The Gaston Danville Megapack Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DAISY

  REMEMBRANCE

  FLAT

  THE MURDERER

  THE DEPUTY

  ILLUSORY CARESSES

  HOW JACQUES COMMITTED SUICIDE

  THE CLOCK

  ADRIFT

  LISBETH

  THE DARK ANGEL

  THE DEAD MAN’S DREAM

  THE LAMP

  IN VAIN

  IN ANIMA VILI

  MOUSMÉ

  THE STOLEN HEART

  THE CINQ-BRAS

  THE EVOLUTION OF LITERATURE

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Gaston Danville MEGAPACK®: Weird Tales and Contes Cruels is copyright © 2013 by Brian Stableford. All rights reserved.

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  The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

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  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  In addition to being a brilliant author, Brian Stableford is an accomplished editor and translator. Here he has selected and translated his choice of the 17 best weird tales and contes cruels by French author Armand Blocq (1870-1933), published under his pseudonym Gaston Danville. Check out Brian’s long and informative introduction for more information.

  Enjoy!

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

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  INTRODUCTION

  “Gaston Danville” was the pseudonym of Armand Blocq (1870-1933), the younger brother of Paul Blocq (1860-1896), a colleague of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, who was the author of several books on neuropathology. Danville was also one of the principal collaborators involved with the early issues of a periodical founded in 1890 by Remy de Gourmont, Alfred Vallette, and others, which resurrected the name of a much earlier periodical, the Mercure de France, in order to provide a voice for the burgeoning Symbolist Movement. The new Mercure was not the only periodical that attempted to do that, but it was by far the most successful, and it survived long after the movement in question had lost its crusading zeal and Symbolism had melted into the general cultural background, eventually overtaken by Surrealism, which pushed a similar literary envelope considerably further.

  At the time of the Mercure’s foundation, the Parisian literary scene was afflicted by fervent disputes between various literary “schools” and “movements,” of which Symbolism was one of the most prominent, having developed out of Romanticism—once seen as revolutionary in its reaction against Classicism but long lapsed into a kind of orthodoxy—in close association with Decadence, a label resolutely adopted by some of the more radical Romantics, after having initially been leveled at the movement as a term of abuse by the Classicist critic Desiré Nisard, and resurrected in the 1880s as an assertive banner. Symbolism was widely seen as being engaged in a crucial rivalry with Naturalism, which was considered by many commentators to have recently evolved from its origins in the work of Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers into a “neo-Naturalist” phase represented by “psychologists” such as Paul Bourget, the latter placing more emphasis on internal states of mind than external behavior in their supposedly-naturalistic accounts of the human predicament.

  It is arguable that the apparent opposition between Symbolism and Naturalism was illusory, and had more to do with the fact that the Symbolist school was primarily a school of poetry, crucially associated with avant-gardist poets, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean Moréas, whereas Naturalism was primarily a school of prose fiction, closely associated with the evolution of the narrative techniques of the novel. Naturalist novels did not, in fact, shun the employment of symbolism as a narrative device; nor did Symbolist writers, when they diversified into prose fiction, shun the devices developed by novelists in the interests of representational verisimilitude. Leading writers of both schools shared a keen interest in the seamier side of social life, and were routinely preoccupied with erotic and violent subject-matter. Nevertheless, many of the individuals caught up in the controversy did see themselves as being involved in an ideological conflict, and were often eager to take up positions in the front line, firing their critical weapons with reckless abandon. Gaston Danville was no exception to this general rule, but he was highly exceptional in the particular stance he took, and the location from which he elected to fight. He was, in a sense, the most ideologically-extreme of all the neo-Naturalists, but he took up his position at the very heart of the Symbolist movement, as a cuckoo in its most precious nest.

  Alfred Vallette became the editor of the new Mercure, and his wife Marguerite, who had already become famous under the pseudonym of Rachilde, became one of its most frequent early contributors, along with Gourmont, Jules Renard and Saint-Pol Roux, all of whom would have identified themselves unhesitatingly as devoted Symbolists. The early issues established historical roots for the movement by reproducing various posthumous materials, including such quintessentially Decadent materials as previously-untranslated essays by Edgar Poe (French publishers never used the middle name posthumously grafted on to Poe’s signature in America by his literary executor) and passages from Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève future that had been dropped from the final book edition. Essays and reviews took up the bulk of its pages, doing most of the donkey work in mapping out the field of Symbolist literature and art and promoting its virtues; and while the page-count remained at its initial figure of 32, priority was given to poetry with regard to creative material. Once the number of pages had been doubled to 64 at the beginning of 1891, however, prose fiction was able to play a more important parallel role in carrying forward the ideals of the movement.

  Much of the Mercure’s early prose fiction was very brief, set in the tradition of the “prose poetry” that had been launched forty years earlier by Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire and subsequently hailed by Joris-Karl Huysmans as “the osmazome of literature.” The crucial contributions to the magazine made in its first few years by Gourmont, Saint-Pol Roux and Renard all belonged to that lapidary tradition, and many of the other contributors followed suit, although, when Vallette was able to increase the page-count again, to 96 in 1893 and 128 in 1895, he was progressively able to find room for longer works, including serial novels—and when its periodicity eventually increased from monthly to fortnightly in 1905, those serial novels, in accordance with continuing changes in literary fashion, became a far more important feature. From the very beginning, however, Remy de Gourmont was interested in expanding the scope of prose-poetry beyond the merely lyrical, and adding more substance to it. In that quest, Gaston Danville must have seemed to Vallette to be a useful ally; his early contributions to the magazine resemble standard exercises in Symbolist prose-poetry, and the series he began to develop from them, collectively entitled “Contes d’Au-Delà” [Tales of the Beyond], seemed a natural development in terms of the elaboration of their narrative method and concern.

  Vallette would have found out soon enough that Danville did not consider himself to be a Symbolist at all, but he obviously did not consider that to be a reason to exclude him from the periodical, the scope of which he was probably ambitious to broaden from the very start—and which did, indeed, ultimately become a magazine of general literary interest, as the Symbolist crusade in which cause it had been launched increasingly came to resemble a fad, and somewhat passé. At any rate, although Danville was never to appear as prolifically again as he did in 1891-2, he remained a regular contributor for more than thirty years; he published very little short fiction elsewhere, and the Mercure serialized three of his five novels.

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  In 1891-92 Danville published twelve “Contes d
’Au-Delà” in the Mercure, plus two other prose-poems (the second and third items in the present collection) that did not appear under the rubric but can nevertheless be considered offshoots of the sequence; those items were reprinted in volume form by the periodical’s press, with at least one additional story, in 1892, as Contes d’Au-Delà. In 1893 Danville published a longer story in the Mercure, which did not bear the same series title but is an obvious extrapolation of the same line of endeavor, and he published a further item of the same sort in 1894. After that, however, he changed direction markedly. He continued to write non-fiction for the periodical, much of it in a regular section headed “Psychologie,” as well as serial novels, but only published one more short story, of a very different sort, during the Great War.

  Danville’s novels—Les Infinis de la chair [The Infinity of the Flesh] (1892), Vers la mort [Toward Death] (1897), Les Reflets du miroir [The Reflections in the Mirror] (1897), L’Amour magicien [Love the Magician] (1902), and Le Parfum de volupté [The Perfume of Sensuality] (1905)—all carry forward the same project that he had begun in the “Contes d’Au-Delà,” as he explicitly stated in the preface to the first of them, which explained the theory behind the story series and advanced the claim that it would attempt to take the Naturalist cause to a new but logical extreme. The essay also identifies Symbolist and Decadent literature, in contrast to the various subspecies of Naturalism, as “degenerate.” The essay is dated 1 November 1892 and is, therefore, contemporary with Max Nordau’s scathing attack on fin-de-siècle “degeneracy,” Entartung (1892; tr. as Degeneration), which Danville could not possibly have read before offering his own thesis, although he might well have had some prior inkling of Nordau’s argument.

  Vallette, who must have read that preface, although Les Infinis de la chair was published by Alphonse Lemerre, evidently did not take offence at the description of Symbolism as an essentially degenerate form of literature, but it probably did not endear Danville to some of his fellow contributors to the Mercure—even those who, like Remy de Gourmont, were perfectly willing to consider the adjective “decadent” as a compliment. Danville’s novels do not appear to have enjoyed much success, however, and such celebrity as he still retains is almost entirely based on his non-fiction book La Psychologie de l’amour [The Psychology of Love] (1903), which went through numerous editions and was still in print when he died. He also wrote two other non-fiction books, Magnétisme et spiritisme (1908)[1] and Le Mystère psychique [The Mystery of Mind] (1915).

  La Psychologie de l’amour was contemporary with Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’insinct sexuel (tr. as The Natural Philosophy of Love), which was published by the Mercure’s press in the same year, and makes a very interesting comparison with Danville’s book, given Gourmont’s deep commitment to the Symbolist ideals and methods condemned as degenerate by Danville. It is not obvious, however, that the two books were written in an explicit spirit of rivalry, or, even if they were, that the rivalry was hostile rather than amiable. Danville’s “Contes d’Au-Delà” were composed and published alongside some of the stories that Gourmont subsequently collected in Histoires magiques (1894) and the novella “Le Fantôme” (1893 in the Mercure; added to the former collection in the English translation entitled Angels of Perversity) and both series are illuminated by a comparison that suggests a certain mutual influence. The two writers did, however, follow markedly divergent paths after 1892, Gourmont remaining primarily preoccupied with literary matters, becoming the foremost critic of his era, while Danville progressively shed his literary interests in favor of concentrating on essays on psychological science and its sociological implications.

  Danville was by no means the only litterateur active in the fin de siècle period to take a strong interest in parallel developments in psychological science, and the entire neo-Naturalist school, whose analyses of human behavior had progressed from the hereditary theses of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series to the quasi-psychoanalytical theses developed with great fashionability and considerable commercial success by Paul Bourget, was more-or-les compelled to keep an sharp eye on its developments. On a more popular level, the rapid evolution of crime fiction had also taken aboard a powerful fascination with theories of criminal psychology. In Danville’s view, however, the neo-Naturalists and writers of popular crime fiction were somewhat behind the times, routinely clinging, tacitly or explicitly, to scientific theses he considered to be obsolete. He wanted to take his place within—or perhaps to constitute in its entirety—a new avant garde, producing literary works explicitly based in up-to-date psychological theory. By virtue of that very fact, however—as illustrated by the juxtaposition of his most successful book with one of Remy de Gourmont’s most extravagant enterprises—his plans brought the method and substance of his work into close association with some key Symbolist endeavors.

  Because of its nature, Symbolist literature was intensely interested in fantastic material, and a good deal of Symbolist fiction is explicitly supernatural. The fact the Symbolist writers were operating in an age when supernatural notions had all-but-lost the warrant of belief, however—which is why Danville considered such traffic “degenerate” or “retrogressive”—meant that such motifs were very rarely represented as simple matters of fact; indeed, the whole point was that they were symbols, ideas essentially representative of something else, and not mere accidents of happenstance. For the Symbolists, the apparently supernatural was really the psychological, reflective of internal emotions and obsessions. Exactly the same was true for the Naturalists, the principal difference being that the Naturalists were usually up front abut declaring the seemingly-supernatural to be delusory or hallucinatory, while the Symbolists, not considering that to be a crucial issue, routinely left even the ambiguity unstated, allowing the images to speak for themselves. The effect of that distinction was, however, weakened—in Danville’s work more than most—by the fact that Naturalistic narratives adopting the viewpoint of a deluded or hallucinating character are compelled to represent their delusions or hallucinations as apparently real.

  The invocation of the supernatural in Symbolist prose fiction is much more obvious in short fiction than novels, and there is an obvious correlation between the length of Symbolist prose works and their usage of natural representation and narrative development. This is not surprising—indeed, it is inevitable, given the innate naturalism of the narrative techniques typical of the novel—and it is arguable that there is really no such thing as a Symbolist novel, the principal candidates for that designation being distinctly patchy, either because of their episodic quality (as, for instance, in Gustave Kahn’s Le Conte de l’or et silence, tr. as The Tale of Gold and Silence) or because that they carefully embed significant Symbolist interludes in thoroughly naturalistic narratives (as, for instance, in André Beaunier’s L’Homme qui a perdu son moi; tr. as The Man Who Lost Himself). That pattern is very obvious in Gourmont’s work, and equally obvious in Danville’s, with one notable difference consequent on the point made in the previous paragraph.

  Many of Gourmont’s short stories are “contes d’au-delà” in the perfectly straightforward and commonly-understood sense that they are blithely supernatural, even when their supernatural motifs are obviously symbolic of erotic urges. Many, therefore, consist of brief Gothic fantasies, either horror stories of the conte cruel variety or delicate dream-fantasies in a more sentimental vein. Danville’s choice of “Contes d’Au-Delà” as a title for his own series was, however, consciously and determinedly ironic. The “Beyond” from which his tales come is only the supernatural world of ghosts and demons in the sense that images of that kind are held as a matter of ironclad faith to come from within rather than without, as products of the unconscious. Danville’s characters are haunted—and how!—but they are very definitely haunted by memories and unconscious impulses, and the poignant emotions provoked by those internal spurs. All their apparitions are delusory, and although that does not prevent them from seeming real to deluded protagonists, in exactly the same way that the symbolic devices in Gourmont’s stories seem real to his characters, the underlying rhetoric of their presentation is essentially different.