Excerpts

"It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savor this bitter fruit with impunity." Chants de Maldoror - Comte de Lautréamont (1846 – 1870)

Prologue

Very little is known about Isidore Lucien Ducasse, who would later take on the pseudonym Le Comte de Lautréamont, a name he took from the title of a Eugène Sue novel -- Làtreaumont -- inspired by the extreme arrogance of its Byronic hero. What historical information does exist is based mainly on wildly apocryphal writings, speculation, recreation and even biographical invention which has proven to distort the true picture of Ducasse/Lautréamont’s life and yet given birth to an almost legendary mystery.

Born during The Great War on April 4th, 1846 in Montevideo, Uruguay to a French Consular Officer and his wife, Ducasse was remembered as being a sullen introvert with a sharp voice and a distant, scornfully proud demeanor. His teachers were dismayed with his "excesses of thought and style," characteristics which would subsequently earn him a permanent place in French literature.

Raised in a time of civil war, (Oribe’s nine year-long siege of Montevideo has been described by Alexandre Dumas as "the new Troy," a beleaguered city overrun by the armies of bloodthirsty Argentinean dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas), in a capital city where outbreaks of cholera beset the region, Ducasse’s mother died when he was only 18-months-old, a suspected suicide.

Near the end of 1867 Ducasse, at the age of twenty-one, moved to France, living in a hotel room in Paris on a generous allowance given by his father, and began composing the infamous Les Chants de Maldoror -- mal d’aurore, or dawn of evil -- whose main character Maldoror, was similar to Eugène Sue’s hero, a narcissistic misanthrope. His exploits would encompass murder and sadism with a menacing and unrestrained savagery designed to debase humankind and rebel against God. The novel was printed in the summer of 1869, though publishers feared prosecution because of the blasphemous and obscene nature of the work and ultimately never made the book available to the public.

On July 19th, 1870, France declared war on Prussia. By September, France was ignominiously defeated by Prussia at Sedan. The Empire fell and the Republic was proclaimed. The siege of Paris began and with it, increasing hardships, a severe winter, chronic food shortages that would lead to famine and a series of epidemics (smallpox and tuberculosis).

Ducasse died of unknown causes on November 24th, 1870. He was only 24-years-old. His death certificate simply states: "The twenty fourth of November, eighteen hundred and seventy, two p.m., death certificate of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, man of letters, aged twenty-four, born in Montevideo (South America), died this morning at eight o’clock in his domicile, Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, 16 – single (no further information)." His life and death are utterly consistent in their mysteriousness and impenetrability.

Ducasse/Lautréamont died alone and unknown. It was not until a Belgian literary journal published Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror in 1885 that his work began to emerge from obscurity and find an audience among the literary avant-garde. It was the 1927 publication of Lautréamont at Any Cost by the Surrealists Philippe Soupault and André Breton that assured Ducasse/Lautréamont his current status in French literature as the patron saint to the Surrealist movement.

Chapter 1

November 24, 1870 -- Paris, France

Isidore sat at the oak writing table next to the window, head in his hands, and wept.

Suffering from unrelenting headaches, he blamed them on shame and contempt, and prayed. "Heaven grant that my birth be not a calamity for this country, which has driven me from her breast," he said, sobbing.

From land to land he’d go, hated everywhere. Some say he’d been stricken since childhood by a type of inherited madness. Others held that he is of an extreme and instinctive cruelty of which he himself is ashamed, and that his parents died of grief because of it. There are those who maintain that he was branded with a nickname in his youth and that he has for the rest of his existence remained inconsolable, because his wounded pride saw in this a flagrant proof of men’s wickedness, which shows itself from earliest years and increases thereafter. This nickname was The Vampire!

There was still blood staining his hands, black under his fingernails like ground in dirt, and his clothes were wrinkled and unlaundered. The room weighed heavy with the stink of death and unwashed hair and Isidore was sick with the muted cries of those suffering in the streets. The city was plagued. Famine, syphillis, tuberculosis and smallpox swept the countryside, and the Prussian siege would bring the fall of Paris in all its babylonian glory. The red banners of the worker’s revolution billowed in the winds, and the ghastly sight of piled up dead only fed the flames of miserable defeat with souvenirs of pious sorrow. One could measure the dead by the rod. There they lay, tier above tier, each successive tier powdered over with a coating of chloride and lime. Among the dead were many women. There, thrown up in the sunlight, ringed fingers and busts still shapely in death. Faces distorted out of humanity with ferocity and agony combined. The ghastly effect of the dusty white powder on the dulled eyes, the gnashed teeth, and the jagged beards. He shuddered at the sight of it.

He recalled the face of the child. The young girl whom he’d so brutally murdered only hours before. Flashes of his blade tearing into her delicate cheeks and the dizzying scent of salt on her flesh, sweat, tears and blood tracing lines down her tiny throat and across her boyish undeveloped body. "You liked it," Maldoror growled from inside him, the fever-dream of his alter ego burning in the back of his chest and deep in the pit of his belly. "You wanted it, you wanted to fill that child with all your fuck as badly as I did, you twisted hero of killers."

"Shut your mouth!" Isidore said, gritting his teeth as he doubled over in the chair nursing his stomach as though he might vomit at any moment.

Flashes of the dead girl. Her cold black hair falling in shining tresses over her small shoulders, and her dark eyes beaming brilliantly with fear and desperation. "Please sir," she said, "spare me this punishment." And he admired her courage as he sliced open her trunk and gutted her without hesitation, spilling her intestines onto the sand and taking delight in the warm squishing sounds of her sopping bloody organs.

Isidore choked and vomited, drenched in bile, he dropped to his knees, Maldoror’s constant hissing pricking his brain like probing black eyes and insatiable need. "No one is ever going to read your...masterpiece," Maldoror said under his breath with a low contemptuous thunder, the sound a snake would produce if only it could laugh. "Your father pays you to stay away, how else could you afford to live in such luxury, pathetic remittance man that you are, your peers think you weak!"

"I deride your illusions of power," Isidore said, pulling himself up to look upon his reflection in the mirror.

"Forget this place, this world of men, you’ve seen into the depths of the human heart and what did you find? Blackness. A void filled with nothing more than greed and sin. Men...brothers of leeches and fathers of fools. Why fight? Why continue this stupid quarreling, you know resistance is fruitless."

Another flash of the dead child like photographs branding themselves into the unforgiving landscape of his memory. Sixty-five pounds of pale flesh hacked almost to pieces, and that shining black hair, matted into locks of coagulated blood and dirt, her big globules of deadpan eyes and those miniature expressionless hands.

"Your mother killed herself because she feared your evil, young Isidore Lucien, evil, you are evil, like me." Isidore watched his reflection, sneering and growling at himself in the mirror, his own mouth contorted into a hideous mask of horror.

"I hate you! ¹Vous êtes si laid!" Isidore was screaming at the mirror in a desperate wail of pain and loathing. "I fucking hate you! ²Mon Dieu! You sick bastard, you’re mad, you’re mad, you’ve gone completely mad!" He slammed his fist into his reflection and sharp shards of mirror came apart into a noisy heap.

He wiped his eyes and stared down at the fragments of broken polished metal.

"No one will know you Maldoror!" Isidore picked up the largest and sharpest point of splintered glass. "My annihilation will be complete!" He jammed the glass shard deep into his throat, blood spraying across the wall, he fell to the marble-tiled floor and with his last breath, looked up into his walled sky, the fourteen-foot stucco ceiling looking back down at him as though with pity and sadness.

¹ "You are so ugly!"
² "My God!"

Chapter 2

November 24, 1994 -- Toronto, Canada -- 124 years later

It was a Friday night and Belle was once again, locked in her room crying. Her crackhead boyfriend had stolen three hundred dollars from her wallet and left her waiting, like an idiot, in a hotel lobby. She’d loitered there for an hour, having been mistaken for a prostitute twice before she realized painfully, that Michael had stood her up again.

She could barely speak she was so disappointed. Just lay there in her shitty double bed in her shitty room staring at the nicotine veneer on the stucco ceiling. Her mother’s boyfriend was in the other room complaining they’d run out of beer, and while she listened through the walls, the tones of perfect hate resonating through their petulant exchanges, I hate my fuckin’ gene pool, she thought, and simply continued to lie there and plan her demise, imagining what her tombstone might say.

HERE LIES ISABELLE LOUISE DUCETTE, the stone would read, DAUGHTER, FRIEND, 15-YEAR-OLD REPROBATE AND STILL NOT LISTENING. R.I.P.

Belle smirked at the thought. She was down to the last of her benzodiazepines and decided to steal a fresh bottle of barbiturates from her mother’s purse, pain relief for her stress-induced migraines. The effects of an overdose were coma and death and Belle had made sure to bypass the coma phase, heading directly into death by taking the entire bottle, a dose that could easily bring down a small elephant.

This time she’d be dead for sure, unlike the first time when the dose wasn’t high enough and she’d ended up in hospital, the staff psychiatrist looking down at an over-medicated teenager and saying, "Do you always whine like this?" Isabelle had wanted to reply with a simple, go fuck yourself, but instead chose to nod politely, "Yeah, it’s not really working for me, obviously," a much less predictable response, she thought.

Once she’d taken all the pills, she hid the empty bottle under her mattress in an effort to hide the evidence, should anyone attempt to thwart her suicide. She crawled into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin and proceeded to cry like the lovesick schoolgirl she was. Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting album was playing and she hummed along, her weeping creating a kind of eerily deranged death song.

The numbness began to take over slowly and she even smiled a little with the relief of it. "Cool," she thought, "this shit really is pain relief." Suddenly Isabelle didn't give a shit about anything at all. The empty feeling in the back of her chest was gone, and the buzz from the drug just wrapped its arms around her, all warm and sweet like a gentle lover. It was quite possibly the euphoric and hallucinogenic aspects of the drug kicking in because a strange character she’d been dreaming about, a kind of vampiric entity, was pushing the hair from her face and whispering in her ear.

"Shh...don't cry my love, those vultures can't have you now, they're all gone." His words were like music and with the mere inflection of his imagined voice, all of life's small tortures had vanished. "I know I left you for awhile, but see...I’m still here, you know I’ll always come for you." He knelt next to Isabelle’s bed, resting his head just below the nape of her neck, taking in the sweat-salt scent of her. "I’ve done away with them, I tore their fingernails out, one at a time, so as to cause them as much pain as you have endured, I cradled one's head between my hands carefully, forcing my thumbs deep into the sockets of his eyes, I tore the eyes from his head and threw them to the ground, so that he can never look upon such beauty and harm you with his vile treachery. I crushed one's skull with swift hammer blows, spilling his brains onto the streets, and to the other, I tore his tongue from his mouth and snapped both of his arms like twigs, forcibly feeding them to him until he swore he'd never utter another hateful word or raise another fist."

Protected. Loved. Isabelle felt loved. It was so unfamiliar and so sweet and it didn't seem to matter that she’d apparently made it all up in her head. Dreamed it like the romanticized sexual fantasies of a bored housewife. It felt real.

She lay on her belly, face in the pillows and let her vampire’s fingers run soft across her neck and back. "That’s it my love, you can rest now," he said, "I’m going to take you to that invisible world, I know you want to go there, and we'll be there soon..."

Isabelle had recently seen the movie Lady Jane. Cary Elwes and Helena Bonham Carter starred in the film and in it they’d quoted Plato –- "The soul takes flight into a world that is invisible, and there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise." Exactly what she’d imagined about the world of the dead. A world with no fear. Il morto sono non più solitario -- The dead are no longer lonely.

She felt his imagined lips kiss the small of her back. "I promise Belle, I won't let anyone hurt you, ever again..." he said as the thin, sharpness of his fingernails cut into the backs of her knees and though Isabelle winced at the pain, it seemed almost comforting still, like sleep. One knee at a time, he tore open the flesh and she felt his mouth close over the wounds and the points of his teeth as he drained the blood from her body. She felt weak now. Cold. The sound and movement around her became dulled and the room was brighter suddenly, like high beams. "Don’t be scared my love, we'll be there soon." He kept whispering with a warmth in his voice, bringing on an ecstasy that would soon erase the shitstorm that was Isabelle’s wasted youth.

"I’ll never be alone again," Belle said, turning to look deep into her imagined vampire’s liquid blue eyes.

The air in the room was thick with blood.

Belle was lying, half-conscious on the bathroom floor. She could hear people moving in the room and her friend Tess was shouting, her frantic voice all around, ricocheting off the walls in vibrating echoes.

Is that Tess? I think she may have found me out. Had I attempted to go to the bathroom? For godsakes! Stupid smallest bladder in the entire universe! Belle thought. She was frustrated now, her suicide attempt was going to fail -- again. She couldn’t even kill herself right.

Despite the drug-induced haze, she slowly came to realize there were police officers in the room. They were rummaging through her bedroom, tearing the room apart in search of any evidence that might explain exactly what had made her sick. One of the officers said, "Do you know if she's tried to kill herself?"

And then Tess said, "No she didn't, she didn't, it was an accident!"

"Say, I’m not in trouble with the cops am I?" Belle said, her speech was slurred like a happy wino on a bender. The paramedics had arrived, and began attempting to bring Belle into a more conscious state of awareness. They picked her up and tried to force her to walk. She fell. They picked her up again and began yelling out her name.

Then black.

Now she was on her back and moving. There were bright lights above and one of the medics put a mask over her mouth. She’d been wheeled into the ambulance, crying now and calling for her Mom. Isabelle was frightened. She began calling for her boyfriend as well, the abusive drug addict with whom she’d had a turbulent on-again, off-again relationship. She called him by his name and then heard someone say, "Who's Michael? Can we get Michael in here? I just got her back!" She started to cry again, knowing Mike would never show up in a million years and it was the black that came again instead.

Belle woke up in a hospital emergency room vomiting black curds into a large, blue plastic bowl. They’d shoved a funnel down her throat and filled her belly with a viscid, liquid charcoal. Evidently the revolting sludge acts as a stomach pump by coating the lining of your gut to stop it from absorbing the drugs, and then inducing what seemed to Belle, like some seriously intense projectile vomiting. She was covered in thick, black puke and now she was just pissed off, sobbing and screaming, "Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I was fuckin’ sleeping you assholes!"

Understandably, the attending nurse took on the role of unsympathetic bitch and replied, "If you can swallow a bottle of pills, you can swallow that too."

That's when Belle looked down and realized her arms had been strapped to the gurney with leather restraints, and once all the fight had gone out of her, she’d fallen onto her back and lay there crying quietly, spitting unpleasant bits of charcoal onto the clean hospital sheets.

Another nurse leaned in, close enough that Belle could smell the soap on her well-scrubbed face. She pulled the hair out of Belle’s eyes and wiped the sweat from her forehead, whispering, "Why are you crying?" Isabelle stopped for a moment and looked up. The nurse was Filipino, she could tell from her accent and though her brain was working out all the reasons for which she was lying there bawling her eyes out, fully intending to answer the question, it turned out she’d said nothing at all, just lay there, looking up at the Filipino nurse and wondering, rather stupidly, why so many nurses are Filipino.

Isabelle’s mother ran into the room from behind a curtain-wall, puffy and red-eyed and Belle began throwing up again. Through the feverish blur of sweat and vomit, she could swear she saw the vague outline of her father, her real father, but when she looked up he was gone.

Once all the wretching was over and the room was quiet, the doctors had attached Isabelle to several machines, heart monitors and intravenous fluids. Another staff psychiatrist entered and with a contrived calm, looked down at Belle and said, "You've taken some very dangerous drugs, when you're feeling better, we can talk about why you did that."

She hated his condescending manner and angry she was still alive, still trapped in this mortal coil, Belle put on her defensive, juvenile delinquent hat and said, "Could I please have a fucking cigarette?"

Several hours had passed and Isabelle found herself alone in the dark, cold and frightened and surrounded by wires, cables and beeping machines. She began to cry again, wishing, praying and hoping beyond hope that her imaginary vampire would come for her, sweep in like magic to take her away from this ugly place.

Chapter 3

Isabelle sat in the back of the stolen SUV, the door open and her legs dangling over the edge of the seat. She was licking the remains of an apple pie with whipped cream off a paper plate. "Izzy, you didn’t get enough whip cream," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and smearing her cherry lipstick.

"My love, you are sweet enough as it is no?" Isidore crawled into the back seat behind her and kissed the back of her neck, making her shrug and giggle.

"Cut it out!" she laughed, raising her voice over the din of the stereo. "We have to go soon."

"Soon Belle, not now," and his hand slipped under the cotton of Isabelle’s shirt, her girlish laughter only encouraged him and he smiled. ³"J'ai cherché les coins de la terre pour vous."

"What does that mean?" her voice throaty and her head thrown back.

"Your mouth, it tastes of sugar my love," Isidore looked down at her face, her eyes closed and her shoulders bared. He put a hand over her throat and tracing the bottom lip of her half-smile with his thumb, began to kiss her again.

"Hm...I love you Isidore," she whispered swooning.

Isabelle liked that his French accent seemed to get thicker whenever he was aroused. She felt safe with him. Familiar, as though she’d known him all her life. There was an unspoken bond between them, a spiritual link, she’d felt strangely drawn to him and was galvanized in his presence. Gripped in an almost hypnotized state of wanton desire for him. He was tall and beautiful, with dark hair that fell over his shoulders and the liquid blue of his eyes penetrated the very core of her soul. Her sweet rebel prince, he wouldn’t just look at her, he held her with his gaze in a ginger and delicate embrace.

She took in his scent of harvest and musk, bare boned and reeling, pushing her smeared cherry lipsticked lips into his. He touched her chin and spoke all the right words. Everything Isabelle had ever wanted to hear. It was almost as though he could read her thoughts; he knew exactly what she wanted, even before she knew it herself. She adored him and would follow him into the mouth of hell. Perhaps she already had.

The driver of the SUV was slumped in the front seat, his throat cut and the heavy metallic blood smell filled the air.

³ "I have searched the corners of the earth for you."