The Crazy Corner Read online

  The Crazy Corner

  Horrible Stories

  by

  Jean Richepin

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 5

  THE CRAZY CORNER 10

  Lilith 11

  A Legacy 17

  The Clock 23

  The Parrot 29

  The Two Portraits 36

  The Enemy 41

  A Duel of Souls 46

  The Painter of Eyes 52

  The Mirror 59

  Fezzan 64

  The Other Eyes 69

  The Gaze 73

  The Red Casket 78

  In a White Dress 83

  The Goat-Kid 89

  Booglottism 94

  The Mask 99

  The Ugly Sisters 104

  The Double Soul 109

  The Other Sense 115

  The City of Gems 123

  The Plague-Man 130

  The New Explosive 136

  NIGHTMARES 141

  Pft! Pft! 141

  An Adventure 148

  Immorality 155

  The Man With the Pale Eyes 161

  Countess Satan 167

  La Morillonne 173

  The Malay 178

  The Old Fogey 184

  In Less Time Than It Takes To Write… 198

  Correspondences 242

  The Murder at the Pitcher that Pitches 247

  Dead Drunk 253

  Mademoiselle 261

  Violated 267

  Jeroboam 273

  TALES WITHOUT MORALS 279

  Behemoth 279

  The Korrigan 284

  An Honest Man 289

  A Monster 294

  The Two Gwaz 300

  A Confession 305

  CHIMERICAL THEATER 311

  The Monster 311

  FRENCH HORROR COLLECTION 320

  Introduction

  Les Coin des fous, histoires horribles by Jean Richepin (1849-1926), here translated as The Crazy Corner: Horrible Stories, was originally published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1921. It was the author’s fourth collection of short stories, but a long gap separated it from the third, Cauchemars, published by Charpentier & Fasquelle in 1892. The stories included in Le Coin des fous, however, began publication immediately after the earlier collection, and the latest of them dates from 1900.

  I have also translated the contents of Cauchemars in this collection, as “Nightmares,” with the exception of one story, which I have reproduced in a slightly abridged, but otherwise unchanged, version from Richepin’s fifth collection, Contes sans morale, issued by Flammarion in 1922 as a companion collection to Le Coin des fous. I have translated six stories from the latter collection here, under the heading “Tales without Morals,” for purposes of comparison, but have not included another story that is a slightly modified version of the story entitled “Pft! Pft!” in Cauchemars. I have also added one further item from the author’s collection of dramatic pieces Théâtre chimérique, published by Charpentier in 1896, under the heading “Chimerical Theater.”1

  As the reader of the present collection will observe, the skeletons of two of the other stories in Cauchemars also served as frameworks for stories in Coin des fous, although the flesh set on the skeletons in question is considerably transfigured. The transfiguration of earlier materials reflects a significant shift in the Parisian marketplace for short fiction that took place in the 1890s, when the daily newspaper Le Journal was founded as a aspirant rival to the well-established Republican paper Le Matin. Both papers used feuilleton fiction as a means of attracting readers, attempting to reproduce the circulation wars associated with the first big boom in feuilleton fiction in the 1840s, when Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas’ serials competed for reader loyalty in Le Journal des Débats and Le Siècle.

  Le Journal attempted to position itself upmarket of Le Matin, and of the other two major Parisian dailies of the period, Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal, especially in literary terms, and instead of concentrating on the long action/adventure serials favored by its chief rival, its first editor, Fernand Xau, concentrated on short fiction, showcasing such writers as Octave Mirbeau and Alphonse Allais. When Xau was replaced in 1899 by Henri Letellier, the new editor followed the same policy, making more use thereafter of Jean Richepin and Edmond Haraucourt. Le Matin continued to rely heavily on longer serials, especially those written by its staff reporter Gaston Leroux and the prolific Jean de La Hire and Paul d’Ivoi, although it did introduce an occasional short-story section entitled Les Mille et un matins, while Le Journal began publishing more serials, poaching Leroux as well as using writers from its own stable.

  The significance of this development was not simply that it broadened the Parisian market for short fiction, but that it put new pressure on the kinds of fiction written for that market because of the unusually narrow slot it offered, somewhere between 1400 and 1700 words. Alphonse Allais’ wry humor was easily adaptable to that format, but Octave Mirbeau and other writers who followed in Mirbeau’s footsteps in Le Journal developed a much blacker kind of comedy, in a genre for which the Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had provided the most widely-used label via the title of his collection Contes cruels (1883)2, although it had originated in the 1830s in the short fiction of Jules Janin and Petrus Borel’s Champavert (1831). It was in this genre that Richepin had already been working in most of his short fiction, and he adapted to the more restrictive format with considerable alacrity—including, as has been observed, adapting some of the stories he had already written. In Le Coin des fous he preferred the label histoires horribles to contes cruels, because “the horrible” was his particular specialty.

  While Mirbeau and others celebrated the ironic cruelty of fate in a relatively slick and sophisticated fashion, Richepin developed an uncompromising ghoulishness that had much in common with the contemporary developments in drama developed and showcased at Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which opened in 1897. Of all the late 19th century writers of contes cruels, Richepin was the cruelest when it came to the treatment of his characters, not so much in the nasty fates to which they were often delivered—which are typical of the entire genre—but in the merciless way in which he describes and characterizes them. This is why his stories were more horrible than horrific; they do not attempt to frighten their readers, as some horror stories do, but to evoke a reaction in a different part the spectrum of horror, closer to indigo than red in metaphorical terms.

  Le Coin des fous also illustrates the fact that there was a partial rehabilitation of supernatural contes cruels, at least for a while, in the 1890s, closely associated with the rise in the fin-de-siècle period of the overlapping Decadent and Symbolist Movements. Some writers associated with those movements eschewed the supernatural, including Mirbeau, who also had strong Naturalist sympathies, and Richepin—who was also ambiguous in his affiliation—had originally placed himself in that camp, but the sheer stress of turning out stories of brief dimension in quantity made supernatural twists very tempting. Even with that addition to his range however, the whole spectrum of the stories translated in this collection show the author wrestling continually with the problem of finding appropriate endings for his sketchy exercises in grotesquerie, sometimes to the extent that he attempts to make a virtue out of refusing to provide an ending.

  In this connection, it is worth observing that the stories were written in a period when the underlying theory and method of short story writing were undergoing a significant transition. The traditional “tale,” which achieves brevity by exploiting the synoptic prerogatives of a manifest teller, was in the process of giving ground to a mode of story
-telling that attempted to borrow the immediacy of novelistic technique without the detail and length previously deemed necessary to achieve and cement that immediacy: the “slice of life” story. That method of short story writing reduces the narrative distance between a teller and reader by employing a passive narrative voice situated much closer to the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, and substituting brief impressionistic references for elaborate description. Its development was primarily associated in France with Guy de Maupassant, but it was also favored by Mirbeau. Richepin remains something of a traditionalist in this regard, but the pressure of the new fashion is evident in the manner in which he deploys and characterizes first-person narrators, and abbreviates the reportage through which their accounts are usually filtered. If he shuns the solution that has since become orthodox, he is nevertheless grappling with the problem in his own fashion.

  Richepin was luckier that many writers who produced stories for Le Journal’s slot, in contriving to have them reprinted in book form, albeit belatedly, although his contemporary Edmond Haraucourt did manage to publish two volumes of short stories including contes cruels in his own particular vein, and most of Villiers’ and Mirbeau’s work was reprinted reasonably promptly. In general, book publishers preferred longer and meatier works even in story collections—the reader will observe that Cauchemars includes an original novella alongside its shorter pieces in order to bulk them out. Many stories of the brief length favored by Le Journal and the Mille et un matins series are, in fact, calculatedly trivial, and even the finest exponents of the form do not always escape triviality, but it is nevertheless an interesting format, both in terms of the extreme pressure it puts on narrative method and in terms of the crucial role it played in the evolution of the conte cruel. Richepin was one of the most distinctive exponents of the form, and one of the most striking, as this showcase will hopefully serve to illustrate.

  The translation of Coin des fous was taken from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s copy of the Flammarion edition, as reproduced on its website gallica, but that copy is defective and is missing four pages; I am indebted to Jean-Marc Lofficier for obtaining and supplying the missing text. The translations from Cauchemars and Contes sans morales were also taken from the gallica versions, while the translation of the story from Théâtre Chimérique was taken from the version reproduced on archive.org. Where I have been able to ascertain dates and places of original publication I have added them to the titles of the stories as footnotes.

  Brian Stableford

  THE CRAZY CORNER

  To Max and Alex Fischer,3

  in memory of our “extralucid” evening,

  I dedicate this book affectionately.

  J.R.

  Lilith4

  The first time the two young men had witnessed the strange scene they had not suspected anything strange, and they had scarcely taken any notice of it.

  After having left their poor mansard by its sole skylight, they had installed themselves in the broad guttering of the roof in order to smoke a pipe in the tranquility of the mild late autumn evening, and they were only thinking about savoring their relaxation while breathing the fresh air rising from the large trees in the solitary garden. Their legs hanging down among the highest leaves, at the very top of the bare wall, devoid of any opening, which served as the background of the garden, they did not even think of looking to see whether anything was happening beneath them. They had, therefore, seen the strange scene, that first time, almost unconsciously, and had no suspicion of anything strange therein.

  It had been almost the same the second time, and that occasion had not excited them even more, although they had experienced a slight surprise on seeing exactly the same scene reproduced at exactly the same time.

  So what, though? One reflection, was there anything surprising in the fact that the old man behaved for a second time in an identical fashion in identical circumstances? Undoubtedly, hazard alone was the cause of the scenes of the other evening and this one seemed to be the same one, scrupulously repeated. It was a coincidence, of course—no more.

  The scene, moreover offered nothing in itself that was not quite simple and quite natural, did it? It was the banal action of an old man making a tour of his garden before going to bed, and calling to someone to come out—his wife, his servant or his dog—and calling in that particular voice because he had that particular voice, and at precisely the same time because that happened to be the time, and that was all!

  But the two young men had been forced to astonishment, and to judge the scene positively strange, when, thereafter, their attention awakened and their curiosity on the alert, they were convinced that the repetition of the actions and gestures could not be attributed to hazard, that the old man’s conduct was habitual and deliberate, and that the slightest details seemed to have been regulated once and for all, minutely and, one could easily believe, ritually.

  Every evening, whatever the weather, even on rainy evenings when the two young men allowed themselves to be soaked in their gutter rather than not see it, the same bizarre ceremony had taken place.

  Just at the moment when the last vibrations of the nearby clock were sounding a quarter to midnight, the two battens of the French windows of the pavilion opened, and the old man appeared, clad in a long overcoat, bare-headed, carrying above his head a little muted lantern with a thin and pale beam of light.

  He leaned to the left, then to the right, and then forwards, with slow movements that had initially appeared to the two young men to be the attitudes of someone leaning forward in order to see better into the shadows, but which now represented themselves as manifest salutations, like those of a priest to an idol.

  The old man then took three large strides forward, and two small ones back—and repeated that combination of steps three times, once in each direction in which he had bowed.

  Having arrived thus at the entrance to a cypress arbor, which formed a dense labyrinth in the middle of his garden, he swiftly blew out his lantern, and then, in a plaintive, whistling, emphatic voice, which was low but nevertheless carried a long way, he called into the darkness of the labyrinth: “Lilith! Lilith! Lilith!”

  What did he do in the labyrinth? How long did he stay there? By what exit did he emerge to go back to his pavilion? That was what the young men were never able to determine.

  The old man probably came back by means of a path that ran along the left hand all of the garden, garnished with a bower of virgin vines, which circled around the pavilion in such a way that he could get back in through a door located on the other side—but that was only a supposition, because no furtive human footsteps were audible on the gravel of that pathway, and his extinct lantern did not permit any divination of where he went.

  The only thing of which the two young men were certain was that he stayed in the labyrinth for at least a quarter of an hour. When the clock sounded the first stroke of midnight, the old man’s voice could be heard there, now as if coming from underground, doubtless because of the thickness of the cypresses—and that voice was no longer appealing, but seemed thankful, and said only once, with a profound sigh of ecstasy: “Lilith!”

  The two young men were “apprentice great men”—that was what they called themselves, those poor, ambitious adolescents hungry for power and glory, of the sort that reading Balzac could still create forty years ago. They had made their poverty communal in that Montrouge mansard, where they each took turns to serve the other as cook and housekeeper, and where they had both promised to be Orestes and Pylades, Nisus and Euryale, Pierre and Jaffier.5

  They said to one another: “We’ll discover the old man’s secret of. Perhaps it will be the commencement of our fortune.”

  With prudence and cunning, they asked around the neighborhood. They learned that the old man have lived there for a long time, looked after by his aged wife, his granddaughter and a maidservant. Yes, looked after—for he was, it seemed, a little crazy. The granddaughter hardly ever went out. Only the old woman was
occasionally seen outside; she went to the market herself. They were rentiers, owners of the pavilion and the garden. The old man had been “some kind of a teacher.” In spite of the fellow’s craziness, they were “well-thought-of in the neighborhood.”

  Armed with a name and the “some kind of teacher” the two young men set out in quest of further information. They did, indeed, find traces of the old man at the Collège de France. Briefly, a long time ago, he had taught a course there on Assyriology. He had published two pamphlets on Chaldean magic. Those publications had got him sacked, as a lunatic.

  At the Bibliothèque Nationale, the two young men asked for the pamphlets, tried to understand them, and were obliged to give up. The sentences therein were bristling with occult formulae and shibboleth terms, and thus written either, indeed, by a madman, or with the design of constructing an indecipherable cryptogram They could not discern anything therein but the name of Lilith, repeated to the point of saturation.

  They admitted to one another that it was necessary to seek the commencement of their fortune elsewhere than in the old man’s seemingly-vain secret.

  Well, they were wrong, and the absurd imagination to which their reading of Balzac had driven them was right. They learned that only a few days ago, and I saw them both become singularly pensive when they were informed of it, and go pale with bitter regret.

  It was at one of those dinners whose foundation is also due to a Balzacian idea, at which people of the same generation, all of whom emerged together from the Parisian battle and all of whom have more-or-less hollowed their niche in life, meet up for years on end, three or four times every winter.

  The two young men are participants in one such dinner, but only figure there, alas, in minor parts. The former apprentice great men have not become great men. One of them is simply a government official; the other, a good advocate, is the head of a legal firm that does not handle major cases. In the Parisian battle in which they hoped to play Napoléon, they are survivors, no more. They gladly put the blame on destiny, saying: “We didn’t have a lucky break.”