The M’sieur Fleurnoir depicted in the press was not a far cry from the M’sieur Fleurnoir with whom I dined at the Cabaret Mort. There was the same baleful demeanor, the same pale gleam of malice in the eye, and his remarks, few as they were, never failed to be less than cutting. His silences of course were legendary, and as they grew in stature, so too did his ambition to attain the kind of silence the press described as “towering.” For those who liked their Fleurnoir undiluted, Wednesday’s interminable evenings were considered the best time to catch him. Being one of his few old friends, rather than one of his many ex-friends, I was permitted to sup with him, and sup we did, after a fashion. The odd oyster, a Vin Mariana or two, followed perhaps by an apricot or a dollop of blancmange. Fleurnoir always ate with an air of distaste, seeming to savour his reputation as one who’d subsisted for decades on a diet of raisins and boiled cabbage. He told me he’d never in his life tasted boiled cabbage – that, he said, was a newspaper invention! He had however lived for years on a diet of stale chocolate and gutrot coffee. Stickler for detail, Fleurnoir. Especially if the subject under discussion was himself.
He wasn’t all dirge. He liked it when the clapped-out pianola started up. That too of course may well have been irony. If so, then tiresomely so, and long may he wander the dread shores for it.
That Fleurnoir had lost his mind was one of those tales endlessly and carelessly retold – usually by those who should have known better than to tell, knowing as they did that Fleurnoir had indeed lost his mind. The tale’s appeal to those younger souls who frequented the Cabaret Mort was all too clear; they hoped for a glimpse of madness in action, and occasionally Fleurnoir would oblige with a show of staring at an object for eons on end, or he’d hug the clock that had no hands and simply weep. But whatever the symptoms displayed they would invariably leave the poor young souls disappointed. Fleurnoir knew this; hence the periodic displays.
With me, Fleurnoir had less need to act the part of himself, but there was no part of himself that had not been so endlessly rehearsed it couldn’t help but be acted. He seemed to be what he was and what he was he seemed to be, all the while of course being neither. His convictions were inlaid with arguments designed to prove their falsity. He doubtless expressed enthusiasm for what least moved him. Indeed I know that he did, how could I not. He seemed to be in many places at once while not quite being where he was. Conversation was a fitful affair. I would remark on the weather, and after a considerable pause, Fleurnoir might reply with a comment comparing cloud and mizzle to a particular soup available to the Poor. You could hear the capital P in the way he pronounced the word. Perhaps the one category of persons beyond his contempt, he being poor of course. – In the literal material economic sense. He could hold forth on other kinds of poverty sure enough. Poverty of heart poverty of thought poverty of interest poverty of imagination poverty of spirit poverty of conviction. The list doubtless went on, life not being short. I’ll not say poor Fleurnoir. There was nothing poor about him, penniless as he was. Too aloof to be thought poor. A downturned mouth on a head held high, his lips blackened at the edges from rumoured opium use, his eyes tinged a faint yellow in the Cabaret’s lurid light. Pardon my saying lurid light. He would not approve. I do not approve. Yet it’s how he thought fit to present himself. In that kind of light. And if people paid to see that kind of lurid, then maybe Fleurnoir at some point had simply sighed and thought fuck it, I’ll go play myself and get paid for it. If the floor’s a tad puddled and the clientele faintly herbivorous, it is nonetheless identifiably a place containing those creatures known as Others. After a lifetime of spare rooms and lumpy mattresses, such a place may stink of charm. He liked it there, at the Cabaret, dismal as it was. The place rarely if ever closed. Indeed I’ve never known it not open. But with M’sieur gone, it’s not the same place. There’s no one else keeps up appearances, or even attempts to, though Fleurnoir must’ve known the scuffed shoes and frayed sleeves were discernible enough to any observant eye. Now there’s barely an exchange of glances with anyone. And never a word of reply to anything I might say about the weather. That clapped out pianola starts up and no one so much as groans.
Image by Booth Kates from Pixabay – Three caberet dancers in feathered costumes and skimpy tops in black and white.
literally stories 
Geraint
Live debauched, too long then indifferently fill your spectral sheet is a preferable motto to the James Dean cliche. The object of the work is captured in words, succinctly, even elegantly. We all play a role; sadly, due to the boredom we cause and hammy behavior, I would not cast most people in the roles of themselves. Good for those who build an interesting legend, and plaudits to you for this fine bit of work.
Leila
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Geraint
I want to second Leila’s wise, beautiful words on this.
I can add that the character reminded me of Charles Baudelaire’s “flaneur,” the poet of the streets who sees beauty where others cannot and is defined as much by what he refuses to do as by what he does. He prefers children, cats, and dogs to most adults and if he dates anyone, which is rare, it’s usually a brilliant prostitute. Rimbaud also wrote like this, taking off from Baudelaire and straight to Patti Smith. There was also Oscar Wilde in the shadows drinking absinthe with Paul Verlaine and chain-smoking.
This is a great flash fiction like a prose poem, worthy of being re-read and studied. Entertaining in the best sense because it’s complex, brief, with density, and compacted.
Thanks!
Dale
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I really liked the tone of this and the style and the debauched hero. I suppose for there to be satellites there has to be a centre and I do so admire the idea of being your own person and not caring for, or being amused by the rest and there is always the ‘rest’. An entertaining read very well done. Thank you – dd
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Wonderfully atmospheric! It has a pervasive and skewed sense of oddness and decay. Not a piece I’d particularly like to recall to be honest but one I suspect will linger in my memories, like a peculiar smell!
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Geraint
Your every line was an act of trusting the reader. Get on board! The curvy sentences that eat themselves — poof. The precious tautologies that were perfectly sensible of Fleurnoir’s world. The comma-less list of the many “poverties” that abound around him.
And if I could have ripped off the hands of my clock, I would have held it to me and cried.
Perhaps its best quality was, how the dirge of sentences never relented. A lesser writer would have.
Think I loved it? It made me want to write a story about a guy I knew once!
Gerry
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Hi Geraint,
Simply put – A brilliant piece of character writing that left the reader wanting to know more!!!
Excellent!!
Hugh.
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Quite a character! Alool, mysterious and weird. Written with playfulness, dry wit, and a kind of poetic quality in the writing.
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I definitely want to know more because the character description is so engaging and rich, and Fleurnoir clearly has many, many stories within in and around him. The writing is great and really on point, but I also feel like I need more, that this feels like a lead in, a beginning…
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Geraint
Samuel Beckett wrote, in Stories and Texts for Nothing: “to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” This story, “Fleurnoir,” can sit comfortably with Beckett’s work, especially (in my opinion) Stories and Texts for Nothing, which is one of my very favorite works (not just by Beckett, by anyone). This piece also reads like a new “Illumination” by Arthur Rimbaud, or a late work by Paul Verlaine. And indeed, Verlaine even SEEMED TO BE “Fleurnoir” on one of my readings of this story (or Fleurnoir seemed to be Verlaine), the late Verlaine who was both famous and isolated, very famous, and VERY isolated, in his beloved Paris. There’s that picture of him sitting alone at a table with absinthe glowering at the world.
This story has a truly kaleidoscopic nature to it, as it’s like a piece of broken colored glass that gives the reader a new glimpse of reality every time it’s glanced into again. Someone, either Yeats or Larkin, said that a great poem needs to be read LINGERING-LY, and that is absolutely the finest and best way to read your story, because this piece contains a whole world that never feels quite the same as it did the last time every time a careful reader returns to it.
There are two main characters of course, the title character, AND the narrator…The title character dominates the story, but only at first….fairly soon, when considering this piece with the depth of response it deserves, one seems to realize that the main character IS NOT FLEURNOIR!….It’s the Narrator!!! After all, it’s his language, point of view, reflections, and presentation that is driving this flash fiction/prose poem more than in others. His writing style is beyond compare, it’s so one of a kind, ironic, iconic, profound, intriguing. The “sentence” about various kinds of poverty is both biblical and post-modern. I can’t say enough about the prose style in this piece. The best thing I could say about it is to compare it to Beckett again, which is the best thing one can say because, while this piece does not seem influenced by Old Sam on the surface, it has the same kind of mystery and self-contained wholeness to it that his prose style does, especially in Stories and Texts for Nothing. The only way one can PROPERLY respond to this story is by writing a Beckett-like response that somehow manages to contain the mystery too.
Sometimes Fleurnoir almost seems Dylanesque (in a weird, way, weird in the ancient, original sense of the word)…sometimes Chaplinesque, too (this serious story has levels of hilarity and irony in it that cannot be grasped by everyone)…other times he feels like he’s from an old, classic black-and-white movie from the 1930s, maybe made in Germany…and at another time, he’s morphed again and seems like someone else, though always himself, and the narrator, who remains in the shadows mostly, begins again to emerge as more vivid than the main character.
The Cabaret Mort becomes the world itself, the whole, entire modern world….the story stretches itself out from its private insularity to somehow contain everything in the current mortal sphere…while still remaining only its very private self! The very name Cabaret Mort tells the reader so very, very much! The characterizations, the world (and all the people in it), the language usage in this story make it, absolutely, one of the very, very best pieces I’ve read in LITERALLY STORIES…the cutting-edge, the avant-garde, is never dead, and this is a story that is (right now) helping to keep it alive!!!
I have to admit that I was really drawn to this story the first time I read it, and I liked it very, very much, but I did not like it as much as I do now, because I didn’t really realize JUST HOW GOOD IT IS! on my first reading. I knew it was good, but not HOW good! And I can say that I had the same reaction/feeling on my initial reading of Stories and Texts for Nothing…it hooked me the first time enough to draw me back to it again later, and only slowly did it begin to dawn on me what I had here, which was great writing beyond compare!!! I had the same feeling with the Mona Lisa….it took me years to even begin to understand the second-to-none greatness of the thing.
THANK YOU for writing, reading, commenting…
Sincerely,
Dale
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Quite staggered by your generous and enlightening comments. Thank you. Certainly Beckett’s Stories & Texts For Nothing are familiar to me – as are the works of Rimbaud and, to a lesser extent, Verlaine. In fact you were also spot on in your earlier comment – in October – with regards to Baudelaire. He’s the model behind it. I once tried to turn him into a kind of comic character, stubble-headed and sepulchral, adapting some of his prose-poems into one-minute monologues to be performed by a M’sieur Fleurnoir. Little came of it.
Enjoyed too your comments on Chris Klassen’s story ‘Notion’. As Herr Nietzsche put it, “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” The roll call of great writers known also as great walkers would include Dante, Mandelstam, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Walser, Thoreau, R.L. Stevenson, Kerouac, Chatwin and of course Nietzsche himself – not forgetting the still upright and active likes of Werner Herzog, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Patti Smith. That only one woman writer should spring to mind is odd, given that I’ve known several not-very-well-known ones who could outwalk the sturdiest – and the 19th century saw a good many stride out alone for regions remote and dangerous – Isabella Bird, Alexandra David-Neel and others. That you yourself walk at least 10 miles a day should be spur enough to any would-be walker currently seated or recumbent! I’m serious. It’s good to be re-minded – a reminder being as good as a prod.
Looking forward to reading more of your meditations, essays, stories. Much taken too by your poems as featured in e.g. Braided Way Magazine.
Thanks again Dale.
Geraint
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Geraint
Thanks for letting me know about Baudelaire!…the fact that I was on the mark the first time with this means more to me than I can explain…it makes my day, and even my Holiday Season! One of the brilliant aspects of your story is that one gets the hints and shades of Baudelaire, without being able to tell, and/or without thinking, that it’s really him…the fact that it’s based on him, but isn’t him, so to speak, is truly brilliant! And: “stubble-headed and sepulchral” – it somehow nails him in a phrase. His life is as fascinating as his work, and sometimes more so, and your story nails that aspect as well…again, without letting the reader know it’s him, which is a flash of symbolic/symbolist greatness. Your story really does do him, Rimbaud, Beckett et al justice… that’s a literary accomplishment I truly envy. (If Bob Dylan read your story, I have a feeling it would make him jealous and inspire him to write a song…)
Your list of famous literary walkers is also extremely amazing, and I’ve already read it and pondered upon it several times…yes, Rousseau for sure, and he captures it in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, which is a book I used to carry in my pocket while walking. To the list can also be added Oscar Wilde and Soren Kierkegaard…Wilde said his greatest comfort after getting out of prison was walking on the boulevards and in the countryside in France (under his alias, Sebastian Melmoth), and Kierkegaard said he’d walked himself into every great idea he ever had….Your list of great walkers is one I will be returning to for inspiration in the days ahead…Thank you! Thanks also for reminding me of Chatwin…..THE SONGLINES is such a great book! I read it three or four times in a row when I first discovered it without reading anything else…
Thanks for reading my Braided Way work….that poem was written in less than five minutes, but had been building up inside for at least a year (probably longer). (It’s also been re-posted by other people I don’t know on Substack a few times…)
Dale
PS, They say Dylan is also a great walker….puts his hoodie on so no one knows who he is…
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Geraint
I wrote a reply to your latest comments this morning, but I don’t remember if I hit “Reply” or “Leave a Comment,” just fyi…
Here are two quotations I believe fit in well with Fleurnoir and our walking discussion earlier as well as Chaplin/Kafka etc…
“The forest was all about me and the boughs, twining together at a prodigious height, compared to mine, sheltered me from the light and the elements. Some days I advanced no more than thirty or forty paces, I give you my oath. To say I stumbled in impenetrable darkness, no, I cannot. I stumbled, but the darkness was not impenetrable. For there reigned a kind of blue gloom, more than sufficient for my visual needs. I was astonished this gloom was not green, rather than blue, but I saw it blue and perhaps it was. The red of the sun, mingling with the green of the leaves, gave a blue result, that is how I reasoned. But from time to time. From time to time. What tenderness in these little words, what savagery. But from time to time I came on a kind of crossroads, you know, a star, or circus, of the kind to be found in even the most unexplored of forests. And turning then methodically to face the radiating paths in turn, hoping for I know not what, I described a complete circle, or less than a circle, or more than a circle, so great was the resemblance between them. Here the gloom was not so thick and I made haste to leave it. I don’t like gloom to lighten, there’s something shady about it. I had a certain number of encounters in this forest, naturally, where does one not, but nothing to signify…I never really had much love to spare…” – Samuel Beckett
“The next day being quite fine, though cold, I took a walk as far as the Military Academy, expecting to find some mosses in full flower there.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thanks again!
Dale
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Thanks again Dale. Your take on matters always inspiriting. The Beckett passage tremendous. . . Didn’t know that fine Wildean alias Sebastian Melmoth. And that glowering quaffer Verlaine, didn’t he sometimes go by the name Duchatelet? And Rimbaud, trawling for a job, put an ad in The Times calling himself ‘Tavant’ – before later working his passage aboard ship posing as one Edwin Holmes. Karl Marx often used the nom de guerre A.Williams. And if I’m not much mistaken Nietzsche had initially wanted his Human, All Too Human to be published under the name Bernard Kronck. There’ll be a heap of other examples – and there’s doubtless some lightfooted study to be made on these nominative matters – if it’s not been done many times already. And yes, can well imagine the ever-quirky Dylan ambling the roads in a hoodie. Genuinely strange dude, often endearingly so. Apparently, during a lull on one of his UK tours some years ago, he went into the London Underground with his guitar and busked on the platform, making perhaps £5 in all; some commuters were heard to mutter things like “He thinks he’s Bob bloody Dylan” as they passed by . . . On another occasion, so it’s told, again in London, he took a taxi to what he thought was Dave Stewart’s house – he of the Eurythmics – but got the address slightly wrong e.g. 12 Sefton Road rather than 12 Sefton Park. At the incorrect address lived Dave, a plumber, and his family. Dylan was invited in and went on to spend half the afternoon chatting with Dave the plumber and his wife before eventually heading off for the other Dave’s house. Such good humoured charm to these tales. I once had a conversation with Judy Gascoyne (wife of poet David Gascoyne) who was Dylan’s landlady during the Isle of Wight Festival and she found him to be just that, good humoured and very courteous – and, if I remember rightly, extremely partial to Cornish pasties.
Go well Dale.
Geraint
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