Being Under the Influence: Catulle Mendès and Les Morphinées, or Decadence and Drugs

Being Under the Influence: Catulle Mendès and Les Morphinées, or Decadence and Drugs Liz Constable FEMMES DAMNÉES, "CHERCHEUSES DE L'INFINI,"1 and their drug-induced artificial paradises, the Baudelairian themes of Catulle Mendès's Méphistophéla (1890), suggest that any issues concerning influence (the text's intertextual topoi, influences upon the author) might be rather straightforward to trace in genealogical terms. Text and protagonist seem to establish themselves quite legitimately as Baudelaire's literary progeny, offspring of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Les Paradis artificiels (1860) and Le Spleen de Paris (1864), in the thrall of le baudelairisme, and Mendès a decadent "fils de Baudelaire," as contemporary critic Michael Fouquier comments in 1891.2 To wit, Catulle Mendès's diabolical female character, Sophie Hermelinge, "l'impératrice blême de quelque macabre Lesbos" (553), later masculinized when renamed Sophor by her lesbian lover, is an Amazonian morphine addict (une morphinée) whose tale of self-destruction unfolds in & fin-de-siècle Paris, exuding and oozing with the pus of an inner moral decay, and compared to "un homme qui par les pores ouverts de toute sa peau, verrait grouiller sa pourriture interne" (31). From this brief description, it is easy to see why Baudelaire becomes here a retrospectively constructed father-figure, not only of Mendès's text, but of an entire supposed lineage of fin-de-siècle texts which literary critics have grouped loosely, and frequently despairingly and disparagingly, under the heading of "decadent literature."3 And yet, although the Baudelairian tracks are quite undeniably powerful in Mendès's text, there are quite a few problems with this particular genealogy. First, we face the incongruity of the very notion of a father-figure—origin and model—for decadence, and the straightforward patrilineality implicit in this familial paradigm of literary and cultural decadence in the fin-de-siècle post-Baudelairian context. Genealogical paradigms, sons in the image of fathers, schools and disciples all run counter to Baudelaire's own aesthetic principles: namely, his substitution of cosmesis for mimesis, his exasperation with the literalist "échelle de littératures" paradigm used by detractors of so-called decaVOL . XXXVII, NO. 4 67 L'Esprit Créateur dence, and his resistance to didacticism in literature.4 This is sufficient reason to make us suspicious of the validity of genealogical filiation as a way to understand his influence. It is of course inevitable that those who write "under the influence" of Baudelaire depart from his own aesthetic principles, but these dissonances are sufficient to make us ask what it would mean to be a decadent son of Baudelaire. Furthermore, such genealogical narratives clash with the prevalence of narratives of non-familial influence in so-called decadent texts themselves , for decadent texts focus both thematically and stylistically on interrupted, diverted, and broken genealogies, in sum, on "unnatural" beginnings and endings (from a genealogical perspective).5 Not only do absent, or substitute, parent figures abound in Méphistophéla, as in other decadent texts. These breaks and gaps in the genealogical machinery are frequently accompanied by combinations of three interrelated non-genealogical modes of influence, or means of transmission of values. Méphistophéla thematizes influence primarily through a narrative of addiction, as the craving for, and dependency on, "bad" (animate or inanimate) objects, while it also attributes influence to contagion and contamination, and/or questionable pedagogic models, as do other decadent texts.6 Finally, "la morphinomanie" of Mendès's narrative is a specifically 188Os and 1890s phenomenon, quite distinct from the earlier laudanum use of De Quincey and Baudelaire. Seen by contemporaries as a contagious epidemic, or "une mode" particularly widespread amongst upper class women (hence the special term la morphinée), the morphinomane 's aesthetic of emaciated, anemic, neurosis-ridden bodies suggests itself as the nineteenth-century equivalent of contemporary ' 'heroin chic."7 And morphine addiction is a far cry from the Romantics' recourse to opium. As Arnould de Liedekerke comments, in his comprehensive survey of French fin-de-siècle literature on and about drugs: Les voyages qui transportaient les romantiques derrière les portes de corne et d'ivoire sont d...