French Decadent Tales by Stephen Romer

Author:Stephen Romer [Romer, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Deshoulières

HIS name was Deshoulières and he didn’t like it.

In this he was wrong, for it was doubtless in large part his name, and the banalities associated with it, that led to his singular obsession with being original.

He was indeed, as far as originality goes, a species apart, rare and whole.

Having dabbled in nearly everything—arts, letters, pleasures—he had forged for himself an ideal, that consisted in being unpredictable in everything.

At first sight, this wasn’t anything strange, the theory merely indicating a curious soul, the enemy of the commonplace, a seeker of the new—in common with all true creators. But where things became unusual was that Deshoulières made of this theory a rule of conduct in his daily life and in his dealings with the world, pushing it to the point of extreme eccentricity.

He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.

* * *

So it was that, finding originality only in change, he invented the following axiom: one should never look like oneself, physically, especially. It is this that explains his extraordinarily varied clothes, manners, voice, and even physiognomy. Making ample use of make-up and false hair, he emerged each day with a different head, and lived like a veritable Proteus.*

His mind was as various as a kaleidoscope, showing up paradoxes like coloured glass, mingled with the most monstrous truisms, which made in reality for a dazzle of words, ideas, images, arguments, quite blinding for those who wanted to take the measure of this fantasmagorical intelligence.

* * *

He was, moreover, extremely gifted.

Robust and well-built, he was two feet longer than the verses of his deplorable homonym,* and one could discern a modern beauty under all his borrowed facets. He had marvellous facility in assimilating every virtue and every vice, all the sciences and all the arts. He was known for his acts of heroism and his acts of cowardice, for his tours de force and his swoonings, for incomparable fragments of verse and prose, for snatches of novel melody, for sketches which showed the marks of a future master. Potentially, he possessed every human genius.

But he never took anything further, claiming that it would be too banal to do so. It sufficed him to say that he had all the power necessary to become a great man, poet, musician, painter—but he renounced such things, such grandeurs being altogether too vulgar and below him.

It’s all as old as the hills, he would say. There is no point in my being the god of my century, since I already am. It might amuse me to be that god, if I were a mere brute! But even that has been done before!

Mostly, people wrote him off as a lunatic. But some men thought of him as a kind of Antichrist.

But this Antichrist was much too subtly eccentric to believe in himself.

If God did exist, he said one day, and if I were He, I wouldn’t be so stupid as not to prove to myself I did not exist.

* * *

Holding such theories, it is obvious that

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