Bluebirds

Catulle Mendès

Translated by Brian Stableford

Bluebirds by Catulle Mendès (1841-1909), here delightfully translated for the first time into English by Brian Stableford, is fascinating, not only because it illustrates a particular evolution within the pattern of the author’s own works, but because that pattern reflects a more general one associated with the evolution from the French Romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century to the Decadent and Symbolist Movements of the fin-de-siècle.

Mendès was one of the key figures in the latter phases of that process of development, launching his literary career in the 1860s under the patronage of Théophile Gautier, whose daughter Judith he married—much against her father’s wishes—in 1866, and then becoming a leading figure among the “Parnassians” who attempted a renewal and revivification of Romantic ideals, before he entered wholeheartedly into the Decadent Movement launched in the 1880s.

The stories in the present collection extend over a linear spectrum, moving by degrees from the affected sentimentality of Romanticism to a darker and somewhat jaundiced world-view that illustrates the Decadent sensibility very well, although all the stories were written in advance of the enormous fashionability that the sensibility in question achieved in the late 1880s.

About the Author
Catulle Mendès (1841–1909) was a French man of letters and the protégé of Théophile Gautier, whose daughter, Judith, he married, though their relationship did not last long. In 1860 he founded La Revue fantaisiste, ¬publishing such authors as Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Charles Baudelaire. He gained the reputation as a sensualist after his ‘Le Roman d’une Nuit,’ which appeared in the same review in 1867, was condemned as immoral, and he was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs for publishing it. He wrote voluminously—plays, poetry, essays, novels, and short stories.
Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated his Dionysian-Dithyrambs to Mendès, celebrating him as “the greatest and first satyr alive today, not just today . . .”

Paperback, 180 pages. Release date: March 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94381-325-4
Price: US$15.50

Hardcover edition, 182 pages
Release date: March 20, 2017
Price: US$27.00