Preface to Les Diaboliques

The preface to this famous collection of tales authored by this Frenchman, as included in the first edition.

Here are the first six stories!

If the public bites and finds them to its taste, six more will then be published because in total they are twelve, twelve mistresses of sin!

Of course, with the title of Diaboliques, they could not possibly pretend to be a book of prayers or of Christian imitation.  They are nonetheless lush with true observation, however daring, and have been written by a Christian moralist who believes – and these are his own poetics – that great painters can paint anything and that these paintings are always both moral and tragic; from them will inevitably emerge the horror of the things they describe.  Only the impassive and the mocking are truly immoral.  And the present author, who believes in the Devil and in his influence upon the world, is not mocking anything at all and has no purpose in recounting these tales to those of pure soul other than to terrify and repulse them.

Once the public has read Les Diaboliques, I doubt there will be anyone who will wish to read it again, which is exactly what comprises the morality of a book.

That said as a matter of honor, we should answer another question.  Why has our author bestowed such a sonorous name upon these plain and dirt-strewn tales?  Is Diaboliques a bit too much?  Was the name chosen only for the stories included here or for the women at their core?

Alas, all these tales are true.  Nothing was invented or devised, we simply could not name the actual people involved!  They have been masked; and in these masks we can perceive the outline of their dresses.  "The alphabet belongs to me," said Casanova when he was reproached for not using his name.  The alphabet of novelists is the life of all those who have experienced passion and adventure, and it is only a matter of combining the letters of this alphabet with the discretion of profound art.  Moreover, despite the necessary precautions at the heart of these tales, there will undoubtedly be some among us whose attention will be attracted by the title Diaboliques, and who will not find them quite as diaboliques as they seem to boast of being.  They will expect inventions, complications, research, refinements, and all the shaking and trembling of modern melodrama (which is taking hold everywhere, it seems, even in the novel).  But these charming souls will be sadly mistaken!  Les Diaboliques are not devilries, they are truly "the diabolical," real stories of our progressive age and of a civilization both so delicious and divine that when we dare to describe them it always seems that they have been dictated by the Devil himself!  The Devil is like God.  Manichaeism, the source of the great heresies of the Middle Ages, might not be quite as stupid as we thought.  Malebranche said that God can be recognized by employing the simplest of means possible.  The same can be said of the Devil.

As for the women in these stories, why wouldn't they be the titular Diaboliques?  Are they not sufficiently steeped in diabolism in their own person as to deserve this gentle moniker?  Diaboliques!  There is not one of them here who is not diabolical to some degree; there is not one of them here whom we might seriously address with the words "my sweet angel" without fear of exaggeration.  Like the Devil – who was once an angel himself but fell irreparably – if they are angels then they are angels in his image, their heads lowered and the rest on high!  There is not one of them here who is pure, virtuous or innocent.  Monsters even, at least to some extent, they represent a collective of good sentiments and morality of precious little consideration.  Thus they could also have been called Les Diaboliques without really earning it.  We would have liked to create a museum of these ladies – as we wait for an even smaller museum of those ladies who are their counterparts and their foils in society, because all things come in pairs!  Art has two lobes just like the brain.  Nature resembles these women who have one blue eye and one black.  Here is their black eye in blackest ink, in the ink of those of easy virtue.

Perhaps later on we will publish something on their blue eye.  After Les Diaboliques, why not Les Célestes if we can find a blue of sufficient purity ...

But does such a color exist?

Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY

Paris, May 1, 1874

The Valley of Fear

Once upon a time, a young, impecunious Scottish physician had a brilliant idea for making a bundle of money, and, more importantly, for squeezing some pulp out of his burgeoning creative juices.  He would concoct a story that would combine the latest elements of forensic science with the camaraderie of old knighting tales, and throw in some historical relevance for good measure.  After a sufficient amount of superficial research, he had come up with the names of his protagonists, a suitable method for introducing them (one would narrate the tale, the other would star in it), and a topical setting that evoked a wide array of interest and emotion.  The year is the palindromic 1881, and another physician of likely Scottish provenance has returned  from an Afghan war to the tranquility of London.  Needing a room, as bachelors those days were expected not to be able to do anything for themselves,  he learns of a man also looking for lodgings whose "studies are very desultory and eccentric" and who "has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors."  Our physician, a humble soul by the name of Watson, is rather impressed by this man with "a passion for definite and exact knowledge," precisely the type of desires that should plague a man of medicine, but which, in the case of Watson, most properly do not.  How odd that the trained scientist is then the Romantic, and that his thin, ferocious, animated and highly mood-driven partner with the soul and wit of a poet is the man of unadulterated rationality; stranger still that this thinker would have an encyclopaedic command of all the crime committed in London in the last two decades.  This "walking calendar of crime" is, of course, Sherlock Holmes, and his first novel and appearance, A Study in Scarlet, is mimicked in structure by this unusual narrative, his last novel.

Unlike other tales which commence with a brief example of Holmes's deductive genius, Holmes and Watson are hardly at home or at peace for much time before Holmes receives a mysterious coded message from a man with the erudite pseudonym of Porlock.  Never identified or actually present in physical form in the novel, Porlock is one of the oddities in the Holmesian universe, an underling of the satanic Professor Moriarty who dares disobey his patron.  Money may be behind his betrayal, although Holmes unusually discusses the salary ("more than the Prime Minister gets") of Moriarty's prime henchman and Holmes's antagonist in this story; more likely is the reason Holmes surmises almost immediately: "because he feared that I would make some inquiry after him in that case, and bring trouble on him."  The case in question is deciphered with the help of Whitaker's Almanac:

There is danger/ may come very soon/ one Douglas rich/ country now at Birlstone/ confidence is pressing.

It is then far from shocking when, shortly thereafter, a Scotland Yard inspector by the name of MacDonald visits the duo to inform them that "Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night."  John Douglas to be exact, a Sussex resident of a large moated house equaled in size only by his wealth and boyish vigor.  He was "somewhat offhand in his manners," suggesting that "he had seen life in social strata on some far lower horizon," freely mingled with people of all classes including the nearby villagers whose businesses he patronized again and again, and "had spent a part of his life in America."  He was married to "a beautiful woman, tall, dark and slender, some twenty years younger than" her fiftyish husband, and very often visited in his residence by a dangerous-looking man called Cecil Barker.  But the most interesting thing about the late John Douglas was his tenacity:

The good impression which had been produced by his generosity and by his democratic manners was increased by a reputation gained for utter indifference to danger.  Though a wretched rider, he turned out at every meet, and took the most amazing falls in his determination to hold his own with the best.  When the vicarage caught fire he distinguished himself also by the fearlessness with which he reentered the building to save property, after the local fire brigade had given it up as impossible.  Thus it came about that John Douglas of the Manor House had within five years won himself quite a reputation in Birlstone.  

It is said that in premeditated crimes the character of the victim will reveal the culprit.  Determine what kind of man John Douglas was and you will soon have the reason for which he was killed; the gruesome method of execution – a sawed-off shotgun literally blowing his head to pieces and the perpetrator bounding out a tower window into the moat – will greatly distract the modern mind from this more essential matter.  And so, Holmes proceeds with great alacrity through the palette of possible solutions before arriving at one of the best thought-out plots and most satisfying explanations that Doyle would ever devise.

Yet the novella is hardly perfect.  As it were, it suffers from the same shortcoming that diminishes both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four: a rambling, wholly unwarranted back story. Whether readers truly care about the origin of a crime may be less pertinent than Conan Doyle's limitations as a novelist.  In any case, a quick flip through the book's second half will demonstrate how one writer possessed by a spirit of genius and originality – a font of sustained brilliance rarely matched in English literature – can produce dull prose that reads like a cross between a macabre fable and something from this legendary German author of westerns.  For those readers who have not tried non-Holmes tales by Conan Doyle, there is happy news: his best work always featured Holmes and always featured Watson.  So when critics chide Conan Doyle's forays into the fantastic, the Arthurian, and the spiritual, we would do well to recall his description of MacDonald: mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.  And, occasionally, genius doesn't quite realize what it has accomplished.

Une Vieille Maîtresse

It is said that every man has one woman who destroyed him; what this destruction precisely entails and whether or not the man is the better for this havoc is left to the imagination of the listener.  What is interesting about such an observation is that it has held true despite the overt sexual liberation of the postwar period.  Once upon a time a poet's soul was devastated by a princesse lointaine who remained lointaine; now it is a unclothed body he cannot forsake.  The reasons for such mutability are probably many, but the most likely is man's desire for a muse.  Of the two genders, men are most definitely the greater idealists, with the fact that they endure fewer reminders of their mortal frame throughout a lifetime contributing to this luxury of perspective.  Men will write an ode to a woman's beauty, or her voluptuousness, or the love that he cannot overcome or replace, and that woman will more often than not still be in the throes of youthful perfection, every curve unjagged, every corpuscle unblemished.  With this repining for glory gone comes a certain nonchalance towards present time actions, namely relationships following upon this destruction.  In fact, his thralldom to a former mistress might provide him with a convenient excuse for his lack of commitment, or worse, for his lack of faithfulness, which in most of us is nothing more than a fear of commitment.  Old themes, yes, but nicely packaged and ribboned in this recent film. 

The plot is simplicity itself, which in these types of tales is usually a good sign. 1835, Paris: a dashing young rake, Ryno de Marigny (first-timer Fu'ad Ait Aattou) has been chosen to marry the delicate, virginal and unmistakably wealthy Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida).  Before the wedding, Hermangarde's grandmother decides to have a fireside chat with Ryno regarding his past affairs and smartly leaves her whole night unbooked.  Ryno proceeds with his studied guile, flirting gently with the woman almost three times his age, and finally avers that he could not marry Hermangarde if he did not love her so passionately.  The grandmother and the viewer know, however, exactly what passions Ryno has been harboring: according to rumor and the brief scenes that preface this long conversation, Ryno has been involved for ten years with an illegitimate Spanish woman (Asia Argento) who, in the year of our Lord 1835, is now thirty-six and past a respectable age for that type of behavior.  She is a product of the previous century ("the age of Laclos," quip a few characters at different junctures) and therefore not subject to the same rules and expectations that might bind, say, the artless Hermangarde.  Ridiculous details are added as they become available: the mistress, known only as Vellini, was born to a Spanish bullfighter and an Italian duchess, and is married to an old English nobleman whose failing hearing and sight make her extracurricular activities that much easier.  Ryno's first encounter with her has the touch of cinematic coincidence, and the sudden hatred that can only yield to carnality also suggests more modern conduct.  Yet we are convinced in the film's first half (the wedding comes exactly at the midway point) that our story has been garnished with the details that all storytellers permit themselves to amuse their audience.  Moreover, the grandmother, an old fool who is madly taken with Ryno and his full Roman lips, has already made up her mind to allow the two to wed well before Ryno concludes his story at daybreak with the avowal that he has not been with Vellini in a very long time.  She is completely satisfied, but we are not.  After the wedding, a somber and drab interlude with a hurried reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians on the place of women, Hermangarde and Ryno retreat to the seaside to one of her family's many stations and plan a life without Vellini or anyone else.  A third act with a couple of twists convinces us, however, of the validity of that aphorism about old habits.

Unsurprisingly, this wealth of absurd detail has led many critics to deem the film pornography in period piece guise, which is both rash and as absurd as the tidbits they feel sully the screen.  And while we quickly catch on to the simple dichotomy in this author's novel on which the film was based – good girl, bad girl; sexless, sexpot; nice, naughty (all Ryno gets to do to Hermangarde before they are wed is plant a wet kiss on her raised brow) – our expectations are challenged by the format the film assumes.  There are admittedly a few scenes of candid intimacy; but given the subject matter they are interspersed between verbose narratives which seem to feed off one another like the near-incantations of this famous storyteller.  There is almost no violence, no hysterics (other than upon the sudden death of a child), no pulsating passion that would resolve itself in more conventional films into an ungodly amount of bloodletting, no pretension towards sublimating the film into some sort of moral tragedy backed by a cloying soundtrack.  In fact, every scene is longer, simpler and closer than we expect.  Widely praised for her performance by the film's admirers, Argento overacts continuously because her character is the epitome of overacting: she is compensating for the fact that she is neither beautiful nor rich nor intelligent nor, as it were, particularly interesting.  What she does offer is a lull from the icy rituals of everyday life among the elite, but she could never be someone a person of right mind would want to keep as his own.  Is that a reason to criticize the film?  Not at all, it is a reason to applaud the casting.  Had Vellini been a true knockout, there would have been no appeal whatsoever to Ryno, who has seen and done everything with everyone.  If she didn't have two curls like intertwined lovers or some satanic symbol on her forehead; if she didn't pray one minute and cackle in defiance the next; if she didn't disguise herself as the devil to a masked ball by dressing exactly the way she always does; if she didn't remind us of another unstable Spanish girl who might be the harbinger of doom, we would not be inclined to believe that ten years of lovemaking (with the "average marriage in Paris nowadays lasting only seven") could be at all riveting.  "I am afraid of a part of my destiny," says a beleaguered Ryno at one point, but we don't believe he's afraid of anything except his own weakness.  And more than once in the film are we reminded of an old Arabic proverb: only the scorpion gives things for free.

The Dancing Men

          What one man can invent another can discover.

                                                              Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"

We should not be surprised at the recent uptick of books about codes (some, if not most, of dubious aesthetic value), nor should we be foolish enough to attribute this trend to a development in the world's interest in arcane knowledge.  The opposite, as it were, is true.  The majority of us work very hard trying to weave all the aspects of our life into a tapestry as beautiful as the one we hope one dark day will garnish our sinking coffin.  And when we do choose to escape to a realm of pure delight, we want that realm to succor the same ideals that we nurture in our collective bosom.  Now I am not belittling the everyday – there is no reason to fight it.  But where we came from, where on earth or beyond we may be going, and what this life could possibly mean should not yield as facile and pellucid a solution as the repair of an office appliance or, after burrowing through a mountain of paperwork, the retrieval of a missing document.  Yet this is precisely the direction the lives of so many who cannot be bothered to worry about existence are taking.  More often than not, it is the banality of survival that devours them, that proves time and again that philosophy is a luxury of the rich, and the stitches and knots we gaze upon in the starry sky should be easily resolved in a short novel that explains everything by means of a conspiracy or plot in which all of human history is strapped together in a lie.  Everything we believe in is a lie, but a planet billions of miles away is the truth, all we have to do is stare at the firmament until it all becomes justifiable in our ignorant skulls.  There is little that can be done for you if you find this line of thinking appealing; if, however, you sense an almost indecipherable pattern that undergirds the layers of our reality, you might enjoy this clever tale.

Our sleuthing duo is visited by a certain Hilton Cubitt, a member of the landed gentry whose family was extremely famous in the county of Norfolk.  Cubitt recently married an American by the name of Elsie Patrick who was visiting the old country for reasons that will become appreciably clearer as the story unfolds.  Some men would shy away from women like Elsie Patrick – unrefined, tomboyish, and beholden to a checkered past – but Cubitt does not count himself among them.  No, some men would deem a warning such as the following a decisive criterion in breaking off any engagement:

I have had some very disagreeable associations in my life ... I wish to forget all about them.  I would rather never allude to the past, for it is very painful to me.  If you take me, Hilton, you will take a woman who has nothing that she need be personally ashamed of; but you will have to be content with my word for it, and to allow me to be silent as to all that passed up to the time when I became yours.  If these conditions are too hard, then go back to Norfolk, and leave me to the lonely life in which you found me.

The passage above might well have been pasted from any nineteenth-century harlequin romance; and it is indeed this sentimental attachment that plagues Cubitt, "a fine creature, this man of the Old English soil – simple, straight and gentle, with his great, earnest blue eyes and broad, comely face ... [whose] love for his wife and his trust in her shone in his features," and induces Holmes to come to his aid.  It took only a year of marriage before Elsie began to receive mail from the United States, and then a series of childlike symbols resembling slightly varied dancing stick figures.  Holmes detects a code and, from Elsie's reaction ("she turned deadly white, read the letter, and threw it in the fire"), a threat.  Soon the same mysterious characters are found written in chalk on the actual windows of the Cubitt estate, then in the tool shed nearby, and Holmes, "the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject [of] secret writings" in which he catalogs and analyzes "one hundred and sixty separate ciphers," gathers as many samples of this curious language as he can before mounting his riposte.

The story remains notorious among Holmesians for two reasons: the tragic fate of the good Cubitt, a man far too ethical, forgiving and noble-minded to walk among the ruffians of his time, and the double-pronged nature of the crimes that are committed.  Holmes is not only called upon to break the code – if it is a code after all and not just "the mere random sketches of children" – he is also entrusted with one of the first locked-room mysteries on record, a conundrum that would become one of detective fiction's greatest phenomena in the first half of the twentieth century as exemplified by the works of this Anglo-American (although the very first occurrence may well be this novel).  We may impute Holmes's statement about what man can invent and discover as an unfortunate dreg of his arrogance, and yet such boasting has been constant throughout man's invention and reinvention of the same ideas, shapes and systems.  What is even more amazing than Holmes's arrogance is that of modern-day scientists who consider their work impenetrable and the brilliance of the Ancients a potpourri of legend, myth and superstition.  So many manmade laws – and that term should be used as loosely as possible – are unbreakable because they cannot be refuted by any logic since they themselves redefine logic to suit their needs, a violation that you will never find in nature.  Perhaps that is because what is not invented by men shall remain a mystery until death.

The Three Students

There are, we are told by the new priests of the religion of unassailable and unfathomable darkness, a hundred billion suns in each of a hundred billion galaxies in our universe.  That these pundits are rounding to the nearest happy figure (one with a comet tail of twenty-two zeros) should tell you exactly how sure we are of what is out there and what might actually be hidden from our perspectives.  The students of today are indeed confronted with the dilemma of overspecialization, of realizing from the beginning of their education that they unlike this man of letters or this great philosopher, mathematician and diplomat, cannot possibly learn in a lifetime everything that is worth learning.  Instead, they are advised to choose one small, sniveling category as their Bible and pursue that microcosm with all due alacrity and ferociousness, with man's greatest achievement, literature, being no exception.  Surely – and I may reveal some prejudices with the following statement – each literary tradition needs its experts.  Each language needs diligent men and women gorged on the masterpieces of the tradition in question and sufficiently familiar with everything else of note to derive from this assortment another library of thematic and philological studies.  In smaller and newer traditions, however, there inevitably lurks a paucity of works available to the scholar who wishes to place his countrymen (usually these tasks are best left to a native) on the same shelf with the books of great world literature.  It has been commonplace in the last century and in this one to speak of major traditions as simply those who have been historically blessed over the course of written time.  So the fact that Italy has countless works of art and Slovenia does not (as it were, my grandmother was an ethnic Slovene who spoke both languages) should not make one think that Slovenian literature possesses any less dignity than its Roman neighbor.  Yet given our terrestrial limitations, what is worth learning and what isn't?  Have I been foolish in my choice of Czech (now long since forgotten) and Danish, two smaller traditions rich in culture?  Let us put these questions aside for the moment and turn to this gem of a story that broaches the subject.

From its title, we understand that the tale will involve a university or a school, and likely one of great standing.  This suspicion is confirmed in the opening paragraph when Watson informs us that he and his sleuthing chum had the opportunity "in the year '95 ... to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns."  Holmes profits from the occasion to frequent a library

Where [he] was pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters – researches which led to results so striking that they may be the subject of one of my future narratives.

Although Holmes's academic interests – tire tracks, ash, poisons, inks, and coded languages, to name but a few – are arcane and often only used to propel the story forward, it is always interesting to see a great mind tackle a subject systematically since true learning can only be gotten from such an approach.  Holmes's work is going so well, in fact, that he initially fends off the pleas of a Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer at the College of St. Luke's.  It turns out that, the following day, Soames will be administering an exam in Ancient Greek (including a sight passage from this famous historian) with the best grade to be awarded a scholarship.  Perhaps stupidly, he receives a copy of the Thucydides passage and leaves it unattended on his desk for an hour.  When he returns, he finds a key in the lock of his office and, upon entering, the three slips of paper containing the Greek scattered across the room.  The only other person with a key is the mild-mannered servant, Bannister, "a little, white-faced, clean-shaven, grizzly-haired fellow of fifty" and "absolutely above suspicion."  So the blame must fall to one of the three students for Soames is responsible:  Daulat Ras, Miles McLaren, and a young man named Gilchrist.

Holmes's methods are simple and elucidating, so no more of the plot will be revealed here.  What is most interesting is Conan Doyle's choice of three students, instinctively reflecting three societal currents with which Victorian England as a whole had to contend (women's rights lagged behind just a tad).  Gilchrist, who is never mentioned by his Christian name, is the son of the infamous Sir Jabez Gilchrist, a lord of ill repute "who ruined himself on the turf"; Ras, "a quiet, inscrutable fellow," represents the movement of academics from the Indian subcontinent to the best universities of their erstwhile oppressors and the seed of postcolonialism in general; and McLaren is described as "wayward, dissipated, and unprincipled," but "when he chooses to work, one of the brightest intellects of the university."  To Conan Doyle's credit, little is made of these differences, and the investigation proceeds more along an examination of personality and motive rather than cultural tendency.  Still, we see old England, modern polyethnic England, and modernity's knee-jerk reaction to authority and its preposterous claim to hereditary divine rights.  By the way, the only divine rights that exist are common to all of us, and they involve the right to believe in something greater than ourselves.  Sometimes that means admitting that we cannot understand our universe in full, but that, to paraphrase this writer of genius, we can begin to grasp the outline of a future understanding.  Maybe this sentiment can be pamphletized as follows: read as much as you can, learn as much as you can, but do it with the big picture in mind.  Regardless of how many suns you choose to worship.