Êtes-vous fous?

by René Crevel

Êtes-vous fous? by René Crevel is a novel written in the early 20th century. It plunges into a feverish, surreal Paris where a disoriented man—soon rechristened M. Vagualame—stumbles from a mocking, personified City to a fortune-teller’s prophecies and into the orbit of the enigmatic Yolande. With demi-mondaines, a Prince, and visions of colored infants and flaming birds, the book satirizes fate, desire, illness, and modern decadence through hallucinatory episodes and razor-edged wit. The opening of the novel personifies the City as a frigid temptress and follows a man shaken by an autumn morning into the lair of Mme de Rosalba, a fortune-teller whose trance-visions predict a marriage to a redhead, a blue baby, ruinous pleasures, and the entanglement with the glamorous Yolande, while scolding his “vague à l’âme” and offering absurd cautions. Reeling out, he recalls a wintry delirium when a “flame-bird” burst from a trombone and his illness led him to a Swiss sanatorium of balcony-bound patients and dueling gramophones; adrift again in fog, he accepts his new name, meets the alluring Yolande, and follows her home. There she rejects Rosalba’s gossip and unveils the incredible: she is a “living dead” woman sustained by a mummified fakir, once the dancer-spy Myrto-Myrta who moved through Viennese court intrigue, was betrayed by a mysterious lover-officer, executed, and then resurrected—only for her English savior to die in her cold embrace—after which she remade herself as Yolande. As she continues, the tale rewinds further to her childhood as Camille with her twin Pauline in Picpus—a cocher father’s fatal accident after a “prépuce” misunderstanding, a widow’s Italian lover who abuses the girls, and their exile to a fairground with their marraine Rachel, the future Mme de Rosalba—where the excerpt breaks off.