“Septima” was written by Marcel Schwob and first appeared in Vies Imaginaires (1896). The French Schwob (1857-1905) was a writer noted for his scholarship and his short stories.

“Septima” is about Septima, an African slave in the Phoenician city of Hadrumetum. Her mother had been a slave, as her mother before her had been, and each had been “beautiful and unknown, to whom the dark gods had revealed the spells of love and of death.”¹ Septima falls in love with Sextilius, a young freeman, but their love cannot be, “for she belonged to those who knew the mysteries of the lower world and served love’s adversary whose name is Anteros...when Eros touched her with his flame, Anteros took the man she loved.”² Septima yearns for Sextilius, so she goes to the Necropolis outside of Hadrumetum and speaks to her dead sister, Phoinissa, who died a virgin at sixteen. Septima pleads with Phoinissa to speak to Anteros and Hathor on Septima’s behalf, and to make Sextilius burn with love of Septima. Phoinissa descends into the underworld, but Anubis and Hathor ignore her pleas, and she is unable to find Anteros. But Phoinissa feels pity for her sister and goes to Sextilius to do as her sister asked. As she sits down next on the bed next to the sleeping Sextilius, “Eros struck against Anteros, seizing the dead heart of Phoinissa, making her desire the body of Sextilius to sleep between her sister and herself in the house of death.”³ Phoinissa kisses Sextilius, killing him, and then returns to Septima and takes her hand, killing her. And the trio rest together in the Necropolis, Sextilius lying between Septima and Phoinissa.

“Septima” is a short, potent piece of dark fantasy. Although the French Academie has only recently deemed Schwob worthy of study, he and Imaginary Lives were influential in his lifetime and afterwards. As well-written examples of fictionalized biographies–many of the stories in Imaginary Lives are short biographies of real people–Imaginary Lives was devoured by and influential on Jorge Luis Borges, particularly in his A Universal History of Infamy (1935) and in some of the stories in Labyrinths (1962). It is not known whether Schwob was read by the outstanding American fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, but there are marked similarities in style between Schwob and Smith. The formal tone, emotional detachment, and irony in Imaginary Lives and “Septima” appear in many of Smith’s stories, especially his Zothique series (1932-1953). Schwob writes in vivid images, similar to the Decadents, and the association between love and death, so strong in “Septima,” appears in the Decadents as well as Smith.

Print: Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives, transl. Chris Clarke. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2018.

¹ Marcel Schwob, “Septima,” in Vies Imaginaires (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1896), 59.

² Schwob, “Septima,” 60.

³ Schwob, “Septima,” 66.