The Peculiar Case of the Jewelled Tortoise, or: Thoughts Towards a Jewellery of the Decadent Woman

Abstract

A hunger for refinement, originality, and the will to bend nature to the artistic imagination: the transformation of a tortoise into a living jewel, as detailed in the fifth chapter of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, has become an iconic image of the decadent sensibility. That this living jewel became a reality, however – that life, quite literally, imitated art – is a fact barely known today; indeed, decadence itself seems to be a chapter curiously absent from jewellery history. Yet during the winter of 1897-98, tiny jewelled tortoises, harnessed in gold and glistening with precious stones, trod the corsages of daring Parisiennes and were readily recognised as a ‘joaillerie décadente’.^[i]

^[i] Tiburge, ‘Causerie’, Les Veillées des Chaumières, 12 February 1898, pp. 237-38 (p. 238).