French Decadent Tales

`I sing of knights and ladies, of love and arms, of courtly chivalry, of courageous deeds.' So begins Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), the culmination of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France. It is a brilliantly witty parody of the medieval romances, and a fitting monument to the court society of the Italian Renaissance which gave them birth. This unab...

The name of the Marquis de Sade is synonymous with the blackest corners of the human soul, a byword for all that is foulest in human conduct. In his bleak, claustrophobic universe, there is no God, no morality, no human affection, and no hope. Power is given to the strong, and the strong are murderers, torturers, and tyrants. No quarter is given; compassion is the virtue of the weak. Yet Sade w...

Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was v...

The Victorian fin de siecle has many associations: the era of Decadence, The Yellow Book, the New Woman, the scandalous Oscar Wilde, the Empire on which the sun never set. This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked and evil curses, foul murder, doomed inheritance and sexual menace played on the stretched nerve...

'Dangerous as lucifer matches.' That was how Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte Bronte's husband for the last nine months of her life, described her letters. Full of acute observations, pithy character sketches, and passionate convictions, the letters are our most direct source of information about the lives of the Brontes and our closest approach to the author of Jane Eyre. In them Char...

Hoffmann is among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics. This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, puts in the foreground those tales in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. The humour of these tales is a result of the incongruity of supernatural beings at large in an ostentatiously everyday world. They include The Golden Pot, re...

`Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: - to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, "a Vampyre, a Vampyre!"' John Polidori's classic tale of the vampyre was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Set in Italy, Greece, and London, Polidori�...

'For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination' Thomas De Quincey's three essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' centre on the notorious career of the murderer John Williams, who in 1811 brutally k...

'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe' E. M. Forster E. M. Forster's description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultur...

Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland cou...