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It is still uncommon to find the names of Erckmann–Chatrian in studies of Continental literature, a sad reflection on the obscurity suffered by these fine writers for more than a century.

While their main writing efforts – military history and fiction – are now unread and unavailable, their tales of terror have managed to survive in part, even seeing a revival in the early 1970s. The Invisible Eye – the first collection of their stories in Britain since 1981 – will, I hope, introduce more readers to their masterful talent for the macabre.

Emile Erckmann (b. 20 May 1822) and Louis Alexandre Chatrian (b. 18 December 1826) were both natives of Alsace–Lorraine, the border region for so long a bone of contention between France and Germany. Erckmann was born in Phalsbourg, the son of a bookseller, and it is possible that his being surrounded by books from an early age did much to inspire him to his own imaginative works. Chatrian was born in Soldatenthal, the son of a glass-blower. He did not follow his father’s trade, instead becoming a teacher at Phalsbourg college.

It was here that Erckmann met Chatrian, while the former was studying law (a profession he never followed), and the two hit it off very well. It seems that Erckmann was the more literary and imaginative of the two, while Chatrian was of a much more practical and energetic mind. Their writing style seems to have been adapted to this difference between them, with Erckmann writing and Chatrian revising (a working system which was later to produce the most awful trouble).

They started writing together almost immediately, and had the distinction of seeing one of their first efforts, a play on the invasion of Alsace in 1814, banned in 1848 because of its effects on the volatile state of public opinion in the province at the time. They did manage to publish Histoires et Contes Fantastique in 1849, two years after their writing partnership commenced. It was ironic that the first work by the dynamic duo should so neatly sum up their writing career and later obscurity. It was an awful failure, and must have made them wonder if it was all worth the effort. They fared so badly in those early years that, by all accounts, they nearly starved. Thoroughly discouraged, Erckmann resumed his legal studies, and Chatrian took a job in the Eastern Railway Company in France.

It took some time, but they finally cracked the market in 1859 with their novel The Illustrious Doctor Matheus. Four years later, they struck the vein that was to bring them national renown with Madame Therese, a novel about Alsace at the time of the French revolution. They specialised in French history, particularly of the Napoleonic era; a time still alive in the memories of older French citizens, who supplied them with much detail. The books flowed out: Waterloo (1865), La Guerre (1866), Le Blocus (1867), Histoire d’un Paysan (1868) – the list was impressive.

As well as military fiction, they tried their hand at drama, and one result was the interesting Le Juif Polonais, published in English in 1871 as The Polish Jew. This was high drama on the psychological decline of a murderer. It became the stage play The Bells, and gave Sir Henry Irving his most celebrated role. Oddly, it also gave Boris Karloff one of his first horror film roles (five years before Frankenstein) as a hypnotist in the 1926 Chadwick production, directed by James Young from his own screenplay based on the Erckmann–Chatrian work.

Their most interesting book, Contes Fantastiques (not to be confused with their first collection), appeared in 1860. It contains some of their finest tales of terror (several of which are included here), and remains their best work in the genre.

The pair were known as ‘the twins’ at the height of their fame. According to one source, they worked out the plots of their stories while they sat drinking and smoking; and there is certainly plenty of both activities in their tales.

In Britain they fared very well. Their first book appeared in 1865 – Smith Elder’s translation of The Conscript – and the same firm issued The Blockade four years later. Various publishers issued Erckmann–Chatrian books, including Richard Bentley, J. C. Hotten and Tinsley Brothers, but the writers really struck gold with Ward, Lock & Co. Starting with The Great Invasion of 1813–14 (1870), Ward, Lock & Co. were to publish nineteen of their titles, fourteen of them between 1871 and 1874, which were big sellers. Luckily for us, Ward, Lock’s catalogue was to include nearly all of Erckmann–Chatrian’s short story collections.

Their happy working relationship did not last, however. In 1889 they quarrelled violently and it seems that Chatrian arrogantly claimed the copyright of their work. (Remember that Chatrian had spent the past forty years as the revising half of the partnership.) Erckmann went to court and recovered damages from Chatrian’s secretary (I am unable to find out exactly why). Chatrian went into an immediate decline and died on 3 September 1890. Erckmann lived on for nine years, dying on 14 March 1899. They must have been rather sad years; he does not seem to have written anything of importance on his own following the split.

Within a few years of their deaths, the two writers had slipped into obscurity in Britain. The golden era of Ward, Lock had ended around 1880, and no new title by Erckmann–Chatrian appeared in Britain after 1901. There was a Blackie edition (in French) of Contes Fantastique in 1901 (somewhat late in the day, it must be said), and there were one or two French study editions of their novels, including one, Le Blocus (1913), with a fine introduction by Arthur Reed Ropes, a friend of M.R. James and himself the author of a splendid macabre novel, The Hole of the Pit (1914). But that was it for eighty years.

However, Erckmann–Chatrian did live on, even if only as pale and wan shapes in the corner, thanks to weird fiction. They had attracted the attention of two famous writers in the genre, as different as two authors could ever be – H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James.

It is entirely due to these two that this book exists at all. If I may be allowed a little personal history, I first encountered the names Erckmann–Chatrian in M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories. Being very scared of spiders, I was fascinated to read in his introduction that ‘Other people have written of dreadful spiders – for instance, Erckmann–Chatrian in an admirable story called L’Araignée Crabe’. I spent many years wondering what terrors lay hidden behind that French title. Then, much later, I came across H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (a superlative researcher’s primer), and was fascinated to read more about Erckmann–Chatrian. Lovecraft noted that ‘“The Owl’s Ear” and “Waters of Death” are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar over-grown spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists’. It was a good bet that ‘Waters of Death’ was the same story as that mentioned by M. R. James. But how to get a copy? The British Museum catalogue did not mention either title, and I found that the Lovecraft version only appeared in an obscure American edition from the turn of the century, which was impossible to obtain. However, the British Museum catalogue did list several books of short stories by Erckmann–Chatrian and, on the assumption that one of them would contain this intriguing spider story, I set about tracking them down.

I never found an English book version of ‘L’Araignée Crabe’, much to my annoyance (in the end I got the French translated). What I did find was a set of splendid stories, forgotten for a century, which I duly reprinted in several of my anthologies. Then a chance encounter in 1978 with Thomas Tessier, who was an editor at Millington, led to his suggestion of an Erckmann–Chatrian collection. That Millington book was the original of this much expanded edition.

Erckmann–Chatrian stand apart from most of their contemporaries in European fiction who wrote in this vein. They did not essay the conte cruel, like Villiers de l’Isle Adam, or go in for paranoid fantasies, like Guy de Maupassant. Their tales are simple and straightforward, with all the effects up front. By rights, they should have dated severely. The pleasant surprise for modern readers is that they haven’t.

They wrote two fine, long tales: ‘The Wild Huntsman’, an essay on teratology with a sunshine-filled forest for a setting, and ‘The Man-Wolf’, a chilling story of lycanthropy, set in a winter-shrouded Black Forest castle. Their weirdest tales deal with metaphysics. ‘The Three Souls’ postulates that man is made up of three stages of development: vegetable, animal, and human. An enterprising Heidelberg scholar decides to bring them all out in the hero by starvation. Another seeker after wisdom tries to eavesdrop on the whole world through a freak of geology called ‘The Owl’s Ear’. In neither case are the results successful or happy.

‘The Invisible Eye’ is a remarkable tale of an old woman who induces suicide in the tenants of a hotel room through dummies on which she bestows magical powers. Like all of Erckmann–Chatrian’s work, the story’s florid style (probably exaggerated by the awkward translation of the day) only adds to the marvellous atmosphere. Their most memorable tale is ‘The Crab Spider’, and it is easy to see why M. R. James liked it so much. He borrowed its structure – mysterious deaths, terrible cause discovered, fiery climax – for his ‘The Ash-tree’.

In the works of Erckmann–Chatrian, we are able to step back over one hundred and fifty years, to the lost world of mid nineteenth century Europe, full of eminently believable characters – young men wooing, old men reminiscing, drinkers, smokers, noblemen, woodmen, peasants, witches, monsters, murderers, ghosts. Nothing like this is written today. Compared to their contemporaries – authors like Le Fanu or Bulwer-Lytton – Erckmann–Chatrian offer an easy target to critics, with their light touch and often bucolic tales. But these are stories with imagination second to none, and modern readers will not be disappointed. Welcome to the world of Erckmann–Chatrian.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

January 2018