Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker

239 Pages·2016·1.02 MB·English

by  Jean Lorrain

NIGHTMARES
OF AN ETHER-DRINKER

JEAN LORRAIN (1855-1906) was the pseudonym of Paul Alexandre Martin
Duval. He was one of the leading figures of the Decadent Movement and the
author of numerous novels, volumes of poetry and short stories. At one point he
was probably the highest paid journalist in France. Though mostly remembered
today for his famous duel with Marcel Proust, he might be seen as the true
chronicler of the fin-de-siècle.

BRIAN STABLEFORD has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for fifty
years. His fiction includes a series of “tales of the biotech revolution” and a
series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin. He is
presently researching a history of French roman scientifique from 1700-1939 for
Black Coat Press, translating much of the relevant material into English for the
first time, and also translates material from the Decadent and Symbolist
Movements.
JEAN LORRAIN

NIGHTMARES
OF AN ETHER-DRINKER

Translated and with an Introduction by

BRIAN STABLEFORD
THIS IS A SNUGGLY BOOK

Translation and Introduction Copyright © 2002, 2016 by Brian Stableford.
All rights reserved.

This Snuggly Books edition is an unabridged, slightly amended version of the
translation first published by Tartarus Press in the United Kingdom in 2002 in a
limited edition of 350 copies.

ISBN: 978-1-943813-05-6
Contents

Introduction

Early Stories:
The Egregore
Funeral Oration
The Locked Room
Magic Lantern
The Glass of Blood
Beyond
Glaucous Eyes

Sensations:
One of Them
An Undesirable Residence
A Troubled Night
A Posthumous Protest
An Uncanny Crime
The Holes in the Mask
The Visionary
The Possessed
The Double

Souvenirs:
The Toad
Night-Watch
The Spirit of the Ruins

Récits:
Dolmance
One January Night
The Spectral Hand
Prey to Darkness

Contes:
The Princess of the Red Lilies
The Princess at the Sabbat
Narkiss
The Princess aux Miroirs
Introduction

None of Jean Lorrain’s biographers has contrived to discover exactly when or
why Lorrain began taking ether, or how much of it he took before realising (too
late) that it was an extremely bad idea, but the rumours he encouraged when he
classified a series of his short stories as contes d’un buveur d’éther were almost
certainly exaggerated. He must have had Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater (1822) in mind when he used that title, but he must also
have known that there was a world of difference between ether-drinking and
laudanum-drinking. Although various English writers—Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Algernon Swinburne prominent among them—had produced
brilliant visionary fantasies under the influence of laudanum, Lorrain knew too
many morphinés and morphinées to be under any illusion as to its long-term
effects on literary production.
Long before he squeezed his first ungenerous drop of ether into a glass of
wine or a carafe of water Lorrain knew perfectly well that it was a killer; he
could only have risked it in the hope that doses small enough to be harmless
might help combat the symptoms of his other maladies. He must, alas, have
realised very soon how misguided that hope was, and he probably gave it up
within a year—easily enough, given that the étheromanes to which his writings
on the subject often refer were not addicts but lunatics unhinged by a strictly
temporary recklessness.
Ether is by no means the only hallucinogen to which Lorrain’s fiction makes
reference, but his references to such old favourites as opium and hashish are
mostly tokenistic. He was, after all, a dutiful member of the Decadent
Movement, more conscientious than most in his pursuit of the Decadent lifestyle
as well as the ideals of Decadent literature. One reason for his fascination with
ether was certainly the fact that it had not previously been widely featured in
Decadent prose, and he was always ambitious to be a pioneer. He had certainly
drunk a good deal of laudanum in the attempt to quell the recurrent fevers and
headaches to which he was subject, and it is likely that the nightmares he
associated with ether had at least as much to do with the legacy of that usage as
with the chemical effects of ether itself, but there was little literary scope left for
“revelations” of the effects of opium and hashish since Théophile Gautier and
Charles Baudelaire had offered their accounts of the experiments undertaken by
the Club de Haschichins in the 1830s and 1840s.
Lorrain’s “tales of an ether-drinker” are, in one important sense, set firmly in
the tradition established by the Club de Haschichins, whose exploits had
provided one of the foundation-stones of Decadent lifestyle fantasy. The pose he
adopted in order to set them down and organise them into a series has a mock-
scientific aspect; the principal reason why it is the narrator’s friends who
experience the worst effects of ether under his observation is not that Lorrain did
not wish his readers to think that the tales were not based on personal experience
but because he wanted to preserve the clinicality of his catalogue of the drug’s
effects. In this he was following an august precedent. The hallucinatory
adventures of Théophile Gautier and his friends had been supervised and guided
by a doctor named Joseph Moreau, who liked to style himself “Moreau de
Tours”. Moreau’s study of Hashish and Mental Alienation (1845), based in these
experiments, reprinted the whole of an article on “Hashish” that Gautier had
published in 1843.
Gautier’s account of the effects of hashish has little in common with modern
reports of the effects of cannabis, and the phenomena he describes presumably
had at least as much to do with his own anticipations as with the actual
physiological effects of the drug. Lorrain’s accounts of the hallucinatory effects
of hashish, contained in such novels as Monsieur de Phocas. Astarté (1901; tr. as
Monsieur de Phocas) are so similar to Gautier’s that there can be little doubt as
to where he researched them, and the legacy of that research seems to have been
carried over into his accounts of the effects of ether, suggesting that his
experiences under the influence of the drug were prejudiced by expectation. The
chief difference between Gautier’s musings on the effects of hashish and
Lorrain’s account of the effects of ether is, in fact, an inversion that had already
been suggested by Baudelaire. Although Baudelaire was the great pioneer of the
Decadent lifestyle, he was sceptical from the very first of Gautier’s attempts to
find ecstasy through hallucination, and his own essays on the search for
“artificial paradises” concluded that hallucinogens flattered only to deceive, and
were far less likely, in the long run, to guide a man to Heaven than they were to
deliver him to Hell.
Jean Lorrain knew this before he ever touched a drop of ether, and he was
probably set from the very beginning to find the dark side of the coin whose
brighter face Gautier had described so enthusiastically:
“Never had such beatitude flooded me with its waves: I had so melted into the
indefinable, I was so absent, so free from myself (that detestable witness ever
dogging one’s footsteps) that I realised for the first time what might be the way
of life of elemental spirits, of angels, and of souls separated from their bodies. I
was like a sponge in the midst of the ocean: at every moment floods of happiness
penetrated me . . . my whole being had been transfused by the colour of the
1
medium into which I had been plunged.”
Given this, the real mystery of Lorrain’s ether-drinking is why he did it at all.
It would not have been atypical of Lorrain’s character and method to have faked
the whole thing, merely posing as an ether-drinker for notoriety’s sake, but even
though we do not known how much he took and when, we can be certain that he
did indulge, for the simple reason that it killed him. It did not kill him swiftly,
and it certainly did not kill him mercifully, but it did kill him. The ulcers it left in
his gut were so bad that he had to have a section of his small intestine surgically
removed, and it was while attempting to soothe those in his large intestine with
an enema that he blew a hole in his colon and perished—alone and unattended,
ignominiously as well as horribly—of fecal peritonitis. We may presume that he
did not expect this to happen, but he did know the risks. Why, then, did he take
them?

*

Although there is no reliable documentation to prove the point, it seems probable
that Lorrain first took ether some time after the fateful day in 1886 when he
realised, following the death of his father, that his long-anticipated inheritance
had all been spent and that he would have to earn a living. He was already well-
established as a writer, but while he had lived on the allowance whose eventual
dramatic increase he had confidently expected, he had been more than content to
adopt the voguish pose of the dilettantish dandy, for whom writing was a
vocation rather than a profession. He had published three collections of poetry
and a couple of conspicuously literary novels, but these items could hardly be
considered a sturdy foundation for a commercial career. As soon as the necessity
of making a living by his pen became clear, however, he set to his task with a
furious will.
Within a year of his father’s death Lorrain had become a prolific newspaper
columnist and short-story writer, and the character of his work was utterly
transformed. He retained too many pretensions to be thought of as a mere muck-
raker (although the enemies he made were not slow to accuse him of it) but he
embraced the controversial and the scandalous with a determined will, if not a
whole heart. Within ten years his short fiction had chronicled every perversion
he could think of—which included a considerable number that no one had ever
thought of before—and it was in that spirit that his first tale of etheromania, the
cautionary “Oraison funèbre” (1887; tr. herein as “Funeral Oration”) was
written. It does differ from some of his other tales of perversion in employing a
first-person narrative voice—when he went to extremes, as in his pioneering tale
of vampiric lesbian paedophilia “La verre du sang” (1891; tr. herein as “The
Glass of Blood”) he tended to employ a more distanced third-person viewpoint
—but the narrator reacts with thoroughly respectable horror and sadness to the
realisation that his friend has fallen victim to the demon drug. The story does,
however, pay homage to the alleged power of the drug as a stimulant—the one
property that distinguished its reputation very sharply from that of laudanum.
It was this property of the drug that Lorrain must have found tempting. A
dilettantish dandy can easily tolerate long periods of enforced idleness, and
being a “career invalid” only added to the reputation of such writers as
Swinburne. While Lorrain had expected to inherit a fortune his persistent bouts
of ill-health had been testament to the delicacy of constitution and temperament
expectable in a literary prodigy, but once he was a newspaper columnist grinding
out copy day by day they became exceedingly inconvenient. The pen-portrait he
paints of a literary hack in “Au-delà” (1891; tr. herein as “Beyond”) is
characteristically vicious, but there is an element of envy in its frank admission
that such work requires a strong constitution. Lorrain’s physical frailty became
extremely inconvenient after 1886, and the medications to which he had become
used—including laudanum—were no help to him, because in dulling the pain
they also had an anaesthetic effect that made work impossible. In late nineteenth
century Paris there was only one drug available whose reputation claimed a
remarkable restorative effect, and that was ether.
The reputation was, of course, undeserved, and the toxicity of the substance is
so great that even a single drop dissolved in a glass of wine was far from
harmless, but by the time Lorrain had figured that out the damage was done. He
certainly knew that he had made a mistake long before he sat down to write the
first of his ether-drinker’s tales, and it seems very probable that he only took the
drug for a matter of months, but the initial mistake is not beyond comprehension.
Such was the haphazard nature of nineteenth-century medical theory that he may
well have taken the drug on medical advice, or at least with medical sanction,
and it was certainly only one of several quack cures he employed in the hope of
relieving his lifelong proneness to mysterious fevers.
The other early story in which Lorrain makes a brief reference to ether is “La