“The Dust Fay approached a basin as large as a sea and, plunging her arm into it, she first pulled out strange plants; then animals even stranger, which were still half-plant; then free individuals, separate from one another, living mollusks, and eventually fish, which she made to jump, saying: 'That’s what Dame Dust can produce when she deposits herself on the bed of the waters. But there’s better—turn around and look at the shore.'

“In fact, I saw an arborescent vegetation rise up rapidly and become populated by reptiles and insects, while unknown beings agitated on the shore that caused me a veritable terror. 

“'Those animals won’t terrify you in the earth of the future,' said the fay. 'They’re destined to fertilize it with their remains; there aren’t any humans here yet to fear them.'

“'Wait!' I cried. 'Did you need all these massacres and all these stupidities to make us a compost heap?'

“'The great fay Nature has higher aims,' replied Dame Dust. 'She doesn’t intend to stop at the things you know. She works and invents perpetually. For her, who knows no suspension of life, repose would be death. 

“'The future will make of all of you, feeble human creatures, into fays and genii who possess science, reason and goodness. See what I am enabling you to see, and know that these first sketches of life, summarized in instinct, are closer to you than you are to what will one day be: the reign of the spirit over the earth that you inhabit. The occupants of that future world will then have the right to be as profoundly scornful of you as you are scornful today of the world of the great saurians.'”

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, 1875

“Beware in the future of works which appear to inhabit the skies; often they are a product of a dark, morose mind.” 

Claude Debussy, 1917

“Just as the human soul has its secret folds, so the cathedral. An entirety, which extends beneath the church floor, constitutes the crypt (from the Greek Κρυπτός, hidden). In this low, damp, and cold place, the observer experiences a singular sensation that commands silence: that of power united with darkness. We are here in the asylum of the dead, as at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, necropolis of the illustrious, as in the Roman Catacombs, cemetery of the Christians. Stone slabs; marble mausoleums; sepulchers; historical debris, fragments of the past. A mournful and heavy silence fills the vaulted spaces. The thousand noises from outside, those vain echoes of the world, no longer reach us. Are we about to emerge into the caves of the Cyclopes? Are we on the threshold of a Dantesque inferno, or in the underground galleries, so welcoming, so hospitable to the first martyrs?–All is mystery, anguish, and fear in this obscure cavern… Around us are numerous, enormous, massive pillars, sometimes paired, standing on their broad, chamfered bases. Short, squat, sober capitals with little projection. Rough and crude forms, where elegance and richness give way to solidity. Thick muscles, contracted under effort, which unfailingly share the formidable weight of the entire edifice. A nocturnal, mute, rigid will, tensed in a perpetual resistance to being crushed. Material force that the builder knew how to order and distribute, giving all these members the archaic appearance of a herd of fossilized pachyderms, welded to one another, rounding their bony backs, hollowing their petrified bellies under the thrust of an excessive load. A real but occult force, which exerts itself in secret, develops in the shadows, acts without respite in the depths of the work’s substructures. Such is the dominant impression experienced by the visitor while traversing the galleries of the Gothic crypts.”

Fulcanelli, 1922

 

“The Mother Superior received me afterward, affectionately but sadly.

“'Alas, my dear child!' she said. 'What an unfortunate end for one who had hoped to take the veil! That a former president of the Children of Mary should go on the stage is sad indeed. Yet Monsieur Fevêque foresaw it! He said long ago that you were a born artist.' And she added, in the same words as my aunt, 'We will pray for you!'”

Emma Calve, 1922

 

“A city like that plunges as far into the ground as it rises into the air; its roots go in search of the nucleus of the world and only stop when they arrive at the surfaces of interior lakes or the furnace of the central fire. Beneath the living city extends the dead city, the black city of motionless inhabitants. Broad ventilation-shafts, gaping like the mouths of Hell, lead to the region of crypts and sphinxes. Funereal tribes labor in the vomitory cities, tribes of gravediggers, the slaves of death; those who melt the natrum and the bitumen in boilers; those who weave the mortuary bandages; the coffin-makers, the painters, the gilders and the sculptors of tombs—all those whose works will never see the light of day, and who trace inscriptions by the yellow light of a lamp that lacks air that are immediately covered by shadow and will only ever be read by sightless eyes.”

Théophile Gautier, 1851

“She sings like a locomotive in distress, but her buttered scones are marvellous.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

 

“I regret never having met Odilon Redon. Lithographer, etcher, he had begun to paint at the age of forty, like Titian. This Saturnine visionary of dark worlds, bathed in a halo of obscurity—the years that have passed since his death have so far illuminated only a few too-faint rays of a glory still to come.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1937

 

“For a long time we could not hope to prove to a critic that the Symbolists were not Rosicrucians; we were told that the Rosicrucians declared themselves Symbolists, that Péladan was almost the same thing as Paul Adam. We had to explain that there were symbols and symbols: religious symbols, Rosicrucian symbols, Symbolist symbols, and a variety of symbols for each Symbolist. The bewildered critic would recoil and go away repeating: The Symbolists are occultists.”

Gustave Kahn, 1902

 

“‘What is God?’

“‘The ensemble of Forces,’ stammers the shrill and musical voice. 

“‘What is a force?’

 “‘That which creates movement, heat, electricity, all the states and aspects of nature, and in consequence, the universal physical laws, the attractive relationships of heavenly bodies, nebulae, suns, planets, vapors, seas, waters, vegetation, plasmatic cells, mollusks, fish, amphibians, quadrupeds and humans.’

“‘Did God, then, create humans?’

“‘Yes, through the series of the three kingdoms, and in order that humans, in their turn, in accordance with the evolution of races, would know and adore the harmony of Forces.’

“‘What do you know about Adam and Eve?’

“‘Adam is the red Earth, the incandescent Earth before the gradual cooling of the planet. Eve is Aïscha, or the volitional faculty, the energy that permits the evolution of life, from the humblest cell of vegetal plasma to the scientist and the hero. Because of that, the priests taught that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib—which is to say that human intelligence was extracted by the evolution of cooling matter.’”

Paul Adam, 1891

“Just as the majestic multitude of worlds surpasses our tiny globe, so the night sky seems to me superior to the daytime sky.

“What moves me most about the stars is not the brilliance of these powerful masses, nor the prodigious distances that separate them from one another. 

“It is the presence of the souls gathered around these innumerable hearths.

“We all breathe together in the same light. The scintillations of the stars are for me like an image of gazes crossing everywhere in space. Under the figure of the stars, we discover the august assembly of creatures seated in a circle before our eyes, on the infinite tiers of the amphitheatre of the universe.

“How could one not be stirred in the depths of the soul at the thought of so many unknown and unimaginable beings surrounding us, sharing with us the same time, the same space, the same ether, and, under the hand of the same sovereign, rushing through the varied tumult of life toward the same end? What diverse organisations! What destinies! What alternations of good and evil! What trials! What passions in motion! What surges! What despair! What adorations and prayers!

“In the apparent immobility of the constellations, what an appalling swarming!”

Jean Reynaud, 1863

“'Wouldst thou know my power?' said the false goddess, in her charming and paradoxical voice. 'Listen, then!' She put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet, decorated after the fashion of a mirliton with the titles of all the world’s newspapers, and with this instrument she sounded my name, so that it reverberated in the air like the sound of a hundred thousand thunderclaps, and sent echoes back at me even from the furthest of the planets.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1863

“He decided to devote his stock of teeth to the execution of his mosaic.”

Raymond Roussel, 1914

 

“On this subject, illustrious Amilec, I will tell you that they take the idea of the plurality of worlds to extremes. They know that Mercury, Venus, all the other planets and their satellites are inhabited, like the Earth, or habitable. They also know that every fixed Star is a Sun that illuminates its Earths, as ours illuminates its own. 

“In addition to that, however, they claim that every drop of water, having, as everyone knows, a swirling movement, must be a little world, in the center of which there is a tiny sun, which illuminates even tinier worlds placed at its circumference—with the result that when a Lunar Philosopher drinks a glass of water he regards himself as a monstrous animal swallowing a prodigious multitude of Suns, Earths, Moons and Worlds. 

“Furthermore, they say that, what a drop of water—which is an aqueous world—is to ours, ours may be to a third. It might be that our Sun, our fixed Stars and our Vortices is, as a whole, nothing but a drop of liquid, which some enormous animal, an inhabitant of a Planette much more immense than we can imagine, might one day drink.”

Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche, 1754

 

“The night of my début at La Scala, I was horribly frightened. I sang out of tune and lost my head completely. The audience hissed at me, and quite rightly! How often, since then, have I blessed that fortunate hissing which made me realise my shortcomings and spurred me to undertake the serious studies which I so much needed!”

Emma Calve 1922

 

“Silence, radiant reparative force, slumber of life, brief glimpse of the mountains of faith.....Silence, original to the beginning and the end, overwhelming law.....Silence beneath the arpeggios of the Sun on serene coasts..... Silence of the coraline cities of submarine depths.....Silence of the time when, weary of its futile sleep, the Sun drapes itself, and the clots of its blood stain the quotidian and temporary crosses of the ether.....Silence, promise of Erebus, and of the lairs of inspired seers.....Silence, sole word among the blind who dream the worlds.....Silence, of which only the tortures of hunger draw the iron talons from the excoriated prophet.....Silence, liturgy and panacea.....Silence, thou the hope all the days of the world.....Silence, father of the night of our over-feverish and excessively ambulant dreams.”

Gustave Kahn, 1898

 

“Henri Delaage wrote a number of forgotten works on magnetism, occultism and kindred stimulants of the imagination by which some of the meek are, in every generation, consoled and made insolent.”

Lewis Galantière, 1937

 

“Madame Truphot, rid of her husband, had realized a long-cherished dream. She had opened a literary salon. Symbolism was then at its height, and hordes of fools, devoid of all syntax and spelling, were working to overcrowd the asylums by offering up masses of improbable rebuses for admiration, formulas as unheard of as they were hermetic, in which, it seemed, they had imprisoned Beauty. Madame Truphot was thus a Pre-Raphaelite, ardently. Young men, somewhat kleptomaniac, came every Tuesday and Saturday to pour out the overflow of their genius into her home, in the form of pentameters, hexameters, and myriameters, while simultaneously oozing, as best they could, the scrofula of their aestheticism. After some resistance, Sar Péladan, his head adorned with an armful of sepia-toned shavings and a bundle of steel wool, Sar Péladan himself, finally yielded and, for a year, graced her dwelling with his dandruff and his ears shaped like nightjar wings.”

Fernand Kolney, 1904

 

“You who are passing through the crossroads of infinity, pause; form a circle around me. Although old, my melody is always new. The one who made it is the master to whom I belong. Beneath his hardened fingers, a thousand centuries ago, I learned it in order to make the round-dance of the stars, worlds, skies, people and hours who link hands circulate and sway around him. Again, again! Let the round begin again! Let the suns rotate more rapidly! Let the waltz of the spheres and their satellites pass and pass again, whirling, until they are dizzy, until they say, staggering: “Satellites, where are we?”

Edgar Quinet, 1834

 

“A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume floats above a box of sandalwood.”

Robert Chambers, 1895

The Wax Lady

I watched the mannequin turning round,

Admiring her figure, her bosom fair,

Her golden hair, her teasing little face,

When suddenly I saw her nostril quiver

And her slender neck of viper-like form.

"She lives, then!" I told myself in terror.

And ever since, haunted at every hour

By a love that nothing can destroy,

I have both the fear and the curiosity

Of seeing the wax lady enter my home.

In every weather, beneath an African sky,

Or under clouds uneasy and forlorn,

Like a swimmer pursued by a shark,

Unable to flee, I remain before her display window,

And there I hear my heart beating like a drum.

Though I tell myself, "Horror! Madness!"

There are nights of dreadful darkness—

—So much do I summon her, so much do I desire her!—

When I can imagine it possible

That the wax lady might enter my home.

Just as she is, in her nankeen dress,

With eyes the color of aquamarine,

And that alluring, mischievous smile,

The spinning beauty with crimson lips

Settles herself into my brain and engraves herself there.

I willingly hallucinate her,

And, drunk on strangeness, sink deeper

Into a fog that my reason strives to tear apart,

For it is my most ardently cherished dream

To see the wax lady enter my home.

Maurice Rollinat, 1883