“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

 

“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