The Decadent Bestiary

From the Golden Fly to the Wounded Lion, animal tales of decadence, mystery, and the uncanny.

An original collection of animal stories and poems from fin-de-siècle England and France, selected, translated, and introduced by Jessica Gossling and Sam Kunkel. Bringing together works by forty writers including Michael Field, Remy de Gourmont, Lafcadio Hearn, J. K. Huysmans, Rachilde, and Eric Count Stenbock, this timely anthology explores the inexorable connection between human and animal, from the lion to the ant. Bringing together tales both familiar and largely unknown, some of them translated into English for the first time, The Decadent Bestiary opens a new chapter in the complex story of our relationship with the natural world, showcasing the beasts of beauty and burden that recur in decadent and symbolist writing.Beasts
Wild

• To Androcles’ Lion, Victor Hugo
• The Seal, Iwan Gilkin
• The Rat, Hector Chainaye
• Bats, Jules Renard
• The Lady with the Wolf, Renée Vivien

Domestic

• Pierrot, Guy de Maupassant
• With Dog and Dame: An October Idyll, Aleister Crowley
• The Greyhound, Iwan Gilkin
• The Hound, H. P. Lovecraft
• Sredni Vashtar, Saki
• Three cat poems from Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire, translated by Arthur Symons
• The Philosophy of Cats, Stanislas de Guaita

Birds
Land

• Peacocks: A Mood, Olive Custance
• Poem IX, Gustave Kahn
• Ennui, Maurice Maeterlinck
• The White Peacock, William Sharp
• The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde
• The Parrot, a Dark Tale, Catulle Mendès
• The Owls, Charles Baudelaire, translated by Arthur Symons
• Sunset Wings, D. G. Rossetti
• “L’Oiseau Bleu”: A Painting on Silk by Charles Conder, Max Beerbohm

Water

• The Egg of the Albatross, Eric Stenbock
• Ballad of the Bird-Bride, Rosamund Marriott Watson
• Upon the Threshold, Remy de Gourmont
• The Swan Killer, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
• The virgin, vivacious, and lovely day at hand, Stéphane Mallarmé
• Wild swans at Coole, W. B. Yeats

Insects

• The Dream of Akinosuké, Lafcadio Hearn
• The Caterpillar, Jules Renard
• Caterpillars, E. F. Benson
• To a Moth That Drinketh of the Ripe October, Emily Pfeiffer
• A Dream of Wild Bees, Olive Schreiner
• The Golden Fly, Algernon Blackwood
• The Study of a Spider, John Byrne Leicester Warren
• Arachne, Marcel Schwob

Fish & Herptiles

• The Berlin Aquarium, Joris-Karl Huysmans
• The Aquarium, Jules Laforgue
• Snake-charm, John Todhunter
• A Dying Viper, Michael Field
• To my Tortoise Chronos, Eugene Lee-Hamilton
• The Frog Killer, Rachilde

A Friend to the Animals, Léon Bloy
Bibliographical and Story NotesSam Kunkel is a French translator and scholar of nineteenth-century religious literature. He has translated and introduced Echoes of a Natural World by Gustave Kahn (2020) and A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest: Mystical Prose Works of Édouard Schuré (2021).

Jessica Gossling is Lecturer in English and teaches Victorian literature, decadence, modernism, poetry, and literary theory. Her research is primarily focused on French and English literary decadence, spatial theory, and occulture. She is a member of the Decadence Research Centre and she completed her PhD on Decadent Threshold Poetics in 2018.