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I do not know whether there are people who escape despair, and if there are, I believe that they are not very numerous. I do not envy those people. There is in despair a bitter substance, a fecund poison, the seed of a superior virtue that one cannot find elsewhere. Everyone, sooner or later, ought to aspire to the juice of the hemlock that gives wings, the sacred belladonna. But it is necessary to be able to drink the poison and not die.
Those are the opening words of the preface to Maurice Magre’s book La Beauté invisible (1937). The text comprises three sets of vignettes: “Communication avec nature” (tr. as “Communication with nature” as an appendix to The Albigensian Treasure), “Le Côté d’ombre des âmes,” and “Révélation des mondes invisibles” (both tr. as “The Dark Side of Souls” and “Revelations on Invisible Worlds,” as appendices to Melusine). Most of the vignettes are mock-autobiographical reminiscences, although they are clearly fictitious; some are mini-essays or prose poems. They mingle the humorous with the earnest, and are replete with fantastic imagery; overall, however, the portmanteau comprises the most buoyantly optimistic of all his books. Although the preface begins with that forthright announcement of the author’s désespoir [despair], his conviction that the despair in question is the general human condition, and a declaration that he is glad that he has it, he goes on to assert that he has now conquered it, at last, and that the book’s contents can inform others—if they care to listen and make the effort to understand—how they can conquer theirs. The claim impressed some readers, at least; the book was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature de l’Académie Française, the most important of the literary awards that the author won during his lifetime.
La Beauté invisible was published shortly before Le Trésor Albigeois (1938; tr. as The Albigensian Treasure), which offers curious echoes of its narrative strategy, similarly consisting of a somewhat disparate series of vignettes, whose plot, insofar as it has one, is fragmented and punctuated with reflective essays and prose poems—many of them concerned with communication with nature, the dark side of souls, and the revelation of invisible worlds—as well as being replete with fantastic imagery. In a curious sense, some of them are even mock-autobiographical, in that certain aspects of the protagonist’s quest for the Holy Grail, set in the early years of the seventeenth century, seem to be transfigurations of aspects of the author’s own experiences.
A recent French edition of Le Trésor des Albigeois
Some time after Le Trésor Albigeois, Magre published Mélusine ou le secret de la solitude (1941; tr. as Melusine), which has a similar structure, its brief chapters mingling mini-essays and prose poems with a first-person narrative that, although clearly fictitious and exceedingly rich in the fantastic, is proffered by an unnamed protagonist who is clearly an alter ego of the author. The three-year gap in publication of the two “novels” might not reflect a three-year gap in their writing. At any rate, along with La Beauté invisible, the three texts can be seen as a trilogy of sorts, experimenting with the same themes and a similar literary method—or reexperimenting with it, as he had tried something similar earlier in his career in Les Colombes poignardées (1917; tr. as “Stabbed Doves”) and La Tendre camarade (1918; tr. as “The Tender Comrade”).
Magre had not given up more traditional narrative methods—in 1939, he published the most extravagantly action-packed of his adventure novels, Jean de Fodoas: aventures d’un Français à la cour de l’empereur Akbar (1939; tr. as Jean de Fodoas), as well as the posthumously published novel Les Frères de l’or vierge (1949; tr. as The Brothers of the Virgin Gold), which is a sprawling portmanteau of adventure stories—but there is a sense in which the three carefully fragmented texts were produced as a kind of culmination of his literary endeavor, as well as the summation of a lifelong philosophical endeavor that was, in essence, an attempt to overcome, or at least to learn to survive with, despair.
It would not have come as a surprise to anyone who had bothered to follow Magre’s literary career from the beginning that he was a troubled man, whose writing, in all genres, included both an attempt to express and analyze that fundamental disturbance and an attempt to counter it. As the first part of this article explained at some length (NYRSF 341), his first collection of short stories, Histoire merveilleuse de Claire d’Amour suivie d’autres contes merveilleux (1903) was remarkable in being the most downbeat and despairing of all the tales of disenchantment written in that genre, setting new standards in pessimism and lamenting desperately the conclusion that the irresistible light of Amour was a lure that was not only unattainable but utterly destructive. That part of the article also pointed out, however, that having got the expression in question out of his system, the author then set about trying to find a way to repair the situation personally. After an interim in which he tried existential solutions whose immediate literary spinoff was limited, he eventually returned to using prose fiction to explore, analyze, and express the solutions he had tried as well as those he was still in the process of trying out.
What Magre meant by désespoir has something in common with such clinical terms as depression and such philosophical terms as Martin Heidegger’s angst, but it is probably more apt to liken it to terms used by other writers, such as Robert Burton’s melancholy and Charles Baudelaire’s spleen, in that those authors not only used literary work to express and analyze their perceived predicament but also used their literary endeavors as part of their coping mechanism, as a form of self-medication. There are similarities not only between the feelings that they were trying to dramatize but in the narrative strategies those endeavors encouraged, and, in particular, their powerful attraction to the fantastic. That attraction is natural, because the phenomenon that Magre called désespoir is essentially an excess of realism, which insists on seeing life as it is, with all its essential nastiness, brutality, and brevity. If it is to be escaped, or even survived, it has to be done by means of an adventurous, creative imagination.
Some of Magre’s readers might, of course, have doubted the fundamental assertion made in the opening sentence of La Beauté invisible that if there are any human beings who escape despair, they are very few in number. Doubtless there were readers, too, who could not understand why Robert Burton was banging on at such enormous length about melancholy, why Martin Heidegger thought that human life was essentially cursed by angst, etc. Even Magre, in one of the mini-essays in “Le Côte d’ombre des âmes”—a set of humorous essays on the weak points of great philosophers who sought solutions to the human predicament—says that the Buddha exaggerated in saying that life was essentially evil, suggesting instead that it is really only two-thirds evil and one-third good, and asserting that most people would be quite satisfied with an even smaller proportion of good. It is undeniable that many people think of Magre’s problem as something rare and abnormal, just as naïve psychologists have a tendency to consider depression as a kind of “mental illness” rather than a variety of sanity.
Perhaps those people are right and Magre was wrong, and it is only a minority of people rather than a vast majority who are living lives of quiet despair. Perhaps, on the other hand, it is simply that a great many people are “in denial”: that they are, in fact in despair, but cannot and will not admit it, even to themselves, and are hence suffering from the only authentic disease of reason, optimism. That is obviously far too big a question to debate in an essay on one man’s fantastic fiction, but it is worth pointing out that it does have a particular relevance to fiction in general, and fantastic fiction in particular, because it has a considerable bearing on the nature of the literary appetite and certain peculiar features of that appetite, including the liking for the fantastic and, most of all, the avid, compulsive hunger for what are generally called “happy endings.”
If one takes a philosophical sidestep in order to take a more distanced look at the phenomenon of literature, and the nature of reading as a mental activity, recognizing their fundamental bizarrerie, one would surely be tempted to come up with the hypothesis that it is not merely authors of fiction who often use that endeavor as self-administered therapy to counter their mental troubles but their readers as well, consciously or unconsciously. Most of those readers, of course, most of the time, like their tales of enchantment to be far less nihilistic than Magre’s story of Claire d’Amour, and many of them would think Magre’s constant aversion to conventional happy endings—which even extends to his most buoyant texts, including those named above—to be disappointing, or even perverse. Perhaps, though, that is merely a side effect of their denial. The reason that Magre wrote in the manner he did, rather than in the conventional manner engendered and controlled by the tastes of the majority of the reading public, is not only that he was in despair but that he knew it and wanted a better solution to the problem than the endless ritual repetition of the kind of story that ends with a marriage and an inheritance.
Whether such a solution can be found is, of course, a debatable point. The answer that such literary predecessors as Burton and Baudelaire tacitly reached, in the end, was negative, but that does not mean that their endeavors were not heroic. In the first part of the present essay, dealing with the light of Amour, I pointed out that in 1903, after penning the allegory of Claire d’Amour and its associated contes merveilleux, Magre deliberately changed his amorous strategy, setting aside the quest for true love, judging it after a fair trial to be hopeless, and attempted reckless promiscuity instead, beginning a quest to sleep with as many women as possible: a quest that, as he states forthrightly in his Confessions sur les femmes, l’opium, l’amour, l’idéal, etc.... [Confessions regarding Women, Opium, Amour, the Ideal, etc....] (1930), became obsessive.
The strategy did not work, as his subsequent fictional representations of erotic desire and his autobiographical reflections on that period of his life clearly testify. It was, however, an educative experience, as his most fervently erotic works of fiction—“Vies de courtisanes” (1923; tr. as “Courtesans’ Lives”), Priscilla d’Alexandrie (1925; tr. as Priscilla of Alexandria), La Vie amoureuse de Messaline (1925; tr. as “The Love Life of Messalina,” in the same volume as The Angel of Lust) and La Luxure de Grenade (1926; as The Angel of Lust), all produced in an intense and rapid burst—clearly testify.
The reason for that failure, graphically but obliquely illustrated in those works of fiction, is frankly explained in Confessions, where Magre says that in that period he became sharply aware of the fact that there were two selves within him, and that his erotic impulses, their avidity and obsession, were the features of an inferior self whose sole goal was material enjoyment. The other, the higher self, was not oriented toward carnal pleasures but toward spiritual goals, aiming for a kind of purity that transcended material pleasures and might be represented as an approach to, and perhaps even a union with, the divine. Magre routinely expressed that orientation, as many people before him had done, as quest for “the Ideal.” That orientation was supernatural in a literal sense, attempting to rise above nature, beyond the material, and it is therefore understandable that the fictional spinoff from the quest was almost all fantastic in its content.
Many philosophers of the past, Magre recognized, had assumed that the quest to develop the superior self entailed the ruthless suppression of the inferior self. All of them, he pointed out sarcastically in “Le Côté d’ombre des âmes,” had recommended chastity, but few of them had actually practiced it. Magre did not want to practice it either, and he quickly convinced himself that the division in his self was mirrored in the sexual attractiveness of women, that the beauty that constituted the alluring flame also had a “pure” aspect, which belonged to the superior realm of the Ideal. In one of his later novels, Lucifer (1929; tr. as Lucifer), that distinction is mapped out in the contrasted characters of two half-sisters, the carnal Laurence and the pure Evangeline, although the narrative experiment ultimately finds the distinction problematically blurred. The simple idea that, as well as bad women, like Claire d’Amour, there are good ones, like the mermaid Genofa in “La Fleur de jeunesse,” was, however, exactly the kind of dogmatic cliché that Magre was always determined to avoid. He attacked the problem in the first instance from a very different angle, endeavoring to reach the Ideal not by casting aside the carnal but by trying to work through it, to discover in sexual intercourse, especially in the crucial moment of orgasm, a kind of portal to the spiritual, to divinity.
Looking back on that phase of his endeavor in Confessions, Magre makes that statement explicitly and straightforwardly, but its reflection in his fiction is oblique, and its expression is far more ironic in two brief essays employed as prefaces to Les Colombes poignardées, the first item of long fiction he produced after a fourteen-year hiatus, and to “Vies de courtisanes,” the first of the cluster of works attempting a fictional analysis of the fallen angel of lust. The first of those prefaces is offered “in praise of infidelity” and the second as an argument for the superiority of “courtesans”—pretentious prostitutes—over other women. By far the most extravagant statement of the argument in question, however, is the first of the stories in “Vies de courtisanes,” which presents a brief fictitious biography of “Hermanossa, auteur du traité sur les moyens pour orienter vers le divin la volupté de l’amour physique” [Hermanossa, author of the Treatise on the Means of Orienting the Sensuality of Physical Amour toward the Divine].
The comedy in question describes how the eponymous protagonist leaves her respectable home in ancient Greece to join a ragtag commune of Cynic philosophers, attracted by their institution of drunken and brutal free love, and then progresses via a relationship with an equally brutal sculptor, to become a famous courtesan servicing the aristocratic, artistic and philosophical elite of Corinth, becoming a philosopher of note herself. Although seemingly irresistible to men because of her beauty, she is immune to infatuation until she is rejected by one Pausanius, with whom she immediately falls in love. He has spurned her because he is oriented toward the spiritual rather than the carnal, but she reacts to that as a philosopher would, producing a treatise to prove to him that the route to the spiritual that goes through the carnal is at least as effective, and perhaps more so, than any other. Fragments of the thesis are appended to the story.
By the time he wrote “Hermanossa,” of course, Magre had already tried out its prescription, and had not succeeded, so it is unsurprising that Pausanius does not yield to the entreaty of the treatise. The attempt to attain the ideal through sex did not conclude with that initial failure, and in Confessions, looking back from 1930, he fuses that quest with another, which he followed in connection with it: the attempt to attain the spiritual ideal of the divine by smoking opium.
Magre’s biographer Jean Behu was unable to identify exactly when Magre first tried smoking opium, and the chronology of Confessions is extremely vague, but it was probably after 1908 (opium is not mentioned in the long essay on La Conquète des Femmes he published in that year) and certainly before 1913. Although there might be good reasons for suspecting that the account of his early experiments with opium given in Confessions cannot be taken entirely literally, there is no reason to doubt its fundamental assertions, which are that he first started smoking opium because he thought that lying scantily clad on a mat next to an drug-addled woman was an absolutely reliable means of getting laid, and that a slight intoxication by opium—and he went to great lengths to stress that it had to be slight—achieved an alteration of his own consciousness that greatly enhanced the possibility, real or illusory, that the experience of orgasm would afford a glimpse of the divine. Indeed, he explains that he quickly came to think that it was the opium, rather than the orgasm per se, that provided the vital connection.
Confessions contains a long rhapsody, “La Messagère de la déesse” [The Messenger of the Goddess], in which opium is represented as a literal gift from the gods, a pathway not, as Baudelaire had once suspected, to “artificial paradises,” but to the real one. By the time he wrote that rhapsody, however, and by the time he wrote the four literary works in which opium smoking and its fantastic effects are extensively represented, Magre had given it up. It did not take him long to witness, and perhaps to experience in moderation, the deleterious effects of addiction and excessive inhalation, and Confessions also contains a chapter describing the drug’s destruction of some of his erstwhile smoking companions, as well as relentless assertions to the effect that if taken in excess, the goddess of opium ceases to reward its users and punishes them instead, setting them on a road to spiritual retrogression, in which use of the drug becomes the most degrading as well as the most dangerous of physical pleasures.
The attitude to opium use manifest in the four works of Magre’s fiction in which it plays a major role—Les Colombes poignardées, La Tendre camarade, Le Mystère du tigre (1927; tr. as The Mystery of the Tiger) and La Nuit de haschich et de l’opium (1929; tr. as “The Night of Hashish and Opium” in the same volume as Lucifer)—is markedly ambivalent. All four pay homage to its revelatory role and the potential it has for functioning as a “messenger of the goddess” as well as a useful anesthetic, but all four also retain a keen awareness of its dangers. The last-named, in particular, is a cautionary tale in which the hallucinations induced by the drug are nightmarish. The most interesting of the four in terms of the depiction of opium, however, and the most harrowing, is La Tendre camarade, which refers to another cost of that experimental phase of Magre’s life, one which he apparently felt quite sharply.
Part I of the present article mentioned a chapter in Confessions, “Le Retour des morts,” in which Magre detailed three deaths that continued to haunt him long after they had happened. One was the death of a friend of his youth, the second—detailed with embarrassed brevity—was the death of his mother, but the third, detailed at much greater length, was that of a woman he hardly knew, a prostitute named Elise.
Magre relates that he met Elise in a café, liked her, slept with her a couple of times, but actively avoided forming a continuing relationship with her, that not being part of his life plan at the time. One night, however, she turned up at his apartment at four o’clock in the morning, in a state of extreme distress, presumably having had a nasty experience with a client. He did his best to comfort her, but she would not tell him what had happened or report it to the police, and in the morning, she left. Some time later, he received a letter from her, saying that she was dying and would like to see once more the only man who had ever treated her kindly. He tore the letter up and did not go. Subsequently, he felt extreme remorse at that needless cruelty, but three months passed before he finally went to the address—which he still remembered in spite of having destroyed the letter—to find that she was not only not there but was hardly remembered, a girl of that name who had died of consumption being confused with another who had simply gone elsewhere.
That remorse never quit him, and he dramatized the lesson he had drawn from the experience at least twice in his fiction, albeit obliquely, in La Tendre camarade and L’Appel de la bête (1930; tr. as The Call of the Beast). In the latter novel, the unnamed narrator behaves in a more honorable fashion to the prostitute who turns up at his apartment late at night in distress, even though it costs him dearly to do so, but in the earlier novel, the debt that the philosophical philanderer Jean Noël tacitly contracts to a prostitute whom he first treats kindly but then discards casually is left as tragically undischarged as a similar one that his opium-smoking companion, a former colonial officer, describes as the pivotal event of his life, and the one whose remorse has converted his opium addiction from his greatest pleasure into a form of slow suicide.
Jean Noël, busy pontificating about the search for the Ideal via the “tender comradeship,” of women remains callously oblivious to the lesson that the colonial officer has tried to teach him, but Magre clearly did not, and it seems to have been a belated awareness of the damage that he might have been inflicting on some of the women that he was using so casually and prolifically for his own ends that convinced him that it was an addiction he had to break. The corollary use of opium, addiction to which he had tried so conscientiously to avoid, also declined, his initial enthusiasm for the possibility of using it as a portal to the divine having waned considerably as he became more familiar with its effects.
It is possible that Magre’s marriage in 1913 seemed to him to be a crucial move in breaking his addiction to promiscuity, although Behu’s investigations suggest that it did not work, and it is possible that it was not until he was diagnosed with syphilis in the early 1920s that he was forced to complete the change in his behavior. He was still capable of looking back on that phase in his life with affectionate nostalgia when he penned Confessions, and the belated force of that nostalgia was still sensible enough in 1941 to provide the sadly ironic core narrative of Mélusine. The marked change in the attitude toward female beauty exhibited in the erotic fictions of 1923–26, however, exhibits very clearly the virtual eradication of the philosophy advanced in the prefaces to Les Colombes poignardées and Vies de courtisanes. Priscilla’s attempt to combine carnality and spirituality in Priscilla d’Alexandrie, following up Hermanossa’s thesis, although represented in her story as a triumph of sorts, ultimately comes to a conclusion that it is difficult for a reader to interpret as other than tragic, although the same is admittedly true of the alternative paths tried out in the text by the three chaste philosophers, Aurelius, Socles, and Olympios.
L’Appel de la bête, however, illustrates the fact that having tried sex and opium as roads to the Ideal and found them wanting, Magre found a further potential resource, in the occult underworld of Paris. It is magic, rather than the rewards of opium smoking that is crucially mingled with sex in the erotic fantasies of 1923–26, but that alliance was problematic from the very beginning. In L’Appel de la bête, the unnamed narrator finds the idea of using magic as a means of seduction profoundly offensive, and the scene in which he realizes that his disgusting friend Fallu has actually contrived to seduce the beautiful Rachel Stevens by means of his erotic magic is represented as purely horrific. The sex-addicted sorceress Khepra, in Priscilla d’Alexandrie, is represented as a monstrous figure, and the visitation by a succubus contrived by magic in the course of Isabelle de Solis’s attempts to seduce Almazan in La Luxure de Grenade is represented in a fashion almost as ambivalent as Dr. Fazeuille’s unwitting intercourse with a zombie in Les Frères de l’or vierge.
In the fiction that Magre produced from 1927 onwards, in fact, erotic magic plays a very minor part, and where it is featured, as in La Nuit de haschich et de l’opium, which recapitulates the spell Khepra put on Priscilla as a child, and the one put on the adolescent Messalina by Chilon, in a more ingeniously specific fashion, it is represented as an evil deed committed by a loathsome man. In Lucifer, the uncanny gift for seduction that the narrator has always had is represented as essentially diabolical, whether or not it comes, as he strongly suspects, from a literal Satanic pact.
As the trajectory of his life and writings makes clear, however, Magre’s fervent interest in magic and mysticism was never expressed in terms of a desire to practice it, but in terms of trying to find therein a key to the secret wisdom of the ancients, and to the Ideal that they had allegedly possessed. The models that Magre selected for personal investigation from the narrative experiments carried out in Priscilla d’Alexandrie did not include that of Priscilla, who attempts to combine the carnal with the spiritual, as Hypatia had allegedly wanted to do in this version of the story, before being brutally murdered, or that of Socles, who eventually refuses the opportunity to open the tomb of Alexandria because he has found the joy of physical labor to be more rewarding in the course of his excavations. Those Magre actually tried to follow up, initially in thought and later in action, were those of Aurelius, who undertakes a journey to India in quest of guides capable of teaching him wisdom, and Olympios, who withdraws from the world in order to devote himself to solitary mediation.
Magre went to India himself in 1935 in order to consult a Hindu sage in Pondicherry who called himself Sri Aurobindo Ghose, whose philosophy Magre likened to that of Lao-Tsu (Laozi) in an article in the Mercure de France that he subsequently wrote about his journey and incorporated into one of his wide-ranging autobiographical texts, À la poursuite de la sagesse [In Pursuit of Wisdom] (1936). Sri Aurobindo was a former teacher of French, which facilitated their communication greatly, and he helped Magre to put flesh on the elusive educators previously featured in his hypothetical fictions, including the mysterious sage who covertly assists the antihero of Le Mystère du tigre along the road to redemption and the Albigensian perfecti whom the hero of Le Sang de Toulouse (1931; tr. as “The Blood of Toulouse”) attempts in vain to consult and comprehend.
Typically, however, Magre’s initial enthusiasm for the spiritual rewards of his pilgrimage to Pondicherry soon waned, and he found the prospect of taking the advice he had been given—essentially, to seek solitude and meditate, after the fashion of Olympios and his own depiction of Lao-Tsu in Le Roman de Confucius (1927; tr. as “The Story of Confucius” in the same volume as Le Mystère du tigre)—difficult to put into practice. He had not hesitated in Priscille d’Alexandrie to represent Olympios as a contented man, nor to represent Lao-Tsu’s eventual lonely but hallucinated death as a transcendent triumph. He had been equally wholehearted in representing Albigensian perfecti and their alleged successor Christian Rosenkreutz as supremely joyful and successful philosophers, in his fiction and scholarly fantasy alike, but it was one thing to make that statement in scholarly fantasy and imaginative fiction and another actually to try to live it.
The ideal philosophy that Magre had designed for attribution to the Albigensians in Magiciens et illuminés [Magicians and Illuminati] (1930) and Le Sang de Toulouse was an idiosyncratic derivative of the Buddhist notion that every individual human life is an element in a chain of reincarnations in which all sins have eventually to be punished and expiated, in future incarnations if not the present one. The ultimate reward of that expiation is to escape the cycle of reincarnation by attaining instead a spiritual unity with the divine, by finally contriving to lead a pure life free from sin, with all previous moral debts discharged.
Magre observed continually that that is not a goal that most people, fatally addicted to the vulgar pleasures of carnality actually desire, and he was never entirely sure that he could overcome his own lingering addition to carnal pleasure sufficiently to desire it himself. The contest with that doubt is represented in particularly striking terms in Mélusine, and it is arguable that his representations of the allegedly successful protagonist of that novel is considerably less convincing than his depiction of the eponymous hero of Jean de Fodoas, who eventually has solitude and meditation forced upon him, but whose principal desire is to escape it and return to carnal pleasures. There is, however, a further complication to the schema that was introduced, perhaps paradoxically, into his depiction of the Albigensians, explicitly in Magiciens et illuminés and tacitly in Le Sang de Toulouse, and that is his representation of the consolamentum.
The consolamentum, at least according to Napoléon Peyrat, was the Albigensian version of the last rites, administered by perfecti to their less accomplished followers, essentially analogous to the Catholic sacrament of Extreme Unction. In Magre’s version, however, the consolamentum becomes magic of a powerful kind, which enables those who receive it not only to escape immediately from the cycle of reincarnation, even if they have not lived a pure life or discharged their legacy of moral debt, but also to die painlessly. Le Sang de Toulouse makes much, especially in its description of the siege and capture of Montségur, of the avidity of the Albigensians to find death, which they regard as the ultimate—indeed, the only—good, because it is the portal to the divine, which they can not only go through but can do so joyfully, thanks to the magic of the consolamentum. The protagonist of the novel does not understand that, because none of the perfecti he consults is able to make it comprehensible to him, but he is in no doubt about it, and the allegation is spelled out explicitly in the relevant chapter of Magiciens et illuminés. It is a rather implausible, but nevertheless revealing invention.
What Magre was actually seeking, and what all his characters in quest of spiritual enlightenment are actually seeking in their research in the wisdom of the ancients, is not an awkward and thorny path to the divine but a shortcut. The Buddhist message was by no means difficult to come by in the era in which Magre lived and wrote, but its prescriptions are hard to follow, and the attainment of the eventual reward is arduous. What Magre hoped to find, as a solution to his despair, or a means of living with it, was a consolamentum: a magical formula that would cut out all the crap of life and its undischarged moral burdens, and allow him to make direct contact with the divine, preferably without dying, but, if that were still necessary, doing so painlessly and joyfully.
That is a tall order, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he seems to have been able to convince himself, at least momentarily, in the late 1930s that he had found a means. The key to psychological serenity and the effective antidote to innate despair, he decided, was beauty: not the beauty of women, which was essentially deceptive, a kind of trap set by carnality in order to drag men down into the murky depths of their inferior selves, but the beauty of nature. It was, he concluded—or tried to—via the contemplation of nature and learning to comprehend the secret languages of animals and vegetables, that one could make contact with the universal soul of the divine. That particular beauty is what he called “invisible beauty” in the title of one of the three books celebrating his discovery, although the title is deliberately paradoxical.
It is via a particular solitary communication with nature that both Michel de Bramevaque in Le Trésor des Albigeois and the unnamed narrator of Mélusine contrive to find their personal consolamenta. Both of them are endowed with the temporary gift of being able to understand the speech of animals, and thus to understand the true situation of animals and humans in the hierarchy of creation. Magre lays claim to the same gift in the fantasized essays in autobiography contained in La Beauté invisible, allowing him to conclude, in one of the exercises in visionary symbolism contained in the final section of that volume, that “the lake of despair is not far from the mountain of serenity”—always provided, of course, that one can find the way.
As to how long that sensation of consolation lasted, we can only speculate. Magre died on 11 December 1941 in Nice, twenty days after the publication of Mélusine on 21 November. That book was printed in Avignon, but it might have been written sometime before. Whether it had or not, it could not have been published in Paris at that time, which was then under German occupation.
It seems possible, and quite probable, that some parts of the posthumously published patchwork Les Frères de l’or vierge had been written before the trilogy concluded by Mélusine, but some of it was surely written afterwards, as its main plot thread was obviously incomplete when the author died, and it was tidied up for publication in dismissively cursory fashion when Magre realized that he could not finish it properly and curtailed it in haste. One of the other principal plot threads, however, is the story of Noël Alga, whose great talent is the ability to communicate with the animals and trees of the Pyrenees. Perhaps his story is incomplete too, but perhaps it was actually intended to end where it does in the published text, when he arrives home after ten years of adventures in America to find that he has just missed the opportunity to catch his mother’s last breath, echoing Magre’s failure to do the same, which had hunted him all his life. We cannot tell from the published version, therefore, whether Noël was intended by his creator to go on to find a consolamentum for his loss in the resumption of his communication with Pyrenean nature, or whether he was to be left brutally bereft. One of the completed elements of the portmanteau, however, does allow Hugues Borromée to find the faith in God of which he feels so desperately in need, by celebrating mass in a legendary “invisible cathedral,” before a congregation of ghosts.
Jean-Jacques Bedu was able to ascertain that Magre did not die alone; his ex-wife, who was still living in the south of France, was with him at the end. Bedu concludes from that circumstance that, whatever had caused the breakup of their marriage twenty years before, Jeanne Rosen still loved him. She must at least have felt sorry for him and wanted to offer him what consolation she could. As Bedu conscientiously observes, however, she might have been wiser to have been thousands of miles away in her native America. In fact, she stayed in Vichy France until she was rounded up by the Gestapo in 1943 for the crime of having Jewish ancestry, and she was deported, dying not long thereafter in a German concentration camp.
There is, alas, no encouragement in that narrative conclusion for any reader who would like to believe that there really is a solution to the existential problem of désespoir that Magre had spelled out in the preface to La Beauté invisible, or that one really ought to be glad to suffer from that kind of despair, provided that one can live with it. But Magre’s career and literary achievements do suggest that writing fantastic fiction can help, in some measure, and so perhaps reading it can, too.
Brian Stableford lives in Hadleigh, Essex.
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