Champavert: Contes immoraux. “Whether Champavert were a fictitious or real personage, I know not; there is, however, a long circumstantial account of his suicide here given; and I trust, for the honor of France, that the Lycanthrope actually lived and died in the manner described in the book.” —Thackeray.
“These seven stories, though not immoral, as
they profess to be, in the defiant manner of the day, are as extraordinary
as any production of the human brain. All are studies in horrors and
iniquities; above all, in the shedding of blood. Written by anyone else
they would be revolting, for they spare no detail of monstrous deeds; they
would be pitiless but for their immense self-pity; cruel but for their
irony, which is a bitter, personal, and at times magnificent arraignment
of things. They are crude, extravagant, built up out of crumbling and
far-sought materials; they are deliberately improbable, and the persons
who sin and suffer in them are males all brain and females all idols or
ideals. They are as far from reality as intention and style can make them;
a world of yari-colored puppets swinging on unregulated wires. And yet
these violences and crudities and all this digging in graveyards and
fumbling in the dead souls of the treacherous and the unforgiving, have
something in them or under them, a sincerity, a real hatred of evil and
unholy things, which keeps us from turning away, as our first impulse may
well be, in mere disgust. A man, suffering from some deadly misery, leaps
before us in ironical gymnastics, and comes down with his mortal laugh, a
clown, in the arena. That is what makes the book tragic, a buffoon's
criticism of life; there is philosophy in it, and an angry pathos.” —Horace
Holley in The
Forum,
1915.
1833
edition (the first).
1870 édition
compacte.