Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [139]
Now, there was only a mausoleum.
Charlotte knew that Moreau had died in Honolulu, but she also recalled that his body had been returned to the island, where someone with no official existence must have taken delivery of it and laid it in this tomb. Charlotte assumed that it would not be allowed to remain here, but it was here now: the mortal centerpiece of Moreau’s Creation.
It was a very large tomb, hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. There was nothing overelaborate about its formation, although it was tastefully decorated. It bore neither cross nor carven angel, but on the plain white flank which loomed above its pediment a text was inscribed. It read: SPLEEN Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant les courbettes, S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres betes. Rien ne peut 1’egayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelise se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de 1’or n’a jamais pu De son étre extirper 1’element corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Remains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n’a sur échauffer ce cadavre hebete Ou coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Lethe.
“Baudelaire?” Charlotte asked of Oscar Wilde. “Of course,” he replied. “Would you like me to translate?” “If you would.” “It runs approximately thus,” he said.
“I am like the monarch of a rain-soaked realm,” “Rich but powerless, young but perhaps too old, “Who, despising the sycophancy of his teachers,” “Is as sick of his dogs as of all other beasts.
“Nothing can enliven him, neither prey, nor predator,” “Nor deaths displayed before his balcony.
“The satirical ballads of his appointed fool” “No longer soothe the frown of his cruel malady; “His flower-decked couch is transformed into a tomb,” “And the courtesans for whom every prince is handsome, “Can no longer find attire sufficiently immodest,” “To force this youthful skeleton to smile.
“The maker of alchemical gold has never contrived” “To extirpate elementary corruption from his own being, “And in those baths of blood which the Romans left to us, “Which powerful men recall in the days of their old age,” “He has failed to renew the warmth of that dazed cadaver “Where runs instead of blood the green water of forgetfulness.” “Spleen, I assume, does not here refer to the common or garden organ of that name?” said Michael Lowenthal.
“It does not,” Wilde confirmed. “Its meaning here is one that was rendered obsolete by the modern medical theories which replaced the ancient lore of bodily humors. Spleen was the aggravated form of the decadents’ ennui: a bitter world-weariness, a sullenly wrathful resentment of the essential dullness of existence.” “Is that, do you suppose, what drove him to make all this?” Charlotte asked.
“I doubt it. This paradise was not born of bitterness or resentment, although the trail of murders that paved our way with bad intentions must have been. The poem is a commentary on the artist’s final approach to death, not on his life as a whole. Spleen was what Moreau fought with all his might to resist, although he knew that he could not live forever, and that it would claim him in the end.
Like us, dear Charlotte, he was delivered by history to the very threshold of true emortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How he must have hated the knowledge