“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

 

“One day I had a bad cold, and I remarked to my teacher that I could not think how I had caught it. She looked at me with a frown and said: 'Have you washed your head?' I nodded. 'Certainly,' I said, 'I washed it two days ago.' She shook her finger vehemently at me. 'A singer never washes her head,' she said. 'She cleans it with tonic. She cleans it with a fine tooth comb. But she never washes it.'”

Emma Calve, 1922

 

“Théa has not accompanied us to the city of Mercure. She has gone back to Jupiter, to which her office summoned her. We are walking alone, Pythie and I, through the miracles of the scientific city.”

Paul Adam, 1898

 

“The mass by Palestrina was incredibly beautiful. Although written in a strict manner technically, its effect is one of perfect whiteness, and emotion is not expressed (as it has come to be) by shrieks and roars, but by melodic arabesques. It is the result to a certain extent of the contours, and the interlacing of the arabesques—producing something which seems to be unique: harmony created by melody.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

“The Bat-Magi, the Satan-Magi, have come to Earth to aid in the reincarnation of Martian souls, to introduce them by means of their perfumes into human bodies and secure them in place by their incantations, after having expelled the human souls. For the Earth is the Martian paradise, the place necessary to Martian souls after death; it is on our planet that these souls are ordinarily reincarnated in the bodies of new-born babes, which become in consequence violent and bellicose individuals, criminals and warriors. And because the population of Mars is four or five times less than that of the Earth, these errant souls find themselves rapidly reincarnated, and the ex-Martians are a minority among human beings. 

“But the cremation of their planet by the Thunderbolt from Jupiter has liberated millions of Martian souls at a single instant! They have arrived on Earth, their paradise, hoping to begin the new existence that will eventually permit them to pass on to Venus, then Mercury—necessary stages of the transmigration that is destined to end in the supreme beatitudes of the central star: the Sun!”

Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet, 1922

 

“Yes, Monsieur, the Ruling Being of Mars has wings. He flies, passing from one continent to another like a spirit, all around his world, although he is unable to move beyond the vestiges of its atmosphere. I see them flying over the plains and cities, in the gilded air that they have there–for although it was believed in former times that the Martian sky is red while ours is blue, it is actually yellow: a beautiful, golden yellow.

Guy de Maupassant, 1887

“I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire,

Through its magical being in which the Sphinx is incarnate;

Through the caressing charm of the light so clear

That escapes in long jets from its two lynx-like eyes,

I understand why the cat struck Baudelaire.”

Maurice Rollinat, 1883

 

“'Nevertheless,' replied Maurice’s guardian angel, 'man has created science. The important thing is to introduce it into Heaven. When the angels possess some notions of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and physiology; when the study of matter shows them worlds in an atom, and an atom in the myriads of planets; when they see themselves lost between these two infinities; when they weigh and measure the stars, analyse their composition, and calculate their orbits, they will recognise that these monsters work in obedience to forces which no intelligence can define, or that each star has its particular divinity, or indigenous god; and they will realise that the gods of Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Sirius are greater than Ialdabaoth.'”

Anatole France, 1914

 

“The child loved Wagner; she sensed something in birth in those monstrous choirs, and, dreamily seeking on her guitar the intervals between the intervals, she found the voice of the wind, and beyond the scales of the wind, yet other scales.”

Louise Michel, 1886

 

“'Father, dear, what will the weather be like in a fortnight’s time—which is to say, on the third day of the second moon?'

“'I’ll tell you, my dear Sinusia. Let me consult the meteorometer.'

“These words, which might seem strange, were exchanged in the workroom—or, rather, the laboratory—of Professor Spherides Altair, in one of the most beautiful dwellings of Jovian Avenue in Kentropol, in the year 9978 of our era.

“'There’ll be a little rain in the morning,' he declared, 'but fine weather in the afternoon and for the next two days.'

“'Ah! So much the better—for I’m planning to take a pleasure trip to the ruins of Paris and London with my friends Aphelia and Parhelia Elliptine, their brother Helikos, and Triagul Parabolis.'”

Henri Allorges, 1922

 

“To be back in Paris I would willingly give the nine symphonies of Beethoven bound in the skin of Richard Strauss.”

Claude Debussy, 1891

 

“The green transparencies

Have drowned into the depths,

Which now roll within their black folds

The sonorous Vertigos.

Conquering Night

Has come,

And one sees the train undulate

Behind her robe fringed with moist stars,

Then disappear.

Behold, far away,

The Lighthouses begin to appear.”

Marie Anastasie Krysinska, 1890

 

“Yes, Monsieur, science will procure the definitive triumph of suffering humankind. It has already done a great deal; it has tamed time and space. Our railways, our telegraphs and our telephones have suppressed distance. If we succeed, as Dr. Pastoureaux seems to anticipate, in demonstrating that we can put intelligence into our machines, humans will be liberated forever from servile labor. No more serfs, no more proletariat! Everyone will become bourgeois! The slave machine will liberate from slavery our humbler brethren and give them the right of citizenship among us. 

“A day will come when machines, always running hither and yon, will operate themselves, like the carrier pigeons of Progress; one day, perhaps, having received their complementary education, they will learn to obey a simple signal in such a way that a man, sitting peacefully and comfortably in the bosom of his family, will only have to press an electro-vitalic switch in order for machines to sow the wheat, harvest it, store it and bake the bread that it will bring to the tables of humankind, and thus finally become the King of Nature.”

Emile Gondeau, 1891

“Evening fell. At sunset the mountains were opalescent. New ones appeared; they trailed laminated algae, which, long and fine as hair, appeared first as captive sirens, then as a vast reticulation; the moon shone through as a jellyfish in a net, as nacreous holothurian; then moving freely through the open sky, the moon turned azure-colored. Pensive stars went astray, whirled, plunged into the sea. Toward midnight appeared a gigantic vessel; the moon illuminated it mysteriously; its rigging stood motionless; the bridge was dark. It passed close beside us; there was no sound of oars, no noise from the crew. We finally realized that it was caught in the ice, between two icebergs that had closed in on it. It passed on by, silently, and disappeared.”

André Gide, 1893

“They are creatures perfect enough to disquiet their creators with the possibility that these strange beings should one day cross, by means of their acquired speed, the narrow frontier within which intelligence confines instinct, trying in their turn to scale the heavens, to stifle their bewildered masters against breasts of bronze, and to render into their native dust the human clay that they once took for gods!”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1884