My Hospitals & My Prisons

Biographies & Memoirs

VERLAINE, PAUL

Arts & Literature

Sunny Lou Publishing

Fanchette&#700;s Pretty Little Foot (originally Le Pied de Fanchette in French), a novel by Restif de la Bretonne, was first published in 1769. The story is a cross between the fairytale Cinderella, from 1697, and Samuel Richardson&#700;s moral story (actually libertine novel) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, from 1740. Now, Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper was originally a folktale dating back at least 2000 years ago to a similar tale from Greece or Egypt, but it was made famous in the modern era (at least for Western audiences) with the 17th-century publication of French writer Charles Perrault&#700;s version of the tale, and more recently still by the 20th-century release of Walt Disney&#700;s animated movie. &#65279;But one does not have to be a scholar of French fairytales, Hollywood movies, or 18th-century English libertine novels to appreciate this simple, but delightful tale about a young and virtuous bourgeois girl, the daughter of a wealthy fabric merchant, whose parents die while she&#700;s still a teenager, leaving her to fate&#700;s fortune in then-naughty Paris. She is pretty as a belle [sic] and even more virtuous, but it is her prettier little foot in especial that gets her into all kinds of trouble. Who would have thought that a girl&#700;s foot, embellished by a rich slipper, could be so attractive and seductive? Leave it to the French to capitalize on that. Or leave it to Restif de la Bretonne in this charming story, which is really a comedy, to bring it front and center. Interestingly, this novel was the first to give a name to a sensual preference called shoe fetishism, or "retifism" in French (after the author&#700;s name).

Fanchette's Pretty Little Foot: The French Orphan Girl

Literature & Fiction

Bretonne, Restif De La

Literary

"In these unprecedented times" (ugh) we need a prophet. But prophets are hard to come by in the flesh and blood, unless we unearth one from the modern or post-modern past, from our own graveyards preferably. If fusty, fetid, fecal, and fiery Léon Bloy cannot fit the bill, we don&#700;t know who can. Salvation Through the Jews picks up where certain apocryphal, poetic, eschatological, and prophesying chapters in The Desperate Man left some readers panting for more. It was published 6 years after the latter novel, and one can see in it the sprouting sequel of a germ planted in 1886, if not earlier. Léon Bloy was a great artist and a genius. Nobody can deny that. And there is artistry in this book; he uses it deftly to make a compelling point. But like all arguments, one needs to hear the major and minor premises first before arriving at the synthesis or conclusion. This work NEEDS to be read even if one is not a Christian or a Jew because although it is about the Passion and although it is about the so-called "Jewish problem," on another level it is something else, and one can take the Jews and Christians out of the equation altogether, strip them naked, bleach them white, remove their particulars from this book, and replace them rather easily by more modern equivalent cardboard cutouts in the theater of now. On a more scholarly note, according to U.C. Berkeley Professor of History, John Connelly, this book is important because it had a major influence -- doubtless through the auspices of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, a friend of Bloy's -- on the Second Vatican Council's formulation in 1965 of section 4 of Nostra aetate, which formally and radically changed the Catholic Church's 1500+ year-old attitude towards Judaism.

Salvation Through the Jews

History

Bloy, Léon

Europe

The Words of a Demolitions Contractor (originally Propos d'un Entrepreneur de Démolitions), published in 1884, is a collection of articles written by French author Léon Bloy, previously published in the columns of various Parisian journals between the years 1882 and 1884 - the Chat Noir journal principally, but also the Gils Blas, the Figaro, the Nouvelle Revue, and Le Petit Caporal. Selected by the author himself, they represent Léon Bloy at his earliest and fiery best as a thunderous, irascible, intransigeant Catholic pamphleteer and polemicist. These are the articles that earned him his reputation, and these are the articles that essentially torpedoed his career. So maligned and hated was he from the start, that his reputation as an author still suffers. But as the dust settles after nearly 150 years, in retrospect, Léon Bloy stands out as a beacon of righteousness, a Parisian Diogenes, shedding the light of his genius and rancor on the ills plaguing Paris and France at the time - during the Belle Epoque years and the years leading up to the two world wars.It&#700;s hard to discover a writer of such intensity, love and disgust, pathos, anger, and parody - in any language, at any period of time in the history of Western literature. Imagine the gloom and despair of Dostoevsky, mixed with the prophesy and thunder of an Old Testament prophet, throw in the biting wit of Jonathan Swift - shake it up and let it sit for a minute - and there you have him: Léon Bloy.

Words of a Demolitions Contractor

History & Criticism

The title of this story, Ecclesiastical Laurels (originally Les Lauriers ecclésiastiques), foreshortens in two words the basic plot: a commendatory abbot, the Abbot T***, wages war on the field of love. After several conquests, of varying degrees of success, with women at various levels of society and of various vocations, he progresses from a complete neophyte in the rules and etiquette of love-making and seduction, through a middle period of maturation and rage, to finally being fulgurated by the woman of his future happiness and "legitimate passion," who, as chance might have it, is a nun. His successes, or conquests, earn him his laurels, imaginary leafy crowns that are more like garter belts. One subtitle of this story, the "Abbot T***&#700;s Campaigns," further emphasizes the libertine tendencies of the main character and plot. But if anything, it is soft-libertinage, where the main character could be described as a mélange between ambitious young lover Julien Sorel (of Stendhal&#700;s Le rouge et le noir, also a bildungsroman) and master seducer Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos&#700; Les liaisons dangereuses.

Ecclesiastical Laurels: Abbot T***'s Campaigns

de la Morlière, Jacques Rochette

On Huysmans' Tomb (Sur la tombe de Huysmans originally) is a collection of critical essays written by Léon Bloy about his erstwhile friend, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Written between 1884 and 1893, and published in book form in 1913, six years after Huysmansʼ death, it is an appraisal of Huysmans himself and his most important work at that time: À Rebours, En Rade, Là-Bas, – as nobody other than Léon Bloy could have written, with keen psychological insight into Huysmansʼ mind and personality, and providing first-hand information about the inception of those works, particularly Là-Bas, that satanic masterpiece of Huysmans' that originally was intended to look up (Là-Haut), rather than down. “The intensity of a writer like Huysmans is, principally, in his contempt... The well-known author of À Rebours has not at all the ignivomitous allures of an imprecator, and the torrential flux of green bile is, in him, merely the literary illusion of some prickly vanity... Huysmans had finally divested himself of the pedagogic reminiscences of his art education, in order to enter upon certain originality,... The synoptic pessimism of des Esseintes appeared to many as a stopping place or as a refuge, and the agonizing future of that anchorite of analysis excited the emulation of a large group of dreamers...” “En Rade does not appear to be a work fated to modify the destiny of that reprobate [des Esseintes]. The pessimism of À Rebours has merely been strengthened and consolidated... No counterweight, from now on, to the deep despondency of souls. No pale brightness, no wan glimmer of the skies... Never has hope been so positively dismissed...” This work also includes, in the appendix, a critical review of À Rebours by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly

On Huysmans' Tomb: Critical reviews of J.-K. Huysmans and À Rebours, En Rade, and Là-Bas

Ten Years a Bohemian (Dix ans de bohème in French), first published in 1888, is the autobiographical account of a young man, Émile Goudeau, who moves to Paris from the French countryside in the mid- to late-1870s, with high ambitions of becoming a poet. Would that it were so easy! Whimsical and endearing, it tells the story of the Bohemian life of not just one young man, but countless other struggling artists in the Belle Epoque period of Paris, many of which artists are now famous (and more not) – a whoʼs who of sculptors, painters, musicians, performers, poets, writers, and comedians, you name it – living, struggling, drinking, laughing, – somehow managing to survive, with stiff upper lips and on shoe-string budgets – in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. Émile Goudeau, a recognized poet, is best known today as the founder the Hydropaths Club, a wildly-successful literary club in Paris from 1878-1880, and subsequently as the influential editor-in-chief of the Chat Noir journal, eponymous mouthpiece and vehicle for the world-famous cabaret, which he helped found with Rodolphe Salis. Rodolphe Salis, the “gentleman cabaret owner,” often gets credit for the idea of the Chat Noir journal and cabaret – but after one reads this story, one will quickly realize that the true genius behind both of them is probably... Émile Goudeau, poet, editor, journalist, novelist, and finally... shepherd, in Asnières. On the cover is a scene from Parce Domine, 1884, by Adolphe Willette, the full version of which was painted on the walls of the original Chat Noir cabaret.

Ten Years a Bohemian: An Artist's Life in Paris during the Belle Epoque

Goudeau, Émile

The Soul of Napoleon (Lʼâme de Napoléon, originally), by Léon Bloy, is a poem in prose on the great generalʼs achievements and greatness, but it is more than that, it is a re-assessment of his significance from a Catholic and a Catholic eschatological point of view, as perhaps no other writer than Léon Bloy could have put down on paper. Written in 1912, it is also, like many of Léon Bloyʼs writings, prophetic in an eerie way of near-term events to come, a prefiguration of both WWI and beyond. “The history of Napoleon is quite certainly the most unknown of all histories. Books that claim to recount it are innumerable, and there is no end to documents of every sort. In reality, Napoleon is perhaps less known to us than Alexander and Sennacherib. The more one studies, the more one discovers that he is the man whom nothing resembles and thatʼs all there is. Itʼs the unfathomable gulf. One knows the dates, one knows the deeds, victories or disasters, one knows, a bit or quite a bit, of the famous negotiations that are, today, merely dust. His name alone remains, his prodigious Name, and when it is pronounced by the poorest of all children, it is enough to make a great man blush, no matter whom. Napoleon is the Face of God in darkness.” “There is, in the humblest churches of France, a poor lamp lit night and day, before the Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The thought crossed my mind, absurd perhaps, that that lamp is something like Napoleonʼs confidence.”

The Soul of Napoleon

Blood of the Poor (originally Le Sang du pauvre), by Catholic writer Léon Bloy, is perhaps the hardest to read of Léon Bloy?s writings, as it goes straight to the heart of the matter of what is wrong in the world. It is hard to read, emotively, because it gives the honest reader no room for cover, no space for shelter, no shadow of a tree to hide behind. With avarice as its subject, it is a dark poem in prose, a sermon in the style of Savonarola, with the biting satire of a Jonathan Swift."The Blood and the Flesh of the Poor are the only aliments that can nourish, the substance of the rich being a poison and a putrefaction. It is therefore a necessity of hygiene that the poor be devoured by the rich who find that very good, and who ask for it again. Rich children are fortified by the juice of the poors? flesh, and the rich man?s cuisine is endowed with concentrate of the poor.""You believe yourselves to be innocent because you have not slit somebody?s throat, as yet, I want to believe; because you have not forced open somebody?s door nor scaled his wall in order to despoil him of his possessions; because finally you have not transgressed human laws too visibly. You are so gross, so carnal, for you do not conceive of a crime that cannot be seen. But I say to you, my very dear brother, that you are a plant, and that that assassin is your flower.""It is true that there are refuges: drunkenness, prostitution of the body, suicide, or madness. Why would the dance not continue?"

Blood of the Poor

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Theresa the Philosopher, by the marquis dʼArgens (purportedly), was published in 1748, over 270 years ago – before the modern era, before the Napoleonic phenomenon, before the Directorate, before the French Revolution. It is a happy tale with a happy ending, with not a little bit of hanky-panky slapped in between. Compared to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, which was the first modern (albeit English) novel, whose characters are more than two-dimensional and whose story depends more on what happens inside the mind of the characters than, say, where a boat might go (like Robinson Crusoe for example) – Theresa the Philosopher is scandalous. Compared to the marquis de Sade’s Justine, which was published in 1791, it may seem tame. According to the marquis de Sade, Theresa the Philosopher “achieved happy results from the combining of lust and impiety... [it] gave us an idea of what an immoral book could be.”The Carmelite Extern Nun, written by Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon, and published one year earlier, in 1747, is another whopper. It is the “Amorous True Story [of Saint Nitouche], the Carmelite Extern Nun, Written by Herself, and Addressed to her Mother Superior.” It is anticlericalism, antiestablishmentarianism, and eroticism – the three main pillars or themes, sometimes even agendas, of the 18th century libertine novel – all in one short, but fast-paced, scandalous sack.

Theresa the Philosopher & The Carmelite Extern Nun: Two Libertine Novels from 18th-Century France

De Querlon, Anne-Gabriel Meusnier

d'Argens, Marquis

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