Stories to Read by Candlelight

By Jean Lorrain and Erin-Claire Barrow

Stories to Read by Candlelight contains eight stories first published in the 1890s by the French author, Jean Lorrain, translated here into English by Patricia Worth. Jean draws the reader back in time to his provincial childhood when his grandmother’s seamstress would tell him stories that gave him goose bumps and made him jump under the covers. Here he recounts these same stories, or invents new half-lived half-dreamed stories born of objects found in an attic or an old house. The characters have a mythical quality, whether they be fantastical beings who long to be real, like the embroidered Princess Mandosiane, or real people like Madame Gorgibus, accused of being a wicked fairy. The stories fall between legends and fairy tales, a genre favoured by a few Decadent authors protesting against realism and regretting technological progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odyssey Books
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925652598

Jean Lorrain

Jean Lorrain, Fécamp, 9 août 1855 - Paris, 30 juin 1906 De son vrai nom Paul Alexandre Martin Duval, ce fils de bonne bourgeoisie provinciale sortit vite du rang. Ayant jeté ses études aux orties, il se lança dans la poésie, la littérature et le journalisme. Mais surtout il sut jouer de son goût de la provocation pour se composer un personnage outrancier haut en couleurs, bagarreur, scandaleux, et volontiers vulgaire. Son attrait morbide pour les paradis artificiels, les ambiguïtés de sa sexualité, joints à la qualité indéniable de ses oeuvres, composent un ensemble hétéroclite qui exclut d'emblée l'indifférence. Usé par ses extravagances, il finit par mourir à 50 ans, après plusieurs cures de désintoxication peu concluantes.

Book preview

Published by Ensorcellia, an imprint of Odyssey Books, in 2019

Copyright © Patricia Worth 2019

Illustrations Copyright © Erin-Claire Barrow 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

www.odysseybooks.com.au

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN: 978-1-925652-58-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-925652-59-8 (ebook)

Cover design: Simon Critchell

The following stories from this collection have previously been published:

‘Madame Gorgibus’: The Brooklyn Rail ‘inTranslation’, February 2015

‘Princess Mandosiane’: Eleven Eleven, Issue 19

‘Queen Maritorne’: Eleven Eleven, Issue 19

‘Gudule the Maid’: Danse Macabre, 99

‘Useless Virtue’: Sun Star Review, Vol 1, Issue 2

Introduction

About forty years ago in the little old towns of the bourgeoisie and the judges, in the homes of the old families, one could meet neat and discreet little people treated less as hirelings than as friends. They did not live in the attic but spent at least three or four days a week relegated to the family’s upstairs linen room, laboriously occupied, the darling creatures, in works of sewing and mending for the household.

These young seamstresses, these wenches with a needle, cousettes as they were rudely and impertinently named in the eighteenth century to which they seemed to belong, were the joy of every provincial childhood, today mature and in their forties.

They were spinsters, somewhat sanctimonious, finicky and gossipy, yet our parents would not have suffered them being ridiculed in church. They were trusted to take children to their grandparents’ homes, where in a large room cluttered with armoires these sweet old girls would bring their strangely thoughtless heads together and tell gripping stories.

They had no end of odd habits: mass at six in the morning that they wouldn’t miss for anything in the world; the pot of embers dying beneath ashes that they lugged around in all weathers—rain, snow, and wind squalls—shielding it under a corner of their mantle; the most stubborn refusal to take a place at a table where cutlery was crossed; curious devotions and little faïence saints that they always kept buried at the bottom of some huge pocket under their skirts; a priceless way of crossing themselves at any swearword; and hair-splitting, and fussmaking, and curtseying!

I knew one of these poor, pitiable girls. Her name was Norine; she came to my grandmother’s during the day and was responsible for all the mending work in the house. She had once been pretty and had a suitor with honourable intentions, but Norine never wanted to leave her old, infirm parents. One fine morning the lover grew tired of waiting, and Norine grew old alone in her little worker’s cottage with the memory of her old parents who had died late in life, and perhaps with regret for the lover who had left. In my grandmother’s house Norine was greatly loved; she was an old maid with funny ways, though she was upright, honest, and would never lie. But I sense melancholy descending and filling me as I try to recall this colourless and frail little figure; all the ashes of the past are blanketing these stories in a premature snow, and I wanted them to be cheerful. I’ve drifted unwittingly into the inexpressible charm of this small autumnal town, this small fortified town like an etching from the last century, the kind of town with a belfry, trees in quincunx arrays and, in the market, tall houses with sculpted gables.

Brr! Brr! Brr!

‘But anyway,’ as Norine herself would say, ‘a pinch of tobacco and a demitasse of coffee, and with that we can thumb our nose at the devil.’

Here is the first of Norine’s stories, such as she would tell it in her rather peculiar language, when the