CHATEAU BOREL, PETRUS BOREL, AND CONRAD'S "UNDER WESTERN EYES"

Structurally and symbolically, Chateau Borel dominates Parts II and III of Conrad's Under Western Eyes like the threatening, sinister castle of a Gothic romance. However, the name itself reveals yet a third function. That Conrad freely satirized Leo Tolstoy and vented his dislike for Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the novel has long been an accepted fact,1 but an equally bitter animosity towards French Gothicism, particularly "black romanticism,"2 has gone unnoticed even though Conrad signaled it, I believe, by naming the Chateau after the extravagantly flamboyant Petrus Borel3 and by using romantic conventions similar to those found in writers connected with or influenced by Borel. Conrad's known dislike of French romanticism, Borel's reputation for extreme republicanism and particularly bloody sketches in horror, and Borel's house in Algeria argue that an association between the man and the chateau is quite plausible. Conrad was familiar with the works of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans and disapproved of them only slightly less than he did those of Dostoyevsky.4 Borel was a close friend of Gautier and directly influenced him and Baudelaire. As a less talented, less known but obvious romantic, he provided an appropriate symbol for one wishing to discredit the movement. Borel's own works,5 Rhapsodies (1832), Champavert, contes immoraux (1833), and Madame Putiphar (i839), combine all the excesses of a De Sade, Byron, or Poe in a primitive, yet intense style justifiably earning him the title, le Lycanthrope,6 as he chose to sign himself. The result is a melding of melodramatic extravagances and sensational horrors in which husbands dismember their wives' lovers, rivals hack each other to death, mothers abandon babies in cesspools, and insane lovers disinter corpses with macabre grotesqueness. One can see why Borel's writings could well have been included in Conrad's mention of "sensational novels" in his