A Surfeit of Mirrors
A Surfeit of Mirrors
Symbolist Tales and Uncertain Stories
by
Henri de Régnier
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
The stories here translated as “Symbolist Tales” all appeared in the collection La Canne de Jaspe [The Jasper-handled Walking-Stick] in 1897. Some of those in the section “Tales of Oneself”1 had previously appeared in Contes à soi-même (1894), but that earlier collection had contained at least one other item, and at least one new item was added to the section reproduced in the later collection. The three stories in the section “The Black Trefoil” had earlier appeared in Le Trèfle noir (1895). I have reversed the order in which the three sections were presented in La Canne de jaspe in order to make the sequence contained here more nearly chronological.
The items translated as “Uncertain Stories” all appeared in the collection Histoires incertaines (1919). “L’Entrevue,” here translated as “The Glimpse,” had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1917. I have not been able to trace periodical appearances for the other two stories, but it seems obvious that they, too, were written during the Great War and partly motivated by the same uniquely melancholy impulse of escapism. Again, I have changed the order in which they appear in the collection to what seems to me to be a more rational sequence, and I have also taken the liberty of detaching the final part of the second story, “Marceline ou la punition fantastique,” here translated as “Marceline; or, The Fantastic Punishment,” and removing it to an appendix at the end of the section, because I do not believe that the author really wanted or intended it to be attached to the story, and inserted it under real or imagined editorial pressure. The reason for my action will be obvious to the reader. “L’Entrevue” and “Le Pavilion fermé,” the latter here translated as “The Sealed Pavilion” were both reprinted separately in volume form in 1927.
“Le Veuvage de Shéhérazade,” here translated as “The Widowhood of Scheherazade” was initially published in L’Illustration in 1925 and was reprinted separately as a booklet in 1926; it was reprinted again in the collection Le Voyage d’amour, ou L’Initiatian venetienne (1930). “Le Paradis retrouvé,” here translated as “Paradise Regained” was published as the title piece of the posthumous collection Le Paradis retrouvé: contes choisis (1937); I have not been able to locate any previous publication, and suspect that the frequent attribution of the date 1936 to the story is a guess as to its date of composition, based solely on the fact that Régnier died in that year.
Henri de Régnier was born in Honfleur in 1864; although both his parents were of aristocratic descent—his mother’s maiden name was Thérèse du Bard de Curley—both families had suffered the effects of the Revolution; his paternal grandfather, who belonged to a military family, had emigrated, and although his maternal grandparents had hung on in Burgundy, and had retained their aristocratic pretensions, they too had come down in the world. Henri’s father was a customs inspector, but he had literary connections by virtue of having been a childhood friend of Gustave Flaubert. Régnier maintained aristocratic airs, always posing as a gentleman and ostentatiously wearing a monocle, but manifested little snobbery in his literary associations and had no hesitation in working for politically-radical periodicals.
His affectations were fed in childhood by his maternal grandparents, at whose home in Paray-le-Monial he sometimes spent vacations, returning continually to the house after its desertion, in search of isolation, observing its gradual decay. The nearby ruined Château de Cypierre was in an even worse state, and it was there that he experienced a kind of epiphany that cemented a lifelong fascination with the past in decay—a moment described retrospectively in “Le Pavilion fermé.” In 1874, he was enrolled at the Collège Stanislas, which he hated, but where he met Egbert Vielé, who was later to change his name to Francis Vielé-Griffin, and formed a fast friendship that lasted for many years, until it fell apart in 1900 when Vielé criticized Régnier’s first novel in terms he could not forgive. They provided one another with an audience for their first verses, and hung around Le Chat Noir after they both began half-hearted studies in law that were soon abandoned in favor of literary life.
Régnier published his first collection of poems, Les Lendemains [Next Days] in 1885. He and Vielé became involved in the publication of Lutèce, one of several periodicals that provided him with an early outlet; he is alleged to have published six short stories there as well as numerous poems, but the periodical is not available on gallica, so I have not been able to check its contents. Lutèce gradually became an early showcase for the Symbolist Movement, and Régnier was a participant in the movement’s first meetings, held at the salon of the ill-fated Robert Caze, who was killed in a duel in 1886 by Charles Vignier, after being charged with cowardice for refusing to fight when called out by Jean Richepin. Régnier met and became closely involved with the other pioneers of the movement, including Stéphane Mallarmé—whose mardis became the new focal point of the group—and Gustave Kahn.
Régnier also frequented the salon maintained by the Parnassian poet Jose-Maria Hérédia, at which the doyen of the Parnassians, Charles Leconte de Lisle was a regular attendee, and he was seen by some critics as a hybridizer of Parnassian and Symbolist approaches. Indeed, he sometimes described himself as an “independent” first and a Symbolist second, but he was generally quite happy to be identified as a leading member of the movement; in 1890, with Vielé-Griffin and Paul Adam he founded a periodical dedicated to the movement’s ideals, Entretiens politiques et littéraires, in which he published a good deal of work, including “Le Sixième marriage de Barbe-Bleue” (1892), here translated as “Bluebeard’s Sixth Marriage” and “Eustase et Humbeline” (1893). Most of the other leading Symbolists, including Remy de Gourmont, were fellow contributors, although they all transferred their primary allegiance to more dedicated and resilient publications such as the Revue Blanche, in which Régnier published “Hermogene” (1893), “Hertulie” (1894) and “Les Diners Singulier” (1896; tr. as “The Singular Diners”) and the Mercure de France, co-founded by Goumont and Alfred Vallette, in which Régnier published “Le Signe de la Clef et la Croix” (1897; tr. as “The Sign of the Key and the Cross”). The press associated with the Mercure published most of his books, including the two collections translated herein.
Régnier produced one of the Symbolist movement’s key “manifestos” in Le Bosquet de Psyché [Psyche’s Arbor] (1894), and the poetry he published in the 1890s warrants consideration as a core contribution to Symbolist verse; the relevant collections include Poèmes anciens et romanesques [Old and Romantic Poems] (1890), Tel qu’en songe [Whatever One Thinks] (1892), Aréthuse [Arethusa] (1895) and Les jeux mystiques et divins [Mystical and Divine Games] (1897). He did retain something of the formality of Parnassian verse, as well as its interest in antique themes—most obvious in Aréthuse, which is replete with the mythological creatures, including fauns and centaurs, that remained central to his personal symbolic schemas—but he also followed Gustave Kahn and Jean Moréas into experimentation with free verse.
Alongside his Symbolist poetry, Régnier developed a series of experimental exercises in symbolist prose that ran parallel to the similar experiments carried out by Remy de Gourmont (a selection of which in translation can be found in The Angels of Perversity; Dedalus, 1992), and which similarly helped form an exemplary core. That core might have expanded much further had other journals associated with the movement Régnier not folded—Le Centaure, which was primarily the inspiration of Mallarmé’s loyal disciple Jean de Tinan, collapsed after publishing only two issues 1896—but there were en
ough to make up the two collections whose contents were eventually recycled, with new material, in La Canne de jaspe.
Although Régnier’s literary work seemed to change character markedly after 1898—the year in which Stéphane Mallarmé’s died—in which respect he was by no means alone among the stalwarts of the Symbolist cause, and he was often referred to thereafter as an “ex-Symbolist,” he never abandoned the fascinations that had drawn him to the movement in the first place, but merely began to place them more discreetly in verses and narratives of a more orthodox kind. This obvious in the way that the same key symbols of the first phase of his career—centaurs and other mythological half-humans as well as the everpresent keys and mirrors—recur in the much later narratives of the “uncertain stories.” Although it is by no means necessary to have read the symbolist tales to enjoy the later works, they certainly enable a fuller and more sophisticated appreciation thereof.
Régnier was by far the most popular of the self-declared Symbolists while the movement was in full swing; his poetry helped win the movement a much wider audience, and his prose fiction easily outsold Gourmont’s, the latter eventually becoming much better known as a critic than as a poet or writer of fiction. As the movement’s commentator-in-chief, Gourmont did not rate Régnier as highly as some of its other contributors, but in observing Régnier’s tendency to monotonous repetitiveness, he carefully framed his remarks as faint praise rather than outright condemnations, and was right to do so. At any rate, La Canne de jaspe was probably the best-selling Symbolist volume of all, at least in its own era; it was reprinted several times in the last few months of 1897 and stayed in print until 1927. Many of Régnier’s subsequent books also went through multiple editions—no mean feat when one considers that he was an unusually prolific poet and novelist, credited with more than fifty distinct volumes—and he retained his popularity, without undue prejudice to his reputation, for more than three decades. He was also a prolific journalist, although he never attained a reputation as a commentator to match Gourmont’s and relatively little of his criticism was reprinted in book form.
Régnier was the only explicitly-advertized Symbolist to be admitted to the Académie, and although his election came after he seemed to have deserted the fold, it was undoubtedly construed as a belated endorsement of the Movement’s aspirations. He first offered himself as a candidate in 1908, when he was the odds-on favorite to beat Jean Richepin and Edmond Haraucourt, both of whom had significant black marks on their reputations, but he lost to Richepin; swallowing his chagrin, he offered himself again for the next vacant chair in 1911, and was elected against the sole opposition of Pierre de Nolhac, whose credentials were very much thinner but still managed to muster 14 votes to Régnier’s 18. Remy de Gourmont’s comments on Régnier’s admission were typically half-hearted, devoting far more effort to regretting the fact that so few of the leading Parnassians had been admitted to the august institution than celebrating the fact that a Symbolist had actually made it, but they were nowhere near as acidic as the speech of “welcome” made by Comte Albert de Mun, a Catholic writer who disapproved strongly of Régnier’s apparent atheism, and who attacked the new member for the supposed licentiousness of his novels. Mun’s speech is still cited on the Académie’s website as the second most hostile reception ever accorded to a new member (that of Alfred de Vigny taking first place) but Régnier made no protest.
Régnier was more conspicuously aware of his aristocratic descent than Remy de Gourmont, but it is manifest in his work primarily as an affected lofty world-weariness, reminiscent in some ways of the pose adopted by Lord Byron, one of the key forebears of the Decadent style and Decadent world-view that became intricately interlinked with Symbolist technique. Although he was much les of a dandy than some of his more flamboyant contemporaries, Régnier did like to represent himself, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, as a man accursed by being born out of his time, spiritually anchored in the eighteenth century. He was never a happy man, partly because he was rarely a well man, much given to bouts of depression and illness. François Broche, introducing the edition of Régnier’s Cahiers [Notebooks] (2002), whose publication Régnier had explicitly forbidden, summed up the first section of his introduction to the author, in which he quotes numerous acquaintances to establish the fact that Régnier was always “distant,” by stating brutally that Régnier never liked himself, at any stage of his life—and his works certainly give the impression of a deep-seated gloom and self-dissatisfaction, without any real explanation of the fact.
That downbeat tendency is quite obvious in La Canne de jaspe, even though the contents of that collection were all published in advance of the event that some observers might have taken for the turning-point of his life—although Régnier did not seem to see it that way himself. His notebooks suggest that he fell in love with Hérédia’s second daughter, Marie, in 1891, when she was only sixteen, but at the time she preferred his friend Pierre Louÿs, whom he had introduced to Hérédia’s salon a few months previously. In 1895, however, taking advantage of Louÿs temporary absence from Paris, Régnier asked for Marie’s hand, and was accepted. Louÿs, at first incensed, soon forgave him, however—and within two years of the marriage, Marie began a long affair with Louÿs that was not interrupted when Louÿs married Marie’s younger sister, Louise, in 1899 (they divorced in 1899, but Régnier never divorced Marie).
Louÿs subsequently told acquaintances that he had found Marie to be a virgin when their affair began, but it is unclear what evidence he had for that assertion. Whatever the truth of the matter, Marie soon began a series of other affairs in parallel with her association with Louÿs, beginning with Jean de Tinan. Régnier seemed to take the situation in his stride, and when Marie became pregnant, apparently—and according to her own testimony—by Louÿs, he insisted that Louÿs accompany him to the Mairie to register the child’s birth as Paul de Régnier, and that he be present at the christening to be inscribed as the boy’s godfather; he also invited Louÿs to accompany the family on a holiday shortly thereafter. Régnier apparently took most of Marie’s numerous other affairs in his stride in the same way, except for one particularly tempestuous fling with Henry Bernstein in 1910, which threatened to cause a scandal—but he refused to divorce her, and appears to have countered his wife’s ever-increasing resentments after the affair with Berstein with a string of determinedly platonic relationships with married women, including the three dedicatees of the Histoires incertaines.
Exactly what the cause was of Régnier’s unusual relationships, it is now impossible to determine—his notebooks offer not the slightest clue, turning a determinedly blind eye to the whole issue—but something was obviously amiss in his own eyes, and although his literary works make the mere fact obvious, they are as determined as his private writings never to specify any underlying cause. Nor do Marie’s writings, when she became a successful poet, novelist and short-story writer in her own right, under the pseudonym Gérard d’Houville, offer any convincing clarification. It is not entirely surprising, however, given these and other circumstances, that Régnier conceived and nursed a bitter heartache that suited him very well, and might always been his manifest destiny. That dire self-disappointment, doubtless augmented by the depredations and deprivations of the Great War, is very obvious in the two long novellas that conclude the “Uncertain Stories” section of this collection and are, in effect, its principal showpieces.
As with all dedicated Symbolists, Régnier strove for literary effect in his early works to such an extent as sometimes to make it difficult to perceive his meaning, both at the syntactical level and in terms of the import of his stories. Many symbolist tales are formulated in the image of fables or apologues, but steadfastly refuse the conventional and simplistic morals that are traditionally attached to such tales; Régnier’s are not only no exception to that rule, but occasionally take their deliberate perversity to unprecedented lengths. His early prose fancies, offered in straight-faced earnest, are mostly exercises in esoteric
self-analysis, not so much of his own individual self as of the general nature of the self: an analysis riven with supposedly-inevitable disillusionments, whose occasional suggested solutions are—to say the least—eccentric.
As with many of Symbolist prose writers, although by no means as obviously as Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, Régnier’s work in that vein strayed in the direction of surrealism, but it is probably more intriguing viewed as a series of exercises in offbeat existentialism. The success of La Canne de Jaspe, however—which far outsold the two volumes cannibalized therein—is probably due at least in part to the fact that the new material he added to it, which he placed at the front of the volume, was more playful in nature, and—to begin with, at least—more cheerful in tone. Indeed, it is not entirely obvious why “Monsieur d’Amercoeur” bears that name, as most of his reminiscences depict him as a devil-may-care individual blessed with a more-than-diabolical charm and luck, upon whom the misfortune he refuses to talk about only fell belatedly. As the black humor of “Marceline” and the addenda to the two collections demonstrate, Régnier was never incapable of playfulness, but even his playfulness became increasingly tinged with deep irony as his career and life progressed.
We have no way of knowing whether Régnier, when he became an old man himself, looked back on his own life in the same deeply embittered fashion that many of the old men who feature in his youthful work looked back on theirs. Perhaps one should be kind enough to hope not—but no serious student of probability would bet on it.
The editions of La Canne de jaspe and Histoires incertaines used for these translations were the copies held in the London Library; both date from the original year of publication, although the former is identified as a third printing and the latter as a fifth. I have not been able to compare the versions of “Le pavilion fermé” and “L’Entrevue” contained in the latter volume with the separate editions published subsequently, but the version of the former story reprinted (inappropriately) in the anthology Vampire Story (Fleuve Noir 1994) edited by Stéphane Bourgoin appears to be identical to the one in Histoires incertaines. The two addenda are both translated from versions reproduced on a website entitled Miscellanées: une bibliothéque heteroclite, located at www.miscellanees.com.