“Symptoms of revolt have appeared among the Atmophytes. These machines have proffered seditious squeaks; these slaves have insulted citizens; and several among them, emerging from the subterranean region to which our constitution restricts them, have taken the air in the street. These fits are the result of the excessive development that you have allowed the Atmophytes’ organs to acquire— unconsidered improvements by which you have given them not merely instincts, but souls and the power of thought.”

Le Comte Didier de Chousey, 1884

 

Les Quat'z'arts Magazine

'Memories Without Regrets'

“An old man, a traveling singer, went proclaiming in the courtyards the word of God.

“To the tune of a very old carol or Christmas song, he would intone in a soft and distant voice a song whose words it was impossible to catch. Whether it was French, Celtic, Greek, Hebrew, the words with their strange sounds would fly away into the air, leaving in the souls a trail of soft light.

“His song finished, he would collect the coins that had been thrown to him, bow and leave the court, starting his refrain again: 'Love yourselves! etc.' We had nicknamed him The Prophet.

“My mother, a musician curious about all musical oddities, wanted to know more. While the prophet was singing, she went down and asked him the origin of his song,— Would it be possible to have the words? she asked, promising she could transcribe the music under dictation.

“The man, his large hat in his hand, with a salute of great lordship fixed my mother with his large clear eyes, smiled gently and said to her—My songs are from a distant world. Do charity: give to the poor without hope of reward and do not seek to know mysteries that you could not understand. Thank you, madam. Then having put his large hat back on, the Prophet turned on his heel and walked away slowly, making a large gray stain on the snow of the sidewalk.

“He died during the Commune, and when I arrive at this page of my memories, I will tell you of his death, too, mysterious, as strange as his life as a traveling musician.”

Charles de Sivry, 1898

“It is official today that the whole of our solar system is moving, insensibly, towards the celestial point marked by the sixth star of the constellation of Hercules (or Zeta Herculis, according to our language). This igneous abyss—of dimensions such that the numbers which express it would somewhat confuse thought (if, for those who think, the apparent sky could have any importance)—seems, in astronomy, to be the end or the inevitable erasure, in fact, of our set of phenomena.”

Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, 1890

“When all is said and done, Desire is what counts. You have this crazy but inescapable longing, a need almost, for some work of art (a Velazquez, a Satsuma vase! or a new kind of tie), and the moment of actual possession is one of joy, of love really. A week later, nothing.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

 

“Know, then, that in fact, everything that happens down here among humans in the order of external things is figured on the surface of all the spheres that circulate in the heavens, and that everything that humans operate with so much care, so much importance and so much pride has been represented since the beginning of time on the envelope of those same spheres, which are veritably covered in all those signs, as your skin is covered with little wrinkles and little stars whose arrangement and symmetry is infinitely variable. All the marvels of which humans boast on earth, therefore, ought no longer to flatter their self-esteem, since they are not their inventors, and they are only repeating in a servile and mechanical manner what the surfaces of the heavenly bodies imprint on them as they pass over them.”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798

 

“Forms are held together and summon one another by a mysterious bond. The universe is like a sumptuous fabric. As soon as one seizes it, it unfurls entirely, embroidered with signs in gold and crimson. You will never lift, even in moments of ecstasy, the sacred veil of Isis, but you might surprise, at any moment, a different movement of the goddess and find her present everywhere...”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903

“The telechromophotophonotetroscope eliminates absence in an even more radical fashion. The telechromophotophonotetroscope is, as everyone knows, an almost synoptic succession of instantaneous photographic prints, which reproduces electrically the face, speech and gestures of an absent person with a verity equivalent to presence, and which constitutes not so much an image as an apparition, a duplication of the absent individual. This very simple apparatus consists of a chromophotograph that provides color prints, a megagraph that magnifies them, a stenophonograph that receives and transcribes the subject’s speech, aided by a microphone that amplifies it, enclosed in a telephone conjoined with a tetroscope, to propagate the image and the sound.

“You can imagine all the benefits of such an instrument and all the vitality that it lends to relationships. No more isolation or solitude; whether one likes it or not, one receives spectral visits from absent friends, provincial relatives or idle neighbors at all hours, arriving unceremoniously to spend and hour or a few days in your home. What a unification of all the inhabitants of the country, linked into a single family by threads so tight that one could not sever a limb without making the entire body cry out, nor pull out a single hair without tearing off the entire scalp!”

Le Comte Didier de Chousey, 1884

“Mirrors open a bizarre door to the unknown. One dare not look at them too closely when one is alone, for fear of perceiving that one is no longer alone. Astral larvae take refuge on the other side of the wall in an unreal apartment that reproduces, with a slightly satanic exactitude, since it is reversed, all the details of this one. What apprehension there is of perceiving, in the tilted light of candles, a face other than our own! How necessary it is to be attentive to taking the necessary precautions!”

Gabriel de Lautrec 1904

 

“We are currently living through the most extraordinary days in the history of our planet. Humanity in the 20th century is being given the opportunity to witness an incredible astronomical evolution. We can no longer speak of the Earth in the singular, but that our planet, under the effect of unknown causes, has split along a plane perpendicular to the equator, making our globe into two halves, one of which bears the Old World, the other the New World. At present, it is a split earth that gravitates in space, and its two halves, although bathed in the same atmosphere, are separated by a distance of about fifty kilometers. Will this gap widen? Will we see, during their respective revolutions, one of the two halves of our globe collide with the Moon?”

Jacques Spitz, 1935

“The first observations made had revealed the full extent of the disaster. It was confirmed—but in this case, was confirmation necessary?—that we were in the presence of an unusual cataclysm. On all coasts, a retreat of the sea was noted. The Baltic, according to German estimates, had dropped by three meters. The Mediterranean was slowly emptying; its level was dropping by two centimeters per day and the current was such in the Strait of Gibraltar that erosion, noticeable to the eye, was eating away at the ancient Pillars of Hercules. But of all the news, the strangest was the silence of America. No wireless communication had been established with her.

“It was beginning to be feared that the earthquake had assumed an even greater importance in the New World than in the Old. The story of Atlantis naturally came to mind, and all that was talked about was sunken continents. The newspaper headlines read: 

WHERE IS AMERICA? 

IS AMERICA AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA?”

Jacques Spitz, 1935

“More and more gigantic eagles are waiting to leave the nest to circle over the last hiding places of mankind; already thousands of iron spiders are rushing tirelessly to and fro to weave shining silvery wings for them.” 

Gustav Meyrink, 1922

 

“Lunched with Richard Strauss, his son and daughter-in-law, at the Hofmannsthals’ in Rodaun. Strauss aired his quaint political views, about the need for a dictatorship, and so on, which nobody takes seriously.” 

Count Harry Kesler, 1928

THE FALL 

The black collapse of the first darkness
Is accomplished. And Satan, lover of the lights
Of punch, of impure vice and of the orgy in rut,
Fell from the top of the sky like a rough rock falls
 
He fell so long that the immense ages
Rang in turn to the bells of the madness
That God placed here and there in the boundless space.
 

Charles Cros, 1874

 

Les Quat'z'arts Magazine

'Memories Without Regrets'

Paris during the Prussian war, without bread, without potatoes. In the cafés, once bright, people lit candles. The jewellers of the Palais-Royal put on display (under a globe) BUTTER!! Twenty francs a pound, moreover.

At the Halles market, they sold—dearly—horse legs with their feet still shod. 

We had the good fortune to come across a servant as resourceful as she was honest. From time to time, she asked my mother for permission to take a half-day. She went to the outposts, provided, naturally, with the necessary money, and never returned empty-handed.

Once at the height of hostilities, she returned triumphant, bringing a beautiful piece of meat that weighed at least two pounds.

Strange thing: no skin, no trace of fat.  We were astonished; but, having declared that it smelled good and looked good, we cooked the mystery.

It could not be veal,

Nor pork,

Nor donkey,

Nor platypus,

Nor horse.

The mystery, once cooked, was declared succulent.

The next day, we had the good fortune to have Dr. Cros at lunch.  He was served the same meat.

He brought the dish back to examine it. Scrutinizing the fibrils, examining especially the sauce which, similar to goose fat, had not set:

"I know what it is," he cried triumphantly, "it's human flesh." Then, very gently, to my mother, "Madam, I'll ask you for more."

My fiancée, with her heart not yet hardened, left the table.

I confess, to my shame, that I continued to eat with much more interest.

Charles de Sivry, 1898

“Just now I have seen the sphinx fly away. He galloped off like a jackal.” 

Gustav Flaubert, 1874

 

“I might tell you that the sun will be hurled from Heaven and you would believe me. I might tell you that a worm is creeping through my brain—you would believe me—you would even see it and catch it!”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1910

 

“As for the song of the Sirens in the celestial concerts, very rash would be anyone who attempted to analyze it. It is one of those ineffable harmonies of which the Divinity keeps the secret, one of those luminous sounds of which mortals only grasp the shadow.

“The song of the Sirens-birds, souls of the stars, stars themselves, belongs to this class of cosmic harmonies. We can define it even less easily than we can define the voice of the speaking statue, that is to say the sound of the rising sun and the setting sun, the sound of the moon whistling its light through space, the moan of nature shivering in contact with the morning breeze, and the music of the rain falling rhythmically on the ground.”

Jean-Georges Kastner, 1858

 

“There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable. Perchance they form the real point at which Life obscurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of the stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting-point, as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature.”

Jules Michelet, 1861

“When the god Pan assembled the seven pipes of his syrinx, at first he imitated only the long drawn out and melancholy note of the toad voicing his sorrows in the light of the moon. Later he turned to birdsong. It is probably from that moment that the birds enriched their repertory. These are her sacred origins of which music can well be proud and which enables her to maintain an element of mystery. In the name of all the gods let us try neither to deprive her of them, nor to seek to explain them.”

Claude Debussy, 1913

“Let photography quickly enrich the traveler’s album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. 

“So far so good. 

“Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion, books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve our thanks and applause. 

“But if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!”

Charles Baudelaire, 1859