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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.

Borel was not alone in this quest 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 without adding a footnote.