Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Le Diaboliche

There is an age that the Gods will forever envy us for and that, from the bile-ridden fixity of their eyes, has always represented the true, great, unheard-of privilege granted to human beings, the age of sudden shudders and excessive wonders that tear through the days with the power of Van Gogh's gaze emerging from one of his self-portraits, the exquisite delicacy that we cannot savor without life later presenting us with the (salty) bill.

When I too was paddling in that spring water vulgarly called pre-adolescence, Sunday lunch was at my grandmother's with all the relatives (or at least all that were available).

I adored that house of hers full of knick-knacks, utensils, trinkets that were already decidedly out of fashion then (late '80s-early '90s), I adored her and her energy that had an indescribable picaresque quality, that sweet firmness of hers as a woman who refused to keep up with the times and was certain that the only way to do certain things right was, indisputably, hers.

I am not able to convey with a pen the look with which, one day, she blasted my mother for bringing her a package of pre-ground coffee: I could tell you that in it a kind of compassionate love towards her daughter who committed the most ludicrous of foolishness could be read, but it would only be a pale transposition.

No! For my grandmother, coffee had to be bought as beans first, then ground with the appropriate grinder, and only then prepared in the coffee pot. And it wasn’t just a matter of taste; it was about respecting the temporal order of a rite which, if one step were skipped, would otherwise lose all its meaning.

You should have seen the care she took in turning that handle, you should have heard how at the first sip, rolling her eyes slightly back, she would invariably declare: “Sì, l’é gnì propi bén” [translation: “Yes, it turned out really well”].

Reading “Les Diaboliques” I thought of my grandmother, I recognized the wrinkles that etched her face among the folds of the book.

Imagine an indomitable monarchist forced to live in an era rife with democratic dogmas, a self-proclaimed “Christian Moraliste” morbidly attracted to scandalous situations and shaken by apostate rages, a refined dandy Parisian who winks at the customs of Napoleonic soldiers, a staunch defender of the aristocratic tradition seen as the perfect stage to represent the sordid passions. If you can imagine all this, you're on the right track to understand what Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly is made of.

An ideal link between the scathing sarcasm of a Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and the redemptive aspirations of a Léon Bloy, he did not have, like the first, the same modernity of humor and had, compared to the second, a much more pronounced taste for the grotesque.

The 6 stories of “Les Diaboliques” are certainly his most representative creations and were completed in 1874 (at the dawn of the Naturalist fundamentalism proposed by Zola) when Barbey d’Aurevilly was beautifully 66 years old.

Whether the narration is in the first person or happens through the words of an aging gentleman, a retired officer, a disdainful materialist doctor, our author inevitably uses the ploy of the flashback and employs it (as a good grumpy eccentric who cannot stand anything of his own contemporaneity anymore) on the one hand to set the stories in a time (the first half of the 1800s) that he loves with his whole being and on the other to ensure he can compare it to his present, never missing the opportunity, as soon as it arises, to launch his anti-liberal broadsides.

The core of Barbey d’Aurevilly's stories is therefore narrated against the same backdrop in which Balzac narrated his, but, while the two share the same passion for detailed descriptions of the furniture and interiors of the time, the "archetypal" character that the genius author of the “Human Comedy” assigned to his characters, is completely lost with Jules-Amédée who is interested only in exceptional cases.

But who are these diaboliques?

They are women who have (or provoke) uncontrollable passions, who (not by chance) have an almost Luciferian power, an abnormal, a deformed anomaly of character or blood that can lead themselves (or anyone who allows themselves to be ensnared by their charm) to physical and moral destruction.

Barbey d’Aurevilly adores these creatures of his, veils them in such dense mystery, outlines them with such exasperated care and with colors so calibrated, that one wonders if they all are not just his forbidden dreams repressed for too long in the soul and unconfessed even to himself.

It must be said that, at times, this old pirate of letters gets carried away a bit too much and delineates situations so grotesque as to be, more than diabolical, involuntarily comical (in the end, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, many of Maupassant's women, or even Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, appear much darker and more terrifying precisely because they are driven by more banal and materialistic intentions).

But do not be deceived, behind the veneer of extravagant hyperboles, of exaggerated oddities, of disconcerting surprises, hides the powerful tread of a thoroughbred. The skill with which (after a thousand digressions of impassioned creativity) he leads the reader to the acme of the stories is textbook and resembles a labyrinthine string of rooms that, in a castle, must be traveled if one wants to reach the treasure room. His resounding and vivid pages that solidify into syntactic grains with an intoxicating aroma which are later powdered by qualifying refinements dispersed in periods full of unruly eccentricity, resemble a good strong coffee, like those no longer made.

I can picture good Jules-Amédée at his old Empire-style desk, I see him as he finishes one of his stories, as he glances at the last sentence for a moment and then mutters to himself something like: “Sì, l’é gnì propi bén”.