Paul Alexis – Three Novellas (1880)

As mentioned in a prior post, I’d given myself an assignment to read J.-K. Huysmans’ novels in the order in which they were written. My objective was to track his progression from a Naturalist writer in Emile Zola’s orbit to the author who wrote À rebours, the novel some refer to as “the Decadent bible”. 

I skipped Huysmans’ first effort, Le drageoir aux épices (1874) and started with his first two novels: Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) and The Vatard Sisters (1879). After that was "Sac au dos", his contribution to Evenings at Médan, an 1880 anthology of French Naturalism comprised of stories by six different authors. As a mini-survey of French Naturalism, I gave myself a sub-assignment to read all six stories in Evenings at Médan. 

Unfortunately, there’s no English version of the anthology. I was able to read the stories by Zola (“The Attack on the Mill”) and Guy de Maupassant (“Boule de Suif”) via English language anthologies of each authors’ short stories. However, I could not find translations of “Bloodshed” by Henri Ceard, “The Affair of the Great 7” by Leon Hennique, or “After the Battle” by Paul Alexis. In fact, very little from these three authors appears to be available in English.

There are translations of three novellas by Paul Alexis, all written within a year of Evenings at Médan. They are: The Misfortune of Monsieur Fraque and A Platonic Love, (both published by Sunny Lou), and The End of Lucie Pellegrin (Snuggly). After reading them, it seems Alexis’ métier – at least at this stage of his oeuvre – was describing the futility and anonymous irrelevance of people’s lives.

In The Misfortune of Monsieur Fraque, Alexis sets out his agenda in Chapter One. Fraque leaves his country town for college in Paris only to find himself “lost in that busy and indifferent crowd of people, where nobody paid attention to him”. His youthful liberalism and debauchery are so unremarkable that “the liquidation of his follies of youth diminished consequently very little of his capital”. 

“Too proud to resign himself to secondary roles in so vast a theatre”, Fraque returns home “where he would easily play the first.” Once there he stumbles into marriage with Zoé, who is neither accomplished, interesting, or pretty. She neither loves nor respects Fraque and is determined to make him miserable. Her bitterness culminates – as an old woman – in an infatuation with a young abbé. When they finally are alone, she only feels “foolish and empty” and leaves. The affair is unconsummated, and he seems to only have been interested in her money.

After Zoé dies, Fraque watches her burial from afar and feels “as though they had just thrown dirt, large shovelfuls of it, over fifty years of his life, which had disappeared into the bottom of a hole.” While Alexis states in his introduction that this is “merely the sketch of a novel”, it’s a marvelous Naturalist portrait of pointless suffering between an irrelevant man and woman. 

In A Platonic Love, Alexis approaches the same theme from a different angle: upper middle-class Monsieur Mure engineers the happiness of the woman he loves, Helen, by facilitating her marriage to a rich old bore. With increasing self-abnegation, Mure witnesses Helen’s assignation with a lover and her scandalous fall into poverty. Without Helen requesting his help, Mure returns her to her bourgeoise existence by salvaging her marriage. His feelings for Helen are never spoken.

Once more, Alexis clearly states his theme in the narrative. In Chapter 7, he writes: “Nothing lasts. Everything gets sorted out and levels out in the end. And no matter how much the shock of passions and catastrophes can damage, rend, and crack a life, little by little, a fine, impalpable powder falls on things, dulls the edges, mellows new situations, spreads out everywhere with the uniformity of a salutary patina.” In other words, nothing really matters.

Alexis’ story certainly illustrates this, and it goes further to even question motives. Helen ultimately emerges as shallow and flighty, rendering Mure and his fixation on her as rather ridiculous. There are also several hints that Helen is aware of his feelings and uses them to manipulate him. At the end of the novella, Helen’s very happiness – so painstakingly arranged by Mure – doesn’t even appear genuine, for Mure himself observes early on that Helen is only concerned with “the external trappings of happiness”.

On a side note: The translation of the novella’s title as A Platonic Love may be literally correct, but I’m not sure it captures the layered meaning Alexis may have intended with Un amour platonique. In French literature of this period, amour can connote a passionate or tragic affair rather than true love. This connotation of amour – perhaps not easily translated into English - creates a very different meaning in the title much more in keeping with my assessment of Alexis’ purpose. Perhaps the literal translation explains why Robinson, in his strange introduction, suggests Mure is a laudable character.

The third novella – The End of Lucie Pellegrin – speaks to the same theme but via much different characters and setting. Whereas the other works dealt with upper middle-class characters situated in the country, the main characters in The End of Lucie Pellegrin are prostitutes in Paris. A minor character is probably a lesbian, including a reference to the Rat-Mort, a Parisian club notorious for its lesbian clientele.

The End of Lucie Pellegrin is the shortest and least complex of the three works. It consists of a conversation about Lucie among the four prostitutes while they kill time in a café. Once they visit her, Lucie quickly meets her unceremonious – and ignominious – ‘end’. This build-up and anticlimax certainly align with the anonymous futility underlining Alexis’ characters. In fact, the final image in the story is Lucie dead on the floor while her dog has given birth. Life literally marches on. 

I’m grateful to Richard Robinson for his translations. I haven’t read the original French, so I can’t speak to their accuracy or quality. However, they read well and have minimal or no typos. On the downside, his introductions are very brief, not especially insightful, and veer into oddly petulant social commentary for no apparent reason. This may be why the Snuggly edition does not include an introduction from Robinson at all.

In summation, reading Paul Alexis was enjoyable and helpful in expanding my exposure to French naturalist writers.