“No stupid self-respect! The important thing is to succeed. Yes, let’s get together with the other worlds. Let’s create an international and intercosmic company to destroy… to destroy!” Penkenton bit into the repeated world as if it were prey between the teeth of a tiger. “Destroy everything: worlds, suns, space itself, and time! Annihilate everything, engendering nothingness! What an achievement—greater than creating being! And what a god man will be when he has achieved that creation! But one man, one company, or one world isn’t sufficient to the task; we need for associates the 115 planets that surround us and the 38 million suns that flame at the end of our telescopes. So let’s get on with it, without wasting a moment, and reach an understanding with our allies.”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1883

“Then I saw strange animals moving in all directions, mingling their dazzling scales, twisting their fiery coils, walking, crawling, flying and responding to one another with profound and sonorous voices like the notes of an organ. There were sphinxes shaking their bandelets and chimeras with green phosphorescent eyes spitting fire through their nostrils and striking their foreheads with long dragon’s tails. There were griffins, half lion and half vulture, clenching their red paws and stretching out their blue necks, and basilisks with violet bodies undulating in the sand. There were a thousand strange, scarcely suspected, beasts: tragelaphs, half stag and half ox, alligators with the feet of roe deer, goats with the hindquarters of donkeys, owls with serpents’ tails, gigantic chameleons, and terrifying monsters sometimes as tall as mountains and sometimes as slender as reeds. There were immense metal flowers on the legs of women, and dragonflies whose deployed wings resembled the sails of ships and whose bodies shone like steel yardarms.”

Jane de la Vaudere, 1893

“Hashish will be taken under the auspices of Moreau and Aubert-Roche. Arrive between five and six at the latest. You will have your share of a light dinner and await the hallucination.”

Fernand Broissard to Théophile Gautier, 1845

 

A small high-pitched voice caused them to turn round. “Glory to the Superman! May he favor you with an operation, Messieurs!” 

It was a legless man, posed on a silently-wheeled pedestal equipped with a deflector reminiscent of a locomotive’s cow-catcher. His torso was swathed in a kind of green leather sheath bolted to the pedestal, and that armature, hermetically sealed, only opened on the right side, to give passage to a single arm, and at the neck, to let through the head.  But what secured the originality of the face most of all was the complete absence of a lower jaw, replaced by a kind a glabrous membrane that extended to the lower lip, partly opening an entirely toothless mouth. 

“I shall proclaim it loudly forever! I’m perfectly happy, firstly because I’m Dr. Caresco’s masterpiece, and secondly because I’ve greatly diminished the chances of physical suffering and mental disappointments!”

“Would it not have been more complete, in that case, to suppress your existence totally?” said Choumaque. 

“When the Superman wishes to take me!” affirmed the half-man, with pious respect. 

André Couvreur, 1904

 

“You don’t know the power of precious stones,” he said. “They’re the eyes of inanimate matter, the stars that the earth elaborates through the centuries in its profound night. They attract or repel beings, gazes, fluids and thoughts.”

Édouard Schuré, 1897

“Mademoiselle,” I said. “I’m Polyplast 17,177 of the Aristotle Foundation. That title, which might not mean anything to you, is that of a biologist specializing in cases of aphanasia, or Napus. Your friend has just disappeared. We witnessed it, this gentleman and myself.”

Leon Daudet , 1927

 

“For beings of imagination, music without words– symphony or waltz, sonata or fanfare of horns– is the great and artificial manufacturer of dreams. The chance chords make one feel beautiful, rich, glorious, loved. One hears a deep rumbling within himself, like armed vehicles filled with rhymes, sonorous poems; or perhaps one suffers, one groans, one grows emotional, one weeps, one feels his soul get lost in the overly thick shadows or under the decidedly distant stars; and at the back of oneʼs skull, like penitent phantoms, strophes exit and slide in cadence; or maybe itʼs a flight, an orgiastic whirlwind, kisses that one steals and cups one breaks, while the diverse timbres of the orchestra respond, striking chords like the feet of ballerinas on an elastic parquet.”

Emile Gondeau, 1888

“In the midst of adoration and ritual precaution, they kept a fiery stone which the poetic imagination had made into a messenger of the sun. 

“With the brightness of the most beautiful rubies, it was also a perpetual ardent coal. It burned without being consumed, and its redness, which passed from vivid to dark, was not a deceptive symbol. Visible Fire: at its approach all hands, including those of the most pious, became profane. One could no more grasp it than a firebrand. It was intangible, like flame, lightning and mystery. A religious quality, for our corporeal person. And such an object can sustain astonishment better that fetishes of wood or stone. It has not always required as much for people to make of something a god.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903

“As it stands, it’s a curious mixture and reminds me of certain American drinks made out of vegetables, champagne, fruit, etc. You can’t tell whether they’re excellent or revolting, but you just drink them out of astonishment.”

Claude Debussy, 1902

“But by the ten beams of light that your central shadow projects, by the ten conductors of your vibrations, by the ten delegates of your Amour, I summon the virtues of your principal emanations.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1900

 

“The sound emanating from seashells into your ear is phonescence. Phonescence is to sound what phosphorescence is to light. Or, to employ terminology more easily within your range, the shells are phonographs of a sort, which have registered the mysterious songs of fish and rendered it sensible to your eardrum, in the same way that a phosphorescent plate shines in the dark with light captured during the day.”

Alphonse Allais, 1904

“I foresee the possibility of music written specially to be performed in the open air, constructed on broad lines, vocally and instrumentally audacious, floating freely in the air and soaring gaily over the tops of the trees. Certain harmonic progressions that might seem abnormal in the concert hall would certainly be appreciated at their real value in the open air. There would be a mysterious collaboration between the air, the fluttering of the leaves and the scent of the flowers and the music itself; the latter would unite all these elements in such perfect harmony that it would appear to be a part of each one of them... Finally, one would be able to verify once and for all whether music and poetry are the only arts which move in space... I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there is enough in this idea for future generations to dream about.”

Claude Debussy, 1903

 

“On that world, composed of beings and objects infinitely varied and all of perfect transparency, it is the difference in the density of bodies which indicate surfaces to the Elierians’ expert eyes. With the utmost skill, they can comprehend at a glance the forms of everything; and those forms, themselves penetrable, by no means prevent their gazes from comprehending, through the nearest forms, those of bodies which the first would have hidden if they had been opaque. Thus, an inhabitant of Elier, casting down his exploring gaze from the top of a mountain, perceives at first, on the surface of the ground, the forests spreading out a layer of diaphanous vegetation in dense tufts; and, thoroughly analyzing with his eyes each tree and each bit of moss, he can just as easily and distinctly study the superficial and deep strata from that point on down to the center of the world. His gaze, going through the entire thickness of Elier, can even, by means of a telescope, examine the buildings of a city at the antipodes—if, however, it is not forced to turn away before the rays of a sun blazing at the nadir.”

C.I. Defontenay, 1854

 

O our king, for the delights

Grant us again your palaces, your gardens, your fountains,  

And your golden terraces where the sea of evening breaks,  

And your magic forest where in the night you lead  

The silver Unicorn, the Wyvern, and the black Fawn.  

Grant us again the sweetness of your dead Brides  

Who sleep in the tomb of your soul and who lie  

Under the double lock of gates and doors—  

Your regret, your posthumous love, and your shiver.  

We, who are the eternal Letter of the Book—  

Symbol null, if no one reads the sleeping word!—  

Be the spirit that impresses and stirs and gives life,  

And the triumphal Love that saves from death.  

Tie our hair as a pennant to your standard,  

Sweet knight, dream through us your scattered dream,  

And come to us through life and through chance—  

We are the Mirror and the Amphora and the Lamp.  

Henri de Regnier, 1890

 

“Go into the labyrinth, spend time in the arbors—and read my book, page by page, as if you were a solitary walker, turning over a scarab beetle, a pebble or a dead leaf with the tip of your long, jasper-handled walking-stick, on the dry sand of the pathway.”

Henri de Regnier, 1897

“If you live close to the end, as today we all do, you want to see the course by which the eagle makes his swift descent. Unlike the dove, he leaves a trail of smoke, somehow, in the air. Not that there will not be a new world, but this is the end of ours. And being selfish, we are concerned with that.”

David Stacton, 1960

“When will someone come along and put an end to this dreadful notion, so popular at the moment, that it is as easy to be an artist as a dentist? Why don’t we stop making the secrets of the art so readily available? Let us not keep so many people away from their true vocations at the haberdashery counters of our department stores.”

Claude Debussy, 1912

“Who could tell what unexpected discoveries and what superhuman masterpieces might find a theater in the soul of the Martian god, nestling within its cupola of stone?

Gustave la Rouge, 1908

"I believe in capricious magic of alcohol, and I’m not adverse to feeling its affects. I have about a half-pint of whiskey every night... Strange that it sometimes brings us close to things we’re familiar with, and allows us to see them in a new light.”

Claude Debussy, 1912

 

“Everyone agreed that they had never eaten anything more flavorsome. Then, tranquilly, Scaramouche said: ‘What you are eating, Messieurs, is Human! And I think that if you search carefully in the sauce, you won’t fail to find a few small bones revelatory of the kind of meat you’ve been eating with so much satisfaction.’

“The writhing and the laughter redoubled. But Scaramouche, said, imperturbably: ‘If I’m not the Night herself, I’m her cook. The immense blue vault is a transparent frying-pan, on which I fried, holding it by the Milky Way, which is its handle, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Neptune and all the stars, on the stove of the eternal Sun. The comets, which have the form of a cruet, pour flamboyant oil; every red bolide is a grain of Cayenne pepper, and the wind of infinite space has the function of a bellows that activates the fire under the frying-pan—with the consequence that it’s the sky, cooked to perfection, that I’ve served you for supper. Not all the sky; the planets, being tough, remained in the cooker; but the little parasites of the heavenly bodies—I mean the living beings of the firmament—have sizzled in the sauce, and you’ve nourished yourself on your celestial resemblances.’

“At the same time, with a long black leg that raked the whole table, Scaramouche tipped over, broke and extinguished the candelabra; and in the darkness, while he roared with laughter, the dead-drunk scientists, sickened and frightened by the execrable feast, vomited parcels of cutlets, backs, fillets, ribs and fry of Mars, Mercury, Saturn and the divine flesh of Venus, which is golden in the blue of beautiful skies.”

Catulle Mendes, 1888