GLR March-April 2023

Fig. 5. Lorrain as a dying warrior in a costume improvised by Sarah Bernhardt and photographed in her studio.

sensitive neurotic, the title character in Monsieur de Phocas (1910), a combination of Dorian Gray and Mr. Hyde, is obsessed with a statue of Antinous and goes to his death seeking a wonderful shade of green once glimpsed in the eyes of the goddess of lust. A morphine and ether addict, perpetually in failing health, Lorrain excelled at portraying physical decrepi tude and superannuated desire. For him, love consists of the intimate contact of two solitary and incompatible beings. It can be expressed only in excess, leading to madness or violence. Characters who long for beauty tend to be repel lent lunatics or venal perverts. The dominant mood, a sort of mournful and sadistic sensuality, may be derivative (think Al gernon Charles Swinburne, Joris-Karl Huysmans, or Jules Bar bey d’Aurevilly), but the overwrought style is all his own. Although Lorrain was infatuated with the stage, his own plays had scant success. The best attended was his version of Prometheus, performed in 1900 at an open-air amphitheater in Orange and drowned out by a thunderstorm. The flamboy ant actor Édouard De Max, Lorrain’s histrionic counterpart, played it in the nude, and the hairdresser who had depilated his body placed the cuttings for sale in his shop window with the sign: “Tuffts [ sic : poiles ] from the great tragedian De Max” (Figure 6). Caricaturists had a field day with Lorrain’s pigeon-breasted posing, particularly his desire to be elected to the Académie, an institution he attacked in his columns. Lorrain was pilloried in Carle Armory’s comedy Le monsieur aux chrysanthémes (1908; the title parodies La dame aux camélias ). Its camp antihero is a sought-after celebrity journalist who revels in destroying repu tations and thwarting heterosexual love affairs. The subject was considered so daring that no actor of repute would take the part. Note that Armory’s play appeared only after Lorrain had vanished from the scene. Much as he had relished notoriety, he

Fig. 6. De Max as Prometheus. Photo by Boissonnas and Tapinier, Orange.

would have riposted savagely to such a frontal attack. Near death, impelled partly by patriotism, partly by a sense of wan ing fashion, Lorrain overturned the idols of his youth in his un finished novel Pelléastres ( Fans of Pelléas , 1910), savaging æsthetes along with the German Wagner and the Belgian Maeterlinck. Fed up with Paris, he settled in Nice with his one true love, his ever-faithful mother. There he died at the age of

fifty, succumbing not to the embraces of a circus roustabout but to an enema that perforated a colon already ravaged by tu berculosis, syphilis, and drug abuse (Figure 7). Detested by most of his contemporaries and underval ued by his immediate poster ity, Lorrain’s amalgam of lowlife culture and preciosity, of exhibitionist journalism and artistic aspirations, has come to be seen as forerunners of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. His musky writing may be an acquired taste, but, then, so is caviar.

The G & LR Fig. 7. Lorrain’s last photograph.

12