It is significant that the letter Harry presents as Huysmans’ second letter to her should actually have been written in late 1904. Moreover, the possibility that Huysmans’ first meeting with Harry took place either in late 1903 or early 1904, rather than in 1902 as she claims, is supported by other documentary evidence. Abbé Mugnier was one of Huysmans’ close confidantes during this period, and his Journal, which wasn't published until after Harry's death, refers to numerous conversations he had with him. The first reference that Mugnier makes to Harry in relation to Huysmans is an entry dated 25 April 1904, in which he writes:

Huysmans nous parlait, hier soir, de Myriam Harry qu’il connait. Une Allemande et une Orientale tout ensemble. Elle est née à Jérusalem. Elle a l’horreur de protestantisme, elle est païenne et ne croit qu’à la chair. C’est une allumeuse. Son livre la Conquête de Jérusalem renferme de vraies pages d’art.(10)

The implication of this is that their friendship is of a fairly recent date. Ironically, Harry herself recalls Huysmans telling her that he had talked to Mugnier about her,(11) but while she places this incident early on in their relationship, i.e supposedly between December 1902 and November 1903, we can see from the journal that this conversation actually took place at the end of April 1904. However, there is a more conclusive proof for their friendship having commenced at a later date than the one Harry claims, and that is Huysmans’ own assertion, made in a letter to Léon Leclaire of 12 March 1904, in which he states that his relationship with Harry began ‘il y a déjà des mois, sous le couvert de visite de petite confrère’.(12)

Further proof of Harry’s unreliability, if not her downright mendacity, becomes clear once one starts checking her statements against the factual evidence. Unfortunately, even though the falsity of some of her stories can be proved simply by checking the dates of the incidents she mentions, none of Huysmans’ biographers seem to have done so. Instead, they have reprinted her fabricated version of events unchecked. For example, in various versions of her memoirs, Harry claims that she sent Petites épouses to Huysmans while he was still in Ligugé and that he was under the impression she was a male writer, but that when he returned to Paris he found out she was a woman after having seen a photograph of her dressed in Chinese robes on the cover of a magazine. In Trois ombres Harry goes on to say that when she mentioned the magazine to Huysmans he then pulled it out of the drawer in his desk.(13) However, by looking at the chronology of events one can see that this anecdote is false. In the first place, Pétites épouses was published in April 1902 and Huysmans had returned to Paris from Ligugé in November 1901, so he could not have read the book there or be under any delusion while he was there that she was a man. Conclusive proof that the story is a total fabrication lies in Harry's careless reference to the photograph on the cover of the magazine: although Harry sets the incident in 1902, during what would have been a significant — and surely memorable — first meeting with Huysmans, the picture of Harry dressed in Chinese robes actually appeared on the cover of La Vie heureuse of April 1904.(14)

Having proved that Harry deliberately made false and misleading claims about the chronology of her friendship with Huysmans, I want to turn now to three other contentious assertions that Harry makes in the course of Trois ombres and see how well they stand up to a more rigorous scrutiny. First, the claim that Huysmans travelled to Belgium with the Countess de Galoez, otherwise known as ‘La Sol’; second, that Huysmans considered committing suicide in 1901; and third, her claim to have visited Huysmans just before he died.

As regards Huysmans’ supposed trip to Belgium with La Sol, Harry gives a highly theatrical account of this expedition. She recounts that during the journey, La Sol came to his compartment at night, that 'la tentation était trop forte; ils ne pouvaient plus se contenter d’une platonique amitié…': , and that 'tout sa gâta'. They then separated not wanting to see 'leur rêve ravalé à de basses réalities charnelles.'(15) However, despite Harry’s dramatic recollection of the incident, there is absolutely no evidence that Huysmans travelled in Belgium or Germany with La Sol. Harry is most likely misremembering somethings she has either heard or been told by Huysmans, as in a letter to Cécile Bruyère of 30 July 1899 he says that La Sol went to Bruges in 1897 to solicit help from ‘un affreux prêtre démoniaque que j’ai peint dans Là-Bas, sous le nom de chanoine Docre.’(16). The Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal contains Pierre Lambert’s annotated copy of Harry’s memoirs and his view of this absurd claim is succinctly summed up by the double lines and a question mark inscribed next to the text.(17)

This notion that Harry picked up pieces of information from other people who knew Huysmans and then reused them, often incorrectly, in her own memoirs seems to be echoed in another of Harry’s claims, that Huysmans contemplated suicide in 1901. It is unlikely that, given his views on the subject of suffering and the will of God, Huysmans would have seriously considered suicide at this period, and he gives no hint of such feelings in letters to two of his closest friends, Arij Prins and Léon Leclaire. In the Abbé Mugnier’s Journal, we can see several entries covering the period when Huysmans lived at the rue Monsieur address. Mugnier mentions that Huysmans was unhappy there — mostly because it was so cold — and complained about it at the time, but gives no hint that it was depressing him so much he actually considered suicide.(18) Mugnier does, however, refer to the subject of suicide in a conversation he had with Huysmans in 1892, during which Huysmans said that ‘influences diaboliques’ had urged him to kill himself. Although Mugnier’s Journal itself wasn’t published until many years after Harry’s death, it is perhaps no coincidence that this passage about suicide was published for the first time in René Dumesnil’s La Publication d'En Route (1931), just a year before Harry’s own book came out.(19) Significantly, although several of the claims made in Trois ombres also appeared in earlier versions of Harry’s memoirs, the reference to Huysmans’ thoughts of suicide doesn’t appear in any of the memoirs published prior to the publication od Dumesnil’s book. It is not beyond the bounds of speculation to suggest that Harry inserted these dramatic ‘revelations’ into her book not only to attract attention to it, but also to publicly ally herself with a writer whose reputation was enjoying something of a renaissance at the time. Ironically, a reference to suicide does appear in one of Harry’s ‘memoirs’ of Huysmans published before 1932, the version that appeared under the guise of fiction in Le Tendre Cantique de Siona (1922). However, here it is Siona, the Myriam Harry character, who initiates the subject in the course of a conversation about the difficulties of writing. Siona says to Mirmans (the Huysmans character), 'Il y a des jours où, réellement, j’ai songé à me suicider pour une phrase incomplète,' to which Mirmans replies, 'J’ai connais ça!'. In any event, whether she was refashioning the revelations in Dumesnil’s book or misremembering her own conversations, there is no supporting evidence for her suicide claim, and a considerable weight of evidence to suggest that it was an anecdote she herself fabricated.(20)

The last claim I want to look at here is that involving Harry’s supposed visit to Huysmans just before he died. In Trois ombres, Harry provides a moving account of going to visit Huysmans in early 1907 only months before his death on 12 May. She recalled how thin he seemed, and she congratulated him on having received the légion d’honneur. They talked for a while, but she then had to leave due to the arrival of the doctor, and as Huysmans opened the door for her, he called her by her Christian name for the first time. As she walked down the stairs, she looked back and saw him still standing by the door. Tears sprang into her eyes and with a pounding heart she wished him a loving adieu. This heartfelt scene would indeed be one of the most moving of Huysmans’ life, but for the fact that it is completely fabricated, conjured up some twenty-five years after the writer’s death. If we look at Harry’s account written in 1908, a year after Huysmans’ death, we get a much starker, and much truer picture of events. Harry left Paris for Tunisia sometime after April 1906. She describes visiting Huysmans before she left, and then she says, in her own words, ‘Je ne devais plus le revoir’. She was away for about a year, during which time she says that he sent her a copy of Les Foules de Lourdes and wrote her a letter, dated 5 January 1907. Harry’s 1908 memoir concludes with a statement that she only learned from ‘Madame Bavoil’ that Huysmans was dead the day after his burial.(21) In other words, writing a year after the novelist’s death she makes no reference to having seen him before he died, and indeed explicitly states that the last time she saw him was early in 1906. Harry wrote another article on the third anniversary of Huysmans’ death, published in the Revue des Temps Présent, of 2 April 1910, and yet again, there is no mention of a final visit. Indeed, there is no reference to a ‘last visit’ until after 1927, the year in which Huysmans’ secretary Jean de Caldain died, as he was the only person who could have refuted her story. Although her accounts in the Revue de Paris and Revue des Temps Présent so dramatically contradict the one she gives in Trois ombres, the fabricated memoir has remained unchallenged since its first appearance and has now regrettably passed into literary history.

Taken together these instances of factual innaccuracy, half-truths and out-and-out fabrication, place a large question-mark over Harry’s trustworthiness as a witness to the events of Huysmans’ life. It is to be hope that more letters between the two writers will come to light in the future. It is only by gaining access to the originals of Huysmans’ letters that researchers will be able to map out a factual chronology of his relationship with Harry and begin to correct her numerous errors that have not only gone unchallenged, but have unfortunately worked their way into the official narrative of Huysmans’ life since his death.

Addendum

The sale of Myriam Harry’s archives in 2019 inadvertently revealed another of Harry’s misrepresentations, further undermining her credibility as a witness. In Trois Ombres (pp. 33-34), Harry describes how, as she is leaving Huysmans’ study after what she claimed was her first visit, she noticed a pile of new books, copies of the recently-published De Tout. Huysmans took one and dedicated it to her with the inscription A madame Myrrhiam Harry, respectueusement son dévoué, G. Huÿsmans. But while Harry’s archives did include four copies of books that carried inscriptions from Huysmans to Harry, De Tout was not one of them. Harry’s copy of De Tout (as well as a 1903 copy of L’Oblat) was actually signed to Georges Vanor (1865-1906), the symbolist poet with whom Harry had had an affair in 1897 and who was most likely the man who facilitated her meeting with Huysmans. Once again, another piece of Harry’s ‘evidence’ that she visited Huysmans before 1903 (De Tout being published late in 1902) turns out to have no substance, and reveals a deliberate attempt to falsify the facts.

NOTES

(1) Fonds Lambert 48.

(2) Information on Faouaz Perrault-Harry (Chombard-Gaudin gives his birth name as Faouaz Qabalân al Hatim, though an internet search returns no results on that name) is equally scarce. Evidence from letters and photographs would suggest that he was about ten years old when the Perrault-Harrys were first introduced to him, probably some time around 1926. He was apparently still alive in 2005 when Cécile Chombard-Gaudin wrote her initial biography of Harry, which would have put him in his nineties at the time. But he must have died sometime after that, though there is no information about his death in the second edition of Chombard-Gaudin’s book of 2019. Harry’s archives were sold at auction in 2019, presumably after the death of Perrault-Harry’s partner.

(3) Email from Cécile Chombard-Gaudin to author, 1 June 2006. Chombard-Gaudin’s recent biography, L’Orient dévoilé: Sur les traces de Myriam Harry (Turquoise, 2019) offers a slightly revised account of the friendship between Huysmans and Harry than that contained in her original version of Harry’s life, Une orientale à Paris: Voyages littéraires de Myriam Harry (Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005). However, Chombard-Gaudin still relies far too heavily on Harry’s own unsupported version of events as recounted in Trois ombres, despite the existence of Huysmans’ 1904 letter and the internal evidence that disproves Harry’s chronology. It is to be hoped that a later edition will incorporate this documentary evidence and give a more nuanced and factually accurate account.

(4) Myriam Harry, Trois ombres (Flammarion, 1932), p. 19.

(5) The letter was originally sold in a Christie’s auction of ‘Important mobilier et objets d’art: Flammarion’ in 2003. Presumably the letter was acquired or came into Ernest Flammarion’s possession around the time of the publication of Trois Ombres, which his firm published in 1932.

(6) Manuscript copy in possession of the author. In the preface to L’Orient dévoilé, Cécile Chombard-Gaudin states that Harry’s adopted son, Françoise Perrault-Harry, destroyed Harry’s literary archive before his death, which may mean that the originals of Huysmans’ letters to Harry will now never come to light. The single letter printed here which escaped this destruction clearly reveals Harry’s willingness to publish fabricated ‘evidence’ in order to boost her own literary reputation. While he was alive, Perrault-Harry consistently refused to allow anyone access to Harry’s archives, and this may have been to stifle evidence of her intellectual dishonesty. It isn’t exactly clear how this 1904 letter came to separated from the rest of the Harry archive – it is possible that Harry gave it to Flammarion as a memento of Huysmans, but this is just speculation. Despite Chombard-Gaudin’s reference to the destruction of the archive, at least some of it appeared in an auction sale in Paris early in 2019, so it may have been a selective process. Interestingly, a Huysmans-related lot appeared in the sale, consisting of four books dedicated to Harry by Huysmans. The two original editions – Trois primitifs and Les Foules de Lourdes – date from 1905 and 1906 respectively, while the other two, La Cathédrale and En rade are from later editions – the former was a 25th edition from 1904. Harry did possess an original signed copy of De Tout (which also appears in the auction sale), but it was dedicated to Georges Vanor, who she had an affair with and who was most likely the man who facilitated her meeting with Huysmans.

(7) Ghislain de Diesbach (ed.), Journal de l’abbé Mugnier, 1879-1939 (Mercure de France, 1985), p.149.

(8) Joseph Daoust, J.-K. Huysmans: Directeur de conscience, lettres inédites à C. Alberdingk Thijm (Durand et Fils, 1953), p. 7.

(9) The suspicion that Harry fabricated the published versions of her letters becomes almost a certainty after seeing another lot in the Harry archives auction sale mentioned above. This consists of three partial ‘transcriptions’ of letters from Huysmans in Harry’s handwriting, though as the originals have never surfaced it is more than likely that these are simply fabrications. The fragments have some similarities with versions published in Trois ombres, but there are clear differences, showing that Harry has invented or fabricated large portions of the letters she published.

(10) Ghislain de Diesbach (ed.), p.146.

(11) (Trois ombres, p. 51)

(12) Huysmans to Léon Leclaire. Fonds Lambert 60.

(13) Myriam Harry, ‘En Mémoire de J.-K. Huysmans’, Revue de Paris, 15 May 1908; Trois ombres, p. 23-24.

(14) Harry also recounts an anecdote during this period which she claims took place in 1903. She recalls Huysmans proffering an unflattering comment about Charles Deremme, who had just sent Huysmans his latest book of poems, La Tempête. However, the book wasn’t published until 1906.

(15) Trois ombres, pp. 67-8.

(16) René Rancoeur, Correspondance de J.-K. Huysmans avec Madame Cécile Bruyère, Abbesse de Sainte-Cécile de Solesmes (Paris: La Pensée Catholique 13, 1950), p. 22.

(17) Copy of Trois ombres in Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

(18) Ghislain de Diesbach (ed.). See entries for 8 and 23 May 1902 (p.132), for example, where Huysmans admitted that he felt ‘déprimé’, and told Mugnier that he ‘veut quitter son apartment’.

(19) Réné Dumesnil, La Publication d’En Route (Société Française d’Editions Littéraires et Techniques, 1931), p. 88; Ghislain de Diesbach (ed.), p. 76.

(20) In an article published in Candide in 1932, Harry again imputed thoughts of suicide to one of her biographical subjects: Anatole France. She reported France’s wife and former mistress, Emma Laprévotte, saying: “Oh ! vous ne sauriez croire combien nous étions malheureux, désemparés, abandonnés de tout le monde. M. France, sans amis, sans bibelors, sans livres, accusé de toutes sortes de forfaits, a sérieusement songé, je vous assuré, au suicide...” It is probably no coincidence that Laprévotte, the only person who could have proved or disproved Harry’s story, had died two years previously in 1930.

(21) Harry betrays herself again here in that Julie Thibault, the model for Madame Bavoil, had left Huysmans’ service in 1899, years before Harry’s first visit to the writer. Anyone who knew Huysmans well would have known that his housekeeper up until the time of his death was not the Madame Bavoil of his novels.

Bibliography

Dumesnil, René. La publication d'En Route de J.-K. Huysmans. Societé Française d'Editions Littéraires et Techniques, 1931.

Harry, Myriam. Revue de Paris, 15 May 1908.

Harry, Myriam. Revue de Temps Présent, 2 April 1910.

Harry, Myriam. Le Tendre Cantique de Siona, Fayard, 1922.

Harry, Myriam. Trois ombres, Flammarion, 1932.

Mugnier, Abbé. Journal 1879-1935, Mercure de France (1985).

Rancoeur, René. Correspondance de J.-K. Huysmans avec Madame Cécile Bruyère, Abbesse de Sainte-Cécile de Solesmes. Paris: La Pensée Catholique 13, 1950.

© 2006 (original article revised in 2022 to include new information and details).