Stories to Read by Candlelight E-Book

Jean Lorrain

• Herausgeber: Odyssey Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 71

Beschreibung

Stories to Read by Candlelight contains eight stories first published in the 1890s by the French author, Jean Lorrain, translated here into English by Patricia Worth. Jean draws the reader back in time to his provincial childhood when his grandmother’s seamstress would tell him stories that gave him goose bumps and made him jump under the covers. Here he recounts these same stories, or invents new half-lived half-dreamed stories born of objects found in an attic or an old house. The characters have a mythical quality, whether they be fantastical beings who long to be real, like the embroidered Princess Mandosiane, or real people like Madame Gorgibus, accused of being a wicked fairy. The stories fall between legends and fairy tales, a genre favoured by a few Decadent authors protesting against realism and regretting technological progress.

Leseprobe

Published by Ensorcellia, an imprint of Odyssey Books, in 2019

Copyright © Patricia Worth 2019

Illustrations Copyright © Erin-Claire Barrow 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

www.odysseybooks.com.au

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN: 978-1-925652-58-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-925652-59-8 (ebook)

Cover design: Simon Critchell

The following stories from this collection have previously been published:

‘Madame Gorgibus’: The Brooklyn Rail ‘inTranslation’, February 2015

‘Princess Mandosiane’: Eleven Eleven, Issue 19

‘Queen Maritorne’: Eleven Eleven, Issue 19

‘Gudule the Maid’: Danse Macabre, 99

‘Useless Virtue’: Sun Star Review, Vol 1, Issue 2

Introduction

About forty years ago in the little old towns of the bourgeoisie and the judges, in the homes of the old families, one could meet neat and discreet little people treated less as hirelings than as friends. They did not live in the attic but spent at least three or four days a week relegated to the family’s upstairs linen room, laboriously occupied, the darling creatures, in works of sewing and mending for the household.

These young seamstresses, these wenches with a needle, cousettes as they were rudely and impertinently named in the eighteenth century to which they seemed to belong, were the joy of every provincial childhood, today mature and in their forties.

They were spinsters, somewhat sanctimonious, finicky and gossipy, yet our parents would not have suffered them being ridiculed in church. They were trusted to take children to their grandparents’ homes, where in a large room cluttered with armoires these sweet old girls would bring their strangely thoughtless heads together and tell gripping stories.

They had no end of odd habits: mass at six in the morning that they wouldn’t miss for anything in the world; the pot of embers dying beneath ashes that they lugged around in all weathers—rain, snow, and wind squalls—shielding it under a corner of their mantle; the most stubborn refusal to take a place at a table where cutlery was crossed; curious devotions and little faïence saints that they always kept buried at the bottom of some huge pocket under their skirts; a priceless way of crossing themselves at any swearword; and hair-splitting, and fussmaking, and curtseying!

I knew one of these poor, pitiable girls. Her name was Norine; she came to my grandmother’s during the day and was responsible for all the mending work in the house. She had once been pretty and had a suitor with honourable intentions, but Norine never wanted to leave her old, infirm parents. One fine morning the lover grew tired of waiting, and Norine grew old alone in her little worker’s cottage with the memory of her old parents who had died late in life, and perhaps with regret for the lover who had left. In my grandmother’s house Norine was greatly loved; she was an old maid with funny ways, though she was upright, honest, and would never lie. But I sense melancholy descending and filling me as I try to recall this colourless and frail little figure; all the ashes of the past are blanketing these stories in a premature snow, and I wanted them to be cheerful. I’ve drifted unwittingly into the inexpressible charm of this small autumnal town, this small fortified town like an etching from the last century, the kind of town with a belfry, trees in quincunx arrays and, in the market, tall houses with sculpted gables.

Brr! Brr! Brr!

‘But anyway,’ as Norine herself would say, ‘a pinch of tobacco and a demitasse of coffee, and with that we can thumb our nose at the devil.’

Here is the first of Norine’s stories, such as she would tell it in her rather peculiar language, when the girls—my cousins—and I would gather round her knees in my grandmother’s linen room.

Monsieur d’Avonancourt

‘Now, then! My chattering little ladies, and you, sir, awake after your long sleep, let me tell you about a rich and powerful lord, a marquis and Grand Cordon, Monsieur du Tillet d’Avonancourt. He had lived a long time in Paris and also in Versailles, where he had done some things which were not nice, they say, for this happened under Louis XV, before that beggar of a Revolution. In those towns he had often visited people of all sorts, bankers and alchemists, in fact, many types more in favour with hell than with the Church. He had, they say, been present at the Great Work. What it was, the local people would have been hard-pressed to say, but it was …’ (and here Norine always crossed herself) ‘… the final abomination.

‘So it was that when he returned to this region, on his last legs and at a loss for words, no one in the nobility cared to see a man as compromised as he. They said he was more dead than alive. But the little vidame1 of Ravanailles could not stand this; as a child, he had been acquainted with the old marquis in his father’s house. So one morning, consumed by curiosity, he left for the house of du Tillet.

‘It was mid-autumn, the plane trees were already yellow, and on the lawns were dead spots resembling twenty-franc coins. He arrived at the entrance to the park, made enquiries at the gate, and with a lively leap from his Berlin, stopped, agog and astounded, his mouth agape, to learn that Monsieur le Marquis, whom he believed to be in bed and yielding up his ghost, was taking a walk round the park. In he dashed, and at the end of the most majestic avenue what do you think he saw? Straight as a post, head held high, gold-knobbed cane in his hand, the old Marquis d’Avonancourt in person.

‘This man, spry as a youth, saw the vidame in the distance and called out to him. In a falsetto voice, his fist proudly planted on his hip, he said:

‘ “Well, well! Vidame, you coming to see if I’m dead? In town they’re barking lustily about my last gasp. You can see that I’m in quite good health, eh! eh! I’m taking a turn round the park and I’m not afraid of the cool air!”

‘And in a singularly cutting tone, he continued:

‘ “And there are no clergy, no doctors in my house. What need do I have of that lot? I’m doing very well, you must admit, for my seventy years, young man!”

‘And, with an authoritative blow of his cane, he struck the ground littered with dead leaves and said:

‘ “I come here every evening to take my turn round the park; the sunsets here are splendid, you must admit. I’m here this evening and I’ll come on many more evenings yet; and those money-lenders bothered by this, I’ll tell them myself, straight to their faces, eh! eh! eh!”

‘The vidame of Ravanailles has since told how he then had a strange sensation of malaise. The marquis had suddenly seemed to him so oddly thin on that autumnal crepuscular avenue that a little graveyard chill descended on him. This haughty, sarcastic silhouette profiled in black against the crimson sky reminded him alarmingly, with its very smile and its sunken, gleaming eyes, of a certain Monsieur de Voltaire, a heathen in the manner of Monsieur le Marquis and no better than him.

‘The vidame took his leave rather hastily without that great rogue of a marquis troubling to escort him. Quickly, quickly, he got back to his Berlin and called out:

‘ “Hup! Don’t spare the horses! A big tip for the postilion!”

‘And at full gallop he reached the town’s ramparts where the first news he heard on arrival at the gates was that the marquis had been dead since the previous day.

‘And the vidame had just seen him, had just spoken to him. And this chateau, visited by death, this chateau of a dream, this phantasmagoric chateau where unreal valets and ghosts had received him… !

‘ “I come here every evening to take my turn round the park; the sunsets here are superb, you must admit. I’m here this evening and I’ll come back on many more evenings yet.”