Read Online The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century by Terry Hale - Free Book Online
Authors: Terry Hale
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could easily have been mistaken for the lamp which burns at a funeral wake. Peering with deliberation through this chiaroscuro, just as one examines a Rembrandt etching, it was possible to make out a dining room decorated in the style of Louis XV, which the classicists of the absurdo-Roman school maliciously call the Rococo. And, appropriately enough, both the stringcourse and the necking of the cornice running around the ceiling were indeed sinewy and well-delineated, totally unlike those of the entablature of the Erechtheum, the temple of Antoninus and Faustine, or the Arch of Drusus. In compensation, there was an utter dearth of overhanging projections, dripstones, watercourses and outer fillets, designed to channel and repulse the rains which never fell. Nor were the archways surmounted by coping-stones of the kind called Attic, designed to channel and repulse the rains which likewise never fell. It would also be true to say that the height of the archways was not two-and-a-half times their width. Finally, no attention whatsoever had been paid to the illustrissimo signor Jacopo Barrozio da Vignola and the rule of the five orders had been completely disregarded. 1
Still, it could not be claimed that this interior was merely a worthless pastiche of the clumsy architecture of Paestum; of the cold, bare, rigid, repetitive architecture of Athens; or of the derivative and bastardised architecture of Rome. This was a building which had its own physiognomy, shape, and particular charm. The perfect incarnation of its own epoch, each was ideally suited to the other. Indeed, so unique was its physiognomy that, even after the toll taken by the centuries, Louis XIV and Louis XV rococo is still immediately recognisable, a distinction altogether lacking in the work of contemporary craftsmen who provide us with nothing more than illiterate copies of the old styles without imparting any of the character of their own period – so much so that posterity will view the results as no more than second-rate antiques imported from abroad.
The wall-panelling was covered in still-life paintings worthy, though unsigned, of Venninx 2 and the mouldings represented pastorals like those which serve as backdrops at the opera, charming scenes of shepherdesses and their swains in the manner of the immortal Watteau. These graceful and delicate pictures, with their bright, pleasing colours, were truly in the style of that great master – an artist whom an ungrateful and unappreciative France should reclaim and hail as one of her principal glories. Let us honour Watteau and Lancret, Carle Vanloo and Lenôtre! Let us honour Hyacinthe Rigault, Boucher, Edelinck, Oudry! 3
If truth be told, I believe that I feel equally at home and free to let my imagination wander in these vast seventeenth and eighteenth-century residences as in a Byzantine chapter-house or a Roman cloister. All that reminds us of our fathers and forefathers, buried in a plot of honest French earth, overwhelms my heart with a religious melancholy. Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!
At the table on which the candle was placed two men were sitting.
The younger of the two remained motionless, his pale head bowed beneath a stream of red hair; his eyes hollow and treacherous, his nose long and pointed. To say that his whiskers were trimmed squarely on his cheeks like gaiterstraps will disclose that this scene takes place under the Empire, around 1810.
The older one was stocky, the prototype of the native of the plains of Franche-Comté. His thick hair hung heavily, like Babylon’s garden, across his broad, flat face – the face of a nocturnal bird.
The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs.
One was less than a wolf: he was a public
Still, it could not be claimed that this interior was merely a worthless pastiche of the clumsy architecture of Paestum; of the cold, bare, rigid, repetitive architecture of Athens; or of the derivative and bastardised architecture of Rome. This was a building which had its own physiognomy, shape, and particular charm. The perfect incarnation of its own epoch, each was ideally suited to the other. Indeed, so unique was its physiognomy that, even after the toll taken by the centuries, Louis XIV and Louis XV rococo is still immediately recognisable, a distinction altogether lacking in the work of contemporary craftsmen who provide us with nothing more than illiterate copies of the old styles without imparting any of the character of their own period – so much so that posterity will view the results as no more than second-rate antiques imported from abroad.
The wall-panelling was covered in still-life paintings worthy, though unsigned, of Venninx 2 and the mouldings represented pastorals like those which serve as backdrops at the opera, charming scenes of shepherdesses and their swains in the manner of the immortal Watteau. These graceful and delicate pictures, with their bright, pleasing colours, were truly in the style of that great master – an artist whom an ungrateful and unappreciative France should reclaim and hail as one of her principal glories. Let us honour Watteau and Lancret, Carle Vanloo and Lenôtre! Let us honour Hyacinthe Rigault, Boucher, Edelinck, Oudry! 3
If truth be told, I believe that I feel equally at home and free to let my imagination wander in these vast seventeenth and eighteenth-century residences as in a Byzantine chapter-house or a Roman cloister. All that reminds us of our fathers and forefathers, buried in a plot of honest French earth, overwhelms my heart with a religious melancholy. Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!
At the table on which the candle was placed two men were sitting.
The younger of the two remained motionless, his pale head bowed beneath a stream of red hair; his eyes hollow and treacherous, his nose long and pointed. To say that his whiskers were trimmed squarely on his cheeks like gaiterstraps will disclose that this scene takes place under the Empire, around 1810.
The older one was stocky, the prototype of the native of the plains of Franche-Comté. His thick hair hung heavily, like Babylon’s garden, across his broad, flat face – the face of a nocturnal bird.
The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs.
One was less than a wolf: he was a public
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