Mon volume de nouvelles, tu en connais le principe: de vieux canevas brodés d'âmes à la mode.

In these terms did Laforgue describe his only collection of stories, the Moralités légendaires, one of the two great products of his last years and one of the most ingenious prose creations of the late nineteenth century. The controlling principle that he identifies here—introducing a distinctly modern spirit into established stories of the literary tradition—had motivated him somewhat throughout his career, but never as extensively as in these late tales, where it becomes the predominant feature of a genre. The Moralités are parodies that take as their target of mockery and their creative material a myth, a style, a genre, or simply literary conventions, and refashion them in accordance with the preoccupations of the late nineteenth century. They contain the essential features of all great parody, employ its characteristic devices, and perform its distinctive critical and self-reflexive functions.

"Salomé" was one of the first moralités that Laforgue wrote and is generally taken to be less subtle, less sophisticated, less interesting, and unquestionably less delightful than most of ones that accompany it in the volume. Laforgue himself expressed some dissatisfaction with it when he sent it to Kahn for publication in La Vogue. In [a letter dated June 3, 1886], he remarked: "J'ai tardé à te répondre parce que j'ai recopié Salomé. J'en suis tout moulu. Et en conscience ça me semble énormément lourd."

"Salomé" indeed conveys a certain heaviness in that it contains many of the qualities that had characterized Laforgue's earlier "cosmic" poems: the vocabulary of philosophical pessimism, Buddhism, and mysticism; underwater and lunar imagery; a sense of the artificial and the contrived. Laforgue's misgivings about "Salomé"'s heaviness, however, did not prevent him from subsequently adding to the original Vogue version one of the story's most ponderous passages, the long and important Aquarium section, which contains precisely these "cosmic" features. A reading of "Salomé" as a parody suggests that, far from being gratuitous, such language, imagery, and thematic material actually constitute vital sources of the parody and its effects—its humor, its criticism, and its selfcriticism—for they were commonplaces of late nineteenth-century thought and art, including Laforgue's own. (The Aquarium section itself came, slightly transformed, from Laforgue's prose sketch of that title.) "Salomé", in fact, parodies various key texts of the period, specifically those associated with and exemplary of the Decadent, or early Symbolist, movement, by means of the fundamental parodic device of comic quotation. It is a play on a number of late nineteenth century works which can be said to constitute a Salomé "genre", and which contained and evoked all the themes, attitudes, obsessions, and stylistic features of Decadence that Laforgue would both ridicule and share.

Laforgue's tale follows the principles and procedures of serious parody and is not merely a satire of an accepted literary manner or even a farcical debunking of the values which that manner may represent. As I have suggested, parody since Antiquity has operated primarily by means of comic quotation: it imitates a work, a school, a manner, a genre, but distorts it and makes from this distortion a new literary work. The parodied work is therefore simultaneously an object of the parodist's mockery (mockery that may include criticism, although it need not do so) and, by providing him with preformed materials and devices which he incorporates into his own work, a model for the parody itself. I call particular attention to this point because it implies the ambivalence of the parodist toward the original text, an attitude both irreverent and admiring; in this way, parody distinguishes itself from satire. It both mocks and reaffirms the primary text, renews it, revitalizes it, interprets its significance for a new age and a new sensibility. The discrepancy between the original text and the parody, between the expectations raised for a given work and the disappointment of those expectations by distortion, need not aim at satire but may simply imply humor, for which this has always been, as Aristotle formulated it, a basic literary strategy.

Such humor appears even less satirically critical by virtue of the reflexive, self-critical nature of parody. The degree to which the parody exposes and ridicules its own processes differs according to each case, but all parody possesses inherently a self-reflexive quality by virtue of the dual function of the parodist. Because the text obviously distorts an implied model, it points up his role of reader (of the parodied work) and of author (of the parody). By thus presenting the reader an example of a critical reading, the parody calls into question its own activity and suggests a critique of the "revised" version that it offers. Some works make this self-criticism even more direct by calling attention to the medium, by making writing or interpretation an issue in the story, or by including as a target text one of the parodist's own works. "Salomé" employs all of these devices, as I shall demonstrate more fully later.

Finally, by virtue of its distortion of a model, parody signals clearly to the reader that it refers to some other text (or texts), and thus by nature it is consciously intertextual. The particular significance of the parody is born of the difference between it and the parodied work, which is yet included within it. Flaubert's "Hérodias" has always been acknowledged as Laforgue's source for "Salomé", since he himself implied as much in a letter to Henry: "Tu connais 'l'Hérodias' de Flaubert. Je viens de finir une petite Salomé de moi." But "Hérodias" alone does not suffice to explain the parodic nature of Laforgue's tale: too many aspects of it remain unmotivated and unintelligible, most especially the character of his remarkable heroine. Salomé herself hardly figures at all in Flaubert's novella, where she appears only for the short scene of the dance and utters only the few fatal words prepared for her by her mother Hárodias. In Laforgue's story, on the other hand, Hérodias does not figure at all, and Salomé holds unquestionably the most important place: she is the guardian of the Iles Blanches Esotériques and their values, the high priestess of the night sky, the incarnation of the moon and its corresponding cult of artifice, purity, atrophy, and sterility, a bard whose ravings are supposed to enchant, a committed virgin whose "initiation" brings death to her lover and to herself. For such a figure, we must turn from "Hérodias" to another of Flaubert's Oriental novels, also associated with the Salomé genre, in which the heroine indeed possesses these qualities. Salammbô provides a key for interpreting "Salomé".

In fact, Laforgue's tale contains certain established features of the major representations of Salomé: basic elements of the plot, in which Salomé performs for the tetrarch and in return receives, at her request, the head of John the Baptist; the Oriental decor and her exotic, jewelled attire; and certain symbolic, especially sexual, associations. But it diverges from this norm in strategic places and ways, to parody the whole Salomé genre and the Decadent spirit which, to the late nineteenth century, it embodied. This group includes not only "Hérodias", but also Gustave Moreau's celebrated paintings on the theme ("Salomé dansant devant Hérode" and "L'Apparition"), Huysmans' elaborate description of them in À Rebours, and, to a lesser extent, the "Scène" portion of Mallarmé's "Hérodiade". The integration of Salammbô into this complex qualifies the character of Salomé herself: she is not only the destructive femme fatale of nineteenth century tradition but also a bard and priestess. Salomé is the ultimate Decadent poet, and her final misfortune points a moral to an aesthetic position which Laforgue held himself. The parody is structured upon a series of distortions which ultimately reverse the implications of the Salomé legend. She is a fatal woman, but she destroys herself and not the Baptist, as she intends to do. A work that is itself one of the supreme examples of Decadence sends the whole Decadent edifice, like the heroine herself at the end, hurtling into the ground. "Salomé" smashes Decadence upon the rocks of the real world and counsels, instead, a less extreme version of the pure poet.

Laforgue modifies Salomé from the destructive woman which her name had come to symbolize, through a tradition of literature and visual representations, to a Decadent poet by means of a neat, though crucial, parodic alteration to the legend. The central episode of the story, the essential and defining element of the whole Salomé genre, never takes place: Laforgue's Salomé does not dance, she talks. Or more precisely, she chants an incomprehensible and supremely tedious improvisation on nothingness. This change in the character of her art reflects the fundamental change in Salomé herself: a pseudo-philosopher and bard devoted to the Absolute, to nothingness, to purity, to the aesthetic, and to a mystical reality higher than the world of men, she is an extreme example of the Decadent sensibility. Laforgue accordingly converts her chambers into a terrace observatory: she is quite literally a stargazer, and the miscalculations that she makes from her heights precipitate her end. In this, she resembles another Laforguian tower-dweller and amateur astronomer, that quintessential artist and Decadent, Hamlet. Misjudging her step, as she has all along mistaken the nature of reality and her role in the world, she falls over the railing and crashes headlong into a hollow of the rocks.

The expectation raised by the title is not disappointed until the parody of the dance scene in Part III. From the very beginning, however, Laforgue's text alerts us to the parody and to what it targets. It abounds with anachronisms, puns, sound play, authorial asides, internal incongruities, and discrepancies with respect to the parodied works. Nearly every sentence contains elements that contribute to the parody, and therefore in the short space of an article I cannot do justice to the complexity of the whole work. I propose, however, to look at some of the features of the text that make it a parody and signal it as one, elements that not only point to another text but that contribute, as well, to its own coherence as one. I feel that this will illuminate somewhat a work that is exceedingly obscure by accounting, for example, for some of its eccentricities and difficulties, and also clarify Laforgue's relationship to Decadence. "Salomé" is at once parody and self-parody, a critique of Decadence such as only a committed Decadent could make.

The story generally follows the lines of "Hérodias", with its four parts: the opening scene at the palace that introduces the tetrarch and provides background for the rest; the visit to the subterranean rooms of the building and the cell where the Baptist is imprisoned; the anniversary banquet, the dance of Salomé, and the decapitation of Iaokanann; and finally, the removal of the head. Like both "Hérodias" and Salammbô, it opens with a description of the court on an anniversary holiday. But the details of this description are puzzling. Indeed, the long sentence that constitutes the first paragraph does more than set the scene; it identifies the story as a parody and suggests what the parody will target.

Il faisait ce jour-là deux mille canicules qu'une simple révolution rythmique des Mandarins du Palais avait porté le premier Tétrarque, infime proconsul romain, sur ce trône, dès lors héréditaire par sélection surveillée, des Iles Blanches Esotériques, dès lors perdues pour l'histoire, gardé toutefois cet unique titre de Tétrarque, qui sonnait aussi inviolablement que Monarque, outre les sept symbolismes d'état attachés à la désinence tetra contre celle de monos.

Unlike the festivities in "Hérodias", which celebrate the tetrarch's birthday, or even the opening death feast in Salammbô, the celebration with which "Salomé" begins commemorates a literal palace revolution and anachronistically has all the qualities of the anniversary of another famous revolution, the French national holiday. In this initial passage, "canicules" first signals the association (that "révolution" will immediately reinforce) by suggesting the July setting, and soon Laforgue will make it explicit by attaching a "de juillet" epithet to the sun and the fish in the pond, by calling the celebration specifically a "fête nationale", and by giving it the attributes ("pétards et orphéons, pavoisement et limonades") of its nineteenth-century French counterpart. Changing the nature of the holiday in this way serves two purposes. First, it relates the civilization of the Iles Blanches Esotériques to that of the late nineteenth century, the former taking on à outrance the distinctive qualities of the latter. This association is strengthened by "héréditaire par sélection surveillée", Laforgue's play on the nineteenth-century obsession with heredity and a natural selection "overseen" by an ineluctable evolutionary pattern. Laforgue thus calls attention to one of the governing principles of the Moralités, by which an historical moment is infused with and animated by specifically modern concerns. It is the first signal of the parody. Secondly, the alteration of the holiday places emphasis on revolution, which will become a major theme of the story. The civilization born of a revolution will, at the end of the tale, die with one, Salomé's tumble and the Baptist's implied ascendancy; and revolution specifically links the tetrarch, formerly an "infime proconsul romain" with the other obvious revolutionary and second-class citizen in the story, Iaokanann.

The first sentence also identifies the object of the parody as Decadence, the typical late nineteenth century quality that will characterize the Iles Blanches Esotériques. The name itself expresses the closed, isolated, hermetic, and sterile world that they represent and that their inhabitants, especially Salomé, will seek to preserve. The text calls attention to the unreality of the Isles in "perdues pour l'histoire" and thus establishes the first term of an opposition that will arise later between the "esoteric" Isles "sans histoire" and the "other", real world, the land of Iaokannan and his countrymen, the Princes du Nord.

Although such peculiar details can be reasonably explained, a more troublesome one remains. The digression in the final clause that justifies the title of tetrarch by the symbolism of its etymology would seem ludicrous except for the even more remarkable fact that it is not quite right: tetrarch seems appropriate as a name for the new monarch, but it really is not, and the story will prove that it is not any more "inviolable", either; in addition, "tetra" means four, which thus clashes with the "sept symbolismes d'état" that it allegedly expresses. Such a mistaken analysis, placed so conspicuously and in such a seemingly gratuitous manner in the very first sentence, reflects and calls attention to the methods of the parody itself. The text misinterprets the prefix and misuses the word. In distorting another work and interpreting it for his own purposes, the parodist himself practices this kind of faulty, and suspect, philology. The parody urges us to do a critical reading of itself.

As in "Hérodias", Part I introduces the tetrarch, who appears on the terrace, leans against the railing, and reviews in his mind the events that have preceded the beginning of the narrative. Laforgue modifies the story in all its details, from the portrait of the tetrarch to the setting: everything reflects the Decadence which his story parodies. The monolithic palace, a "titanique masse funèbre veinée de blême" that reflects "mystiquement" the rays of the July sun, embodies in its very structure the morbid and mystical obsessions of its inhabitants. Even the famous balustrade of Flaubert's story is here made of decorative ceramic, suitable to the aestheticism of the Isles. The story opens not at dawn but at a silent, "stagnant" high noon, thus consistent with the lethargic, atrophic atmosphere of the place, and the landscape includes not Flaubert's mountains, palm trees, and Jordan river, but only the sea, that Laforguian symbol of the Unconscious and mystical bliss. The tetrarch himself, his name playfully transformed from Hérode-Antipas to Emeraude-Archetypas, represents the perfect Decadent: he is a disillusioned, slightly detached aesthete, a fatalist, a dilettante, an aging dandy with elegant gloves. He is Ennui personified: like Baudelaire's monster, he slowly and sulkily smokes his midday houka. He gazes vacantly across the hypnotic expanse of sea and, in contrast to the stifling July atmosphere, worries about oncoming winter. Although this detail clashes with the setting, it nevertheless is consistent with the tetrarch's autumnal spirit, so characteristic of the Decadent, and the "wintry" concerns that trouble him: he grows old and his aging body does not respond to tried and true sources of energy such as art and meditation; nothing ever came of the omen that marked his birth and in which he placed such hope, a lightning bolt that flashed alpha and omega across the sky; despite daily pilgrimages to the family necropolis, he cannot seem to regain the resignation that had made him such a devoted ascetic in his youth; worst of all, he still has his daughter Salomé who refuses to listen to reason and get married.

The tetrarch's musings do more than identify him as a world-weary Decadent, however. They also introduce two important themes of the story: Salomé's resistance to marriage and the tetrarch's typological relation to Iaokanann. Indeed, the tetrarch's former asceticism and resignation make him appear as a kind of failed prophet and thus associate him with the other unsuccessful prophet in the story, Iaokanann. The alpha-omega allusion to the Book of Revelation serves the same end, making the tetrarch believe, wrongly, that he may possibly be the Messiah. Iaokanann, too, sees himself incorrectly as a liberator of men, though of a different sort: a socialist revolutionary, an engagé intellectual with a scruffy beard and spectacles, his nose always buried in a pile of papers, who had been imprisoned by the tetrarch not for having voiced his disapproval of Herod's adulterous marriage to Herodias, as in the traditional story and Flaubert, but rather for having tried to inspire a revolutionary consciousness in the inhabitants of the Isles. But his efforts to incite them to action were destined to fail because they, as much as their leader, embody the lassitude of the Decadent. "Pâles, épilés, les doigts chargés de bagues", they sing their hymn of praise to that Decadent god, Ennui: Laforgue converts the Te Deum to a "Taedium laudamus". And they profess a philosophy of atrophy: "Les mandarins pensaient qu'il fallait atrophier, neutraliser les sources de concurrence sociale, s'enfermer par cénacles d'initiés vivotant en paix entre eux dans les murailles de la Chine, etc., etc." So annoying did they find Iaokanann's zeal that they mustered enough energy to attempt, though not to carry out, a stoning.

The tetrarch also considers the two recently arrived visitors, the Princes du Nord, Iaokanann's countrymen, who came upon the Isles during one of their voyages of exploration and decided to have a look out of curiosity. They represent the opposite extreme from the Decadent aesthetes of the Isles. Ludicrous bourgeois figures in military garb, they profess a state philosophy: "l'autorité armée, religion suprême, sentinelle des repos, du pain et de la concurrence internationale." They mouth maxims about progress: "Et tout honnête homme, d'ailleurs, professe/ Le perfectionnement de l'Espèce." They are ugly, tasteless, inarticulate people who believe in Napoleonic ideals, detest such declassed ideologues as Iaokanann, and speak in clichés: "Leurs Altesses congratulèrent le Tétrarque, se félicitant eux-mêmes du bon vent qui... à pareil glorieux jour... en ces îles,—". By letting their words trail off and not filling in the holes, Laforgue not only conveys the emptiness of what they say, but also signals the parody. He alerts the reader to the presence of the medium, and calls attention to the author's role in the narrative. Here, he is leaving things out, and we must therefore suspect his narration as a whole. Although the Princes are uninteresting characters, relative to Salomé and the tetrarch, they have an important function in the parody, for they represent the reader. Like him, they see the curious world of the Isles for the first time and are asked to interpret it. More importantly, they must interpret its cultural myth, the recitation of Salomé in Part III. Significantly, everything goes by them completely: they are the poor readers that we should not be.

The presence of Iaokanann's two countrymen on the Isles makes the tetrarch especially glad that he listened to his daughter Salomé and did not have him executed. By this offhand reflection, with its startling piece of information, Salomé formally enters the story: in a shocking violation of the traditional legend, she has interceded with her father to spare the Baptist's life. The reason for her "inexplicables intercessions" remains for the moment unstated, and in fact will not be given explicitly until the end of the story, but already this detail focuses attention on the relations between Salomé and Iaokanann. Seen in the light of the tetrarch's worried reflection on Salomé's unmarried state, it hints at salomeé's motive for the beheading, which, until the end, also remains unnamed: her secret sexual relations with Iaokanann for which, as this detail suggests, she is responsible. The "Précurseur" of legend becomes "l'Initiateur", and she will make him pay for her own transgression and her guilt with his head.

The precise nature of salomeé's transgression is not identified until Part II, and even then only indirectly. Her brief appearance at three different moments, expressed in a repeated formula, provides the clue:

juste à temps pour voir disparaître une jeune fille [forme] mélodieusement [hermétiquement, décidément] emmousselinée d'arachnéenne jonquille à pois noirs.

This disappearing figure motif is inspired by a structurally similar feature of Flaubert's narrative, in which Salomé repeatedly eludes Herod, who glimpses her several times before he finds out, at the moment of the dance, who she is. Long before her seductive dance, she has aroused Herod's desire and thus guaranteed the fulfillment of her request. In Laforgue's version, the motif serves a different purpose entirely, since the theme of Herod's desire does not exist. Its recurrence makes conspicuous salomeé's dress, insists on it, and thus suggests that it holds some special significance. Unlike other aspects of her attire, such as her scarf and her headdress, it bears no resemblance to traditional representations of Salomé. The formula itself—"emmousselinée d'arachnéenne jonquille à pois noirs"—poses a certain problem of interpretation, though with some imagination it can be paraphrased as "dressed in a jonquilcolored grown of light chiffon." But the text will not permit this rationalization to suffice for long, for later, in Part III, it takes one quality of that attire—jonquille—and plays on it to describe the decor of the banquet hall: "cette aérienne salle jonchée de joncs jaune jonquille". Such outrageous word play calls attention to itself and begs for explanation. The text suggests that the answer lies in the significance of the color yellow, since elsewhere it associates this color with Salomé herself: not only the "jonquille" of her dress and, metonymically, herself ("la petite vocératrice joune à pois funèbres"), but also the decor of her apartments with which she has been identified, and the color of the moon that has been transferred to her. But it does not give us any hints as to the symbolism of this color, and the significance of salomeé's dress and of the color itself must be sought elsewhere, namely in "jonquille". This term communicates its meaning by virtue of a substitution that uses "jonquille" for its synonym, the metaphorically more obvious "narcisse".

This detail is important: the repressed term not only suits salomeé's narcissistic character but betrays, long before the end of the tale, the precise motive for the beheading. salomeé's relations with Iaokanann take her out of herself, a privilege formerly reserved for the stars: "Salomé ne sortait guère d'elle-même qu'aux étoiles." She has violated the narcissistic cult of the Isles that she represents and is supposed to uphold in her capacity of "cariatide des îles", a narcissism reflected in the isolated, closed atmosphere of the Isles ("archipel des cloîtres de nature"), and salomeé's own seclusion ("Oh! .. . la fine recluse des Iles Blanches Esotériques!"). As we will be told later, this "fatal sacrifice . . . l'avait obligée, pour faire disparaître l'Initiateur, à l'acte (grave, on a beau dire) nommé homicide." The repressed symbolism of her dress, the symptom of which remains visible in the conspicuous "jonquille", suggests the reason for her request.

The tour of the palace does not, as in "Hérodias", reveal the tetrarch's secret store of arms; rather, it elaborates the atmosphere of the Isles by presenting the various parts of the palace in the imagery and terms that Laforgue associated with Decadence. The party is led by the "Ordonnateur-des-mille-riens"; a "salle des Parfums", where Salomé concocts her special potions, is directed by the "Arbitre des Elégances"; utter silence characterizes the "parc suspendu", where great white swans bearing weighty earrings glide languidly through stagnant ponds. Laforgue plays with the conventions of Decadence—nothingness, aestheticism, silence—all of which he brings together in his most substantial embodiment of the spirit, the Aquarium. Labyrinthine, silent, claustral, humid, womb-like, "toute une flore fœtale et claustrale et vibratile", it represents the "béatitude aveugle et silencieuse" to which the Decadents of the Isles aspire, perfect tranquillity, stillness, and satisfaction, unlike the tormented, restless existence of men, perpetually unfulfilled. This mystical state of torpor will reappear in salomeé's hymn to nothingness and the Unconscious in Part III.

But the most eventful moment of the visit occurs, as in "Hérodias", in the basement of the palace, when they come upon the cell of Iaokanann.

Et soudain, on le vit se hausser sur ses pieds nus, les mains tendues à une apparition à qui il hoqueta les plus doux diminutifs de sa langue maternelle. On se retourna,—ah! juste pour voir disparaître dans un tintement de clés, sous le blafard de cet in-pace, une jeune forme décidément emmousselinée d'arachnéenne jonquille à pois noirs.

Laforgue's version of Moreau's famous "Apparition" retains the features of the pose (on tiptoe, barefoot, hands extended toward the apparition), but takes place before the beheading, for it inverts the characters. The "juste pour voir . . ." formula identifies the apparition as Salomé, and Iaokanann here adopts the celebrated pose that Salomé has in the painting. By reversing their roles, Laforgue not only calls attention to the parody, but also reinforces the thematic inversions that his account of the legend proposes. Salomé herself is a kind of prophet, having inherited the role from her father, and her chant in the next section will make this role clear. In the picture, Salomé is startled and frightened by her vision of the Baptist's head which haunts her, punishes her for her part in the execution. In Laforgue's story, Iaokanann is haunted by the vision—or glimpse—of Salomé; the parodic reversal of roles suggests that Salomé will take revenge on her lover, for a different but equally serious kind of execution. The childlike outburst of tender words in his "langue maternelle" (we have been told specifically beforehand that he knows how to speak the language of the Isles), and the "tendresse enfantine" with which he wipes up the ink that he has spilled hint at his relations with her. She has conquered him, though she has significantly weakened her own position in the process, and thus she must eventually have the witness of her fall, his head.

During the banquet scene of Part III, Laforgue teases us by delaying the arrival of Salomé on stage for the longawaited dance. He transforms the palatial hall into a circus tent and presents us with various acts before the feature performance—jugglers, organ-grinders, trapeze artists, and so on. Three clowns

jouèrent l'Idée, la Volonté, 'l' Inconscient. L'idée bavardait sur tout, la Volonté donnait de la tête contre les décors, et l'Inconscient faisait de grands gestes mystérieux comme un qui en sait au fond plus long qu'il n'en peut dire encore. Cette trinité avait d'ailleurs un seul et même refrain:

O Chanaan
Du bon néant!

Néant, la Mecque
Des bibliothèques!

Elle obtint un succès de fou rire.

By placing this parody within the parody, Laforgue not only mocks Schopenhauerian and Hartmanian concepts by using their terminology; he also presents us with a model for our reading of the larger "Salomé" text. In addition, if we realize that the refrain comes from one of Laforgue's lunar poems ("Litanies des derniers quartiers de la lune"), we see that the scene is a self-parody that makes some of Laforgue's own verses and favorite terms part of a circus act. The reader is forced to see an example for his own activity: if the author can parody himself, that is, "read" and "rewrite" his own works, then the reader must question the status of this work, the parody itself, and he must look at it with the same critical detachment with which the parodist "reads" the primary text. The critical function of parody is in this way extended to include self-criticism. Here, Laforgue's use of a cherished persona (the clown), of key words of his own thought and writings ("Volonté", "Inconscient", "Idée"), and of lines from his own poem, makes especially clear that he participates in the same Decadence which he mocks (he even provides us with the proper reaction); that his criticism is directed as much toward himself as toward others; and, by implication, that the parody itself has the status of an independent work and is therefore subject to the same kind of reading, interpretation, and recreation that it has applied to its target.

As the moment of salomeé's appearance approaches, Laforgue does give us a dance of sorts, which resembles closely enough the dance of Salomé to make us suspect that there may be no other. A young ice skater "valsa sur les pointes comme une ballerine" and leaves the stage skating on his hands. This recalls Flaubert's scene, in which Salomé finishes her dance by running across the stage on her hands. But Laforgue's skater specifically traces a gothic cathedral onto the ice, and with this added detail, the scene also evokes for us the celebrated representation that allegedly inspired Flaubert in the first place: the portal of the Rouen cathedral that depicts Salomé as an acrobat, dancing on her hands.

The scene of salomeé's performance represents a noticeable departure from all the Salomé stories, since it features a philosophical chant rather than a dance. Some recognizable Salomé details are present in her appearance: peacock feathers, the scarf that floats behind her, her pose ("délicatement campée sur le pied droit, la hanche remontée, l'autre jambe infléchie en retard à la Niobide"), all recalling Moreau's "Apparition". But this scene first suggests the link with Salammbô that I mentioned earlier. The two heroines share certain attributes of dress and appearance: powdered hair, the symbolic gold chain about the ankles, the pink mouth, the bare arms, the peacock-feather headdress, the black lyre. Both are associated temperamentally with the moon, as well as being its high priestess: Salammbô follows the cycle of the moon and literally grows weak as it wanes; and we are told that for Salomé, "pour faire un sort à la petite personne en question, la Lune s'était saignée aux quatre veines et .. . on la tenait d'ailleurs généralement . . . pour la sœur de lait de la Voie Lactée." Both descend the stairway slowly and, accompanied by a lyre, chant a near-incomprehensible hymn. Significantly for the Salomé story, Salammbô's incantation recounts the tale of a severed head, the story of Masisabal whose head was cut off, attached to the prow of his victor's ship, and carried along on the waves. The story is somewhat prophetic of the fate of Iaokanann's head at the end of "Salomé" which, thrown into the sea, is borne along by the waves.

The Salammbô connection is important for interpreting "Salomé". First, it reinforces the identification of the heroine as prophet, bard, and high priestess of the moon and its cult of purity. Second, it relates Salammbô's fortunes to salomeé's: for Salammbô, death is the price of sex, as it will be for Salomé as well, although nothing else in the story indicates this outcome. Salammbô functions as a key, transforming the fatal woman of the Salomé tradition into a Laforguian Decadent and assisting the thematic alterations to the story.

Laforgue's Salomé is always a distortion, however. Despite her physical resemblance to Salammbô, she does possess a significantly distinctive trait: her unusually large head, her "candide tête supérieure", so heavy that it literally and figuratively inhibits her actions. "Que sa tête lui était onéreuse! Elle ne savait que faire de ses mains, les épaules même un peu gênées." Her cumbersome head represents its overdeveloped, or in Decadent terms, hypertrophic faculty: she possesses in the extreme the overrefined, paralyzing consciousness that the late nineteenth century attributed to Decadence. We begin to suspect that it is salomeé's head that prevents her from dancing; her cerebral preoccupations and the imbalance that they cause keep her from performing the essential Salomé act. Ultimately it will cause her fatal topple in Part IV. The heavy head is also consistent with the inversion of Salomé and the Baptist that the story has maintained earlier, for it transfers his heavy head in the last sentence of "Hérodias" to her. Iaokanann's head will be buoyed up by the waters; salomeé's would be too heavy to float.

Although the scene of the incantation likens Salomé to Salammbô, Laforgue gives to his heroine quite a different text to intone from Salammbô's tale of the severed head: she improvises on the favorite Decadent theme of nothingness.

Que le Néant, c'est-à-dire la Vie latente qui verra le jour après-demain au plus tôt, est estimable, absolvant, coexistant à l'infini, limpide comme tout!

She sings of absolute harmony and prays for human beings to become passive, "des êtres atteints d'incurie", to live in "l'état pur" by giving themselves over to the force that governs the universe, the Unconscious, "la Grande Vertu Curative (disons palliative) qui raccommode les accrocs des prairies, des épidemies, etc.—Quia est in ea virtus dormativa. Va. . . . "

Her language, with its alliteration, its rhythms, its puns, constantly turns back on itself, plays with sounds, transposes one word into another: it is as narcissistic as she is:

Ça s'avance par stances, dans les salves des valves, en luxures sans césures; en surplis appâlis, qu'on abdique vers l'oblique des dérives primitives; tout s'étire hors du Moi!—(Peux pas dire que j'en sois.)

Such outrageous language obviously appears ridiculous. But there are other, more subtle things that make us suspicious of salomeé's chant. First of all, Laforgue leads us to believe that she is a fake who knows she puts on an ironic act:

Salomé, ayant donné cours à un petit rire toussotant, peut-être pour faire assavoir que surtout fallait pas croire qu'elle se prenait au sérieux, pinça sa lyre noire jusqu'au sang, et, de la voix sans timbre et sans sexe d'un malade qui réclame sa potion dont, au fond, il n'a jamais eu plus besoin que vous ou moi, improvisa à même.

The digressions, the familiar manner of speaking, and the words themselves call attention to the irony with which Laforgue treats his heroine. Salomé herself weakens her credibility considerably by her Latin quotation, which she alters according to her own purposes and consequently bungles. Changing the original "eo" (referring to opium) to "ea" is permissible, consistent with its feminine antecedent, vertu, but "dormativa" is simply wrong, the faulty ending conditioned by contamination from the preceding "Curative" and "palliative". She also chooses her authority badly: as always, Molière's joke ridicules purely verbal reasoning, and hers is verbal reasoning par excellence. Even more ironically, it reflects on the tedious, soporific chant itself, an opinion with which the Princes du Nord are inclined to agree: they are bored and they wonder what time she will be put to bed. salomeé's own words betray her; she is not only unintelligible and boring, but also inaccurate, and her verbal slip gives her away.

Salomeé's mystical ravings replace the more sensuous dance of her predecessors. She drops no veil but undergoes a quite literal deflowering: in the frenzy of her chant, the flowers fall from her breasts. Salammbô ends her recitation when her lyre falls from her and she herself falls silent; Salomé, typically, takes matters into her own hands and breaks her lyre over her knee. This action is significant: the broken lyre, like Salammbô's more conventional broken chain, clearly represents salomeé's ruptured virginity as well as her lost prophetic and artistic powers. Committing the act herself, she reveals herself to be responsible for her deflowering and, ultimately, for her fall. Here she commits a metaphorical suicide; her fatal tumble in Part IV, although an accident, is no less inevitable, for by her refusal to accept the new self that she has become, she has brought it upon herself. This "vocératrice jaune à pois funèbres" actually sings of her own death and wears the funereal attire of her own mourning. She dies not for having simply violated the moral code that she is supposed to enforce, but for having done so and wanted to return to her former narcissistic state. The moral of the epigraph begins to assert itself: "naître, c'est sortir; mourir, c'est rentrer". Laforgue tells us that "Salomé n'était plus la petite Salomé," she nevertheless tries to go back, and she will die for it.

Although Salomé forsakes the tradition of the dance, she remains true to her heritage at the end of her chant by asking for the head of Iaokanann on a platter. Laforgue's story has none of the traditional explanations (the ire of Herodias, the wrath of Salomé for having been scorned); but the text has provided enough hints for us to understand the reason for such a seemingly unmotivated request. Laforgue makes it explicit in Part IV, as Salomé holds court with the night sky:

D'abord, exorcisée de sa virginité de tissus, elle se sentait maintenant, vis-à-vis de ces nébuleuses-matrices, fécondée tout comme elles d'évolutions giratoires.

Ensuite, ce fatal sacrifice au culte (heureuse encore, de s'en tirer à compte si discret!) l'avait obligée, pour faire disparaître l'Initiateur, à l'acte (grave, on a beau dire), nommé homicide.

Enfin, pour gagner ce silence à mort de l'Initiateur, avoir dû servir, encore que coupé d'eau, à ces gens contingents, l'elixir distillé dans l'angoisse de cent nuits de la trempe de celle-ci.

But although things have gone smoothly for her so far, as the parenthetical aside informs us, we suspect that salomeé's fortunes are due to change. She is so ill-suited to her role that she had to resort to one of her occult concoctions, prepared, no doubt, in the Salle des Parfums, to enchant the audience and thus have her wish fulfilled. Despite her composure, she knows moments of real human anxiety, as she gazes at her favorite nebula, wintry Orion, symbol of her maidenhead. But she is determined to carry out her plan to dispose of the head, which she has elaborately and carefully prepared:

Or là, sur un coussin, parmi les débris de la lyre d'ébène, la tête de Jean (comme jadis celle d'Orphée) brillait, enduite de phosphore, lavée, fardée, frisée, faisant rictus à ces vingt-quatre millions d'astres.

It is significant that she has set the head among the pieces of the shattered lyre, symbol of her own "shattered" purity and powers. The parenthetical aside that likens the Baptist's head to that of Orpheus prepares the end of the story and its symbolism, the rise of a new, true poet to replace the ineffectual and fallen Salomé. She takes from her crown her greatest treasure, the opal representing Orion, and symbolically places it "comme une hostie" into the mouth of Iaokanann. With this gift of her virginity, Salomé confers upon him the role of poet that she can no longer fill. Giving the head a last kiss, she tosses it over the cliff into the sea. But Laforgue's "unfortunate little astronomer" has miscalculated and, "avec un cri enfin humain", she follows the head over the edge:

elle alla, dégringolant de roc en roc, râler dans une pittoresque anfractuosité que lavait le flot, loin des rumeurs de la fête nationale, lacérée à nu, ses diamants sidéraux lui entrant dans les chairs, le crâne défoncé, paralysée de vertige, en somme mise à mal, agoniser une heure durant.

Salomeé's gruesome end seems unwarranted, however artificial her existence has been, especially since she has finally become human. Even the famous Laforguian irony is rarely so gratuitously harsh as to condone such remarkable brutality. The answer, I think, can once again be found in the parody: salomeé's star-like diamonds that lacerate her body appear in another Salomé representation in slightly different form. Describing Moreau's "Apparition", Huysmans writes:

Sous les traits ardents échappés de la tête du Précurseur, toutes les facettes des joailleries s'embrasent; les pierres s'animent, dessinent le corps de la femme en traits incandescents; la piquent au cou, aux jambes, aux bras, de points de feu, vermeils comme des charbons, violets comme des jets de gaz, bleus comme des flammes d'alcool, blancs comme des rayons d'astre.

The gems of salomeé's costume seem to come alive by the light emitted by the Baptist's nimbus and to stab her: Laforgue leaves out its metaphorical sparks and stabs his Salomé quite literally with the jewels, each representing a star, with which she has dressed her hair. Moreau and Huysmans depict the Baptist's posthumous revenge on the woman whom they have described as his executioner and symbolic castrator: his image haunts her and frightens her. Laforgue, too, punishes Salomé, but more fatally and for a different reason: she is killed by the very emblems of her other-worldliness, her star diamonds.

Significantly, Iaokanann's head appears as a "phosphorescente étoile flottante .. . sur la mer", a star that is, so to speak, closer to earth than salomeé's. Like the head of Orpheus with which it has already been associated, it is buoyed up and carried along by the waters, and the allusion suggests that it will, like Orpheus, ultimately reach land and prevail. Iaokanann's position between the real world of the North and the aesthetic world of the Isles qualifies him for the role of poet. He belongs to the real world but does not share the despicable qualities of its representatives, the Princes du Nord; he has lived on the Isles but without adopting the manners and beliefs of the inhabitants. Salomé is too extreme, too far removed from reality, and thus she dies:

Ainsi connut le trépas, Salomé, du moins celle des Iles Blanches Esotériques; moins victime des hasards illettrés que d'avoir voulu vivre dans le factice et non à la bonne franquette à l'instar de chacun de nous.

If the moral of this moralité légendaire is a critique of Decadence for its factitiousness and its distance from life, Laforgue nevertheless reminds us that it has permitted the parody. It is Salomé who has made Jean the new Orpheus, both by her preparation of the head and by her bold venture out of herself, the sexual gift which her gift of the treasured Orion opal represents. Laforgue indeed accuses Decadence of killing itself and of thwarting its own aesthetic purposes, but he gives it credit for the parody by which, transformed, it lives.

The parody itself does not have the final word, however; it is another text, subject to the same sort of critical treatment that the target has undergone. The qualifying aside about Salomé ("du moins celle des Iles Blanches Esotériques") admits openly the existence of other Salomés, other versions of the story that are, or will be, as valid as this one. And the irony of the last line, with its quaint "à la bonne franquette" and its more literary "à l'instar de", points the mockery at the parodist and ourselves. The story has brought Decadence under fire, but it ends with the suggestion that the solution proposed in its stead may be no less absurd. For every Salomé there is, on the other side, a Prince du Nord. Parody resolves some of the questions but leaves itself open to question, to revision, to transformation; it does not kill literature, but rather assures its continuation. Laforgue's last sentence ironically proposes a whole new text, with the lesson of the parody itself at issue. Only this Salomé has died, only this Salomé has ended; the parody inspires a new story, a new heroine, "à l'instar de chacun de nous".