The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue

 

I’ve had a copy of The Mysteries of Paris* on my shelf for decades, with the clear intention of reading it.  I suppose the pandemic gave me the opportunity to do so.  I’ve had my anonymously translated and undated 1,300 + page Walter J. Black edition for long enough that it’s finally been superseded by a Penguin Classics translation from 2015.** I read the beginning of both editions to help me decide which version to go with (I’m sure as hell not going to read it twice), and ultimately chose the older one.  Despite its having been thoroughly bowdlerized, with an inexact (if not simply fanciful) translation, the 19^th Century sensibility and underworld argot seem more alive here than in the meticulously translated (and to me – remarkably flat) Penguin edition.  Sure, some scenes have been omitted, but it’s pretty easy to tell from the context of the narrative when a rape or some other such horror represented by lacunae has occurred.  Frankly, I simply enjoyed the flavor of the older edition better, and I’m reading for enjoyment.

The Mysteries of Paris began publication in a serialized form in 1842-43, and was an immediate success. It was a social novel, luridly yet humanely representing different strata of Parisian society and therefore appealing to a wide audience.  It could be read in bourgeois drawing rooms, or aloud in a smoky tavern for eager listeners.  It proved to be a model for later works, such as Les Miserables (which took up its examination of social issues having to do with crime and the poor, and the responsibilities of the wealthy) and The Count of Monte Christo.  Sue clearly sought to use his novel as a means of putting forth aspirational views of reforming how French society views the poor, and how society approaches questions of incarceration and rehabilitation. 

The cast of characters is large, but surprisingly intimate in a contrived way.  As we read, we become astonished at how, in a large and crowded metropolis, the right people just happen to run into each other at the right time; for instance, in a woman’s prison, the heroine just happens to form a bond with another inmate whose lover happens to be the brother of the river pirate who will later try to drown said heroine in a hit job later in the novel. There is a remarkable trend of serendipity in this work, from the very first scene.

*Potential Spoilers Ahead*

And so – in the beginning, a mysterious man thwarts an attempted assault of a teenage streetwalker by a ruffian who goes by the name of “Slasher” (the first of many delightful sobriquets in the book).  Slasher, as we should not be surprised to learn, is a fellow with a sharp knife and anger issues, but comes to have a deep respect – devotion, really – for Monsieur Rudolph, who has, to use the vernacular, kicked his ass.  Incredibly, this M. Rudolph, the Slasher, and the virginal prostitute la Goualeuse (aka Fleur-de-Marie) end the evening as fast friends. From here, the novel descends into a blur of secrets, betrayals, suicides, madness, poverty, infanticide (alleged), noble actions, social polemics, and icky craven lust. We meet the Screech-Owl, a one-eyed crone who is the tormenter of dear Fleur-de-Marie and the companion of the hideously disfigured (by his own hand) Schoolmaster and other unsavory types.  We take side trips to an idyllic farm run as a social experiment, and to an antebellum slave plantation in Louisiana, where the (obviously) cruel master keeps a harem of dusky maidens to serve his own perverted lusts.  We meet the honest clerk Germaine, of uncertain parentage (there’s a lot of that) and the endearingly hardworking seamstress Mademoiselle Dimpleton (aka Rigolette), the desperately poor gem-cutter Morel and his family, which includes his gibberingly senile mother-in-law and his unfortunate daughter Louise, who is held captive and assaulted by the loathsome solicitor Jacques Ferrand, and we meet the proprietors of the rooming house where many of these folks live, the comical Madame Pipelet and her husband Alfred who, in characteristic ill-fitting clothing and a floppy oversized hat, is tormented to distraction by the affectionate teasing of a bohemian artiste named Cabrion, who plasters he and Alfred’s names on the walls of Paris as exemplars of inextinguishable friendship.  We will also meet an epileptic nobleman who holds a gentleman’s breakfast during which he blows his own head off after his wife – who has had her father turned against her by a gold-digging stepmother who has likely poisoned her (the wife’s, that is) own mother – refuses to sleep with him due to his horrid foaming-at-the-mouth.  (Apparently he stopped foaming long enough once to have sired a daughter upon her, but who the hell knows what happened to her?  Wrong!  It’s not Fleur-de-Marie – she’s someone else’s lost daughter, the big secret of the book that’s revealed quite casually about one-third of the way in.)

Lest you think I’ve given too much away, my friends, we’ve hardly scratched the surface.  I haven’t even mentioned Cicely, the irresistibly sexy quadroon (think young Lisa Bonet) who brings about Ferrand’s downfall, driven mad with lust; her abandoned husband, the African-American David, who rose from slavery to the practice of medicine in the service of Rudolph; the Skeleton, who rules his fellow prisoners with an iron hand; a disenfranchised noblewoman and her daughter, dying helplessly of hunger in a garret as the daughter is threatened with assault; or finally the duplicitous Sarah McGregor, who pursues Rudolph (remember him?) even unto death based on an early prophecy that she would marry into nobility.  And just who is this Rudolph, master of disguise?  Is he a lowly clerk, or something more? Like maybe, say, a German prince? That might explain the Sarah McGregor thing.

It’s a long and raucous ride, with lots of noble actions, regretful weeping, earnest emotion, hidden love, violence, torture, assault, blinding (for his own good, really), drownings and near-drownings, partings and reunions.  But after all the twists and turns and the serial cliffhangers, the wicked are punished to the appropriate degree of their repentance, monetary legacies are established to raise the poor – a few of them anyway – above the filth and violence of the Paris streets, and father and daughter are reunited for a happy ending.  Well, not really: Sue sought fit to tack on an epilogue in which, despite his best efforts, Rudolph simply cannot convince his poor daughter, the delicate flower who had been debauched in the dark alleys and dim taverns of Paris, that you can unring a bell, and a fat turd of a downer is dropped on the final act, but one which might have been oddly satisfying to the weeping readers of France. 

*Entitled The Works of Sue, a misnomer, as The Mysteries of Paris is the only work represented, and Sue published many other works, including an equally long novel called The Wandering Jew (1844).

** There is also a Dedalus edition, based, I believe on a different older translation.  I don't believe this one is still in print.

Searching for Icons in Russia by Vladimir Soloukhin

 

Tangible reminders of Russia’s Byzantine heritage, icons are intensely venerated images of Christ, Mary, saints, and holy scenes popular in Orthodox pre-revolutionary Russia.  As they age, the varnish that gives their surfaces a brilliant luster turns black. In the past, the darkened images were often painted over, the new image reflecting what was generally a less artistic manifestation of the underlying image.  This could occur several times, and, as Vladimir Soloukhin discovered sometime in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s (his chronology is obscure), it was relatively easy to strip off the later images layer by layer, ultimately revealing a pristine and vibrant sixteenth century painting below the accumulated later works. This discovery led to an obsession which consumed much of Soloukhin’s time as he traveled from village to village in Soviet Russia, searching out the icons that had, for decades, been devalued, reused to make vegetable crates, watering troughs, and window coverings, or axed into kindling.

Translated into English in 1971 and now out of print, this work (originally titled Black Boards in Russian) is an anecdotal account of some of the author’s encounters with rural villagers as he seeks out rare and beautiful icons. It is in part an elegy for the destruction of a part of the Russian heritage, and while Soloukhin wisely does not debate the wisdom of Soviet policies towards religion, he does write passionately regarding the beauty of the icons as a unique manifestation of the Russian artistic heritage.  He seeks them in abandoned or repurposed churches and in the homes of elderly village women who have managed to salvage a few icons and continue to venerate them, if not as religious objects, at least as relics of a disappearing past. 

Some of Soloukhin’s attempts to separate the objects from their caretakers may raise an eyebrow, but in general, the caretakers feel somewhat reassured that the images will be respected and tended to, rather than fall into the hands of heirs who would just as soon burn them for firewood. Most of the villagers the author encounters are bemused, rarely hostile, as he collects the relics.  A few give him a good ribbing as to why he values such useless items, but he counters with passionate arguments in favor of beauty for beauty’s sake (pointing at the lilacs along the fence line - “What did you plant them for? They’re not potatoes or carrots, you can’t eat them”).  What is most disconcerting is the general indifference to the past, that not a thought is given to the bulldozed churches where their parents were married, or the cemeteries where their grandparents lie, the stone and marble grave markers carted away and cheap plywood markers used for the graves of those who have died under the Soviet regime.

Soloukhin begins the book with a chapter on collecting, on the mania that people can suddenly develop for stamps, books, chinaware, etc.  The scene where his artist friends show him the technique for revealing ancient icons beneath the layers of the “black boards” soon follow, and one assumes that he is simply entranced by their beauty and intrigued by their fairly easy availability in the rural areas of the Soviet Union.  It is only much later in the book that he reveals that, as a child, he and his friends would take the boards and figurines abandoned outside the church in the village in which he grew up and float them off in the nearby stream, lobbing rocks at them to sink them. Surely Soloukhin – the poet who later published impassioned works on the necessity of preserving the Russian artistic heritage and who was denounced for his troubles, only to be revitalized as an enthusiastic supporter of perestroika – felt a sense of shame for the unperceived callousness of his childhood games.

Searching for Icons in Russia is a pleasant and unique testament to one person’s passion, and a love letter to collectors everywhere, who pursue their objects of desire with enjoyment of the chase and the pleasure of acquisition, with a sense that they have done a small service to the past by preserving an aspect of it for the future.

On Having Too Many Books (First of an Occasional Series)

Recently, I sat in a colleague’s office discussing a project.  Behind him was a small bookshelf with a number of nice hardcover volumes, some of which were on topics of interest to me, and some of which I hadn’t seen before.  I’ll admit to a certain distraction as we conducted the conversation.  Books are catnip – or porn, if you want to be vulgar about it - to me, and if they’re in plain sight, well, I’m going to be looking at them.  I’m also gonna hightail it out after the meeting and look up as many of the titles as I can remember to see if they should go on my wishlist.  I’m a bibliophile, and that’s what we do.

Over the holidays, we visited relatives in Seattle and my niece gave us a nice tour of the University of Washington.  I was particularly struck by the beautiful reading room in the Suzzallo Library, a/k/a ‘the Soul of the University’.  In this vast booklined space, I noticed two things: all of the hardcovers lacked dust jackets, and none were catalogued.  I dug deeper and found out that this particular collection houses books that were gifted to the University and that were duplicate copies of those already in their collections.  I tore myself away, but only after taking photo of a book that caught my eye. I checked Amazon that evening and found that the most inexpensive copy of The Frozen Tombs of Siberia by Sergei Rudenko (University of California, 1970) could be purchased for around eighty dollars.

A few days later, a Twitter post alerted me to the existence of Everett Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature, which sports a delightful drawing of a gargoyle-like creature reading with evident relish on the dust jacket. That one’s going for fifty-eight bucks.  I won’t likely be buying either this or the Rudenko book anytime soon (my Christmas gift cards have already been exhausted), but I feel happier knowing that they are out there, and I can gaze upon them in my wishlist whenever I like, biding my time until a bargain copy turns up.  Such are the cheap thrills of a bibliophile.

At present, my book catalogue shows a total of almost 7,500 volumes in my library.  I have a separate spreadsheet showing that I’ve removed almost 1,300 books since I began to tally such things only a few years ago.  Although it may appear static, a personal library is an ever-changing beast.  Still, it is a comfort to me that I can stand and look at the shelves and recognize individual titles and think about the meaning that each of them has; they are all talismans of a sort, with individual meanings whether they’ve been read or not.  (It humbles me to think of how many of these books that I, a constant and lifelong reader, have not yet read and, as my age creeps up on me, I may never have the opportunity to read.)  Every one of them is something I’ve picked up in a book store, or found in a catalog or website, considered, and ultimately decided that it was worth bringing home. I’ve had few regrets in these decisions, although I’ve had plenty of regrets for items I’ve passed up.

Over the years, I have honed a response to that absurd question that people ask when they come in and eye the shelves, then turn to me with an accusatory look and spit out “have you read all these books?”  I look right back and say, quite truthfully, “I’ve read some of them twice.”

I fully acknowledge that my collecting and reading are likely manifestations of, or compensation for, some psychological defect.  So what?  A realization I’ve acquired over the years is that we all have some psychological defect, and some of us have several of them. I at least do not suffer chronic alcoholism, or have an idee fixe that people from the Highway Department are trying to steal my garden hose.  


I feel an unreasonable tinge of envy when I see a library larger than mine.  A recent profile on Twitter showed a library that turned me green, but I had a strange hunch and searched and found what I suspected -the photo in question was one of Umberto Eco’s library.  If ever there was anyone on earth who deserved a labyrinthine colossus of a library, it was the venerable Umberto.  He also provides a convenient excuse whenever anyone expresses the absurd idea that I have too many books: how could that be, when his collection numbered in the hundreds of thousands! My meager collection pales in comparison!

Thank you, Signore Eco.