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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CLASSICS OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE
NUMBER SIX
Copyright © 2013 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
INTRODUCTION
Champavert: Contes Immoraux by “Pétrus Borel, le lycanthrope,” here translated as Champavert: Immoral Tales by Pétrus Borel the Lycanthrope, was initially published in Paris by Eugène Renduel in 1833. It was the second book to appear under the signature of Pétrus Borel, having been preceded by a volume of poems entitled Rhapsodies, published the previous year. It was not the last such publication, although the later ones were, so to speak, illusory, for reasons explained in the preface to Champavert.
The preface in question explains that “Pétrus Borel” was the pseudonym of someone named Champavert, who had recently committed suicide, and that the collection of stories was an initial sampling from the papers he left behind—including the story of Champavert’s suicide. Like the narrative voice that describes Champavert’s death retrospectively in the final passage of the final item in the collection, someone or something did live on after that alleged suicide, but it was not the same person; the Pétrus Borel who had secretly been “Champavert le lycanthrope” was dead, and had indeed committed suicide, spiritually and artistically. As is obvious to any reader of Champavert, the Pétrus Borel who published the novel Madame Putiphar [Potiphar’s Wife] (1838) and several further stories—including “La Nonne de Penaranda” [The Nun of Penaranda] (1842) and “Le Trésor de la caverne d’Arceuil” [The Trasure of the Cave of Arcueil] (1843) in the Revue de Paris and “Miss Hazel” (1844) in the Revue pittoresque—was not the same person, and signaled the fact by omitting to add “le lycanthrope” to his signature.
Biographies of Pétrus Borel tend to blur this circumstance, inevitably, because biographies, by their nature, are committed to a world-view that measures continuity in terms of physical presence, and cannot admit the possibility that an artist might commit suicide, although the man in whom he dwelt carries on living, in a purely metaphorical sense—but Pétrus Borel the Lycanthrope was a key member of the French Romantic Movement, and he understood things differently.
The “biographical sketch of Champavert” that begins the collection explains how Borel came to adopt the nickname “lycanthrope” as a consequence of being accused, on the basis of Rhapsodies, of being a Republican. If he was a Republican, he replied, then his was the Republicanism of the lynx or the lycanthrope—by which he meant the ultimate social outsider, a wolf in human guise. Had he lived in a later era, no one would have been so foolish as to accuse him of Republicanism; they would have charged him with being an Anarchist, which would have been closer to the mark, but still a trifle wide. An Anarchist is a believer, committed to the faith that the total destruction of the sick civilization in which we live might herald a new and paradisal dawn. Had he ever heard of Anarchism, Pétrus Borel the Lycanthrope would doubtless have been less scornful of it than he was of Christianity, but that would not have altered the fact that, for him, there was no possibility of dawn after disaster, but only of oblivion.
Having said that, it is worth noting that the subsequent literary work that came closest of all to reproducing the violent sensibility of the stories collected in Champavert is Les Microbes humains (1887; tr. as The Human Microbes) by the anarchist Louise Michel—but Louis Michel had to be unjustly imprisoned, not for the first time, and held incommunicado in solitary confinement in order finally to raise her virtuous outrage to the pitch that overflowed furiously into that novel; Pétrus Borel only needed to be in the world, to be alive, to feel the same awful psychological pressure. He was a remarkable man, and a remarkable writer—perhaps the most remarkable of all the members of the Romantic Movement, albeit one of the least successful in commercial terms.
Joseph-Pierre Borel, who subsequently tarted up his preferred forename to make it more distinctive, was born in 1809 in Lyon, the twelfth of fourteen children of an ironmonger. His younger brother André—some of whose poetry is quoted in Champavert—was a keen genealogist, who expended a great deal of effort trying to prove that the Borels were of aristocratic descent, and eventually took to calling himself André Borel d’Hauterive, with the result that many biographical sketches of his brother do him the same imaginary favor—very inappropriately, for Pétrus Borel did not care a fig about aristocratic descent. Quite the reverse; he remarked regretfully on the fact that his father had “come down from the Mountains” in order to take up residence, and a civilized occupation, in the city of Lyon. He seems, however, to have been fonder of Lyon than of Paris, to which the family moved in 1820, and where his father set up a business dealing in esparto products.
The “Biographical Sketch of Champavert” notes, contemptuously, that his education was “confided to priests,” which only served to give the young Pétrus a powerful appetite for atheistic self-education, and that thereafter, he was apprenticed to the architect Antoine Garnaud—who was presumably a relative, his mother’s maiden name being Garnaud. It was during that apprenticeship, which became increasingly theoretical before evaporating completely, that he found his true vocation, when he began attending the cénacle hosted by Victor Hugo, and then became the heart and soul of its splinter group, the petit cénacle.
The first cénacle, which gave its name to subsequent gatherings of writers intent on disrupting the dry dominance of Classicism and infusing new life into French literature under the banner of Romanticism, had been founded and hosted by Charles Nodier, but as Nodier’s health had deteriorated and his cantankerousness got worse, while Victor Hugo’s reputation had grown apace, the focal point of the movement had changed location. The younger writers drawn into the circle, however, found Hugo and his intimates a trifle intimidating, and soon set up their own meetings, where they could feel more at ease.
Most of what eventually became common knowledge regarding the petit cénacle is derived from the fond memories of it recorded by its most successful member, Théophile Gautier, in what he called, inaccurately and immodestly Histoire de romantisme (1871; tr. as The History of Romanticism). In that account, although its author freely proclaims that Borel was the star and presiding genius of the group, it is Gautier who takes center stage, especially in the elaborate description of the première of Hernani, the play by Hugo whose staging in 1830 seemed to the Movement’s supporters and opponents alike to be a crucial benchmark in its progress: the moment when the pressurized dam finally burst and the great inundation began. Borel and Gautier organized the claque that was instructed to applaud the play and, if necessary, engage in fisticuffs with its detractors: a claque whose renown is now focused on the emblematic red waistcoat that Gautier commissioned for the occasion. Borel could not afford to order a red waistcoat from a tailor, and turned up in his everyday clothes—a circumstance that serves to symbolize their subsequent careers, in the course of which Gautier, metaphorically speaking, never took off his flamboyant waistcoat, flaunting it as the banner of Romanticism for an entire generation, while Borel faded into the background. Had the battle actually turned physical, however (it did not), we can be sure that it would have been Borel that took the brunt of the enemy assault, and then led the retaliatory charge.
It is difficult now, on reading Hernani, to see what all the fuss was about. It includes words that had not been heard on the Parisian stage before, and sentiments that had not been expressed there before, but they rapidly became commonplace, and there is nothing remotely shocking about them now. In a fashion typical of Romantic works, the play pushed the envelope of what was thought to be acceptable at the time, and by so doing, permanently revised the tacit rules of acceptability. Pétrus Borel, however, was not a crafty pusher of envelopes; he wanted to smash the barriers of acceptability to smithereens, rip up the rules, hurl them in the fire and spit on the ashes. He succeeded; Champavert is still capable of shocking readers today, and hopefully will, in this very belated translation.
