1858: Lord Alban Fitzartur
Private papers
This afternoon I went to the library in search of a parcel of letters—dull correspondence from Father’s estate accountant—and while rummaging through the trunk beneath the window (the old one with brass corners and a broken latch) I came upon something I had not expected at all. It contained not accounts, but contraband of the most exquisite sort: books my father would condemn on sight and burn without remorse, as he did poor Shelley’s verse when I was ten. Why, then, they should be hidden here of all places, in his own domain of pious catalogues and parliamentary papers, I cannot imagine. Concealment suggests shame, yet his footmen dust this room weekly and no one remarks upon the trunk. Perhaps it belonged to Grandfather—the libertine Duke—whose portraits Mother cannot bear.
At first I thought them foreign bibles: gilt lettering, faint perfume of tobacco and ink. But when I opened the first, Les Fleurs du mal by one Charles Baudelaire, I realised I tread on dangerous, delightful ground. Evil flowers — what an intoxicating notion! I lingered upon those words as one might over wine forbidden by the doctor. The lines within seemed to glow like embers: sin made articulate, melancholy dressed in velvet. Instead of condemning pleasure, this Parisian creature makes of it a kind of sacrament. He praises desire, decay, and perfume with the gravity of sermon, but a sermon turned inside out.
And there, in the margin of one poem titled La Débauche — To my Youth, I read a word which startled me: décadent. I had heard it muttered once in chapel, hissed through a curate’s teeth as though venomous. Decadence, they say, is the rot of the soul, the slide from virtue into velvet ruin. Yet in this Frenchman’s company it feels quite another thing—not decay but refinement, the deliberate bruising of experience to release its rarest scent. He writes as if the pursuit of beauty and sensation were not sin, but salvation from the dull sermon of progress.
Beside it lay another volume, Théophile Gautier’s essays, their pages foxed with affectionate handling. He continues the theme, though more elegantly: decadence as devotion to the exotic, the elaborate, the unnecessary. He argues for art as dream, for life conducted as pageant rather than duty. Reading him, I felt as though he had given language to an appetite I did not yet dare to name—the longing for worlds more radiant than the one prescribed.
The church tells us that pleasure is evil because it distracts from God. But what if pleasure is the sign of divinity, the living spark within the clay? What if the so‑called “fall” was merely man’s first dance? When I read Gautier describing the artist’s surrender to fantasy, I felt some answering stir within myself—not wickedness, but recognition.
I replaced the books at dusk, though reluctantly, hiding them beneath the dull ledgers where no servant will trouble them. Yet I find myself changed. There was a scent upon those pages—not merely of Parisian dust, but of liberation. Perhaps Father has forgotten them, or perhaps he remembers and cannot admit their power. If decadence means awakening to beauty through disobedience, then I am content to be decadent.
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