The Bacchantes. Leon Daudet
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double import of that painting it in mind. Daudet’s version of Dionysian impetus is not identifical to Nietzsche, and is calculatedly confused with other ideas, but he is clearly attempting to follow a similar trajectory, albeit in the context of a novel aimed at general readers rather than a critical and philosophical essay.
Needless to say, this is an eccentric quest, and there is no resn to be surprised by the fact that Les Bacchantes is a unique book, but it is interesting for that reason. It might be reckoned an awkwardly-flawed book, just as Léon Daudet might be reckoned an awkwardly-flawed man, but it is an intriguing book that is abundantly supplied witth a certain wry eloquence and keen vision, just as Léon Daudet was in the various facets of his career. It is, at any rate, well worth reading for any connoisseur of the unusual.
* * * *
This translation is taken from a copy of the 1931 Flammarion edition. I have retained the author’s eccedntric spelling of “Dyonisos” and a few other eccentricities of usage and improvisation. I have attempted to provide adequate explanatory footnotes for most of the esoteric motifs that he introduces into the story without any explanation of his own but I have not repeated information already given in the introduction when reference is made to Zagreus, Kore etc.
1. I hope to translate most, if not all, of this other material in the future.
THE BACCHANTES
TO ARTHÈME FAYARD2
To his admirable spirit of enterprise
and assemblage,
who has done so much for French letters,
on the golden anniversary of our friendship, begun in 1881 at Louis-le-Grand,
and continued, without interruption, until today.
His old comrade,
LÉON DAUDET
August 1931
2. Arthème Fayard (1866-1936) followed his father into the publishing busineesss, taking over the family firm in 1894. He produced an edition of the collected works of Alphonse Daudet, and Léon Daudet’s Les Morticoles, but was best known as a canny promoter of popular fiction, including the highly successful Fantômas series.
CHAPTER ONE
A CRUEL ACCIDENT
In the laboratory of his residence in Avenillon, known as the Villa Dyonisos, in the heart of the Blésois Beauce, half way between Blois and Châteaudun, the great physicist Romain Ségétan, the French Edison—and more—was bringing to completion, by means of calculations and experiments, his supreme discovery: the waves of time.
A little over fifty, widowed ten months earlier, he had abundant smooth hair, half gray and half chestnut, a clean-shaven Romanesque face with chiseled features, dark blue eyes, both meditative and ardent, and a neatly-arched mouth with thin lips. A member of the Academy of Sciences, a Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur, with a host of foreign decorations, a doctor of medicine and science, he was independent, very rich and generous. He was devoid of arrogance but thought very little of humans in general and the poor dignities they afforded him. His love of knowledge did not entirely mask his sensual love of women, which enveloped him with an atmosphere of desire.
A paunch, due to a strong appetite and a sedentary existence, had not yet rendered him heavy. He loved good food, books, the body of Venus and the stars. He understood faith without feeling it, and matter without submitting to it. A rare energy, interrupted by abrupt weaknesses, formed the aggregation of his multiple and confused heredity, half-peasant and half-bourgeois. He only kept company with superior people. All women interested him, especially if they were unhappy, oppressed and beautiful. The distant amity of his peers helped, he was sure, to make his life worthwhile. His family was extinct, save for distant, stupid relatives of whom he was glad to have lost sight.
The laboratory occupied a wing of the Villa Dyonisos. It contained a special apparatus designed for the production, emission and reception of rays of all categories, electromagnetic and photographic apparatus, sky-maps, tables of measures and large-scale diagrams. The majority of the instruments had either been devised or improved by the Master, who invented as one breathes, with an extraordinary facility. It happened in the following manner: at night, before going to sleep, at about ten o’clock, for half an hour and without thinking about anything else, he evoked the equally-admirable face and body of his dead wife, his Lili. Then he allowed darkness and dreams to come. The next day, when he awoke, a bold and naked hypothesis or the idea of some fertile experiment had germinated in his mind, springing up like mushroom. The critical and scientific domains communicated in him without intermediaries. He did not know whether that interdependence was rare or frequent; he had been subject to it for several months with a particular intensity.
He had met Lili—Félicité Duvoir—at the age of thirty-five, on a ship that traveled regularly between Buenos Aires and Bordeaux. She was then twenty-one. She was blonde, youthful and as full of life as a Rubens. Forcibly recruited in Paris by pimps, professionals in the white slave trade, she had been their prisoner but had been saved by agents of the Sûreté Générale, who had discreetly thrown the pimps overboard by night during the journey—with no witnesses, of course.
Immediately, Ségétan fell madly in love with the pretty girl, breathlessly infatuated, and the narrow pleasures of the cabin, even though it was first-class and luxurious, only sharpened his desire. It was then that he conceived the notion of the waves of time and meditated the means of capturing them.
Lili had a nature no less strange than his own. She, who had already known so many men, adored him exclusively; she did not leave his side by night or by day, following him with her gaze while he worked, educating herself assiduously—in the beginning, she barely knew how to read and write, but had made extraordinary progresss at the end of a year. He hired teachers of orthography and syntax for her, one of history and geography, one of music and one of drawing. She was thus his mistress, his pupil and his child at the same time.
To avoid slanderous gossip, as soon as they were duly married, they retired to the country and lived, in Avenillon, an existence of work and affection. That had only come to an end with Lili’s death, which occurred in the wake of a double pneumonia. Ségétan’s grief was immense but brief, for he had had the refuge of the astonishing discovery that was about to turn the world upside-down, and of which every magical quality echoed the beauty and charm of the departed. Absent, she was no less influential on the reconstructive imagination of her constantly-haunted widower.
The latter was aided in his endeavor by two other scientists of vast scope: his neighbors, who had been attracted by his genius. One of them, Félix Dévonet, occupied himself simultaneously with physics, dermatology and entomology, and was trying to establish communication between humans and insects—a supposedly insoluble problem. The other, his former fellow student Doctor Bénalep, known as “M’sieu Bienallé,”3 was seeking new remedies by associating the roots of different plants in the ground, which he then submitted to the action of rays.
The three men had in common the investigative spirit that, sometimes by the mathematical and quantitative route and sometimes by the biological and qualitative route, knocks on the door of the Unknown, opens it by a crack, and then, after a few moments, finds it slammed in its face. Married to a young and ravishing woman, as dark as her name of Mélanie, Dévonet was almost as sensitive as Ségétan to the corporeal beauty of the exquisite sex. As for Bénalep, like many Semites, he had periods of desire, which he satisfied rather poorly, and periods of chastity, which he devoted to botanical research and works of erudition.
For twenty leagues around, from Salbris to Tours, from Sully-sur-Loire to Châteaudun and from Vendôme and Blois to Chartres, there was little talk of anything but the “three sorcerers” of Avenillon, who attracted to the region visitors from England, America,