Originally published in December 1887 in Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui, Volume 7, No. 314.

Léon Hennique was born on the 4th of November 1851 in Guadeloupe. Of his military origins, his exotic swaddling, his childhood years, his schooling at Juilly, his present existence, I have nothing to say that might kindle the concupiscent appetite for gossip amongst the multitudes. For those few who concern themselves with the habits of a man whose work they esteem, it will suffice, I believe, to attest that Léon Hennique has lived until this day apart from newspapers and publicity, and that he has been, in his desired isolation from the rabble, a man of letters both meticulous and honourable.

It was in 1876 that I first encountered him. At that time La République des Lettres was appearing. Monsieur Catulle Mendès, who directed it, welcomed without distinction of vintage the most diverse works, provided they were woven by scrupulous artists and were consequently stamped in everyone’s eyes with that aggressive mark, struck with that undeniable taint. One evening, I made my way to the rue de Bruxelles, to Monsieur Mendès’s house—he was kind enough to print my stumbling and hasty pieces—and in the dining room, before a table cluttered with glasses, I conversed with a tall young man whom I did not know and whom I learned to be Léon Hennique. He too was making his debut in this review which welcomed, at one and the same time, Maupassant’s first verses and threw open both leaves of its pages to Mallarmé’s tantalising prose poems.

Among the contributors to this irregular publication who were invited that evening to the poet’s dinner were the futile d’Hervilly, a few Mérats, then Cladel—celebrated in this circle for his Bouscassié and Va-nu-pieds—Léon Dierx, whose verses are iniquitously omitted by the contaminated glory of our age, and finally Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, one of the most magnificent, one of the most penetrating, one of the most occult writers of the present hour. Since that evening when, whipped by Villiers’s lyricism—whose cerebral punch blazed in the wind—words flew like percussion caps from one end of the table to the other, I often saw Léon Hennique again, and we rode together, boot to boot, whilst naturalism succeeded in harassing for a few days the hypocritical prudery of the newspapers and the bovine apathy of the crowds.

At that time, Hennique had just completed two volumes: Monsieur de Ponthau and Élisabeth Couronneau—excessive volumes struggling furiously within cracked frames, achieving, as in the latter of these books where the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard writhe, the effect of a woman’s crucifixion, with intense vigour of colouring and a gallop of atrocious pathos. Then he published with Charpentier La Dévouée, a modern novel featuring an inventor who murders his daughter to steal her money and realise his discoveries. This novel brought a singular mixture of precise reality, charming intimacy of women preparing preserves, verbose dinners pertinently noted, criminal tempests of the soul, tragic scenes ardently painted—all traversed by veins of black irony, furrowed by silent sarcasms.

After La Dévouée, which stirred the stagnant inertia of letters, Hennique inserted in Les Soirées de Médan “L’Attaque du grand 7″—tumultuous and horrible memories of the war of 1870, broadly brushed, slashed with great strokes like the stockings of one of the women of the grand 7, in vivid tones. This story is certainly one of the most pressing and tenacious in that book, which did not await the so-called valiances of the present epoch’s centre-left cavalries to strike with ancient force at the ridiculous copses of chauvinism.

In any case, in this elliptical and swift genre of the short story, carried off as living anecdote, Hennique dominates. Three other tales—”L’Enterrement de Francine Cloarec,” “Benjamin Rozes,” and more recently “Pœuf”—testify to the veracity of his observation and the quality of his language, high in colour, patient and precise.

“Francine Cloarec” is the story of a poor dead girl being buried. This stamp of black irony, this deadpan spirit of which I have spoken, wells up at every turn from this harsh work. “Christ’s name! It reeks something fierce!” says an undertaker climbing a staircase where tufts of stench bloom in sheaves from basins yellowed by the rust of old lead pipes.

“Yes,” the concierge simply replies. And they fill the coffin which they carry down, bumping along, scraping the walls, whilst like a vigilant commodore standing on the quarterdeck, the porter stationed on the landing commands the manoeuvre to the black sailors whose shoulders bend under the weight of the coffin and whose throats, ever athirst, are parched.

In “Benjamin Rozes,” this mockery softens, becomes good-natured and, irresistibly droll, recounts the adventures of a former notary in whose belly an obstinate tapeworm coils. Under Hennique’s pen files past an amusing village which monitors the notarial functions and watches for the exit of the bothriocephalus, whilst Benjamin Rozes seeks the monster’s head and beats in a commode chair, with a ruler, the rémoulade of his purges. This achieves enormous gaiety, but a particular gaiety—compressed, dense, all the more detergent for not speaking with fists on hips and nose in the air, but affirming itself deliberately with a disquieting silent laugh, sly, and a quasi-ceremonious tranquillity that disconcerts.

Finally, in “Pœuf,” the terrain is different again. Evidently inspired by childhood memories, this story relates, within a frame of exotic landscapes of stimulating odour, the history of the sapper beloved of children who is shot after killing his adjutant from jealousy. A penetrating and intimate story, all pricked with authentic notations of infantile soul, with delicate and vivid sensations.

But however imperious, however demanding these tales may be—whose artistic probity is, in these times, necessarily rare—they somewhat pale when one rereads the novel entitled L’Accident de Monsieur Hébert. The subject, in two words, is this: at Versailles, a magistrate, Monsieur Hébert, is cuckolded. Madame Hébert loves Ventujol, a swaggering officer enamoured of advancement; then she gives birth, rises from childbed deteriorated by metritis, and wearies the sabre-dragger, who abandons her. Let us add that the husband discovers the adultery and requests and obtains his change of residence.

That is all; but from this familiar subject, Léon Hennique has drawn most curious pages. There has been much talk in recent years of psychology and analysis. Well! among the examples of novelists that are cited, some should be taken from this book which narrates states of soul truly well stripped bare, truly accurate. See how the scene between lover and mistress is crafted—both of them stupid! This scene, the lamentably foolish fall of Madame Hébert into Ventujol’s arms, a night spent in a Parisian hotel, with the man’s mendacious grimaces and the woman’s belated modesty, should, if justice existed, be shown as perfect specimens of life written!

In this novel, observations abound. In her heart’s disaster, Madame Hébert “began to suffer with voluptuousness as only sentimental women can suffer, at certain hours and in certain settings.” And one must see the narrator’s sly bonhomie as he notes with placid ferocity the sordid foolishness of the couple, the imbecile solemnity of the husband, the bourgeois stupidity of their surroundings, as he traces in ineffaceable strokes the mother of Monsieur Hébert, a terrible old woman, frigid and dry. “What devil could have married such a dragon?” he wonders. And he answers himself tranquilly, after a silence:

“A particular tax collector had had that audacity.”

Expert at recounting failures of the soul, Hennique appears in this book as an acute narrator, sometimes cruel, but without bitterness. He reveals himself neither optimist nor pessimist, but indifferent and mocking. Without a general stem of idea about life to support it, this novel, dispensed from synthesis, wishes to be simply inquisitorial and exact; but one should not infer from this that Hennique is merely a skilful recorder of acts, a realist apt to describe everyday episodes, that his personality resides entirely in this faculty of “observations” summarised in coloured and precise phrases. No, there remains in this writer the artist of the first books, the novelist enamoured of unexpected and tragic shocks, the visionary of explosive and bizarre pages, and it is from these two diverse, almost contradictory elements—these dramatic and dreamed postulations on one hand, and these rigid and mocking remarks on the other—that this complex temperament which occupies us is formed.

Until now—La Dévouée aside—these two currents have, sometimes joining slightly, followed each their parallel route; at the present hour, one can perhaps presage the definitive fusion of these streams and dream, with the most scrupulous writer that Léon Hennique is, of an interesting and novel surprise of the modern novel.