That Old-Fashioned Morphine
Miss Emma in the Belle Époque
Maurice Talmeyr, Les Possédés de la morphine (Paris: E. Plon, 1892) pp. 16-18 (my translation):
“When I take morphine, I never experience the romantic optimism that people talk about,” said one woman. “Instead of seeing life through rose-coloured glasses, everything takes on the dismal hue of melancholy. The simplest things, the most insignificant things, assume gloomy proportions. A lamp glowing in a room, a book on a table, a chair near the fire — I do not know why, but they fill me with terribly dark thoughts. They may be quite ordinary objects, but they make me uneasy, and I find them sad; while looking at them I think about how death must come one day, and I tell myself that everything is awful, that everything is vile, and that it is horrible to live to see what you see, with the things and people that surround you, and that it would be better to die straight away... I am unable to explain how a book or a lamp can inspire these kinds of ideas, but the more I look at them, the more clear these ideas become — they envelop me, suffocate me, bury me. The book or the lamp seem to become more sinister, and the mystery of all these impressions pushes me further into despair. That’s just the way it is… But I can't put it all into words… Other people become morose when they drink wine. I become morose when I take morphine.”
Susannah Wilson has written an interesting article about cultural representations of morphine use in France between 1870 and 1916 (also available on Academia.edu). She mentions Léon Daudet’s La Lutte, a novel about a young doctor’s struggle to abandon his debauched life and overcome his addiction to morphine — as far as I can tell, it remains untranslated.
When it comes to bringing fin-de-siècle and decadent literature into English, the harvest is plenteous but the labourers are few.
Title of this post courtesy of Jolie Holland.
In an earlier post, I forgot to include a link to a virtual tour of Jeanne Mammen’s tiny studio in Berlin. I’ve updated it here.
Sounds like a good reason not to take morphine!