makes him nearer the bour­ geois in search of surplus value than any of his aristocratic victims. Secondly, there is no indication in the text that the clients do not value his work: rather, they make use of it in the rituals of courtship and chivalry – the highest values in Louis’s court – thus investing it with active properties close to sympathetic magic rather than storing it away as capital. Thirdly, there is no indication that Cardillac himself appreciates his own creations as being works of art, rather than simply objects which he covets due to his ‘böse Stern’. This evil star resulted from his mother’s own greed while pregnant with him. Before learning the art of jewellery-making, he coveted and stole beautiful objects: now he is in the paradoxical position of being both labourer and consumer of his own products, which he stores away as a futile form of portable property, marked with a set of ironic price tags. The fact that Sylvester, in the Serapionsbrüder edition of the tale, connects the story to a shoemaker of Venice who stored away the objects of the aristocrats whom he killed with no chance of selling 60

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them, reinforces the fact that the gold­smith’s own murderous­ness has nothing to do with any contempt for philistin­ism.26 Gisela Gorski also sees the tale as juxtaposing different views of art, but unlike Röder attempts to contextualize the story in relation to the contemporary role of the artisan in Louis’s court. She notices how there were two systems of power in the court of Louis XIV, particularly after he removed the court to Versailles in 1682 to escape the remains of the Fronde.27 On the one hand his finance minister, Colbert, had created a new system of free capital that had facilitated limited social mobility for the upper bourgeoisie, and was beginning to move the power of wealth from the landed aristocracy to them. On the other hand, a courtly code of etiquette and deference was used by the king himself to impose his authority as the only legitimate power in the land, which helped him play off potential rival factions against each other.28 Cardillac, according to Gorski, wishes to avoid having his work swallowed up by Colbert’s new system of capital, since as artist he sees the work as a unique expression of himself, and as artisan he defines himself by his ‘tun’ (act) as well as by the finished ‘Werk’ (pp. 81–2). While Gorski provides much useful information and is justified in examining the conditions of capital in Louis XIV’s reign, in my opinion this reading is wrong mainly because this historical context was not known to Hoffmann, who portrays Louis’s France as a site in which an older view of capitalism as the visual expression of absolute power is still prevalent, and that it is rather the goldsmith himself who represents the new artisan and consumer that fetishizes the commodity through his labourtime, effectively embodying the rise of high capitalism. Above all, however, the historical setting of the tale is actually quite complex, not least because it refers to more than one epoch in history. While it is set in 1680, during the reign of the roi soleil (Sun King), the sites and events are full of foreboding. The Chambre Ardente enacts a ferocious justice and sends its victims to the Bastille; the Fräulein is accosted on the Pont Neuf; aristocrats are being killed nightly in great numbers. The places and events which Hoffmann meticulously describes resonated entirely differently in the age through which he himself had recently lived. Hilda M. Brown sees in the brutality of the Chambre Ardente a proleptic echo of the time of the Terror, but as shall be shown the overlaid references to the 61

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era of Revolution are more far-reaching than this.29 The Paris of Revolution and Terror, from the fall of the Bastille, the sacking of Versailles in October 1789 until the death of Robespierre (1794) and the Brumaire plot of 1799, which brought Napoleon to power, occupy an almost palimpsestic space in this tale of an even earlier time, in which a skilled artisan and bourgeois began massacring aris­ to­crats in great number. While Röder sees examples of a morally compromised system of values and justice during the reign of Louis XIV, if we take the standard metaphor of Louis being roi soleil, the sun – the omniscient ruler who animates and knows all beneath him, divinely appointed to rule a state of which he is the only external embodiment – then we can see that the allusions to light and dark in the novel condone a Legitimist and counter-revolutionary view of justice and the state. When Louis is performing official work in the rooms of Madame de Maintenon, he receives the poem that describes the perils run by lovers carrying jewels to their beloveds at night, fear of which kills off all desire. Only Louis himself can solve this, since: Louis, the shining Polar Star of all love and gallantry, who by shining clearly can destroy the gloomy night and thus reveal the black secret hidden therein. The Godlike shield, who strikes his enemies low, will now also draw his victorious, sparkling sword and, like Hercules the Hydra, like Theseus the minotaur, fight the threatening monster, that quashes all desire for love and darkens all joy in deep suffering, in comfortless sorrow. (Ludwig, der leuctende Polarstern aller Lieber und Galanterie, der möge hellaufstrahlend die finstre Nacht zerstreuen und so das schwarze Geheimnis, das darin verborgen, enthüllen. Der göttliche Held, der seine Feinde niedergeschmettert, werde nun auch sein siegriech funkelndes Schwert zücken, und wie Herkules die Lernäische Schlange, wie Theseus den Minotaur, das bedrohliche Ungeheuer bekämfen, das alle Liebeslust wegzehre und alle Freude verdüstre in tiefes Lied, in trostlose Trauer.)30

Here Louis, who has devolved power to La Regnie in pursuing the criminal(s), is compared to Hercules and Theseus,31 in his role as guardian of the lovers. However, most noteworthy in the original 62

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verses is the association with the polar star, that can break through the darkness and reveal the murderers’ identities. This is a much stronger light than the ‘shimmering of the moon, which had just broken through the dark clouds’ that accompanies Brusson’s first entry to Scuderi’s house (p. 50),32 or the ‘moonlight’ (‘Mondschein’) through darkness, that was not strong enough to allow Desgrais to capture his prey when he saw the murderer kill the Marquis de la Fare and disappear into a wall (p. 60). Here, in order to show the contrast between light and darkness, the more usual image of the sun is replaced with the polar star to convey the king’s power of making even night like day. When Fräulein von Scuderi gives her alternative assessment of the poet’s panegyric, he returns the compliment ‘with flashing eyes’ (‘mit blitzenden Augen’ (p. 64)). Later, however, Louis’s more usual image of the sun is used in relation to the jewels as the revealer of truths. When Fräulein von Scuderi first receives the jewels left by Brusson, she holds them up to the light, which refracts through the curtain and does not permit her to forget their dubious origin: The sun shone clearly through the deep red, silk curtain, and came in such a way, that the diamonds, which lay on the table next to the open casket, sparkled in a red gleam. Gazing at them, Scuderi, full of terror, hid her face and ordered Martinière to remove immediately the frightful jewels, to which clung the blood of the murdered. (Die Sonne schien hell durch die Fenstergardinen von hochroter Seide, und so kam es, dass die Brillanten, welche auf dem Tische neben dem offenen Kästchen lagen, in rötlichem Schimmer aufblitzten. Hinblickend verhüllte die Scuderi voll Entsetzen das Gesicht, und befahl der Martiniere, das fürchterliche Geschmeide, an dem das Blut der Ermordereten klebe, augenblicklich fortzuschaffen.) (p. 66)

Placed beneath the sun, the truth cannot hide, nor can one’s con­ science be ignored. If we take the sun as representative of the king, le roi soleil, himself ruling by divine right, the event foreshadows the ultimate restoration of justice and the re-establishment of morality through his timely intercession, when he quashes the Chambre Ardente and takes the administering of justice into his own hands. 63

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When das Fräulein goes to visit her friend, the beautiful young Marquise de Maintenon and mistress of the king, the jewels again sparkle in sunlight: She took out the necklace and the armbands and went to the window, where she now let the jewels play in the sun, and now held the wondrous goldwork quite near to her eyes, so as to behold directly with what wonderful art each little link of the entwined chains had been worked. (Sie nahm den Halsschmück, die Armbänder heraus und trat damit an das Fenster, wo sie bald die Juwelen an der Sonne spielen liess, bald die zierliche Goldarbeit ganz nahe vor die Augen hielt, um nur recht zu erschauen, mit welcher wundervollen Kunst jedes kleine Hakchen der verschlungenen Ketten gearbeitet war.)(p. 67)

It is in the sun that she can see the beauty and intricacy of the arm­ bands and necklace, and although this is an optical illusion, it also has a metaphorical potential. For while the courtiers may not always show the gallantry which is demanded by the ‘Liebeslust’ of Louis’s late, chivalric court, and while the king himself may be accused of being slow to assume his responsibility, and not a little adulterous, the jewels do not only take their beauty from the skill of the artisan, but from their role as ‘Geschenken’ in a set of courtly rituals which honour both the court and the king, the secondary system of power identified by Gorski.33 Not only is the omniscient Sun King poten­ tially the ultimate basis of morality and justice in his state, but it is his order that gives objects their symbolic meaning, and with this their real intrinsic value. The goldsmith’s refusal to allow his clients to keep their jewellery and his preparedness to kill the aristocrats who bear them indicates his objections to continuing with his courtsanctioned role as artisan within a symbolic order: rather, he has developed a much less symbolic and more material attitude to the objects he creates, which involves what Marx called the ‘fetishization of commodities’ and the consequent destruction of a previous sym­ bolic order. In The Waning of the Middle Ages, J. Huizinga explained that the tenor of life in France and the Netherlands just before the Renaissance 64

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was both more violent and more dramatic than in post-Enlightenment society, with objects being rich in symbolism. This symbolic way of life, which required elaborate show and rituals, meant that objects themselves were often invested with meanings that related to status and power. Talking of the sin of pride he argues that: Very little property is, in the modern sense, liquid, while power is not yet associated, predominantly, with money; it is still rather inherent in the person and depends on a sort of religious awe which he inspires; it makes itself felt by pomp and magnificence, or a numerous train of faithful followers. Feudal or hierarchic thought expresses the idea of grandeur by visible signs, lending to it a symbolic shape, of homage paid kneeling, of ceremonial reverence.

Thus pride is a symbolic sin, since it is expressed through visual symbols. The author then explains the importance of cupidity as the main sin in the later Middle Ages, in which physicality is divested of its symbolism: Riches have not acquired the spectral impalpability which capitalism, founded on credit, will give them later; what haunts the imagination is still the tangible yellow gold. The enjoyment of riches is direct and primitive; it is not yet weakened by the mechanism of an automatic and invisible accumulation by investment; the satisfaction of being rich is found either in luxury and dissipation, or in gross avarice.34

In the first phase, as described by Huizinga, there is a symbolic investment of power, either overtly theological or presumably in a derived sense (since all temporal power, and expressions of power, owed their being to the sacerdotal); in the second phase the visual takes over from the symbolic and acts as a form of satiation, in wealth. In neither case do the overt displays of wealth enjoy that ‘spectral impalpability’ of modern capitalism, which Huizinga sees as created by the credit system. Later, when describing the conven­ tions of love, after having related the importance of chivalry as a model of imitation and of interpreting a prince’s virtues and relations to others, Huizinga continues to describe the importance of the presents of courtship in both cementing attachments and in providing 65

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symbolic messages: ‘Rings, veils and bands, all the jewels and presents of courtship had their special function, with devices and enigmatic emblems which sometimes were veritable rebuses’ (p. 116). While such objects at any time in history cost money to provide, in the late medieval epoch they took their value less from the monetary system than from their opulent beauty and the significance they held between lovers and, of course, from what they indicated about the status of the people who both gave and wore them; and who, in taking part in the game of romantic courtship, were demonstrating their ‘curteysie’ and role within a highly mannered court. The ‘spectral impalpability’ of wealth, and also of the commodity as an object of investment, occurred with the rise of high capitalism, so that wealth began to exist in figures rather than in display. However, an important part of this process was the rise of exchange value measured through the medium of money itself and the fetish­ ization of commodities. According to Marx objects initially had different use-values, and with this different exchange values. Money – a medium of value which he believes occurred first among nomadic people, and as originally made of gold – is the ultimate gauge of all commodities, allowing possessors to measure the value of all objects.35 In high capitalist society, however, the exchange value which is in­ herent to a commodity is governed not by its use-value but by the labour time spent in creating it (p. 82). Ultimately it is the labour time exerted over production that the consumer is paying for, turning it into a ‘social hieroglyphic’ – for however private and independent the labourer’s work is, the production of a commodity by an in­ dependent labourer is always a social activity in which the labourer’s time is valued by its length, which is then transferred to the com­ modity itself, giving it a comparative value in relation to other com­ modities (pp. 84–5). Thus the work of the independent labourer in creating an object transfers the labour-time involved to the exchangevalue of the commodity produced, so that it becomes fetishized without either the labourer or the consumer reflecting on this strange, almost magical transformation (p. 87). This is of course an important stage in Marx’s argument that under high capitalism, where com­ modities attain surplus value and create huge disparities in wealth between the labourer and the employer, surplus value can only be achieved through the exploitation of labour. Such a condition is 66

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very different, of course, to feudal times, in which labourers were dependent rather than independent, and defined themselves by their type of work. They did not see the value of the object as transferring their labour time into its exalted exchange value, but rather saw their work as part of a set of given relations between members of the hierarchy not to be measured by time itself (pp. 88–9). Das Fräulein von Scuderi is a tale that effectively encapsulates these two different ways of seeing the commodities of the artisan, and which juxtaposes the concept of the artefact as symbolic object of beauty, used to bind the love relations of courtiers and represent their status through opulence, and the new concept of the fetishized commodity which leads Paris’s most skilled artisan to covet his own goods and withdraw his labour from its more traditional place in the French hierarchy. The narrator who tells the tale once Hoffmann included the piece in Die Serapionsbrüder, Sylvester, openly admits to having been inspired by Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV when pre­ paring his story.36 Hoffmann certainly read the description of how Louis devoured verse and classical writers because he was impressed by their galanterie, and also must have been aware of the ways in which verse was used as a method of communicating to the king.37 The portrayal of the court in the novella is somewhat anachronistic, since Hoffmann clearly ignored the discussions of Louis’s patronage of science in favour of the more self-conscious attempts of the last, great absolute ruler in Europe to propagate ideals of chivalry and courtly love.38 Hoffmann reinforces this symbolic and quasi-spiritual concept of artifice and artefacts by reference to alchemy. In the novella the greed and violence of the goldsmith Cardillac is effectively prefigured thematically by the discussion of the Italian Goldsmith Exili, who uses this sacred art for evil purposes. The theme of alchemy helps to underline the view that precious metals can have symbolic and spiritual meaning in the king’s court. This became especially true after the rise of neo-Platonism and Rosicrucianism in European courts and in the Epic Romances of Renaissance times, which had helped to reinvigorate the allegory of love in a way that was more distant from the symbolism of Catholicism and the cult of the Virgin.39 The link in Hermeticism between Gold and the sun binds this relation­ ship all the more locally, given that the divinely appointed ruler 67

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was the Roi Soleil. At the Trianon Cardillac’s mother had seen the cavalier who wooed her become transformed by his gold jewellery, and so ‘a being of a higher level’ (‘ein Wesen höherer Art’),40 before he caused her humiliation by dying on her – a probable reason for Cardillac’s own more venial attitude towards precious metals. That Hoffmann was aware of the significance of alchemy has been well proven by Hans Leitherer, who examined Hoffmann’s literal and metaphorical use of it in Die Brautwohl and in the Der Goldne Topf,41 centring on his use of symbols like sylphs, salamanders and gnomes to represent elements in traditional alchemy (p. 24). That Hoffmann was also aware of the Hermetic belief underpinning alchemy that metals corresponded to heavenly states is made evident, albeit loosely, in Die Bergwerke zu Falun, where the phantom miner who guides the young seaman to Falun reminds him that metals are symbols of the heavens, and thus should not simply be exploited for profit and material gain.42 This does not mean that we should read either story as though its different gems were involved in a precise allegory like The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz, or that the eight stages of alchemy from the nigredo up until gold find any place in the works. Nevertheless, the allusion reminds the reader that in Louis’s late Renaissance Paris, metallic objects can have metaphysical resonances beyond being mere commodities. Cardillac’s own behaviour shows that he understands his artisanship as providing immense surplus value to raw materials. Often presented with inferior jewels and gold, he performs marvels with his artefacts, which become priceless and with which he is loath to part.43 The labour time (‘day and night can he be heard hammering in his work­ shop’ (p. 68))44 and quality of the labour which he bestows upon the raw materials are ultimately too costly for him to allow others to possess them in the court of Louis, and so he prefers to steal them back and store them for himself, their value indicated not now by money, but by the death of the owner, which he marks on their ironic price tags. It could be argued that he has fetishized the commodities to such a degree that he sees them as beyond the exchange medium of money, or else that he actually understands the process whereby the labour time of the artisan is transferred onto the commodity itself, and refuses to part with the fruits of his labour to others. In any case, his attempt to store the stolen commodities rather than 68

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allow them to adorn the rich and beautiful acts as an early, mocking comment on the strategies of the bourgeois collector who collected curia and rare objects as a form of capital, which serve no purpose except to maintain and improve the objects’ potential exchange value. In Cardillac’s case this is a set of objects that cannot be traded or left in his will due to their connection with his crimes, any more than could the objects stolen by the feckless Venetian shoemaker mentioned in connection with this tale in Die Serapionsbrüder.45 Only to Fräulein von Scuderi, poet and moralist fiction writer, can Cardillac present a token of his esteem. This is as a result of feeling exonerated through the misinterpretation of her epigram, which he takes to mean that his victims are morally unworthy of their jewels if they fail to fend him off, and that Louis is thus right not to interfere. However, another reason for the presentation is her status as ‘Holy Virgin’, since she is one of the few court members to have never married and to be unlikely to do so now, given her advanced years. The connection with the Virgin of St Eustace certainly helps to prick his conscience, or at least suffices as a desperate, sublimated plea for clemency for his sins. Most importantly, however, as virgin she is external to the pattern of courtly love and marriage amongst the aristocracy which is the major purpose of his jewels, a point made ironically clear when the Marquise mocks von Scuderi goodnaturedly as the latter dons the necklace and armbands, saying that she is being prepared for her husband. In this context it is all the more ironic when Cardillac decides that the necklace would look better on Henrietta of England, as though his recantation of the one generous deed he has performed is because he would now like to see jewellery perform its more traditional function. Cardillac’s excuses for his crimes, like his misinterpretation of von Scuderi’s ‘anmütige Wersa’ (‘graceful verses’) to the king, are totally self-exculpatory, and point to a low level of moral understanding compared with the Kantian-minded jurist Hoffmann, who believed in the importance of free will and rationalism in moral decisions. The laissez-faire injunction by Fräulein von Scuderi, which asserts the aristocratic values of gallantry and bravery when protecting tributes of love, is used by Louis, the absolute monarch and ‘Polarstern’, to justify a continued personal negligence of the thefts and murders, and by Cardillac himself to justify his continued attacks: the dictum 69

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of the revolutionary or terrorist, who blames the moral failings of his victim for the gratuitous violence he inflicts, rather than his own voluntary actions. Similarly, the ‘böse Stern’, which Cardillac believes he cannot fight, is also used to exculpate himself. However, the ‘Polarstern’ of the Sun King does eventually break through the clouds and restore justice where the Chambre Ardente of La Regnie has failed. While it could be argued that the novella satirizes his rule by showing how his initial interest in Brusson is piqued by Fräulein von Scuderi’s eloquence, rather than by an examination of the case, as Röder argues,46 this view ignores the fact that he is presented as a divinely appointed monarch, whose decisions, whatever the efficient motivation, are moved by the final cause of God, as long as he is attempting to assume the role of king rather than abrogate his responsibilities (which is not the case at the beginning). He is the polar star who sheds light on darkness, and the Sun King whose hierarchical court ensures the values of gallantry that give both meaning and lustre to the jewels fashioned by the jeweller. He is both chosen by God and the apex of a courtly system that prescribes the behaviour of his courtiers, their rank and the value of their possessions. Without him they would be nothing, their trappings of rank and virtue falling to the status of mere capital: objects judged by their exchange-value. The presentation of Louis as a monarch who begins by abrogating his responsibility and who then, having dismissed the Chambre Ardente, restores justice, follows in microcosm the process by which, according to Voltaire, the pampered courtier who was deceived by the despotic Mazarin, eventually came to take over the reins of government and mix his courtly pleasures with serious government. Another important source for Hoffmann was Schiller’s translation of François Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes Célèbres (1731–43), which contains the original history of the Paris poisoners the Marquise de Brinvilliers and her lover Sainte-Croix. Most of the characters in Hoffmann’s transformation, including Sainte-Croix, the Marquise de Brinvilliers herself, the policeman Desgrais47 (who in both versions tracks her down to a monastery), and even her servant la Chaussée, are to be found in the original (p. 17). However, there are two major changes from the source text. The first is that the original alchemist in Hoffmann’s tale, Glaser, who innocently teaches Exili his art, is 70

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in Pitaval’s true story the simple apothecary who provided SainteCroix with his potions, and became unexpectedly caught up in the investigation.48 The second and crucial addition is the character of Exili himself, who in Hoffmann’s adaptation is now the teacher of both Sainte-Croix and the more plebeian la Voisin. This change points to a more anachronistic allusion to the French Revolution, especially given the parallel to be drawn with the goldworker and jeweller Cardillac, which dominates most of the narrative. Exili the Italian alchemist bears a resemblance to the exiled Sicilian freemason and alchemist Cagliostro, of whom Hoffmann was demon­ strably aware since in Der Sandmann Nathanael compares him to the inventor Spalanzani (favourably) when describing the marvel the latter creates.49 Cagliostro had been charged with hatching a plot and controlling Cardinal de Rohan, his patron, as he attempted to buy an expensive diamond necklace in 1785 to give to Marie-Antoinette, without his realizing that the letters from the queen were in fact forged by the fraudster Jeanne de la Motte. Both de Rohan and Cagliostro were acquitted in a trial which was seen as a corrupt attempt on Marie-Antoinette’s part to destroy the unwitting Cardinal (whom in reality she hated) as well as Cagliostro himself.50 Cagliostro had performed alchemical experiments with Rohan as his assistant (p. 114), and was also famous as a doctor throughout Europe, giving his ‘elixirs’ to the poor without any desire for financial recompense (p. 136). Not only does Exili, like Cagliostro, corrupt the aristocracy in a way that becomes obvious to the crowd, but the story of the necklace was a probable inspiration for the whole tale Das Fräulein von Scuderi: the major difference being that whereas in the age of Louis XVI it was the court and its adulterous flirtations that were exposed as corrupt through faked jewellery, in Hoffmann’s tale the vices of the aristocracy and carelessness of the court are shown to be lapses from a more laudable ideal of gallantry and courtly love, which the artisan craftsman himself threatens to upset and replace with something inferior. Both these alterations help the tale to attain greater metaphorical and allegorical significance. The allusion to alchemy obviously re­ inforces the quasi-spiritual nature of Cardillac’s artefacts within Louis’s system, while the wholly metonymic reference to the con­ temporary Cagliostro affair points to the degradation of this ideal 71

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at a later time. In this sense too we can see the unique use of allegory, since the goldsmith’s killing of the aristocrats represents the events of the Revolution, but does so in a more literal and synecdochic way, as he is simply doing what the later bourgeoisie shall themselves do during the Terror. The veiled allusion to Cagliostro helps to contrast the two sets of events, and in doing so creates a paradigmatic contrast between two different epochs, explaining the extent to which the structure of Louis’s courtly society already contains the seeds of its own destruction at a later date, just as the honest alchemist Glaser finds his work perverted by the poisoner Exili/Cagliostro and the Marquise de Brinvilliers. Thus, through the palimpsestic references to future times, the story becomes an allegory for what will happen when the court’s values have degraded and when the bourgeois attitude to capital no longer accepts the pomp and luxury of a monarchy that wishes to reinforce its power through luxuriant displays of wealth, when it is really the labour-time of the skilled artisans and the bourgeoisie which facilitates this. One catalyst for the French Revolution was, after all, the bankruptcy of the Royal Treasury and the refusal of local parlements to provide it with loans raised from taxation between 1787–8.51 A court which still paraded the pageantry of Louis XIV’s time through symbol, and whose lovers still gave each other jewellery – although without the gallantry of the earlier court – was demanding the owners of real wealth in the country that they empty the coffers and fruits of their labour to maintain an order for which wealth was symbolised as power, not the ‘spectral impalpability’ of abstract riches. Like Hoffmann’s goldsmith, the Third Estate, and their champion Necker, refused to comply, but in refusing helped to unleash a far more degraded concept of capital upon French society. While Hoffmann cannot be taken as a literal believer in absolute monarchy, since another story Doge und Dogaressa effectively con­ demns the arrogance of the would-be Venetian despot Marino Faliero in trying to become a prince, his contempt for Napoleon and the ‘hated French’ (‘verhassten Französen’) is well recorded in letters to his friend Hitzig. In these he detailed the arrival and occupation in Dresden of the ruinous French, from the ‘unglücklicke 8t Mai’ 1813 until they were driven out in October:52 events which caused ructions in Hoffmann’s own life. Although Hoffmann expressed 72

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little pronounced political opinion, it is unlikely that he was upset by the restoration of absolute monarchies to Europe in 1814–15, compared with the miserable effects of the Revolution and sub­ sequent Napoleonic order that had so disrupted his family. Thus while his tale is not pure Fantastic and only faintly suggests super­ naturalism – in the murderer’s miraculous disappearance in the wall and the speculations of the crowd – it still bears the hallmarks of the counter-revolutionary Fantastic in its attempt to reject the substi­ tution of the ancien régime’s symbolic values by the modern, and in its artful, allusive overlaying of different periods of time in order to indicate a counter-revolutionary or Legitimist viewpoint: a feature repeated by Gautier and Féval in their own Fantastic and frénétique writings. In summation, Hoffmann’s fantastic tale uses metaphors relating to the divinity and seminal role of Louis’s kingship, the veiled allusion to a recent court scandal and the prevalence of other, more con­ temporary events, to invest his narrative of Louis XIV’s era with an allegory that symbolizes two contrasting and changing views of commodities and their role in propagating the French Revolution. The later events of the Revolution are alluded to palimpsestically throughout the work, and the novella manages to merge the literal with the allegorical, the long gone past with the more recent past, which merging serves to investigate and judge the processes in history. Through allusion, metaphor and allegory, Hoffmann presents a view of French society as moving from a more noble concept of com­ modity to a more degraded concept, but also suggests through oblique, contemporary allusion (represented in the Exili/Cagliostro parallel) that the later version of capital was facilitated by the decline of the gallantry ideal and responsible autocracy, which decline was already incipient in Louis XIV’s reign, despite his ability to act decently when required. If we return to Scott’s definition of the new German school of the Fantastic, which supposedly allows an unbridled supernaturalism and mixes different modes of representation without ‘some rule or other’ to govern the reader’s expectations, the tale still conforms to some of his core observations. Scott further complained that ‘the most unforeseen and extraordinary transformations take place through the most improbable means’ in this new type of literature.53 Hoffmann 73

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has certainly written an improbable tale that presents moral ambiva­ lence, that deploys historical accuracy and yet clearly merges different historical epochs through allusion and symbol, and which shows contrasting and irreconcilable elements to a personality. In this sense, the novel fits in with Scott’s complaints over imaginary discipline, since the writer has liberally used various techniques to make an unusual and symbolically versatile story that explains modernity and history, and which also demonstrates an advanced understanding of the changing nature of commodities in historical process. Scott’s more measured belief in the ‘“middle way”’,54 and the continual mutations of the past in a violent but assimilative process, is entirely threatened by Hoffmann’s radical techniques and ideas. For the likes of Nodier, however, mixing the familiar (of known history) with the mysterious (of unusual motivation here), and thence the literal with the allegorical, was exactly the way in which writers could divine truth against the banality and failures of the time. Hence its very hybridity and historical seriousness makes Das Fräulein von Scuderi appear eminently a part of the Fantastic as conceived by the con­ temporary French critics. Die Bergwerke zu Falun Another short story which juxtaposes different attitudes to precious metals is of course Die Bergwerke zu Falun (‘The Mines at Falun’) (1821). In this piece the young Elis Fröbom has sailed home with the East India Company to Göteburg, only to find that his mother is dead, and that he has no desire to take part in revelry.55 A miner arrives and advises him to go to Falun, and begin mining: contrary to his fears, the mines are not simply for profit, but are worked in service of beauty and the mystical Queen of metals; for the metals are symbols of the world above the clouds (p. 32). That night he dreams that he sees a mighty woman rise with a host of maidens from the centre of the earth and sprout a tree giving forth ‘wondrous flowers and plants of shining metal’ (‘wunderbare Blumen und Pflanzen von blinkendem Metall’) (p. 33). His mother’s voice calls to him and he sees that this is the Queen. The next day he sets out for Falun, and finds that the mysterious miner shows 74

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him the way. Before reaching his destination he has a vision of horror at the open-face pit, during which he contemplates turning back (pp. 35–6), but once there he meets Ulla, the beautiful daughter of the foreman, Pehrson Dahlsjö, and determines to stay for her sake (p. 38). He settles into his job as miner, and one day discovers the miner who took him, who tells him he is about to find a rich vein, before accosting Elis as a ‘blind mole’ [‘blinder Maulwurf’] for forgetting that his real duty is to the Queen of metals (p. 41). Told by others that he has seen the mythical miner Torbern, whose appearance always precedes the finding of a new vein, he returns only to find that Dahlsjö has promised Ulla’s hand in marriage to a wealthy man, so that Elis may remain as his own help in old age (p. 43). Elis runs back disconsolate to the mines and there has another vision of the mighty woman, seeing the tree rise once more from her heart, the laughing maidens and metal flowers. Calling on Torbern he now vows to dedicate himself to her (p. 44). On returning home, however, he finds the betrothal to another man was a ruse to test him, and that Dahlsjö expects him to marry Ulla. From this point onwards he is torn between his earthly beloved and the Queen of metals, whose precious stones and guiding inscriptions he alone can see (p. 46). The day before his marriage he goes to tell Ulla that the two of them will be enshrined in the centre of the Queen’s tree, for he has seen the pink alamandine which contains the story of their lives. On the day of the wedding he goes once more to the mines, but they collapse on him. Years later his body is discovered and an aged and un­­married Ulla returns to find reconciliation. The story was suggested by the genuine discovery of a miner’s body in Norwegian mines.56 Lansing Evans Smith has seen an in­ debtedness to Dante’s Inferno, with the old miner Torbern repre­ sent­ing a Virgil figure, initiating the younger miner in the ways of the underworld, and has remarked on the ‘psychogenesis’ and discovery of new personality caused by embracing the queen. For Evans Smith the distinction between the Queen and Ulla represents, allegorically, a distinction between domestic life and that of the artist, and two in­compatible personalities.57 Hilda Brown makes a similar observation, noting that the incompatible choice between two different types of beloved, such as Nathanael’s between Klara 75

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and Olimpia in Der Sandmann, is a familiar theme in Hoffmann’s writings.58 There may be some reference to the Hermetic ideas which under­ pin alchemical practice – that metals correspond to different spiritual essences in the celestial region, and symbolize stages of spiritual ascent for the adept. As Torbern tells Elis: ‘You speak of base profit, Elis Fröbom . . . it may be that in deepest earth by the weak glimmer of the mine’s light the eyes of man become more penetrating, surer and more skilful, so that finally they can recognize in the wonderful stones the reflection of that which is hidden above the clouds.’ (‘Du sprichst von schnödem Gewinn, Elis Fröbom . . . so möchte es wohl sein, dass in der tiefsten Teufe bei dem schwachen Schimmer des Grubenlichtes des Menschen Augen hellsehender wird, ja dass es endlich – sicher mehr und mehr kräftigend – in dem wunderbaren Gestein die Abspiegelung dessen zu erkennen vermag, was oben über den Wolken verborgen ist.’) (p.32)

Thanks to the growth in Freemasonry through the Illuminatenordnen of Adam Weishaupt, such Hermetic views were popular in the German-speaking world at this time (even if rather loosely combined with neo-Platonism), with Weishaupt himself writing works which argued for the correspondence between the spiritual and material, and against Cartesian dualism.59 The reference to the tree sprouting recalls the central image of Cabbala, the Tree of Life, with the Queen perhaps being Shekinah, the lowest sephira on the tree which acts as a form of immanence.60 Likewise the inscriptions in the mine also recall the Cabbalistic practice of notaqarion, while the concept of the marriage recalls The Chemical Marriage of Father Christian Rosenkreutz, the central mystical text of the Rosicrucian order, a subsect of Free­ masonry prevalent in Middle Europe in the early 1600s which made use of both Cabbala and alchemy.61 However, the allegory of the Queen of metals and the tree with metallic flowers that sprout from her in a vision of paradise would appear to be an unusual and somewhat parodic hybrid of the occult, and is most probably, through its very preposterousness, a mockery 76

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and satire of such groups and their ideas. Folklore is entwined with the reality of mining and an eclectic group of occult practices. Such eclecticism and switching of modes is what led Walter Scott to charge Hoffmann not only with excessive imagination but with too great a range of absurdities, unlike the ‘merveilleux’, which maintains its relation to a fixed set of superstitions that are historically and ethnically localized.62 While such a charge may be justified, the mocking or satirical effect of this eclecticism is again exactly what made Hoffmann’s work so appealing to French critics, who not only enjoyed the fact that he merged ‘by turns’ the extremes of the supernatural with ordinary reality in a nonchalant, unhesitant way (a feature of this particu­lar tale), but also enjoyed the fact that he was ‘by turns’ ‘pathetic or buffoonish’, ‘satirist and enthusiast’. This tendency was also what made his work so completely a part of the Fantastic, a tendency which, as Neil Cornwell rightly notes, makes his work compatible with the Bakhtinian carnivalesque.63 The Fantastic not only breaks the accepted laws of nature and thus of generic realism, but also allows for the breaking of a singular emotional and moral tone in the treatment of a work, so that a work of fiction may be an entirely double-sided discourse. Such is the case in Die Bergwerke zu Falun, where the work can be seen inconclusively as either an allegory of the dedicated artist, or an ironization of the quasi-mystical character with which artists and other devotees invest their callings. In conclusion, the Fantastic in France arises from the celebration of Hoffmann’s work through translation, and the rejection of Scott’s condemnation of the Prussian writer’s fiction. Specifically, the French appreciation of Hoffmann involves a love of the generic contrasts which his work employs, and the wide range of literary modes that he uses. This appreciation demonstrates an understanding of the Fantastic, in its initial manifestation, which is very different to that presented by Todorov, and also divergent from the understanding of ‘terror’ promoted by Ann Radcliffe. Above all, Hoffmann allows the Fantastic tale to overlay different areas of history through allusion – a feature later borrowed by Gautier and Féval – in order to present a pessimistic and counter-revolutionary view of history which is a challenge to the ‘“middle way”’ of Scott. That said, Hoffmann’s techniques also involve ironization and self-contradiction: all of 77

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which make him a most unusual and elusive figure when understood as a commentator upon the rise of modernity.

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3 The Double Life of the Artist in the Récits fantastiques of Théophile Gautier, and the Rejection of Bourgeois Life under the July Monarchy  Théophile Gautier is best known for his poetry, through which he practised his belief that art has no moral dimension, no finer purpose than to make manifest the beautiful, and through which he also used his earlier skill as a painter to create a language that is more visual than it is exclamatory. So successful was he in this that he inspired the Parnassian School of poetry, in which poets attempted to convey both emotions and ideas through imagery rather than through abstract descriptions or lengthy effusions of feeling. His skills have tended to be seen by subsequent poets – particularly by Modernists like Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound – as examples of Classical rather than Romantic taste, although his earliest allegiances were to Romantic writers like Victor Hugo and not to Classical groups.1 His political allegiances were presumably non-existent, and he openly embraced apoliticism, being unwilling to rival Stendhal or Balzac in condemning the rule under which he lived as a young man.2 Despite this his father, a sometime Royalist hero from the Midi who had become a Treasury distributor under the first Restoration,3 lost his position and fortune when the second revolution swept the Legitimist, Bourbon monarchy from the throne and replaced it with a bourgeois, constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe d’Orléans in July 1830. This led to the family relocating and living in reduced circumstances (pp. 36–7). Thus it is hard to believe that Gautier’s personal beliefs were entirely apolitical, and his references to Louis-

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Philippe in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin and letters to friends betray much animosity.4 Indeed Gautier’s career as writer began exactly as all sectors of society, including some members of the aristocracy, collectively overthrew the autocratic rule of Charles X (1825–1830), who had succeeded the more pragmatic and participatory Louis XVIII (1814– 15; 1815–1825). In doing this they restored democratic ideas and a greater executive role for members of the bourgeoisie.5 This return of bourgeois values was routinely abhorred by most Legtimists, in­ cluding Balzac, who saw in the creation of a constitutional monarchy and rule by the bourgeoisie a diminishment of the role of the Church (p. 79). However, Gautier’s own condemnation of Louis-Philippe’s reign stemmed more from a dual objection to what he saw as prudish, Catholic morality and Utilitarian principles in literature, which con­ tempt stung him into a cult of art and beauty for its own sake, a search for exotic experiences, and a forceful defence of the ‘immoral’ in art in various of his writings. At the same time, Gautier was very impressed by the new translations of Hoffmann that were being published by journals like Revue de Paris and also, increasingly, by booksellers. His earlier literary successes were mainly Hoffmanninspired contes fantastiques like ‘La Cafetière’, ‘Onuphrius’, ‘Omphale’ and ‘La Morte amoureuse’, the writing of which was often prompted by the lure of quick, reliable money from booksellers and editors, who began to specialize in shifting more populist book-copy than that provided by the older Romantic writers in the Restoration period (p. 86). In 1836, the year after Gautier had published Mademoiselle de Maupin, his celebration of female beauty and the near impossible quest for making the artist’s erotic ideal a reality in his life, he also published a short appreciation of Hoffmann, in which he praised the Prussian writer’s ability to ground the fantastic in life as it is experienced. While in the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin there is an attempt to extol beauty in art for its own sake, the Hoffmann appreciation tends instead to value Hoffmann’s work through its ability to comment upon a presumed ‘real life’ by means of the fantastic form. Not only that, but ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (lit. ‘The Dead Woman in Love’), the fantastic tale that Gautier published directly after Mademoiselle de Maupin, and which also contains a quester after 80

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romantic love, appears to deny entirely the celebration of beauty promoted by the earlier narrative, since in this case the beloved is revealed to be no more than a blood-sucking vampire who threatens the lover Romuald, a priest, with his own annihilation through the relationship. Given the contrasts between the Preface to the earlier novel and the essay on Hoffmann, the presentation of art and beauty in Mademoiselle de Maupin as ideal truth and its suborning in ‘La Morte amoureuse’, it might well appear that Gautier is actually torn between two views of art and two attitudes to both religion and bourgeois values, allowing his ‘serious’ fiction and poetry to present his official ‘art for art’s sake’ and anti-morality views, while giving space for his misgivings, both towards the purpose of art and the truth involved in beauty, through the more concealing form of the Fantastic tale. In fact, as will be shortly demonstrated, the portrayal of sexual love and physical beauty in ‘La Morte amoureuse’ in no way contradicts Gautier’s discussion of beauty and artistic ideal in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, but instead allows the reader to determine more fully what constituted his entire objections to the values present in Louis-Philippe’s reign. In the following chapter I will consider the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), and its portrayal of art and culture under LouisPhilippe, and then of Gautier’s essay ‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’ (1836). Having examined the extent to which Gautier’s tale ‘Onuphrius’ conforms to his portrayal of Hoffmann, and what it reveals about his views of the artist, I will compare the presentations of ideal beauty, as both an aesthetic and love ideal, in Mademoiselle de Maupin and ‘La Morte amoureuse’, and the extent to which these help to illuminate his aesthetic and political ideas. Finally, with relation to the unusual use of the double in the tale, there will be a comparison between Gautier’s vampire tale and its near contemporary, Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ (1839). Theories of art 1834–6 In the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier presented his most expanded defence thus far of artistic beauty and the moral nature of art. He objected to the rise of a new type of journalist since the 81

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July Revolution, who would condemn new literature for its moral qualities, likening this type to Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, who had placed fig-leaves over the offending parts of statues.6 He disliked the return of Christianity as a model of belief through which to judge literature, and reminded his readers that despite the concern over immorality in modern works, the plays of Molière were also full of adultery and sexual misbehaviour (p. 38). This over-moralising he saw as propagating two great sins. The first one is the worst. When he has met under the table, and even elsewhere, a quite large number of these dragons of virtue, I am restored to a better opinion of myself, and I suppose that with all the faults that I may have they partake of another which in my eyes is certainly the largest and worst of all: - it is hypocrisy that I mean. (j’ ai rencontré sous la table, et même ailleurs, un assez grand nombre de ces dragons de vertu, je reviens à une meilleure opinion de moimême, et j’estime qu’avec tous les défauts que je puisse avoir ils en ont un autre qui est bien, à mes yeux, le plus grand et le pire de tous: - c’est l’hypocrisie que je veux dire.) (p. 41)

The second major fault is envy. This envy leads him to compare the critics to eunuchs, linking the activity of artistic creation very provocatively to sexual prowess. Eunuchs can only watch the ‘Grand Seigneur’ enjoy his harem, just like the critic ‘who sees the poet walk in the garden of poetry with his nine beautiful odalisques’ (p. 42).7 This link is important since Gautier’s novel deals with the attainment of both a sexual and aesthetic ideal in the relationship between the poet d’Albert and his beloved Madelaine, suggesting that Gautier sees beauty in art as being an extension of erotic experience in life. This erotic element is rendered all the more important by the fact that Gautier also declares that art cannot be immoral, since it does not constitute a model for life but rather copies life, and that while poets may present extreme or ‘immoral’ experiences, this has no bearing upon their private lives (critics themselves frequently forget the ‘dramatic principle’ (p. 48)). In Gautier’s defence of aesthetic beauty from the charge of immorality, it is never quite clear whether 82

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the content of art which constitutes its beauty, and thus its exemption from moral judgement, should command the same respect when recurring in life. The second class of critic against whom Gautier rails are the Utili­ tarians, who believe that art should address social issues and ultimately be useful in furthering progress (pp. 49–50). Gautier argues that art cannot do this because it serves beauty, and ‘Nothing that is beautiful is indispensible to life’ (p. 53).8 Despite this he claims that ‘enjoyment appears to me to be the end of life, and the only useful thing in the world’ (pp. 54–5),9 before later declaring that progress is itself a myth. He continues to condemn other critics, such as the ‘critiques blasés’, who are too young and too indifferent to observe what they see properly, and finally those who look to the literature of the future. He understands entirely why it was that Charles X closed down many periodicals, and expresses the wish that Louis-Philippe would do the same, since journals are killing the book trade (p. 68). Mademoiselle de Maupin itself tells the story of a young man, d’Albert, searching for the ideal beloved, who for him would be like a goddess become palpable, expressing her spirit through an ideal form. Venus is his deity, not the Christian God, since she is a ‘divinity who loves men . . . she does not wrap herself in the languorous veils of mysticism: she stands upright, her dolphin behind her, her foot on the conch shell’:10 not only does Venus exempt man from restraint, but her spiritual essence can become flesh. His expectations are high and exact, nurtured from an early age by the paintings of Giorgione and Rubens (and presumably Botticelli). As Albert B. Smith has pointed out, d’Albert takes his conception and comparisons of the beautiful from both the plastic arts and from experiences in nature,11 his penchant for proportionality rather than the irregular indicating that despite Gautier’s professed interest in Romanticism, his hero’s concept of the beautiful was certainly more Classical. D’Albert takes Rosette as a lover, but she is unsatisfactory, capable of being both the courtesan and St Ursula, but never the ideal, and d’Albert even contemplates the desire of seeing her as male and himself as female.12 Eventually Théodore arrives in town, a beautiful young man with whom both d’Albert and Rosette become infatuated, d’Albert astonished at Theodore’s perfect expression of feminine form (p.178). Having teased d’Albert with the possibility of his hermaphroditism, Théodore 83

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eventually reveals himself to be Madelaine de Maupin, and makes love to the poet, before leaving him to contemplate the fleeting nature of the aesthetic ideal that has made itself manifest in life. The work extols the union of the aesthetic with the real, of the spiritual with the material, and justifies, despite its erotic and poten­ tially homosexual content, the cult of beauty promulgated in the preface: such a work of literature is not immoral because it presents an ideal of beauty that can cause ‘enjoyment’(‘jouissance’). On the other hand, the fleeting nature of the lover’s perfection may act as a motif, encapsulating the idea that it is only in the work of art that perfection can be met, and thus why it is that art cannot be asked to serve morality or progress. D’Albert’s love for Madelaine de Maupin is preconceived through poetic imagination and ideals from the visual arts, eventually becoming manifest in his real life only to disappear, in what is for the reader himself or herself always only a work of art representing a quest for ideal love. In this sense it may be that the ideal of artistic beauty understood by Gautier may really exist only in an aesthetic realm because it is so distant from life, despite the fact that he also argues in the preface that art is itself modelled on life, and also compares the beauty of women, as an aesthetic pleasure, with music and the plastic arts (p. 53). Such a view is supported by his extolling the consumption of opium and hashish, and his preparedness to write about the experiences in ‘La Pipe d’Opium’ (1838) and ‘Le Club des Hachichins’ (1843). Whether ideal beauty is a potential in life which art reflects, or simply a wishfulfilment that finds its end only in the art object: this is a tension that Gautier never completely resolved. The fact that the decor, costume and styles of the novel are extremely imprecise, as AvignonLe Roux has shown, with the moments of intense beauty being couched in the era of Louis XIII, indicates this division between the world of the novel and its artistic ideals, and the real world of contemporary France.13 Whatever the ironies and inconsistencies involved in Gautier’s presentation of the art ideal, his defence of Hoffmann in 1836, ‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’, seems to promote a different theory, or at least a different emphasis.14 Seemingly aware of the existing criticism of Hoffmann from the likes of Scott and Fanny Seymour, that the Prussian writer diverges too far from real life, and expressing surprise 84

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that the Voltairean French should be so in love with his work when they are so little disposed to the Fantastic,15 Gautier stresses that there is much verisimilitude in the Prussian’s work. Hoffmann is capable of giving the semblance of reality to things that ‘seem least true-to-life’ (‘les plus invraisemblables’), and this is because he seizes objects through colour, sound and feeling (p. 43). Coupled with this he has a ‘marvellous finesse for observation’ (‘merveilleuse’ presumably denoting a pun), and like Goya notices the ‘risible’ in the body. Gautier declares that ‘In art, a false thing can be very true, and a true thing very false: all depends on the execution’ (pp. 45–6),16 and Hoffmann’s ability to make the unreal seem real clearly depends upon his technique. However, Hoffmann’s ‘marvellous’ is not the same as that which is found in fairy-tales, since he ‘always has a foot in the real world’. We do not see enormous, fantastic creations in his writing, but rather the ‘occult sympathies and antipathies . . . mysterious and malign influences of an evil principle which he only draws vaguely . . . it is the positive and plausible of the Fantastic’ (p. 46).17 Hoffmann saw so many extreme conditions, that when writing about them in his work he was able to ‘mix reverie with action’ plausibly. Thus the Fantastic in his work always has ‘a certain pretext’ and a ‘plan’, since ‘it is hardest to succeed in the genre where everything is permitted’ (p. 48).18 Effectively, Gautier’s defence of Hoffmann is based on the German writer’s ability either to make his more fantastic elements seem real and plausible, whether morally or psychologically, or to use the Fantastic to illustrate situations that operate in reality, even if they do not do so through the imagery and devices with which he depicts them. Gautier clearly does not believe, with Nodier, that the Fantastic is ‘mensonge’, nor that it constitutes a necessary ‘deviation from reason’.19 While Gil Curiel sees this merging of the real with the unreal in Gautier’s depiction of Hoffmann as indicating the understanding of a new reality whereby ‘plausibility and implausibility lose their sense’,20 I would argue that Gautier to some degree does veer towards the accepted Radcliffean and Todorovian views of the Gothic and Fantastic here, in sharp contradistinction to how earlier French critics had seen his work. In fact Gautier discerns both terror and hesitation between natural and supernatural explanation in the tales. Describing 85

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how Hoffmann often paints pictures of reality that differ in one small, unsettling or uncanny detail, Gautier elaborates that once something has appeared to be wrong one feels, despite assurances to the contrary, ‘a frisson of terror as if you were seeing lady Macbeth and her lamp appear or the ghost of Hamlet entering’.21 Such an observation demonstrates that Gautier, like Walter Scott, values the supernatural for its emotional effect rather than simply for its potential meaning. Thus Gautier sees beauty as the goal of art and understands art as cherishing what is highest in life and as transcending it; of manifesting latently the ethereal and ideal that the physical world barely ever achieves; and also as having no useful or moral purpose. On the other hand, he understands Hoffmann’s use of the Fantastic as being most valid because it makes the unreal appear plausible, and conversely because it is rooted in life. It remains to be seen whether Gautier’s own Fantastic tales follow his Hoffmannesque prescription. Onuphrius ‘Onuphrius’ was Gautier’s second récit fantastique, written when he was only twenty-one years of age, and is specifically about a young artist and poet like himself who has become obsessed with the litera­ ture of Hoffmann – with disastrous results.22 Onuphrius is waiting in his studio for his model and mistress Jacintha, who arrives as the clocks are striking eleven – a fact which disturbs Onuphrius since he is convinced an hour has been lost. As he attempts to finish his painting of the beautiful girl he discovers that a small moustache has been painted on the picture, and that the bristles on his brush are too stiff. She leaves him to finish his master­ piece and we are told that he is very much part of the Romantic, Jeunes-France movement,23 and a great believer in the work of Hoffmann, his mind constantly beset with demons and creatures inspired by the writer’s work. He is also someone who finds it impossible to communicate with the outside world and to realize his imaginative conceptions (p. 72). As he finishes the piece it is thwarted by a mysterious hand, throwing a little fibre on the point where he wanted to paint the light of the iris, making him believe 86

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that the devil is at work – although he simultaneously notices that the woman in the painting bears more of a resemblance to Roxelane, a friend of Jacintha, with whom he had a brief affair, than it does to his model/beloved (p. 77). At this point he leaves on horseback for the countryside, to have dinner with Jacintha’s uncle. Haywains mysteriously move and curtail his movement, and when he reaches the banlieu he finds that the clocks strike seven seemingly for hours. Jacintha has left, leaving him to dine alone with the uncle and play a board-game. While playing, he notices that a claw with a ruby starts to move his pieces, causing him to lose. On his way back he is surrounded by four men, one with a ruby-ringed claw, who place a sheet in front of his horse which mysteriously transfixes it until dawn (pp. 79–81). Back in his lodgings he falls asleep and has many dreams, which he later relates to the unnamed narrator, the narration now moving to the first person. In one of these he is already taken for dead, even though he is still sentient, with Jacintha mourning him. He is placed in a coffin and given a premature burial, in which he passes time by composing a poem called ‘La Vie dans la mort’, until he is exhumed by body-snatchers (pp. 82–5). Placed on the dissecting table and cut to his heart, his soul now soars happily above Paris and then reaches a gallery where he sees the man with the claw and ruby, whom he takes to be a friend, claiming one of Onuphrius’s paintings as his own and robbing Onuphrius of any glory. Appalled, the soul seeks Jacintha, but failing to find her goes to the theatre, to see the same man now claim as his own a play written by Onuphrius, and then be kissed passionately by Jacintha. Onuphrius’s soul goes home, but is distracted into the lodgings of an old man who begins to brush him until he disappears (pp. 86–8). From this point on Onuphrius was frequently delirious, recalls the narrator, who now resumes the narration. Onuphrius looks in the mirror for the first time in many years, and discovers that he has two reflections: one his own face and the other the same as the devil-like man with the claw and the rub ring. This reflection leaves the mirror, and trepans Onuphrius’s skull, so that he sees all his ideas of women rise like bubbles out of his head. He receives two letters: one from Jacintha ending the relationship (a sign that she has noticed the likeness of Roxelane in the portrait, Onuphrius 87

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conjectures). The second letter invites him to a soirée. He dresses as a figure from a Van Dyck painting, and attends, meeting again the man with a claw and ruby ring, now dressed as a dandy (pp. 89–93). Onuphrius is asked to recite poetry by a society woman but is rendered immobile. The dandy places a paste made of frivolous and meaningless eighteenth-century poetry into Onuphrius’s mouth, which the young poet then spits out to enormous applause from the bourgeois audience. Disgusted, he flees and is run over by a horse and carriage driven by Jacintha and her dandy lover (pp. 95–8). He staggers home and, mindful of the story of Pierre Schlemil in Hoffmann’s ‘Aventures de la nuit de Sylvestre’ (‘Adventures of New Year’s Eve’), refuses to look at his reflection again. He now leaves ‘le monde positif’ (‘the positivist world’) for good, while Jacintha herself soon forgets him (p. 100). The récit is extreme in its use of fantasy, and owes many debts to Hoffmann, and more importantly to Gautier’s own understanding of the Prussian writer. The movement of the clocks and the thwarting of the painting correspond to the sense of unease in an otherwise normal setting, which Gautier sees as a cause of terror and suspense in Hoffmann’s work. The synaesthesia of the words being a visual paste is also an ironic borrowing from Hoffmann’s ‘musical theme’ works such as the ‘Kreisleriana’, in which Hoffmann’s brilliant alter ego, the composer Kreisler, is always attempting to give musical form to his visual imagery. Like Hoffmann’s work, ‘Onuphrius’ has more than one narrator in order to centre claustrophobically on the young man’s experience, while at the same time allowing the reader some critical distance; it employs ideas of duality in the self and the double; furthermore, there is the problem of reflection conferring identity, which is inspired by Hoffmann’s Der Nacht vor Sylwester. The sheer self-indulgence and dreamlike quality of the tale, how­ ever, would seem to exceed the use of the Fantastic employed by Hoffmann, especially as described by Gautier in his appreciation of the German writer, who saw him as a Fantastic author with a ‘foot in the real world’. In fact, ‘Onuphrius’ also appears to be indebted to Charles Nodier’s ‘Smarra’ (1821), in which a young Piedmontese dreams that he is ‘Lucius’ in Roman Thessaly, who is then raised to the sky by the witch Méroé, beheaded in front of a large crowd and forced to suffer the stryge Smarra attacking his heart, before 88

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finding himself next to his friend’s corpse outside Corinth.24 These details may have influenced concrete aspects of the dream sequence in Gautier’s tale, which involves the dissection of the poet’s body, the soul soaring above Paris and the public humiliation at the ball. Moreover, the general lack of proper consecution, which is replaced by absurd connections, spurred by repressed anxieties rather than cause and effect, is very similar to Nodier’s elastic short story. The extreme nature of the fantasy led Castex to conclude that ‘Onuphrius’ was really the satire of a ‘literary mode’, inspired by Hoffmann, and a mockery of those members of Jeunes-France who have gone too far to return to ‘le monde positif’, since Onuphrius suffers from an ‘excessive development of his interior life’.25 Peter Whyte also argues that it is a satire of Gautier and his friends, the Latinization of the protagonist’s name indicating other Jeunes-France members like Petrus Borel,26 although the name was also inspired by Horace Walpole’s ‘superchérie’ (false name) for the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Onuphrio Muralto. Despite the extreme nature of the fantasies and hallucinations/ supernatural experiences, the excess of ‘Onuphrius’ nevertheless follows a logical plan and, like the fantastic elements of Hoffmann which Gautier had observed, has a ‘pretext’, since it appears to emanate from Onuphrius’s over-indulgent imagination and repressed anxieties. Indeed, the récit explores concerns about the artist’s relation to his ideal and to his audience which are serious, and which are also explicable in psychologically plausible terms. We learn of Onuphrius’s inability and presumed lack of concern about making his ideas under­ stood early on in the tale: ‘As little accustomed as he was to living in the real world, so likewise did he not know how to go about putting his ideas into action, and he made mountains out of the slightest thing’ (p. 74).27 The later dream and hallucinatory reverie in which his diabolical double claims the credit for a successful painting and a popular theatre piece, trepans his unrealized concepts and eventually replaces his barren poetic mouth with a paste of eighteenth-century platitudes to entertain the crowd, indicates an anxiety about this lack of communicative ability, which Onuphrius’s unconscious mind realizes but stubbornly refuses to address. Thus the double represents Onuphrius’s repressed desire to communicate with the bourgeois world which shuns him, and so attain success, but at the expense 89

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of his own art. Since Onuphrius has also cheated on Jacintha, both sexually and artistically, the double also represents the repressed guilt which he feels at confusing two women and painting Jacintha to look like Roxelane. The diabolical double or alter ego can be explained in relation to various well-known psychoanalytical theories. It can, for example, be understood, in the Freudian sense, as the familiar repressed, the ‘unheimlich’ or ‘uncanny’, here thwarting Onuphrius’s pure artistic ideal.28 Or, as Clifford Hallam has shown when considering the double as ‘incomplete self’, it can be related to various aspects of Jung’s theory of archetypes in the collective unconsciousness. The double can be the ‘wise old man’, who guides and directs in dreams, or the ‘shadow’, upon whom the ego projects aspects of its own psyche that it prefers not to hold. These two figures also have an im­personal and ‘archetypal’ character issuing from myth or folklore.29 This latter fact may explain why in Onuphrius’s case the double is both mythic and personal: like the traditional devil and yet also later dressed as a dandy at the soirée, just as Onuphrius himself is dressed as a character from a Van Dyck painting. Whatever the cause, the belief that some dark figure is undermining him by ruining his brushes and preventing him from placing the finishing touches to the portrait of Jacintha is no more than an attempt to project the confusion of Jacintha and Roxelane in his mind onto an unacceptable other who is understood as external to himself, as occurs in Nathaniel’s obsession with the character of Coppelius in Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. Few tales that employ the double as a motif, however, contain such elaborate and excessive portrayals of the supernatural and the Fantastic. In her essay, ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (1946), Melanie Klein understands the act of projection onto another as result­ ing from the ego’s schizoid splitting of the breast into good and bad at the maternal suckling stage, which allows the child also to split one object into two and hence divide its experience of reality. Through introjection and projection in relation to the object, there is ultim­ ately a splitting in the ego: introjection of the good, or gratifying, into its own ego, and projection of the bad onto external objects. In the schizoid stage of development the child can experience hallucin­ ations which give it a sense of gratification, completely denying the negative aspects of the ego and making the remaining ego appear 90

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omnipotent.30 Paradoxically, as Klein noted briefly in later works, hallucinations of persecution also perform the same task, by similarly projecting the uncontrollable elements of the ego onto the external, in what David Wadsall has termed ‘dread-fulfillment’.31 The process of splitting the ego, projecting and introjecting, continues into adult life, and if excessive can have disastrous con­ sequences for the subject’s relation to reality. As Klein notes, such intense splitting can develop into schizophrenia in later years.32 The deflection of guilt onto another over a ‘beloved’ object can cause excessive projection and continued denial, often in the form of ‘projective identification’. Thus Onuphrius’s immersion in Hoffmann may simply have fur­ nished his psyche with a set of vehicles which allow him to project his anxieties about his sexual guilt and compromise of aesthetic ideal onto a demonic figure – the unheimlich, the shadow or the other – but which activity results in hallucination, and further facilitates the very disintegration of reality which Klein understands as a schizoid and psychotic, not a neurotic experience. Thus Gautier’s tale could be seen as a very realistic account of the breakdown of a psyche which cannot maintain its own guilty thoughts and desires, creating the double as a form of obfuscation, denial and projective identifi­ cation.33 As such it is in line with Gautier’s own description of the Fantastic in Hoffmann’s writing, where the Fantastic always has a ‘pretext’ (in this case a schizoid reaction to guilt) and ‘a foot’ in real life, since Onuphrius’s experiences here could be seen as plausible rather than as a convenient literary allegory for his divided self.34 Onuphrius’s very failures as an artist and their horrendous con­ sequences also anticipate the fusion of erotic and artistic ideal which is exhibited in Mademoiselle de Maupin, where the artist wishes to find the supreme love with an ideal beloved, whose form he envisages through his previous exposure to the paintings of Rubens, Botticelli and Giorgione. Onuphrius’s relationship with his girlfriend and model, whom he is attempting to paint to a harmonious perfection, is in fact compromised from the start, being based more upon mutual sympathy than genuine appreciation of her being: she ‘loved him as a mother loves her son’, while he loves her ‘as Christopher Columbus had to like the first who did not laugh in his face when he spoke of the new world which he had guessed at’.35 Despite trying to present 91

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her as an ideal it is no small wonder that he has inevitably faltered. Thus Onuphrius’s erotic infidelity is at odds with his imaginary zeal, and leads him to traduce his aesthetic values, in a tale of the Fantastic that is eminently realistic in relation to the Kleinian understanding of projection and the root causes of psychosis. All in all, this tale follows closely Gautier’s own appreciation of Hoffmann’s work, by using fantasy to show the plausible workings of psychology, by being rooted in the real world and showing a ‘pretext’ and a ‘plan’. The work also expresses the pitfalls involved in his own cult of the beautiful in art and in erotic ideal through using the device of the double to portray the psychotic experience caused by either the repression or projection this must entail. It is a bitter irony that by the end of the story we are informed that Jacintha, the model whom Onuphrius used to express this Giottoesque ideal and to whom he believed, in his mistaken egotism, that he had wished to devote himself, has forgotten him completely a year after his death. La Morte amoureuse In ‘La Morte amoureuse’ Gautier wrote what appears superficially be an alarming cautionary tale. In its portrayal of consummate female beauty as corrupting, it seems initially to offer a rebuttal to the very values that he had espoused a year earlier in Mademoiselle de Maupin and its anti-Catholic, anti-moralist preface. As I shall argue in the following section, closer observation of both the tale and Mademoiselle de Maupin reveals this not to be true. Indeed, with the analysis of the tale we can discern the more precise objections which Gautier harboured towards the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe and its drab, hypocritical and acquisitive culture. The story begins with the priest Romuald, an old man, confessing to an interlocutor that he has indeed enjoyed romantic love in his life, despite his being a priest. Raised in a seminary, his only desire was to serve God, and as a youth he had little contact with the out­ side world. On the day of his ordination in Venice his gaze wanders to a woman ‘of a rare beauty and dressed with a royal magnificence’. At this point ‘the candles paled on their golden chandeliers like stars 92

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in the morning’, before the ‘angelic revelation’, whose ‘fabulous reality’ was greater than ‘the ideal beauty’ which the best painters have ‘brought back to earth’ in the form of the ‘divine portrait of the Madonna’.36 He describes her bluish, white skin, her blonde hair, her ‘sea-green eyes’, her red velvet dress and her fine teeth, her features indicating that she must be either ‘an angel or a demon’, and is certainly no issue of Eve (p. 120). He immediately feels sick, like the young girl forced to marry against her will, or the novice who rents her veil having become the bride of Christ. He stares intently at the woman and imagines that she is begging him to give up his vocation and live a life of sensual delight with her. Her black page approaches him and presents him with a purse of gold coins, containing also the message: ‘Clarimonde, at the palace Concini’ (p. 124). Afterwards Romuald curses his habit, wishing he could be dressed like a cavalier and be her companion. He now feels total regret at having embraced the celibate life. Seeing this, his mentor Abbé Sérapion warns him against the pleasures of the flesh and temptation, telling him to ‘Pray, fast, meditate’ [‘Priez, jeunez, méditez’] (p. 126). Sérapion finds Romuald a parish living at C***. Travelling there with him, the two see a large palazzo from a distance. This, according to Sérapion, is the house of the unspeakable and depraved Clarimonde. Romuald fancies he can discern her form on the terrace (p. 128). A year after assuming his duties he is called away at night to give the last rites to a dying woman. He arrives to find that the woman is none other than Clarimonde and that she has already died. The room is nothing like a bedroom of death, with the waft of oriental essences consuming it (p. 132). She is dressed in a shroud and he can still see the tint of her pink lips and blonde hair, ‘the charming form of her body’ (p. 133). Indeed, her ‘perfection of forms, although purified and sanctified by the shadow of death, troubled [him] more voluptuously than it should have done’, causing him to forget his ‘office funèbre’, and furthermore fancy that she cannot really be dead. He describes her being dead as ‘yet more coquetry’, and her expression one of ‘melancholic chastity and thoughtful suffering of an inexpressible power of seduction’.37 Momentarily she comes to life, saying that after waiting so long for him, her beloved, to arrive she is now dead, and wishes him a passionate adieu. Falling into a 93

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swoon, Romuald forgets entirely the next three days, until he awakes to hear Sérapion, his tone ‘hypocritical’, tell him that she died after an extenuated orgy. Clarimonde, however, visits Romuald again at night in her death shroud. She offers him a life of luxuriant sensuality, which he accepts. He arrives at her palace a night later to see her transformed into the beautiful courtesan once more, and begins a new life, in which he is effectively two people. ‘Dating from this night, my nature became double in a certain way’ (p. 143).38 By day he is the assiduous priest, and by night a luxuriant lover in a special dream life. One day he pricks his finger, only to find Clarimonde suck­ing his blood, screaming that she will not die. ‘“My life is in yours,”’ she declares, ‘“and all that is me comes from you.”’39 Perturbed by this, which happens several more times, Romuald confesses his dalliance to Sérapion, and the Abbé takes him to Clarimonde’s grave and unturfs her cadaver, sprinkling it with holy water and making the sign of the cross, her body falling to dust (p. 149). The young priest now comes to his senses, ‘and the seigneur Romuald, lover of Clarimonde, separated himself from the poor priest’.40 At night she appears in a dream and accuses him of madness, for had he not been happy with her? He admits that he still regrets her loss, but that that is the story of his youth (p. 151). The conte was probably influenced by another vampire tale set in Venice, Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen (1820), which was an adap­ tation of Polidori’s original tale, and by Hoffmann’s only vampire narrative Gästliche Geschichte (‘Ghostly Tale’), which details the story of a Baron marrying a young relative whose vile mother is a vampire, only to find that his wife herself begins to visit graves at night and then attempts to eat her husband.41 Gil Curiel also notes an in­ debtedness to Lewis’s The Monk, in the temptation and ultimate succumbing by the Priest.42 As I intend to demonstrate, the sources for ‘La Morte amoureuse’ would appear to be wider than that, and to involve a quite complex relation with other areas of Hoffmann’s writings and with elements of French history. Compared to Mademoiselle de Maupin there seems to be a greater equivocality in the portrayal of erotic love and physical beauty. Clarimonde epitomizes a superlative ideal that is denied to the priest by his calling, and yet she is also a vampire who sucks the priest’s blood: in reality no more than a cadaver who is already dead, not 94

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a divine creature made flesh. Centring upon the remorse that the priest feels in losing his beloved, and Gautier’s rejection of Catholic­ ism elsewhere, Albert B. Smith has read this conte as enshrining the same values as Gautier’s novel, and sees the priest Sérapion as a frustrator to the consummation of an erotic and artistically conceived ideal, similar to Rosette in Mademoiselle de Maupin, who threatens to thwart d’Albert in his aim of attaining Madelaine.43 Castex saw the tale as reproducing the scenario of Manon Lescaut, noticing that it contains a division of the two aspects of the love, the spiritual and the physical, which d’Albert feels for Mademoiselle de Maupin. He understood the story as representing a bifurcation in Gautier’s own mind into ‘an obscure struggle between his good and his bad conscience’.44 Rather perceptively, Gil Curiel has noticed the extent to which eros is linked to thanatos in the conte, with the desire only becoming charged and then consummated once Romuald has seen Clarimonde dead: a change which I would explain as resulting less from the effect of her death, than from his actual ordination and the prolonged performance of his duties.45 Taken at face value the tale can seem to be opposing the very values which Mademoiselle de Maupin espouses, since here idealized beauty masks corruption. Smith ignores this potential interpretation, and casts Sérapion, the ‘hypocritical’ frustrator, as being entirely negative and opposed to Gautier’s own ideas: a somewhat problem­ atic conclusion given the very real danger that Romuald finds himself in, and given that the Abbé is also named after the brotherhood, and positive artistic ideal, with which Hoffmann framed many of his narratives. Closer inspection of the priest’s impressions and desires reveals, however, that the values of ‘La Morte amoureuse’ neither contradict those of Mademoiselle de Maupin, nor coincide with Smith’s opinion. Rather, the tale helps to define what Gautier’s ‘ideal’ of beauty actually is, how far short Clarimonde falls from it and the role which the Catholic Church in Gautier’s time played in prevent­ ing an erotic and aesthetic ideal from becoming manifest. In Mademoiselle de Maupin, d’Albert, before beginning his conquests, describes the ideal beauty as a woman of a certain kind: She is blonde with black eyes, white as a blonde woman, with the colouring of a brunette, something red and sparkling in the smile. 95

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The Fantastic and European Gothic The lower lip a little wide, the pupil swimming in the flow of a deep moisture, the throat round and small . . . a form of beauty at once fine and firm, elegant and lively, poetic and real; a motif from Giorgione executed by Rubens. (Elle est blonde avec des yeux noirs, blanche comme une blonde, colorée comme une brune, quelque chose de rouge et de scintillant dans le sourire. La lèvre inférieure un peu large, la prunelle nageant dans un flot d’humide radicale, la gorge ronde et petite . . . un caractère de beauté fin et ferme à la fois, élegant et vivace, poétique et réel; un motif de Giorgione exécuté par Rubens.)46

When meeting the local beauties d’Albert finds it impossible to discern this ideal in concrete form and despairs that he will ever meet it. He blames the poets and then the painters for delineating his ideal to him, and then describes once more how Rubens and Raphael have depicted them better than anything life itself has offered. With Rosette, he has a fleeting glimpse of his ideal becoming real, when he kisses her in a pastoral setting that enhances his mood, but he soon tires of her over-sensual nature. Nevertheless, d’Albert writes to his correspondent that although he is bored of her, I have taken up with her a habit of pleasure, which it would be painful for me to suspend. – It is true that there is the resource of courtesans; – I used to like them enough in the past, and I had no lack of them under similar circumstances; –but today they disgust me horribly and give me nausea. – anyway, there’s no need to think about it, I am so drenched in sensual pleasure, the poison has insinuated itself so deeply into my bones, that I cannot bear the idea of being a month or two without a woman. (J’ai pris avec elle une habitude de plaisir qu’il me sera pénible de suspendre. Il est vrai que l’on a la resource des courtisanes; - je les aimais assez autrefois, et je ne m’en faisais point faute en pareille occurrence; - mais aujourd’hui elles me dégoûtent horriblement, et me donnent la nausée.- Ainsi, il n’y faut pas penser, je suis tellement amolli par la volupté, le poison s’est insinué si profondement dans mes os que je ne puis supporter l’idée d’être un ou deux mois sans femme.) (p. 165) 96

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Having related his nausea for the courtesan, and that the ‘poison’ of sensuality had made him an unwilling addict, he admits that beauty is more important for him than the spirit or soul, since beauty in­ carnates the latter any way: ‘I adore above all things that are beautiful of form; –beauty for me is visible Divinity, palpable happiness, it is the heavens come down to earth’ (p. 167).47 D’Albert is certainly attracted to the carnal, but its over-presence when not infused by the spiritual is ultimately disgusting to him, even if it is also addictive. Clarimonde’s initial appearance to Romuald is as the embodiment of a spiritual ideal higher than any form of immanence yet figured: ‘The greatest painters who, when seeking the ideal beauty in the heavens, brought back to earth the divine portrait of the Madonna, do not even come near this fabulous reality’ (p. 119).48 Whether this incarnation is benign or malign he cannot be sure (p. 120). However, once her status as courtesan is revealed by Sérapion, the same man who advises Romuald to fast and pray, she is identified as a purely carnal figure. Romuald’s first close encounter with her occurs when she is already a corpse, and the pleasures which she presents him are entirely sensory rather than the intimation of any more ethereal ideal, since it transpires that she has a ‘chameleon’-like quality, which allows her to take on the form of whichever woman pleases him (p. 144). When she sucks his blood, her overly carnal nature makes itself clear as she displays ‘ferocious and savage joy’ before sucking ‘with an air of indescribable, voluptuous pleasure’.49 Such carnality frightens Romuald and leads him to seek refuge in Abbé Sérapion’s advice. While it would seem that Catholic morality is presented as necessary in the tale, in fact the priest’s dependence upon Clarimonde’s sensuousness, preceded by his erotic excitement at her dead form, is explicable in Gautier’s own terms as resulting from the ridiculous moralising of the era, which the writer believed surrounded him. In the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier had complained bitterly about the vice of hypocrisy in critics who believed themselves apostles of virtue (p. 41). This complaint is anticipated by his discussion earlier in the preface of the example of Tartuffe in Molière’s play of the same name. Complaining that while he himself would never be so prudish as to cover Dorine’s breasts with a handkerchief, he also states that he ‘would not grope if Elmire’s dress is soft, and would not push her holily onto the edge 97

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of the table, as did this pathetic man Tartuffe’.50 Although Sérapion saves Romuald from death, his morality is no solace for the young man and not in itself to be associated with the Hoffmannesque artistic ideal with which his name is more usually connected. His tone is hypocritical when asking after Romuald’s health, and his eyes are yellow,51 a colour which the young priest identifies with death (p. 132). Romuald also readily accepts the duality of soul and body which Gautier’s other hero, d’Albert, sees physical and erotic beauty as dissolving (p. 146). Hence the carnality of Clarimonde, including her deathly corporeality and infectious over-sensuality, is itself a result of Romuald’s own division of the spiritual from the corporeal, aided and abetted by hypocrisy and repression, which Gautier saw as endemic to the practice of religion in his own age. Similarly, the doubleness that the priest experiences, in which he genuinely believes that he has become two people, is itself symptomatic of the bifur­ cation of selfhood, and hence hypocrisy, exemplified by the ‘pathetic’ Tartuffe and by the pious critics whose secret immoral excesses Gautier claimed to have seen. Indeed, the degradation of Clarimonde’s beauty from the im­ manent to the carnal in the priest’s eyes begins with the event of Romuald’s ordination. While initially his eyes move from the church chandeliers to a woman beautiful enough to rival the Madonna, after the ordination her beauty is immediately associated with the gold offered by her page, by Romuald’s own desire for rich clothing, and later with the revelation of her depravity. Sérapion’s advice that Romuald should pray, fast and meditate, and effectively deny his own body, ultimately makes him more susceptible to a savage and sensual beauty far removed from the spiritual essence he had originally seen. In this sense embracing the priesthood has unbalanced his nature just as religiosity did Tartuffe’s, making Romuald all the more susceptible to profane, physical beauty as well as to the vices he later espouses of pride (a princely status) and greed (an obsession with wealth), which he details when discussing his lifestyle of gondoliers and snobbish disdain for others while with Clarimonde (p. 144). Another element in the presentation of Clarimonde is that her attraction is embedded within this further promise of luxury and wealth. After his ordination, her page presents Romuald with a purse of gold coins along with her name and address. When thinking of 98

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the life he might have had with her had he not just been ordained, Romuald conjectures that ‘instead of being wrapped in my gloomy shroud, I would have clothes of silk and velvet, chains of gold, a sword and feathers like handsome cavaliers’ (p. 125).52 When Clarimonde appears to him as though in a dream after her death, she tells him that he will live ‘la belle existence dorée’ with her, a woman who even refused a pope as a lover (p. 138). Later, once the period of dreamlike assignations has begun, Romuald describes her renewed vigour more by the opulence of her dress than through her inherent physical beauty. She is now in a ‘superb travelling costume of green velvet decorated with golden loop and rolled up at the side to reveal a satin skirt’ (p. 141).53 He describes how her thick, blonde hair is under a wide, felt hat full of ‘capriciously arranged’ feathers. When he looks at himself in the mirror he sees that gone is his priestly habit, and that his old form has been changed into that of a handsome man in rich attire, his ‘vanity . . . tickled’ by the transformation (p. 142). Throughout most of the tale, therefore, Clarimonde does not represent an ideal love with whom Romuald seeks both a physical and spiritual union, as does d’Albert in Madelaine de Maupin, so much as the promise of both sensory gratification and advancement into a wealthier social world that can transform his own identity. The treatment of objects of luxury in this tale indicates a subtle change from both the codes of treatment present in Das Fräulein von Scuderi, where there is a contrast between the portrayal of luxurious objects as having an emblematic and symbolic meaning, and the greedy, venial treatment accorded them by the goldsmith Cardillac. Here, however, objets d’art are treated as comparable to other symbols of wealth and are used to reassure their possessors of a newly found status. Since Gautier wrote this tale during the era in which, accord­ ing to Benjamin, the fetishization of mass-produced and exotic com­ modities began, when the private lives of the bourgeoisie in Paris were being adorned by new, collectable goods, there are certain parallels to be drawn with the portrayal of collectors’ objects in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, although there are also many differ­ ences as well. In The Arcades Project Benjamin famously described how the erection of iron-wrought arcades in Paris placed in public the phantasmagoria of bourgeois private life. This happened specifically during the reign 99

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of Louis-Philippe, when the new commodities became accessible to a larger group of people, and when there arose a marked distinction between the public life and the private – between the real-life world of the office and the imaginary, ideal world of the home, where the collector could furnish his apartment according to his tastes. In such a case, however, the collector attaches new value to works of art in his privacy, arranging pieces eclectically and with little sense of their official status in art history, but with the hope of investing them with a value beyond mere exchange value.54 The phenomenon of ‘la vie privée’, as an effect of bourgeois consciousness, was a common understanding of the time, and was itself mentioned by writers like Paul Féval, who saw it as a cause of hypocrisy.55 The division in Romuald’s own life could also be understood as an ironic comment on the division between public and private life, the one drab and conventional, the other quite literally the private ‘phantasmagoria’ mentioned by Benjamin. This would be the case, if it were not for the fact that the original public/ private bifurcation more neatly symbolizes problems recognized by Gautier as caused by religiosity rather than by bourgeois acquisition, and hence by hypocrisy. Indeed, rather than being private connois­ seur, Romuald is both a philistine and an exhibitionist, certainly in comparison with Gautier’s other recent hero. While for d’Albert the paintings of Rubens and Giotto are enhancements to discerning his ideal lover, the statues, frescos and Titians at the Concini palace are taken by Romuald to mean nothing more than the wealth to which he aspires, since he compares them without distinction to the gondolas and barcorolles that both he and Clarimonde possess.56 These status symbols – which are all unique artefacts rather than reproductions – afford him the luxury of looking like a prince, as though he were descended from ‘the family of one of the twelve apostles’ (p. 144),57 and he now regretfully acknowledges that he would not have turned to look at the Doge himself if he had gone past him in the canal, as though he had now risen to a higher rank through this acquisition. Thus Gautier portrays Clarimonde and Romuald as treating artistry as indiscriminate and conspicuous expressions of the upwardly mobile bourgeois, more in keeping with the continued fetishization of objects purely as images of public status than with Benjamin’s phantasmagoria 100

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of the private world, even though the status to which Romuald aspires is the aristocracy. Gautier’s critique of this tendency is couched entirely in religious terms, with Romuald’s subsequent understanding of this hubris as being on a par with claiming divinity. The priest now acknowledges the greed and pride that he had shown, saying that not since Satan fell from the heavens had there been a prouder man on earth: a sure sign of the hopelessness of his divided self, since neither extreme –self-denial or self-indulgence – can provide solace or a sense of value (p. 144). That an aspiring aristocrat should treat objets d’art as proof of status, comparable to other status symbols, is no surprise given the court culture in France at the time when Gautier was writing. Bourgeois fashions and open investment in business and trade were now de rigueur under the new liberal monarch, many of which cosmopolitan trends were taken up by the aristocracy, who began to disdain the more aloof and esoteric behaviour of their forebears.58 The fact that the palace which Clarimonde possesses was given her by a certain ‘Concini’, after which it is also named, helps to create a historical and contiguous relation with this court culture, since the name belonged to one of the most notorious social upstarts in French history, the Florentine Concino Concini, who transcended his lowly beginnings to become Maréchal d’Ancre, First Minister and effective Regent of France when Louis XIII was a child in the early 1600s. This meteoric rise had been due entirely to his marriage to another Florentine, Eléonore Dori, dit Galigai, most trusted confidante of the Queen and then Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV. Gautier was probably spurred by several aspects of the story to include this name in his vampire tale. Even though ‘La Morte amour­ euse’ is by no means a conte-à-clef, the parallels between the two stories create a set of connections to the French court. A recent source, Répositoire général des causes célèbres (1834), had detailed the history of the two Italian upstarts and the grievances committed by the husband, which led to Vitry, captain of the King’s Guards, killing him outside the Louvre in April 1617.59 Not content with Concini’s death, the vengeful crowd exhumed his body, hanged it from a gallows, and then presented it before the statue of Henri IV, the previous king, ‘to enact the making of amends’ (p. 20).60 Concini’s 101

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widow was placed on trial, charged with bewitching the Queen Mother, was eventually convicted of Judaism, casting spells and malversation, and was executed by beheading (pp. 21–3). The details of exhumation, bodily mutilation and presumed bewitching in this historical scandal of the French court enjoy obvious parallels with this vampire story set in Venice, which might well have been known to Gautier’s audience, and have led them to connect the story of vampir­ism with a real history of depravity closer to home, thus explain­ ing why Gautier made Clarimonde a former lover of ‘Concini’. Concini’s further celebrity as an upstart and social climber, however, invites a parallel not only with the court of Louis XIII but with that of the 1830s, where the haute bourgeoisie used the acoutrements of aristocratic life to display their aggrandizement. This contemporary allusion is all the more feasible given that the tale was so obviously satirizing the other contemporary ill, as Gautier saw it, of religiosity and sexual repression. Just as Das Fräulein von Scuderi alludes to the future depravities of Cagliostro in order to illustrate the flaws in­ herent in Louis XIV’s system, so the reference to the French court of an earlier time allows ‘La Morte amoureuse’ to indicate the vices of Gautier’s own day. As in Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi or Nodier’s ‘Histoire d’Hélène Gillet’, this Fantastic tale employs allu­ sion to extend the historical parallels from one era to another, in contradistinction to the more progressive model of history employed in the realist historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Clarimonde’s eyes are frequently described as green and ‘seagreen’, or as ‘phosphorique’, the latter being an epithet also used to describe the eyes of the cats that line the road to her palace.61 Sérapion’s eyes are yellow, a colour that Romuald himself associates with death (pp. 132, 136). Given that the Abbé is a representative of the Vatican, we might also be tempted to see the yellow as symbol­ ising not death but the colours of that state, while the green of Clarimonde and her familiar cats’ eyes may not simply represent the diabolical, but the colour of Islam. Clarimonde’s resemblance to Cleopatra (p. 144), her penchant for peacocks and oriental musks all connote a faint association with the newly present delights from France’s North African colonization, not to mention the prevalence of Egypt in the contemporary French mind, where French generals were attempting to undermine British power.62 The fact that Venice 102

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was traditionally a Catholic empire with a window on the Orient and control of Muslim peoples makes the opposition between the yellow eyes of Sérapion and the green of an eastward-bearing sea all the more resonant as a potential symbol of the Islamic world. However, the continual reference to Clarimonde’s eyes being ‘sea-green’ also shows that the story partakes of a subtle intertext with another tale by Hoffmann, also set in Venice, namely Doge und Dogaressa, in which the real-life octogenarian Doge Marino Faliero, who in history was executed for attempting to make himself a prince (1355), is depicted as marrying a young wife who is herself in love with the young gondolier Antonio. In one scene Antonio is overhearing their conversation on a boat, when the Doge is allud­ ing to the fact that he is also officially husband of the sea. When he jokes with the Dogaressa that he is happy to be now with his human wife rather than in the cold arms of his other spouse, Antonio pipes up the following quatrain: Ah! Senza amare Andare sul mare Col sposo del mare Non puo consolare! (Ah, if without love, it cannot console to go on the sea with the sea’s husband)63

The Doge fortunately misses the import of these lines, lines which Gautier certainly read since he echoed them in a poem of his own written in the 1830s.64 In ‘La Morte amoureuse’ the concept of two types of marriage, a spiritual and a physical one, also occurs to the priest who accepts his ordination begrudgingly. When discussing his acceptance, he compares himself to the bride who wishes to refuse the elderly suitor, or the novice who rents her veil having married Christ.65 The alternative presented to him at this point is the angelic/demonic woman whose eyes he continually associates with the escapism of the sea, meaning that his alternatives are similar to those of the Doge, who also has a choice between a physical/ human spouse and a symbolic/spiritual spouse. However, a major difference for 103

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Romuald is that the seemingly human option is related to the sea, which for the Doge is the non-human and spiritual option. Further­ more, unlike the Doge, he cannot have both, and is actually placed in a position more akin to the Dogaressa of Hoffmann’s tale, who is forced to accept a spouse whom she does not desire, considering himself to be like the bride in his marriage to Christ. Effectively the priest, like the Doge Marino Faliero, does eventually enjoy both spouses, and finds like him that the double-marriage is incompatible. The subtle reversal from Hoffmann’s tale of valences in the mar­ riage alternatives, and in the degree of choice initially presented to the Priest, is Romuald’s understanding of himself as the bride, not the bridegroom, as though the commitment to Christ is like the enforced position of woman. Marriage to the beautiful woman with ethereal appearance and ‘sea-green’ eyes is what might allow him to feel male, his imagination dressing himself as a young cavalier if he were to become her lover (p. 125). In this attitude to gender relations in love he again contrasts very markedly with d’Albert in Mademoiselle de Maupin, who, despite searching for the ideal feminine form, has little fear about considering himself as female and Rosette as male when seeking to attain a union in love that transcends the purely carnal,66 and then happily falls in love with a man when contemplating ‘his’ androgynous perfection. Gautier, like Balzac (whom he had recently befriended), appears to have taken an interest in Swedenborg’s marriage of the angels as described in On Conjugial Love.67 ‘La Morte amoureuse’ was published one year after Balzac had published Séraphita, his tale of a seraph, or Swedenborgian angel, resulting from union with another spirit: a spirit of wisdom (male) and a spirit of love (female), perfectly uniting so that they are then both androgynous.68 Balzac’s novel exemplifies the idea illustrated by Swedenborg that although sexual love prevents lovers in their incarnate lives from uniting their interiors completely, when the exterior has been cast off after death the male and female lovers may genuinely become one.69 Balzac takes some liberties with Swedenborg’s dualist conception of interior and exterior by allowing Séraphita to become immanent, and such androgynous immanence is at least entertained by Gautier’s d’Albert as well in his striving after perfection, even though the ultimate revelation of Madelaine as woman kills the delusion. 104

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Romuald, however, does not entertain such sympathies. His under­ standing of himself being like the unwilling bride of an old man at the ordination paints an image of sterility and helplessness, which is all the more pronounced in that he cannot countenance his own potential androgyny. Similarly, however, the aggressively malegendered behaviour of Clarimonde when she sucks his blood also indi­cates a general bifurcation, as though in both marriage to Christ and union with the beautiful courtesan, Romuald becomes unaccept­ ably passive and female, rather than truly androgynous in a blending of the two sexes. This imbalance itself issues from the perversity of a marriage that is either too spiritual or too carnal, like Hoffmann’s Doge caught between his spiritual bride the sea (who eventually kills the Dogaressa out of jealousy), and the young, unloving bride whom he may not satisfy. In summation, ‘La Morte amoureuse’ uses the vampire theme to express the perils of an overly carnal relationship, and in doing so satirizes the attitude toward sexuality and wealth present in the time of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy, in contrast to the healthier attitude toward both sexuality and objets d’art exemplified in Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier’s novel of the previous year. Thus the tale re­inforces the extremes caused by Catholic repression and also partakes of intertextual relations with Hoffmann’s Doge und Dogaressa, which serve to underline the difficult choices before the priest, as well as the ultimate emasculation which is forced upon him by the fasting, the self-abnegation of his ordination and the aggres­sion of the vampire Clarimonde herself. The allusion to an earlier scandal in French history, the affair of Concino Concini and Eléonore Dori, indicates the concept of historical recurrence, with the vices of the past re-emerging: a feature of the vampire as an allegorical theme which encodes a different attitude to history to that of Sir Walter Scott. Finally, thanks to its rootedness in Catholic repression and bourgeois avarice, with metonymic connections to the French court, ‘La Morte amoureuse’ follows Gautier’s own interpretation of Hoffmann, by being plausible and positivist in its account of the priest’s experience (which may all along be no more than a fantasy caused by a psycho­ logical wound), and in its political references. It allows the Fantastic to seem real rather than false due to its psychological causality and 105

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through Romuald’s subtle changes in attitude toward Clarimonde, and also refers to real, topical problems, but obliquely. With its exploit­ ation of terror and promotion of ‘hesitation’, Gautier’s practice in both ‘Onuphrius’ and ‘La Morte amoureuse’ comes nearer to the Gothic as understood by post-Todorovian British and American critics than does Nodier or Ampère’s description of the Fantastic. Nevertheless, like Nodier, Gautier centres less on the mystery of causes for a supernatural manifestation like the vampire and more on its intellectual meaning. As we shall see with Paul Féval, the recurrence of the vampire can be used in a historical context both to subvert the Scott view of history as progress, and to symbolize the re-emergence of earlier, unexpurgated ills. The Double Both Onuphrius and La Morte amoureuse contain forms of the Gothic double: in the first tale the double represents the unacknowledged guilt of the artist which leads to his being constantly thwarted at the hands of the doppelgänger and attendant psychotic experiences, while with Clarimonde we have a different type of doubling, in which the necessary hypocrisy of the priest in fulfilling his duties and simul­ taneously sating his desires means that he leads a dual existence. In both cases the double is the incomplete self identified by Hallam, although the first one more closely approximates to its use in con­ temporary works like Der Sandmann and Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, in which Wilson’s doppelgänger acts as the corrective to hubris and an unchecked pleasure principle for a man who has never developed a consistent restraint to his infantile narcissism. The double is usually the unheimlich, or a mysterious other whom the main character con­ fronts unwillingly, and as such the conscious duality espoused by Romuald points more to the type of feature represented by Cardillac in Das Fräulein von Scuderi, whereby doubling occurs as a result of op­ posing moral codes. In this instance the double is a result of hypocrisy and the rise of ‘private life’, and is very probably the model later used by the Francophile Robert Louis Stevenson. While ‘La Morte amoureuse’ may not present the same type of doubling as one sees in ‘William Wilson’, it is worth noting that the 106

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tale, which indulges in an almost necrophiliac form of carnality, bears other resemblances to Poe: or if not actually to Poe, then to Allen Tate’s understanding of him. The Southern American Modern­ist critic had complained of how in his portrayal of vampiric women like Morella, Poe had anticipated modern feelings by replacing ‘sens­ ibility’ with ‘sensation’: the former, which has ‘atrophied’ in Usher, ‘keeps us in the world; sensation locks us into the self, feeding upon the disintegration of its objects and absorbing them into the void of the ego’. This portrayal of an almost schizoid set of introjections, is what effectively happens to the young priest Romuald, who divides his self between soul and body and responds to Clarimonde through her physical voluptuousness and material splendour. Later Tate examines Poe’s tales in relation to his Unitarian and necessitarian explication of the Universe, Eureka, and observes that ‘His characters are, in the words of William Wilson’s double “dead to the world”; they are machines of sensation and will.’70 While rejecting Poe’s belief system, the closeness of this despiritualized view of humanity to his own age horrifies Tate, and makes him conjecture whether Poe may not in fact be his own cousin (pp. 470–1). Gautier represents the vampire woman as similarly dehumanized through sensation, and yet places the blame not solely on the rise of commercialism and materialism, which is implicit to Tate’s essay, but upon religion as well. As we shall see, such a view is not necessarily consonant with later writers’ development of Gautier’s ideas.

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4 ‘A Life in Death, a Death in Life’: the Legitimist Novels of Paul Féval and the Catastrophe of the Second Empire  Three works by the French feuilletonnier Paul Féval which have benefited from resurgent interest in recent years are ones which made little impression upon the French public during his own life­time.1 Indeed his La Vampire of 1856 and Le Chevalier Ténèbre of 1860, which blend the historical, sensational and Gothic novel sub­genres, were not even serialized then, unlike his inordinately successful Les Mystères de Londres (1843) and Le Bossu (The Hunchback) (1858). Admittedly his later vampire novel of 1875, La Ville Vampire – an affectionate send-up of both the English and an admired writer, Ann Radcliffe, which has the young novelist chase an abducted and vampir­ized friend to Serbia and then Montenegro – was given an ‘Avant-Scène’, or preview on 12 September 1874 through Le Moniteur Universel,2 before being printed in book form the following year. It was never reprinted until the late twentieth century, despite certain claims to the contrary. The reason for non-serialization may have been political. While La Ville Vampire: adventure incroyable de Madame Anne Radcliffe (1875) was a pastiche of the English Gothic Romance, the two earlier novels can be seen as forays into more sensitive and dangerous areas. Although Féval used his sensational novels to lampoon the English and his historical novels to capitalize on the continuing popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction, his use of the vampire as a theme and as an allegorical motif appears to have been to make more

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dangerous and pertinent comments about the effects of the Revo­ lution and the Bonapartist dynasty during the reign of Napoleon III. The first, La Vampire, is set at the time of Georges Cadoudal’s Royal­ ist plot to kill Napoleon, just before the latter became Emperor (1804), and concerns a beautiful, mysterious Hungarian countess, who is ordering the dumping of cadavers into the Seine in order to work up vampire frenzy and act as a decoy to her own murderous intentions. In Le Chevalier Ténèbre, the scene is a September ball at the palace of the Archbishop of Paris, de Quélen, in 1825 (implicitly just after the accession of Charles X), when two brothers, the Baron d’Altenheimer and Monsignor Benedict d’ Altenheimer, begin to tell the story of the Ténèbres, one a chevalier, the other a vampire, who have tyrannized Hungary and Serbia, constantly being executed and then returning to life. In both novels there is an East European progeny to the vampire and a very obvious relationship between true vampirism and the brigandry of monetary greed, which form opposed and unresolved causes to narratives that are by turns both marvellous and uncanny. In this way they are far more conducive to a Todorovian explication of the Fantastic than the tales previously examined,3 and hence are far more in line with the traditional understanding of the Gothic, although they exploit the ‘hesitation’ for philosophical and political ends. Unlike in the vampire tales of Stoker or Mérimée, Féval uses the East European origins to mask the local significance of his vam­ pires and make veiled comments about French history. In further com­bining the Gothic with elements from the sensational and the historical subgenres, Féval uses the conventions of the Gothic/frénétique novel to suggest the horror caused by the end of the age of Faith and rise of materialism, which is blamed for the advent of vampirism: really an allegory of the greed and malign spirit of materialism. Thus in the play between literal and allegorical meanings – vampirism and capitalist brigandry – Féval paradoxically sees the true Gothic terror as the callousness unleashed by rationalism and then positivism, and its cure as a return to the age of Faith and a more spiritual under­ standing of the universe. It is, therefore, an understanding exactly opposed to the view of literary vampirism proffered by David Punter and Judith Barbour, who interpret it as a bourgeois fear that the ancien régime will return after the fall of Napoleon.4 109

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In the following chapter I shall be observing La Vampire in relation to the novel which it sequels, La Chambre des Amours (1856), and examining how Féval uses the second to build on the themes of corruption and self-delusion in pre-revolutionary France which led to the catastrophe of the Revolution, and to the Revolution’s grim reward in the rise of Napoleon’s dynasty. Above all I shall demon­ strate how historical and contemporary allusions intertwine so as to allow for concealed comment on the Second Empire of Féval’s own day, and shall be analysing the unique way in which La Vampire em­ ploys stories within stories and metaphorical connections to protect his explosive social commentary from censorship. Finally, I shall be demonstrating how Féval uses the play between allegory and the literal to portray terror as resulting from Enlightenment. Féval: Biography and Politics Paul Féval was born and grew up in Rennes, Brittany, the son of a Jurist who died when he was still a child. Despite hardship, he resisted attempts by his family to force him into the law.5 Moving to Paris in his teens he worked in a bank and clung to the edge of Bohemian and student circles (p. 24). Gaining work as an editor and reader of short stories he managed to publish pieces and eventually novels of his own, but only gained his first real success with Les Mystères de Londres (1843): a series of incidents set in London’s criminal under­world which he published under the name Francis Trollopp. This book established his penchant for portraying macabre, frénétique violence and immoralism, as well as his intense Anglophobia, which extended to accusing the English of excessive materialism, false liberty in their corrupt constitution and appalling habits as tourists (pp. 216–18). After the revolution of 24 February1848, Féval wrote and pro­duced a play extolling the uprising, and also published a pro-Republican paper called Le bon Sens du peuple. Journal des honnêtes gens (p. 26). He also began to serialize a pro-Republican novel in La Semaine called Alizia Pauli, later publishing it as an entire novel that regretted in strong terms the Revolution’s failure through an added epilogue (p. 27). Such Republican sentiments were possibly more a result of 110

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pragmatism than genuine feeling, since all of Féval’s extant corres­ pondence reveals the mind of a staunch Catholic, Légitimiste and counter-revolutionary. In the early 1850s, just after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had de­ clared himself Emperor on a wave of popular nostalgia, and effect­ ively crushing the democratic spirit of 1848 that had swept aside Louis-Philippe’s July monarchy, Féval fell into a great depression which was only cured through homeopathic medicine, leading him to extol the works of Samuel Hahnemann in various novels, including La Vampire. He married his doctor’s daughter (p. 28), and continued his successful career as feuilletonnier, eventually becoming Officier de la Société des Gens de Lettres, which title he received from Napoleon III: a man whom he liked personally, but despised politic­ ally (p. 30). In this period he wrote many historical romances which extolled the romantic but doomed heroes of monarchist causes, in­­ cluding one historical novel concerning the Second Jacobite Rebellion, La Cavalière. Disaster struck in 1873 when he lost his entire fortune through un­wise speculation in Turkey. In 1877 he ‘reconverted’ to Catholic­ ism and became a staunch reactionary, even insisting upon moving to a small lodging in the north of Paris to be near the site of Sacré­ Coeur. In 1880 he attacked his friend Alexandre Dumas for sup­ porting divorce in the constitution in a 300-page book called, subtly, Pas de Divorce!6 His letters of this period reveal an uncompromisingly pro-monarchical and anti-atheist attitude, with those written to Charles Buet, Oscar de Poli and others praising absolute monarchy as the only sacred form of government. In one letter to Oscar de Poli, a fellow monarchist, he actually criticizes Louis XVIII for not being enough detached from the affairs of men, declaring: I am sticking to the fact, and I am saying: any king who is spiritual or simple enough to want to mollify the revolution is dead. The role of kings is not to please their enemies. Kings are judges, believe me, there is the real truth of politics. Kings are MASTERS. (Je reste dans le fait, et je dis: Tout roi qui est assez spirituel ou assez simple pour vouloir amadouer la révolution, est mort. Le rôle des rois n’est pas de plaire à leurs enemis. Les rois sont des juges, croyezmoi, voilà la vraie vérité de la politique. Les rois sont des MAÎTRES.)7 111

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In another letter to the Republican-minded publisher, Jules Clarétie, from earlier in the 1870s (although not precisely dated), Féval opines: In our age to believe in revolutions is a given, like being beautiful, like being brave. I do not believe in this. I suffer the consequences of my beliefs harder than you can imagine; but I have no shame about them; on the contrary . . . Temptations have sometimes overcome me. Did Saint Anthony really resist? I have seen the ghost of Eugène Sue pass from the other side of my table, that aristocrat who gained so much money with democracy. He was no doubt sincere. I, who am not an aristocrat at all, can see the future of peoples in the place where the peoples seem not to see them. All the most urgent social reforms for me lie in augmented authority. I will go even further: I believe that we would today have the majority of the desired reforms if there had been no revolutions. ‘Unus deus, rex unus, una lex. In my eyes, that is the law of the possible, real socialism, even though it belonged to one of the coarse Normans who conquered England: ‘one king, one faith, one law.’ (En notre siècle, croire aux révolutions est un don, comme être beau, comme être brave. Je n’y crois pas. J’en subis les conséquences plus durement que vous ne pouvez l’imaginer; mais je n’ai pas honte, au contraire . . . Il m’est survenu parfois des tentations. Saint Antoine résistait-il vraiment? J’ai vu passer de l’autre côté de ma table l’ombre d’ Eugène Sue, cet aristocrate qui gagna tant d’argent avec la démocratie. Il fut sans doute sincère. Moi, qui ne suis pas aristocrate du tout, je vois l’avenir des peuples là où les peuples semblent ne pas le voir. Toutes les réformes sociales si urgentes sont pour moi dans l’autorité agrandie. Je vais bien plus loin, je crois que nous aurions aujourd’hui la plupart des réformes souhaitées, s’il n’y avait pas eu des révolutions. ‘Unus deus, rex unus, una lex. A mes yeux, voilà le droit du vrai socialisme possible, quoique ce fût celle d’un des rudes Normands qui conquirent l’Angleterre: ‘Un roy, une foy, une loy.’) (p. 178)

This attitude is all the more surprising given that it was Charles X’s absolutist spirit and refusal to engage in any power-sharing, as opposed 112

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to the geniality and pragmatism of Louis XVIII, which had cost him the monarchy in the July 1830 revolution. While Féval’s anti-Republican, pro-Monarchist and staunchly Legitimist letters date from the period of his reconversion, his friend Buet suggests that: ‘By birth, by education, by instinct, if it can be expressed as such, he was Breton, Vendéen, Chouan, inveterate royalist, “joking” about his beliefs a bit, which he had believed to be outdated and which suddenly revived in him, at an age when there is no longer even the recollection of youthful enthusiasms.’8 This view of Féval would appear to have some support from a letter which de Poli passed on to Buet, but which was originally written to the Comte de Chambord, the Bourbon dynastic pretender, whose château in Austria, Fröhsdorf, Féval visited in the 1850s. Recounting his experience of meeting Chambord’s almoner there, Féval remarks in a letter written on 24 March 1881: I experienced the fortune and great joy of relaying my humble homage to the elect of God at around 1859. Monsignor could not pay serious attention to me, despite his exceptional generosity; but as for me, I took with me from Fröhsdorf the reaffirmed faith in my love and a tender admiration, that I shared with all whom I love. I was enraptured above all (simple, unconverted gensdelettres that I still was) by a truly magnetic delicacy of spirit, by a beautiful lucidity of heart, and by a truly up-to-date knowledge of the moral state of France. Ah! That man was admirably French! And during the journey from Hungary which I made before arriving back in Paris, I remained under the charm of my impression, which I kept like a treasure. (J’ai eu le bonheur et la grande joie de porter mon humble hommage à l’élu de Dieu vers 1859. Monseigneur ne put faire sérieuse attention à moi, malgré son exquise bonté; mais moi, j’emportai de Fröhsdorf la fidélité raffermie de mon amour et une tendre admiration, que j’ai fait partager à tous ceux que j’aime. Je fus émerveillé surtout (simple gensdelettres non converti que j’étais alors) d’une délicatesse d’esprit vraiment attirante, d’une belle lucidité de coeur, et d’une science vraiment actuelle de l’état moral de la France. Ah! celui-là est Français admirablement! Et pendant le voyage de Hongrie que je fis avant de regagner Paris, je restai sous le charme de mon impression, que je gardai comme un trésor.) (pp. 172–3) 113

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Later in the letter Féval praises the monarchy and the Bourbon dynasty, flattering its recipient. The letter is striking for two current reasons. Firstly, in relation to both La Vampire and the later Le Chevalier Ténèbre, it explains why Féval was able to describe the expanse of Hungary from Belgrade to the Eastern border with such detail. Rather than being dependent upon travel books, he had actually toured the land itself, travelling eastward ‘vers 1859’ after visiting the almoner of Fröhsdorf and before returning to Paris. Secondly, unless we take it to be retrospectively somewhat rosetinted, the letter shows us that before his ‘reconversion’ Féval did harbour, as Charles Buet believed (who only knew him from 1866), pro-Bourbon and Catholic sympathies. This in itself does make it seem odd that he should have supported Republicanism in 1848, and have even criticized the Société des gens de Lettres for not being egalitarian enough when he joined.9 However, as Fritz-El Ahmad has noticed, he constantly expressed the need to support established orders for the sake of patriotism, and felt it beyond his duty to make lone attacks (p. 209). His acceptance of the ruban (prize ribbon) from Napoleon III on behalf of the Société also points to his belief that personal politics should not disrupt the views of the many, and indicates that he was prepared to respect the person of the incumbent monarch, even if he rejected the legitimacy of his rule.10 In relation to Republicanism, however, there is at least evidence that Féval admired the practitioners of left-leaning Jacobin Repub­ lican­ism (although not the movement itself), but felt the ‘authorité agrandie’ of monarchy to be superior. As we shall see from a con­ sideration of La Vampire, Féval was capable of portraying egalitarian Republicanism as a well-intended (though mistaken) creed alongside the views of a Chouan idol like his fellow Breton Georges Cadoudal, who had taken part in the Royalist insurrection in La Vendée in 1795. On the other hand, Féval appears never to have accepted the bourgeois monarchism of the Orléanist dynasty nor the opportunistic and atheistic dictatorship of Bonapartism.

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La Chambre des Amours La Vampire is the sequel to a novel written the same year (1856) but set in 1787, just before the Revolution. Both novels follow the career of an unusual character called Jean-Pierre Sévérin, nicknamed Gâteloup, master of fencing, brilliant singer, the son of the keeper of the city morgue, and uncontrollable drunk due to his having failed to prevent his beloved from committing suicide. The first novel begins at le Puits-sans-vin, an estaminet near the Seine owned by Madame Fortune and her husband. They are arranging for their room at the end of the garden, the ‘Chambre des Amours’, to be used that evening by the Champion-Maréchal Beaumarchais, a finan­ cier who is responsible for the Royal lottery, and Baron de Guitry, a Royal chamberlain. The old rakes are intent on having their wicked way with two seventeen-year-old girls, who are being duped by Mme Fortune’s cousin, a milliner, into prostitution. The girls think naively that they are simply going to meet a couple of old gentlemen who will help them with their dowries for the next day (which includes, ominously, gold coins for the parish). They have never­ theless bought a lottery ticket from the same woman, their number being chosen from a shared dream in which they uncannily saw the room where their seduction will be attempted.11 The two girls, Jeanne and Félicie, are respectively the daughter of the court clerk, and failed actor, Courtmantel, and the mean old draper Lancesseur, the one too poor, the other too mean to put up a dowry. It so happens that they are also to marry each other’s brothers Horace and Grégoire, who have arrived at the Puits-sans-vin to drink the night away with two friends. One of these friends is Michel de Travers, a satirical writer who wishes to expose corruption and has come to spy on the Chambre des Amours, and Jean-Pierre Sévérin, who is aghast when he hears that the girls have gone to see the milliner Madame Denis, and relates the story of how she suborned the woman he loved, Marie, and induced her to commit suicide by jumping in the Seine before he could rescue her – the reason why he now drinks (pp. 70–7). As luck would have it the two girls win the lottery and rush home to claim their ticket. This has been stolen by Félicie’s father, the mise­ rly Lancesseur, who now feels that fortune has at last smiled on him, 115

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and goes to collect his prize of some seven hundred thousand louis to a cheering and scorning public (his legendary miserliness having made him a figure of fun in the neighbourhood (pp. 90–9)). In his impulsiveness he forgets to lock away his cash box, where his lifetime’s savings have been stored, and in a fit of angst admits this to a man whose trustworthy demeanour belies the fact that he is really Bonafous, an infamous cut-throat (pp. 104–5). Lancesseur hurries home to find that his box has been taken, betrayed by his house­keeper, who is now rushing it over to the barge of Bonafous and his mistress, who themselves promptly murder the woman that has helped them (p. 122). Lancesseur, who followed the housekeeper, now conceals himself on the barge and waits until they are asleep (they are off to hide their ill-gotten gains at – where else? – the Puits-sans-vin). He manages to dispatch Bonafous and his accomplice, but is killed in his turn by Bonafous’s mortally-wounded beloved (pp. 133–5). The scene now changes to the inn itself, where Madame Denis comes to break the horrifying news that the girls have won the lottery, and have no need of the ‘patronage’ offered by the ChampionMaréchal and Baron de Guitry (p. 141). Despair breaks into relief when the two girls come running to the inn believing that the men will help them (p. 154). Madame Denis gleefully points them in the direction of the ‘Chambre des Amours’ and the two gentlemen, one of whom, the Champion-Maréchale, controls the lottery. They go to explain their problem, only to be lewdly attacked, the ChampionMaréchal proving exceptionally forward (p. 173). Help comes in time, as Sévérin, Grégoire, Horace and Michel Travers, realizing the scenario unfolding beneath their very eyes, storm the room. Sévérin, the brilliant fencer, breaks his usual vow not to practise his art in anger and makes to attack de Guitry. In attempting to help him, the Champion-Maréchal plunges to his own death (p. 181). The two girls run off to the Seine, like Marie before them, hoping to commit suicide after the suborning of their honour, but are stopped by their lovers and the idealistic Sévérin, who refuses – rather ominously, as it turns out – to accept that they were about to commit suicide and commit an even greater sin than losing their virginity. La Chambre des Amours is not a Fantastic or Gothic novel, per se, but is full of suspense, lurid criminality and night-time urban scenes: 116

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aspects for which Féval had already established a reputation in Les Mystères de Londres. He was imitating works like Hoffmann’s ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’, and borrowing from the Urban frénétique genre already established by his socialist rival, Eugène Sue, and from English sensational novels like Oliver Twist. Féval’s novel establishes the historical context with conversations alluding to the coming Revolution and the personalities of the day, such as one between de Guitry and the Champion-Maréchal which includes information on Necker (the king’s Swiss First Minister, whose failure to resolve the crisis between the Treasury and the Estates General helped hasten the Revolution) and Cagliostro, the famous fraudster and alchemist accused of stealing Marie-Antoinette’s necklace (p. 66). Both men blame the girls’ tardiness on ‘ce mauvais esprit de liberté’ (p. 67). Despite the obvious debt to the historical novels of Walter Scott (which subgenre Féval also emulated more closely in other novels), the characters portrayed are much more what we might call ‘uni­ versals’ of human nature, who are simply reacting to a context that is unravelling before them rather than being implicitly shaped by it, making the novel more of a Legitimist historical novel than the more dynamic and change-driven form practised by Scott himself. In this way Féval’s Balzacian inheritance also makes itself evident, since the writer uses the omniscient narrator to create a relationship with the reader which involves the former’s moralizing on themes such as the dual nature of Paris, which themes were meant to have equal resonance in his own day (‘For Paris is such: when it is not in the grip of an exquisite taste, it suddenly verges towards the detestable’ (p. 57)),12 or the rise of ‘la vie privée’, whose prevalence in his own era Féval shows as dating back to 1787. The main plot device, the purloined lottery ticket and its catastrophic consequences, probably owed much to one of Balzac’s most famous novels, La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep [1842]), in which the ‘black sheep’ him­self steals Madame Descoing’s lottery ticket money, only for her habitual number to come up when she is in forced abstention after decades of taking part. The plot theme is fable-like, revolving around the extreme and fickle ironies of fortune, and its characters are given and unchanging types, whose interpretation is immediate and straight­forward: the miser, the spendthrift, the incurable romantic, the sexually naive young girl and the lecherous old man. As in 117

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Balzac’s novels, the permanent vagaries of human nature, and of Paris itself as a site for their conflict, are the novel’s main staples, rather than the historically-defined differences of personality between the readership’s own time and pre-revolutionary France, which for Lukács constituted some of the foregrounded elements in Scott’s form of characterisation.13 Féval was writing at a time which Lukács identified as undergoing a ‘crisis of bourgeois realism’ (p. 171) due to the decline of interest in Hegel’s ideas, culminating in the historical novel’s new self-indulgence in the exotic, and projection of the consciousness of the present upon the past for the sake of naive escapism (pp. 173–6). The political views of Féval, and the proximity of the events to his own time, combined with his grim cynicism, are in fact closer to the Legitimism of Châteaubriand, and in fact maintain a serious historic purpose, which is to show that the eternal verities of human nature are more important than the qualifications of ideology and material change. Despite its sense of the eternal, Féval does allude self-consciously to two themes of emergent change between the Paris of 1787 and his own times. One is the theme of la vie privée, or private life, and the importance this was to assume after the Revolution. Michel Travers, the satirist who drinks with Sévérin, is forever predicting the future. One aspect of future life which he predicts, citing his editor M. Mercier as his source, is the inviolability of ‘private life’, and how this will come to dominate Press manipulation in nineteenth-century France. Talking of future trends before going off to spy on de Guitry and le Champion-Maréchal, he discusses the coming changes to society: ‘One of these hollow, loud, stupid words that the mass accepts without understanding and in front of which people kneel as if they were holy relics. M. Mercier has guessed this word; it will be: La vie privée! [private life] Note that this word signifies absolutely nothing: it includes all that is not public, and consequently everything that one wishes to hide. But also note that it verges directly on something sacred, loved, respected: the family, and that it is extremely easy to establish from either bad faith or from sophism a premeditated confusion between these two distinct things.’ 118

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The Catastrophe of the Second Empire (‘Un de ces mots creux, sonores, stupides, que la masse admet sans les comprendre et devant lesquels on finit par s’agenouiller comme s’ils étaient de saintes réliques. M. Mercier a deviné ce mot; ce sera: La vie privée! Notez que ce mot ne signifie absolument rien: il comprend tout ce qui n’est pas public, et par consequent tout ce qu’on a intente à cacher. Mais notez aussi qu’il cotoie étroitement une chose sacrée, aimée, respectée: la famille, et qu’il est souverainement facile à la mauvaise foi ou au sophisme d’établir, entre ces deux choses distinctes, une confusion préméditée.’) (pp. 50–1)

This passage can be understood as referring to a forceful defence of the individual enshrined in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, particularly with relation to its seventeenth article, which enshrined the rights of private property. The Napo­ leonic code also prioritized the family and the male householder in French law. Travers and Mercier both appear to foresee the problem of exposing corruption caused by a fierce culture of privacy, which in Féval’s own time was preserved mainly through the strict censor­ ship of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. However, more generally the obsession with private life is understood by Féval as inducing hypocrisy: a theme which is given greater prominence in the sequel novel, La Vampire. This effectively means that the division between private and public life discussed in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, which signifies the distinction between the public life of work and the private phan­ tasma­goria of escape at home, and which Benjamin formulated by analyzing life in the new apartment blocks and boulevards of post1848 Paris,14 is not the same as Féval’s public/private divide. Whereas Benjamin understood ‘la vie privée’ as being the prerogative of the bourgeois collector, who establishes his own private space for himself with his own unique interpretation of each object, Féval understands the accepted closing of doors around nuclear families as being the moral erosion of a set of communal, Catholic values, rather than a phenomen driven by capitalism. Another theme which has bearings upon La Vampire is the change in the attitude to drama after the Revolution. When detailing the 119

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early ruin of Courtmantel, before he became a court clerk, we are given a frank description of the pre-revolutionary community of actors: He liked theatre. You will judge that it is a venial sin. Perhaps you’re right. But he also liked actresses, and even more actors. This tendency is disappearing little by little, as theatre people lose their own originality, and as Messieurs ‘les artistes’ become men exactly like the wig-maker at the corner, who is also an artist. But during the time of which we speak, theatre was a nation apart, a gypsy nation profoundly separated from common life . . . (Il aimait la comédie. Vous jugerez que c’est péché véniel. Peut-être bien. Mais il aimait aussi les comédiennes, et encore les comédiens. Ce travers s’en va petit à petit, à mesure que le peuple des théâtres perd son originalité propre, et que MM. ‘les artistes’ deviennent les hommes tout pareils au perruquier du coin, qui est aussi ‘un artiste’. Mais, au temps dont nous parlons, la comédie était encore une nation à part, une bohème profondement séparée de la vie commune . . . )15

Féval here alludes to a thoroughly important theme for his later novel, La Vampire, which is the confusion of drama with real life in the post-Revolutionary era: a theme which is pursued in both that novel, to most macabre effect, and in Le Chevalier Ténèbre. On a political level La Chambre des Amours effectively satirizes the avarice which surrounds the lottery and the opportunism of the criminal classes, who are preparing for revolution by manipulating cynically the lust of aristocrats. The murder of Beaumarchais but patronage of de Guitry illustrates Féval’s distaste for royalty involving itself in the affairs of men as well as his admiration for the essential clemency and decency of the aristocracy and supporters of the mon­ archy. It is a historical novel, but does not mix real-life figures with fictional ones, all the protagonists having been invented. Apart from the anomaly of the prophetic dream, it does not employ the super­ natural elements of a Gothic or Fantastic novel, although it does refer 120

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to vampirism as a metaphor for greed and the parasitical elements of society, albeit ironically,16 and certainly enjoys the suspense and macabre details of the urban frénétique. The novel’s view of the coming revolution is cynical, its portrayal of history based on an understanding of human nature as unchanging regardless of context; that said, it also makes comparative comments about the age in which Féval himself lived in order to show contrasts unfavourable to his own times, which are the promotion of private life and the end of the division between drama and real life. It is in no way a particu­ larly sophisticated historical novel – unlike its sequel, La Vampire, which uses the Fantastic and supernatural, like Hoffmann and Gautier, to show processes in history. La Vampire La Vampire begins with the spectacle of ‘fishermen’ waiting on a bridge over the Seine near St Antoine, as body upon body arrives on account of a mythical vampire, who is murdering Parisians by the dozen. By the banks is a cabaret called La Pêche Miraculeuse – an allusion to the fairground, lucky-dip game – managed by a Jew named Ezéchiel, where the ‘fishermen’ arrive in the evening. Earlier that day, a brilliant young medical student called Germain Patou had been following the beautiful Angèle, who had been follow­ing her lover René, who was in turn following a beautiful Hungarian countess as she completed her marriage vows to a German in the church Saint Louis in the Île St-Louis.17 Then first René and next Angèle left, allowing Patou to report the strange goings-on to his patron, the new leader of the masons and Keeper of the City Morgue, Jean-Pierre Sévérin, dit Gâteloup, the erstwhile saviour of Jeanne and Félicie, now transformed into a Republican by the Revolution. Patou says that René is bewitched by the new woman and is follow­ ing her to a house where – as we find later through yet another analepsis – he has followed her before, at Bretonvilliers. The house in fact contains an assortment of malcontents against Napoleon who wish to find Cadoudal and aid him in the assassination plot, which plot René himself had originally overheard while lying there halfconscious before (p. 81). 121

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Angèle has followed him all the way there, and sees him kiss the mythical Countess, now mysteriously sporting black hair. At sight of the kiss Angèle falls into a swoon, and is later taken into the cabaret of the Pêche Miraculeuse which is behind the house (pp. 49, 92). Sévérin, in the meantime, has gone to Ezéchiel to tell him that he knows the vampire story to be a plot, and that the Jew is being paid by the Countess to help spread the myth (p. 43). He then witnesses his daughter Angèle being brought in unconscious, and then goes off to look for René, although he knows that he cannot enter the heavily guarded house next door without a warrant. In the house itself, the countess’s sister Lila, who has black, not blonde hair, and is the woman whom René has in fact kissed (p. 93), now tells the story of Addhéma, the Bulgarian vampire who came to Hungary as a noblewoman in Ottoman times, only to re­ appear as the vampire of Uszel years later and commit horrendous deeds with the neighbouring vampire and brigand, the Count of Szandor (pp. 100–1). This woman needs to rejuvenate herself with the scalps of happy and beautiful women, each year of whose wasted life becomes an hour in Addhéma’s own. Apparently Addhéma also cannot consummate her love until she has told each new lover her story (p. 103). One of her victims was the mother of Lila and her sister, the blonde Countess with whom René is infatuated. Lila then continues to tell of how her sister married Marcian Gregorji, a Croatian Count, but foolishly conducted an affair with Napoleon just after the treaty of Campoforcio (1797) while in Trieste. The Count challenged Napoleon to a duel, but was then shot by the Countess before he could accomplish this (p. 109). Her subsequent rejection by Napoleon, however, turned the Countess firmly towards the revenge-seeking camp, and so she has now, along with a black insurgent called Taieh (who wishes to avenge the Carribean hero Toussaint), and an Ottoman Osman (who wishes to avenge the Battle of the Nile (1796)), become a member of the ‘Frères de la Vertu’ [‘The Brothers of Virtue’]. Seeking to collaborate with the Chouan Cadoudal, they require his address from René, his nephew. René gives it and is immediately rendered almost unconscious by a strong opiate. He now faintly realizes that Lila and the Countess are the same person, and that she has consummated her wish in exactly the fashion she described in relation to Addhéma – telling 122

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her life story before mesmerizing her victim. It is now too late, as he is locked in the room (pp. 119–21). The scene now switches to the office of the Prefect of Police and his deputy Berthellemot, both of whom are dreaming of glory and rewards at the hands of the soon-to-be-Emperor and have little con­cern for justice. Sévérin walks in with a warrant signed by Napo­ leon (forged in fact) to search the Countess’s house at Bretonvilliers. He tells them how he had once taught Napoleon fencing and called him ‘majesty’ unconsciously (p. 136); how he suspects the Countess of using the Vampire hysteria (a result of her henchmen opening up the cemeteries and pouring newly buried cadavers into the Seine) to mask her own murderousness (p. 158), as she has in the meantime married and killed three wealthy Germans with the intention of inheriting their wealth (p. 154); how on a nightly search for his missing daughter, Angèle, he had seen a young girl on the Seine, presumably about to commit suicide, being suddenly grabbed and scalped without proffering resistance by a cadaver floating down the river (pp. 164–5), and had later seen the Countess sporting hair exactly the same as Angèle’s; and finally, how he believed his pro­ spective son-in-law was holed up in the Countess’s house. They oblige him with policemen. Just as he has left the Countess comes to blow the whistle on the Frères de la Vertu and betray the where­ abouts of Cadoudal. Sévérin meanwhile goes to the house at Breton­ villiers – now abandoned – and meets Germain Patou. They break into the room where René is imprisoned, and Patou brings him back to life with an opiate solution, working from Hahnemann principles of like curing like (p. 211), but then has to break to him the bad news of Angèle’s death from suicide. Meanwhile, the Countess has tipped off the police as to where the Frères de la Vertu are now hiding in order to betray them (Chemin de la Muette, SainteAntoine (p. 238)),19 and then travels to Cadoudal to entice him out into a trap. As she walks into Cadoudal’s house she meets René, who shoots her dead in revenge for Angèle’s death (p. 226). Simul­ taneously, the honest Cadoudal is being surrounded by a crowd, but is determined to fight, being aided only by Sévérin, who tries to help him fend off the Bonapartist mob and flee: the Hébertiste Republican and the Monarchist Chouan symbolically united against the angry, vain and ambitious (p. 232). 123

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René is resting with Patou, who, ever interested in proving the errors of material science, has Ezéchiel bring the Countess’s body for dissection. She comes to life again, flees Patou, and returns to Uszel to meet her greedy lover, Count Szandor, the capitalist vampire who will only give her love in return for money (pp. 247–8). He wishes to leave her for the beautiful girls of Prague, and so she stakes him through the heart before committing herself to flame. The plot is vaguely signposted, with many analepses, paradiegeses and frequent points of confusion, such as the description of Angèle’s death. We are told that she ‘fell dying’ [‘tomba mourante’ (p.92)] before the window of the house in Bretonvilliers, even though she is later taken to La Pêche Miraculeuse to be revived and clearly dies later. Nevertheless, Sévérin’s witnessing of her real demise is not explicitly related at the time, and only made clear once he has Patou’s confirmation that she had intended to commit suicide (p. 209). Similarly, René fails to see that Lila and her sister are the same person, and also fails to notice Countess Gregoryi’s resemblance to his first love, Angèle. When waking up at Bretonvilliers a second time he also regards it as a slightly different building, even though it is ostensibly the same place he was at before (p. 92). The sense of displacement and the frequent inability of the main protagonists to recognize similarities between different characters in fact enhances the role of the doppelgänger and uncanny as a device for illustrating moral failure. The novel attempts to present the vampire as a creature that is alien and yet somehow familiar, and to whom different char­ acters are related both physically and morally, as indeed is Angèle herself through the motif of the hair and the more literal fact that she gives herself up willingly to the cadaver on the banks of the Seine. Sévérin’s failure to save Angèle is all the more marked given that in the previous novel, La Chambre des Amours, he had managed to save Jeanne and Félicie from prostitution. More so even than La Chambre des Amours, La Vampire bears the typical hallmark of the historical novel in its use of fictional characters placed against a genuine history involving real-life persons, and also embodies the Gothic and Fantastic in its use of stories within stories, confused chronology, uncanny events and terror. In contrast to the works of Walter Scott or Tolstoy, however, the events in the lives of the real-life characters are slightly changed, and while historical 124

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development does not alter, nevertheless, genuine events are modi­ fied. Since Sévérin did not really exist, it is hardly likely that Cadoudal was helped just before his arrest by any disillusioned Republicans, even though political opponents of all persuasions did find solidarity at the time of Napoleon’s self-coronation. David Lodge argues that the historical novel blends private experi­ ence with public fact, placing the life of an individual against ‘a reality, a history, that is larger and more complex’.20 If we understand mimesis as working ontologically rather than perspectivally, we can see such a process as allowing the unreal private experience, which acts as a means of identification for the ordinary reader, to take place against the more important public history which the fiction itself cannot change. Féval’s modification of the ontologically real aspects of this history is symptomatic not so much of an attempt to change historical effect as to inject a judgement into historical events, and serves to make the novel more morally illustrative than Scott’s work. This modification of historical reality for moral illustration also explains in part the use of the Gothic, vampire theme. Georg Lukács argued that Scott’s promotion of the historical novel was a result of his understanding that history was a conflictual process determined by the conditions of the time, but which was eventually resolved in a ‘“middle way”’.21 While Lukács admits that Scott was attempting to illustrate the conservative notion that history finds a peaceful reso­ lution, he nevertheless exonerates Scott from reifying his characters due to the fact that his process bears unconscious similarities to the Hegelian belief that history is a conflict of opposites, which clash at moments of crisis (p. 53). Nevertheless, in detailing these moments of crisis, and even showing ‘wrecked or wasted heroic human en­ deavour’, Scott still ‘affirms the result, and the necessity of this result is the ground on which he stands’ (p. 54). However, Féval’s use of the vampire motif as an allegory of both brigandry and greed in this historical novel serves exactly the opposite purpose.22 It allows Féval to write about recent history, with private as well as public characters being closely intertwined, but also to suggest, metaphorically, the continuing and unresolved element of French history in his own day, since the vampire famously dies only to be reborn at a later date, a feature emphasized in the novel. 125

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Another reason for using the vampire allegory is the need to escape censorship and to suggest rather than to relate. As Robert Goldstein explains, censorship of the press in the Second Empire was severe. Napoleon III’s Press Decree of February 1852 reintroduced licencing, slashing the number of Parisian dailies to fourteen.23 The publications by political undesirables like the anarchist philosopher Proudhon were met with censorship, imprisonment and exile (pp. 59–60). Maxime du Camp complained that in this period ‘you had to turn your pen around seven times between your fingers, since before the courts you could sin by thought, by word, by action or by omission’.24 To attack the regime in print and avoid repression was therefore extremely difficult. In this novel Féval manages to avoid direct conflict with the regime via both the play between the metaphorical and literal planes of the vampire’s meaning, and also through the incorporation of different narrative levels: the use of stories within stories in the style of Potocki and the Arabian Nights. While the vampire Addhéma is originally Bulgarian, hailing from an island in the Save just north of Belgrade and south of Szeged, in her own unreliable story within a story – told when she is pretending to René that she is Lila – it is Napoleon himself who is the real vampire: ‘I see everywhere this terrible thing which has the name of vampirism: this method of living at the expense of the blood of others. And with what are all these glories made, if not with blood? ‘With blood, it is said, the Hermeticists used to create gold; they needed tonnes of it. Glory, more precious than gold, wants torrents of it. And over this red ocean floats one man, sublime vampire, who has multiplied his own life with a thousand deaths.’ (‘Je vois partout cette terrible chose qui a nom le vampirisme: ce don de vivre aux dépens du sang d’autrui. Et avec quoi sont faites toutes ces glories, sinon avec du sang? ‘Avec du sang, dit-on, les hermétiques créaient de l’or; il leur en fallait des tonnes. La gloire, plus précieuse que l’or, en veut des torrents. 126

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The Catastrophe of the Second Empire ‘Et sur ce rouge ocean un homme surnage, vampire sublime, qui a multiplié la vie par cent mille morts.’)25

This passage identifies Napoleon as the ‘vampire sublime’. It also relates vampirism to both the ‘creation of gold’ (and gold has already been associated with the vampire at the Pêche Miraculueuse), and thus capitalist greed, and the search for personal glory. Thus it serves the dual, metacritical purpose of openly identifying the novel’s vampir­ ism as an allegory of political egotism and capitalist greed, and of indicating its cause to be Napoleon’s warmongering. Here Hermetic­ ism is used not to indicate the more spiritual potentials of metals, but as a metaphor for both vampirism and the creation of wealth and of glory, since all three use blood (and death) in their magical trans­ formations. As such the passage provides both a key to interpreting the rest of the novel and an important distancing device for avoiding censorship. On the one hand, the passage openly explains vampir­ ism’s metaphorical meaning of Bonapartism, egotism (‘la gloire’) and capitalism (‘l’or’). On the other hand, the statement is presented within an unreliable story and lower level of narration, told by the woman who is the literal vampire, and contains analepses outside the main diegesis, all of which features serve to distance it from the main narration, or from the prioritized discourse of the wisest character, Germain Patou. This makes the description of Napoleon appear, at surface level, merely a detail within a Fantastic story. Furthermore, even once the initial terror or horror at the supernatural colliding with the real has been solved and the reader can accept vampirism as having an allegorical meaning, it would be easy to see the explicit metaphorical meaning of the vampire presented here as relating only to the deceitful Addhéma herself, the woman whom we eventually see act as a vampire at the main narrative level when she escapes Patou and takes her wealth back to her lover. In such an interpretive scenario Lila-Addhéma’s own explicit connection of vampirism to Napoleon’s selfish egotism and to capitalist greed could be seen conveniently as an attempt to divert attention from herself towards Napoleon, and thus symbolize a malaise within Eastern Europe rather than domestic France. The use of Eastern Europe as an origin for the vampire is also an important part of the process of concealment, since at a surface level 127

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the vampire is an exterior invader to Paris. Thus, not only does em­ bed­ding this important key to the allegory – the greed of Napo­leon himself – within the words of an unreliable narrator help to obscure the allegory’s real target, but so also does the exteriorization of the vampire to Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary help to place the blame for the malaise on an area far from France. Nevertheless, despite the concealment and exteriorization, the real target of the vampire allegory, its most important proxy, is still the first Napoleon and his legacy. If we take into account that the ‘vampire sublime’ Napoleon is ultimately saved at a mundane, plotlevel by Lila-Addhéma, her extended allegorical meaning must, even at the novel’s resolution, also have bearings on his own significance since their fates are inextricably entwined. Despite its context in an unreliable story-within-a-story, Lila-Addhéma’s overt association of Napoleon with metaphorical vampirism is an important key to understanding her own meaning as vampire. It is Napoleon and his legacy which she facilitates literally and then represents metaphoric­ ally, her brigand vices being nothing to do with Eastern Europe at all, but rather the unleashing of an irrepressible moral malaise which begins with Bonaparte’s coronation. In fact the ‘exteriorization’ of the vampire’s source to Eastern Europe associates the vampiric brigandage of Napoleonic France with the France of Féval’s own day. Féval makes extensive and meto­ nymic allu­sions through the vampire’s name to the Hungary of his present time, extratextual allusions which would have been obvious to his readership, even though in the novel itself they are couched as historical. We are told by Germain Patou that Addhéma’s lover died in 1646, placing him in a historical situation. Germain Patou even explains how he would have liked to have revived the vampire with Hahnemann methods and asked him about the Thirty Years War, rather than stake his heart as did those present when he was dis­interred (p. 86). The vampire is the Count of Szandor, born near Semlin, north of the Save. This name clearly links the vampire not to the past, but to the present, since in the 1850s southern Hungary was effect­ively ruled by the criminal Rozsa Sandor, born in Szeged, who had gained constant notoriety in the western press due to his mixture of gallantry and cruelty. In 1856 he was still at large (although was im­prisoned a year later), but was a subject of much speculation in Western papers.26 128

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One effect of this extratextual allusion is to reinforce vampirism’s metaphorical meaning of brigandry, and thus the activity of the ‘vampire sublime’ Napoleon himself as being nothing more than criminality. However, this is not the only effect. While it might be easy to see the text at this point as condemning Eastern Europe in contradistinction to France through the obvious extratextual allusion to a contemporary Hungarian criminal, the more likely result is that it reinforces the contemporariness of metaphorical vampirism as brigandry and capitalism within 1850s France, since what is presented in the novel as historical is really an allusion to something that was entirely current, as readers in 1856 would have known. Thus by extension, we can see the role of the first Napoleon – ‘vampire sublime’ – now being reprised through the work of his nephew, the Third, under whose rule the novel was written. Thus the com­ bination of a vampire theme related to greed and brigandry, to Napoleon himself and to his influence on French society, and then a conveniently exteriorized metonymic association to a contemporary Hungarian bandit, extends the vampire as historical allegory to the further scope of referring to a coded and obfuscated present-day: an allusion made all the more credible due to parallels between Napo­ leon III’s support for Hungarian nationalism and Sandor’s own well-publicized role in the 1848 rebellion.27 The indirect allusion to Napoleon III’s promotion of bourgeois greed through the name of a contemporary brigand and the reemergent, ineradicable nature of the vampire would not have been lost on Féval’s readers, given the Emperor’s somewhat reckless promotion of free trade and speculative capitalism. Despite replacing a corrupt bourgeois monarchy on the back of a Republican and anarchist revolt, and even committing himself to universal suffrage,28 the new Emperor made a (qualified) free trade declaration in 1852 (p. 11), and presided over the expansion of the stock-market (p. 72) and a plethora of banks making substantial loans (pp. 75–6). Many writers, including Alexandre Dumas fils in La Question de l’ Argent (1857), and Jules Valles in L’Argent (1857), went on to question the growing importance of money in popular works a year after Féval’s publication. As Plessis writes: ‘The authors stressed that society was under the absolute and exclusive domination of this new god, which bestowed power and fame. Money was the key to all pleasures; to 129

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own wealth was already to experience the enjoyment of power’ (pp. 71–2). Féval’s anglers congregating at La Pêche Miraculeuse were an earlier and more metaphorical satire of this desperate, and ultim­ ately ruinous tendency. While Napoleon I’s economic policy was in fact far more protectionist than Napoleon III’s, the present chaos – partly necessitated by the Crimean War – may have made Féval keen to explain history by tarring Napoleon I’s economic tendency with the brush provided by that of Napoleon III. Thus the vampire of the first empire is resurging in the contemporary epoch of the brigand Rozsa Sandor, and in doing so comes to represent the actual processes of history through anachronistic allusion, a feature seen earlier in Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi and Gautier’s ‘La Morte amoureuse’. However, if we see the novel in relation to the conventions of the Gothic rather than those of the historical novel, we can under­ stand that the matching of vampirism with brigandry allows Féval to invert Gothic conventions and make further, more salient com­ ments about the causes of Napoleon I’s rise and with it this meta­ phorical vampirism of greed. For the success of the vampire as brigand and venture capitalist is not owing to the resurgence of irrationalism but rather to the prevalence of reason and Republican views. On a metaphorical level, the vices of capitalism (brigandry and greed) are vampiric (i.e. predatory) and never-ending (they cannot die). However, at a purely literal level, the rise of this type of capitalism is presented as being the death of a spiritual world view in favour of a rational one. Sévérin’s refusal to believe in the vampire, even after he has seen it carrying off a young woman whom he does not recognize as his own daughter, and – more importantly – his involuntary address to Napoleon as ‘majesty’, all point to the fact that his rationalist and Republican views have created the path to ‘vampirism’, understood at its metaphorical level of Bonapartist brigandry. It is at this point that we have to consider the most alarming in­ version of British Gothic conventions and causality presented by the novel in its mixture of the historical with the frénétique and fantastique, and in its play between the naturalistic, literal level and the vampire’s more important metaphorical and ethical meaning. The novel’s posited life-world is not one that is implicitly naturalistic but then 130

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threatened by the irrational, as in the works of Radcliffe and Lewis: or at least is not explained as such. Rather, it is an impli­citly spiritualist order that is threatened by the scepticism of rationalism, which on a metaphorical level means that vampirism as brigandry and capitalist greed results from the rise of materialism rather than from the re­ surgence of the irrationalism of an older, pre-Enlightenment world. This may cause some clashes of value or expectation with relation to the novel’s basic mimetic code, rooted, as it is, in real history and realist convention, since the vampire on a literal level is un­avoidably portrayed as a challenge to a presumed, naturalistic world order, otherwise it could not necessitate the hesitation between an uncanny and marvellous explanation, described subsequently by Todorov, and exploited by Féval himself here and elsewhere. Féval manages to obviate this contradiction between the conventions of realism implicit to the Gothic and the moral point about vampirism, by high­ lighting the ideas of Patou, who shows the intellectual superiority of Hahnemann’s understanding of the universe over that of natural scientists. It is Hahnemann’s belief that the world is organic, and that disparate things have a correspondence, which allows Patou to resuscitate René by giving him a solution containing opiate, the same thing that has drugged him.29 The combination of the vampire theme with a homeopathic understanding of nature is also used as a causative mechanism elsewhere in the novel, and explains some of the uncanny, structural pairings and paradigmatic relations between character and event which run across the narrative, and which work simultaneously at an allegorical and an ontological level. Féval expands the Hahnemann theory from the purely medical to the spiritual and ethical through the Countess’s chilling motto. ‘In vita mors, in morte vita’ is itself governed by Hahnemann theories of correspondence, and becomes an important motif in the book. Death in life, Lila slowly uttered, life in death: it’s the motto of human­ kind . . . She [Addhéma] comes to us from one of our relations, the baron of Szandor, who is also accused of being a vampire . . . You are going to see that we are a strange family. (La mort dans la vie, prononça lentement Lila, la vie dans la mort: c’est la devise du genre humain . . . Elle [Addhéma] nous vient d’un 131

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The Fantastic and European Gothic de nos aïeux, le ban de Szandor, qu’on accusa aussi d’être vampire . . . Nous sommes une étrange famille, vous allez voir.) (p. 102)

This relation of the chiasmus ‘death in life and life in death’ – the ‘motto of humankind’ – to the kinship between Lila’s family and Szandor, is of course apocryphal, and again, like the interpretation of Napoleon as vampire, embedded in Lila-Addhéma’s unreliable story; but like the other passage it is an essential part of the vampire’s metaphorical meaning and political significance. In Hahnemann’s theory illness is an interruption of the vital spirit from an incidental, material cause, which can only be cured by a germ of the illness’s symptom, restoring the body’s vital balance.30 Because of this we are presented with the Latin dictum ‘Similia similibus curantur’ (‘Like things are cured by like’) from the mouth of Patou as he gives René the watered opium solution which cures him of his stupor.31 Although ‘La mort dans la vie . . . la vie dans la mort’ is an obvious echo of the sub-titles of Gautier’s extended graveyard poem La Comédie de la mort (1838: see below), in Lila’s Latin version ‘In vita mors, in morte vita’ there is an alternative interpretation of Patou’s own homeo­ pathic motto, also in Latin, which involves the spiritual as well as the bodily. Effectively Lila’s motto means that in the human species illness and death are also ‘same-causing’, and are attracted to seem­ ingly wholesome bodies, which in fact already contain them in a germ of likeness. After uttering the motto, Lila then proceeds to tell the story of how her mother was killed by Addhéma – her own kinswoman. Thus the motto represents both spiritually and morally the degree of correspondence between victim and predator, the former attracting the latter. This theory of like attracting like is especially relevant at a spiritual and ethical level in relation to the life and death of Angèle, who, despite her virtue, is also a single mother, having borne René a child outside wedlock (p. 149), with the growth of ‘la vie privée’, predicted by Michel Travers in La Chambre des Amours, having facilitated this hypocrisy. Angèle meets her death at the hands of Addhéma, giving herself without resistance to a woman who takes her scalp and is even later mistaken for her by Sévérin, and by René in his dual image of the two women when he is under the influence of drugs (p. 116). So Sévérin’s tolerance of extramarital sex, and of a mock 132

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marriage ‘provisionally, with neither priest nor Mayor’ in Angèle’s room (p. 148),32 simply leads Angèle to meet her moral double in the vampire. This in turn demonstrates the degree to which, on a metaphorical level, Napoleon’s emperor status, which is the crown­ ing of vampire activity, assured by a female vampire who is Angèle’s double, was prepared for by the lax morality of seemingly altruistic revolutionary politics, and thus why, when meeting Napoleon in his younger days, Sévérin called him ‘majesty’ unconsciously. Napo­ leon’s life that exists in death – moral and physical – was simply invited by the moral death that lurked beneath the surface of Repub­ lican ideals. Long before critics used Freudian theories of projection and the uncanny to prove the implicit wish-fulfillment involved in the subject’s contemplation of their repressed id in an external being, Féval quite self-consciously adapted the homeopathic principle of medicine to illustrate the underlying moral and spiritual inter­ connected­ness of seeming opposites, and how fine ideals at bottom contain the germ of destruction for those who believe them. The novel’s spiritual substructure of homeopathy helps to facilitate this moral relatedness, but also manifests itself at a literary level through the Gothic conventions of doppelgänger and the uncanny, allowing an unlikely fusion of the ontological and the symbolic, the causative and the analogical, through the same concept. Most importantly, however, by bringing the vampire and the double into the historical novel, Féval manages to suggest both the continuing and unresolved nature of recent history and to attack the replacement of a moral, spiritual understanding of reality by Republicanism and rationalism. Féval also manages to show how revolution deprives people of the necessary fear and moral responses which characterized the age of faith, and effectively paints the Urban Gothic/frénétique subgenre itself as being a bastardization of genuine moral fear through aesthetic apprehension. The ‘Theatre’ built at St Orme, where Sévérin, the keeper of the present city morgue, finds himself at the beginning of the novel, turns out to be a new morgue, which will be treated as a source for spectacle by the curious, much as the guillotine is, drawing the same ‘obscene crowds’ (‘foules obscènes’) (p. 238). This aesthetic reaction to the terror of the Gothic is shown to result from Bonapartism, since the crowd which comes to spectate here is de­ scribed immediately after the description of the hateful, Bonapartist 133

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mob that turns on Cadoudal, effectively linking the two. However, whereas the terror of the Burkean sublime relates to fear of death being modified by aesthetic distance, so that sources of pain can become sources of pleasure,33 and was further used by Radcliffe to define terror in distinction to horror, in Féval’s novel the separation between aesthetic distance and pain is transmuted to the entire lifeworld itself, with the populace treating the morgue as a theatre of death. Furthermore, they are delighting in the physical and carnal display of the horror rather than in a threat of extinction or super­ natural agency – an example of the macabre and the dissociation from proper emotional and moral reaction, which also constitutes a denial of the sympathetic principles inherent in the universe of homeopathy. Thus the Gothic fascination with terror would appear to result from an emotional distancing whose ultimate end is dis­ sociation from the moral dilemmas of life itself. This illustration continues the theme first promulgated in La Chambre des Amours, which suggests that in the post-revolutionary world the gap between drama and life has receded. A final point to be made concerns the novel’s allusiveness to the work of other writers. Féval places the house at Bretonvilliers in Île St-Louis as an allusion to Gautier’s article ‘Le Club des Hachichins’, since the real club was situated just up the road from this street, facing the northern bank of the Seine at l’hôtel Pimodan. As Gautier himself explains, the hachichin club to which he belonged is in fact descended from the caste of Assassins employed by the Seljuk Turks, who were given hashish in order to make them glimpse paradise.34 Hence the site where René takes opium is also a den for assassins, placed between east and west. A further and important allusion which Féval makes is to Nodier’s stage-play Le Vampire (1819), albeit in another anachronous form. While expressing his belief in vampires to René, Patou admits that: ‘I know a man who is going to make ships run with neither sails nor oars, but with the steam of boiling water; he has the name Citizen Jouffroy; he is a Marquis and mad like Hahnemann; he is creating a melodrama entitled Le Vampire. The theatre of Saint-Martin will collapse from it!’

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The Catastrophe of the Second Empire (‘Je connaîs un homme qui fait aller les bateaux sans voiles ni rames, avec de la vapeur de l’eau bouillante; il a le nom de citoyen Jouffroy; il est marquis et fou comme Hahnemann; il fait un mélodrame intitulé: Le Vampire. Le théâtre Saint-Martin en croulera!’)35

Albert Jouffroy was Nodier’s collaborator in creating the vampire drama from Polidori’s short story (1819). The literary reference here helps to place the text in its historical context, and yet once more subvert this through anachronism, since neither Byron nor Polidori had as yet even arrived at the Villa Diodati by 1804. In summation, Féval blends elements of the Gothic, Urban frénétique and historical novel in order to create a harsh critique of the period just before the declaration of the First Empire, which critique still has unresolved significance for the Second Empire, and that the use of fantasy, exteriorization and embedded, unreliable narrators succeeds in obscuring. Despite the naturalistic and material reality of the novel’s life-world, which in classic Gothic fashion appears threatened by the vampire, the work enjoys an underlying spiritual authority represented by homeopathic medicine, not only creating a potential for the marvellous, but also a dynamic for spiritual and moral inter­ connectedness that manifests itself in the novel’s uncanny and doubling motifs. Ultimately, the play between the metaphorical and literal meanings of the vampire creates a unique Gothic hybrid where the phenomenon of vampirism – in its metaphorical meaning of capitalist greed – is in fact a result of rationalism and the end of a spiritual world-view, rather than the continuation of an irrational belief in the sacred. As the narrator writes when extolling Hahnemann, under the Restoration fifteen years later he will pass for a sorcerer, so supernatural will his cures appear (p. 216). While the vampire itself may not be real, the marvellous and the spiritual are: materialism and rationalism are the real superstitions that cause terror and horror, as Charles Nodier would no doubt have agreed. Faustianism At the beginning of the novel the vampire, as monster, is compared to Faust through a set of engravings that the narrator remembers 135

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from his youth. In this version of Goethe’s legend, we are shown Faust, who was given youth and beauty along with the power of science, becoming the predatory vampire that ravages Marguérite (Gretchen). Thus the original story, in which Faust foolishly seduces the young maid, who is then outcast with her illegitimate child and sentenced to death, is transformed into something yet more macabre. Here Faust is shown abducting Marguérite, from Pesth along the Theiss all the way to Peterwardein in Wallachia, where she is finally presented in a coffin, surrounded by other ‘pale statues’ of maidens whom the vampire has dessicated (pp. 17–18). Linking the story of Faust to the vampire theme would perhaps seem to associate it with technology, but there is little discussion of science in itself here, simply revolutionary ideals and lax morality. The theme is probably suggested again by Gautier’s La Comédie de la mort, in which the narrator is guided by a virgin of death to meet Faust in a graveyard in the second section, ‘La Mort dans la Vie’. The narrator hears Faust now regret having ‘with no distrust/Bitten the golden apples of the tree of science/Science is death,’ and he moans that he now ‘believes in nothing’, and is ‘a living corpse’ (‘Un cadavre vivant’), wishing that he could kiss Marguérite once more.36 Féval subtly changes the meaning of ‘la vie dans la mort’ and ‘la mort dans la vie’ through the Hahnemann theme of similarity, but the Faustian theme of the vampire signifying scepticism and scientific overreaching, present in Gautier’s text, is also faintly suggested. As shall be seen, this particular theme becomes all important in Féval’s next vampire novel, Le Chevalier Ténèbre.

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5 Paul Féval’s Le Chevalier Ténèbre and Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’: the Failures of the Bourbon Restoration 

While Féval suggests the continuing demise of society through modern capitalism and Bonapartism in La Vampire, his critique of the waning of the age of faith and subsequent rise of both material­ ism and positivism becomes more pronounced and more open in his next vampire novel, Le Chevalier Ténèbre, leading him to abandon the homeopathic theme in favour of a more overt espousal of Legit­ im­ist views. So extreme is his critique, that we might even call this work an ‘anti-Gothic’ novel if David Punter’s and Fred Botting’s under­standing of the Gothic as an indulgent diversion from En­ lightenment principles is accepted,1 for it is a novel which defiantly sees terror and horror as resulting from losing rather than maintaining credulity towards the supernatural. This effectively necessitates many passages of explication from an omniscient narrator, since on a literal level it seems absurd that the phenomenon of vampirism should be caused by the rise of scepticism. However, at a metaphorical level vampirism as capitalist greed can indeed be understood as caused by the waning of faith and rise of scepticism, which in the narrative itself forces the novel’s audience to doubt literal vampirism. It is this moral equation – involving a translation of the literal to the metaphorical – which Féval is once more keen to promote. Hence the work’s moral necessitates much external explication, which is liberally provided, to the extent that at points it resembles a didactic

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lesson on the ills of scepticism and modern technology more than it does a work of terror and suspense. Le Chevalier Ténèbre The action begins at the palace of the famous Archbishop of Paris, Mgr de Quélen, in the year 1825. With him are the worthy, but somewhat over-aesthetic Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, the famous conservative theologian who wrote La Défense du Christian­ isme (1825), and La Princesse de Montfort, who has brought her younger son, the Marquis Gaston de Lorgères, with her.2 It is a stifling hot September evening, but nevertheless they feel a gothic chill. The revellers ask Mgr de Quélen for a story to make them tremble, but instead up step two brothers, one the Baron d’Altenheimer, tall and dark, the other the Monsignor Bénédict d’Altenheimer, short and blonde. Some demand a story about ‘fantômes’, while the Princess demands of them a story about brigands, and some desire a story about ‘vampires’. Brigands and vampires are exactly what they hear about, as the two brothers both predict that two other brothers, the Chevalier Jean Ténèbre, who is tall and dark, and his younger brother Ange, short and blond, will arrive that evening to rob them all: one a brigand and ‘eupire’ who eats flesh, the other a ‘vampire’, ‘a drinker of human blood’.3 The d’Altenheimers tell the story of the Baron Jacobyi of Baszin, and his daughter Lénor, who were tricked by two Ottoman gypsies, Solim and Mikaël, into letting them stay at their house after Lenore is lonely due to the departure of her best friend Efflam. Solim and Mikaël described to Jacobyi and Lenore how they had travelled from Szegged, where they saw the hanged bodies of the two Ténèbre brothers fall onto their horses and come back to life: how they travelled on to Temeswar and saw the two thieves similarly resurrect themselves from the Theiss after being thrown into the rivers in sacks; how they found their tombs on the plain of Grand Waradein, one short, the other long, dating from the time when they were both French medieval knights who ravaged the plain. Later the d’Altenheimers saw the two brothers being beheaded, after being convicted of killing Lénor’s friend Efflam. 138

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Mikaël and Solim, says the Baron d’Altenheimer, are really the Chevalier and Vampire themselves. La Princesse de Montfort, not scared by the story, ‘looked at her son laughing’ [‘regarda en riant son fils’] (p. 23), while Frayssinous, the Bishop of Hermopolis, loves the story, because he ‘insisted on seeing things from the point of view of art’ (‘s’obstinait à voir les choses au point de vue de l’art’) (p. 25). After considering whether vampires should be seen as a material or spiritual manifestation, the latter of which views is sup­ ported by Frayssinous, the two continue to relate what happened next. Having told their story to Jacobyi and his daughter Lénor, Mikaël and Solim kidnapped the daughter, only restoring her after a ransom which, while not ruinous in itself, off-balanced the Baron Jacobyi’s finances and caused banks – even worse vampires, as the Baron d’Altenheimer informs us – to call in his estate and leave the father and daughter penniless (pp. 27–8). The two brothers d’Alten­ heimer tell more about the audacious disguises used by the two brothers Ténèbre. At a wedding in Venice they came as Giovanni Stewart, Jacobite pretender to the throne, and his younger brother, but stole everything, having magnanimously placed a gift of pearls on the table – which they later reclaimed along with everyone else’s jewels (pp. 31–2). They did the same at the King of Wurtemberg’s party for the christening of his son, where they arrived as Infante and Infanta of Spain, abducting and killing one of the King’s daughters (pp. 38–9). This is why the Baron d’Altenheimer and his brother Monsignor Bénédict – both from the court of Wurtemberg – are here to meet them again and challenge them, confidently predicting that they will return. In the interval some people become suspicious that the Baron and his brother the Monsignor may themselves be the Ténèbres, but the two allay this through playing up to the suspicion (p. 51). Only the Marquis de Lorgères is convinced, and having seen the beautiful Mlle d’Arnheim (really Lénor) singing opera, then goes to visit her impoverished father (really Baron Jacobyi) in an anteroom to ask him for Lénor’s hand in marriage (p. 64), and to see if he can identify the thieves of his inheritance (the Marquis has in fact been communicating with Lénor through a favourite dog for some weeks (pp. 66–8)). Frayssinous arranges a collection for the Christians suffer­ ing under the Ottoman Empire, and secures rich contributions from 139

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the Baron d’Altenheimer and his brother (pp. 72–3). At the appoint­ ed time of the Ténèbres’ arrival the lights dim, and the thrilled crowd suffers the theft of all its contributed goods by the two men – the Ténèbre brothers being themselves, of course, the Baron d’Altenheimer and Monsignor Bénédict. Later we see the two brothers as they ‘really’ are: the East End villains Bobby and William. They are cock-a-hoop until they discover they have lost the missal from around William, the short blonde ‘Monsignor’s’ neck (pp. 93–8). They quickly work out that it is the Marquis Gaston de Lorgères who has taken it. It contains all their money from previous thefts, but with it Gaston intends to buy back Jacobyi’s estate for him, and thus appease the pragmatism of his mother in choosing Lénor as his mate (p. 112). The brothers follow Gaston and, once more disguised, suborn his carriage, stabbing him near fatally but returning empty-handed (p. 116). We next see them travelling to Szegged and ‘Chandor’ with a mind to stealing and avenging (p. 120). Set upon by Jacobyi’s huntsmen, they choose to run eastward towards their tombs at Grand Waradein, passing the Theiss, Temeswar (Timisoara), and eventually sealing themselves up in the tombs (p. 126). At the Archbishop of Paris’s ball the following September the same characters are all there once more, and Gaston describes how Lénor’s uncle went to the tomb, found two corpses and then sealed the tombs irrevocably (p.131). Despite this a taunting letter arrives from the brothers, now seemingly returned to their supernatural rather than their natural status, the marvellous and uncanny endings beautifully equipoised and unresolved. Like La Vampire this is a vampire novel which balances the marvel­ lous against the natural, and with this the vampire’s literal against its metaphorical meaning, although more pointedly owing to the difference between the two brothers (one brigand, the other vampire). Like the other work it creates a historical fiction, with the super­ natural narrative interweaved into the lives of real-life figures like Frayssinous and de Quélen. It almost alludes to La Vampire in the theme of different hair colour, and furthermore mocks the Gothic or frénétique for being a potential cause for dissociation from the reality of evil, since the Marquise de Montfort and Frayssinous, who loves the purely aesthetic, treat a real-life story as a thrilling 140

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fiction rather than heeding it as the ominous warning that it is. Indeed, as in La Vampire, the brothers tell the story of their lives in order to get what they want, although here as a brazen device that is used to satirize scepticism.4 Like La Vampire, the grounding in historical reality is meticulous and plausible, with details such as the long cessation of links between Spain and the German Federation in the 1820s being used to explain why the two brothers attracted so much enthusiasm as Infante and Infanta in Wurtemberg: ‘Spain is a China in the middle of Europe’ (p. 35). Like La Vampire, it betrays Legitim­ist colours, and attempts, through the play between literal and allegor­ical meaning, to invert the life-world and con­ ventions of the traditional British Gothic novel, and present the vampire – in its allegorical meaning of capitalist greed – as being a result of the denigration of a spiritual world-view and Catholic moral order in favour of a more materialist and rationalist one.5 The major difference here, however, apart from the abandonment of Hahnemann theory as a spiritual and moral framework for explain­ ing the vampire, is the continued authorial intrusions relating to positivism and materialism – theories supported by the Baron but contradicted by his clerical brother and by Frayssinous himself – particularly in relation to the actual telling of the story. Whereas in La Vampire the motto ‘In vita mors, in morte vita’ represents both the ‘undead’ status of Addhéma and the homeopathic principle of like both curing and attracting like,6 the successful ploy of the brothers’ confessional story illustrates the woeful spirit of materialism from which criminality benefits. After the heist at the Archbishop’s palace, the narrator explains how the two thieves were simply operating under the maxim of the London villain Joshua J. Marshall, who had explained at his trial how he had escaped capture until his eighties: ‘Say to the constable: I am Jack Sheppard, and he won’t believe you; prove to him, with the help of your birth certificate, that you are Jack Sheppard, and he will treat you as an imposter: steal from him his pocket-watch, his wallet, his shirt and his truncheon, and he will laugh to himself, saying: “Go on! Jack Sheppard! It’s not possible!”’ (‘Dites au constable: Je suis Jack Sheppard, il ne vous croira pas; prouvez-lui, à l’aide de votre acte de naîssance, que vous êtes Jack 141

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Sheppard, il vous traitera d’imposteur: volez-lui alors sa montre, sa bourse, sa chemise et sa baguette, il rira en lui-même, disant: “Allons don! Jack Sheppard! Ce n’est pas possible!”’) (p. 82)

Marshall’s bravado leads the narrator to call him ‘a sage according to the religion of matter, and devotees of nothingness who refuse to regard him as a sage are mad.’7 Marshall’s use of effrontery and honesty thus makes him a perverse prophet, even though such a positivist ideal depends upon empiricism, which Marshall’s doctrine might seem, at first glance, to refute. The narrator, however, soon explains why Marshall is such a sage, by contending that jailers will tell you that prisoners always escape when they are being most conspicuous and most obvious, and asks ‘do you want the cause?’ It is that since ‘the human spirit . . . has the passion for contradiction, all precaution can, by definition, translate itself or resolve itself through this affirmation: I am not a robber’.8 Hence while mocking the argumentative strategy of positivism which analyses positive effects before determining the cause, he shows how this ‘religion of materialism’ in fact leads to the opposite of truth: that scepticism is its result. This combined spirit of positivism and scepticism has clearly infect­ed the crowd who wish for a thrilling story rather than believe the incredible, and thus the inversion of Gothic conventions apparent in the earlier novel, La Vampire, continues in the play between the allegorical and literal meanings, although with an added twist. Where­ as there it is mainly moral laxity and the end of a spiritual order which allows the vampire, in its allegorical meaning of brigandry and capitalism, to prosper, here it is literal scepticism towards the supernatural – a result of materialism – which allows it to do so. Furthermore, this spirit of scepticism is also now regarded as causing the aesthetic taste for the Gothic or frénétique. The waning of the age of faith in favour of Comtian positivism has made people para­ doxically less realist, and is shown to have contributed literally to the love of the theatrical and of the Burkean sublime, as people treat terror and horror in real life as though an aesthetic experience, like the spectators at the morgue in La Vampire. The difference here, however, is that the relegation of these tastes to the purely literary means that the aristocratic audience cannot accept a story as referring 142

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to reality, while for the working-class spectators at the morgue this was a dissociation of moral feeling from real events due to theatricality and spectacle. The vampire phenomenon, which the novel’s characters mistreat through scepticism, also represents metaphorically the usurpation of sacerdotal rules and a divinely sanctioned political order, as common criminals invade the world of the aristocracy and enthrall it. This fall from the age of faith and divine temporal order, shown as permeating even the restored Bourbon dynasty (which Féval later recognized as having been too compromising during the reign of Louis XVIII),9 and as being abetted by the spirit of scepticism, helps facilitate the further fall of a more heroic and classical spirit, and thus of the rightful mystique of aristocracy, which collapse becomes evident at the second ball: John Grape has dethroned Bacchus, who was too gentlemanly a god. One night I had a nightmare in which I saw Homer come back to life with scarlet spots on the end of his nose. I asked him news of Achilles, of Hector and of Agamemnon; he sang the Marseillaise to me. It’s the repellent side of our age, this insolent odour of bad wine, which is gaining acceptance, mingled with the ignoble pollution of political smoking-dens. (Jean Raisin a dethroné Bacchus, qui était un dieu trop gentilhomme. J’ai eu ce cauchemar une nuit, de voir Homère revivre avec des bourgeons ecarlates au bout du nez. Je lui demandai des nouvelles d’Achille, d’Hector et d’Agamemnon; il me chanta la Marseillaise. C’est le côté repoussant de notre siècle, cette odeur effrontée du mauvais vin, qui fait école, melée à l’ignoble méphitisme des tabagies politiques.)10

Here, through allusions to the death of classical culture, the political upshot of the changes taking place is made evident, as the Legitimist, anti-Republican tenor of Féval’s political views is delineated more obviously than in the earlier vampire novel. Unlike in the work of David or Voltaire, in Féval’s novel there is no classical parallel for the modern drinking God, with the less gentlemanly Jean Raisin ( John Grape) being celebrated in comic poems like those of Gustave 143

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Matthieu.11 Festivity has lost its honourable meaning and society has sunk to a carnal level, one that the Restoration, already tainted by the lack of spirituality caused by Republicanism, has proved powerless to reverse. Republicanism and its offshoot regimes are a bastardization of a more heroic and traditional society, depriving that society of its historical roots. The bastardization of society through the decline of aristocratic culture and rise of materialism is matched by a similar condemnation of venture capitalism and its English origins. While in La Vampire the exteriorization of the vampire to Eastern Europe is used to mask the internal, Bonapartist cause and also to allude to the contemporary (through Rozsa Sandor), in Le Chevalier Ténèbre the unmasking of the vampires as East End villains, similar in temperament to the sage Joshua Marshall, is not an attempt at exteriorization, since Féval understood Britain as being the forerunner of many of France’s materialist and capitalist ills.12 Indeed 1860, the year of the novel’s publication, saw Napoleon III sign an unprecedented free trade agreement with Great Britain.13 Hence while lèse-majesté, capitalist greed and materialist scepticism – all symbolized by the vampire and its unhindered plundering – are presented as endemic to postrevolutionary France, their British progeny is also not deniable. Despite this, Féval now openly recognizes the potential danger of a materialist and technologically-obsessed France, and inverts the direction of invasion that was presented – at least at a literal level – in La Vampire. Exploiting the Hungarian location of the vampire, Féval uses it to symbolize not the potential degradation of the West by the East, which phenomenon Pick and others have seen in Stoker’s novel Dracula, but rather the degradation of Eastern Europe by the West.14 Explaining how the two brothers/thieves return to Hungary, the narrator interjects that he has recently seen the area, and that various railways now move from Pesth to Belgrade over the Theiss thanks to ‘nos ingénieurs français’. There is even a bridge at Szeggedin executed by a multilingual workforce. Having seen a photographic camera working on the bridge he declares, ‘Notre civilization est là’. The narrator suddenly pleads: May God will that it does not bring with it there our impieties, our dissensions, our shames and our miseries! What the high barons of 144

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The Failures of the Bourbon Restoration our materialist feudality call Progress has terrible repercussions, and some people have paid very highly for the doubtful advantage of seeing their Tribunes live like Princes. The grand industrial festival that intoxicates and shakes the old age of the world is assuredly brilliant, but it leaves behind a deep sickness made each day more incurable . . . That is not to say that nothing should be improved, quite the opposite, everything should be improved: the moral element as well as the material side of things. (Dieu veuille qu’elle n’y amène point avec elle nos impiétés, nos discords, nos hontes et nos misères! Ce que les hauts barons de notre féodalité matérialiste appellent le Progrès a des envers terribles, et certains peuples ont payé bien cher l’avantage douteux de voir leurs tribuns vivre en princes. Elle est assurément brillante la grande fête industrielle qui enivre et secoue la veillesse du monde, mais elle recouvre une maladie profonde que chaque jour fait plus incurable . . . Ce n’est pas à dire qu’il ne falle rien améliorer, bien au contraire, il faut tout améliorer: l’élément moral aussi bien que le côté matériel des choses.)15

Although we cannot simply designate Féval’s Balzacian, intrusive narrator as being the author himself, we must nevertheless remember that this is biographically true, since Féval had visited Hungary ‘vers 1859’ after a sojourn in Austria when he had met an almoner work­ ing at a castle owned by the Bourbons.16 Here the narrator very closely scorns the material effects of positivism, just as he had mocked the scepticism and cynicism which had given rise to the Gothic fascination with the macabre and the Fantastic. The truly horrific and terrifying is not the irrational, but the results of materialism and science, which impede moral growth. Furthermore, the narrator in the above extract is also implicitly attacking the change in the class order, calling materialism ‘feudal’ and its proponents ‘barons’, while showing the cost for their fellow men of their ‘living like princes’. The attack is not on ‘barons’ or even ‘feudality’ itself, so much as the reversal of traditional class structure, since the implication is that allowing industrialists to ‘live like Princes’ causes greater inequality than the order which preceded it, as everyone else must ‘pay dearly’. The vampire considered as Faust, which concept prefaced the beginning of La Vampire, comes 145

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to fruition in this novel which satirizes not only greed, but the effects of ‘progress’, and with this the further disparities in wealth and income which this opens up. If one takes the contemporary and apparent nature of the vampire (since the vampire cannot be eradicated) and Féval’s further use of the intrusive narrator to stress the currency of the materialism which he shows as embedding itself in the spirit of the aristocracy during the Restoration, the vampire theme may also be a coded condem­ nation of Napoleon III’s policy of support for the new nations of middle and eastern Europe and the agitated breakdown of Catholic Austria.17 This is further symbolized by the fact that the two brothers cause havoc in Venice, which town had at the time been part of the Hapsburg kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and hence loyal to Emperor and Pope, but had since been incorporated into the new king­dom of Italy (1856), partly on account of Napoleon III’s inter­ cession. Again, the infiltration of the Kingdom of Wurtemberg – which since 1806 had been an absolute monarchy, but which had had to accept a bourgeois democracy in 1848 – may also represent this fear. The rule of the divinely sanctioned crowns of Europe is threatened by both democracy and nation-building as promoted by Napoleon III. While the novel sees these effects as emerging during an earlier era, the use of an omniscient narrator and the vampire theme itself once again opens up the historical novel, with its individual agents but complex public history, into a form that sees history as still emergent, its causes unresolved, in close contra­ distinction to the novels of Scott. In summation, Le Chevalier Ténèbre is, like La Vampire, a hybrid of the historical and Gothic/frénétique genre novels, that uses the vampire theme as an allegory of an ineradicable evil and that presents vampirism, at its metaphorical level of criminality and capitalist greed, as resulting from the growth of scepticism towards the spiritual and supernatural. This didactic message is delivered through an unusual play between the literal and allegorical levels, since in condemning the spirit of scepticism and materialism, the novel does not demand that we believe in the literal existence of vampires. Rather, by employ­ ing the vampire theme in combination with the criminal theme, Féval uses the reactions of the guests to the d’Altenheimers’ story to illustrate a tendency which, once translated to its metaphorical 146

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level, can then be understood as a spiritual problem which causes an ethical and a political malaise. This last point is made far more forcefully than in La Vampire, where Féval uses Hahnemann ideas to illustrate spiritual and moral interconnectedness and to enable interpretation of the doppelgänger and uncanny; however, since the age in which Le Chevalier Ténèbre is set was post-Bonaparte, Féval appears happier to use authorial intrusions to condemn the spirit of scepticism rather than the regime which he undoubtedly felt contributed to it. Furthermore, whereas in La Vampire the East European origin is a mask used to condemn internal malaises and link the vampire to the contemporary, in Le Chevalier Ténèbre Féval situates the origin of malaise in Great Britain, with whom Napoleon III had just signed a commercial treaty, and sees the sicknesses of technology and materialism as constituting a threat to the more sacerdotal East: another example of the vampire as Faustian over-reaching. Legitimism Finally, one must consider this novel in the light of Lukács’s own portrayal of Legitimist history, and of the Legitimist novel by the likes of Châteaubriand. Although Féval was writing in the period after 1848, which Lukács identifies as creating a crisis for bourgeois realism when the historical novel became a form of modern escapism, his political motivation clearly aligns both La Vampire and Le Chevalier Ténèbre with Legitimism, and so should be seen in the light of Lukác’s own description of this trend: The ideal of Legitimism is to return to pre-Revolutionary conditions, that is, to eradicate from history the greatest historical event of the epoch . . . According to this interpretation history is a silent, imperceptible, natural, ‘organic’ growth, that is, a development of society which is basically stagnation, which alters nothing in the time-honoured, legit­ imate institutions of society and, above all, alters nothing consciously.18

Féval certainly sees the ‘time-honoured’ institutions of history as preferable to those created by revolution and so-called ‘progress’. 147

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However, he does not ignore the progress of revolution and its aftermath, but portrays it as an aberration which does not really progress, but simply recurs: a form of poison whose nature is constant, like the spiritual universe it assaults. Furthermore, he does not see the institutions of the old order as unchanging, but rather as selfabusing through interference with the affairs of men. By combining the Gothic with the historical novel, metaphor with the literal, Féval shows history after the Revolution in a moral and theological framework that resembles the fall from paradise rather than measured change. Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ Another Gothic work which explores the Restoration in France is Le Fanu’s ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, the longest piece to be included in the collection In a Glass Darkly, and written almost con­ temporaneously with the vampire story ‘Carmilla’. Like ‘Carmilla’ it contains a mysterious woman who first entrances the tale’s narrator and victim after an accident in a carriage, and contains many refer­ ences to vampirism. However, whatever potentially supernatural elements it may contain are weak and possess almost no potential for the marvellous whatsoever, as the plot quickly turns into a perverse romance, driven by the eager love of the young man, whose pursuit is in fact framed by vile, criminal deceptions from more than one party. Richard Beckett, a young and wealthy English gentleman, is on the grand tour and on his way to Paris just after the removal of Napoleon at Waterloo. He encounters a veiled woman and an elderly man in a carriage, who it later turns out are directed towards the same lodging-house as himself, the Belle Etoile.19 There he chances to remark the mirrored reflection of the woman’s now unveiled face and sees that it is beautiful, and so now wishes to take lodgings as close to her as possible. He is later approached by Monsieur Droqville, who has mistaken him for another Beckett, and then introduces himself to the young man as being really the Marquis d’Harmonville, forced to travel in disguise. Droqville advises the young man not to go to the gaming tables when he reaches Paris, and to beware 148

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of the artful rogues who wait there. On enquiring about the young lady, Beckett discovers she is the Countess de St Alyre, the old man her husband the Count: their marriage presumably happy (pp. 138). While Beckett is in the courtyard, a veteran of Napoleon’s army, Colonel Gaillarde, of slim gait and ‘revenant’-like appearance, is perusing the red storks emblazoned on the St Alyres’ carriage doors (p. 134). Later, he abuses the Count, and tries to attack the Countess, giving Beckett the opportunity to show off his gallantry by serving him a serious blow to the head. The Countess whispers a sweetness in Beckett’s ear, and then walks off promptly, leaving the young man dazzled (pp. 141–7). Ultimately Beckett travels off to Paris with Droqville/ d’Harmon­ ville, and is rendered incapable of moving any limbs for several hours. While he is in this state a young man with a scar enters the carriage and rifles through his personal papers, although steals nothing (p. 153). After recounting the story to Droqville, he is assured by him that the condition is probably a result of the physical exertion against the Colonel Gaillarde, and that the young man was probably a police spy. On reaching Paris the Marquis advises him about finding acquaint­ ances, and tells him that there will be a masked ball at Versailles which the Countess will be attending. The Marquis takes him to a room at the Dragon Volant, named after both the large serpent that flies, and the cannon used by Napoleon’s forces. There Beckett discovers that his room overlooks the very building, the Château de la Carque, where the Countess and her husband live (p. 166). He hears astonishing stories about the disappearances of other men who inhabited the room, but dismisses them. At the ball he meets the Marquis and is finally introduced to the Count, before being taken to see the central spectacle, which is a palanquin inhabited by a Chinese guru, who communicates through a bearded oriental conjuror. The conjuror appears to know the secrets of the Count’s own quarrels with his wife (a point noted by Beckett) and also knows of Beckett’s own love for the Countess, whispering in his ear the same words she had originally whispered to him after the fracas with Gaillarde: ‘I may never see you more; and, oh! that I could forget you! go – farewell – for God’s sake, go!’ (p. 176). 149

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Later at the ball he meets another masked lady, Madame de la Vallière, who arranges to meet him at the little Greek-style temple on the edge of the estate in order to tell him more about the Count and Countess. He also meets Carmaignac, the chief of police in Paris, who tells him more strange stories about the room he is staying in and the disappearance of all the single men who sojourned there (pp. 185–9). At the tryst, he meets the lady, who reveals herself to be the Countess, and also unmasks her love for him and the desire to escape her husband, before arranging to meet Beckett there again, but by a different route (p. 196). Once back at the Dragon Volant the Count calls on Beckett and asks him if he will do him the favour of signing documents for the burial of a young relative of his near Rouen, to which he agrees in his eagerness to appear ingratiating (p. 198). That evening he meets the Countess again, although has to avoid the mysterious presence of Gaillarde when meeting her, and they hatch a plan to elope which involves him withdrawing all his money to match the wealth of her jewels (£30,000) (pp. 208–9). The next day he prepares to leave for Paris, having been warned by an elderly worker at the Dragon Volant to leave for good, so as not to allow a well-known family of former good repute to drag itself further into the mud (p. 213). He ignores this, and sets off to withdraw his money. While in Paris he sees Droqville/d’Harmonville’s reflection in the mirror of a shop, and to his surprise notices that he is convers­ ing with his enemy Colonel Gaillarde, and an ugly-looking, pockmarked man (p. 216). Once back he runs again to the Greek temple in order to meet his beloved, who guides him into a room in the house to prepare for the elopement. He is stunned to see the coffin of the young relative next door, but she assuages his fears, saying it is full of blocks. She then gives him a coffee and a liqueur, which renders him once again incapable of movement (p. 226). He now finds that the Count and Marquis (really the corrupt doctor Planard) also arrive to help load him into the coffin, the prospect of premature burial glaring horrific­ally in the mature Beckett’s memory (p. 233). Fortune changes suddenly, as Planard leaves the room to return with Carmaignac, the chief of police, who wishes to search the Count’s house for smuggled goods. He demands that the coffin be 150

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opened, and discovers the handkerchiefs marked with the initials of Richard Beckett, and not the Count’s kinsman (p. 237). Planard/ Droqville/d’ Harmonville had turned coat to save his life by inform­ ing on the others, and so Beckett has proven doubly unwitting: both in relation to the Count’s plot, and also to the plot into which St Alyre has been coaxed by Planard and Gaillarde, with Beckett himself as the dumb decoy. The graves of all the previous victims of this scheme are now exhumed, revealing Colonel Gaillarde’s brother amongst others. Gaillarde is so delighted to see the Count executed, his ‘wife’– really an actress, who also disguised herself as the police spy and the conjuror – sent to prison and some of his fraternal inheritance restored, that he forgives Beckett the blow to his head. The scorned Beckett now retreats in the footsteps of Byron to Switzerland and Italy, having learned an early lesson ‘in the ways of sin’ (p. 242). Much of the criticism of the piece deals with the mortis imago caused by drugs and fear of the ‘immobilised consciousness’ apparent in Beckett, which McCormack has recently understood as forming a symmetrical relation to the sexuality of Carmilla’s immortal state, while Jochen Achille has drawn comparison between Beckett’s con­ dition and some of the post-mortem conditions discussed by Poe.20 In his earlier study of Le Fanu, McCormack notices the peculiar im­ pulses in the young man, who allows himself to prepare so willingly for his own death through the ‘allure’ of love: a recurrence of Le Fanu’s habitual theme of self-destruction and the ‘obsessive narrative of suicide’.21 The link between love and self-destruction is in fact first mooted through Eugenie’s song from the window of her balcony at the hotel the Belle Etoile, which warns that: ‘Death and Love, together mated, Watch and wait in ambuscade; At early morn, or else belated, They meet and mark the man or maid.’22

The union of eros and thanatos is thus early remarked on, and the steps which Beckett takes in order to prepare his elopement could just as easily have been made, as he momentarily remarks before meeting Eugenie to elope with her, to facilitate his demise: 151

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Suppose I were to disappear finally, like those other men whose stories I had listened to! Had I not been at all the pains that mortal could, to obliterate every trace of my real proceedings, and to mislead every one to whom I spoke as to the direction in which I had gone? This icy, snake-like thought stole through my mind, and was gone. (p. 219)

James Walton has noticed the evident debt which the novella owes to Hoffmann’s tale ‘Automata’, which involves an automata that provides self-fulfilling prophecies to the young man Ferdinand in a game of clairvoyance, with the young Ferdinand himself later falling in love with a beautiful singing woman who is chaperoned by an ill-natured, older man. Walton centres on the extent to which Beckett invests his beloved with his own vain desires, and effectively treats his encounter with her as a form of drama that involves many details of harlequin pantomime and operatic comedy, such as the pagan temple and ruined chapel where they meet and the characters themselves.23 While I agree with Walton’s discussion of both the projection of wish-fulfillment in the tale and self-dramatization by the young man, it seems that many of the features which are typical of Italian pantomime and harlequinade were also features to be found in French Romances written at the time by authors like Balzac and George Sand, and had their roots in both Epic Romances of the late sixteenth century and the comedies of Shakespeare. Such features were also rooted in the self-consciousness of the era, as satirized by Stendhal in his novel of Restoration and Parisian love, Le Rouge et le Noir (1826), which consistently ridicules the use of novels ‘à la mode’ as models for imitation in love and courtly behaviour.24 Nevertheless, discussion of this novella has been relatively scarce compared with discussions of ‘Carmilla’, ‘Green Tea’ or Uncle Silas, and one can assume that the lack of marvellous events or channelled hesitation between natural and supernatural solutions (for Beckett rarely thinks beyond his desire) means that it has excited less interest than other tales amongst critics of the Gothic. However, the possi­ bility of vampirism is certainly raised towards the beginning of the story when the appearance of Colonel Gaillarde is first remarked upon by the narrator, who is told by the marquis that ‘“he has often been 152

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taken for a revenant”’ (p. 141). The Colonel adds to this impression through his copious thirst for red liquid (Mâcon and Burgundy, not blood), and through the proof of his astonishing facility for surviving wounds and self-restoration, which he himself attributes to being filled with ichor (p. 139). Nevertheless, when Gaillarde sees the Count and Countess, it is they who are accused of being revenants of the vampiric sort. Refer­ ring to the red storks emblazoned on their black carriage, Gaillarde screams: ‘I was not sure of your red birds of prey; I could not believe you would have the audacity to travel on high roads, and to stop at honest inns, and lie under the same roof with honest men. You! you! both – vampires, wolves, ghouls. Summon the gendarmes, I say.’ (p. 145)

The brief references to vampirism have little effect upon the plot and generic structure of the tale, but are actually important thematic­ally, since they help develop the tale’s allusive framework and political resonance. The story is set just after the Battle of Waterloo, when young men like Beckett could first perform the grand tour over the traditional sites of France and Italy – countries which had been off-limits to British travellers in the Napoleonic era. The most famous Englishman to have made this tour at this time, from which he never returned, was Lord Byron, who composed Cantos III and IV of Child Harold’s Pilgrimage during his journey. He never visited Paris, preferring instead to tour through Belgium and across Water­ loo, and then spend several months at the Villa Diodati above Lake Geneva. Apart from two new Cantos of Child Harold, two more pieces of Grand Tour literature arose from this sojourn, one being Byron’s ‘Fragment’ – his offering on the evening when he, Shelley and Mary Shelley were writing ghost stories – the other Polidori’s re­ writing of the ‘Fragment’ as the more famous ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), which formed the basis of so many plays and novels in Germany and France. ‘The Vampyre’ deals with the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven, the naive accomplice and the Byronic antihero who seduces and destroys women through Belgium and Italy and Greece, before sealing a promise from Aubrey not to reveal his 153

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death for a year when he is dying at Ephesus. The story has Aubrey return to England, only to see Ruthven seduce his own sister, marry and kill her before the exasperated younger man can be released from his promise. The original, undeveloped ‘Fragment’ (which Polidori could have only referred to from memory when he wrote up the story for Countess Bruce in 1816), consists mainly of the vampire’s ‘death’ scene, after the young accomplice, ‘Darvell’ (the original Ruthven) and a janissary have travelled from Smyrna to Ephesus, even though it is clear Darvell is about to die. The only clue as to the plot which Byron intended to develop later is contained in the symbolic coup­ ling of two animals remarked upon by the narrator: ‘As he sate, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a serpent in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us.’ The dying Darvell mentions the bird first: – You perceive that bird? – Certainly – – And the serpent writhing in her beak? – Doubtless: there is nothing uncommon in it; it is her natural prey. But it is odd that she does not devour it. – He smiled in a ghastly manner, and said, faintly, – It is not yet time!25

The relationship between stork and serpent obviously portends the relationship between Darvell and his accomplice. However, the relationship between the animals is not straightforward. Storks do not prey upon snakes in nature, and so the writhing of the serpent in the bird’s beak is not natural. Normally one would expect the snake to prey upon birds. Hence the reference to ‘she’ and ‘her’ in the younger man’s speech could easily be interpreted as the serpent that is being borne in the air by the stork. With regards to the two animals’ allegorical meaning in the story, the vampire may be either one, there being an element of ambivalence in the relationship between the two animals, as there is ambivalence between Darvell and the young narrator, since the latter cannot guess that the man for whom 154

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he is caring on the point of death will return to prey upon him: whether as the stork or as the unsuspected serpent is unclear. In ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ the image of the stork is emblazoned on the door of the St Alyres’ carriage: a symbol which the colonel construes negatively when he disturbs Beckett’s con­ templation of it: “‘A red stork – good! The stork is a bird of prey; it is vigilant, greedy, and catches gudgeons. Red, too! – blood red! Ha! ha! The symbol is appropriate.’”26 Here the stork is equated with the predator and implicitly with the blood to which the Colonel himself, lover of burgundy and seeming vampiric revenant, has been more nearly related earlier in the tale. As in Byron’s fragment, all is not as it seems and the travellers initially harassed by the colonel are, it turns out, the real predators. In this sense, following Byron’s symbolism, it may well be that the Dragon Volant, or flying dragon, is a transformed allusion to the serpent writhing in the beak of the stork: hence Beckett is related to the stork’s/Darvell’s unsuspecting victim by virtue of his staying at this inn (we must remember that Byron himself refers to a ‘serpent’, not a ‘snake’, and that in dictionaries available to Le Fanu the term ‘serpent’ was synonymous with ‘dragon’).27 The ambiva­ lence of Byron’s original symbols is also important, since throughout Le Fanu’s story it is Beckett who assumes he is the predator, the one who is preparing to steal another man’s wife from him, and even recalls before meeting the masked Countess in the château grounds that he felt ‘as nefarious a poacher as ever trespassed on the grounds of unsuspicious lord’ (p. 193). However, neither the Count, nor his ‘wife’, nor the man whom they dupe can guess that their prey is in fact their bait, the serpent or flying dragon whom they lure into a coffin being the device that ensnares and consumes them. Nor can they have guessed an initial victim of their predatory behaviour, Colonel Gaillarde, is himself turning from prey to predator and catching the original poacher of his brother’s wealth just as they themselves feel most in command of their predatory behaviour. Thus while the ‘revenant’-like Colonel may accuse the St Alyres of vampirism, and prove finally that it is they who have preyed upon the living, ironically the final act of deception and ‘alluring’ is actually his own. The Colonel is a literal ‘revenant’ in that he finally returns to avenge the murder of his brother, whose exhumation 155

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from the grave serves to condemn the Count and his fake wife. Thus the ambivalent symbols from Byron’s ‘Fragment’, the stork and the serpent writhing in its beak, have informed the twists and duplicities of Le Fanu’s work, in which the predator and the prey, the poacher and the poached, are multiple and reversible due to the plot of triple deception, in a piece which also replicates the excitement of Byron’s visit to the continent in 1816, recorded in the ‘Fragment’ itself, Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The initial transference of vampire-revenant status from the Colonel Gaillarde to the St Alyres themselves could well hold political significance. Despite making use of many elements of the romance, such as masked balls, mysterious women and small classical backdrops – staples of Le Fanu’s contemporary writer of sensational Romances, George Sand – the novella is still very much couched in the context of the time in which it is set, with Beckett constantly reminding the reader of the recent events. The young man who – unlike his friends – did not take part in Waterloo, is determined to steal some of the glamour of the Napoleonic wars, and even compares his keenness to approach the Countess’s carriage with the horsemanship of Murat (p. 162), Napoleon’s brilliant cavalry chief and brother-in-law, whose services Bonaparte had famously refused before Waterloo owing to an earlier treachery. Thus in this sense it is a historical novella, if only in that it attempts to recapture the headiness of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era, and the follies of forced gallantry and literature-fed vanity satirized in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, itself set in 1826. Despite this, the fable-like end­ing, in which the young narrator declares that he had learnt a moral lesson in the ‘ways of sin’ is, like La Vampire, more in keeping with a Legitimist presentation of history, in which the universal moral lesson is more important than the illustration of the social determinism of the time. Le Fanu was politically an Irish Tory and devotee of Palmerston, and had been a co-owner of the Anglo-Irish Dublin Evening Mail until quite recently before writing the tale. Despite this, the political attitude betrayed through the novella is quite difficult to discern. The fact that the aristocracy, in the form of the Count, has fallen to such a level of villainy, and that the Napoleonic Colonel, who initially 156

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appears to be the villain, is in fact the aggrieved, would suggest that the implied vampirism, metaphorically understood, relates very much to the return of the old order, in which case we have an example of the vampire symbolizing the returning ancien régime after 1815. This is effectively how both Judith Barbour and David Punter interpret the rise of the vampire theme in the Restoration era.28 Before assent­ ing to this interpretation of the tale, it should be remembered that Gaillarde’s motives for hating the St Alyres are less grief at his brother’s murder than the fact that his patrimony has disappeared with the crime, and that the partial return of his brother’s wealth entirely restores his happiness. The motivation of the characters, even a war hero like Gaillarde, stands in marked contrast to the romantic afflatus which Beckett desires to imbibe from the experience. Indeed, the grotesque Gaillarde is a fitting exemplum of the real effects of war­ fare, so opposite in nature to the romanticism discerned by Beckett in the exploits of Murat and others. What is so surprising in this novella is that despite there being very little sense of terror or horror until the very end – for the narrator is too fixated upon his romantic conquest – of all the stories collected in In a Glass Darkly, this contains the greatest number of motifs and iconic features pertaining to the Gothic Romance. Horace Walpole discussed openly his desire ‘to blend the two types of romance, the ancient and the modern’ in the Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto.29 This effectively meant resuscitating the ideal, mythical and magical features of the Epic Romance written by the likes of Ariosto, Sir Philip Sidney and even by Shakespeare in his Comedies (which contain pastoral scenes and masked balls), and combining them with the close mimesis of nature and promulgation of psychological plausibility present in the novels of Richardson and Defoe. However, one could also make a distinction between those elements of the Epic Romance which were employed by writers like Radcliffe and Lewis, such as vast aristocratic houses, masked balls, visits to the opera, exotic characters from Oriental countries, couleur locale – and the purely macabre and grotesque details which are involved either in the promotion of terror or the presentation of horror, such as premature burial, ghouls and vampires. While many of these latter details are frequently combined with the Romance elements to create mystery, terror, and the anticipation 157

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of the marvellous in the Gothic Romance, they are not necessarily so, as is shown by the fact that the novels of a later French writer like George Sand have little trace of terror, horror or the marvellous – the frénétique – but exhibit many similar features to those of Radcliffe or Lewis. In the nineteenth century such features also belong more properly to the Romance than to the realist novel, since they are clearly designed to facilitate escapism rather than the ‘Saint-Réal’ which Stendhal saw as imperative in the art of fiction, and frequently present implausible and overly melodramatic reactions from char­ acters.30 Indeed the masked balls and opera-singers of Sand’s novels, like Consuelo: La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1843), even if set in historical and exotic locations, often act as a naive denial of the realities of historical epoch which are central to Scott’s novels, and provide a sense of achronic space, in which a real life-world can be transformed into an unchanging site of escapism. While Lukács saw such problems in ‘bourgeois realism’ as emanating from the death of interest in Hegel’s ideas and the rise of a more subjective attitude to history after 1848, so that both historians and novelists (in particular Flaubert in Salammbô) imposed the perspective of the present on the past as a form of escapism,31 we can see this general escapist tendency as having already begun before this time. Not only do we find this tendency in works like Sand’s Consuelo (1843), which situates a modern sens­ ibility in the eighteenth century, but in Balzac, whose novels like Le Peau de chagrin and Une Femme de trente ans are frequently full of either uncanny events or Romantic details alongside the more topical changes and problems of the time.32 The romance elements in ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ include veiled women, night-time assignations in a classical temple, a masked ball with an Oriental conjuror and the gloomy, ruined château in the environs of Versailles, all of which help to reinforce the young man’s delusions. The grotesque and macabre elements include the ‘revenant’-like Colonel Gaillarde, the horror of pre­ mature burial, the vicious callousness of the plotters and the ultimate exhumation of decayed bodies. While the macabre and grotesque details may cause terror and horror in this novella, they are not presented as resulting from supernatural causes, but rather from historical reality, the post-Napoleonic legacy and the desperate fall 158

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of old houses (the Marquis at one point informs Beckett that he may well become wealthy if he buys up the paintings of people who have lost all by backing Napoleon on his return).33 These macabre details are part of a genuine life-world in which the narrator must immerse himself, rather than an inducement to experiencing the sublime or the irrational, as is the case in most Gothic novels. The choice before the young narrator, therefore – his hesitation – is not between the marvellous and the uncanny, but between indulgence in romantic wish-fulfilment or an acceptance of the grim moral climate of post-Napoleonic France, which alternatives are actually represented by the polarized features of the Gothic Romance. The juxtaposition itself serves to delineate the gulf between the accepted delusion of a generation as it attempts to bring Romantic conventions to life, and the desperate reality with which it was faced. In fact the novel’s contrasting use of mirror reflection scenes betrays a more than passing allusion to Stendhal’s metaphor that a novel is ‘a mirror that is carried along a high road’,34 and in doing so represents different metaphors for both these choices and the different novelistic conventions which can encode them in a fictional work. As Ann Jefferson notes, Stendhal himself used his metaphor of the mirror in Le Rouge et le Noir to defend his portrayal of aspects of society to which his readers might object, claiming that the real culprit was society rather than the man carrying the mirror.35 Indeed, the ‘SaintRéal’ to whom Stendhal attributed his famous epigraph that a novel is ‘a mirror dawdling down a lane’ is, as Jefferson writes, no genuine author but a reference to the sanctity of the real in the novelist’s art (p. 26). In Le Fanu’s tale of Restoration France there are two parallel, literal mirror scenes, in which Beckett sees not his own reflection but those of other people. The first occurs when Beckett accidentally sees his beloved’s beautiful, unveiled face in the mirror, the other when he also accidentally sees Gaillarde and Planard in ‘a large mirror in an old-fashioned, dingy frame’ talking to a ‘lean, pale man, pitted with the small-pox, with lank black hair, and about as mean-looking a person as I had ever seen in my life’ (p. 216). Both of these scenes have a more metaphorical meaning, which represent different literary modes, and also different versions of reality fostered by such modes. 159

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Beckett’s beloved is crucially called ‘Comtesse de St Alyre’. The name St Alyre can refer to a local shepherdess from the Périgord who was canonized; however, it would appear that Le Fanu’s proxy is wholly different. Phonetically, in keeping with the French form of the phonetic alphabet, the ‘y’ can be seen as repre­senting an /u:/-like sound as a vowel, as it did in dialects of Old English and as it does in the modern Cyrillic alphabet. In French dictionaries alyr is the actual phonetic spelling of the word ‘allure’, which in that language means ‘appearance’ rather than ‘enticement’ or ‘temp­ tation’. In Le Fanu’s novel, therefore, the hero puts his faith in the ‘Saint Allure’, the ‘holy appearance’, rather than in what is, by neces­ sary contrast, the ‘holy real’, preparing him to believe entirely in the promise of love presented in one mirror and refusing to heed the importance of the plotting of the grotesque Gaillarde and his ugly friend shown in the other. Where Le Fanu’s transumed and antithetical allusion to Stendhal differs from the original is that the real, which for Stendhal has no moral dimension, is here utterly sordid and grotesque, its juxtaposition with appearance (‘allure’) and romance making these grotesque features necessarily a part of reality rather than something hyperbolic. Thus these two scenes are metaphors which, through allusion to Stendhal, act as motifs and polarities for two sets of conventions in the Gothic Romance, and also two understandings of reality: the one false, the other genuine. Perversely the latter are the same as some of the frénétique and macabre details which Charles Nodier had once claimed were far from reality.36 The novella shares certain similarities with Féval’s Le Chevalier Ténèbre beyond its temporal setting, vampire theme and use of the ball as a device for tricking and concealing. While in Le Chevalier Ténèbre the rise of positivism and scepticism is employed to invert the normal logic of the Gothic, here Gothic conventions are used to polarize the choices of reality laid before Beckett, epitomized by the mirror scenes. However, both narratives share a belief in the irrevocable failure of the Restoration: Féval’s novel situates the blame on an already prevalent lèse-majesté, descent into positivism and the death of a spiritual world-view; Le Fanu’s novel lays blame upon the disgraceful decline of the aristocracy due to the long interregnum, which means it is incapable of resurrecting itself. Before leaving to withdraw his money, Beckett is told by the servant woman: 160

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The Failures of the Bourbon Restoration ‘Monsieur; I know why you stay here; and I tell you to begone. Leave this house to-morrow morning, and never come again.’ She lifted her disengaged hand, as she looked at me with intense horror in her eyes. ‘There is nothing on earth – I don’t know what you mean,’ I answered; ‘and why should you care about me?’ ‘I don’t care about you, Monsieur – I care about the honour of an ancient family, whom I served in their happier days, when to be noble, was to be honoured.’ (p. 213)

A feature central to the Gothic Romance – the decay of aristocratic houses – is here situated against a real historical situation. The moral decline of aristocratic families makes the success of the Restoration impossible, since even the return of a monarchy does not mean that the nobility can be returned to being honoured. They are now as deceitful and as much an appearance as the bourgeois imposters who unseated them. In this sense Gaillarde is a genuine revenant, whether as stork or serpent, in his triumph over the resurgence of representatives of the ancient regimes he had fought so hard to destroy. In conclusion, both these narratives address the issue of the Res­ tor­ation using Gothic Literary devices. Le Chevalier Ténèbre, like La Vampire before it, shows terror and horror and even the vampire itself, in its metaphorical meaning of brigandry and now tech­ nology, as arising due to scepticism and the failure of a sacerdotal order to reassert itself. It thus continues Féval’s original, Legitimist portrayal of the vampire. ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ uses intertextual allusion to Byron’s ‘Fragment’ to suggest ambivalence concern­ing the theme of vampire and predator. The novella also contains allu­sions to mirror metaphors in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, a novel which discusses the refraction of literary ideal onto real life, in order to present two different views of reality – the romantic and the grotesque – which are in fact contained in the division and polarization of two separate sets of generic features that are normally entwined in the Gothic Romance. In alluding so invent­ ively to previous texts, Le Fanu creates a more complex tale than that of Féval, but one which ultimately offers a very grim codicil to Napoleon’s legacy. 161

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6 Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Refutation of Utilitarian Morality  Linda Dryden has understood ‘Olalla’, a piece published just before The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and written almost con­ temporaneously to it, as further proof of Stevenson’s interest in Galton’s theories on hereditary degeneracy, and as even tentatively anticipating Lombroso’s more recent theories of atavism:1 the belief that racial stock can decline.2 There is certainly some evidence for the prevalence of such theories of degeneracy in the text, as Stevenson’s young narrator describes Olalla’s brother Felipe as being ‘inclined to hairyness’ and ‘a child in intellect’.3 Furthermore, the mother is described as showing similar marks of a ‘degenerate’ intelligence, and suffers from blood that has been ‘impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive’ (p. 108). Indeed, so evident is the language of eugenic theories in the story, that the allegorical meaning of vampir­ ism requires little effort of interpretation on the part of the reader once it occurs, since its metaphorical scope has been prepared long before the climax, in which the mother tries to drink the young man’s blood.4 Despite the obvious interest in eugenics, heredity and degeneracy, there is a further moral meaning to the story related to natural decline, which involves the opposition of self-sacrifice to pleasure. While the ‘nature’ of stock and biological determinism is depicted as an effect of hereditary features such as inbreeding, the moral element of the

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tale is that there is a symbiotic relationship between such postDarwinian understandings of human behaviour and the con­scious moral choices of previous generations. This attempt, on Stevenson’s part, to link a kind of Christian moral absolutism to the hereditary determinism of the individual seems bizarre: as though the sceptical rationalist wishes to reprise a kind of Augustinian piety as an antidote to the biological mutations which can threaten civilized society. In some ways it is not so surprising, since self-denial is perhaps the only answer for the perversities caused by bad heredity. However, the reasons stem from Stevenson’s ambivalence towards his own rejection of his parents’ faith and disdain for much of the desacralized moral thought of his era, whether it be Positivism or Utilitarianism. Indeed, the following chapter will demonstrate that ‘Olalla’ repre­ sents the Tory and traditionalist in Stevenson consciously rejecting the Utilitarian morality of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and J. S. Mill (1806–1873), and further, that The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde also represents an attack on their moral principles in Victorian philanthropy, and on the belief that scientific investigation can be put to good use. Rather, it is the rejection of Christian and Calvinist morality and the espousal of secular forms of morality by the Liberal middle class – the very class which W. T. Stead and the philanthropic proponents of the White Slavery Act had come from – which failed to redress evil by its very insipidity. As such, the Francophile Stevenson continues the Gothic tradition established on the continent by the likes of Nodier and Féval, which questions Enlightenment and makes the cause of terror and horror not the re-emergence of an older, spiritual order but rather the folly of ignoring and overturning it in favour of rationalism and materialism. Olalla ‘Olalla’ is probably set at the time of the Second Carlist war (1872): a civil war waged in Spain on behalf of the Bourbon monarchy against Catalans supporting their own pretender to the throne. The young Englishman who narrates the story has gone to fight on behalf of the monarchy and has been wounded. The surgeon suggests he go and stay with an aristocratic family that has fallen somewhat in 163

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stature and moral direction, the two young scions of the house being possibly fathered by a muleteer (pp. 96–7). Here he meets the hairy and imbecilic Felipe, the son of the house, who is given to torturing animals and has great strength (p. 104). The young soldier sees the portrait of the beautiful ancestor, a woman whose refined beauty he recognizes in a degraded, carnal form as still en­ twining within the physique of Felipe himself. He then meets the beautiful but nauseating mother, whose form he can also see repeated in the picture of the beautiful ancestor (p. 101). He is curious to meet the daughter about whom the doctor has forewarned him, and one day stumbles across a notebook in a library, clearly written by the daughter, which indicates her surprising virtue (p. 113). His curiosity now increases, and when he meets the young lady for the first time, her candid stare and exact similarity to the portrait he has seen leads him to fall in love with her immediately. Greeting her one day as she sits and watches over the hills, he tells her openly of his feelings, only to be told by her he must leave at once, despite obvious indications that she loves him as well (pp. 121–2). Soon after this, as he is preparing to repeat his suit, he accidentally cuts his finger, a misfortune which induces Olalla’s mother to attack him with astonishing force (p. 124). Olalla and Felipe, who are both present, manage to repel the mother, themselves exhibiting immense strength, and bolt the door of the bedroom while the mother continues to howl outside, solving the mystery of the howl­ ing animals that had disturbed the Englishman’s nights previously. Afterwards Olalla explains her decision to reject him, which is based on a will to prevent the ills of her family being passed on to future generations (pp. 126–8). A priest comes to see the Englishman and explains how devoted a worshipper Olalla is at his church. As the young man is going, he sees Olalla by the crucifix in the hillside, but does not approach her, ending this story by reflecting on the nobility of her wilful bearance of suffering in contrast to the pursuit of pleasure (p. 134). Hilary J. Beatty has traced (exhaustively) the literary origins of the tale to Nodier’s ‘Inès de la Sierras’, given the military and Spanish connection, and to Gautier’s ‘La Morte amoureuse’, given the themes of vampirism and dual carnality and self-denial.5 She understands the tale as a kind of exorcism of neuroses rooted in Stevenson’s 164

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dream of the winking dog in ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, and sees the relationships between the four main protagonists as involving a degree of doubling in which ‘the doubles are women, and it is the male characters (other than the narrator) who are ancillary’.6 Using Freud­ ian theory she demonstrates the extent to which the story dramatizes Stevenson’s complicated and fearful nature towards female sexuality and degeneration, caused partly by his Calvinist background, so that sexual aggression and its complementary curb, ‘both sides of the split and attenuated female images (evil versus innocent)’ are manifested in the two female characters (II 21). While I do not wish to deny the potential for seeing the Freudian unheimlich in this work, the emphasis of this argument will be more on the political context of Stevenson’s attitude toward ethical beliefs which attenuated the anxieties originally caused by his Calvinist mother, whose influences Beatty so rightly discerns. Julia Reid, however, has noted the link between Galtonian de­ gener­ation and Olalla’s religious views, declaring that ‘Hereditary determinism . . . emerges as a warped version of Christianity, where all must be expiators of the past’, although she notices that Olalla’s views are more Calvinist than Catholic.7 She also notes ‘that Felipe is a Pan-like figure’, and, citing Eigner’s discussion of Stevenson’s portrayal of Pan in the poem ‘Et tu in Arcadia Vixisti’, notes that Pan conjures up a mixture of ‘“glee”’ and ‘“horror”’ therein (p. 84). In fact, throughout the story, one of the major themes appears to be not only degeneration, but the folly of pleasure, the need to curb it, and with this the equation of pleasure with wilful cruelty. Particularly striking is the number of times the word and concept ‘pleasure’ is used and ultimately commented upon, even compared with the much longer The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which the main character certainly does give himself over to decadent pleasures as surely as did J.-K. Huysmans’s character des Esseintes in the seminal decadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature (1884)). The short story ‘Olalla’ soon presents the reader with contrasting attitudes to pleasure in the comparison between the two men journey­ ing to the residencia. Felipe’s lack of reflection and primitive mental reactions are quickly recognized by the officer, who observed:

165

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The Fantastic and European Gothic It is true I had before talked with persons of a similar mental con­ stitution; persons who seemed to live (as he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual object of the moment and unable to discharge their minds of that impression. (p. 98)

This inability to become possessed by anything that is not immediate leads to a further inability to discern an impressive power in nature. When passing ‘into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent’, whose ‘waters thundered tumultuously in the bottom’ so that the ‘ravine was filled with sound’, the narrator noted that the ‘scene was certainly impressive’, meaning that it pleased him visually. However, Felipe’s face possessed ‘paleness of terror’ (p. 99), demonstrating the fact that he cannot move beyond initial sensory impression. The river’s noise, caused by an inconstancy like that of the river Alph in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, is also a cause of fear:8 not due to native superstitions, as the narrator at first thought, but because of the simple fact that it makes a noise. The intuition of Kant’s ‘dynamically sublime’ is evident here,9 illustrated by the officer’s reaction to an awesome physical sight that would be potentially life-threatening if apprehended closely, but which can be a cause of vicarious pleasure to the distant and cultured observer whose imagination fails to resolve the form into harmony.10 The boy Felipe does not have this degree of ‘negative capability’ or imagination, being instinctively attached to nature, and singing spontaneously when hearing water fall more ‘gaily and music­ ally’. While we cannot see Stevenson as necessarily being interested in the theory of the sublime in the same way that a poet like Cole­ ridge was, nevertheless the inheritance from the first generation of Romantics is unmistakeable here, as he contrasts the mature, reflect­ ive ability to appreciate the sublime against the childlike fear of dynamism and discordance in natural objects exhibited by Felipe. Stevenson does not yet use the term ‘pleasure’, but soon has Felipe comment cryptically on the beauty of fire in the officer’s bedroom being ‘“good”’ because it ‘“melts out the pleasure in your bones”’ (p. 100). From this point on the analysis of ‘pleasure’ becomes extensive. Early on in the young man’s stay, he finds it necessary to reprimand Felipe for cruelty towards a squirrel after what had otherwise been a most wholesome exercise: 166

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The Refutation of Utilitarian Morality Little as he said to me, and that of not much import, I have rarely enjoyed more stirring company; the sight of his delight was a continual feast; the speed and accuracy of his movements pleased me to the heart; and I might have been thoughtlessly unkind as to make a habit of these walks, had not chance prepared a very rude conclusion to my pleasure. By some swiftness or dexterity the lad captured a squirrel in a tree top. He was then some way ahead of me, but I saw him drop to the ground and crouch there, crying aloud for pleasure like a child. The sound stirred my sympathies, it was so fresh and innocent; but as I bettered my pace to draw near, the cry of the squirrel knocked upon my heart. (pp. 103–4)

There is an obvious juxtaposition between the sympathetic pleasure of the young officer watching and identifying with Felipe’s ‘delight’, which for a Victorian involves imaginative sympathy and thus a degree of reflection,11 and Felipe’s own capacity for finding pleasure in the purely destructive and cruel. The sympathetic nature of the young officer leads him to feel a pang of pity for the squirrel’s suffer­ ing, just as clearly as it had led him to feel delight earlier at Felipe’s unconscious identification with nature. Trying to provoke the same moral response in the torturer, presumably as a form of emotional education through David Hume’s model of ethics from sympathy, the officer squeezes Felipe’s hand until he yelps, although whether this does induce a genuine sympathetic faculty is questionable, given the obvious degeneracy of the young boy. Hence not only do we observe a contrast between the aesthetic reaction to the sublime in nature and simple fear in the still childlike and uncultivated mind, but also one between the pleasure of imaginative sympathy, leading to sympathetic moral reactions, and the physical pleasure in torture. However, alongside Felipe’s unselfconscious pleasure in causing harm, we are also presented with a different sensory reaction to nature dis­ played by his equally unselfconscious immersion, and hence pleasure, in the natural world. Thus ‘pleasure’ is displayed early on, and in a variety of forms, both positive and negative, the positive and negative in Felipe’s case being equally unreflective. That ‘pleasure’, so named, is an important theme in the story becomes abundantly clear when we hear the verses scrawled and left by Olalla: 167

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Pleasure approached with pain and shame, Grief with a wreath of lilies came. Pleasure showed the lovely sun; Jesu dear, how sweet it shone! Grief with her worn hand pointed on, Jesu dear, to thee! (p. 113)

The import of this poem seems to be that pleasure is always inter­ mingled with grief and with suffering, regardless of whether ap­ proached guiltily or seen as a further embellishment of God’s great­ ness. To approach pleasure as a form of sin is to destroy it with the reflex of one’s conscience, grief bringing a ‘wreath of lilies’: meaning, curiously, a virgin death. Pleasure in nature taken as a proof of God’s greatness is merely testimony to the suffering of our saviour, without whose sacrifice no pleasure in the world could be taken due to our original sin. The verses reveal an aversion to ‘pleasure’ in all its forms, since even the guiltless pleasures are proof of man’s guilt before God. Such verses reveal that its author, Olalla herself, is definitely on the Jansenist wing of the Catholic church and subscribes to the Augustinian belief in original sin, by believing that pleasure is in­ escapably mixed with others’ suffering, and to be avoided in all forms.12 Despite this, when Olalla rejects the Englishman’s love she blames her family’s appalling moral condition upon a post-Darwinian degeneracy back to the level of ‘the brutes’, that is paradoxically caused by the moral choices of earlier generations in her family rather than either the inbreeding noticed by the narrator, or the original sin that she appears to subscribe to in her poem. Originally the family were ‘wise, great,’ but ‘cunning, and cruel’. Their rule of the province involved much violence, and: the people, when the rope was slung for them or when they returned to find their hovels smoking, blasphemed their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level. The breath of weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady and senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was still handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human 168

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The Refutation of Utilitarian Morality heart; the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they were the bones and flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of flies. (pp. 127–8)

The passage is about degeneracy, and is used to explain the fall of a great house, but combines ‘scientific’ language and causality with a traditional Gothic and theologically based judgement of gener­ ational decline. The origins of the continuing fall back to ‘the brutes’ are contained in the family’s willed behaviour before it actually falls, rather than eugenics or inbreeding, and yet the post-Darwinian view of the ascent and potential descent of man is definitely accepted by Olalla, since ‘man is sprung from the brutes’. While her family were ‘wise, great’ they are also ‘cunning, and cruel’. Although they ‘were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war’ (my italics), they were also blasphemed by the people ‘when the rope was slung for them or when they returned to find their hovels smoking’ (p. 127). It is significant in relation to the story’s tension between the natural and supernatural, or literal and metaphorical, that the relation of their fall is preceded by this information about blasphemy, for the fall of the House follows the conventional pattern of the Gothic, as resulting from some curse or crime, like in The Castle of Otranto, or simply unnatural behaviour, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, but with the theological and moral structure being allied to biological causes as well. Effectively, what Olalla is showing is that self-im­ mersion in cruelty and caprice by her forebears, and not inbreeding, ultimately moulded the family’s descent into a form of eugenic brutishness: although at the generic, Gothic level this descent can also be understood as the curse of vampirism (which we only see later) being visited by a spiritual order upon descendants of a house.13 Although we have seen that Felipe can feel ‘pleasure’ at others’ presumed kindness to him, when the Officer comes to castigate him for what he deems is more cruelty owing to the howling at night (‘I took his hand in mine, at which, thinking it to be a caress, he smiled with a brightness of pleasure that came near disarming my resolve’ (p. 115)), we must understand his unbridled cruelty, like his spontaneous delight in his surroundings, as also being the expression of immediate ‘Pleasure’, as ‘passions’ awoken in ‘gusts’, such as had awoken amongst the rest of his family historically. However, the 169

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Christian reading of pleasure provided in Olalla’s short and poorly scanned verse also pays testimony to the fact that the more reflective pleasures of the narrator, like the feeling for the sublime in nature or the sympathetic pleasure of taking delight in another’s joy, are also based upon grief, and are to be avoided, or at least not indulged in, since they are simply instances of grace afforded by Christ’s sacrifice. This would appear to be the lesson the narrator has learnt by the end of the story, since having said goodbye to Olalla as she kneels before the crucifix in the hillside, he delivers the crucial moral of the story: I looked at the face of the crucifix, and, though I was no friend to images, and despised that imitative and grimacing art of which it was a rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was carried home to my intelligence. The face looked down upon me with a painful and deadly contraction; but the rays of a glory encircled it, and reminded me that the sacrifice was voluntary. It stood there, crowning the rock, as it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by, an emblem of sad and noble truths: that pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well. (p. 134)

The Protestant Englishman finds his own unsuspected sympathy with the opinions of Olalla, in a late example of the pro-Catholic tendency in the British Gothic, noted by Maria Purves as occurring in earlier works.14 Pleasure of any kind, whether base or noble, carnal or refined, can only be enjoyed as an accident in this extreme Augustinian reading of Christianity. The fact that her renunciation of pleasure is voluntary may make it all the more magnanimous, since it is a rare affirmation of free will against both the vices embodied in Olalla’s mother and the inability to determine the destiny of one’s soul after death or the predisposition of heredity, depending upon whether one reads the story in a Gothic and theological light or simply a post-Darwinian light. It seems unusual that the sceptic Stevenson should have written a story that affirms such a Christian reading of moral action, but ‘Olalla’ was written not long after the author had read, and greatly enjoyed, St Augustine’s Confessions, a work in which the great theo­ logian detailed his realisation that man was predisposed towards 170

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sin, particularly lust, by nature, and that salvation, if conferred, was purely a result of God’s grace. These two concepts were rejected by St Pelagius, who believed that man was born good and had the power to determine the path of his soul after death by piety and good deeds,15 but were adopted even more enthusiastically by Calvin in his doctrine of predestination. When writing to his (admittedly Calvinist) parents, Stevenson called Confessions ‘one of the most remarkable books I have ever read’,16 although explained his reasons for liking it in more secular terms when writing to his friend Sidney Colvin: The first chapters of the Confessions are marked by a commanding genius: Shakespearean in depth . . . His description of infancy is most seizing . . . And how is this: ‘Sed Majorum nugae negotia vocantur; puerorum autem talia cum sint puniuntur a majoribus.’ Which is quite the heart of R.L.S. See also his splendid passage about the ‘luminoses limes amicitae’ and the ‘nebulae de limosa concupicentia carnis’; going on ‘Utrumque in confuse aestuabat et rapiebat inbellicam aetatem per abruptum cupiditatum. That is dam knowing for a Father of the Kirk. Altogether an interesting card. That ‘Utrumque’ [both] is a real contribution to life’s science. Lust alone is but a pigmy; but it never or rarely attacks us singlehanded. (Book I, ch IX: ‘But elder folk’s idleness is called “business”; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by elders.’ Book II, ch I: ‘And what was it that I delighted in, but to love and be beloved? But I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship’s bright boundary; but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love, from the fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires.’ (Pusey’s translation)) (IV 246; March 1884)

In examining Augustine’s own analysis of the urge to commit acts of lust, Stevenson appears to dismiss the theological progeny of this ‘Father of the Kirk’, but approves the implicit admonition, perhaps somewhat perverting the original meaning. In Stevenson’s under­ standing lust itself is not problematic, merely what it is accompanied by – what that may be he unfortunately does not elaborate upon here, but syphilis and its vicious gifts to later generations may be 171

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what Colvin was meant to understand, or else simply the concomi­ tant troubles caused by family and responsibility. In Augustine’s original tract the ‘Utrumque’ refers more to the combination of a more spiritual emotion (love and friendliness) with a baser one (lust), which he himself felt as a young man, a discussion which leads to Augustine detailing the virtues of abstinence, and reciting Corinthians 7:32–3 on how the unmarried man can love God, while the married man is still linked to earthly pleasures.17 Nevertheless, while Stevenson has somewhat jokingly perverted Augustine’s meaning, his appre­ ciation of the sensible admonition to abstinence as a ‘contribution to life’s science’ is surely genuine. Although Stevenson has wilfully misconstrued Augustine, both these potential issues, the unintended, damning consequences of the ‘pigmy’ lust and the unavoidability of guilt in any type of pleasure, are present in Olalla’s own rejection of pleasure.18 The first inheres in the relation of pleasure to degeneracy: shameful pleasure, of which lust is an example, can facilitate the fall of stock if used wrongly and if indulged in for its own sake. It is fair to say that Olalla’s description of the decline of her forebears’ passions probably does not actually imply sexual disease, but atavism caused by indulging in base pleasures. The second issue, the mixing of lust with the higher emotion of love and friendliness, may well have motivated the total rejection of all pleasure as sinful in her poem, linking it to guilt and the sacrifice of Christ. Again Augustine does not link all pleasure specifically to Christ’s sacrifice in the passage. In Book IV of the Confessions, he in fact advises the penitent to always remember to thank God for any simple pleasure since it is only through Him that we may do this: ‘For He did not make them, and so depart, but they are of Him, and in Him.’19 Olalla’s denial of pleasure far exceeds even Augustine’s doctrine (which centres mainly around concupiscence), but such self-denial was not unusual amongst Jansenists and Calvinists who embraced the doctrines of Grace and original sin.20 The mixture of Galtonian degeneracy in a naturalist work with the theological framework of a Gothic vampire story leads Stevenson to create an unusual hybrid. The novella uses vampirism as a theme to suggest the decline of a house in a Gothic theological mode, and yet also portrays this as resulting from a scientifically plausible atavism. The degeneracy of future generations is based not upon inbreeding, 172

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however, but upon the earlier generation’s immoral actions, leading them to decline and pass on their sin to the later generations through degeneracy. The answer to salvation is thus the resistance to all types of pleasure using the forms of self-mortification suggested by Saint Augustine, rather than any attempt to reverse the former, chosen brutishness through Semi-Pelagian acts of goodness. It is perhaps this bizarre and contradictory hybridity, which renders the vampire theme somewhat redundant as a pertinent metaphor for degeneration, that led Stevenson himself to opine in a letter to Lady Taylor (c.22 February 1887): ‘it is so solidly written . . . Why is it false?’21 However, there are other, contemporary influences and evils that are being exorcized throughout the story. When the narrator tells the reader that pleasure is an ‘accident’ not an ‘end’,22 it would appear at first glance that he has been genuinely converted to the forms of Augustinian self-mortification practised by Olalla. However, if one observes the language closely, one can see that the author’s own object is less to promote rigid, Christian self-denial than to critique, through allusion, the dominant alternative to Christian ethics in his era. For the young man’s words closely parallel those of the Utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill. Bentham, whose ideas were used to regulate and change the poor law in the 1830s, suffused Victorian reform with his belief that morality was not a priori, as was the case in Kant’s philosophy. For Bentham the two ‘sovereign masters’ over mankind were pain and pleasure.23 In his philosophy asceticism and other forms of selfmortification were in no way moral for they helped nobody at all (pp. 11–12). Whatever was useful to man was whatever caused him pleasure and helped him to avoid pain, and Bentham saw no type of motive as being intrinsically bad in itself, judging all motives by their material effects. He decided, therefore, to divide motives not according to some theological basis but on the grounds of the extent to which they are advantageous to the wider community, seeing good­will, which gives rise to sympathy and is a foundation of ‘philan­ thropic’ action, as the most socially advantageous motive, and love of reputation the second most socially advantageous (pp. 120–2). He considered pleasure to be the goal of the legislator, as it should be the goal of all those who seek to behave morally. These pleasures 173

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he defined through their intensity, their duration, their purity (in other words their lack of mixture with pain) and their certainty to produce happiness, amongst other criteria (p. 30). Such a doctrine led some, as Mill noted, to accuse Bentham’s ethical philosophy of being basically ‘mean and grovelling; as a doctrine only worthy of swine’.24 In his long essay ‘Utilitarianism’ (1861) J. S. Mill endorsed Bentham’s ideas but answered these criticisms by stipulating a distinction between higher and lower pleasures: the higher included forms of study and intellectual delight, including aesthetic appreciation, while the lower were the sensory and carnal. He established first that utility was synonymous with pleasure, and that: The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary questions do not affect the theory of life on which this morality is grounded – namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things . . . are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (pp. 9–10)

While ‘pleasure, and freedom from pain’ are all ‘desirable as ends’, Mill does admit that a new qualification of pain and pleasure is in order, presumably because the sevenfold definition of pleasure pro­ vided by Bentham is not in itself good enough. This he provides later in his treatise by defining the ‘higher pleasures’, which proceed from a lack of selfishness and thus ‘a fellow-feeling with the collective interests of mankind’, as well as from a ‘cultivated mind’, which allows the individual to appreciate art (p. 20). He gives no place to Bentham’s love of reputation, and sees love of self as being a cause of misery. Hence in Mill’s understanding sympathy, as a projection of one’s own love of self onto the state of others, which causes 174

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goodwill and a communal sense, appears to obliterate the original love of self as a cause of pleasure, making his atheistical moral phil­ osophy more reconcilable with Christian morality. This essay was published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1861, and preceded Mill’s rejoining the Commons to become an MP in Gladstone’s government until his death in 1874, where he was an effective ally of Gladstone: the Prime Minister whom the Tory Stevenson could not bear (see note 39). In ‘Olalla’ we see a definite distinction being made between the lower and higher pleasures, in the attitudes of Felipe and the narrator. Not all of Felipe’s pleasures are base or dependent upon cruelty, such as his instinctive delight in nature and his pleasure at assuming the narrator means well on approaching him. However, all of his pleasures are rooted in immediate reaction to external stimuli and involve instant self-gratification. The nar­ rator’s taste for the sublime in threatening nature and refined love for Olalla herself are clearly instances of his own predilection for the higher pleasures of Mill, rather than the lower to which Felipe is so drawn. However, the admonition in the story’s conclusion, which sees the voluntary embrace of pain and self-mortification as being the highest form of virtue, is in complete opposition to both Bentham’s and Mill’s ideas, making no distinction between higher and lower virtues, and parodying Mill’s own language in ‘Utilitarian­ ism’. Pleasure should not be the ‘end’ of human endeavour: the voluntary embrace of pain should be instead. Pleasure can only be allowed if it is an ‘accident’ on the road to a wholly different goal. That Olalla so clearly attacks the philosophy of Utilitarianism in favour of an astringent Augustinian Christian ethics perhaps sits oddly with the Galtonism that is also evident in the work: an uneasy effect of the two subgenres of the Gothic as Fantastic–marvellous colliding with the naturalist genre and its emphasis upon determinism and heredity. However, the rebuttal of pleasure in all its forms in favour of self-scrutiny and self-sacrifice is largely a result of Steven­ son’s conviction that man’s nature is dual, and that the inner man, at bottom, belongs to the ‘brutes’: a theme he also develops in the simultaneously composed The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In summation, Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’ merges naturalism with the Gothic novel genre, and in doing so creates an interesting theory of hereditary decline in which the immoral actions of former generations 175

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facilitates the later generation’s loss of reason and slavery to passions. The pursuit of pleasure in all its forms, whether ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, is presented as less noble than the wilful self-sacrifice of Christ, whose crucifixion is itself necessitated by man’s original sin. Finally, the adoption of an astringent, Augustinian Christian ethos represents a rejection of Benthamite Utilitarianism, in which pleasure is the ‘end’ of all moral action. While Stevenson may not be advocating con­version to Christianity, his adherence to its forms of moral redress can be understood as an antidote to the sceptical, Utilitarian morality that had reshaped much Victorian public life. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde The Strange Case partakes of much that is old in genre, and much that is wholly new. Its creation of an Urban Gothic environment owes a lot to the work of French writers like Eugène Sue and Paul Féval, and its development of the double is obviously influenced by Poe (although arguably enjoys more parallels with Gautier’s particular adaptation of the double in ‘La Morte amoureuse’). The actual form of the novel may well have been influenced, like Dracula after it, by Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), borrowing from the epistolary structure of letters and wills which help to con­ tain perspective, increase suspense, and also add an air of greater scientific plausibility to what is essentially still an example of the Fantastic-marvellous, however serious and in other ways mimetic Jekyll’s conversion to Hyde may be. Intellectually one can see a continuing interest in the work of dream theory and Galton’s beliefs in heredity with the revelation of the inner man and the portrayal of the potential return to the ‘brutes’, since like Felipe Mr Hyde is defined by his hirsuteness, and is even described as appearing ‘deformed’ by Enfield (p. 10). However, The Strange Case was more topically influenced, as Dryden, amongst others, has clarified, by the series of articles written by W. T. Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, in which Stead detailed the Eliza scandal.25 The events recounted in Stead’s investigative piece are substantial and comprise much more than the famous acquisition of the thirteen176

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year-old ‘Lily’ (really Eliza) for five pounds from her gin-soaked parents, although this has always dominated discussions of the articles, since it was for this event that Stead was so hypocritically put on trial and imprisoned, suffering for a crime which he was seeking to expose rather than practise. Events which he details range from the entrapment of Irish girls into brothels to the ‘strapping down’ of recalcitrant victims, and makes for shocking reading even today, as Stead sought to reveal and shame the conscience of Victorian society into enforcing laws that would protect children from the vices of the ruling class.26 It is hardly surprising that his main metaphor, despite the Hebraic title, is taken from Classical Greek mythology and involves the labyrinth of Theseus and its deadly occupant the minotaur: In ancient times, if we may believe the myths of Hellas, Athens, after a disastrous campaign, was compelled by her conqueror to send once every nine years a tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens. The doomed fourteen, who were selected by lot amid lamentations of the citizens, returned no more. The vessel that bore them to Crete unfurled black sails as the symbol of despair, and on arrival her passen­ gers were flung into the famous labyrinth of Daedalus, there to wander about blindly until such time as they were devoured by the minotaur, a frightful monster, half man, half bull, the foul product of an un­ natural lust . . . This very night in London, and every night, year in and year out, not seven maidens only, but many times seven, selected almost as much by chance as those who in the Athenian marketplace drew lots as to which should be flung into the Cretan labyrinth, will be offered up as the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. (6 July 1885)

The metaphor is extreme, implicitly linking sexual exploitation to death by cannibalism and drawing upon the old analogy between sexual and food appetites. London here is like that labyrinth in which the minotaur prowled; the lot of the young who will be ‘devoured’ in it a fatal and frighteningly random one; and while the minotaur is depicted as a creature born ‘half man, half bull’, the implicit idea is that he is someone who has been reduced to this brutishness through his own ‘foul lust’ rather than by that of his mother, as in the original myth. 177

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This dramatic description of prostitution in London is reprised in Utterson’s dream of Mr Hyde, in which he imagines the man and tries to see his face in a liminal state: Mr Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp­ lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr Hyde.27

We can see a major difference between Stead’s description and that of Stevenson in the fact that the crime of the monster is one of hurting and trampling over children rather than sexually abusing them, while the minotaur has been replaced by the Hindu God Juggernaut, the term already used by Enfield to describe the tramp­ling of the girl. Otherwise the reference to London possessing ‘labyrinths’ and the sense of helplessness and random selection for the young victims is very close to the description of London in Stead’s contemporary and highly famous series of articles, and is thus too close to ignore. In this light we can see Stead’s journalism as being almost palimp­ sestic to The Strange Case, and understand a further reason for the intense popularity of the latter work. Contemporary readers of The Strange Case who knew of Stead’s articles would recognize the associ­ ation and could see the fact that the earlier trampling of a child 178

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which inspired this dream was really a bowdlerized gloss for more carnal abuses of minors that had already been so candidly reported the previous year (1885), a point which Richard Walker recognizes when he calls it ‘a misogynist sexual assault’.28 While Stead had written a piece of reportage for adult audiences, which allowed him to report realities without the serious threat of a hypocritical censor­ship, Stevenson’s work of fiction risked curtailment if it at­ tempted to present a storyline that laid bare the prurient details such as the ‘strapping down’ of victims, which were exposed in the articles written by his fellow Pall Mall Gazette reporter. The exchange of the Juggernaut for the minotaur, with all the sexual connotations latent to the myth and with which Stead had himself laden it, helps to present Mr Hyde’s evil as one of brute violence rather than lust. However, another reason for making this overpowering figure a Hindu deity rather than the minotaur is because the social emphasis is different in Stevenson’s tale to that in Stead’s reportage. The mino­ taur certainly represents brutishness and the degradation of lineage, but the mythological context points to the decline of aristocracy, since the minotaur is the progeny of the Queen of Crete, Europa, and her mating with a bull, despite Stead’s implicit suggestion that the brutalizing derives from the minotaur’s own ‘foul lust’. In Stead’s article the villainous type whom he impersonates is the idle, decadent, top-hatted aristocrat, a point underlined when he relates how the infamous procuress Mrs Jefferies has an ‘aristocratic clientele’: a degenerate parasite on society who was firmly rejected by the middleclass, Liberal readers of the Pall Mall Gazette.29 In The Strange Case, however, Dr Jekyll is, like Utterson and Hastie Lanyon, a man of the professions: a bourgeois from Bloomsbury who dedicates his life to both charitable causes and to what he believes to be the philanthropic progress of mankind. This factor helps to explain the second part of the above quotation, which has Utterson trying to see the face of Hyde and presents the reader with the unusual and complicated nature of the Doppelgänger motif as used in the story. Much has been made by other critics about the fact that Hyde is the double of Dr Jekyll. Linda Dryden, for example, sees Hyde as an alternative ‘flâneur’ to Jekyll, who ‘mirrors the actual social experience of London’,30 since Jekyll’s fear 179

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of reputation leads him to shut himself in and away from the streets, while his alter ego partakes of rakish delights: a hypocritical reality shared by many, and which she notes was discussed in parliament after the Stead affair (p. 72). However, compared to a work like ‘William Wilson’, the emergence of Hyde is in fact more of an inversion of the Doppelgänger structure. The psyche is divided quite consciously into two by the original ego, as in Gautier’s ‘La Morte amoureuse’, rather than being an unsuspecting, incomplete self which meets its double by surprise. In this story two different people are eventually revealed to the main perspective (focalized externally through Utterson) to be one and the same. This is a point drawn by Richard Walker, who sees in Jekyll’s discussion of his own duality an appropriation of Mr Hyde as double (p. 77). That does not mean, however, that we do not see other forms of doubling more akin to the model presented by Poe in ‘William Wilson’ (1839), or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Double’ (1846). The sense of unaccountable disgust felt by both Enfield and Utterson when they first meet Hyde indicates their confrontation with the unheimlich, or familiar repressed, of Freud, in which the ego of an individual is facing either desires or neuroses that have been sub­ merged in their own ids,31 in contradistinction to the more hallucin­ atory form to be found in Gautier’s ‘Onuphrius’ (1832), or the unacknowledged uncanny present in Paul Féval’s La Vampire (1856). Thus the waking dreams of Utterson, in which he feels the sense of Hyde’s power to overcome sleepers and ‘make them do his bidding’, and also wishes to see the brute’s face, represent a need to confront aspects of his own duality in this figure. However, while the actual meeting with Hyde presents an example of the unheimlich, the dreams show a failure to realize the double and uncover what Hallam calls the ‘incomplete self ’.32 Utterson constantly attempts to see the face, only to find that ‘still it had no face, or one that baffled, or melted before his eyes.’33 The curiosity to see the famed miscreant is unrewarded, and the experience re­ counted by Enfield from his meeting with Hyde is not yet replicated, occurring afterward when he meets Hyde outside Jekyll’s house and is shocked by his troglodytic appearance. The events of the dream itself take place in a liminal state, part conscious and part sub­conscious, and point to various interpretive possibilities. 180

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One possibility is a Lacanian interpretation: that the inability of Utterson to find resolution in the image of Mr Hyde means that he is like the ‘sliding signified’ of Lacan’s unconsciousness, which is the goal of utterance and always eludes definition. In the French philosopher’s description of the adult psyche this occurs in the sym­ bolic, or linguistic stage, and is due to the deferring nature of language in mediating between consciousness and reality.34 The narrator is, after all, called ‘utters on’: the one who continually speaks. However, if we take the search for Hyde in this liminal, rather than subliminal, state as being a more conscious investigation of the unconscious mind, then one can also see the search for the hidden as part of the earlier, pre-linguistic imaginary stage, in which the infant perceiver is attempting to see himself reflected in order to confer an image or imago on his consciousness, and thus discern an identity.35 Or it could represent a form of interstice between the two, afforded only by the peculiarly directed nature of Utterson’s investigation of his own unconscious mind. Lacanian speculation apart, what is perhaps more interesting in Utterson’s search for Mr Hyde is not so much the hidden as what hides it. We are told that ‘even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes.’36 The facelessness of Mr Hyde is more telling than the evil which he conceals, for it is in this featurelessness that he most closely represents the story’s main focus of perspective, and the class of people from which he comes. For while Utterson is externally of ‘rugged countenance’, his face is ‘never lighted by a smile’, his demeanour never changing when in the company of the ‘down-going men’ whom he still knows and seeks to influence. His personality is ‘lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable’ (p. 5). He is a man lacking in good friendships, but enjoying ‘acquaintance[s]’ formed either by an abstract, moral bene­ volence or simply by habit, as is the case with his association with the equally distant bourgeois, his cousin Enfield. These char­acters are in some ways caricatures of the English gentleman, characters so rigid in their self-discipline as to reinforce the horror of Mr Hyde when he manages to make men so cool as themselves register intense disgust. Hyde’s initial facelessness in Utterson’s dream denotes not only the infuriating lack of the recognition that Utterson seeks, but also 181

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the emptiness of the bourgeois self. Furthermore, its featureless­ ness also reinforces the fact that Hyde is hidden not by the particular, but by the general; by any number of formulaic, bourgeois gentlemen who people the novel, whether Enfield, Utterson, Hastie Lanyon or the original Dr Jekyll. These are men who have no individual personality, their determination not to enquire beyond the front doors of respectable houses testimony to their morally pallid natures and obsession with exterior and reputation – which is, incidentally, one of Bentham’s acceptable motives for morally good deeds.37 Hence, when Utterson does decide to play ‘Seek’ to Mr Hyde, he is immediately confronted with the empty form of both his own and others’ exteriors. The contempt which Stevenson held for the bourgeois philan­ thropist, to which group both Utterson and Jekyll belong, was made clear in letters contemporary to the period when he wrote both ‘Olalla’ and The Strange Case, particularly in relation to Gladstone and his dishonourable behaviour towards General Gordon, whose death at Khartoum was attributed to the Prime Minister’s unwillingness to contribute reinforcements until too late. Doppelgänger-like, his contempt was made all the more forceful by his grudging recognition of himself in this group in a letter to John Addington Symonds: Voilà le Bourgeois! Le voilà nu! But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Because I am a sceptic: i.e., a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds: you don’t, and I don’t; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye; trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they had been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Impotent and small and (if you like) spiteful as it is, the mere fact of people taking their names off the Gordon Memorial Committee rather than sit thereon with Gladstone, is the first glimmer of a sense of responsibility that I have observed. (February 1885)38

The paradoxical context against which this was written should not be ignored, and points much towards what Stevenson meant by 182

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this attack and why it is that his earlier letters detailing his love of Augustine also express contempt for Gladstone’s reaction to the siege of Khartoum.39 General Gordon had accepted Gladstone’s offer to lead 2,500 Egyptian soldiers out of Khartoum and away from Egypt’s mini-Empire in Sudan when they were threatened by the armies of the new Muslim ‘Messiah’, the Mahdi. Once there, Gordon had decided that it was his Christian duty to remain and defy orders. Gladstone himself defied popular opinion by refusing to send relief until it was too late, with Gordon eventually dying in January 1885.40 At the same time, however, Gladstone was scoring great points for the Liberal Government in Parliament by enforcing electoral boundary reforms through the Redistribution Bill, which ensured that the extension of the Franchise secured for ten-pound male householders in 1867 would finally be put into effect in a meaningful way (pp. 356–7). The Liberal, philanthropic attempt to ensure rights for all had been successful, despite the previous threat from the Tories under Lord Salisbury that the House of Lords would block this legislation (pp. 354–5). While in Gladstone’s own case such goodwill was a result of Christian charity, more usually the morality of the Liberal cause was motivated by the sceptical ideas of Bentham, who had extolled the power of goodwill motivated by sympathy,41 and Mill, who had been a political ally of Gladstone and had sat in parliament with him.42 As Frank Christianson has written, nineteenth century philanthropy represented a movement of ‘rationalized social advance’ rather than ‘Christian charity’, and had its roots in the moral theories of sympathy espoused by Enlightenment thinkers like Hume and Adam Smith, which were adapted by Liberal and Utilitarian reformers like Mill.43 Such moral ideas, and such victories by the Liberal bourgeoisie on behalf of their fellow man, clearly seemed pale and lacking in ‘manly sensibility’ to Stevenson compared to the Christian self-sacrifice of Gordon, despite Stevenson’s own previous renunciation of his faith. The above-quoted letter to Symonds is therefore important to the present discussion for three reasons. Firstly, Stevenson lays the blame for Gordon’s death on the ‘Bourgeois’ and ‘sceptic’: a con­ demnation of the Liberal. The second is that he identifies himself with bourgeois and sceptics, in an act of self-loathing but immense moral honesty that indicates a divided view of his own self and 183

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identity. And lastly it is important for the scathing attitude he holds for the committee set up by Gladstone in Gordon’s name: a work of public philanthropy motivated by goodwill and sympathy rather than by religious zeal. The first and last points here relate very obviously to the faceless, bourgeois characters of The Strange Case. Both Jekyll and Utterson are bourgeois, and Utterson’s moral beliefs are certainly not formed by religion, but by spontaneous generosity (and vicarious pleasure), since despite his own austere habits he himself admits that, ‘“I incline to Cain’s heresy . . . I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’”44 Jekyll too is a bourgeois and philanthropist, ‘“the very pink of proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good,”’ as Enfield describes him (p. 9). His original motives for promoting ‘good’ cannot have been based on religion, since we are later told after the death of Sir Danvers Carew at Mr Hyde’s hand, that ‘whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion’ (p. 31). This charitable bourgeois was clearly originally a sceptic or agnostic, his desire to do good, like Bentham’s ‘greatest happiness’, or pleasure, based upon a secular moral code which was more phil­ anthropic than ‘charitable’ in essence. It is likely that Jekyll has discovered, like ‘Olalla’, that the only guarantee that man’s moral compass maintain its pre-eminence in the psyche is through selfdenial based upon Christian example and Augustinian beliefs, rather than good deeds performed without faith. This is, therefore, the most important allegorical meaning of Hyde’s facelessness in Utterson’s dream. It is not that Mr Hyde’s selfish carnality lies behind the mask, so much as that the mask represents the weak, amorphous nature of the bourgeois sceptic and philan­ thropist: that those who follow a secular model of morality have no curb with which to save themselves from their own worse nature, and that the scientific curiosity of the scientist does not add to man’s pleasure, but reveals new pains which his lack of self-circumspection is powerless to then redress. Therefore, the use of the Gothic double in Hyde as a direct juxtaposition to the other characters ultimately constitutes a satire of Victorian bourgeois morality. This is a feature similar to the structure in Wilkie Collins’s story ‘Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman’, in which the continental woman 184

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of life and passions acts as a challenge to the repressed feelings of a whole cadre of unnamed professional people. These professionals include the ‘clergyman’ who refuses to help her despite his obvious emotional attraction, and the young man with ‘inveterate reserve in his manner’, who kills her in order to repress the illicit sexual feel­ ings which will hamper the development of an acceptable bourgeois identity and career. While the ghost of Jéromette points to the photograph of the young man on the clergyman’s desk, her final appearance before him also acts as a recognition of the love that he himself has repressed and now lost in favour of conformity.45 In The Strange Case, however, the public, conformist self proves too weak to maintain that repression. As Walker has shown, the relation between Jekyll and Hyde is a symbiosis of public duty and private pleasure, the one the degenerated man of science, whose status as a wage-earner in capitalism has led to his ‘decanonisation’, while ‘Hyde embodies the diligent bourgeois individual’s Doppel­ gänger, the dandy’, whom the man of science can no longer control and thus comes eventually to dominate him.46 Unlike in Collins’s short story, the juxtaposition and doubling exists to show, if anything, the need for repression if the self is to function properly. As in ‘Olalla’ there is a discussion of the role and types of pleasure involved in man’s experience, although here the discussion is initially entirely from the point of view of the Utilitarian sceptic rather than from the Christian. Jekyll’s understanding of man’s rational and ethical make-up is entirely secular. When recounting how he had decided to conduct his experiments, Jekyll recalls that: ‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and intel­ lectual, I thus steadily drew nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two’.47 Here the intelligence is con­ sidered to comprise the moral and the intellectual, as though the capacity for making analytical judgements is equal to the moral sense, with both coming to the same conclusion concerning the make-up of the human psyche. His moral judgements about whether to pursue his experiments are in keeping with sound Utilitarian sense, being rational deductions related to the nature of pain and its ‘avoidance’, to use Mill’s term, and the promotion of ‘pleasure’. Discussing the beneficial ‘separation of these elements’, he reasoned that: 185

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The Fantastic and European Gothic If each . . . could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. (p. 56)

Taking a scientific approach in order to separate that which is just and pleasurable from the ‘unjust’ that causes pain, is itself the ultimate Utilitarian doctrine: not only does it promote pleasure and the good, but it makes man himself capable of seeking only the good and the avoidance of pain around him, and of searching for what constitute the ‘higher’ pleasures of Mill. However, the ‘pleasure’ in ‘good’ becomes degraded, and reveals itself to be ‘swinish’ in its nitric and unbridled form, with the con­ science of the sceptic proving insufficient to check Mr Hyde’s pre­ dominance and increasing sadism. The discourse on pleasure begun in ‘Olalla’ continues when Jekyll, describing the depravities of Hyde, writes that: Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures . . . The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarcely use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous. (p. 60)

The irony here is that ‘pleasure’ is consciously equated with crime and depravity. Dr Jekyll compares and contrasts himself with those who ‘hired bravos’ to ‘transact their crimes’, while he did so ‘for his pleasures’. However, his ‘pleasures’ involve crime, and are crimes. This indicates consciousness that ‘pleasure’ may have a positive mean­ ing in other contexts, divorced from crime. Likewise does the fact that he admits the ‘pleasures’ which he sought ‘in my disguise’ were 186

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‘undignified’: an understatement, he realizes, and one which carries the assumption that there can be pleasures that are ‘dignified’. Mr Hyde is ‘sent forth alone to do his good pleasure’, a sarcastic term that combines the ‘good’ that the philanthropist Jekyll originally promoted with this ‘pleasure’, which we have already been told was ‘undignified’, issuing from a character who was ‘malign and villainous’. Finally, in the same paragraph we are told that ‘his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone’ (p. 60). Here there are no possible qualifications of pleasure. It is accompanied by the ‘bestial’ as surely as it issues from the ‘brutes’ in ‘Olalla’. The passage ends with Jekyll informing us that his con­ science stood apart from Hyde’s actions, since the situation was not subject to ‘ordinary laws’. The entire passage, which outlines the slow descent of Hyde into greater depravity and the dwindling loss of control from Jekyll, can also be seen as a comment on the nature of pleasure itself: pleasure may not be the same as crime, but in this case it was synonymous; pleasure may be dignified, but here it is undignified, at the very least; pleasure may be ‘good’, but in this case such an adjective or association with the ‘good’ of Utilitarian philanthropists is a satirical joke; finally, the term ‘pleasure’ is used unequivocally to mean some­ thing shameful, as though Jekyll accepts Olalla’s definition and attitude towards it. The higher pleasures which Mill had so famously outlined in his essay ‘Utilitarianism’, in Fraser’s Magazine (1861) some twenty-five years earlier, and which had dominated the think­ ing of Victorian legislators, inexorably collapse into the lower ‘mean and grovelling’ pleasures which detractors of Utilitarianism dis­ covered in Bentham’s work.48 The ‘conscience’ of the sceptical, bourgeois moralist is too weak to prevent them from doing so, and the attempt to find a curb in Christian doctrine, which works for Olalla, is now too late. In summation, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde draws upon the topical theme of the exploitation of the lower classes for pleasure, although unlike in Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, to which it alludes, the target is very much the bourgeois man of professions rather than the aristocrat. In this way Stevenson bolsters his rejection of Utilitarian morality in ‘Olalla’ by satirizing 187

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the bourgeois through the representation of the double, Mr Hyde, and also presents an even more involved critique of the Utilitarian concept of pleasure, which for Stevenson cannot contain a division between the higher and lower as prescribed by Mill and cannot act as a curb to the deadlier side of man’s psyche. Ultimately, both texts present the fruits of Stevenson’s reading of Augustine and respect for a religious moral creed which, paradoxically, he himself could no longer believe in. Faustianism Richard Walker notes that Jekyll incarnates the ‘decanonisation’ of the man of science in his own age, but also sees Jekyll as the ‘Faustian/ Frankensteinain bourgeois sorcerer scientist of Marx and Engels who “is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.’ This explains the reason why Hyde himself is hard for the other characters to identify, since he represents a ‘protean’ element in the bourgeois man, who must constantly reinvent himself into a plethora of different self-interested vices.49 Walker has noticed a central paradox, which is on the one hand the tarnishing, almost the mundanity of the professional scientist who is a functionary in capitalist society, but who is also, due to this very feature, able to emulate the ‘“mystical and transcendental”’ Faust by unleashing scientific forces that he cannot control, and that are actually concomitant with the vices of ‘bourgeois individualism’ (p. 84). I would go further, and say that the very decanonization which Walker notices is less simply to do with the denigration caused by professionalism, than by the motivation of a pusillanimous Utilitarian morality, which promotes pleasure as the end of moral action. There is, ultimately, no substitute for a society which sees man’s place in the universe through sacerdotal eyes. The anti-rationalism of Nodier’s ‘fantastique’ and the Faustian theme of Paul Féval’s Legitimist, frénétique vampire novels finds its late, British articulation in the work of the Francophile Stevenson, proving once more that the terror and horror of the Gothic can result from embracing, rather than reneging upon, Enlightenment principles. 188

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Conclusion

 I hope that I have proved the following main arguments in this book. First, that the works we call Fantastic or Gothic in the Englishspeaking world do not necessarily conform to the Enlightenmentbased binary proposed by Todorov, in which the reader is understood as hesitating between a marvellous and uncanny resolution for events which break the laws of nature. This binary is one which is more or less accepted by most critics of the Gothic, who see in the genre’s terror and horror a challenge to Enlightenment principles of nature or an emotional release from them through the resurgence of a more primitive, irrational order. Some of the writers I have analysed instead choose to invert this binary entirely and see terror and horror, through the infusion of the supernatural and the absurd, as resultant from the rise of Enlightenment ideals: the terror of the Revolution having itself been a major motor for such an understanding. Secondly, I hope to have shown that the reason why such writers may do so depends upon the fact that the Gothic, Fantastic, or even the frénétique tale is capable of combining allegory with naturalism. In doing this, many writers are also capable of commenting intelligently and un­ usually upon history, making contrasts and comparisons between different times and condemning the concept of progress present in the work of conventional historical novels. This use is frequently modified by the need to escape censorship or shroud one’s political feelings in oblique literary devices.

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Above all, the initial interest in France for the literary Fantastic appears to have been its very range and ability to break rational assumptions seamlessly, without the sceptical hesitation specified by Todorov. Such literature was able to challenge the dogmatic Voltairean faith in science and present new horizons of knowledge at a time when Enlightenment rationalism appeared to have betrayed mankind. Hence we have seen that certain tenets held by most present-day critics in relation to the Gothic do not actually apply universally when we examine the growth of the Fantastic genre in France, and thus I would like to think that this work may have gone some way to making students of this literature reconsider both the Fantastic, and the Historical novel, as generic forms. It is hoped, therefore, that the foregoing book has successfully challenged some of the existing views on the genesis of the novel in Britain, France and elsewhere, and that it has also demonstrated the extent to which writers of the Gothic in English like Le Fanu and Stevenson have themselves drawn from their reading of Con­ tinental writers, whose traditions are far more complicit with the development of literary genres in Britain and America than the narrow divisions created by university departments often allow. Finally, at a time when the study of literature in France appears to be facing inexorable decline, it is comforting to see new English translations of French frénétique and Fantastic novels appearing. It is my fond belief that in the pan-European field of Gothic Studies the works of Nodier, Féval, Gautier, Hoffmann and Eugène Sue deserve equal attention to the works of Stoker, Le Fanu and Stevenson, and it is my even fonder hope that they will eventually be studied equally alongside such English-language writers in British and American universities.

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Notes

 Introduction  1

 2

 3

 4  5

 6  7

 8

 9

In his preface to Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthven, Nodier writes of how the ‘roman’ is an example of the ‘romantique’, because it breaks with ‘the slavish imitation of antiquity’, citing Aristole as his example – Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen ou Les Vampires (with a Preface by Charles Nodier) (Paris: L’Advocat, 1820), pp. i, iii. Terry Hale, ‘Translation in distress: cultural misappropriation and the culture of the Gothic’, in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic: a Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 17–38, at pp. 24–5. Anthony Glinoer, La Littérature frénétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), pp. 32–3; 45–6. Terry Hale, ‘Translation in distress’, p. 27. Charles Nodier (1821), ‘Critique littéraire: le Petit Pierre, traduit de l’allemand de SPIESS (à paraître chez l’Avocat, au Palais-Royal)’, Annales de la Littérature et des arts, 16ème Livraison), pp. 77, 81, 83. Charles Nodier, Du fantastique en littérature (Paris: Chimères, 1989), p. 36. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), pp. 29, 36. Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 11. Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 36.

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11

12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

25

Germán Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: the Early European Super­ natural Tale – Five Variations on a Theme (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 132. As occurs at the end of ‘Inès de las Sierras’ – Charles Nodier, Contes de Charles Nodier, (Paris: J Hetzel, 1946), pp. 239–40. Paul Féval, La Vampire (Castelnau-le-Lez: Editions Climats, 2004), p. 11. Roger Magraw, France 1815–1915: the Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), p. 86. Théophile Gautier, ‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’, Souvenirs de théatre, et d’art (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1903), pp. 41–51. Ann Radcliffe (1826), ‘On the supernatural in poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16:1, 145–52, at 150. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition), 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 1996 [1979]), p. 21. In Botting’s sense this repre­ sents ‘transgression’ and ‘undermining of physical laws’, which serves to reinforce the dominant, Enlightenment episteme through its very deviance – Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 6–7. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 53. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 32. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Contes Fantastiques de E. T. A. Hoffmann, traduits de l’allemand par Loève-Vemars [sic]. Et précédés d’une notice sur Hoffmann, par Walter Scott’ (repr. Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1832), p. xiii. Clifford Hallam, ‘The Double as incomplete self: toward a definition of Doppelgänger’, Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film, in Eugene J. Crook (ed.) (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981), pp. 1–31, at p. 9. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 87. The ensuing account of the Revolution is taken mainly from Doyle’s book. Roger Magraw, France: the Bourgeois Century, p. 64. Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 11, 74–7. Ian Henley, ‘Drunk revolutionaries? pas du tout’, The Guardian, 13 September 2001. Judith Barbour, ‘Dr John William Polidori, Author of the Vampyre’, in Peter Otto and Deirdre Coleman (eds), Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust 192

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Notes

26

27

Hill Press, 1992), pp. 85–110, at p. 86. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 119. Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 13–14, 131. Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: The Early European Supernatural Tale, p. 132.

1: Fantasy and Counter-Revolution   1

 2

 3

 4

 5  6

 7

 8

 9

10

11 12

13

Since Cyprien Bérard never wrote another work, the suspicion of A. Richard Oliver, Nodier’s only English Language biographer, has been that Nodier wrote it himself, but it could have in fact been the nom de plume of various other people – A. Richard Oliver, Charles Nodier, Pilot of Romanticism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1964), pp. 125–6. Laurence M. Porter, The Literary Dream in French Romanticism: a Psycho­ analytical Interpretation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. xii. Porter’s emphasis after this initial, excellent observation is, in contra­distinction to this present study, entirely psychoanalytical. Marguérite Henry-Rosier, La Vie de Charles Nodier (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1931), p. 23. Brumaire, in the revolutionary calendar, is a month extending from 22 October to 20 November. Oliver, Charles Nodier, Pilot of Romanticism, p. 37. Henry-Rosier, La Vie de Charles Nodier, pp 107–8; Oliver, Charles Nodier: Pilot of Romanticism, p. 38) Henry-Rosier, La Vie de Charles Nodier, p. 136; Oliver, Charles Nodier: Pilot of Romanticism, p. 59. Bryan Rogers, Charles Nodier et la tentation de la folie (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), pp. 45–8. Charles Nodier, L’Histoire des sociétés secrètes de l’armée et des conspirations militaires qui ont eu pour objet la déstruction du gouvernement de Bonaparte, in Charles Nodier, Souvenirs, portraits, épisodes de la révolution et de l’empire, 2 vols ((new edn) Paris: Charpentier, 1864), II 142–258. Hélène Lowe-Dupas, Poétique de la coupure chez Charles Nodier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 54–5, 58. Rogers, Charles Nodier, p. 49. Charles Nodier, Jean Sbogar, ed. Jean Sgard (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, Editeur, 1987), p. 90. Rudolf Maixner, Charles Nodier et l’Illyrie (Paris: Dider, 1960), p. 48. 193

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15

16 17

18

19

20 21

Lowe-Dupas, Poétique de la coupure chez Charles Nodier, pp. 106, 106n–7n. Citing Jean-Claude Rioux (1980), ‘Les Tablettes de Jean Sbogar, ou le voleur et la révolution’, Charles Nodier. Colloque du deuxieme centenaire. Besançon. Mai 1980. Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, pp. 113–32, at p. 128. As he wrote in ‘Suites d’un mandât d’arrêt’ (1832) ‘reconstructing’ one’s own past ‘makes the present tolerable. The events of the past do not belong to us any more than do the events which will never be.’ (‘. . . la rèverie d’un solitaire qui s’amuse à reconstruire pour lui-même l’épopée bourgeoise de sa vie, parce que le passé . . . lui rend le présent tolerable . . . Les événements accomplis ne nous appartiennent pas plus que les événements qui ne seront jamais.’) [sic] – Souvenirs, portraits, épisodes de la révolution et de l’empire, II 84–128, at 84–5. Rogers, Charles Nodier, pp. 36–7. Jacques Hébert (1757–1794) was the most radical and proto-socialist of all the Jacobins. Sbogar in fact espouses views similar to Hébert’s acolyte, François-Noël Babeuf (1760–97), who advocated agrarian communism, and who also – unlike Hébert himself – showed consummate bravery when led to the guillotine. Anthony Glinoer, La Littérature frénétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), p. 67. For a description of the movement from ‘roman noir’ to frénétique in French literature, and the role played by the trans­ lators, see Terry Hale,‘Translation in distress: cultural misappropriation and the culture of the Gothic’, in Avril Horner (ed.) European Gothic: a Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 17–38, at p. 27. ‘Il est absurde de supposer qu’il y ait une guerre d’école à école entre les classiques et les romantiques . . . extravagances monstreuses, où toutes les règles sont violées mais il n’explique pas l’audace trop facile du poète et du romancier qui promène l’athéisme, la rage et le désespoir à travers les tombeaux; qui exhume les morts pour éprouver les vivants, et qui tourmente l’imagination de scènes horribles, dont il faut demander le modèle aux rêves effrayants des maladies’ – Charles Nodier (1821), ‘Critique littéraire: le Petit Pierre, traduit de l’allemand de SPIESS (à paraître chez l’Avocat, au Palais-Royal)’, Annales de la littérature et des arts (16ème Livraison), pp. 77, 81, 83. Glinoer, La Littérature frénétique, p. 68. ‘ce génre romantique . . . [l]e nom même de roman qui rappelle une langue moderne . . . exclut l’obligation de cette imitation servile de l’antiquité’;‘ces superstitions qui . . . n’offrent à la pensée que des scènes de terreur.’ – Charles Nodier in Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, ou Les 194

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Notes

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36

Vampires [with a Preface by Charles Nodier] (Paris: Ladvocat, 1820), pp. i, iii. Charles Nodier, ‘Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit’, Contes du pays des rêves (Paris: Club des Librairies de France, 1957), pp. 45–100, at p. 71. Viaggio in Dalmazia, dell’ Abate Alberto Fortis, 2 vols (Venezia: Presso Alvise Milocco, all Apolline, 1774), I 65. Charles Nodier,‘Langue Illyrienne’ [3 parts], Statistique Illyrienne: articles complets du ‘Télégraphe Officiel’ de l’année 1813, ed. France Dobrovjc (Ljubljana: Edition ‘Satura’, 1933), pp. 62–71. Laurence M. Porter, The Literary Dream in French Romanticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 85–6. ‘brisaient les ais des cerceuils, déchiraient les vêtements sacrés, les derniers vêtements du cadavre’ – Charles Nodier, Contes du pays des rêves, p. 87. Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: the Early European Supernatural Tale, p. 112. Charles Nodier, Infernaliana: ou anecdotes, petits romans nouvelles et contes, sur les révenants, les spectres, les démons et les vampires, préface de Hubert Juin (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1966), p. 180. ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one . . . an image that imparts terror “is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest”’ – Ann Radcliffe (1826), ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16:1, 145– 52, at 150. Bérard, Lord Ruthwen, p. iii. A. Buchez, L’Européen, 25 Fevrier, 1832. Qtd. in Scanu, p. 2. Amédée Pichot, Essai sur le genie et le caractère de Lord Byron, précédé d’une notice préliminaire par M. Charles Nodier (Paris: Ladvocat, Librairie, Palais-Royal, 1824), p. 2. ‘Trahie par une philosophie avide et cruelle’ (p. 6). ‘incroyable déviation de la raison humaine’ (p. 11). Charles Nodier, Du Fantastique en littérature (Paris: Chimères, 1989), p. 37. Walter Scott (March 1829), ‘Du merveilleux dans le roman’, Revue de Paris, 26–33.The essay was a French adaptation of the first half of Scott’s ‘On the Supernatural element of Fictitious Composition, and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore Hoffmann’, first published in the Foreign Quarterly Review, 1827. 195

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The Fantastic and European Gothic 37

38 39 40 41

42

43

44 45

46

Ada Myriam Scanu, Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature, Séminaire d’Histoire Littéraire: La naissance du fantastique en Europe – Histoire et Théorie (2004), p. 3 – www.rilune.org. Scott, ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’, p. 33. Scanu, ‘Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature’, pp. 9–10. Nodier, Du Fantastique en littérature, p. 10. ‘une répugnance prononcée pour les innovations purement matérielles’ – Nodier, Du Fantastique en littérature, p. 35. Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface’, in Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (eds), The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, 9 vols (London: J Humpus, 1821), I 4. Oliver explains that when rejecting Etienne Jouy’s criticism of Nodier’s own acceptance speech at the Académie Française (1827), he was asked why he quarrelled so much with Jouy. Nodier replied:‘“It’s very simple: Voltaire is the damned soul of Jouy, whereas Rousseau is practically a god for me.”’ Oliver does not provide his source, nor the French lan­ guage original, but his belief that Nodier opposed Voltaire over the view on Shakespeare is certainly true, since Nodier had done much to counteract Voltaire’s dismissal of Shakespeare for breaking Classical unities – Oliver, Charles Nodier: Pilot of Romanticism, pp. 219, 220.That said, Nodier relied heavily on Voltaire for his opinion of Horace and other writers­c.f. ‘Littérature: Odes d’Horace traduites en vers français’ (18 May 1831), in Charles Nodier, Feuilletons du Temps: Tome I – Articles et feuilletons (1830 –1843), ed. Jacques-Rémy Dahan (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2010), 94–102, at 96. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les Aveugles (Londres: 1749), pp. 72–6. Nodier was full of praise for Diderot’s literary style, but had little time for his ideas. In an article for Revue de Paris, published 27 June 1830, he applauded ‘le savoir-faire de l’exécution’, but also admitted that he did not like ‘the cynicism of a shameless era, where the whole world was hastening to demolish the society piece by piece, to make I do not know what of its debris.’ (‘le cynisme d’une époque éffrontée, où tout le monde s’empressait à démolir la société pièce à pièce, pour faire je ne sais quoi de ses débris’). His faults were a result of the shame­ful spirit of the time, in Nodier’s view – Charles Nodier (27 June 1830), ‘De la prose française, et de Diderot’, Revue de Paris, in Nodier, Feuilletons du Temps [2010], 673– 690, at 683, 684. Rogers, Charles Nodier, pp. 60–1. Rogers quotes and cites Nodier’s essay, ‘De la palingénésie et de la résurrection’. In 1836 Nodier also returned to the subject by writing a review of Tridace-Nafé-Théobrome de Kaout’ t’ chouk’s Voyage Pittoresque et industriel dans le Paragay Roux et 196

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Notes La Palingénésie Australe for Revue de Paris (28 février 1836), and signed ‘Dr Neophobus’ – Nodier, Feuilletons du Temps, pp. 724–57. Presumably the book was a spoof. 47 Germán Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: the Early European Super­ natural Tale, p. 109. 48 Charles Nodier, Dissertation sur l’usage des antennes des insectes (Besançon, 1798). 49 Charles Nodier, Bibliographie entomologique, ou catalogue raisonné des ouvrages rélatifs à l’Entomologie et aux insectes (Paris: Moutardier, 1801 [An IX]), p. iv. 50 Edward O. Essig, A History of Entomology (repr. New York and London: Hafner, 1965), p. 832. 51 ‘J’ose croire que cette bibliographie est la plus complette qui ait paru jusqu’ici en aucun genre, et j’ai passé six ans de ma vie à la perfectionner.’ – Charles Nodier: Correspondance de Jeunesse: 1793–1809, Edition établie, presentée et annotée par Jacques-Rémy Dahan, 2 vols (Genève: Librairie Droz S. A., 1995), I 141. 52 Scanu, Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature, p. 14. 53 Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960) p. 29. 54 Charles Nodier, ‘Historie d’Hélène Gillet’, Contes du pays des rèves, pp. 25–279, at pp. 262–3. 55 ‘si vous voulez me prêter un instant la baguette magique d’Hugo ou de Dumas, je vais transporter la scène dans un autre lieu’ (p. 269). 56 ‘qui laisse l’âme suspendue dans un doute rêveur et mélancholique. . . la rélation d’un fait tenu pour matériellement impossible qui s’est cependant accompli à la connaissance de tout le monde’ (p. 260). 57 Scanu, Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature, p. 13. 58 Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, p. 29. 59 Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1951), p. 154. 60 Lowe-Dupas, Poétique de la coupure chez Charles Nodier, pp. 64–6, p. 58. 61 Charles Nodier,‘La Fée aux miettes’, in Contes de Charles Nodier (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1846), pp. 61–183, p. 65. 62 Porter, The Literary Dream in French Romanticism, p. 132. 63 Rogers, Charles Nodier, pp. 77; 60–1. 64 Nodier, Bibliographie Entomologique, p. iv. 65 Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, p. 51. 66 Rogers, Charles Nodier, p. 42. 67 Nodier, Contes de Charles Nodier (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1946), pp. 196–7. 68 ‘un pacte préalabale avec l’esprit de malice’. 197

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The Fantastic and European Gothic 69

70 71 72 73

There is also the rather scandalous suggestion that Inès herself ‘in secret subscribed to her kidnapping’ (‘souscrivit en secret à son enlèvement’), leading Estavan to ask who can explain the mysteries of women’s hearts (p. 202). ‘“Inès”, murmura-t-il, “je vais te rejoindre.”’ (p. 224). ‘Possedée d’une frénésie sublime’ (p. 227). ‘l’invention n’est en lui qu’une perception innée des faits réels’ (p. 239). ‘Que fait aujourd’hui la science? A chaque nouvelle découverte, elle justifie, elle authentique . . . un des prétendus mensonges d’Hérodote et de Pline’ (pp. 239–40).

2: History and Politics  1

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First published in English in the Foreign Quarterly Review (July 1827); Ada Myriam Scanu, ‘Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature’, Séminaire d’Histoire Littéraire: la naissance du fantastique en Europe – Histoire et Théorie (2004), p. 11 – www.rilune.org. Théophile Gautier, ‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’ in Souvenirs de théatre, et d’art (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1903), pp. 41–51, at p. 41. First published in Chronique de Paris, 14 August 1836. E.T. A. Hoffmann, Contes fantastiques, trans. M. Loève-Veimars, et précédé d’une notice historique sur Hoffmann (repr. Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1832), p. xiii. ‘ceux qui les nient avec leurs lèvres, les attestent par leur peur’ – Sir Walter Scott (1829), ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’, Revue de Paris, 25–33, at 26. I have used back translations throughout, rather than excerpts from the original English language text, since the differences are large. Here, for instance, Scott originally quotes a passage in Johnson’s Rasselas about superstition, which is omitted in the French text; whether by himself or an independent translator is hard to ascertain. ‘l’imagination doit être stimulée sans jamais être complètement satisfaite’ (p. 26). Ann Radcliffe (1826), ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16:1, 145–52, at 150. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), p. 36. Germán Gil Curiel also remarks on this tendency in the work of Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim and Gautier, noticing how in their stories ‘conventional reality and the supernatural are inter­ woven, in such a way that they get blurred and merge together’ – Germán Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: the Early European Supernatural Tale – Five Variations on a Theme (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 132. 198

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Notes  8

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13 14 15

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18

‘Glaubt nicht an solche Bergmannsmärchen’ – E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der Artushof/Die Bergwerke zu Falun: Zwei Erzählungen (Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag, 1986), p. 47. Charles Nodier, Du Fantastique en littérature (Paris: Chimères, 1989), p. 35. Elizabeth Teichmann, La Fortune d’Hoffmann en France (Genève: Librairie E. Droz; Paris: Librairie Minard, 1961), p. 18. ‘tous les détails . . . exemptes d’exagération qui semblent être les garans [sic] de la vérité historique. Ce récit est arrangé avec un art infini, et pourrait fournir le sujet d’un drame fort intéressant’ – Fanny Seymour, ‘Bullétin bibliographique’, Revue encyclopédique, 36 (9 December 1827), 683. Quoted in Teichmann, p. 18. E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’, trans. R, Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, 37 (Jan–Feb 1828) 94–116, 192–220; (Mar–Apr 1828) 330–46; 423–46. This story is better known as Der Baron von B. Quoted in Teichmann, La Fortune de Hoffmann en France, p. 20. ‘Satirique et enthousiaste, poète et moraliste, changeant à tous momens le ton et restant toujours le même au fond,’ – ‘Revue Sommaire’,‘Contes frénétiques de E.T. A. Hoffmann, traduits de l’allemand par Loève-Vemars [sic], et précédés d’une notice sur Hoffmann, par Walter Scott’, Revue française, 13 (janvier 1830), 300–4. Quoted in Teichmann, La Fortune de Hoffmann en France, p. 35. ‘a ouvert un ordre d’idées tout à la fois simples et merveilleuses, naturelles et fantasques, sublimes et grotesques’, Le Figaro, 30 janvier 1830. Quoted in Teichmann, La Fortune de Hoffmann en France, p. 36. As Teichmann writes, this was probably written by one of Loève-Veimars’s own friends, if not by the translator himself (p. 36). Erich Auerbach, ‘The Aesthetic Dignity of les Fleurs du Mal’, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 201–8, at p. 205. A similar tale, written some years earlier, would be Doge und Dogaressa, which concerns the marriage and attempted coup of the fourteenth century Doge Marino Faliero. Both tales were written just after Hoffmann had been caught in the attack on Dresden and forced to relocate, eventu­ ally in Berlin, as Napoleon’s rule was coming to a close. Hoffmann’s letters reveal utter contempt for the great Emperor, a contempt which is perhaps reflected in his portrayal of the senile Doge’s attempt to make himself an absolute ruler in the tale. His attitude to divinely sanctioned dynasties, which were returning to rule after the Treaty of Paris in 1814, appears to have been more positive in Das Fräulein von Scuderi. 199

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20

21 22

23

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29 30 31

32

33 34

E.T. A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann/Das Fräulein von Scuderi: Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), pp. 51–2. Curiously enough, this man, who tells von Scuderi that the true is not always the true-seeming, was the real-life translator of Augustine, whose translation was consulted by Robert Louis Stevenson, amongst others. See p. 226. ‘wie unsere schöne Bräut um ihren Bräutigam trauert’ (p.114). Hilda M. Brown, E.T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity (Rochester N Y: Camden House, 2006), p. 193. Albert Meier,‘E.T. A. Hoffmann,“Die Serapions Brüder”’, in Hoffmann, Der Sandemann, 2008, pp. 135–41, at p. 139 (the article is taken from Kindlers Literatur Lexikon 30). Helmuth Himmel (1960),‘Schüld und suhne der Scuderi: zu Hoffmanns Novelle’, Mitteilungen der E.T. A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft, 7, 1–15, at 2. Birgit Röder, A Study of the Major Novellas of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 14–16. E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren, trans. Lt.-Col. Alex Ewing, 2 vols (London: George Bell and sons, 1892), II 216.There is, unfortunately, no original German edition of Die Serapionsbrüder available in the British Library. The Fronde were a group of aristocrats and commoners who had waged open civil war against Louis’s right to absolute rule while France itself was involved in war with Spain. Gisela Gorski, E. T. A. Hoffmann ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ (Stuttgart: Akadamischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1980), pp. 19–21. Hilda M. Brown, E.T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle, p. 165. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, Das Fräulein von Scuderi, p. 62. The reference to Hercules was probably suggested by Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, the book which is openly recognized as a major source for the history in Die Serapionsbrüder since Voltaire reports that Cardinal Mazarin ordered the opera Ercole Amante to be performed at Louis’s marriage – Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, ed. Mr de La B***, Nouvelle Edition, 2 vols (Francfort:Veuve Knoch & J.G. Eslinger, 1753), II 258. ‘In dem Schimmer der Mondesstrahlen, die eben durch die finstern Wolchen brachen’ – Hoffmann, Der Sandmann/Das Fräulein von Scuderi, p. 50. Gorski, E.T. A. Hoffmann ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’, pp. 20–1. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: a Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and in the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 26. 200

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Notes 35

36 37

38

39

40 41

42

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol I – Part 1: The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Edward Unter­ mann (repr. New York: Cosimo, 2007), p. 98. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren, p. 149. ‘He liked verses and romances, which, in depicting gallantry and heroism, secretly flattered his character.’ (‘Il se plaisoit aux vers et aux romans, qui, en peignant la galanterie et héroisme, flattoient en sécret son caractère.’) LaterVoltaire relates the story of how the King and Henrietta, his sister-in-law, communicated by verses, only to discover that they were using the same poet to fake their lines – Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, II 250–1, 274–5. Sylvester also admits that he took the story of Fräulein von Scuderi’s couplet to the king and the reward given by a band of murders from a historical source, Chronik von Nürnberg (Neuenbergen Chronicle) by Wagenseil.The story in the original is almost exactly the same, except that she meets the bearer of the necklace in person in Wagensail’s version – Gorski, E.T. A. Hoffmann: Das Fräulein von Scuderi, p. 16.The story of the Marquise de Brinvilliers and Sainte-Croix is contained in a lengthy account by the judge François Gayot de Pitaval in his memoirs of gruesome trials, published in German by Schiller as ‘Geschichte des Prozesses der Marquise von Brinvillier’, Merkwürdige Rechtsfalle als ein beitrag Geschichte der Menschheit, nach dem Fransösischen Werk des Pitaval, durch mehrere Verfasser ausgearbeitet und mit einer Vorrede begleitet heraus­ gegeben von Schiller, 4 vols (Jena: bei Christ. Heinr, Cuno’s Erben, 1793), III 3–102. Voltaire’s Louis XIV also refers to ‘Mademoiselle Scudéri’ when detailing the few people who remained friends with Fouquet, the French minister whom Louis imprisoned after the death of Cardinal Mazarin – Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, II 267–8. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, pp. 104–5. Allegorical details relating love to purity or profanity, or Platonic shadow and idea, also infuse works like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, where the pure love repre­ sented by the nymph Logistilla is juxtaposed with the carnal love of Alcina.This feature was borrowed by Spenser for Book 1 of The Faery Queene, where a contrast between the base carnality of Duessa and the purity of Una eroticizes the spiritual, in a comparison between Platonic and erotic forms of love between man and women. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, Das Fräulein von Scuderi, p. 100. Hans Leitherer (1960),‘E.T.A. Hoffmann und die Alchimie’, Mitteilungen der E.T. A. Hoffmann-Gessellschaft 7, 24–6, at 25–6. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Artushof/ Die Bergwerke zu Falun: Zwei Erzählungen (Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag, 1986), p. 32. 201

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49 50

51

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53 54

55

56 57

58

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Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, Das Fräulein von Scuderi, pp. 68–9. ‘Tag und Nacht hörte man ihn in seiner Werkstatt hammern’ (p. 68). Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren, II 216. Röder, A Study of the Major Novellas of E.T. A. Hoffmann, p. 51. Pitaval, ‘Geschichte des Prozesses der Marquise von Brinvilliers’, I 97. ‘The Apothecary Glazer was also drawn into response through this in­ vesti­gation, because he had provided Sainte-Croix with various materials, and it cost him much trouble to be acquitted.’ (‘Der Apotheker Glazer wurde bei diesem Prossezze auch mit zur Verantwortung gezogen, weil er beim Sainte-Croix verscheidene Materialisten-waaren geliefert hatte, und es kostete ihn alle Mühe, Freigesprochen zu werden’) – Pitaval, Merkwürdige Rechtsfalle, p. 99. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann/Das Fräulein von Scuderi, p. 28. Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (London: Century, 2003), pp. 110 and 138. William Doyle, The Oxford Book of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 79–81. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Briefswechsel, ed. Hans von Müller and Friedrich Schnapp, 3 vols (Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1967), I 422 (1 Dec 1813). Scott, ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’, p. 33. George Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 32. Hoffmann, Der Artushof/ Die Bergwerke zu Falun: Zwei Erzählungen, pp. 27–9. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren, I 210. Lansing Evans Smith (1997),‘Myths of poesis, hermeneusis and psycho­ genesis in Hoffmann, Tagore and Gillmann’, Studies in Short Fiction 34/2, 227–36, at 227–8. Hilda M. Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle, p. 162. One could also add Marino Faliero’s choice between the Dogeressa and the sea, his symbolic spouse, in Doge und Dogaress. ‘ein Accidenz ohne Substanz’ (accidence without essence) is how Weishaupt sees the definition of matter without consideration of its relation to the ideal, and defines fire as a materialization of light – Adam Weishaupt, Uber Materialismus und Idealismus: ein Philosophisches Fragment (1796), pp. 7, 15.The neo-Platonists’ belief in emanation and the existence of four hypostases has some correspondence with Hermeticism, except that it presents the lowest level, matter, as being degenerate rather than potentially correspondential. 202

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Notes 60

61

62

63

S. L. Macgregor Mathers (trans.), ‘The Book of Concealed Mystery’, The Kabbalah Unveiled (from the Latin translation of Knorr Von Rosen­ roth) (repr. London: Arkana, 1991), pp. 43–108, at p. 55. See Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (repr. London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), pp. 60–4. Scott, ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’, p. 33. Conversations with Neil Mann of New York have also been most illuminating in connection with the occult references in this tale. Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic (New York: Harvester Wheat­sheaf, 1990), pp. 82–3.

3:The Rejection of Bourgeois Life  1  2

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Gérard de Senneville, Théophile Gautier (Paris: Fayard, 2005), p. 23. Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), p. 84. De Senneville, Théophile Gautier, p. 12. For example, in a slightly sarcastic letter to the bookseller Eugène Renduel of 22 October 1834, he claims that he is owed money, and that he had not raised the issue during a recent encounter because ‘that is in completely bad taste and would equally necessitate eulogising the citizen King’ (‘celà est tout à fait de mauvais goût et qu’il faudrait autant faire l’éloge du roi citoyen’), meaning either that he does not like pandering to others’ respect for Louis-Philippe, or that grubbing openly about money is tantamount to the same thing, since these were a part of Louis-Philippe’s own values – Théophile Gautier, Correspondance Générale, éditée par Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, sous la direction de Pierre Laubriet (Genève–Paris: Librairie-Droz, 1985), I 36. Magraw, France 1815–1914, p. 55. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 32. ‘le critique qui voit le poète se promener dans le jardin de poésie avec ses neuf belles odalisques’ (p. 42). ‘Rien de ce qui est beau n’est indispensable à la vie’ (p. 53). ‘car la jouissance me paraît le but de la vie, et la seule chose utile au monde’ (pp. 54–5). ‘une divinité qui aime les hommes … elle ne s’enveloppe pas des voiles langoureux de la mysticité; elle se tient debout, son dauphin derrière elle, le pied sur sa conque de nacre . . .’ (p. 229). 203

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12 13

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Albert B. Smith, Ideal and Reality in the Fictional Narratives of Théophile Gautier, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 30 (Gaines­ ville: University of Florida Press, 1969), pp. 18–19. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. 127. Avignon-Leroux sees the novel as mixing the ‘préciosité’ style with Romanticism, but as privileging the age of Louis XIII, with descriptions of its decor and clothes always presaging the appearance of divine beauty – Véronique Avignon-Le Roux (1996),‘Romantisme et préciosité dans Mademoiselle de Maupin’, Bulletin de la Société de Théophile Gautier 17, 1–33, at 10. The piece was first published in Chronique de Paris, 14 August 1836, some two months after Gautier had published ‘La Morte amoureuse’. Gautier,‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’ in Souvenirs de Théatre, et d’Art (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1903), pp. 41–51, at p. 41. ‘Hoffmann est doué d’une finesse d’observation merveilleuse, surtout pour les ridicules du corps; il saisit très bien le côté plaisant et risible de la forme, il a sous ce rapport de singulières affinités avec Jacques Callot et principalement avec Goya, caricaturiste espagnol trop peu connu, dont l’oeuvre à la fois bouffonne et terrible produit les mêmes effets que les récits du contour allemande . . . En art, une chose fausse peut être très vraie, et une chose vraie très fausse; tout dépend de l’exécution’ (pp. 45–6). ‘il a toujours un pied dans le monde réel . . . Les sympathies et les antipathies occultes, les folies singulières, les visions, le magnétisme, les influences mystérieuses, et malignes d’un mauvais principe qu’il ne désigne que vaguement, voilà les élements surnaturels ou extraordinaires qu’emploie habituellement Hoffmann: c’est le positif et le plausible du fantastique’ (p. 46). ‘mais il faut dans la fantaisie la plus folle et la plus déréglée une apparence de raison, un prétexte quelconque, un plan . . .’, ‘Rien n’est si difficile que de réussir dans un genre où tout est permis’ (p. 48). Amedée Pichot, Essai sur le génie et le caractère de Lord Byron, précédé d’une notice préliminaire par M. Charles Nodier (Paris: Ladvocat, Librairie, Palais-Royal, 1824), p. 6 Germán Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach:The Early European Super­ natural Tale, Five Variations on a Theme (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 132. ‘et vous éprouvez un frisson de terreur comme si vous voyiez apparaître lady Macbeth avec sa lampe, ou entrer le spectre dans Hamlet’ – Gautier, Souvenirs de Théatre, pp. 44–5. It was originally published in La France littéraire as ‘Onuphrius Wphly’ in August 1832, and again in October 1832 under the same title for Cabinets 204

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Notes

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de Lecture, but was published as part of a collection called Jeunes-France under its final title – Peter Whyte (1996), ‘Autour d’ “Onuphrius” et de “La Vie dans la Mort”’, La Comédie de la vie et de la mort: Colloque internationale Maisons-Lafitte Bulletin de la société Théophile Gautier 18, 203–17, at 203. ‘Jeunes-France’ was a term used to identify the new generation of Romantics, but the actual collection was more of a satire, in which various young writers poked fun at each other and themselves. Théophile Gautier,‘Onuphrius’, Récits fantastiques, ed. Marc Eigeldinger (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1981), pp. 65–100, at p. 71. Charles Nodier, ‘Smarra’, Contes du Pays des Rêves, ed. Jean Richer (Paris: Club des Librairies de France, 1952), pp. 45–97, at pp. 90–5. Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1951), pp. 223–4. Whyte, ‘Autour d’ “Onuphrius” et de “La Vie dans la Mort”’, p. 205. ‘Aussi peu accoutumé qu’il était à vivre de la vie réelle, in ne savait comment s’y prendre pour mettre son idée en action, et il se faisait des monstres de la moindre chose’ – Gautier, Récits fantastiques, p. 74. Sigmund Freud,‘The Uncanny’, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 121–61, at pp. 15, 161–2. Clifford Hallam, ‘The Double as incomplete self: toward a definition of the Doppelgänger’, in Eugene J. Crook (ed.) Fearful Symmetry: Double and Doubling in Literature and Film (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981), pp. 1– 29, at pp. 16–18. Melanie Klein, in Klein et al., ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, Developments in Psychoanalysis (repr. London: Karnac Books, 1989), pp. 292–320, at pp. 298–300. In an earlier essay Klein also discusses how in persecutory hallucinations the fearful element of an object is so predominant that the good entirely vanishes, but refuses to discuss this phenomenon further – Melanie Klein,‘Some Theoretical Conclusions regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’, in Klein et al., Developments in Psychoanalysis, pp. 198–236, at p. 203. David Wasdall, in his critique of Klein, has noticed the import­ ance of this admission and the infuriating fact that she did not pursue this concept of persecutory hallucinations, which threaten the ego’s sense of ‘omnipotence’ but conversely perform the same function as the gratificatory – David Wasdall,‘Anxiety Defences: their Origin, Functioning and Evolution’, 2 pts (London: Meridian Project, 2002), II 13. Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, p. 309. The process of projective identification involves too much dependence on external embodiments of the subject’s own good aspects, although 205

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The Fantastic and European Gothic also concerns projecting the bad, uncontrollable parts of the ego on others as well – Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, p. 301. 34 Peter Whyte also writes that there is a fundamental ambiguity in the work, since the narrator so closely relates Onuphrius’s experiences that they may be seen as a projection and objectification of his own hallucin­ ations – Whyte, ‘Autour d’ “Onuphrius” et de “La Vie dans la Mort”’, p. 208. 35 ‘l’aimait comme une mère aime son fils’ ‘comme Christophe Colomb dut aimer le premier qui ne lui rit au nez lorsqu’il parla du nouveau monde qu’il avait deviné’ – Gautier, Récits fantastiques, p. 73. 36 ‘d’une beauté rare et vêtue avec une magnificence royale’ ‘les cièrges palirent sur leurs chandeliers d’or comme les étoiles au matin . . . Les plus grands peintres, lorsque, poursuivant dans le ciel, la beauté idéale, ils ont rapporté sur la terre le divin portrait de la Madone, n’approchent même pas de cette fabuleuse réalité’ – Gautier, Récits fantastiques, p. 119. 37 ‘cette perfection de formes, quoique purifiée et sanctifiée par l’ombre de la mort, me troublait plus voluptueuesement qu’il n’aurait fallu’ (p. 133); ‘une coquétterie de plus . . . une expression de chastété mélancholique et de souffrance pensive d’une puissance de seduction inexprimable’ (p. 134). 38 ‘A dater de cette nuit, ma nature s’est en quelque sorte dedoublée’ (p. 143). 39 ‘Ma vie est dans la tienne, et tout ce qui est moi vient de toi’ (p. 145). 40 ‘et seigneur Romuald, amant de Clarimonde, se sépara du pauvre prêtre’ (p. 149). 41 Gästliche Geschichte, about the Count Hypolite and his beautiful bride Aurelia, was published under the title ‘LaVampire’ in various trans­lations, including Henry Egmont’s of 1836 – E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘La Vampire’, Contes fantastiques de E.T.A. Hoffmann, trans. Henry Egmont, 4 vols (Paris: Camuzeaux, Librairie-Editeur, 1836), II 169–91. 42 Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach:The Early European Supernatural, p. 139. 43 Smith, Ideal and Reality in the fictional Narratives of Théophile Gautier, p. 8. 44 Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte Fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1951), pp. 228–9. 45 Gil Curiel, A Comparative Approach: The Early European Supernatural, p. 143. 46 Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. 84. 47 ‘J’adore sur toutes choses la beauté de la forme; –la beauté pour moi, c’est la Divinité visible, c’est le bonheur palpable, c’est le ciel descendu sur la terre’ (p. 167). 48 The word ‘fabuleuse’ is of course more akin to ‘mythical’ than the dead epithet ‘fabulous’ in modern English. 206

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Notes 49 50

51 52

53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67

68

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‘joie féroce et sauvage’ ‘d’un air d’indicible volupté’ (p. 145). ‘Mais je ne tâterais pas si la robe d’ Elmire est moelleuse, et je ne la pousserai pas saintement sur le bord de la table, comme faisait ce pauvre homme de Tartuffe’ p. 32. Gautier, Contes fantastiques, p. 136. ‘au lieu d’être enveloppé dans mon triste suaire, j’aurais des habits de soie et de velours, des chaînes d’or, une epée et des plumes comme les beaux jeunes cavaliers’ (p. 125). ‘un superbe habit de voyage en velours vert orné de ganses d’or et retroussé sur le côté pour laisser voir un jupe de satin’ (p. 141). Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Rudolf Teidemann (Cam­ bridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.4–5, 18–20. Paul Féval, Les Drames de la Mort: La Chambre des Amours et La Vampire (Verviers: Bibliothèque Marabout, 1969), p. 51. Gautier, Récits fantastiques, p. 143. ‘de la famille de l’un des douze apôtres’ (p. 144). Magraw, France 1815–1914, pp. 79–80. ‘La Maréchale d’Ancre’, Répositoire général des causes célèbres, anciennes et modernes, serie 1, rédigé par une société d’hommes de lettres, sous la direction de B. Saint-Edme (Paris: Louis Rosier, 1834), pp. 16–24, at p. 19. ‘pour y faire le simulacre d’une amende honorable’, p. 20. Gautier, Récits fantastiques, pp. 120, 127, 129, 131. Magraw, France 1815 –1914, pp. 70–1. E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Le Doge et la Dogaresse’, Contes fantastiques de E.T. A. Hoffmann, trans. Henry Egmont, 4 vols (Paris: Camuzeaux, LibrairieEditeur, 1836), I 131–204, at 193. The poem is Gautier’s ‘Lamento’, in which the poem’s subject cries: ‘Ah! Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer!’ – Léon Guichard (1947), ‘Un Emprunt de Gautier à Hoffmann’, Revue de littérature comparée, XXI [jan], 92–4. Ctd. in Teichmann, 34n–5n. Gautier, Récits fantastiques, p. 121. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. 127. In December 1835 the two men became friends. Alain Montandon (1993), ‘Gautier et Balzac: à propos de La Morte amoureuse’: Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 15, 263–286, at 263. Honoré de Balzac, Les Proscrits; Louis Lambert; Séraphita, ed. Marcel Guilbaud (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1958), pp. 263–4. Emmanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial Love, trans. A. H. Searle (London: the Swedenborg Society, 1891), p. 42. Allen Tate,‘Our Cousin, Mr Poe’, Collected Essays (Denver:Allen Swallow, 1959), pp. 455–71, at pp. 462–3, 465. 207

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4: The Catastrophe of the Second Empire  1

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12

13

The recent translations of several of Féval’s novels by Brian Stableford include Le Chevalier Ténèbre as Knightshade (Mountain Ash: Sarob, 2001) and La Vampire as Countess Vampire (Black Coats Press, 2003). In Le Moniteur Universel, from 12 September 1874 – Dorothee Fritz-El Ahmad, Untersuchungen zu den Feuilleton Romanen von Paul Féval (Frankfurtam-Main; Bern; New York:Verlag Peter Lang, 1986), p. 251. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), pp. 29, 36. David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1981), p. 119. Judith Barbour, ‘Dr John William Polidori, Author of the Vampyre’, in Peter Otto and Deirdre Coleman (eds), Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1992), pp. 85–110, at p. 86. Fritz-El Ahmad, Untersuchungen zu den Feuilleton Romanen von Paul Féval, p. 23. In the book he calls divorce a deformation of natural law – Paul Féval, Pas de Divorce: Réponse à M. Alexandre Dumas (Paris, Bruxelles: Société Générale de Librairie Catholique, 1880), p. 29. Charles Buet, Paul Féval: Souvenirs d’un ami (Paris: 1887), p. 343. ‘De naissance, d’éducation, d’instinct, si’l’on peut s’exprimer ainsi, il était Breton,Vendéen, chouan, royaliste invétéré,“blaguant” un peu ses croyances qu’il croyait surannées, et qui ressuscitèrent en lui tout à coup, à l’age où l’on n’a même plus le ressouvenir des enthouisiasmes juvéniles’ (pp. 339–40). La Vendée was a region of Languedoc in which there had been a pro-monarchist revolt against the Directory in 1795, while Chouans – many of whom took part in the Vendée – were Royalist guerrilla fighters who opposed the Revolution, and of whom Cadoudal was the most prominent member. Fritz-El Ahmad, Untersuchungen p. 27, citing Edouard Montagne, Historie de la Société des gens de lettres (Paris, 1899), S. 389, S. 416. Buet, Paul Féval, p. 345. Paul Féval, Les Drames de la Mort: La Chambre des Amours et La Vampire (Verviers: Bibliothèque Marabout, 1969), pp. 37–9. ‘Car Paris est ainsi: quand il ne fait pas preuve d’un goût exquis, il s’égare tout d’un coup jusqu’au détéstable’ – Féval, Les Drames de la Mort, p. 47. What Lukács calls the ‘clearly embodied historical basis of existence’ rather than mere ‘“local colour”’ – Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 50. 208

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Notes 14

15

16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26

27

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Rolf Teidemann (repr. Cam­ bridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 18–20. Féval, La Vampire [1856] (Castelnau-le-Lez: Editions Climats et Editions Ombres, 2004), p. 23. The family of the miserly draper and court clerk Lancesseur is taught to consider the acting business as vampiric: an irony given the fact that he and his own friends are described as from ‘les classes inutiles’ and ‘cabotins’ – Féval, Les Drames de la Mort, p. 79. Paul Féval, La Vampire, p. 35. This feature is probably influenced by Collin de Planchy’s description of how bad angels become incubi and attach themselves to women with beautiful hair – Collin De Planchy, Dictionnaire Infernale, 2 vols (2nd edn Paris: à la librairie de P. Mongie ainé, 1825), I 156 –158. They are picked up the day after the main dénouement. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 38. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 32. Daniel Compère notes that the vampire has a politically allegorical dimension, but assumes that these are social ills and ‘all the monsters that haunt our collective fears’ – Daniel Compère, ‘Paul Féval et les vampires’, in Jean Rohou et Jacques Dugast (eds), Paul Féval: romancier populaire [Colloque de Rennes, 1987], (Rennes: Interférences, 1992), pp. 59–67, at p. 61. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 55. Qtd in Goldstein, Political Censorship, p. 57. Féval, La Vampire, p. 112. Owing to the lack of newspaper archiving in France during this period, it is difficult to find adequate documentation in Le Figaro or other papers in this epoch. Rozsa Sandor was referred to copiously in The Times during this period, and was even given an obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1876. Neculai Iorga, Histoire des Relations entre la France et les Roumains (Paris: Librairie Payot, 1918), p. 233. Sandor’s role in the revolt was mentioned by Elisée de Reclus in 1874, a factor which encouraged Jules Verne to include him in Le Château des Carpathes (1892) – Elisée Reclus,‘Voyage aux Régions Minières de Transylvanie Occidentale’, Le Tour du Monde, 28 (Paris: Hachette, 1874), 1–48, at 15; see Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 157. 209

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29 30

31 32 33

34

35 36

Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 14. Féval, La Vampire, p. 211. ‘It is only discordant vital force that produces illnesses’ (‘Il n y’a que la force vitale désaccordée qui produise les maladies’);‘The curative power of medicines is thus founded on their property of giving rise to symptoms that are similar to those of the illness itself and overcoming the latter in force.’ (‘La puissance curative des médicaments est donc fondée … sur la propriété qu’ils ont de faire naître des symptômes semblables à ceux de la maladie et surpassant en force ces derniers.’) – Samuel Hahnemann, Exposition de la doctrine médicale homéopathique ou Organon de l’art de guérir, trans. A. J. L. Jourdain (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1845), p. 109, n. 12; p. 117, n. 27. Féval, La Vampire, p. 211. ‘provisoirement, sans prêtre ni maire’, p. 148. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 36: pt 1: Sect VII. Théophile Gautier, ‘Le Club des Hachichins’, Récits fantastiques, ed. Marc Eigeldinger (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1981), pp. 211–34 at pp. 215–16.The article was originally published in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 février 1846. Féval, La Vampire, p. 85. ‘Malheureux que je suis d’avoir sans défiance/Mordu les pommes d’or de l’arbre de science/La science est la mort’ – Théophile Gautier, La Comédie de la Mort, in Premières Poesies: 1830–1845 (Paris: Charpentier, 1870), p. 147.

5:The Failures of the Bourbon Restoration  1

 2

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day [Volume 1:The Gothic Tradition] (2nd edn London and New York: Longman, 1996 [1979]), pp. 26–7. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 6–7. Frayssinous was the famous advocator of Catholic orthodoxy after the Restoration, and promoted the belief that Christ dies for all men and that the just who lived in ignorance of Christ’s word were not damned – Baron Richard Auguste Mathieu, Vie de M. Frayssinous: Évêque 210

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  3

  4   5

  6

  7

  8

  9 10 11

12

13

d’Hermopolis, 2 vols (Paris: A le Clère, 1844), I 217–18. He became almoner to the king himself in 1821, partly due to the support of his ex-disciple de Quelen.This same year de Quélen became Archbishop of Paris and Frayssinous himself became Bishop of Hermopolis in 1822, and director of the University of Paris, (I 327, II 348–52). The two men were sworn allies and, between them, the most powerful theo­ logical forces in Restoration France. Paul Féval, Le Chevalier Ténèbre (Gloucester: Dodo Press [an Imprint of Goodridge Business], 2000), p. 20. ‘L’Espagne est une Chine au milieu de l’Europe’ (p. 35). Daniel Compère sees the novel as introducing a more sexual element into the vampire theme than Féval’s previous novel, by equating bloodthirstiness with sexual appetite – Daniel Compère, ‘Paul Féval et les vampires’, in Jean Rohou et Jacques Dugast (eds) Paul Féval: romancier populaire [Colloque de Rennes, 1987] (Rennes: Interferences, 1992), pp. 59–67, at p. 63. Paul Féval, La Vampire (Castelnau-le-Lez: Editions Climats, 2004), pp. 102, 120. ‘un sage selon la religion de la matière, et les dévots du néant qui refusent de le regarder comme un sage sont des fous’ – Féval, Le Chevalier Ténèbre, p. 83. ‘L’esprit humain … a la passion de contredire, toute précaution peut, en definitive, se traduire ou se résoudre par cette affirmation: je ne suis pas voleur’ (p. 83). Charles Buet, Paul Féval: Souvenirs d’un ami (Paris: 1887), p. 343. Féval, Le Chevalier Ténèbre, p. 127. ‘Place, Place pour Jean Raisin,/Le Jean Raisin devenu vin!/Laissez donc passer Jean Raisin/Avec son vieil ami le pain’ (Place, Place for John Grape/John Grape become wine!/ So let pass John Grape/With his old friend the bread’) (Gustave Matthieu, 1808–1877). In a slightly ironic book published in 1853, Adolphe Ricard writes an extended paean to ‘John Grape’ and ‘his mother the vine’, which collects several such poems that no doubt formed the lyrics for drinking songs of the era as well – Adolphe Ricard, Éloge de Jean Raisin et sa mère la vigne (Paris: Gustave Sandre, 1853), p. 19. Dorothee Fritz-El Ahmad, Untersuchungen zu den Feuilleton romanen von Paul Féval (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1986), pp. 216–18. Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 11. 211

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15 16 17

18

18

20

21

22 23

24

Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 170–3. Féval, Le Chevalier Ténèbre, p. 118. Buet, Paul Féval, p. 172. Napoleon III had argued vociferously for the unification of Wallachia and Moldova at the Congress of Paris in 1856 – Neculai Iorga, Histoire des relations entre la France et les Roumains (Paris: Librairie Payot, 1918), p. 233. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 26. J. S. Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 123. The story first appeared in serialized form for London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, from February–June 1872 (p. 333). W. J. McCormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu,Yeats and Bowen (Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 146. Jochen Achilles, ‘Fantasy as psychological necessity: Sheridan Le Fanu’s fiction’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothic Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam and Atlanta Ga.: Editions Rodopi, 1994), pp. 150–68, at p. 155. W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 189. Le Fanu, In A Glass Darkly, p. 129. James Walton, Vision and Vacancy: the Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), pp. 179, 181. During the beginnings of young Julien’s romance with Madame de Rênal, the reader is constantly reminded that neither Julien nor his beloved are able to follow the novels of the day (‘In Paris, the position of Julien in relation to Mme de Rênal would have been very quickly simplified; but in Paris, love is the child of novels . . . Novels would have traced the role for them to play . . .’ (‘A Paris, la position de Julien envers Mme de Rênal eût été bien vite simplifiée, mais à Paris, l’amour est fils des romans … Les romans leur auraient tracé le rôle à jouer . . .’) – Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1964), p. 60. According to Ann Jefferson, one of Stendhal’s declared aims in his own novel was to write a work that would defeat the afflatus of the Romance and describe modern Parisian love in a realistic way without the interference of convention. That said, in describing the ‘Saint-Réal’, or ‘Holy-Real’ of Paris in 1826 (see note 30), many of the lovers whom Stendhal describes are themselves copying the con­ ventions of fictional Romances popular at the time – Ann Jefferson, 212

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Notes

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

33 34 35

Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 67, 23. Byron,‘A Fragment’, in Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 227–32, at p. 231. Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, p. 134. The entry for δράκων in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1849), is ‘dragon, serpent’. Le Fanu had studied classics at Trinity College Dublin. Judith Barbour, ‘Dr John William Polidori, Author of the Vampyre’, Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism, ed. Peter Otto and Deirdre Coleman (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1992), pp. 85–110 at p. 86. David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 119. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis and E. J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 9. ‘Saint-Réal’ is the bogus source to whom Stendhal attributes his famous phrase ‘A novel: a mirror that is carried along a highway’ (‘Un roman: un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin’), his epigraph to Book I chapter 3 of Le Rouge et Le Noir, referred to several times thereafter – Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, pp. 100, 398. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 173–6, 183–92. David Punter gave an unwitting riposte to this view when describing how certain Gothic novels, in particular Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5), familiar­ ized historical events by attributing personal motives to historical figures that could be understood in their own day – David Punter, The Literature of Terror, pp. 51–3. The sudden decision by Julie’s daughter Hélène in Une femme de trente ans (1843) to run off with a murderous housebreaker and become a pirate’s wife, in a novel that otherwise attempts to establish with some accuracy the stages of history from the fall of Napoleon onwards, is a case in point. The extreme emotional responses and exotic details of many novels, historical or otherwise, published in France during the 1830s and 1840s, and with this a return to features borrowed from the Epic Romance, point not simply to a need for fantasy as understood by the likes of Nodier, but to a more general cynicism towards history and politics due to the constantly changing ideologies of the time. Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, p. 159. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 100. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 398; Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal, pp. 20–1. 213

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Charles Nodier (1821), ‘Critique littéraire: le Petit Pierre, traduit de l’allemand de SPIESS (à paraître chez l’Avocat, au Palais-Royal)’, Annales de la littérature et des arts (16ème Livraison), 81, 83.

6:The Refutation of Utilitarian Morality  1

 2

 3

 4

Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson,Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 32. Richard Walker has more recently made a similar observation – Richard J.Walker, Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Liver­ pool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 85. Arata has suggested that Mr Hyde’s appearance would have been easily recognisable as ‘trogolodytic’ to Stevenson’s characters, and that in them they would ‘discern the lineaments of Cesare Lombroso’s atavistic criminal’. – Stephen D. Arata (1995), ‘The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde’, Criticism 37.2, 233–247, at 233. This cannot have been possible, however, since Cesare Lombroso’s work was not actually translated into English until 1890, four years after the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the first publi­ cation being a study of criminal psychology in Zola’s La Bête Humaine for Monist magazine – Cesare Lombroso, The Criminal Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso Published in the English Language during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, ed. David M. Horton and Katherine E. Rich (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), pp. 1–25. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 98, 99. ‘Olalla’ was first published in Court and Society Review for Christmas 1885 and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published on 9 January 1886, at which point, according to Robert Mighall, Stevenson was working on the proofs for The Strange Case (p. x). It suffices to say that the conception and genesis of the two pieces is in fact con­ temporary. In 1884, not long before Stevenson began to compose these two stories, Galton had produced a Record of Family Faculties, in which families could register the linear movement of hereditary features. It states that ‘if the father of a family of children collects all the required data con­cerning his own parents and grandparents, and similarly those concerning the parents of his wife, then it is probable in most cases that their children, being informed about all their ancestry up to their eight great-grandparents 214

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Notes

 5

 6

 7

 8

 9 10

11

12

inclusive, will be equipped with almost as much hereditary information as they need.’ – Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties (London: R. Clay and Sons, 1884), pp. 1–2. It is fair to say that such a concept of record is presented in ‘Olalla’ (1886). Stevenson’s indebtedness to French Fantastic writing should be no surprise, given both his own mastery of the French language, and the continuing late nineteenth century vogue for frénétique or French Gothic texts by the likes of Eugène Sue – Terry Hale, ‘Translation in distress: cultural misappropriation and the culture of the Gothic’, in Avril Horner (ed.) European Gothic: a Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Man­ chester University Press, 2002), pp. 17–38, at pp. 32–3. This interest is indicated somewhat ironically in the novel Lady Audley’s Secret, in which the originally lacklustre hero Robert Audley is characterized as blasé about life due to his penchant for French novels – Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 32. Hillary J. Beatty (2005), ‘Dreaming, doubling and gender in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson: the strange case of “Olalla”’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 2, 10–32, at 13–14, 16. Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basing­ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 88. ‘A mighty fountain momently was forced: /. . . It flung up momently the sacred river./Five miles meandering with a mazy motion/Through wood and dale the sacred river ran’ – S.T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 297–98, ll. 19, 24–6. Stevenson, The Strange Case, p. 99. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 36: pt. 1: Sect VII; Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement: Part 2: Analytic of the Sublime, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 94: pt. 24. Frank Christianson observes the link between David Hume’s concept of sympathy and later philanthropic discourse in nineteenth century fiction, arguing that socially motivated moral ideas actually affect aesthetic structures – Frank Christianson, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 36–7, 50–4. Jansenism was a purifying movement in the Catholic Church based on the work of the Flemish Apostle, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who had argued that the Scholastics had over-intellectualized theology 215

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13

14

15

16

17

18

19 20

21 22 23

and that there should be a return to simple faith – St. Cyres,‘Jansenism’, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 12 vols (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914),VII 476–81, at 476. In his Augustinus he returned to Confessions and condoned the Doctrine of Grace. He was accused of condemning the main proponent of free will in Catholicism, St Pelagius, and saying it was a ‘semi-Pelagian heresy’ to believe men were free to adopt Grace or not, and that God died for all men. Hence Jansenists were frequently accused of Calvinism, which they denied (VI, 476, 478). It is unlikely that Stevenson had an in-depth knowledge of Jansen­ ism, and may simply have been attributing the Augustinian (and indeed Calvinist) ideas he admired to a Catholic worshipper. Julia Reid notes that the picture of the ancestor can be interpreted as both a typical Gothic motif, related to the fall of a great house, and also as Galton’s notion of the ‘common physiognomic image of the family’ – Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, pp. 86–7. Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 13–14, 131. For a discussion of Pelagius’s belief system, including his acceptance of free will, grace through merit and other differences with Augustine, please see R. G. Parsons,‘Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism’, in Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, IX 703–11, at 706–708. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1994), IV 239 (c.6 February 1884). In the same letter he curses the government of Gladstone, largely as a result of its refusal to back General Gordon’s occupation of Khartoum – see below. Augustine, The Confessions,The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (Chicago, London, Toronto, Geneva: William Benton,1952), p. 9, Bk. II. pt. 2. Stevenson was working from the famous French translation of Arnaud d’Andilly, which he appears to have found very poor. Augustine, Confessions, p. 23; Bk. IV pt. 12. Original sin, the belief that the human condition is damned to lust or ‘concupiscence’ as a result of Adam’s first sin, is not explicitly discussed in Confessions, although Stevenson’s Calvinist background would have certainly made him aware of this. Stevenson, Letters,V 66. Stevenson, The Strange Case, p. 134. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876), p. 1. 216

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Notes 24 25

26

27 28 29

30

31

32

33 34

35

36 37 38 39

40

J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourne: 1863), p. 10. Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, pp. 50–1. W. T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: the Report of our Secret Commission’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July1885 – http:// www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 27. Walker, Labyrinths of Deceit, p. 75. W. T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon II: the Report of our Secret Commission’, 7 July 1885. Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, p. 71. Sigmund Freud,‘The Uncanny’, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 121–61, at pp. 121, 151, 161–2. Clifford Hallam, ‘The Double as incomplete self: toward a definition of the Doppelgänger’, in Eugene J. Crook (ed.) Fearful Symmetry: Double and Doubling in Literature and Film (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida,1981), pp. 1–29. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 7. What he terms ‘an incessant sliding under the signifier’ – Jacques Lacan, ‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud,’ (1957) in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 493–528, at p. 502. Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychoanalytique’, in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–101, at p. 94. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 13. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 121. Stevenson, Letters,V 81. In the letter to his parents of c.6 February 1884, he laments the defeat of Valentine Baker’s Anglo-Egyptian force on the Red Sea Coast, saying ‘of course it dooms Gordon, and the rest. God will require these lives at the hand of that old man. I would rather be a louse this day than W. E. Gladstone. I give up this government.’ In his later letter to Colvin, in which he quotes from the Confessions, Stevenson berates the whole Liberal administration, complaining that ‘Chamberlain [is] a swindler; Gladstone a man of fog’ (IV 239, 245). Richard Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 351–2, 359. 217

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43 44 45

46 47 48 49

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 112. In his autobiography Mill recounts how he had spoken in favour of suffrage for the working class in 1867, the time of the Second Reform Bill, and had even prevented widespread rioting through his intercession – J. S. Mill, Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 213–14.This was the Bill that had provided the vote to all male ‘ten-pound-householders’, and whose good work Gladstone was attempting to make permanent in 1884 with boundary changes. Christianson, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction, pp. 8–9, 32–9. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 5. Wilkie Collins, ‘Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman’, Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology, ed. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 198–218, at pp. 210, 217. Richard Walker, Labyrinths of Deceit, pp. 83, 85. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 55. Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 10. Walker, Labyrinths of Deceit, p. 84.

218

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Short Chronology of Relevant Events

 1786: The Affair of the Necklace: Cardinal Rohan and Cagliostro acquitted. 1788: Parlements refuse to register new taxation laws in financial crisis. Jacques Necker recalled as First Minister. 5 May: Estates General called at Versailles to sort out the 1789: crisis; Nobility and Clergy each have one vote,Third Estate (Nation) two. 20 June:Versailles locked; Third Estate moved to Royal Tennis Court; institutes National Assembly. 11 July: Necker is dismissed after publishing an overly optimistic account on deficit. 14 July: Bastille stormed due to dismissal of Necker. 19 July: Necker reappointed – fails to reassert authority over crumbling Estates General. August: National Assembly issues The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. October: Declares Constitutional Monarchy. National Assembly replaced by Legislative Assembly. 1790: 1792: 21 September: Jacobin faction in Legislative Assembly declares Republic. 1793: Louis XVI executed.

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The Fantastic and European Gothic

Maximilien Robespierre becomes head of Commission for Public Safety; Official Terror begins; Cult of the Supreme Being. 1794: Thermidorian Reaction: Robespierre arrested with other Jacobins and executed without trial. Terror ends. 1795: Legislative Assembly replaced by five-man Directoire. Napoleon, young General. Wins battle of the Pyramids 1796: in Egypt; Battle of Lodi in Italy. 1797: Treaty of Campoforcio; leads to Dissolution of Venetian Empire, and recognition of French influence in Italy and Dalmatia. Brumaire Coup: Napoleon, backed by General Moreau, 1799: persuades five-man Directoire to stand down in favour of Consulate; Napoleon First Consul. 1804: Napoleon declares himself Emperor: Institution of La Grande Empire. 1805: Battle of Trafalgar – Napoleon defeated at sea. 1806: Napoleon invades Austria; Battle of Austerlitz; destroys Austrian–Russian alliance. 1807: Napoleon signs Treaty with Russia. 1809: Battle of Wagram – Napoleon defeats Austria’s new alliance. 1812: Treaty of Bucharest – Russia at peace with Ottoman Empire and attains Eastern Moldova as a principality. 1812–14: Invasion of Russia; Peninsular War – Napoleon eventually driven out of Spain by Wellesley. 1814: French in Prussia, retreating from Alexander I; Napoleon’s First Abdication and Treaty of Paris. 1815: The 100 days: Napoleon returns and overthrows restored monarch; defeated by Wellesley at Waterloo; Bourbon regime restored with Louis XVIII. 1825: Louis XVIII dies; replaced by despotic Charles X. 1830: July Revolution: new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe Orléans; Guizot First Minister. 1832: Reform Bill in Great Britain passed in Parliament; increases Franchise and ends all direct Royal power. 1837: Victoria becomes Queen of England. 1848: Uprising in Paris; Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, becomes new elected leader. 220

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Chronology

1851: 1852: 1853–6: 1860: 1867: 1883–4:

Louis-Napoléon becomes dictator. Declares himself Napoleon II; Second Empire. Crimean War. Free Trade agreement between France and Great Britain. Electoral Franchise extended in Great Britain. General Gordon besieged and killed by Mahdi in Khartoum; boundary changes in Britain.

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Rolf Teidemann (repr. Cam­ bridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876). Bérard, Cyprien, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires [with a Preface by Charles Nodier] (Paris: Ladvocat, 1820). Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1994). Brown, Hilda Meldrum, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2006). Buchez, A., untitled review in L’Européen (25 février 1832). Buet, Charles, Paul Féval: Souvenirs d’un ami (Paris: 1887). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Castex, Pierre-Georges, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1951). Christianson, Frank, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Coleridge, S. T., Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). Collins, Wilkie, ‘Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman’, in Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert (eds), Victorian Ghost Stories: an Oxford Anthology (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 198–218. Compère, Daniel, ‘Paul Féval et les vampires’, Paul Féval, romancier populaire: Colloque de Rennes, 1987, in Jean Rohou et Jacques Dugast (eds) (Rennes: Interférences, 1992), pp. 59–67. Cornwell, Neil, The Literary Fantastic (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Diderot, Denis, Lettre sur les Aveugles (Londres: 1749). Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Dryden, Linda, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Essig, Edward O, A History of Entomology (repr. New York and London: Hafner, 1965). Féval, Paul, Les Drames de la Mort: La Chambre des Amours et La Vampire (Verviers: Marabout, 1969). —— Le Chevalier Ténèbre (Gloucester: Dodo Press [an Imprint of Goodridge Business], 2000). —— Pas de Divorce: Réponse à M. Alexandre Dumas (Paris, Bruxelles: Société Générale de Librairie Catholique, 1880). 224

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Bibliography —— La Vampire [1856] (Castelnau-le-Lez: Editions Climats et Editions Ombres, 2004). Fortis, Abate Alberto, Viaggio in Dalmazia, dell’ Abate Alberto Fortis, 2 vols (Venezia: Presso Alvise Milocco, all Apolline, 1774). Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003). Fritz-El Ahmad, Dorothee, Untersuchungen zu den Feuilleton Romanen von Paul Féval (Frankfurt-am-Main; Bern; New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1986). Galton, Francis, Record of Family Faculties (London: R. Clay and Sons, 1884). Gautier, Théophile, La Comédie de la Mort, in Premières Poesies: 1830–1845 (Paris: Charpentier, 1870). —— Correspondance Générale, éditée par Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, sous la direction de Pierre Laubriet (Geneve–Paris: Librairie Droz, 1985). —— Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). —— Souvenirs de Théatre, et d’Art (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1903). —— Récits fantastiques, ed. Marc Eigeldinger (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1981). Gibson, Matthew, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Gil Curiel, Germán, A Comparative Approach: The Early European Supernatural Tale – Five Variations on a Theme (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011). Glinoer, Anthony, La Littérature Frénétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). Goldstein, Robert Justin, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Macmillan Press, 1989). Gordon, George, Lord Byron, ‘A Fragment’, in Mary Shelley, Franken­ stein, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 227–32. Gorski, Gisela, E. T. A. Hoffmann ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ (Stuttgart: Akadamischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1980). Guichard, Leon, ‘Un Emprunt de Gautier à Hoffmann’, Revue de littérature comparée 21 (janvier 1947), 92–4. Hahnemann, Samuel, Exposition de la doctrine médicale homéopathique ou Organon de l’art de guérir, trans. A. J. L. Jourdain (Paris: J. B. Ballière, 1845). Hale, Terry, ‘Translation in distress: cultural misappropriation and the culture of the Gothic’, in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic: a Spirited 225

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 17–38. Hallam, Clifford, ‘The Double as incomplete self: toward a definition of the Doppelgänger’, in Eugene J. Crook (ed.), Fearful Symmetry: Double and Doubling in Literature and Film (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981), pp. 1–29. Hastings, James (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 12 vols (Edin­ burgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914). Henry-Rosier, Marguérite, La Vie de Charles Nodier (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1931). Himmel, Helmuth, ‘Schuld und Suhne der Scuderi: zu Hoffmanns Novelle’, Mitteilungen der E. T. A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft, 7 (1960), 1–15. Hoffmann, E. T. A., Der Artushof/Die Bergwerke zu Falun: Zwei Erzählungen (Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag, 1986). —— Briefswechsel, ed. Hans von Müller and Friedrich Schnapp, 3 vols (Munich: Winkler–Verlag, 1967). —— Contes fantastiques, trans. M. Loève-Veimars, et precédé d’une notice historique sur Hoffmann (repr. Paris: Eugène Renduel, 1832). —— ‘Le Doge et la Dogaresse’, Contes Fantastiques de E. T. A. Hoffmann trans. Henry Egmont, 4 vols (Paris: Camuzeaux, Librairie-Editeur, 1836). —— Mademoiselle de Scudery, trans. R, Bibliothèque universelle de Genève XXXVI (jan-fév 1828). —— The Serapion Brethren, trans. Lt.-Col. Alex Ewing, 2 vols (London: George Bell and sons, 1892). —— Der Sandmann, Das Fräulein von Scuderi: Erzahlungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008). Hübener, Andrea, Kreisler in Frankreich: E. T. A. Hoffmann und die Franzözischen Romantiker (Heidelberg: Universität Winter, 2004). Huizinga, J, The Waning of the Middle Ages: a Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and in the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (London: Penguin, 1955). Iorga, Neculai, Histoire des relations entre la France et les Roumains (Paris: Librairie Payot, 1918). Jefferson, Ann, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1988). Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Klein, Melanie, et al., Developments in Psychoanalysis (repr. London: Karnac Books, 1989). 226

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Bibliography Johnson, Samuel, ‘Preface’, in Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (eds), The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, 9 vols (London: J. Humpus, 1821). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966). Leitherer, Hans, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann und die Alchimie’, Mitteilungen der E. T. A. Hoffmann-Gessellschaft, 7 (1960), 24–6. Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). Lombroso, Cesare, The Criminal Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso Published in the English Language during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, ed. David M. Horton and Katherine E. Rich (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). Lowe-Dupas, Hélène, Poétique de la Coupure chez Charles Nodier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962). McCalman, Iain, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (London: Century, 2003). McCormack, W. J., Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester University Press, 1993). McCormack, W. J., Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Macgregor Mathers, S. L. (trans.), The Kabbalah Unveiled (from the Latin translation of Knorr Von Rosenroth) (repr. London: Arkana, 1991). Magraw, Roger, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1981). Maixner, Rudolf, Charles Nodier et l’Illyrie (Paris: Dider, 1960). Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol I – Part 1: The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Edward Untermann (repr. New York: Cosimo, 2007). Mathieu, Baron Richard Auguste, Vie de M. Frayssinous, Evêque de Hermopolis (Paris: A Le Clère, 1844). Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1989). —— Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourne: 1863). Montandon, Alain, ‘Gautier et Balzac: à propos de La Morte amoureuse’: Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier, 15 (1993), 263–86. Nodier, Charles, Bibliographie entomologique, ou catalogue raisonné des ouvrages relatifs à l’Entomologie et aux insectes (Paris: Moutardier, 1801 [An IX]). —— Contes de Charles Nodier (Paris: J Hetzel, 1946). —— Contes du Pays des Rêves, ed. Jean Richer (Paris: Club des Librairies de France, 1952). 227

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The Fantastic and European Gothic —— Correspondance de Jeunesse: Edition établie, presentée et annotée par Jacques-Remi Dahan, 2 vols (1793–1809; 1810–13) (Genève: Librairie Droz S. A., 1995). —— ‘Critique littéraire: le Petit Pierre, traduit de l’allemand de SPIESS (à paraître chez l’Avocat, au Palais-Royal)’, Annales de la littérature et des arts (16ème Livraison) (1821). —— Dissertation sur l’usage des antennes des insectes (Besançon, 1798). —— Du Fantastique en littérature (Paris: Chimères, 1989). —— Feuilletons du Temps: Tome I – Articles et feuillletons (1830–1843), ed. Jacques-Remi Dahan (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2010). —— Infernaliana: ou anecdotes, petits romans nouvelles et contes, sur les révenants, les spectres, les démons et les vampires, préface de Hubert Juin (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1966). —— Jean Sbogar, ed. Jean Sgard et étudiants (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1987). —— Souvenirs, portraits, épisodes de la révolution et de l’empire, 2 vols (new edn Paris: Charpentier, 1864). —— Statistique Illyrienne: articles complets du ‘Télégraphe Officiel’ de l’année 1813, ed. France Dobrovjc (Ljubljana: Edition ‘Satura’, 1933). Oliver, A. Richard, Charles Nodier, Pilot of Romanticism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1964). Pichot, Amédée, Essai sur le génie et le caractère de Lord Byron, precédé d’une notice préliminaire par M. Charles Nodier (Paris: Ladvocat, Librairie, Palais-Royal, 1824). Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). de Pitaval, François Guyot, Merkwürdige Rechtsfalle als ein beitrag Geschichte der Menschheit, nach dem Fransösischen Werk des Pitaval, durch mehrere Verfasser ausgearbeitet und mit einer Vorrede begleitet herausgegeben von Schiller, 4 vols (Jena: bei Christ. Heinr, Cuno’s Erben, 1793). de Planchy, Collin, Dictionnaire Infernale, 2 vols (2nd edn Paris: à la librairie de P. Mongie ainé, 1825). Plessis, Alain, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Porter, Laurence, The Literary Dream in French Romanticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979). Punter, David, The Literature of Terror, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1981). Purves, Maria, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). Radcliffe, Ann ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16/1 (1826), 145–52. 228

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Bibliography Reclus, Elisée, ‘Voyage aux regions minières de Transylvanie Occidentale’, Le Tour du Monde, 28 (Paris: Hachette, 1874), 1–48. Reid, Julia, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Ricard, Adolphe, Eloge de Jean Raisin et sa mère la vigne (Paris: Gustave Sandre, 1853). Rioux, Jean-Claude, ‘Les Tablettes de Jean Sbogar, ou Le Voleur et la révolution’, in Charles Nodier. Colloque du deuxieme centenaire. Besançon. Mai 1980. Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, pp. 113–32. Röder, Birgit, A Study of the Major Novellas of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2003). Rogers, Bryan, Charles Nodier et la tentation de la folie (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985). Saint-Edme, B., Répositoire general des causes célèbres, anciennes et modernes, serie 1, rédigé par une société d’hommes de lettres, sous la direction de B. Saint-Edme (Paris: Louis Rosier, 1834). Scanu, Ada Myriam, Charles Nodier: Du Fantastique en littérature, Séminaire d’Histoire Littéraire: la naissance du fantastique en Europe – Histoire et Théorie (2004), www.rilune.org. Scott, Walter, ‘Du Merveilleux dans le roman’, Revue de Paris (March 1829), 26–33. Seymour, Fanny, ‘Bulletin bibliographique’, Revue encyclopédique 36 (9 December 1827), 683. Smith, Albert B., Ideal and Reality in the Fictional Narratives of Théophile Gautier, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 30 (Gaines­ ville: University of Florida Press, 1969). Smith, Lansing Evans, ‘Myths of poesis, hermeneusis and psychogenesis in Hoffmann, Tagore and Gillmann’, Studies in Short Fiction, 34/2 (Spring: 1997), 227–36. Schiller, Friedrich, Merkwurdige Rechtsfalle als ein beitrag Geschichte der Menschheit, nach dem Fransösischen Werk des Pitaval, durch mehrere Berfasser ausgearbeitet und mit einer Borrede begleitet herausgegeben von Schiller, 4 vols ( Jena: Christ. Heinr, Cuno’s Erben, 1793). de Senneville, Gérard, Théophile Gautier (Paris: Fayard, 2005). Shannon, Richard, Gladstone: God and Politics (London: Continuum, 2007). Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1964). Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 229

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The Fantastic and European Gothic Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Books, 2002). Stead, W. T., ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: the Report of our Secret Commission’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 6–10 July, 1885, http:// www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute. Swedenborg, Emmanuel, The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial Love, trans. A. H. Searle (London: the Swedenborg Society, 1891). Tate, Allen, Collected Essays (Denver: Allen Swallow, 1959). Teichmann, Elizabeth, La Fortune d’Hoffmann en France (Genève: Librairie E. Droz; Paris: Librairie Minard, 1961). Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960). Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XIV, ed. Mr de La B***, Nouvelle Edition, 2 Vols. (Francfort: Veuve Knoch & J. G. Eslinger, 1753). Walker, Richard J., Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis and E. J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Walton, James, Vision and Vacancy: the Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). Wasdall, David, ‘Anxiety Defences: their Origin, Functioning and Evolution’, 2 pts (London: Meridian Project, 2002). Weishaupt, Adam, Uber Materialismus und Idealismus: ein Philosophisches Fragment (1796). Whyte, Peter, ‘Autour d’Onuphrius et de La Vie dans la Mort’, La Comédie de la vie et de la mort: Colloque internationale Maisons-Lafitte Juin 1996, Bulletin de la société Théophile Gautier, 18 (1996), 203–17. Yates, Frances, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (repr. London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1986).

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Index



Académie Française 196 Achille, Jochen 151, 212 Achilles 143 Agamemnon 143 Amiens 19 Ampère, J.-J. 3, 53, 106 Apuleius 25 The Arabian Nights 40, 53, 57, 126 Arata, Stephen D. 214 Argenson, Marc-René d’ 56 Aristotle 25 Arnaud d’Andilly, Pierre 58, 216 Ariosto 157, 201 L’Arsenal 2, 18 Assassins, Caste of 134 Auerbach, Erich 199, Augustine 163, 168, 170–3, 175, 176, 183, 184, 188, 200, 216 Austerlitz, Battle of 220 Austria/Austro-Hungarian Empire 12, 13, 113, 145–6, 220 Avignon-Le-Roux, Véronique 84, 204

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Babeuf, François-Noël 194 Bacchus 143 Baker, Valentine 217 Bakhtin, Mikhail 77 Balzac, Honoré de 8, 53,79, 80, 118, 145, 152, 207, 212, 213 Une Femme de Trente Ans 158 La Peau de Chagrin 158 La Rabouilleuse 117–18 Séraphita 104 Barbour, Judith 109, 157, 192, 208, 213 Barcelona 42, 45 Bastille 62, 219 Baudelaire, Charles 14, 54 Beatty, Hilary J. 164–5, 215 Belgium 153 Belgrade 114, 126, 144 Benjamin, Walter 99–101, 119, 207, 209 Bentham, Jeremy 163, 173–5, 176, 182, 183–4, 187, 216, 217, 218

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Index Bérard, Cyprien 18, 24, 94,191, 193, 194–5 Berlin 59, 199 Besançon 29, 33 Bibliothèque universelle de Genève 53 Bloomsbury 179 Le bon Sens du people: Journal des honnêtes Gens 110 Bonapartism 19, 109, 114, 123, 127, 130, 133, 137, 144: see also Napoleon I Borel, Petrus 89 Botticelli 83, 91 Botting, Fred 6, 47, 137, 192, 210 Booth, Bradford A. 216 Bourbon dynasty 7, 12, 19, 43, 79, 163, 220 and Féval 113–14, 143, 145,167 and Stevenson 163 Braddon, Mary Elisabeth 215 Bretonvillers 121, 123, 124, 134 Brinvilliers, Marquise de 56, 70–2, 201 Britain (England) 102, 106, 154, 182, 144, 147, 153, 190, 220, 221 and Hoffmann 58 literature of 14, 21, 23 British Gothic 2, 3–4, 6, 10, 17, 35, 130, 141, 170 Brooke-Rose Christina 3 Brown, Hilda M. 59, 61–2, 75–6, 200, 202 Bruce, Countess 154, Brumaire Coup 12, 19, 62, 220 Bucharest, Treaty of (1812) 220 Buchez, A. 26, 195 Budapest 136, 144 Buet, Charles 111, 113–14, 208, 211, 212

Bulgaria 122, 126, 128 Bulletin politique et littéraire du Doubs 19 Burke, Edmund (Burkean) 13, 14, 134, 142, 195, 210, 215 Byron, Lord 1, 135, 195, 204, 213, and Le Fanu 151, 153–6, 161 and Nodier 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29 works Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 153, 156 Fragment 153–5, 156, 161, 213 Cabbala 76, 203 Cabinets de Lecture 204–5 Cadoudal, Georges 109, 114, 121, 122, 123, 125, 134, 208 Cagliostro, Count Alessandro di 71–2, 73, 102, 117, 202, 219 Calvinism 163, 165, 171–2, 216 Cambridge 30 Campoforcio, Treaty of (1797) 122, 220 Carlist War, Second 163 Carniola 19 Castex, Pierre-Georges 37, 89, 95, 197, 205, 206 Catalonia 163 Catholic Church (and Catholicism) 4, 14, 119, 165 and Austria 12, 146, 193 and Bourbon dynasty 60, 114, 210 and English/British Gothic 5, 14, 15, 170, 193, 226 and Féval 5, 14–15, 111, 113–14, 119, 141 and French Revolution 2, 11, 12, 34

232

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Index and Gautier 5, 80, 92, 95, 97–8, 103, 105 Jansenism in 168, 215–16 morality of 5, 6, 15, 80, 92, 97–8, 119, 141, 170–3 and Stevenson 5, 165, 170–3 symbolism of 67 Censorship 8, 110, 119, 126–7, 179 Chambord, Henri, Comte de 113 La Chambre Ardente 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 70 Charles X 12, 80, 83, 109, 112, 220 Chateaubriand, François-René de 118, 147 The Chemical Marriage of Father Christian Rosenkreutz 68, 76 China 141, 149 Chouans 12, 19, 113, 114, 122, 123, 208 Christianson, Frank 183, 215, 218 Chronik von Nürnberg 201 Chronique de Paris 198, 204 Clarétie, Jules 112 Clery, E. J. 213 Colbert, Jean Baptiste 61 Coleman, Deirdre 192, 208, 213 Coleridge, S. T. 1, 36, 166, 215 Collins, Wilkie 176, 184–5, 218 Columbus, Christopher 91, 206 Colvin, Sidney 171–2, 217 Compère, Daniel 15, 209, 211 Comte, Auguste 142 Concini, Concino 93, 100, 101–2, 105, 207 Congress of Paris (1856) 212 Consulate 12, 19, 220 Corinth 25, 79 Corinthians 172 Cornwell, Neil 3, 4, 77, 191, 203

Counter-revolution 14–17, 21, 62, 73, 77, 111 Court and Society Review 214 Crete 177, 179 Crimean war 13, 130, 221 Croft, Sir Henry 19 Crook, Eugene J. 192, 205, 217 Crouzet, Michel 203, 212 Cyres, St 216 Daedalus 177 Dahan, Jacques-Rémy 196, 197 Dante 75 Darwin 163, 168–9, 170 David, Jacques-Louis 143 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 13, 119, 219 De Haller, Albert 32 De la Motte, Jeanne 71 De Poli, Oscar 111, 113 De Quélen, Monsignor Hyacinthe-Louis 109, 138, 140, 211 De Senneville, Gérard 203 Dickens, Charles 117 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 180 Doyle, William 192, 202 Dresden 72, 199 Dryden, Linda 162, 176, 179, 214, 217 Du Camp, Maxime 126 Dublin Evening Mail 156 Ducasse, Isadore 14 Dugast, Jacques 209, 211 Dumas, Alexandre 5, 36, 111, 197, 208 Dumas, Alexandre, fils 129 East India Company 74 Egmont, Henry 206, 207 233

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Index Egypt 102, 183, 217, 220 Eigeldinger, Marc 205, 210 Eigner, Edwin, M. 165 Eliza Armstrong case 176–7 Entomology 4, 31–3, 41, 197 Essig, Edward O. 197 The Estates General 11, 117, 219 Europa, Queen of Crete 179 European/ French Gothic 5–6, 15–16, 47, 225: see also Fantastic; frénétique Fabricius, Johan Christian 32 Fantastic (fantastique) counter-revolutionary Fantastic 16, 73 Fantastic-uncanny/marvelous 1, 3, 5, 9, 18, 40, 42, 45, 47, 51, 59, 109, 131, 140, 159, 189 and Féval 6, 8, 73, 109, 121, 127, 130 in France 2–6, 9, 14, 15, 20, 52–6, 74, 77 and French Critics 52–6, 74, 77 and frénétique 2, 6,7, 14–15, 17, 20–1, 23, 34, 36, 47, 73, 130 and Gautier 38, 63, 73, 77, 80–1, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 102, 105–6 and Gothic 106, 120, 124, 155 and Historical novel 16, 18, 77, 102, 121, 124 and Hoffmann 2–4, 28–9, 38, 48–55, 59, 73–4, 86, 91, 102 of Nodier 6, 18, 20–1, 23, 28–30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36–7, 38 42, 47, 51–2, 54, 85, 188 pure Fantastic 4, 59, 73 and Scott 28–9, 48–52, 73–4, 86 Faust (Faustian) 6, 15, 135–6, 145–6, 147, 188

Favart, Charles Simon 40 Feuillant faction 11 Féval, Paul 1, 13, 17, 38, 73, 77, 100, 106, 163, 176, 180, 188, 190, 192, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 and European/French Gothic 5, 47 and Catholicism 5, 14, 111, 113–14, 119, 141 and counter-revolution 14–15 Correspondence of 111–14 and Fantastic, 6, 8, 73, 109, 121, 127, 130 and frénétique 3, 5–6, 7, 8, 73, 77, 109, 110, 117, 121, 130–1, 133, 135, 142, 146 and Historical novel 7, 8, 16, 111, 117, 120–1, 124, 125, 130, 133, 135, 146, 147–8 and homeopathy 10, 111, 131–3, 210 and legitimism 7, 14, 73, 111, 113, 118, 137, 141, 143, 147–8, 188 and Napoleon III 111, 114, 119, 126, 129, 130, 144, 146–7 and Sacre-Coeur 111 and La Société des Gens de Lettres 111,114 works Alizia Pauli 110 Le Bossu 108 La Cavalière 111 La Chambre des Amours 16, 110, 115–21, 124, 132, 134, 207, 208–9 Le Chevalier Ténèbre 15, 108–9, 114, 120, 136, 137–48, 160, 161, 208–9, 210, 211

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Index Les Mystères de Londres 108, 110, 117 Pas de Divorce! 111, 208 La Vampire 9, 15, 108–10, 111, 121–36, 140–4, 145–7, 156, 161, 180, 208, 209–10 La Ville-Vampire 9, 15, 108, 208 Le Figaro 13, 54, 199, 209 First Empire of France 12, 19, 34, 130 135, 220 First Reform Bill 220 Flaubert, Gustave 7, 158 Franche-Comté 19 Fraser’s Magazine 175, 187 Freemasonry 11, 71, 76 Foreign Quarterly Review 195, Fortis, Abate Alberto 25, 195 Foucault, Michel 10 Fouquet, Nicolas 201 France 84, 86, 89, 110, 113, 127–9, 144, 191–2, 194–5, 197, 199, 200, 203–7, 209, 211–13 in seventeenth century 17 and le fantastique 3, 15, 35, 48–54, 77, 190 legitimism in 22, 38 in North Africa 102, 110, 118 and First Empire 12 and Hoffmann 3, 48–54, 62 in Middle Ages 64–5 and Restoration 12, 148, 153, 159, and Revolution 11, 14: see also French Revolution and romantisme 1–2, 17, 18, 21 La France littéraire 205 Frayssinous, Denis, Bishop of Hermopolis 138–40, 140–1, 210–11 French Revolution 7, 10–14, 55, 71–3, 134, 144, 147, 192, 202

and Féval 109, 110, 115, 118, 119–21 and Hoffmann 16, 55, 62, 71, 72, 73 and Nodier 22, 27, 31, 32–4, 47 frénétique 35, 158, 160, 188, 189–90, 194, 199, 215 and fantastique 2–6, 7, 10, 14–15, 17, 20–1, 23, 34, 36, 47, 73, 130 and Féval 3, 5–6, 8,73, 109, 110, 117, 121, 130–1, 133, 135, 140, 142, 146, 188 and Gautier 73 and Nodier 20–1, 23–4, 26, 28, 34, 36, 47, 160, 188 and Stevenson 6, 188 and Eugène Sue 5 and Urban Gothic 117, 121, 133, 135 Freud, Sigmund 9, 58, 180, 205, 217 Freudian 90, 133, 165 Fritz-El Ahmad, Dorothee 15, 114, 208, 211 Fröhsdorf, Austria 113–14 La Fronde 61, 200 Galton, Francis 162, 165, 172–3, 175, 176, 214–15, 216 Gautier, Théophile 4–5, 7–9, 15–6, 48, 107, 190, 203–7, 210 views on art 79, 81–6, 95 and Catholicism 5, 80, 92, 95, 97–8, 103, 105 correspondence 203 and Historical fiction 16–17, 38, 77, 121, 132, and Féval 63, 107, 134, 136

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Index Fantastic in 38, 63, 73, 77, 80–1, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 102, 105–6 and Hoffmann 80–1, 84–6, 88–9, 90–1, 92, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103–5, 121 and Louis-Philippe 80, 81, 83, 92, 100, 105 politics of 14, 79–80, 81 and Stevenson 164, 176, 180 works La Cafetière 80 ‘Le Club des Hachichins’ 84, 134, 210 La Comedie de la mort 134, 136, 205, 210 ‘Les Contes de Hoffmann’ 81, 84–6, 198, 204 ‘Omphale’ 80 ‘Onuphrius’ 80, 86–92, 180, 205, 206, Mademoiselle de Maupin 80, 81–4, 91, 92, 94–7, 105, 203–4, 206–8 ‘La Morte amoureuse’ 5, 16–17, 92–5, 97–106, 107, 130, 164, 176, 180, 205–8 ‘La Pipe d’opium’ 84 Gibson, Matthew 191, 209 Gil Curiel, Germán 4, 15, 26, 31, 85, 94, 95, 192, 193, 195, 197–8, 204, 206 Gilgamesh and Enkidu 9 Girona 42 Girondin Faction 11, 12 Gladstone, William Ewart 175, 182–4, 216, 217, 218 Glasgow 38, 39–40 Glinoer, Anthony 2, 15, 23–4, 191, 194 Le Globe 53, 54

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 21, 136 Goldstein, Robert 126, 209 Göteburg 74 Gordon, General Charles 182–4, 216, 217, 221 Gorski, Gisela 61, 64, 200, 201 Goya, Francisco 204 Grand Waradein 138, 140 Greece 150, 153–4 Greenock 39–40 Grimm brothers 49, 50 Guichard, Leon 207 Guizot, François 13, 220 Gulliver’s Travels 40 Hachichins 84, 134, 210 Hahnemann, Samuel 10, 111, 123, 128, 131–2, 134–5, 136, 141, 147, 210 Hale, Terry 2, 15, 191, 194, 215 Hallam, Clifford 9, 90, 106, 180, 192, 205, 217 Hapsburg dynasty 146 Hastings, James 216 Hébert, Jacques-René 11, 23, 123, 194 Hector 143 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 7, 10, 118, 125, 158 Henri IV 101 Henley, Ian 192 Henrietta, Princess 58, 69, 201 Henry-Rosier, Marguérite 19, 193 Hercules 56, 62, 200 Hermeticism (alchemy) 56, 67–8, 70–1, 72, 76, 126, 202 Herodotus 41, 45, 198 Himmel, Helmuth 59, 200 Hindle, Maurice 213 236

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Index Hinduism 178–9 Hitzig, Julius Eduard 5 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 2–5, 7–8, 12–17, 89, 91, 92, 94–5, 98, 102–5, 117, 121, 152, 190, 192, 195, 198–202, 204, 206–7 correspondence of 72, 202 and Fantastic 2–4, 28–9, 38, 48–55, 59, 73–4, 86, 91, 102 in France 3–4, 15, 28, 48–54, 62 and French critics 3–4, 48, 50–5, 74, 77 and Gautier 38, 48, 81, 84–6, 190, 198, 204 and Nodier 3, 28–9, 38, 48, 53–4, 74 politics of 13, 14, 59–60, 72–4, 77 and Scott 2–3, 8, 10, 28, 38, 48–55, 73–4, 77, 84 works ‘Aventures de la nuit de Sylvestre’ [Der Nacht vor Sylwester] 88 Der Baron von B 199 Die Bergewerke zu Falun 4, 51, 68,74–8, 109, 201–2 Die Brautwohl 68 Doge und Dogaressa 53–4, 72, 103–4, 105, 202, Das Fräulein von Scuderi 7, 16, 52, 55–74, 99, 102, 106, 130, 199–202 Gästliche Geschichte 206 Der Goldne Topf 68 Ritter Gluck 4, 54 Der Sandmann 4, 55, 58–9, 71, 90, 106, 200, 201, 202 Die Serapionsbrüder 59, 60–1, 67, 69, 200, 201, 202

Holy Alliance 12 Holy Virgin Church, St Eustace 58 Homer 29, 143 Horace 196 Horner, Avril 191, 194 Horton, David M. 214 Hübener, Andrea 15 Hugo, Victor 18, 36, 79, 197 Huizinga, J. 64–6, 200–1 Hume, David 167, 183, 215 Hungary 7, 26, 109, 113–14, 121, 122, 128–9, 144–5 Huysmans, J.-K. 165 Île St-Louis 121, 134 Iorga, Neculai 209, 212 Islam 102–3, 183 Isle of Man 39 Italy, Kingdom of 146 Italy 12, 56, 67, 71, 101, 151, 152, 153, 220 Jacobins 11–12, 19, 22, 114, 194, 219–20 Jacobites 111, 139 Jeunes-France movement 86, 89, 204 Johnson, Samuel 30, 49, 196, 198 Journal des débats 18, 23, 54 Juggernaut 178 Jung, Karl 9, 26, 90 Jansenism 168, 172, 215–16 Jean Raisin 143, 211 Jefferson, Ann 159, 212–13 Johnson, Samuel 30, 49, Jouffroy, Albert 18, 23, 134–5 Jouy, Etienne 196, Juin, Herbert 195, July Monarchy 8, 79, 82, 111, 220

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Index July Revolution 12, 79, 113, 22084 Kant (Kantian) 59, 166, 173, 215 Khartoum 182–3, 216, 221 Klein, Melanie (Kleinian) 90–1, 92, 205–6 La Touche, Henri 52 Lacan, Jacques (Lacanian) 181, 217 Lacoste-Veysseyre, Claudine 203 Lamarck, J.-B. 32–3 Lamartine, Alphonse de 18 Larissa, Thessaly 24 Laybach 19 Laubriet, Pierre 203 Le Fanu, J. S. 8, 14–15, 137, 148, 190 and Byron 151, 153–6, 161 politics of 160–1 and Stendhal 152, 156, 161 works ‘Carmilla’ 148, 151, 152 ‘Green Tea’ 152 In a Glass Darkly 212–13 ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ 14–15, 148–61, 212–13 Uncle Silas 152 Le Havre 39 Lee, Sophia 213 Legitimism 12, 38 and Féval 7, 14, 73, 111, 113, 118, 137, 141, 143, 147–8, 188 and Gautier 79–80 and Hoffmann 62, 73 and the Historical novel 10, 117–18, 147–8 and Le Fanu 156, 161 Leitherer, Hans 68, 201

Lewis, Matthew 1, 5, 51, 79, 94, 131, 157–8 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 79 Lewis, W. S. 213 Liddell, Henry George 213 Linnaeus, Carl 32 Lloyd-Smith, Allan 212 Locke, John 31 Lodge, David 125, 209 Lodi, Battle of 220 Loève-Veimar 199 Lombardy-Venetia 146 Lombroso, Cesare 162, 214 London Society (magazine) 212 Louis XIV 16, 56, 59–64, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 102, 200, 201 Louis XVI 11–12, 71, 80, 111, 113, 201, 219 Louis XVIII 12, 80, 111, 113, 143, 220 Louis-Philippe d’Orléans 5, 12–13, 16, 79, 80, 81, 83, 92, 100, 105, 111, 203, 220 Lowe-Dupas, Hélène 20, 22, 37–8, 193, 194, 197 Lukács, Georg 7–8, 10, 15, 118, 125, 147–8, 158, 192, 202, 208, 209, 212, 213 Lutzen, Battle of 43 McCalman, Iain 202 McCormack, William 151, 212 MacGregor Mathers, S. L. 203 Madrid 44 Mahdi 183, 221 Maintenon, Madame de 56–7, 58, 62, 64 Maixner, Rudolf 193 Mandran, C.-F. 33 Manon Lescaut 95 Marie-Antoinette 71, 117

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Index Marie de Medici 101–2 Marie-Thérèse, Empress of France 12 Marshall, Joshua J. 151–2 Marx, Karl 55, 64, 66–7, 188, 201 Mathieu, Baron Richard Auguste 210–11 Matthieu, Gustave 143–4, 211 Maturin, Charles 1, 2, 51 Mehew, Ernest 216 Meier, Albert 200 Mérimée, Prosper 109 Mexico 43–4 Mighall, Robert 214 Minotaur 62, 177–9 Mill, J. S. 163, 173, 174–5, 183, 185–6, 187–8, 217, 218 Moldova 212, 220 Molière 82, 97–8 Moorish civilization 29 Monist (magazine) 214 Moniteur Universel, Le 108, 208 Mont Saint-Michel 39 Montagne Edouard 208 Montandon, Alain 207 Montenegro 108 Moreau, General Auguste 220 Morlacks 25 Müller, Hans von 202 Napoleon I (Bonaparte) 1, 2, 10, 12, 13, 15, 20, 43, 44, 72, 122, 123, 147, 156, 193, 213, 220 army of 22, 42, 149, 199 and Battle of Lutzen 43 and Battle of Waterloo 148 and Brumaire coup 19, 62 and Cadoudal plot 109, 121 coronation of 125 and Hoffmann 72

legacy of 158–9, 161 literary tastes of 18 rule of 1,10, 12, 21, 34, 47, 73, 110, 119, 126–7, 128, 130, 153, 199 as vampire 126–7, 128–9, 130, 132, 133 Napoleon III 8, 13, 109, 212 and Féval 111, 114, 119, 126, 129, 130, 144, 146–7 international policy of 129, 144, 146–7, 212 Necker, Jacques 11, 72, 117, 219, Neo-Platonism 31, 67, 76, 202 Netherlands 12, 64, 200 New Monthly Magazine 192, 195, 198, 217 The New York Times 209 Nile, Battle of the 122 Nodier, Antoine 19 Nodier, Charles 1–4, 6, 13, 17, 18–19, 48, 85, 102, 106, 135, 160, 163–4, 188, 190–9, 204–6, 213 and Lord Byron 18, 21, 22–4, 27, 29, 204 and Enlightenment philosophy14, 20, 27, 30–1, 34–5, 36, 37, 38, 41–2, 47 and Fantastic 6, 18, 20–1, 23, 28–30, 31, 33–5, 36–7, 38, 42, 47, 51–2, 54, 85, 188 and frénétique 2, 17, 20, 23–4, 26, 28, 34, 35, 36, 47, 160, 188 and Hoffmann 3, 13, 28–9, 38, 48, 51–2, 53–4, 74 on pallingenesis 40, 196–7 attitude to science 4, 5, 6, 18, 21, 29–30, 31, 32–4, 35, 36, 37–8, 39, 40–2, 44–5, 46–7, 51–2

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Index and Scott 3, 18, 28, 34, 51–2 works Bibliographie entomologique 31–2, 197 Du Fantastique en littérature 28–30, 31, 51–2, 191, 195, 196, 199 ‘La Fée aux miettes’ 4, 18, 21, 35, 38–41, 42, 46, 47, 197 ‘L’Histoire d’Hélène Gillet’ 35–8, 41, 102, 197 ‘Inès de las Sierras’ 16, 18, 20, 21, 35, 42–7, 164, 192 Infernaliana 26, 195 Jean Sbogar 19, 20, 21–3, 193–4 Lord Ruthwen 24, 26, 94, 194–5 ‘Smarra’ 18, 19, 24–6, 88–9, 205 ‘Trilby’ 4, 42, 46, 50 ‘Le Vampire’ 18, 23, 24, 134–5 Normandy 39, 112 Norway 51, 75 Otto, Peter 192, 208, 213 Ottoman empire 13, 122, 138 Oudet, Gabriel 19, 34 Palmerston, Lord 156 Pan 165 Parlements 11, 72, 219 Parnassian School 79 Parsons, R. G. 216 Pelagius, St (Pelagian/SemiPelagian) 171, 173, 215–16 Peninsular War 220 Périgord 160 Peterwaradein 136 Philadelphes, Society of 19 Phillips, Adam 210, 215 Pichot, Amédée 1, 26, 28, 30–1, 195, 204

Piedmont 24, 88 Pimodan, l’hôtel 134 Pitaval, François Gayot de 70–1, 201, 202 Planchy, Collin de 209 Plessis, Alain 129–130, 192, 210 Pliny the elder 25, 45, 198 Plutarch 41 Poe, Edgar Allan 151, 176, 207 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ 169 ‘William Wilson’ 9, 81, 106–7, 180 Polidori, John 18, 23, 94, 135, 153–4, 156, 192, 208, 213 Porter, Laurence M. 19, 26, 31, 40, 193, 195, 197 Positivism 28, 29–30, 106, 109, 137, 141–2, 145, 160, 163 Potocki, Count Jan 4, 8, 126 Pound, Ezra 79 Prague 124 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 126 Prussia 12, 13, 53, 77, 80, 84–5, 88, 220 Punter, David 6, 7, 14, 47, 109, 137, 157, 192–3, 208, 210, 213 Purves, Maria 14–15, 170, 193, 216 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 171, 216 Pyramids, Battle of the 220, Radcliffe, Ann 4, 22, 45, 51, 131, 157–8, 192, 195, 198 and Féval 108 and romans noirs 2, 33, 42 works The Mysteries of Udolpho 2, 33 The Romance of the Forest (The Abbey of St Clair) 33 240

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Index A Sicilian Romance (The Caverns of Mazzini) 33 ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (and terror) 6, 21, 26, 50, 77, 85, 134 Reeve, Clara 2 Reclus, Elisée 209 Reid, Julia 165, 215, 216 Renduel, Eugène 54, 192, 198, 203 Rennes, Britanny 110 Répositoire général des causes celebres 101, 207 Republicanism 11–12, 110, 112–13, 114, 121, 123, 125, 129, 130, 133, 143–4 Restoration 1, 2, 10, 12, 13, 14, 90, 210–1 and Féval 135, 144–9, 159–61 and Gautier 79, 80 and Le Fanu 152–3, 157, 159–61 and Nodier 18, 19, 21, 43 Revue Encyclopédique 52, 199 Revue Française 54 Revue de Paris 18, 23, 48–9, 52, 80, 195, 196 Ricard, Adolphe 211 Rich, Katherine E. 214 Richardson, Samuel 157 Rioux, Jean-Claude 22, 194 Robespierre, Maximilien 11–12, 19, 62, 220 Rochefoucauld, Sosthène de la 82 Röder, Birgit 59, 61, 62, 70, 200, 202 Rogers, Bryan 20, 22–3, 40, 42, 193, 194, 196, 197 Rohan, Cardinal Louis René Edouard de 71, 219 Rohou, Jean 209, 211 Roman noir 2, 6, 45, 194

Rosicrucianism 67, 76, 203 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 11, 13, 30, 196 Rubens, Peter-Paul 83, 91, 96, 100 Sacré-Coeur 111 Sage, Victor 212 Saint Anthony 112 Saint Antoine (district) 123 St Helena 22 St Orme, Paris 133 Salisbury, Lord 183 Sand, George 8, 152, 156, 158 Sandor, Rozsa 128–30, 144, 209 Saounderson, Nicholas 30 Scanu, Ada Myriam 15, 28, 34, 36–7, 48, 195, 196, 197, 198 Scholasticism 215–16, Schiller, Friedrich 1, 70, 201 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm 59 Schnapp, Friedrich 202 Scotland 7, 23, 38–9, 50 Scott, Robert 213, Scott, Sir Walter 1, 7, 53, 55, 192, 195–6, 198–9, 202–3, 213 and the Fantastic 2–3, 28–9, 48–52, 73–4, 86 as Historical novelist 7, 8, 10, 38, 74, 77, 102, 105–6, 108, 117–18, 124–5, 146, 158 and Hoffmann 2–3, 8, 10, 28, 38, 48–55, 73–4, 77, 84 and Nodier 3, 18, 28–9, 34, 51–2 works The Bride of Lammermoor 18 Du Merveilleux dans le roman 28–9, 48–52, 54, 198, 202, 203 Waverley novels 48

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Index Scylla and Charybdis 29 Searle, A. H. 207 Second Empire 16, 110, 119, 126, 135, 192, 210, 211, 221 Second Jacobite Rebellion 111 Second Reform Act (1867) 217, 221 Seine, River 57, 109, 115, 116, 121, 123, 124, 134 Seljuk Turks 134 La Semaine 110 Semlin 128 Senneville, Gérard de 203 Serbia 108, 109, 128 Seymour, Fanny 52–3, 55, 84 Shakespeare, William 30, 86, 152, 157, 171, 195, 204 Shannon, Richard 217 Shelley, Mary 213 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1 Sicily 43–4, 71 Sidney, Sir Philip 157 Sienna 40 Skilton, David 215 Slovenia 19 Smith, Adam 183 Smith, Albert B. 83, 95, 204, 206 Smith, Lansing Evans 75, 202 Solomon 40 Spain 33–4, 139, 141, 163, 169, 200, 220 Spenser, Sir Edmund 201 Spiess, Christian Heinrich 23, 191, 213 Stableford, Brian 208 Stead, W. T. 163, 176–9, 180, 187, 217 Stendhal 79, 152, 156, 158, 159–60, 161, 212–3 Steevens, George 196 Stevenson, Robert Louis 15, 200

correspondence 171–3, 182–3, 216, 217, and double/Doppelgänger 10, 106, 179–80, 182, 185 and European/ French Gothic 6, 47, 163 and frénétique 6, 47, 188 and Galton 162, 165, 172–3, 175, 176, 214–15, 250 and Gautier 164, 176, 180 and political opinions 175, 182–3 views on religion 15, 163, 165, 170–2, 173, 175–6, 184, 187–8 and Urban Gothic 176 and Utilitarian morality 15, 163, 173–6, 183–7, 188 works ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ 165 ‘Olalla’ 6, 9, 15–6, 162–70, 172–3, 175–6, 185, 186, 187, 214–16 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 15–16, 162–3, 165, 176, 178–88, 214, 216–18 Stoker, Bram 109, 144 Strabo 41 Sturm und Drang 1, 59 Sue, Eugène 5, 14, 112, 117, 176, 190, 215 Swedenborg, Emanuel 104, 207 Switzerland 151 Symonds, John Addington 182, 183 Szeged (Szegged/Szeggedin) 138, 140, 144 Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1820 der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmit 59

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Index Tate, Allen 107, 207 Taylor, Lady 173 Teichmann, Elisabeth 15, 52–3, 199, 207 Télégraphe Illyrien 19 Thermidorian reaction 12, 220 Theseus 56, 62,177 Thessaly 24, 88 Thirty Years War 128 The Times 209 Titian 100 Todorov, Tsvetan 1–4, 5–6, 15, 191, 197, 198, 208 and Fantastic in France 54, 189, 190 and Féval 109, 131 and Gautier 85, 106 and Hoffmann 54, 59, 77, 85, 106 and Nodier 21, 34, 36–7, 42, 44, 45, 54 see also Fantastic: FantasticUncanny/Marvellous Tolstoy, Lev 124 Tory party 14, 156 Toussaint-Louverture, FrançoisDominique 122 Tracy, Robert 212, Trafalgar, Battle of 220 Transylvania 209 Trianon 68 Tsarist Empire (Russia) 12, 13, 22, 220 Urban Gothic 133, 176 University of Paris 211 Utilitarianism 15, 163, 173–6, 183–7, 188, 217

Vatican 102 La Vendée (Vendéen) 12, 113, 114, 208 Venice 8, 16, 22, 40, 60, 69, 72, 92, 94, 102–3, 111, 139, 146, 220 Verne, Jules 209 Versailles 11, 61, 62, 149, 158, 219 Victoria, Queen 220 Virgil 75 Voltaire 11, 12, 18, 85, 143, 190, 196, 200, 201 and Hoffmann 67, 70 and Nodier 24, 25, 27–8, 30–1, 33, 34, 42, 47 Wagenseil, Johann Christoph 201 Wagram, Battle of 220 Walker, Richard 179, 180, 185, 188, 214, 217, 218 Wallachia 136, 212 Walpole, Horace 89, 157, 169, 213 Walton, James 152, 212 Wasdall, David 205 Waterloo, Battle of 148, 153, 156, 220 Weishaupt, Adam 76, 202 Weiss, Charles 19 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington 220 White Slavery Act (1890) 163 Whyte, Peter 89, 205 William the Conqueror 112 Wordsworth, William 1 Wurtemberg, Duchy/Kingdom of 12, 139, 141, 146 Yates, Frances 203

Valles, Jules 129 van Dyck, Anthony 88, 90

Zola, Emile 214 243

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