Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

A baseball blogger I follow has come up with a useful term for thuggish or morally obtuse players: ‘garbage clowns,� he calls them. Léon Daudet was a garbage clown, one of the all-time garbage clowns of French literature. A notorious anti-Semite even by the loosey-goosey standards of his day, he became a big wheel in the proto-fascist cult known as Action Française, which left a broad, brown smear across French politics for decades. His journalism, churned out with horrifying fluency, is a mass of lies, libel, fantasy and invective. In his spare time, he was an incorrigible duelist, constantly goading better men into sword fights and often getting sliced open for his trouble. As I said, a total garbage clown.

So I really wish I didn’t love his writing quite so much. But what are you going to do? The heart wants what it wants, as Selena Gomez put it. And Emily Dickinson before her. And every irresponsible person ever.

Fantômes et vivants is a memoir, the first in a vast, six-volume sequence. Less a narrative than a series of acidic portraits—Proust called them ‘magnifiquement atroces�—the book provides what we might now call an alt-right perspective on cultural life under the Third Republic. The son of a famous writer, and once married to Hugo’s favourite granddaughter, Daudet was an established insider, with one foot in bohemia and another in the dingy back rooms of reactionary politics. He knew everybody, fell out with most of them, and wrote about them all: immortals of literature, party hacks, forgotten salonnards - dozens of these odd or incredible 19th-century figures float through the book, generally while being shat upon from the heights of Daudet’s contempt. The whole performance is bilious, intemperate and grossly unfair. It’s also great, just great. Whatever else he might have been, Daudet was a born writer, with a verbal gift out of all proportion to his humanity. He tosses the French language around with Rabelaisian gusto, mixing slang, archaisms and medical jargon into an inexhaustible slurry.

But even if punchy prose doesn’t turn you on, there’s another reason to read Daudet. He happened to be alive, and at the very centre of things, during one of the most dramatic periods in European history. The first few decades of his life saw: the painful birth of liberal democracy in France, the long agony of the Dreyfus Affair, a wave of anarchist terrorism, huge financial scandals and, just as a digestif, the invention of modern art and literature. And all of this leading, blindly and inexorably, to the hecatomb of Verdun and a million dead Frenchmen. Daudet was interested, involved or implicated in every one of these developments.

Unfortunately, aside from a few extracts, these memoirs have never been translated into English, and I doubt they ever will be. While that’s not a huge tragedy as this world goes, it is a minor scandal. There’s a whole sub-basement of cultural history hidden away away inside this forgotten book, teeming with curios and grotesqueries. You just have to get past the sign on the door saying: �Entrée interdite.�