The Decadent demimonde
Mar 17th, 2015 by houghtonmodern
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
Today’s volume from the Santo Domingo Collection is a chronicle of social and intellectual life in nineteenth-century France, and its provenance establishes an acquaintance between two prominent figures thereof. Jean Lorrain (1855-1906, given name Paul Duval) was a prolific author of the Decadent movement, alongside such others as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; the Decadents claimed Charles Baudelaire as their inspiration and sought to rattle the complacent middle class with shocking imagery and unabashed artifice. The Decadents – a term of critical scorn co-opted by the movement’s practitioners – were associated with drug use, drinking, sexual perversity, and moral corruption.
Lorrain embodied the Parisian demimonde – openly gay, unendingly vulgar, a self-indulgent dandy, and an all-around champion of bad taste. Casually misogynistic and anti-Semitic, and prone to writing scathing personal attacks even in his literary criticism, Lorrain strikes the reader as a fascinating man to know, but a difficult one to love. Poussières de Paris is his 1902 account of his social milieu; setting this copy apart is its inscription to Liane de Pougy. Pougy (1869-1950, given name Anne Marie Chassaigne) was an author, actor, dancer at the Folies Bèrgere, and famous courtesan. Raised in a nunnery, she eloped at sixteen with a husband who would prove violent and abusive; she escaped from that marriage to Paris, where she began a flourishing career of prostitution and acting. Pougy recorded these events in her memoir, Mes cahiers bleus; her novel, Idylle Sapphique, is a fictionalization of one of her lesbian affairs. Toward the end of her life she would return to the Catholic fold, joining the Order of Saint Dominic and pledging herself to the care of children with birth defects.
This book’s inscription, then, demonstrates a connection between two of Belle Époque Paris’s most outsized personalities. Of additional interest: bound in at the front is a four-page letter in Lorrain’s hand, discussing the weather and other mundanities of life in the villa where he resided at the time. Lorrain also makes passing mention of having arranged a pistol duel; Marcel Proust was among the contemporaries offended by one of Lorrain’s reviews, and the two dueled non-fatally in accordance with Proust’s demand for satisfaction. Of course, Lorrain so broadly raised the ire of everyone he knew that it’s difficult to pin down who his challenger here may be. Lorrain writes this letter to an unidentified recipient who may or may not be Liane de Pougy, but whom he certainly addresses as “O Venus!”
Poussières de Paris: FC8.L8938.902p; HOLLIS number 14284864
Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.