Spirite: and Coffee Pot (Dedalus European Classics) Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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  ISBN printed book 978 1 873982 96 9

  ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 49 5

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  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 de Maupin. 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 La Morte 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 du Mal 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 o
f 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 The Coffee 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.