Arria Marcella by Theophile Gautier (1852)

Another slice of voluptuousness. Whereas many of the author's pieces in this mode were published early on, this one proves that the preoccupation was a long-lived one, as it was published in 1852, a good decade and a half into his career. In this, three sensualist young Italian men visit Pompeii and are fascinated by the ruins and artifacts retrieved for the museum. Gautier describes them and their impressions very much from a Parisian standpoint, likenings abounding to French originals and ways of thinking. Max and Fabio are fairly straightforward creatures, Octavian is a historic dreamer. He becomes obsessed by one of the 'casts' displayed in a glass cabinet, which outlines the form of a superbly rounded young woman delineated into a casing of ash and cinders. At dinner that night, with the wine flowing, Max and Fabio rib Octavian about his melancholic fascination with this twenty-centuries-dead creature. When they tumble off to a drunken sleep, Octavian, who is less affected, decides that he'll go for a walk in the ruins as he can't sleep. But under the pressure of the wine, the enchanted moonlight and the urgent call of his soul, he begins to see Pompeii come to life as it was in AD 79. It starts with shadows flitting just out of eyeline and then buildings resume their complete shapes. He begins to see the denizens walking the streets in full view. Then they start to notice him and wonder at his strange attire. Eventually, a young man of the town takes him under his wing as an incomer who needs a welcome. He organises for Octavian to attend the play that is about to be put on. The audience mutter confusedly and curiously about Octavian when he enters the amphitheatre, but they are quickly distracted by the comedy on stage, as is he. Part way through he notices among those in an adjoining stand a young woman who absolutely arrests his attention. As he marvels over her sultry beauty the realisation dawns on him that this is the original of the 'cast' in the museum! Arria Marcella herself is before him. She notices him too, and after the play has her slave Tyche seek him out for an assignation. Tyche leads him through the alleys of the town to the home where, twenty centuries later, the melancholy cast was found, now resplendently beautiful. After he undergoes a ritual bathing, the two finally meet and talk, Arria Marcella explaining that it is his belief in her and the profound urgings of his soul that have brought her back to corporeality. Their sensuality heightens until the curtain is brushed aside angrily and they are faced with her father, Arrius Diomedes, a believer in the then new cult of Christ. He excoriates Arria Marcella for her sensualist ways, exhorts her to stop, and having received a defiant negative, screams out an exorcism which defeats her. She crumbles back to dust in Octavian's arms, her father disappears, and he slumps to insensibility in a small chamber in what is now again the ruins. This is lovely, deeply coloured and entertaining stuff, which Gautier uplifts to other heights with discursions upon the power of the imaginations of true believers and what they mean to art, and psychological and historical detail which enliven it.