There's No Fool Like an Old Fool: Notes on the Case of Ambrose the Masked Dancer

Jean Galland as Ambrose the masked dancer

Le Plaisir (dir. Max Ophüls, 1952) [1]

 

 "The truth of metaphysics is the truth of masks ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Mention The Mask to most people and they probably think of Stanley Ipkiss, as played by Jim Carrey in the 1994 film of that title; or, perhaps, of the original Dark Horse comic book series, created by Doug Mahnke and John Arcudi, that the movie was based upon. 

 

But for the small number of people familiar with 19th-century French literature, then it's the title of a short story by Guy de Maupassant [2]; one which I would like to discuss here, interested as I am at moment with the male response to ageing and what constitutes appropriate (or inappropriate) dress and behaviour in men over a certain age.  

 

II.

 

The story opens at a crowded masquerade ball. People were gathered to have fun and came from every quarter of Paris and every class, united in their desire for amusement and rowdy pleasure tinged with a sense of debauchery. 

 

There were pretty girls of every description; "some wearing common cotton, some the finest batiste; rich girls, old and covered with diamonds, and poor girls of sixteen, full of the desire to revel, to belong to men, to spend money".

The masked dancers were working themselves into a pagan frenzy; young women "whose lower limbs seemed to be attached to their bodies by rubber springs, were making wonderful and surprising motions with their legs", whilst their male partners hopped and skipped and waved their arms about. One could imagine them panting breathlessly beneath their masks. 

 

One man in particular stood out from the crowd due to the fact that he was "making strange fancy steps" which aroused the joy and sarcasm of those watching:

 

"He was thin, dressed like a dandy, with a pretty varnished mask on his face. It had a curly blond moustache and a wavy wig. He looked like a wax figure from the Musée Grévin, like a strange and fantastic caricature of the charming young man of fashion plates, and he danced with visible effort, clumsily, with a comical impetuosity." 

 

The narrator of the tale continues:

 

"He appeared rusty beside the others when he tried to imitate their gambols: he seemed overcome by rheumatism, as heavy as a great Dane playing with greyhounds. Mocking bravos encouraged him. And he, carried away with enthusiasm, jigged about with such frenzy that suddenly, carried away by a wild spurt, he pitched head foremost into the living wall formed by the audience, which opened up before him to allow him to pass, then closed around the inanimate body of the dancer, stretched out on his face." 

 

Oh dear, that's not good; no one wants to pass out on the dance floor and end up flat on their face - even when wearing a mask. 

 

Luckily for him, some kind souls pick him up and carry him off the dance floor. A doctor is called. Upon examining the unconscious figure, he notices that the mask he was wearing was "attached in a complicated manner, with a perfect network of small metal wires which cleverly bound it to his wig and covered the whole head". 

 

Indeed, even the neck was "imprisoned in a false skin which continued the chin and was painted the color of flesh, being attached to the collar of the shirt". All this material has to be cut away with large scissors. When the physician finally removes the elaborate disguise he is surprised to discover the worn out and wrinkled face of an old man:

 

"The surprise among those who had brought in this seemingly young dancer was so great that no one laughed, no one said a word. All were watching this sad face as he lay on the straw chairs, his eyes closed, his face covered with white hair, some long, falling from the forehead over the face, others short, growing around the face and the chin, and beside this poor head, that pretty little, neat varnished, smiling mask." 

 

 

III.

 

This is a creepy and brilliant opening to a tale - one that compels the reader to continue; we must find out who this mysterious figure is and why he wears such a mask. Even the doctor is curious to discover who this man might be. And so, when his patient finally recovers consciousness, he takes him home in a cab.

 

The old man, we are informed, lives on the other side of Montmarte in a somewhat delapidated building. The doctor helps him up four flights of stairs to his apartment, the door to which is opened by "an old woman, neat looking, with a white nightcap enclosing a thin face with sharp features, one of those good, rough faces of a hard-working and faithful woman". 

 

Upon seeing the state that the man - her husband, Ambrose - was in, she cried out in distress. The doctor calms her and explains what has happened. To his surprise, she wasn't at all shocked; for this wasn't the first time that such an incident had occurred. She insisted that the doctor help her put him to bed and allow him to sleep; that he'd be fine in the morning. 

 

The doctor, however, is not convinced and remains concerned for his patient. But the woman, Madeleine, insists that he'll be alright - that Ambrose has merely drunk too much on an empty stomach: 

 

"'He has eaten no dinner, in order to be nimble, and then he took a few absinthes in order to work himself up to the proper pitch. You see, drink gives strength to his legs, but it stops his thoughts and words. He is too old to dance as he does. Really, his lack of common sense is enough to drive one mad!'" 

 

The doctor, his curiosity piqued, enquired: "'But why does he dance like that at his age?'"

 

And that's really the key question here: Why does an elderly man still want to act and look young, at the risk of behaving in an inappropriate manner and making a fool of himself?  

 

It's a question that we might ask today, for example, of rock stars in their sixties and seventies who still take to the stage and attempt to summon up the passions and strike the poses of youth. 

 

As a middle-aged man myself, I think I have a pretty good idea of the answer. And so, whilst I'm irritated and embarrassed by those who, as it were, don masks and attempt to disguise their age with wigs, make-up, fashionable clothes, and much younger partners, I do sympathise.

 

However, as the masked dancer's wife spells out the answer to this question with such cruel precision, I'll let readers hear her reply:   

 

"'Ah! yes, why? So that the people will think him young under his mask; so that the women will still take him for a young dandy and whisper nasty things into his ears; so that he can rub up against all their dirty skins, with their perfumes and powders and cosmetics. Ah! it's a fine business!'" 

 

That's certainly part of it. But not all: the male desire for youthfulness isn't simply about retaining sex appeal and potency, although, obviously, Madeleine's main concern is with her husband's serial infidelity and how this has hurt her: 

 

"'What a life I have had for the last forty years! [...] I have been his wife and servant, everything, everything that he wished [ ...] But how he has made me cry [...]'" 

 

Now, whilst I don't wish to make light of Madeleine's pain, or deny the fact that her husband behaved cruelly in boasting of his affairs and insisting she hear every sordid detail, I would like to know why it is (certain) women always bring things back to themselves - and why they never stop to consider that perhaps - just perhaps - male passion and male suffering is greater than their own? [3] 

 

And without wanting to generalise in a manner that will bring accusations of sexism or misogyny my way, it does sometimes seem that whilst taking their own worries and their own bodies and health issues extremely seriously, women often sneer at men and dismiss their feelings and fears. Thus, they deride the notion of a male menopause, for example, and laugh at the idea of a mid-life crisis; or joke about erectile dysfunction, baldness, and even prostate cancer.

   

But let us return to Maupassant's tale ... 

 

 

IV.

 

Madeleine explains her husband's behaviour to the doctor in terms of regret - that feeling of sadness and disappointment which she understands only too well:

 

"'You see, it's regret that leads him on and that makes him put a pasteboard face over his own. Yes, the regret of no longer being what he was and of no longer making any conquests!'" 

 

I don't think that's right, however. I think it's angst and his sense of becoming invisible in the world that makes Ambrose put on a mask and demand the right to still participate in the game of life. 

Still, perhaps we're simply splitting hairs and forming a false dichotomy between regret and philosophical anxiety ... But talking of hairs:

 

"'Oh, monsieur, when I saw his first white hair I felt a terrible shock and then a great joy - a wicked joy - but so great, so great! I said to myself: 'It's the end - it's the end.' It seemed as if I were about to be released from prison. At last I could have him to myself, all to myself, when the others would no longer want him.'" 

 

At least Madeleine is honest - but that's a rather terrible confession. Remembering her joy at his rapid ageing over the next couple of years and the fact that he would lose his freshness so that women would no longer find him sexually attractive, she continues:

 

"'White hair! He was going to have white hair! My heart began to thump and perspiration stood out all over me, but away down at the bottom I was happy. It was mean to feel thus, but I did my housework with a light heart [...]'" 

 

That's good for her, but I do rather feel sorry for poor Ambrose for failing to live up to his name [3]. In desperation, he tried to start a new career in the hat business. When that failed, he tried to become an actor. Finally, he simply decided to frequent bars and cabaret venues, dancing the night away wearing his home-made mask:

 

"'This habit holds him like a frenzy. He has to be young; he has to dance with women who smell of perfume and cosmetics.'"

 

And - I would suggest - he has to get away from a woman who, whilst claiming to love him, pities him, mocks him and desires nothing more than for the two of them to sit side-by-side in their rocking chairs for all eternity. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Le Plaisir (dir. Max Ophüls, 1952) is a film based on three short stories by Guy de Maupassant; 'Le Masque' (1889), 'La Maison Tellier' (1881), and 'Le Modèle (1883). It was released in the English-speaking world under the title House of Pleasure. Stanley Kubrick once named it as his favourite film. To watch a French trailer (une bande-annonce) for the film, click here.

 

[2] Le masque was published in a periodical in 1889. It first appeared in book form in Maupassant's fifteenth collection of stories (the last published during his lifetime), L’inutile beauté (1890). 

      For this post, I have relied upon the English translation published as an e-book by online-literature.com: click here. The same translation can also be found in Vol. XI of Maupassant's short stories published by Project Gutenberg: click here.   

[3] This might explain, for example, why men produce superior works of art, commit suicide far more often, and experience that most philosophical of all moods, angst, with greater intensity than women. Could it be that the mutated Y-chromosome determines far more difference than we imagine or like to believe between the sexes ...?

 

[4] Ambrose is a boy's name of Greek origin, meaning immortal.

 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the truth of masks might like to see an earlier post from February 2018: click here.

I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville - yet again - for suggesting this post as a follow up to the study of Gustav von Aschenbach, which can be found by clicking here. 

 

 

Pot-au-feu

Illustration by Severo Pozzati (1957) 

used to advertise Maggi pot-au-feu beef cubes

 

Venez à moi, vous dont l’estomac crie misère, et je vous restaurerai!

 

 

Although English people are likely to answer frog legs (cuisses de grenouille), snails (escargot), or coq-au-vin if asked to name the French national dish, it is actually pot-au-feu (or boiled beef and carrots, as Harry Champion would have it) [1]. 

 

This hearty stew, made with simple ingredients, seasoned with herbs and thickened with marrowbone, is thought to encapsulate all that is best about Gallic cuisine and, indeed, French culture; i.e., it taps into the same mythology which Roland Barthes discussed with reference to a good steak and a full-bodied red wine [2].

 

Pot-au-feu, in other words, is for the French what a Sunday roast is to the English, or a Big Mac is to an American; character building and identity reaffirming. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the dish has often featured in French literature, with bourgeois novelists keen to promote pot-au-feu as a symbol of the traditional values they feared were being eroded by modernism and political radicalism. 

 

As one commentator reminds us, Flaubert mocks this in Le Château des cœurs (1863): 

 

"A fantasy, set in the 'Kingdom of the Pot-au-feu', its sixth tableau depicts a huge cauldron of the dish being worshipped by a host of adoring bourgeois. The source of all their happiness, it stands for all that the middle classes hold dear: social and political conservatism, base materialism and narrow self-interest. Its influence is also terrifying. When the play's hero, Paul, refuses to taste the stew, he is taken prisoner and thrown into jail. In a final, horrifying twist, the cauldron rises up into the sky, growing ever larger, until it eventually blots out the sun and plunges the city into darkness." [3]

 

In his novel L’Assommoir (1877), Emile Zola also gives a shout out to pot-au-feu as one of life's simplest pleasures; as does Guy de Maupassant in La Parue (1884). 

 

But for Michel Houellebecq [4], one of the best descriptions in French literature of this robust but delicate dish is given by Joris-Karl Huysmans in Là-Bas (1891), where Durtal, a man disgusted by the modern world, lovingly inhales the aroma of "a peppery pot-au-feu, perfumed with a symphony of vegetables, of which the keynote was celery" [5].

 

I suppose this just goes to show that even Satanists enjoy a good stew served with a simple salad and washed down with cider, followed by cheese and wine.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Boiled Beef and Carrots' is a popular music hall song composed by Charles Collins and Fred Murray (1909). The song was made famous by Harry Champion, who sang it as part of his act and later recorded it. The song extols the virtues of a typical Cockney dish over adopting a vegetarian diet and living on the kind of food they give to parrots: click here.  

 

[2] See 'Wine and Milk' and 'Steak and Chips' in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 58-61 and 62-64.

      In the first of these pieces, Barthes writes: "Wine is felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture. It is a totem-drink ..." [58] And in the second: "Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength."[62]

 

[3] Alexander Lee, 'Pot-au-Feu, France's National Dish', History Today, Volume 68, Issue 10 (October 2018). This excellent piece can be read on line: click here. 

[4] See Michel Houellebecq, discussing pot-au-feu as a French ideal in an interview with Marin De Viry and Valérie Toranian. Originally published in the Revue des duex mondes (July, 2015), it can be found in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 172-195. 

      As Houellebecq rightly says: "No other dish can boast such a literary past; there's no equivalent for the boeuf bourguignon or the blanquette." [174]

 

[5] Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891), Chapter V. I am quoting from the English translation by Keene Wallace (1928), which is available on line as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here. 

      Food is a central concern throughout Huysmans's work; for a discussion of this, see the MA dissertation by Laura Shine, 'De la pitance indigeste au divin pot-au-feu: la quête du bon repas comme thème dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans', (Université de Montréal, 2013): click here. 

La Chronique Scandaleuse 1: The Case of Claude Le Petit

 

 

The French phrase chronique scandaleuse was one that captured my youthful imagination back in the Blind Cupid days and whilst plans for a little magazine with that title came to nothing, I did once incorporate it as a slogan into a hand-painted shirt design. 

 

I seem to recall that I picked up the phrase from Claude Le Petit; a debauched and free-thinking libertine poet and lawyer who, in 1661, published a satirical work entitled Le Bordel des Muses which included a collection of verse called La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule. The work not only maliciously mocked the rich and powerful, but blasphemed against the Virgin Mary whilst honouring a notorious sodomite (Jacques Chausson) for his strength of character. 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not go down well: Le Petit was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for gravely insulting God and the French State. He was burned at the stake, in Paris, on the 1st of September 1662, aged 23, having first had the offending hand with which he wrote the text cut off by the public executioner. 

 

Although his work had been seized from the printers and destroyed, a copy survived and his writings were republished posthumously. It was a good while, however, before they became widely available; for as a result of this affair, all works regarded as being of an obscene, immoral, and politically subversive nature were suppressed in France until well into the 19th-century.  

 

It was said by those who sat in judgement upon him that his was a fine but wasted talent - and who knows, perhaps they were right. Though what else is there to do with talent - with life - but to waste it? As Bataille says: "Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us ..."*

 

Anyway, here's one of Le Petit's poems - Sonnet Foutatif - which anticipates not only Sade and Bataille, but Serge Gainsbourg ...

 

 

Foutre du cul, foutre du con, 

Foutre du Ciel et de la Terre, 

Foutre du diable et du tonnerre, 

Et du Louvre et de Montfaucon. 

 

Foutre du temple et du balcon, 

Foutre de la paix et de la guerre, 

Foutre du feu, foutre du verre, 

Et de l'eau et de l'Hélicon. 

 

Foutre des valets et des maistres, 

Foutre des moines et des prestres, 

Foutre du foutre et du fouteur.

 

Foutre de tout le monde ensemble, 

Foutre du livre et du lecteur, 

Foutre du sonnet, que t'en semble?

 

 

I'm not even going to try to translate the above. But readers who feel tempted to do so are welcome to give it a go ...  

* Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (City Lights, 1986), p. 170. 

 

To read the second entry in this short history of scandal - on Denise Poncher and her vision of Death - click here.  

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful.