Fires Before Easter

For the second time in less than a year, a great work of culture, art, and history has burned. First it was the the National Museum of Brazil in September of last year. This time, of course, it was the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Things look better today than they did last night, but it's hard to see the fire at Notre-Dame as anything less than a disaster.

I wish to speak, and I might use any tenuous connection there might be between the cathedral and Weird Tales or weird fiction as a pretext, but the things I wish to say have little to do with the magazine or the genre. As it stands now, the fire is supposed to have been caused by an accident. Risking their lives, Parisian firefighters finally extinguished it several hours after it began. Other Parisians rescued relics and works of art from the interior as the fire raged, including the Crown of Thorns, saved by a heroic Catholic priest. (The Crown of Thorns, the flames, and the Cross--which at Notre-Dame survived--are among the elements of the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.) We can't take anything from these and the many millions of people of Paris and of France, and we can't exploit the incalculable loss experienced by them in this tragedy. But we also can't overlook the symbolism of the event, or a possible interpretation of it as something more than a mere fire in a centuries-old building. We are now in Holy Week and we will soon have the holiest day in the Christian calendar. It seems needless to point out that Western civilization in general and Europe in particular were built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation. The cathedral of Notre-Dame was constructed at the height of an age of faith, but in a later age of reason, after having been seized by the State, it was abused, plundered, and converted to the house of an atheistic cult. Soon returned to the Roman Catholic Church, the cathedral was again taken over by the State in 1905, and it is under the ownership of the State that Notre-Dame burned. For eight and a half centuries Notre-Dame stood, and now it burns.

I don't think it's any stretch to say that the current European State--and Western culture in general, at least among the élite--is secular, materialist, and anti-Christian, even radically and viciously anti-Christian. I don't think anyone in the French State has anything to gain and much to lose in the burning of a cathedral. Notre-Dame and places like it have become secular symbols of the cities or countries in which they are located. Even adherents to anti-Christian and post-Christian religions have their uses for things made by the Church and its members. The Hagia Sophia comes to mind as an example. It's curious to me, though, that the current president of France should ask for help from other nations to rebuild Notre-Dame. I guess his France is fiercely independent except when it's not. More to the point, people of faith built the cathedral to begin with. Are there not enough now in France to rebuild it? I'm certain there are in fact. Despite the best efforts of the State in that nation and elsewhere, Christianity lives and thrives, as do faith, hope, love, and charity in the hearts of Christians everywhere. And who has stepped forward to offer funds for the rebuilding? None other than the wealthy of France, the same kind of people who are ceaselessly vilified by the leftist and socialist State and its true believers, the same who are looked at as an endless source for legalized plunder. As always, though, that same State and its adherents survive on other people's money, and as always they bite the hand that feeds them. In any case, I believe that Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. I also believe that some people will see this as a symbolic event--"a wakeup call" as people say after there has been a terrorist attack. Some will even see it as an intervention or as a kind of miracle, as an act of God, not in the mundane, actuarial sense, but in the real, literal sense. In 1944, Adolf Hitler demanded to know: Is Paris burning? The German commander there stayed his hand and did not set the city afire. Yesterday a symbol of the city, of France, of Christendom itself burned. Are we paying attention? And if so, how will we respond, not just to the fire in the cathedral but to the flames that threaten to burn down Western civilization? With post-Christian lassitude and ennui? Or with vigor and confidence charged by belief? In the choice between fire and ice, we seem to have chosen ice. We are in trouble, perhaps without even realizing how seriously we are in trouble. Is this then a fire that might thaw us, that might warm us, warn us, and wake us?

* * *

From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, selected titles containing the phrase "Notre Dame":

• "The Fools' Pope," an excerpt from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (1831) in The Monster Book of Monsters, Michael O'Shaughnessy, ed. (1988)
• "Notre Dame des Eaux" by Ralph Adams Cram in Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories (1895)   
• "The Juggler of Notre Dame" by Anatole France in Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket (1896) 
• "The Specter of Notre Dame" by Lloyd Owen in Ghost Stories (May 1931)

I have written before about Weird Tales from France, but neither Victor Hugo (1802-1885) nor Anatole France (1844-1924) had bylines in "The Unique Magazine," even if Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame is recognizably a Gothic work (and his title character was an Aurora monster model of the 1960s). Today is Anatole France's birthday by the way, so Happy Birthday, Anatole!

Notre-Dame converted into an airbus station, from Le Vingtième Siècle (1883) by the French artist and writer Albert Robida (1848-1926), reproduced in Science Fiction: An Illustrated History by Sam J. Lundwall (1977). As I have written before, the artist is a canary in the coal mine of culture and history. In this case, the artist foresaw that a cathedral might one day be used for worldly purposes. At least these people are having fun: perhaps Robida and visionaries like him could not have equally foreseen the funlessness of our world today. (We may be hedonistic but there doesn't seem to be much fun and certainly no love or warmth in any of it. In America at least, that funlessness seems to come from a certain Protestant, more specifically Puritan, worldview that--even if they have thrown off Christianity as the most hateful of things--infects progressives like a disease. The creation of Utopia-on-Earth is, after all, a deadly serious business, partly because it must be done NOW, for there is no after.) Anyway, all of this makes me think of the opening sequence in La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a statue of Christ, dangling from a helicopter, shows religion in our age to be merely a worldly spectacle to distract and momentarily entertain bored and jaded people.

The box lid for the 1960s Aurora monster model of Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1923), the screenplay for which was cowritten by Perley Poore Sheehan (1875-1943), who was, as it turns out, a teller of weird tales.

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold S. Farnese (1890 or 1891-1945)-Part Five

Farnese and the Living Lovecraft

The first that I ever read of Harold S. Farnese was in L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). (I have the Ballantine paperback edition of 1976, which lacks an index.) Here is part of what de Camp had to say about him:

Harold S. Farnese, dean of the Los Angeles Institute of Musical Art [sic], wrote to Lovecraft proposing a joint project: a Cthulhuvian operetta in one act, called Fen River and laid on the planet Yuggoth. As a starter, Farnese had already set two of Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets, Mirage and The Elder Pharos, to music. (p. 387)

Remember that in a letter to Weird Tales, published in August 1931, Farnese had praised Lovecraft's poems as "very fine," writing that they played "a good second to the author's inimitable stories." In the months before Farnese sent off his letter to Weird Tales, the magazine had published several of Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth cycle, including "Nyarlathotep" and "Azathoth" in January 1931, "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos" in February/March, and "Alienation" in April/May. They would be the last of Lovecraft's poems published in Weird Tales in his lifetime.

De Camp didn't give a date for the letter Farnese sent to Lovecraft in which he proposed this joint project. I suspect that it was in 1932, as there are at least two letters extant from Lovecraft to Farnese, dated September 22, 1932, and October 12, 1932. I presume these to be answers to letters written by Farnese. De Camp wrote that, after Lovecraft demurred, "Farnese kept urging," suggesting that there was further correspondence between the two. A source on the Internet says that Farnese wrote several letters to Lovecraft, beginning July 11, 1932, and ending January 9, 1933. That fits with my supposition. It also fits with the timeline of Farnese's summer of 1932 (see the bullet points below).

One of L. Sprague de Camp's themes in his biography of Lovecraft is the author's self-defeating (and ultimately self-destructive) ways. There are those who have their differences with de Camp, but in this at least, I think he was right: Lovecraft, almost certainly because of his upbringing (and especially because of his father's abandonment of him and his mother's unstable emotional state, which resulted in a kind of emotional abuse of her son), too often defeated himself, sabotaged his own efforts, and in the end more or less destroyed himself by long habits of malnourishment, undernourishment, and perhaps even self-starvation. In any event, Lovecraft, offering various excuses, backed away from a collaboration with Harold Farnese, and so a wonderful opportunity (and to us a fascinating possibility) was missed. None of that changes the fact that if Farnese did indeed set "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos" to music, then these were very likely the first adaptations of Lovecraft's work to a form other than poetry or prose.

Harold Farnese had been interested in weird fiction since at least 1925 when he wrote his first published letter to Weird Tales. There are some other interesting tidbits from his career, though, and I wonder about a couple of them: could Farnese actually have performed, sometime in 1932, his music based on Lovecraft's poems?

• On September 25, 1927, the Los Angeles Times published a classified advertisement under the heading "Church Notices--Liberal and Orthodox" that reads in part: "Ancient Spiritual Church [. . .] Mons. Harold Farnese M.A.B.B. of Dyon Un. France will speak on 'What Is Colour?' Piano & vocal solos." (p. 69) (1) That to me suggests that Farnese, like so many other figures in weird fiction, was interested in the occult and alternative spiritual and religious practices. Later correspondence suggests that he was interested at least in black magic.

• In January 1932, the Los Angeles Times mentioned a composition by Farnese as among those that were recently attracting attention in musical circles. The title of Farnese's composition, a piece for piano, was "Dance of the Moon Dwellers." (2, 3)

• In the latter part of July 1932, Farnese left on a trip with other instructors from the Institute of Musical Education. They traveled to Oakland, Portland, and Seattle to conduct normal classes in those cities and returned to Los Angeles in early September. If Farnese and Lovecraft carried on their correspondence from July 11, 1932, to early 1933 (see above), did Farnese then complete his settings for Lovecraft's poems prior to leaving on his trip? It would seem so.

• On the evening of November 21, 1932, violinist Jascha Gegna, recently arrived on the faculty at the institute, played a concert there. Farnese played piano. Included in the program were pieces by Senaillé and Corelli, as well as "two numbers by Harold Farnese" [emphasis added]. Could these have been his settings for "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos"? (4)

• About a week later, Gegna and Farnese performed once again at the institute. Senaillé was once again on the program, as were "two numbers of oriental atmosphere by Harold Farnese" [emphasis added]. Again, were these Farnese's adaptations of Lovecraft? (5)

The chance for an operetta based on Lovecraft's poetry, in which Lovecraft would write the libretto and Farnese the music, came and went in 1932-1933. Then, four years later, it disappeared forever, for on March 15, 1937, Lovecraft died in Providence, the city of his birth.  

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Coincidentally, "The Colour Out of Space"--same spelling--by H.P. Lovecraft was published in Amazing Stories, also in September 1927.

(2) "Southland Composers Versatile in Writings" by Helen Scott, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 3, 1932, p. 44.

(3) The film White Zombie was released on July 28, 1932. Guy Bevier Williams (1873-1955), musical director of the Institute of Musical Education, was the uncredited composer of the chant that plays over the main title sequence of the film. Presumably, Williams worked on that composition in late 1931 or early 1932, perhaps at the same time that Farnese was composing his two settings of Lovecraft's poems.

(4) [Item], Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 1932, p. 41.

(5) [Item], Los Angeles Times, Dec. 4, 1932, p. 48.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold S. Farnese (1890 or 1891-1945)-Part One

Aka Harold Sulzire (or Sulzer) Farnese, Harold Solcetto Farnese, H.S. Farnese
Bank Clerk, Bookkeeper, Musician, Composer, Conductor, Educator
Born March 11, 1890 (or 1891), Monaco
Died October 29, 1945, Los Angeles City or County, California

Origins

Harold S. Farnese didn't write any stories, poems, or articles for Weird Tales, nor was he a cover artist or illustrator. His eight letters published in "The Eyrie," the letters column of Weird Tales, failed to land him in the top twenty contributors in that category. You might say that he was a pretty minor figure in the history of the magazine and its contributors. Except for that part where he was so central to a certain understanding of what we call the Cthulhu Mythos. Beyond that, Farnese may have been the first person to adapt a work by H.P. Lovecraft to a form other than verse or prose.

Harold S. Farnese was born on March 11, 1890 (or 1891), in Monaco. His father, named James (or equivalent), was Italian. His mother was French. (Farnese's mother tongue was also French.) When I'm working on genealogical or biographical research, I tend to put more weight on earlier rather than later sources. I also like information written down by or directly provided by the person in question. That's why I have 1890 as Farnese's probable birth year and Sulzire as a probable middle name, for both are from Farnese's draft card from 1917. (1)

According to a later newspaper source, Farnese was a graduate of the Paris Conservatory of Music. Another newspaper source gives a fuller account of his education:

Harold Farnese, dean of the institute, studied piano under Martial Lecompte and Sapellnikoff, theory and composition under Racky, a pupil of Saint-Saens [sic], and graduated from the Dijon Conservatory. (2, 3)

The institute mentioned here was the Institute of Musical Education, established in Los Angeles in 1915. More on that in part two of this series.

In the U.S. census of 1920, Farnese gave information that he had immigrated to the United States in 1914 but that he was not yet a citizen. (4) I found another record for a border crossing he made in January 1916 from Canada to the United States in which he gave his occupation as bank clerk; his place of national origin ("Nationality") as Germany; his father's name as James; his father's address as Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and his last permanent residence as Montreal, Canada. Farnese's stated final destination was Los Angeles, California, and that's where he went after all. (5)

When he filled out his draft card in 1917, Farnese was still an alien (i.e., not yet a citizen), living at 2195 West 27th Street in Los Angeles, and working as a bank clerk at Hellman Bank. That name is new to me but is no doubt familiar to those who know the history of Los Angeles, as the Hellmans--two German-born brothers--helped to establish many of that city's institutions. Presumably, Farnese's employer was connected in one way or another to these men. It's worth noting here that Farnese seems to have worked in banks and with musicians and composers who had foreign ties. He may never have really cut his own ties to Europe.

In 1919-1921, Farnese lived in San Francisco at 610 Geary Street, site of a hotel, and worked as a bookkeeper and bank clerk. By 1922, he was with the Bank of Italy in San Francisco. Farnese turned thirty-two that year. Sometime during the decade that followed, his life seems to have taken a turn. Unbeknownst to himself and everybody else in the world besides Jacob Clark Henneberger, Farnese also arrived that year at the eve of Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) I haven't seen Farnese's surname as anything but Farnese, but there are indications that Sulzire and Solcetto are also surnames. Until we know something more, I'll assume that Sulzire and Solcetto were surnames in Farnese's family. If I figure this right, Sulzire is a Corsican name, while Solcetto is Italian. Farnese is also an Italian name and a pretty prominent one at that. All of this would match well with Farnese's mother as having been French and his father as having been Italian. Incidentally, Farnese used the middle name Sulzire in his World War I draft card and Solcetto in his World War II draft card.

(2) "Faculty Body at Music Institute Has Top Rating," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 1936, p. 56.

(3) I don't know who Martial Lecompte or Racky were, but I presume that "Sapellnikoff" was the Russian pianist Wassily Sapellnikoff (1867-1941).
(4) In the census of 1920, there is a column for citizenship with choices of either "Naturalized or alien." The abbreviation for Harold Farnese was "Pa," denoting "Papers," i.e., Farnese had "take[n] out papers of declaration of intention to become a citizen." 
(5) About half of the information in this record is unclear; there seems to be a problem with the way the original pages were scanned or photographed and then fitted together again in a digital format.

Revised September 18, 2018. Be aware that previous versions of this article contained errors.
Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

F.B. Ghensi (1865-1943)

Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi
Aka Norbert Lorédan
Government Worker, Diplomat, Theatre Director, Librettist, Lyricist, Journalist, Editor, Publisher, Author 
Born November 21, 1865, Toulouse, France
Died January 30, 1943, Paris, France

In its May issue of 1940, the month in which the Sitzkrieg ended and the Nazis invaded France, Weird Tales printed a story it called "The Red Gibbet" by an author it called F.B. Ghensi. Like the Sitzkrieg, the title and the author's name were phony. His identity has been a minor mystery since then. The Internet allows a solution to the mystery.

Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi was born on November 21, 1865, in Toulouse, France. He studied in Castres and in Toulouse. In 1887-1889, he worked on the revue Le Décadent littéraire et artistique, where he wrote under the pseudonym Norbert Lorédan, but his literary career stalled and he went into politics.

Gheusi was well connected. Among his friends, associates, and supporters were scholar François de Vesian, politician Jean Jaurès, poet and essayist Laurent Tailhade, musician Georges Pierfitte, author Émile Zola, and poet Catulle Mendès. In 1889, Gheusi joined the political campaign of Jaurès in Castres. For several years after that, he held government posts, including in Rheims. In 1894, Gheusi relocated to Paris. In that same year, he married Adrienne Willems, niece of the painter Florent Willems. In 1897, Gheusi made an inspection tour of the Christian schools in Palestine. In 1906, he held a post at le Ministère des Colonies. And in 1911, he served as a diplomat in working to restore relations between France and Venezuela.

From 1888 to 1931, Gheusi wrote works for the stage, including lyrics, libretti, dramas, and comedies. He also authored histories and other works of non-fiction. His first novel was Gaucher Myrian, vie aventureuse d'un escholier féodal. Salamanque, Toulouse et Paris au XIIIe siècle, written with Paul Lavigne and published in 1893. Eleven more novels followed, the last of which, La Fille de Monte-Cristo, was published posthumously in 1948. I have not read any of his books and know nothing about them except for their titles. At least two have titles suggesting genre fiction, however, Le Serpent de mer, roman à clés (The Sea Serpent, a key novel, 1899) and Les Atlantes, aventures de temps légendaires (The Atlanteans, Adventures of Legendary Times, with Charles Lomon, 1905). As it turns out, Les Atlantes is a fantasy, and it has recently been reprinted. (See below.)

In later years, Gheusi held various positions of directorship or editorship, including of Le Gaulois du dimanche (1897), Nouvelle Revue (1899), le Paris Opéra (1906, 1914), l'Opéra Comique (to 1918), le Théâtre Lyrique du Vaudeville (1919–1920), Le Figaro (to 1932), and again l'Opéra-Comique (to 1936). During World War I, he was on the staff of General Joseph Gallieni. Gheusi also used his castle near Biarritz as a hospital for French troops.

The life of Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi was very nearly bracketed by German invasions of his native land. The Franco-Prussian War broke out when he was only four years old and ended not long after his fifth birthday with a humiliating defeat for the French. (His distant cousin, Léon Gambetta, was a leading figure during the war.) Sixty-nine years later, Germans reentered France and again dealt it a humiliating defeat, worse than in his childhood. He would not live to see his country liberated. Gheusi died on January 30, 1943, in Paris.

Three years before, perhaps unbeknownst to him, Weird Tales had reprinted the story "The Red Gibbet," translated by H. Twitchell. Twitchell translated numerous works from numerous languages into English. Unfortunately, Twitchell seems to have left his or her Christian name unrevealed except for its initial. The translator would appear a dead end. The phrase "the red gibbet," however, leads to a solution as to the identity of the author.

I have not read the the story "The Red Gibbet" in Weird Tales, but it seems certain to me that it is merely a retitled reprinting of "The Christmas Wolves" by P.B. Gheusi, originally published in French in Figaro Illustré in February 1897, then in an English translation by H. Twitchell in The International: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine in December 1897 (Vol. 3, No. 6, pp. 546-552). You can read it by clicking here. As its title implies, the story takes place at Christmastime. It involves not only wolves but also a hanged witch. Oddly for a Christmas story, it is a tale of revenge.

So why did Weird Tales change the name of the story and its author? I don't know. The misspelling of Gheusi's name may simply be a typographical error. I doubt it, though. I think it more likely that the magazine was trying to avoid problems with copyrights or other legalistic matters. In any case, the mystery of "The Red Gibbet" is solved, and we have another French author to add to the list of those who were in Weird Tales.

F.B. Ghensi's [sic] Story in Weird Tales

"The Red Gibbet" (May 1940; originally published in the United States as "The Christmas Wolves" by P.B. Gheusi in The International: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1897)

Further Reading

"Gheusi, Pierre-Barthélemy," in French, at the following URL:

http://tybalt.pagesperso-orange.fr/LesGendelettres/biographies/Gheusi.htm

"Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi" on the French version of Wikipedia:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Barthélemy_Gheusi

A portrait drawing of Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi. Note the reference to Gallieni, "the savior of Paris."

On October 31, 2015, Hollywood Comics/Blackcoat Press published The Last Days of Atlantis by Charles Lomon and Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi. The book was originally published in 1905 as Les Atlantes, aventures de temps légendaires. Artist Mike Hoffman created the cover illustration.

Merry Christmas from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Andre Linville (1888-1954)

Pseudonym of André Marie L'Heureux
Author, Journalist, Editor
Born October 20, 1888, Paris, France
Died October 10, 1954, Paris, France

I know very little of André Linville, and what I write here comes from several different sources, most of which are in French. I hope that what I write is correct. Maybe a French reader of this posting can offer something more.

André Linville was the nom de plume of André Marie L'Heureux, a French author, journalist, and editor born on October 20, 1888, in Paris, France. Under that nom de plume, L'Heureux coauthored a book called La Boxe, traité pratique et complet with Jacques Mortane (1883-1939), published in 1908.

In 1914, an utterly disastrous war came to Europe. Like his countrymen, Linville played his part, although I can't say for sure that he was a combatant. In 1916, however, he founded and became editor of a publication called in some sources Journal des Combattants et des mutilés, a title that I translate as Journal of Combatants and the Mutilated. It was later called Journal des Fighters. Linville directed the magazine until his death.

I believe Linville ran for political office after the war. He was instrumental in the enacting of a law from 1919 that led to a later Pension Code in France. He also created a patriotic association called Flamme de la Nation in 1934. It was probably not by coincidence that Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany in the previous year.

In 1935, Editions Chantel of Paris issued André Linville's collection La Dernière traversée et autres récits (The Last Crossing and Other Stories). There are seven stories in the collection. The title story is the same as one called "The Last Voyage," which was published in English in The Grand Magazine in August 1917. The last story in La Dernière traversée et autres récits is called "T.S.F." That story was translated and reprinted in Weird Tales as "Dead Man's Schooner" in December 1939, only three months after Europe had once again gone to war.

Following is a list of the contents of La Dernière traversée et autres récits, as well as further information on the book and its stories. This information is from a website called Le Visage Vert: Littérature fantastique, accessible by clicking here. I have slightly altered the formatting from the original. The translations in brackets are my own.

La Dernière traversée et autres récits (Paris: Editions Chantel, 1935 [juillet]), 253 p.

[Summary]:

"La Dernière traversée" ["The Last Crossing"]

"L'Oiseau sans ailes" ["The Bird without Wings"]
"Une minute de plus" ["One More Minute"]
"Le Raid de Jacques Fromental" ["The Raid of Jacques Fromental"]
"Le 7 mai 1915" ["May 7, 1915"--the date of the sinking of the Lusitania]
"Le Mystère du Philippe-Grandier" ["The Mystery of Philippe-Grandier"]
"T.S.F."

Deux présentations, 1 avec couv. ill., l'autre sans. EO: 50 ex. sur vélin pur fil des papéteries d'Arches ntés de 1 à 50 et 300 ex. sur Alfa Prioux ntés de 51 à 350.

[Stories]:

"La Dernière traversée"
— in Lecture pour Tous, 15 mars 1917, p. 826-837, ill. R. Wallace.
— in [Linville] La Dernière traversée et autres récits (Paris: Editions Chantel, 1935).

"L'Oiseau sans ailes"
— in Lecture pour Tous, août 1921, p. 1481-1488, ill. Lanos
— in [Linville] La Dernière traversée et autres récits (Paris: Editions Chantel, 1935).

"T.S.F."
— in [Linville] La Dernière traversée et autres récits (Paris: Editions Chantel, 1935), p. 241-253.
— in Weird Tales, décembre 1939, sous le titre «Dead Man's Schooner».

— in Jour de l'an chez les momies & autres contes surnaturels et de merveilleux scientifique (Élancourt: Le Visage Vert), mars 1987, p. 31-33. Présentation et bibliographie p. ii.

[End of summary.]

Lecture pour Tous was a French magazine in print from the late 1800s until 1940.

Updates:

Pierre-François Toulze has kindly provided André Linville's year of death, 1954. See his comment below. Thank you, M. Toulze. Update (Dec. 5, 2021): Randal A. Everts has provided the exact date, October 10, 1954, making Linville at his death sixty-five years old. Thank you, RAE.

André Linville's Story in Weird Tales

"Dead Man's Schooner" (Dec. 1939)

Further Reading

If you search the Internet, you're likely to find the same sources I have found. Even the French version of Wikipedia seems to be lacking in information on Linville. Here is a link to a death notice for André Linville from a French newspaper, Le lien, from November 1954:

https://argonnaute.parisnanterre.fr/medias/customer_3/periodique/Stalag/FP_RES_408b/PDF/BDIC_FPR_00408_1954_077.pdf

Thanks to RAE for finding this source.

A photograph of the author, editor, and journalist André Linville. The caption for the photo reads: "[Portrait de] M. [André] Linville [candidat aux élections législatives sur la liste Union des gauches et des anciens combattants de Seine et Oise]: [photographie de presse]/[Agence Rol]." Translation: "[Portrait of] Mr. [André] Linville [parliamentary candidate on the ticket of the Union of the Left and Veterans of the Seine and Oise]: [press photograph]/[Agence Rol]." I have modified the Google translation and hope I have done it correctly. Linville's membership in the Veterans of the Seine and Oise suggests that he was in fact a combatant during World War I, or at least that he had been in uniform.

Thanks to Le Visage Vert: Littérature fantastique for providing the information. Thanks also to Pierre-François Toulze and Randal A. Everts for further information.
Original text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Still More Weird Tales from France

Alphonse Louis Constant
Aka Eliphas Lévi Zahed, Eliphas Lévi
Author, Mystic, Magician
Born February 8, 1810, Paris, France
Died May 31, 1875, Paris, France

For Weird Tales
"Black Magic" (article, Sept. 1923)

Alphonse Louis Constant had been gone nearly half a century by the time Weird Tales printed his article "Black Magic" in the magazine's first year in publication (in Sept. 1923). Born on February 8, 1810, in Paris, Constant studied for the priesthood but left the seminary before being ordained. The reason? Cherchez la femme as the French say. Constant became a writer and associated himself with various names, including the socialist and feminist Flora Tristan (1803-1844), fellow mystic M. Ganneau (ca. 1805-1851), "messianic mathematician" Jozef Maria Hoëhne-Wronski (1778-1853), British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and French sculptress Marie-Noémi Cadiot (1832-1888), whom he married in 1846. (1) Constant was a mystic and a magician, evidently one of the most important names in that realm of endeavor. According to Wikipedia, he incorporated the Tarot into contemporary practice and was a great influence on other mystics and magicians of his time and after, including Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). (2) Constant was also the originator of a famous "Sabbatic Goat" image and of the idea that a pentagram pointing upwards represents good, while one pointing downwards (approximating the countenance of a goat) represents evil. He wrote under the pseudonyms Eliphas Lévi Zahed and Eliphas Lévi and died on May 31, 1875, in Paris.

You can read more about Constant on these websites:

• "Eliphas Levi" on Wikipedia
• "Alphonse Louis Constant" on The Invisible Basilica of Sabazius
• "Alphonse Louis Constant . . . " on a French website, probably the most complete of these sources and including photographs of Constant

Notes

(1) Flora Tristan, née Flore Celestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso, was the grandmother of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Simon Ganneau, referred to as M. Ganneau, was the inventor of the religion Evadaïsme, "a compound of all the dogmas, doctrines and philosophies that have divided mankind," of which he was "the Mapah," a title combining maman and papa and a reference to our "first parents," Eve and Adam, their names combined in the name of his religion. The quotes on him are from The Living Age, Volume 29, on the occasion of Ganneau's death. Like Flora Tristan, he was a progenitor of fame, for he was the father of the archaeologist and orientalist Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau (1846-1923).

(2) Crowley, born less than five months after Constant's death, considered himself a reincarnation of the great magician.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Né Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Author, Playwright, Editor/Publisher

Born November 7, 1838, Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, France

Died August 19, 1889, House of Brothers of St. Jean de Dieu, Rue Oudinot, Paris, France

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was not in fact published in Weird Tales but in an offspring of "The Unique Magazine," Robert W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror from the 1960s. Born on November 7, 1838, in the city of Saint-Brieuc, Villiers seems to have been a man ill-suited to life's demands. Unlucky in love, impoverished for most of his life, and not often successful as a writer, he nonetheless gave us two terms still in use today. One of them has become indispensable in science fiction and in fact.

Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, Villiers wrote tales of fantasy, mystery, horror, torture, and cruelty. (3) In his novel L'Ève future (a title translated by Wikipedia as Tomorrow's Eve, 1886), Villiers employed the term android (which had been in use since at least the 18th century) in its more modern sense, meaning a robot in human form. George Lucas and hundreds of other science fiction writers owe Villiers a debt for that.

Villiers is most well known for his collection of short stories from 1883, Contes Cruels. The conte cruel has become a subgenre or a type of fiction, a short story or tale (conte) in which characters are subjected to cruelty, torment, and torture, perhaps not because they deserve it but simply because--I suppose--life itself is full of cruel vicissitudes. I can imagine that Villiers sometimes felt himself to be such a character. Then again, essayist Arthur Symons remarked upon Villiers' "lack of sympathy," derived from his "disdain of ordinary human beings." (4)

I looked in several books on literature and fantastic fiction for a definition of the conte cruel and came up empty. Barbara, a contributor to Google Groups, admirably answers the question "What is the definition of conte cruel?" at this link. She attributes the origin of the term to Villiers' collection of the same name. She also mentions Villiers' story "The Torture by Hope," which by no coincidence appeared in Magazine of Horror #10 (Aug. 1965). Barbara also mentions Ambrose Bierce and W.C. Morrow as authors of contes cruels.

* * *

He hated every kind of mediocrity: therefore he chose to analyse [sic] exceptional souls, to construct exceptional stories, to invent splendid names, and to evoke singular landscapes. It was part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. (5)

And in him there was ambiguity, too. Though born into an ancient and very distinguished aristocratic family, Villiers was nearly always poor, and though a staunch Catholic, he was also a mystic. (6) Though well loved and admired, he was lonely all of his life. A great talker and great personality, he "sometimes talked them [his stories] instead of writing them, in his too royally spendthrift way." (7) He founded a short-lived revue and one winter burned bundles of issues to keep warm. Like Poe before him, Villiers died young, in his case of cancer. He married but once, on his deathbed, to an illiterate midwife who was devoted to him in every way. Like Constant, he left a son, Victor. The last of his line, Victor--an ironic name to be sure--died in 1901 at age twenty.

Shades of Lovecraft and so many others.

The digest-sized Magazine of Horror was not Weird Tales of course, but I'm not sure there was any closer imitator between the end of the original Weird Tales in 1954 and the short-lived revival of 1973-1974. The Magazine of Horror is, though, a subject for another time.

Further Reading

"CPR Remembers: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" by Garrick Davis on the website Contemporary Poetry Review, March 1, 2005, here.

"Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" in The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons (Dutton, 1958), pp. 21-32.

Notes

(3) Villiers is supposed to have been an admirer of Constant's Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1856). Villiers' other associations: He was friends with Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898); he asked Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) for his daughter's hand in marriage (and was rebuffed); and his hero was Richard Wagner (1813-1883), with whom he was visiting when war broke out between their two nations in 1870. By the way, when M. Ganneau died in 1851, Gautier took his only child, Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, who had just turned five years old, under his wing.

(4) From "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" in The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons (Dutton, 1958), p. 30.

(5) From Symons, p. 28.

(6) Another, Villiers, Philippe de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1464-1534), led the Knights of Rhodes in resisting the siege of Rhodes by 100,000 Turks in 1522. Forced to capitulate, he and his knights eventually ended up on the island of Malta, where he received a fiefdom from Emperor Charles V and established the Knights of Malta. In return for this grant, the knights were obliged to give to the emperor, every year on All Saints Day, a falcon, thus, among other things, the McGuffin for a detective story of the twentieth century.

Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875) aka Eliphas Lévi, a portrait from 1874.

Eliphas Lévi's Bephomet, an image of the Sabbatic Goat. I don't know enough about magic to say anything more. Note the name at the bottom, cut off in this image.

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam did not contribute to Weird Tales, but he was responsible for the conte cruel, a kind of story named for his collection of short stories from 1883. Here is the cover for one edition of Contes Cruels. The image is disturbing, mostly because it looks like it could have been drawn from life.

The image on this cover of a different edition is pretty tame by comparison. The man is being tortured, but he doesn't seem to be suffering much. Take away the bindings and it looks like he could be in a steam bath. (Update, Feb. 8, 2021): It occurs to me now that the image of a man working a circular machine, as in Metropolis (1927) or Modern Times (1936), may be meant to evoke the image of the breaking wheel or Catherine's wheel of medieval times.

The image on this cover of a Spanish-language edition of Conte Cruels (Cuentos crueles) is even more inviting. Are those tiger lilies?

Villiers was the author of at least fifteen books. Isis is an incomplete novel (more accurately, romance) from 1862.

In L'Ève future (1886), Villiers wrote of an android named Hadaly--invented by a fictional Thomas Alva Edison! It's from this book that we have our contemporary usage of the word android.

"The Torture of Hope," one of Villiers' contes cruels, was reprinted as the cover story in Magazine of Horror in August 1965. The cover artist was Carl Kidwell, who also contributed to Weird Tales. 

Revised and updated on February 8, 2021.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

More Weird Tales from France

Jean Richepin

Born February 4, 1849, Médéa, French Algeria

Died December 12, 1926, Paris

For Weird Tales

"A Masterpiece of Crime" (Mar. 1936)

A man of action and a man of words, Jean Richepin wrote poems, plays, libretti, novels, and short stories. He was also a soldier, actor, sailor, stevedore, and one of the many prominent paramours of actress Sarah Bernhardt (ca. 1844-1923). The Wikipedia entry for Richepin describes his "propensity for dramatic violence of thought and language" in his plays. A further indication of Richepin's personality is the fact that he was imprisoned and fined for affronts to public decency for his outspokenness on an early work, Chanson des gueux (Song of the Beggar by my translation). Although Richepin lived into the Weird Tales era, the magazine reprinted his story "A Masterpiece of Crime" only after his death.

Jean Lahors [sic]

Jean Lahor

Pseudonym of Henri Cazalis

Born March 9, 1840, Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France

Died July 1, 1909

For Weird Tales

"The Dance of Death" (poem translated by Edward Baxter Perry, May 1926)

Jean Lahor is a pseudonym of the French physician Henri Cazalis, a symbolist poet, litterateur, Orientalist, and associate of the French avant-garde of his time. Lacking a good book on French literature, I'm forced once again to quote from Wikipedia, which says that "[t]he author of the Livre du néant [one of Cazalis' books] had a predilection for gloomy subjects and especially for pictures of death." Weird Tales reprinted a single work by him in that vein, the poem "Danse macabre," translated as "The Dance of Death" by the blind pianist Edward Baxter Perry (1855-1924). Either the magazine or its indexers misspelled Cazalis' pseudonym by adding an "s" to the end. I don't have the original as printed in Weird Tales, but I can offer three translations I have found on the Internet. One is abbreviated.

The Dance of Death

by Jean Lahor

Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin. 

The winter wind blows and the night is dark; 

Moans are heard in the linden-trees. 

Through the gloom, white skeletons pass, 

Running and leaping in their shrouds. 

Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking. 

The bones of the dancers are heard to crack- 

But hist! of a sudden they quit the round, 

They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.

The Dance of Death

by Jean Lahor

Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,

Striking a tomb with his heel,

Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,

Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.

The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;

Moans are heard in the linden trees.

White skeletons pass through the gloom,

Running and leaping in their shrouds.

Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,

You can hear the cracking of the bones of the dancers.

A lustful couple sits on the moss

So as to taste long lost delights.

Zig zig, zig, Death continues

The unending scraping on his instrument.

A veil has fallen! The dancer is naked.

Her partner grasps her amorously.

The lady, it's said, is a marchioness or baroness

And her green gallant, a poor cartwright.

Horror! Look how she gives herself to him,

Like the rustic was a baron.

Zig, zig, zig. What a saraband!

They all hold hands and dance in circles.

Zig, zig, zag. You can see in the crowd

The king dancing among the peasants.

But hist! All of a sudden, they leave the dance,

They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.

Oh what a beautiful night for the poor world!

Long live death and equality!

The Dance of Death

by Jean Lahor

Set to music by Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Tap, tap, tap--Death rhythmically,

Taps a tomb with his heel,

Death at midnight plays a gigue,

Tap, tap, tap, on his violin. 

The Winter wind blows, the night is dark,

The lime-trees groan aloud;

White skeletons flit across the gloom,

Running and leaping beneath their huge shrouds. 

Tap, tap, tap, everyone's astir,

You hear the bones of the dancers knock,

A lustful couple sits down on the moss,

As if to savour past delights. 

Tap, tap, tap, Death continues,

Endlessly scraping his shrill violin.

A veil has slipped! The dancer's naked!

Her partner clasps her amorously. 

They say she's a baroness or marchioness,

And the callow gallant a poor cartwright.

Good God! And now she's giving herself,

As though the bumpkin were a baron! 

Tap, tap, tap, what a saraband!

Circles of corpses all holding hands!

Tap, tap, tap, in the throng you can see

King and peasant dancing together! 

But shh! Suddenly the dance is ended,

They jostle and take flight--the cock has crowed;

Ah! Nocturnal beauty shines on the poor!

And long live death and equality!

The painting Heart of Snow by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), illustrating or perhaps only associated with the poem "La neige est belle" by Jean Richepin.

La neige est belle
by Jean Richepin

La neige est belle. Ô pâle, ô froide, ô calme vierge,
Salut ! Ton char de glace est traîné par des ours,
Et les cieux assombris tendent sur son parcours
Un dais de satin jaune et gris couleur de cierge.

Salut ! dans ton manteau doublé de blanche serge,
Dans ton jupon flottant de ouate et de velours
Qui s'étale à grands plis immaculés et lourds,
Le monde a disparu. Rien de vivant n'émerge.

Contours enveloppés, tapages assoupis,
Tout s'efface et se tait sous cet épais tapis.
Il neige, c'est la neige endormeuse, la neige

Silencieuse, c'est la neige dans la nuit.
Tombe, couvre la vie atroce et sacrilège,
Ô lis mystérieux qui t'effeuilles sans bruit!

Detail from the "Danse Macabre" at the Rittersche Palast, Lucerne, Switzerland. The danse macabre is a Medieval European genre of art and literature. Examples abound in European culture. I don't know whether this one is a mural, a fresco, or a tapestry. In any case, Jean Lahor drew on the legend for his poem of the nineteenth century.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley