Spirite E-Book

Théophile Gautier

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Spirite is the tale of a woman who dies before the man she loves even notices she exists.

Das E-Book Spirite wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

COPYRIGHT

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 873982 96 9

ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 49 5

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Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

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email: [email protected]

Publishing History

First published in France in 1831 and 1865

First published by Dedalus in 1995

First ebook edition in 2013

Translation copyright © Dedalus 1995

Printed in Finland by W.S. Bookwell

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. Listing for this book is available on request.

CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

Chronology

Introduction

The Coffee Pot

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Spirite

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Bibliography

About the Translator

CHRONOLOGY

1811

August 30, Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier is born in Tarbes.

1829

At this stage, Gautier is still interested in a career as an artist, though it is not long before he devotes himself to literature.

1830

February 25, Gautier dons his famous red waistcoat to attend the fight for the cause of Romanticism, the so-called ‘bataille d’Hernani’.

1835

Publication of the first section of Mademoiselle deMaupin. The second half is published the following year. The preface to the novel represents Gautier’s manifesto on aesthetic freedom.

1836

February, Gautier’s relationship with Eugénie Fort begins.

November, Eugenie Fort gives birth to Théophile Gautier fils.

1838

The next two years see publication of a number of short stories and novellas including Fortunio and LaMorte Amoureuse.

1841

The Paris Opéra stages Giselle ou les Wilis, for which Gautier wrote the libretto. The star of the show is Carlotta Grisi, who becomes a great inspiration to Gautier.

1844

Gautier begins his long-standing relationship with the singer Ernesta Grisi, Carlotta’s sister.

1845

summer, Gautier meets Charles Baudelaire for the first time.

August, Ernesta Grisi gives birth to Judith Gautier.

1847

November, Ernesta Grisi gives birth to Estelle Gautier.

1849

October, Gautier begins a relationship with Marie Mattei.

1852

June, Gautier breaks with Marie Mattei. Publication of a number of works, including Arria Marcella.

1856

Publication of L’Art Moderne.

1857

Baudelaire publishes Les Fleurs du Mal and dedicates the work to Gautier.

Publication of Avatar and Jettatura.

1861

October, Gautier goes to stay with Carlotta Grisi, near Geneva.

1864

September-October, Gautier stays with Carlotta Grisi for a second time.

1865

July-November, Gautier visits Carlotta Grisi once more. During this stay, he writes Spirite.

1866

Publication of Spirite.

Over the next five years, Gautier continues to travel extensively as he has done all his life.

1871

Gautier moves into Eugenie Fort’s apartment in Versailles.

1872

October 23, Gautier dies.

INTRODUCTION

The forgotten prose of Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier was born in 1811 in Tarbes in the South of France. During his lifetime he travelled widely and had a number of relationships with women, including a long-standing liaison with Ernesta Grisi, who was the mother of his children, and a long-standing infatuation with Ernesta’s sister Carlotta. Gautier died in 1872, aged 61.

During his lifetime, he was one of the best known and most highly respected writers in France. To his contemporaries – writers like Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo – he was one of the country’s finest literary figures. So much so that in 1857, Baudelaire dedicated his celebrated Fleurs duMal to Gautier, describing him as a ‘perfect magician’ and an ‘impeccable poet’.

Yet today, when Baudelaire and Hugo are household names, Gautier’s reputation has faded into the shadows, especially in the English-speaking world. Some will be acquainted with Gautier’s poetry despite its fall from favour. Few, however, will associate his name with prose.

Nonetheless, Théophile Gautier produced a great deal of prose: travel writing, art and literary criticism. His great prose passion, though, was fantastical literature, and his fascination with it lasted his whole life. In 1831 he published his first fantastical tale, The Coffee Pot and in 1865 he published his last, the novella Spirite.

Gautier and the erotic fantastic

The fashion for the Gothic novel amongst English-speaking writers during the 18th and 19th centuries coincided with the popularity of ‘the fantastic’ and ‘the marvellous’ which embraced France and Germany in the 19th century. In many ways the genre developed harmoniously in the two countries. So, for example, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s technique of inter-weaving natural and supernatural in a ‘marvellous’ way proved a particularly powerful influence on Gautier. This said, a number of more personally specific trademarks clearly distinguish the Frenchman’s brand of the fantastic from that of his contemporaries.

It is striking, for example, how much importance Gautier attaches to a character’s eyes. Fantastical qualities underpin their often symbolic role throughout his oeuvre. The gaze is a window on the soul; the eye has supernatural power, or erotic, even phallic, significance; the eye of the body is separate from the eye of the soul. Dreaming is another vital theme. Whether awake or asleep, whether natural or drug-induced, it becomes a way of gaining access to a fantastical world.

Erotic desire is at the root of the eye fixation and the dreamy fantasy, as well as other fantastical themes and images that crop up regularly in Gautier’s fiction. The erotic focus is a statue, a painting, a corpse, a spirit even, and it is so rarely discovered in the real world of living people that the desire itself is impossible to satisfy in the context of reality. There is an almost perpetual dichotomy between the physical perfection of an inanimate object of desire and the longing for interaction with that fantasy. So, a dead woman returns a kiss, a statue comes to life, a coffee pot becomes a flagrant mistress and a bodiless spirit tries to entice a man to love her.

Such scenarios have led to much critical study of the so-called Pygmalion complex in Gautier. Ovid portrayed Pygmalion as a sculptor who was able to recreate in ivory his ideal of female beauty. The statue was then brought to life by Venus to provide the sculptor with the incarnation of his ideal. So, it is argued, the hero of Gautier’s fiction is Pygmalion in both respects: because he conceives of his ideal beauty in statuesque form and because his fantasy almost always desires that this inanimate icon of beauty should come to life.

But Gautier’s version of the Pygmalion scenario is more complex than its mythical predecessor. Unlike the Roman poet’s version of the story, Gautier’s tales present an icon of beauty that must retain her capacity to be inanimate even after she is brought to life. If she will not reassume her state of lifelessness, the hero feels threatened by the strong female that he paradoxically desires. One might have thought that a fantasy world would offer a chance for blissful happiness to a man who dreams of perfect beauty and longs to be led astray by a strong woman. But the safety mechanism of that fantasy, which saves the hero from a dangerous position of subordination by arresting life from the object of desire, is what ultimately precludes him from attaining any such happiness. The erotic demand to be seduced by a perfect beauty, and yet always to be safe with her, seems to be too much of a contradiction for Gautier’s hero.

From The Coffee Pot to Spirite

The chronological development of Théophile Gautier’s fiction has long been the subject of critical attention. Many critics have put forward a simplistic linear progression theory, arguing that early works are materialistic and late works spiritualistic. A superficial look at the two texts in this collection, The Coffee Pot (1831) and Gautier’s last major work of fiction, Spirite (1866), tends to reinforce this viewpoint.

Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), one of the better known examples of Gautier’s early fiction, seems to concentrate on the physical appearance of things and on a sensual response to beauty.

The title of Spirite suggests a concern with the spiritual side of things and this is certainly the obvious focus of the text.

Despite appearances, however, a fascination with both physical and spiritual beauty runs through all of Gautier’s texts.

Although the reader of The Coffee Pot is introduced to an erotic beauty, her eyes are so transparent the narrator can see through to her soul. And later, when he sits entwined with his love, his soul ‘is released from its prison of mud to float in ethereal infinity’. In Spirite, on the other hand, when the subjects are two souls already free of the material constraints of the human body, they float away, but as they do so, they fly next to one another ‘in a state of heavenly, radiant bliss, caressing each other with the tips of their wings and fondling each other with divinely provocative gestures.’

Anything more than a cursory examination of Gautier’s fiction reveals a startling consistency through virtually every text, regardless of when it was written. There is always an aesthetic appreciation of beauty and an erotic fixation with physical form; and yet the response to that form is almost invariably expressed in spiritual terms of some sort.

Besides reflecting the underlying balance between physical and spiritual in Gautier’s work, the two texts in this collection also illustrate another much neglected aspect of his writing. As well as displaying a consuming interest in beauty, the stories can also be great fun. The Coffee Pot, with its wonderfully pictorial descriptions, is a perfect illustration. The central animated scene, in particular, shows off the author’s penchant for comic fantasy. By contrast, Spirite exemplifies the wry side of Gautier’s sense of humour. And though the wit is less obvious, it is perhaps more interesting, since it forms part of a commentary on the social rites and fashions of the day. Despite this, the work has not dated: much of the social comment in Spirite is as true of Western society today as it was of Gautier’s Paris. So while Spirite might initially seem further removed from the realities of this world than any of Gautier’s earlier texts – because one of its main characters is a bodiless soul – it does actually provide a very clear insight into the workings of society.

For today’s reader, one of the most interesting and striking facets of this social comment is Gautier’s apparent fascination with the position of women in the world. The eponymous heroine of Spirite uses her position as a soul that has lived on earth to give the reader a posthumous insight into a woman’s miserable destiny:

The lot of women is such a harrowing one […],

condemned to waiting, inaction and silence. They

cannot show their preferences without losing their

image of propriety. They must endure the love they

inspire and they must never declare the love they

feel.

Although The Coffee Pot ends before its heroine gets the chance to bemoan her tragic fate, this does not mean that Gautier’s early texts display an insensitivity to the discrimination women suffer(ed) in society. In Mademoiselle de Maupin, Madeleine revolts against the stereotype of dainty woman-hood and declares: ‘… it bores me to speak in a little, fluty, honey-sweet voice. […] The thing I dislike most in the world is obeying orders.’ Whether this represents a disinterested promotion of woman’s liberation, or whether Gautier’s narrators and heroes just have an erotic fantasy about strong, liberated women, is another matter. The motives seem all the more questionable since Mademoiselle de Maupin also broaches the theme of lesbianism: is this really a plea for women’s rights or just a voyeuristic fantasy?

There are a number of reasons for bringing The Coffee Pot and Spirite together in this collection. Perhaps most importantly they are Gautier’s first and last fantastical tales. And as such they show some of the consistencies and evolutions that occur through his oeuvre as a whole. But Spirite is also a neat sequel to The Coffee Pot because together the two texts chart the course of a male erotic fantasy. The narrator of TheCoffee Pot ends his tale with the words, ‘I realised then that there was no happiness left for me on earth’. And it is Spirite’s Guy de Malivert who seems to pursue the idea as he experiences the temptation of striking up a relationship with a soul that is no longer of this earth.

THE COFFEE POT

I saw through sombre veil

Eleven stars, sun and moon all pale.

In silence deep

And reverentially

They pay me

Homage all through my sleep.

Joseph’s Vision.

I

Last year I was invited, together with two artist friends of mine, Arrigo Cohic and Pedrino Borgnioli, to spend a few days on an estate in southern Normandy.

The fickle weather, which had seemed extremely promising when we set off, suddenly changed and it rained so heavily that the hollowed out tracks we were walking on became more like the bed of a torrential river.

We were sinking into sludge up to our knees and a thick layer of slimy earth had attached itself to the soles of our boots, its weight slowing our progress so much that we did not arrive at our destination until an hour after sunset.

We were exhausted and our host could see that we were straining to contain our yawns and keep our eyes open, so as soon as we had had supper, he led each of us to our own room.

Mine was vast. Walking into it, a kind of feverish chill ran down my spine; it was as though I was entering a new world. To see Boucher’s representation of the four seasons above the doors, the furniture overladen with rococo ornamentation in the worst possible taste, and the heavy sculpture of the mirrored panels, one might actually have thought oneself in Regency France.

Nothing had been done to clear things away. The dressing table, covered with boxes of combs and powder puffs, seemed to have been used just the day before. Two or three dresses which changed colour in the light and a fan studded with silver sequins were strewn over the well-waxed floor. And to my great astonishment, an enamel snuffbox lay open in the hearth, full of still fresh tobacco.

I did not notice these things until after the servant had placed his candlestick on the bedside table and bid me goodnight; then, I swear, I began to tremble like a leaf. I undressed swiftly, got into bed and, to put an end to my foolish fears, quickly shut my eyes and turned towards the wall. But I found it impossible to stay in this position: the bed was tossing beneath me like the sea and my eyelids were being forced open. I felt compelled to turn around and look.

The flaming fire was casting a reddish light across the apartment so that it was easy to make out the characters of the tapestry and the faces of the smoky portraits which hung on the wall. They were our host’s ancestors, knights in armour, wigged counsellors and beautiful ladies with painted faces, white powdered hair and a rose in one hand.

Suddenly the fire began to flicker strangely; a pale light illuminated the room and I saw clearly that what I had assumed were merely paintings were in fact reality; the eyes of these framed individuals shifted and shone in a remarkable way; their lips moved like the lips of people talking but I could hear nothing except the tick-tock of the clock and the whistle of the autumnal North wind.

An overwhelming terror gripped me, my hair bristled on my forehead, my teeth chattered so violently I thought they would shatter and a cold sweat soaked my whole body.

The clock struck eleven. The vibration of the last chime resounded for a long time and when it had completely died away…

No, I dare not say what happened. No one would believe me; people would think I was mad.

The candles lit themselves; unaided by any visible force, the bellows began to fan the fire, rattling like an asthmatic old man; the tongs poked about in the embers and the shovel gathered up the cinders. Then a coffee pot threw itself down from a table on which it had been standing and hobbled over to the hearth, where it settled itself amongst the embers. A few moments later the armchairs set off and with their cork-screw feet flitting around in an astonishing way they came and gathered around the fireplace.

II

I did not know what to think of what I was seeing; but much more extraordinary things were yet to happen.

One of the portraits, the oldest of the lot, was of a big round-faced man with a grey beard, who looked just as I had imagined Sir John Falstaff to look. Grimacing, this man’s head freed itself from its frame. Then with a great deal of effort he squeezed his shoulders and pot-belly between the narrow strips of the border before jumping heavily on to the floor.

He had no sooner caught his breath than he pulled a peculiarly small key from his waistcoat pocket, blew on it to make sure the bit was cleanly cut and then unlocked each of the frames one after another. Whereupon all the frames expanded to let out the pictures they contained.

Chubby little priests, dry sallow dowagers, serious-looking magistrates shrouded in great black robes, dandies in silk stockings and dark woollen breeches, holding the points of their swords up high: all these characters created such a strange spectacle that despite my fear, I could not help laughing. And these worthy characters seated themselves; and the coffee pot jumped lightly up on to the table. They drank their coffee from blue and white Japanese cups, which came running along spontaneously from on top of a writing desk, each one accompanied by a lump of sugar and a small silver spoon.

When the coffee was finished, coffee pot, cups and spoons all disappeared together and a conversation started up that was certainly the most curious I have ever witnessed: none of these strange characters looked at one another as they conversed but instead kept staring at the clock. I too was unable to take my eyes off it or stop following the hands as they marched imperceptibly on to midnight.

Finally midnight struck and a voice with exactly the same tone as the clock could be heard saying:

‘The time has come; you must dance.’

The company rose. The chairs moved back of their own accord and each knight took a lady by the hand. Then the same voice said:

‘Members of the orchestra, let the music commence!’

I have omitted to mention that one half of the tapestry portrayed an Italian orchestra and the other half, a stag hunt with some whips blowing hunting horns. The whips and the musicians, who had not moved a muscle until now, inclined their heads as a sign of mutual understanding.

The maestro raised his baton and a lively, dancing melody started up on either side of the room. The first dance was a minuet. But the quick notes of the score the musicians were playing clashed with the sober bows and curtsies of the dance, so after a few minutes all the couples began to pirouette like German spinning tops. The women’s silk dresses, ruffled by this dancing whirlwind, made peculiar sounds just like the flapping wings of a flock of pigeons. And the wind surging beneath the dresses puffed them out prodigously, making them look like swinging bells.

The virtuosos’ bows moved so fast on the strings that electric sparks flew. The flautists’ fingers rose and fell like quicksilver; the hornblowers’ cheeks were inflated like balloons. And all this created such a hurried deluge of notes and trills, such an incredible torrent of ascending and descending scales that all hell would not have been able to keep up such a speed for even two minutes.

It was pitiful too to see the efforts of those dancers, as they tried to keep pace. They jumped, cavorted, twirled and bounded and leapt three feet into the air; so energetic were they that the sweat ran down their brows and into their eyes and washed off their beauty spots and their make-up. Try as they might, however, the orchestra was always three or four notes ahead of them.

The clock struck one. They stopped. And I saw something which had escaped my notice: a woman who had not been dancing.

She was sitting in a Queen Anne armchair in a corner by the fireplace and seemed to be totally isolated from what was going on around her.

Never, even in my dreams, have my eyes been presented with anything so perfect: her skin was a dazzling white, her hair was ash blond; she had long eyelashes and blue eyes, so clear and transparent that I could see through to her soul as distinctly as one might see a pebble on the bed of a stream. And I felt that if ever I should love anyone, it would be her. I leapt out of bed, where I had been rooted until now and I moved towards her, unconsciously driven by something controlling me from within. Then I found myself at her knees, with one of her hands in mine, chatting away as though I had known her for twenty years.

But as I was talking to her, my head was rocking in time to the continuing music, in a strange and wonderful way; and although I was overjoyed to be in conversation with such a beautiful person, my feet were burning to dance with her.

However, I did not dare ask her. She seemed to understand what I wanted for she raised the hand I was not holding towards the clock face and said:

‘When the hand gets to there we shall see, my dear Théodore.’