"It’s no longer possible to live without the aid of Science, the precious treasure of which increases every day—but that very wealth makes it increasingly difficult to learn; it’s therefore necessary that intelligence becomes increasingly powerful.”

At that moment, a roseate light filled the room, neutralizing that of the lighting microbes. 

“A telephonic communication,” said Sinusia. 

It was, indeed, by such signals that the ancient bells had been replaced. There was no longer any apparent receiver or transmitter; it was sufficient to speak in the direction of the ceiling. The voice was reproduced by a loudspeaker.

Henri Allorge, 1922

 

“I believe that it ought to be the duty of every artist to depart as completely as possible from the place and subject of his previous success.

“The principal fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas. Most of them reproduce them twice, three, even four times. They have neither the courage nor the temerity to leave what is certain for what is uncertain, There is, however, no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one’s whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures. 

“A person who repeats himself is like an imitator, don’t you think? That is the great evil of today. Art has become almost an industry. But, believe me, those who are resigned to this truth are not real artists. If one day I become like that, I shall lay down my pen forever. I shall not complain but quietly go away to tune pianos. Claude Debussy: piano tuner.”

Claude Debussy, 1910

“When Multipliandre had risen up, by means of his wings, to 32,000 feet above the world’s surface, there was no more breathable air. It was impossible to make provision for that; there was only one course of action to take and he took it. That was discorporation. He flew over the highest peak in the entire world and left his body on the inaccessible point of a crag, after having wrapped it up well in furs, having treated it with a health-preserving gel, with which he filled the stomach, the mouth and all the bodily apertures and having placed it so securely that the winds and tempests could not dislodge it. Then, his detached soul could go wherever it wished, because, no longer being in the sphere of corporate life but that of souls, he could dispense entirely with entry into a body.”

Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne, 1802

Memories of Rollinat

When I entered the café, I saw him seated with his back to the window. His gaze, emerging from the half-shadow of his face, looked like a pair of will-o'-the-wisps; a remotely melancholy gaze, that of a fallen angel who had not rebelled, darting brief glances around him.

Across those eyes floated a great lock of hair, comma-shaped, which I saw him suddenly toss back with the whole sweep of a laborer's hand accustomed to the hoe.

I went straight to him.

“Monsieur Rollinat, I have heard Pelleport speak of your poems. They possess an atmospheric kinship with Edgar Allan Poe, whom I once attempted to illustrate. He claims that you compose music resembling your poetry. You will forgive my indiscretion.”

“Sir,” he replied, “I forgive it all the more gladly because you bear a strange resemblance to my brother, alas, now dead. You say you attempted to illustrate Edgar Poe. I should be curious...”

“Oh, I readily admit that one does not illustrate Edgar Poe. One can only create something alongside him, for a publisher's purposes. I shall give you those drawings. But...your music?”

“If five flights of stairs do not frighten you, I still have some wood left and we can light a fire. It is on Rue Saint-Jacques. Do not expect a piano—it is a harpsichord.”

It was on Rue Saint-Jacques, two houses from Rue Gay-Lussac. The staircase was damp and hunchbacked, evoking the mysteries of Eugène Sue.

Rollinat lit a fire, set his pipe upon the edge of the harpsichord, and, in a glowing improvisation, seemed almost to wipe the instrument clean with sound. Its little sharp, vibrating voice jostled itself like battling drops of water in an old basin strewn with dead leaves.

“I shall play you one of Baudelaire's Spleens.”

My chair entered the wall and my whole head entered the piano; my hair, certainly, had suddenly become its strings.

I was elsewhere—elsewhere in the realms of Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, and Eugène Delacroix.

This was not music. It was language.

It seemed to me that this man rolled the very heart of humanity beneath his fingers.

At four in the morning Rollinat was still singing. He nearly got evicted.

Georges Lorin, 1913

“In our belief solar radiation is maintained by the continuous, unbroken succession of souls, in the sun. These pure and burning spirits are replacing the emanations perpetually sent through space by the sun, to the globes which surround him. 

“From their throne of fire, these souls, all intelligence and activity, behold the marvellous spectacle of the march of all the planetary globes which compose the solar world, through space. Placed in the centre of this vast world, understanding the secrets of nature, and all the mysteries of the universe, they are in possession of perfect happiness, of absolute wisdom, and of illimitable knowledge.”

Louis Figieur, 1904

“Journalists! It is no longer a profession. Journalism has been absorbed into information, reportage into announcement or advertisement. The public, increasingly demanding, desires so much to be informed, that its members have ended up gradually, without perceiving it, informing themselves, addressing themselves to newspapers in accordance with their needs, for reportage, news, demands or advertisements, and interviewing one another!

“The newspapers themselves are very much alive and their name is legion. There are not hundreds but thousands and tens of thousands of them, which grow underfoot, arrive via post-balloons from the four corners of the world, in every format, etc., etc. 

“Newspapers no longer only appear in the morning and the evening; some have three or four different editions; they also appear at night, since the brasseries and restaurants have the liberty to remain open. Every corporation, moreover, possesses its particular bulletin, published under the direction of its syndical committee, responding to its needs and defending its interests. They include the Mouron, which is given away free in schools, the Étal, the butchers’ journal, the Lait Chaud de Paris, the organ of dairy-workers, the Flûte, the bulletin of bakers; the Mont-Doré, a specialist sheet for cheese-mongers, etc., etc.”

André Monselet, 1892

 

“The future, which always comes too late for the living, will see these things, and many others too, for the world is born, nowadays, of the union of steam and the railways. Everything that existed the day before yesterday no longer has any reason for being; the new order is already the antipodes of the old; the impossible will regenerate the world; interests are never disunited, they combine; there is no longer any distance; wheels are wings, mountains corridors, ships bridges, oceans streams. What, then, will come to pass after our generation?”

Joseph Mery, 1854

“I would also like, in these notes, to pay homage to that man of incommensurable genius, namely Jules Verne.

“My admiration for him is boundless.

“In certain pages of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, A Trip to the Moon, Mysterious Island and Hector Servadec, he raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language.

“I once had the good fortune to be received by him at Amiens, where I was doing my military service, and there shake the hand which had penned so many immortal works.

“O incomparable master, may you be blessed for the sublime hours which I have spent endlessly reading and re-reading your works throughout my life.”

Raymond Roussel, 1933

 

“'I’m far from finding the canvas restful,' I remarked. It’s as unpleasant as meditating on some of Odilon Redon’s nightmares.'”

Renée Dunan, 1924

“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