for extremes; indeed, he can be retrospectively affiliated to a subsidiary school of Romanticism, usually known as the roman frénétique [frenetic fiction], whose archetypal example was provided by Jules Janin’s L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée (1829; tr. as The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman), a work that had a considerable influence on Honoré de Balzac as well as the members of the petit cenacle. Janin never attempted anything as frenetic again, though, and the entire school faded away—as it had to do, because any writer who begins his career by going directly to an extreme has nowhere to go thereafter but backwards.
Borel was no exception to this rule, but he went to a further extreme than anyone else, and had, in consequence, a more distant and precipitate retreat to make. He was not only more extreme than Gautier, who always retained an elegance and style that blunted and polished his occasional mordancy, but more so even than the petit cénacle’s other conspicuous poète maudit, Gérard de Nerval, who eventually capped his own excess by going mad. Gérard’s madness could never quite match the extremism of Borel’s sanity, though—or, to be accurate, the sanity of Pétrus Borel the Lycanthrope; for the Pétrus Borel that was still alive when Champavert was published, and who remained alive thereafter until 1859—he died of excessive exposure to the sun, after failing to hold on to a job as a colonial administrator in Algeria and being forced into the open as a humble colonist—was no longer possessed of that mortal extremism.
Champavert bears the subtitle “contes immoraux,” which is generally considered to be sarcastic, because the tales are, in fact, extremely moral. Although one or two of the characters do speak out in favor of vice and injustice, it is only in order that we might loathe their villainy or deplore their cynicism more intensely. All the tales are horror stories, including the one that is blatantly farcical, and what they attempt to horrify their readers with, and call upon their readers to be horrified by, is the violence and corruption of the human world, which they abhor in no uncertain terms. However, Borel did not mean “immoral” in that crudely literal sense, as he points out obliquely in the one farce included in the collection, when he pleads for the necessity of the final chapter on the grounds that the story would be “immoral” without it, because, in fiction, crime has to be punished.
Borel was, in fact, very well aware of the fact that fiction has an inescapable moral order, because a work of fiction, unlike the real world, has a God—the author—who has the power, and therefore the responsibility, to decide the distribution of rewards and punishments within it. Readers know that, and therefore expect, by and large, that omnipotent authors will be benevolent, albeit in mysterious ways, ultimately punishing the characters guilty of the crimes they commit, one way or another. Borel was also well aware, however, of the falseness, absurdity and perversity of such authorial rewards and punishments, and of the fact that it is precisely because of the tacit expectation of some kind of “moral balancing” that the refusal of an author to exercise his omnipotence in saving the innocent and damning the guilty can create in his readers a peculiar sense of outrage and sadness: the sensibility of “tragedy.” He knew only too well that arranging “moral” endings in works of fiction is blatant fraud, a kind of artistic false accountancy, and he did not feel—could not feel—that such cooking of books could be justified merely on the grounds that readers yearn to be defrauded, and feel perversely cheated if they are not. Pétrus Borel the Lycanthrope wanted to be an honest accountant, even though he knew full well that, not only would very few readers thank him for it, but that many would be acutely discomfited by it. That was one of the reasons why he committed suicide in advance of the publication of his uncooked book.
Champavert, therefore, is a work of art that hardly anyone liked, and that many people disliked intensely. Borel’s friends undoubtedly understood what he was doing, and why, and sympathized, and some of them even took the trouble to compliment it in print, but they did so rather wryly, because they knew what its fate would be. A typical example of such wry praise can be found in the review in the Revue de Paris, the chief organ of the Romantic Movement, which was written by one of the writers quoted in Champavert, who signed his reviews “P. L.” but his other contributions “P. L. Jacob, le bibliophile,” although his name was Paul Lacroix. Lacroix appreciated the book, as any true bibliophile would, but he also appreciated the fact that it was doomed in the contemporary literary marketplace, where the demand for lycanthropic fiction was so small as to be hardly measurable.
Champavert was not, however, eternally damned, even to oblivion. The essential method of roman frénétique was to be echoed, albeit more subtly, not only by particular writers but by an entire genre: the conte cruel. That term was popularized by one of the genre’s more enthusiastic practitioners, the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and vulgarized when such tales became the standard fare of the Grand Guignol theater. Typically, later contes cruels feature a more refined form of cruelty than the one brought into focus by Borel; they deal in foxy twists of a slim knife rather than furious lycanthropic stabs with a broader blade, but their fundamental principle is the same; Champavert, much more so than any of Jules Janin’s many story collections, remains the great prototype of collections of contes cruels, and came to be appreciated as such by connoisseurs of the rogue genre.
More interestingly, perhaps, one particular idiosyncrasy of Borel’s literary method was hailed as significant precursor of surrealism. The Surrealist Movement—a lineal descendant of the Romantic Movement, via the Symbolist/Decadent Movement—had a core interest in reducing the mediation of consciousness in literary production, aiming toward an ideal of spontaneity in which the subconscious element of the mind might leak on to the page without overmuch interference by the censorship of rational thought. It is arguable that the appearance of Borel’s work is more closely akin to the essentially artificial endeavor of attempting to produce a fictional replica of a “stream of consciousness,” but it certainly was spontaneous, arising from the surges of indignation and despair that sometimes carried him away in the process of creation. It was not merely in his vocabulary and the sentiments he expressed that Borel broke through tacit barriers, but also in his syntax and punctuation.
Because of the way in which the typical French punctuation of printed speech operates—with considerably greater ambiguity than the formularistic English usage of quotation marks—it can sometimes be difficult for a reader to distinguish between a character’s speech-acts and the narrative voice, and that ambiguity is greatly enhanced when character’s thoughts are being represented as well as vocalized speech. In Borel, more than any other author of his time, there is a confusion of representation that sometimes makes it difficult to tell whether a character is speaking or thinking, or whether the narrative voice is intruding upon the business of reportage to address the reader directly. Sometimes, at least, that confusion is deliberate and the blurring strategic, reflecting and creating a calculated confusion between character and narrative voice, which does indeed disrupt the formality of the text to such a degree that the narrative occasionally seems to be an inchoate surge of feeling welling up from somewhere considerably deeper than the rational surface of consciousness, encapsulating not merely real outrage but real anguish.
The stories in Champavert are indeed stories, not reportage, and even its preface is a tongue-in-cheek work of fiction, but the fact that they are not autobiographical does not mean that they are not felt, keenly and deeply. That is one of the reasons why Champavert is such a remarkable book, which rewards reading even, and particularly, by readers who find the experience profoundly discomfiting, in more ways than one. It is a difficult book to translate, partly because it uses so many exotic, foreign and improvised words, and partly because the routine translation of French syntactical and punctuational devices into English ones inevitably fails to reproduce Borel’s idiosyncratic variations, without being able to substitute for them adequately, but I have done my best to retain as much of the flavor of the original as I could.
This translation has been taken from the version of the Renduel edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. Because Borel used so many exotic spellings it is sometimes difficult to identify mere misprints, but there do seem to be quite a few; in many instances where proper names are misrendered, or rendered in an unfamiliar form, in the original, I have replaced them, usually
