Octave Mirbeau’s sharp-witted critique of Robert de Montesquiou’s Les Chauves-Souris (The Bats) – a masterful literary review showcasing the French critic’s signature irony and insight into Belle Époque poetry and symbolist aesthetics.
At this year’s Salon du Champ-de-Mars, there was a rather precious piece of furniture on display: a chest of drawers expertly crafted by M. Gallé of Nancy, following designs by M. Robert de Montesquiou. Now, M. Robert de Montesquiou has a thing about hydrangeas. He paints them, he sings their praises. Not that the hydrangea is, strictly speaking, a flower. In his mind, it’s something rather mad that gives off the impression of nocturnal gleaming, of moonlight caught in sunshine. Well, anything’s possible; and one mustn’t quibble with poets over the unexpected nature of their sensations and analogies. As for me—alas, no poet—I was haunted for ages by the enormous obscenity of lilies. Regrettable profanation, that.
Naturally, the decorative theme chosen for this chest of drawers was these beloved hydrangeas of M. de Montesquiou’s: pale hydrangeas, barely blue, charmingly faded, harmoniously pretty, and so supple and tender in their grace that they seemed like silk torn from Tanit’s very cloak and deliciously wilted. Here and there, tarnished golds from ancient harps played delicately amongst this floral moonscape, and on the pink marble top, dying bronze leaves lay embedded, blown in from some Japanese autumn or other.
Today I picture this chest of drawers again, worked like an intimate jewel box, more tremulous than a fan, cheerful as a kakemono, and I think how perfectly suited it was to contain, in its silent drawers, the manuscript of The Bats, those strange poems that M. Robert de Montesquiou has just collected in an exceptional and sumptuous volume for the delight of his friends.
The Bats—imagine a book of over six hundred pages, dressed in blue silk, the blue of moonlight on a pond, where bats, specially embroidered, flit between the whims of stars and crescent moons. The endpapers are yellow silk, an indescribable yellow, and echo the twilight creature’s flight:
Bee of dusk, with jagged silhouette.
On every page, a bat is watermarked into the paper, whose grain is as soft to turning fingers as a woman’s skin. No flourish, no vignette, no tailpiece, no ornament to betray the usual heavy-handed incompetence of publishers in the publishing business. The taste that governed the furnishing of this book was exquisite.
⁂
M. de Montesquiou has a passion for the unique. Everything he touches, loves, and thinks—fabrics, sensations, trinkets, intellectual matters—he endows with a character of quintessential strangeness, forms of mystifying super-nature that might astonish the Nestorian bourgeois but enchant the artist with their very fine wit, very pure taste, very keen sensibility, and also with that very particular irony with which the poet infinitely nuances the elegance of his disgust, the courtesies of his disdain. In The Bats, the epigraphs placed at the head of each poem, the very titles of these poems, display an uncommon literary culture, profound reading, very noble intellectual habits that many professional writers haven’t quite managed to acquire. M. de Montesquiou doesn’t belabour the point. He seems to make it a matter of coquetry not to frighten the reader with his vast and rare erudition, preferring to charm with the unexpectedness of his sensations and the grace of his imaginative qualities. But make no mistake: his apparent frivolity conceals a foundation of serious thought; his spleen masks with delicate rhymes and inventive music the torment of a soul afflicted with the incurable poison of metaphysics and philosophies. His irony sometimes has the tremor of a sob.
The Bats is an evocation of the nocturnal in nature and in the soul. M. de Montesquiou truly has a feeling for night from both the pictorial and psychic points of view. He shows us its clarities, its penumbras and darknesses, its terrors and restful dreams; he tells us all its songs, all its intoxications, all its laments, all its silence, and he transposes them from nature to humanity. The entire history of man, from Sardanapalus to King Ludwig of Bavaria, is contained in the flight of a bat. The bat is a disturbing creature, hybrid, monstrous, out of orbit and rejected by birds who demand feathers of it, and by beasts who see it fly away. And it goes, ceaselessly, from darkness to light, from the clarity that kills it to the shadow where it panics, in an eternal flight of pain. So too with Sardanapalus and Ludwig of Bavaria, notorious human bats whose nocturnal silhouettes stand out against backgrounds of dazzling stars that are Chopin, Wagner, Whistler. Such is the meaning of M. de Montesquiou’s book. The plan unfolds, in accordance with this general idea, through a thousand adventures and a thousand fantasies. At least, that’s what a well-informed and nebulous exegete explained to us in a recent article. I confess it seems a bit complicated to me. I prefer to believe that M. de Montesquiou went about it with less fuss and was concerned only with beautiful verses.
⁂
From the very beginning of his book, M. de Montesquiou begs that we not ask of him great outbursts, blasphemous rages, the tearing of tragic passions, imprecations against the unfaithful, nor battle paintings, “nor to vibrate like the Reszké brothers.” With a modesty often belied by lofty flights into the realm of pure intellectuality, he declares:
I am the sharp stenographer of nuances,
I capture fleeting impressions on the wing,
My verse has made its nest, like a halcyon,
Upon the waves of the sea of gentle influences.
And further on, as if wanting to push away that bitter chalice which is the pain of thought, he cries out again:
No proofs, no soundings,
Just mirages upon waters.
What he means to evoke are small things, tenuous, transitory, glancing, fugitive appearances, reflections, “echoes of forms,” echoes, “reflections of voices.”
Shadows of awnings,
Skeletons of wrens.
. . . . . . . . . .
The memory in the air
Of a passage of concerts.
. . . . . . . . . .
And the design on the ground
Of parasol leaves.
His virtuosity is exercised in noting, with curious and pretty words, with supple rhythm, shadows of shadows, reflections of reflections; in expressing, in beautiful images, the nuances of nuances, the vanishing of things barely appeared, barely heard, that fade away, that fall silent; in giving colours to the multiple voices of the invisible, voices to the colours of the impalpable. He contrives to paint “with a Japanese hand”:
Through the exquisite mirage of interlace,
On a reflection of moon, a shadow of stork
In the mirror of a lake.
The sky impassions him, not in its mystery of inaccessible immensity, not in its recession of infinity, but in its accident of fugitive light, in its localisations of momentary mists. He finds, to explain it, sometimes surprising images, unexpected analogies, whose affected grace corresponds to secret visions, to acute and somewhat sickly sensibilities, and yet, despite everything, charming in their strangeness. It’s very recherché whilst also very naïve; it ranges from Baudelaire to the simplistic songs of primitive poetry. I have retained this verse:
This sky was the colour of a fiancée.
And this one:
The sky seems like the neck
Of a turtle-dove…
And this:
The cloud is the colour of an evening glove.
He drapes the sky, crumples it, adorns it with nebulous fripperies, in an ingenious and altogether pretty arrangement, as if it were a ball gown, a cloak, or an apartment. He assembles, with his quick, infinitely delicate hands, the subtle décors of night:
The nocturnal spangle
Of the vesperal daybreak,
The brilliant needlepoint
And Silver in sidereal.
. . . . . . . . . .
The foamy muslin,
The peerless tarlatans
With which the mist bewraps
The face of Vesper.
. . . . . . . . . .
The vapours in draperies
And fogs in bonnets,
Guipures of the Siberias
And Japanese jaconets.
I could multiply such examples. They abound in delicious surprises throughout M. de Montesquiou’s work.
And I realise I have said nothing of this work, so varied, nor of what it contains of emotion, as in that admirable poem Laus Noctis, where each stanza exalts itself, swells and rises, borne towards heaven like a prayer in organ song; nor of what it contains of the tragic, like that Shakespearean encounter at the palace of Saint-Cloud between the two enemy and sorrowful widows, the Empress Frederick and the Empress Eugénie; nor of the strong thoughts, the delicious conceits, the rare impressions, sometimes specious, that illuminate themselves in the clarity of a numerous, musical, and very personal style. But what can one say in an article? And besides, what’s the point?
I couldn’t end this useless verbiage better than by reproducing the letter with which M. Leconte de Lisle greeted the appearance of The Bats:
“Your poems are of a very subtle and very delicate art. I have savoured their strange charm with ever-new and utterly sympathetic surprise.
“Doubtless, they address themselves only to an elite of rare spirits; but it is fitting that this should be so with an essentially original work, which I am happy to applaud.”
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 