André Marcueil is one of a long line of Jarry’s heroes with whom he identified himself – supermen so superior to ordinary mortals that they become God. In Faustroll (“Jarry’s spiritual autobiography”) Dr. Faustroll is a man-god who survives his own death. In the Amour Absolu, whose hero is called Emmanuel Dieu, “Jarry makes himself God”; in César Antéchrist he asserts that one has to be God in order to be a man, and in the Amour en Visites he writes: “man must amuse himself in the image of his creator. God has amused himself savagely ever since he has been God, only he isn’t going to amuse himself much longer, because I am here. A good God always dethrones another God.”

A god, perhaps, in his imagination, (which he continually asserted was “real” life), but in what to other people is the real life of the here and now, Jarry was something less than godlike. And such were the contradictions of his character that when, after a complete physical breakdown in 1906, he thought he was dying, in spite of all his braggadocio and blasphemy, he not only received extreme unction, like any good Catholic, but also wrote to his friends to tell them of it. His megalomania was a mask for a great deal of misery, but his works have already guaranteed him that “worthy celebrity” that Catulle Mendes predicted for him eighty years ago.

BARBARA WRIGHT

The Supermale

The Highest Bidder

THE HIGHEST BIDDER

“The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely.”

All eyes were turned upon the perpetrator of this absurdity.

The conversation of André Marcueil’s guests at the Château de Lurance that evening had come round to the subject of love as being, by common consent, the most appropriate, seeing that there were ladies present, and as being also the subject most likely, even in that September of 1920, to avoid tedious discussion about the Dreyfus Affair.

Among those present were the celebrated American chemist William Elson, a widower, with his daughter Ellen; the millionaire engineer, electrical expert, and manufacturer of automobiles and aircraft, Arthur Gough, with his wife; General Sider; Senator de Saint-Jurieu with his baroness, Pusice-Euprépie de Saint-Jurieu; Cardinal Romuald; the actress Henriette Cyne, and Doctor Bathybius.

These diverse and notable figures could easily have reinvigorated the commonplace, pushing it effortlessly toward paradox, merely by each expressing his own original thoughts, but their good manners soon reduced the remarks of these celebrated wits to the polished insignificance of society conversation.

And so this unexpected statement had much the same effect as that, which even to this day has been insufficiently analyzed, of a stone cast into a frog pond; momentary turmoil, followed by universal interest.

It might very likely have produced a different result: smiles, but by mischance it had been uttered by the host.