Octave Mirbeau’s sharp 1898 literary critique examining Lucien Muhlfeld’s ‘Le Mauvais Désir’ and the state of French literature during a time of social upheaval. A masterful essay blending wit, cultural commentary, and penetrating analysis of jealousy and desire in fin de siècle fiction.
It seems we haven’t the time nor the taste for reading books anymore. The newspaper, alas! with its daily violence, its lies, its madness, its crimes – that’s quite enough for our temporarily corrupted curiosity. Not only do we no longer read books; we don’t even talk about them. Apart from what you know all too well, we talk about nothing at all. The anguish that grave events at home and abroad inflict upon all noble hearts leaves no room for those tranquil and charming leisures we once loved. A book demands a calm hour and peace of mind. But our hours now tick away nothing but anxiety and fever. Conversations have taken such an aggressive turn that we’ve simply stopped talking.
We have fallen silent about everything. We pass by beauty without seeing it, without caring, without pausing as we once did. The unexpected death of Puvis de Chavannes could barely wrench us, even for a moment, from our fixed obsessions. We are caught in the cyclone of this furious life that carries us God knows where, with God knows whom!… Oh, how I envy those untouched by this tempest’s bitter breath, who can still look at things with yesterday’s eyes!
I envy them, certainly, and pity them even more – for it’s not entirely bad when such storms occasionally shake a people’s egoism and rouse them from their heavy slumber. These painful crises bring more than just misfortune. Alongside the harm, there’s the good they do, will do, have already done. We see energies reborn, characters reforged, new ideas and consciences arising; we grow accustomed to participating more broadly in the general movement of things. The national soul, too prone to torpor, gains by feeling itself more alive, more active in struggle and peril. Who knows if this fever’s disorder, this illness’s upheaval, isn’t labour pains for a future of better justice, birthing a more beautiful freedom? Illness can sometimes mean rejuvenation. We have many viruses to expel from our organism – who is to say we are not expelling them to forge new strength and joy?… Besides, this is the illness of doubt: we can do nothing about it, since it’s history itself that ferments and bubbles in our depths, stronger than our will, beyond our virtues or crimes!
Despite the inescapable preoccupations of this tragic moment, through effort and the miracle of abstracting myself from their haunting, I have managed to read three books – something that hadn’t happened to me in months upon months. True, these are choice books, their authors friends – friends of my friendship and friends of my mind. The Evil Desire by M. Lucien Muhlfeld, The Holocaust by M. Ernest La Jeunesse, Wisdom and Destiny by that modern Marcus Aurelius we call Maurice Maeterlinck.
Following chronological order, I will speak today only of The Evil Desire. The other two I love – The Holocaust for its acute sensitivity and passionate lyricism, Wisdom and Destiny for the bright, calm, pacifying light it kindles in souls – will come later. These are three brave books I praise for confronting the moment’s hostility and something more terrible still: inattention. And I’m infinitely grateful to these three works, not only for their personal and very different beauties, but for making me live again a life, alas! too forgotten and which I had not known for so long.
⁂
I have been following M. Lucien Muhlfeld for quite some years now, though he is still a very young man. His literary debut dates back, I believe, to the founding of the Revue blanche. It interested me keenly. Right from the start, it revealed a writer of good stock, as well as an ultra-modern temperament. Complete master of his mind and his pen, he showed himself singularly armed for criticism – that is, for the handling of ideas. One sensed in him a man of learning, of strong culture, of reasoned taste, of subtle and precise intelligence. Amidst all those styles too heavily befogged or overloaded with useless details that typically clutter young reviews, I noticed his – sharp and concise, elegant and sober, of almost classical form, with clean, supple lines; a style, in short. Irony played there easily, charmingly, musically, among the high speculations of literature, philosophy and life. Not terribly benevolent, certainly, not always fair either, but M. Lucien Muhlfeld was, in return, absolutely free of those school and coterie prejudices that sometimes make reading such periodicals so irritating, despite all the talent expended. He was too comprehensive for that; and his severity, for which we mustn’t blame him, came from his high conception of the work of art and his desire for the better and the beautiful. What enchanted me in his critical essays and tales – and what was then very rare in a young man – was that his mind was open to life, and he repudiated the nebulous vagueness of symbolist aesthetics and achievements; I was therefore curious to see how M. Lucien Muhlfeld would apply his qualities to the novel.
I have seen it now. If The Evil Desire isn’t a masterpiece in itself, it’s a very fine book that cuts sharply through the monotony of current works – one of the two or three books in a year’s production that deserve to captivate and hold the reader.
The style is brief, nervous and rapid, sometimes of a harsh concision that gathers all thought into a single stroke, sometimes graceful without simpering, coloured without impasto, rich without tinsel, always firm and well-constructed, expressing characters and things with admirable clarity of accent. With M. Lucien Muhlfeld, as with M. Anatole France, the vocabulary isn’t extensive, but it says everything without repetition, each time with astonishing variety. The vision is exact, the comprehension multiple, the composition original and well-ordered, the interest sustained.
The Evil Desire is, without novelistic complication, a love story set against a backdrop of fashionable life. And that’s all! And it’s witty, sensual, profound, dramatic, anguishing! Every character, even those who merely pass through, lives intensely. Each acts and thinks according to their milieu, with all the characteristics of thought and action proper to them. The milieus too are rendered with absolute truth, in all the philosophy of an observation that lets nothing escape of gestures and thoughts.
Beginning gaily among light graces, ironies, delicate sensualities, in the midst of a libertine and easy society, the novel ends abruptly in a stroke of drama. And the drama is all the more poignant, grips your entrails all the more, because it lies not merely in the plot twists – which are quite simple – but in the idea, in the idea’s pathos and terror, which descends like a sinister gleam into the depths of flesh, into flesh’s very darkness.
The lover in The Evil Desire is jealous. Jealousy tortures him, wracks his mind and body. Each kiss leaves on his lips a frightful taste of death; in each embrace, he savours a savage, murderous voluptuousness of suffocation. He doesn’t know which is in him – murder or love. He is about to find out; he will soon know that murder and love are twin instincts. The beloved dies. And it’s over with the evil desire… Suddenly, there’s peace, almost joy.
I won’t spoil this magnificent dénouement of a philosophy that boldly repudiates all the hypocrisies of passion and raises this love story to the fierce summit of the darkest tragedy.
One must read M. Lucien Muhlfeld’s book, and read it again, for each time one discovers more fine talent, more wit, gaiety, terror.
1898.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 