AGAINST THE GRAIN by Joris-Karl Huysmans

 Translated by John Howard

 Contents

 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16

 Chapter 1

The Floressas Des Esseintes, to judge by the various portraitspreserved in the Chateau de Lourps, had originally been a family ofstalwart troopers and stern cavalry men. Closely arrayed, side byside, in the old frames which their broad shoulders filled, theystartled one with the fixed gaze of their eyes, their fiercemoustaches and the chests whose deep curves filled the enormous shellsof their cuirasses. 

These were the ancestors. There were no portraits of their descendantsand a wide breach existed in the series of the faces of this race. Only one painting served as a link to connect the past and present--acrafty, mysterious head with haggard and gaunt features, cheekbonespunctuated with a comma of paint, the hair overspread with pearls, apainted neck rising stiffly from the fluted ruff. 

In this representation of one of the most intimate friends of the Ducd'Epernon and the Marquis d'O, the ravages of a sluggish andimpoverished constitution were already noticeable. 

It was obvious that the decadence of this family had followed anunvarying course. The effemination of the males had continued withquickened tempo. As if to conclude the work of long years, the DesEsseintes had intermarried for two centuries, using up, in suchconsanguineous unions, such strength as remained. 

There was only one living scion of this family which had once been sonumerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Ile-de-Franceand La Brie. The Duc Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose anddelicate hands. 

By a singular, atavistic reversion, the last descendant resembled theold grandsire, from whom he had inherited the pointed, remarkably fairbeard and an ambiguous expression, at once weary and cunning. 

His childhood had been an unhappy one. Menaced with scrofula andafflicted with relentless fevers, he yet succeeded in crossing thebreakers of adolescence, thanks to fresh air and careful attention. Hegrew stronger, overcame the languors of chlorosis and reached his fulldevelopment. 

His mother, a tall, pale, taciturn woman, died of anaemia, and hisfather of some uncertain malady. Des Esseintes was then seventeenyears of age. 

He retained but a vague memory of his parents and felt neitheraffection nor gratitude for them. He hardly knew his father, whousually resided in Paris. He recalled his mother as she lay motionlessin a dim room of the Chateau de Lourps. The husband and wife wouldmeet on rare occasions, and he remembered those lifeless interviewswhen his parents sat face to face in front of a round table faintlylit by a lamp with a wide, low-hanging shade, for the _duchesse_ couldnot endure light or sound without being seized with a fit ofnervousness. A few, halting words would be exchanged between them inthe gloom and then the indifferent _duc_ would depart to meet thefirst train back to Paris. 

Jean's life at the Jesuit school, where he was sent to study, was morepleasant. At first the Fathers pampered the lad whose intelligenceastonished them. But despite their efforts, they could not induce himto concentrate on studies requiring discipline. He nibbled at variousbooks and was precociously brilliant in Latin. On the contrary, he wasabsolutely incapable of construing two Greek words, showed no aptitudefor living languages and promptly proved himself a dunce when obligedto master the elements of the sciences. 

His family gave him little heed. Sometimes his father visited him atschool. "How are you . . . Be good . . . Study hard . . . "--and hewas gone. The lad passed the summer vacations at the Chateau deLourps, but his presence could not seduce his mother from herreveries. She scarcely noticed him; when she did, her gaze would reston him for a moment with a sad smile--and that was all. The momentafter she would again become absorbed in the artificial night withwhich the heavily curtained windows enshrouded the room. 

The servants were old and dull. Left to himself, the boy delved intobooks on rainy days and roamed about the countryside on pleasantafternoons. 

It was his supreme delight to wander down the little valley toJutigny, a village planted at the foot of the hills, a tiny heap ofcottages capped with thatch strewn with tufts of sengreen and clumpsof moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he wouldlie, listening to the hollow splashing of the mills and inhaling thefresh breeze from Voulzie. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs, to the green and black hamlet of Longueville, or climbed wind-swepthillsides affording magnificent views. There, below to one side, asfar as the eye could reach, lay the Seine valley, blending in thedistance with the blue sky; high up, near the horizon, on the otherside, rose the churches and tower of Provins which seemed to tremblein the golden dust of the air. 

Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. Byprotracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form. After each vacation, Jeanreturned to his masters more reflective and headstrong. These changesdid not escape them. Subtle and observant, accustomed by theirprofession to plumb souls to their depths, they were fully aware ofhis unresponsiveness to their teachings. They knew that this studentwould never contribute to the glory of their order, and as his familywas rich and apparently careless of his future, they soon renouncedthe idea of having him take up any of the professions their schooloffered. Although he willingly discussed with them those theologicaldoctrines which intrigued his fancy by their subtleties andhair-splittings, they did not even think of training him for thereligious orders, since, in spite of their efforts, his faith remainedlanguid. As a last resort, through prudence and fear of the harm hemight effect, they permitted him to pursue whatever studies pleasedhim and to neglect the others, being loath to antagonize this bold andindependent spirit by the quibblings of the lay school assistants. 

Thus he lived in perfect contentment, scarcely feeling the parentalyoke of the priests. He continued his Latin and French studies whenthe whim seized him and, although theology did not figure in hisschedule, he finished his apprenticeship in this science, begun at theChateau de Lourps, in the library bequeathed by his grand-uncle, DomProsper, the old prior of the regular canons of Saint-Ruf. 

But soon the time came when he must quit the Jesuit institution. Heattained his majority and became master of his fortune. The Comte deMontchevrel, his cousin and guardian, placed in his hands the title tohis wealth. There was no intimacy between them, for there was nopossible point of contact between these two men, the one young, theother old. Impelled by curiosity, idleness or politeness, DesEsseintes sometimes visited the Montchevrel family and spent some dullevenings in their Rue de la Chaise mansion where the ladies, old asantiquity itself, would gossip of quarterings of the noble arms, heraldic moons and anachronistic ceremonies. 

The men, gathered around whist tables, proved even more shallow andinsignificant than the dowagers; these descendants of ancient, courageous knights, these last branches of feudal races, appeared toDes Esseintes as catarrhal, crazy, old men repeating inanities andtime-worn phrases. A _fleur de lis_ seemed the sole imprint on thesoft pap of their brains. 

The youth felt an unutterable pity for these mummies buried in theirelaborate hypogeums of wainscoting and grotto work, for these tedioustriflers whose eyes were forever turned towards a hazy Canaan, animaginary Palestine. 

After a few visits with such relatives, he resolved never again to setfoot in their homes, regardless of invitations or reproaches. 

Then he began to seek out the young men of his own age and set. 

One group, educated like himself in religious institutions, preservedthe special marks of this training. They attended religious services, received the sacrament on Easter, frequented the Catholic circles andconcealed as criminal their amorous escapades. For the most part, theywere unintelligent, acquiescent fops, stupid bores who had tried thepatience of their professors. Yet these professors were pleased tohave bestowed such docile, pious creatures upon society. 

The other group, educated in the state colleges or in the _lycees_, were less hypocritical and much more courageous, but they were neithermore interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettasand races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortuneson horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting tobrainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt anoverpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed tohim so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardentreactions or excitement of nerves and blood. 

He gradually forsook them to make the acquaintance of literary men, inwhom he thought he might find more interest and feel more at ease. This, too, proved disappointing; he was revolted by their rancorousand petty judgments, their conversation as obvious as a church door, their dreary discussions in which they judged the value of a book bythe number of editions it had passed and by the profits acquired. Atthe same time, he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires ofthe bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they mightstifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritanswhom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker. 

His contempt for humanity deepened. He reached the conclusion that theworld, for the most part, was composed of scoundrels and imbeciles. Certainly, he could not hope to discover in others aspirations andaversions similar to his own, could not expect companionship with anintelligence exulting in a studious decrepitude, nor anticipatemeeting a mind as keen as his among the writers and scholars. 

Irritated, ill at ease and offended by the poverty of ideas given andreceived, he became like those people described by Nicole--those whoare always melancholy. He would fly into a rage when he read thepatriotic and social balderdash retailed daily in the newspapers, andwould exaggerate the significance of the plaudits which a sovereignpublic always reserves for works deficient in ideas and style. 

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge ofhuman stupidity. 

A single passion, woman, might have curbed his contempt, but that, too, had palled on him. He had taken to carnal repasts with theeagerness of a crotchety man affected with a depraved appetite andgiven to sudden hungers, whose taste is quickly dulled and surfeited. Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavishsuppers where, at dessert, tipsy women would unfasten their clothingand strike their heads against the tables; he had haunted the greenrooms, loved actresses and singers, endured, in addition to thenatural stupidity he had come to expect of women, the maddening vanityof female strolling players. Finally, satiated and weary of thismonotonous extravagance and the sameness of their caresses, he hadplunged into the foul depths, hoping by the contrast of squalid miseryto revive his desires and stimulate his deadened senses. 

Whatever he attempted proved vain; an unconquerable ennui oppressedhim. Yet he persisted in his excesses and returned to the perilousembraces of accomplished mistresses. But his health failed, hisnervous system collapsed, the back of his neck grew sensitive, hishand, still firm when it seized a heavy object, trembled when it helda tiny glass. 

The physicians whom he consulted frightened him. It was high time tocheck his excesses and renounce those pursuits which were dissipatinghis reserve of strength! For a while he was at peace, but his brainsoon became over-excited. Like those young girls who, in the grip ofpuberty, crave coarse and vile foods, he dreamed of and practicedperverse loves and pleasures. This was the end! As though satisfiedwith having exhausted everything, as though completely surrendering tofatigue, his senses fell into a lethargy and impotence threatened him. 

He recovered, but he was lonely, tired, sobered, imploring an end tohis life which the cowardice of his flesh prevented him fromconsummating. 

Once more he was toying with the idea of becoming a recluse, of livingin some hushed retreat where the turmoil of life would be muffled--asin those streets covered with straw to prevent any sound from reachinginvalids. 

It was time to make up his mind. The condition of his financesterrified him. He had spent, in acts of folly and in drinking bouts, the greater part of his patrimony, and the remainder, invested inland, produced a ridiculously small income. 

He decided to sell the Chateau de Lourps, which he no longer visitedand where he left no memory or regret behind. He liquidated his otherholdings, bought government bonds and in this way drew an annualinterest of fifty thousand francs; in addition, he reserved a sum ofmoney which he meant to use in buying and furnishing the house wherehe proposed to enjoy a perfect repose. 

Exploring the suburbs of the capital, he found a place for sale at thetop of Fontenay-aux-Roses, in a secluded section near the fort, farfrom any neighbors. His dream was realized! In this country place solittle violated by Parisians, he could be certain of seclusion. Thedifficulty of reaching the place, due to an unreliable railroadpassing by at the end of the town, and to the little street cars whichcame and went at irregular intervals, reassured him. He could picturehimself alone on the bluff, sufficiently far away to prevent theParisian throngs from reaching him, and yet near enough to the capitalto confirm him in his solitude. And he felt that in not entirelyclosing the way, there was a chance that he would not be assailed by awish to return to society, seeing that it is only the impossible, theunachievable that arouses desire. 

He put masons to work on the house he had acquired. Then, one day, informing no one of his plans, he quickly disposed of his oldfurniture, dismissed his servants, and left without giving theconcierge any address. 

 Chapter 2

More than two months passed before Des Esseintes could bury himself inthe silent repose of his Fontenay abode. He was obliged to go to Parisagain, to comb the city in his search for the things he wanted to buy. 

What care he took, what meditations he surrendered himself to, beforeturning over his house to the upholsterers!

He had long been a connoisseur in the sincerities and evasions ofcolor-tones. In the days when he had entertained women at his home, hehad created a boudoir where, amid daintily carved furniture of pale, Japanese camphor-wood, under a sort of pavillion of Indian rose-tintedsatin, the flesh would color delicately in the borrowed lights of thesilken hangings. 

This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed eachother all along the walls, reflecting, as far as the eye could reach, whole series of rose boudoirs, had been celebrated among the women wholoved to immerse their nudity in this bath of warm carnation, madefragrant with the odor of mint emanating from the exotic wood of thefurniture. 

Aside from the sensual delights for which he had designed thischamber, this painted atmosphere which gave new color to faces growndull and withered by the use of ceruse and by nights of dissipation, there were other, more personal and perverse pleasures which heenjoyed in these languorous surroundings, --pleasures which in some waystimulated memories of his past pains and dead ennuis. 

As a souvenir of the hated days of his childhood, he had suspendedfrom the ceiling a small silver-wired cage where a captive cricketsang as if in the ashes of the chimneys of the Chateau de Lourps. Listening to the sound he had so often heard before, he lived overagain the silent evenings spent near his mother, the wretchedness ofhis suffering, repressed youth. And then, while he yielded to thevoluptuousness of the woman he mechanically caressed, whose words orlaughter tore him from his revery and rudely recalled him to themoment, to the boudoir, to reality, a tumult arose in his soul, a needof avenging the sad years he had endured, a mad wish to sully therecollections of his family by shameful action, a furious desire topant on cushions of flesh, to drain to their last dregs the mostviolent of carnal vices. 

On rainy autumnal days when melancholy oppressed him, when a hatred ofhis home, the muddy yellow skies, the macadam clouds assailed him, hetook refuge in this retreat, set the cage lightly in motion andwatched it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until itseemed to his dazed eyes that the cage no longer stirred, but that theboudoir reeled and turned, filling the house with a rose-coloredwaltz. 

In the days when he had deemed it necessary to affect singularity, DesEsseintes had designed marvelously strange furnishings, dividing hissalon into a series of alcoves hung with varied tapestries to relateby a subtle analogy, by a vague harmony of joyous or sombre, delicateor barbaric colors to the character of the Latin or French books heloved. And he would seclude himself in turn in the particular recesswhose _decor_ seemed best to correspond with the very essence of thework his caprice of the moment induced him to read. 

He had constructed, too, a lofty high room intended for the receptionof his tradesmen. Here they were ushered in and seated alongside eachother in church pews, while from a pulpit he preached to them a sermonon dandyism, adjuring his bootmakers and tailors implicitly to obeyhis briefs in the matter of style, threatening them with pecuniaryexcommunication if they failed to follow to the letter theinstructions contained in his monitories and bulls. 

He acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced bywearing costumes of white velvet, and gold-embroidered waistcoats, byinserting, in place of a cravat, a Parma bouquet in the opening of hisshirt, by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, arevival of the eighteenth century, celebrating the most futile of hismisadventures, was a funeral repast. 

In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformedgarden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered withbasalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, thedinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned withbaskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which greenflames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared. 

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nudenegresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth withpatterns of tears, served the guests. 

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russianrye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort blackpudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice andblacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grapepreserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, outof dark glasses, wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penasand Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvasand porter and stout. 

The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility--this was what hehad written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices. 

But he was done with those extravagances in which he had once gloried. Today, he was filled with a contempt for those juvenile displays, thesingular apparel, the appointments of his bizarre chambers. Hecontented himself with planning, for his own pleasure, and no longerfor the astonishment of others, an interior that should be comfortablealthough embellished in a rare style; with building a curious, calmretreat to serve the needs of his future solitude. 

When the Fontenay house was in readiness, fitted up by an architectaccording to his plans, when all that remained was to determine thecolor scheme, he again devoted himself to long speculations. 

He desired colors whose expressiveness would be displayed in theartificial light of lamps. To him it mattered not at all if they werelifeless or crude in daylight, for it was at night that he lived, feeling more completely alone then, feeling that only under theprotective covering of darkness did the mind grow really animated andactive. He also experienced a peculiar pleasure in being in a richlyilluminated room, the only patch of light amid the shadow-haunted, sleeping houses. This was a form of enjoyment in which perhaps enteredan element of vanity, that peculiar pleasure known to late workerswhen, drawing aside the window curtains, they perceive that everythingabout them is extinguished, silent, dead. 

Slowly, one by one, he selected the colors. 

Blue inclines to a false green by candle light: if it is dark, likecobalt or indigo, it turns black; if it is bright, it turns grey; ifit is soft, like turquoise, it grows feeble and faded. 

There could be no question of making it the dominant note of a roomunless it were blended with some other color. 

Iron grey always frowns and is heavy; pearl grey loses its blue andchanges to a muddy white; brown is lifeless and cold; as for deepgreen, such as emperor or myrtle, it has the same properties as blueand merges into black. There remained, then, the paler greens, such aspeacock, cinnabar or lacquer, but the light banishes their blues andbrings out their yellows in tones that have a false and undecidedquality. 

No need to waste thought on the salmon, the maize and rose colorswhose feminine associations oppose all ideas of isolation! No need toconsider the violet which is completely neutralized at night; only thered in it holds its ground--and what a red! a viscous red like thelees of wine. Besides, it seemed useless to employ this color, for byusing a certain amount of santonin, he could get an effect of violeton his hangings. 

These colors disposed of, only three remained: red, orange, yellow. 

Of these, he preferred orange, thus by his own example confirming thetruth of a theory which he declared had almost mathematicalcorrectness--the theory that a harmony exists between the sensualnature of a truly artistic individual and the color which most vividlyimpresses him. 

Disregarding entirely the generality of men whose gross retinas arecapable of perceiving neither the cadence peculiar to each color northe mysterious charm of their nuances of light and shade; ignoring thebourgeoisie, whose eyes are insensible to the pomp and splendor ofstrong, vibrant tones; and devoting himself only to people withsensitive pupils, refined by literature and art, he was convinced thatthe eyes of those among them who dream of the ideal and demandillusions are generally caressed by blue and its derivatives, mauve, lilac and pearl grey, provided always that these colors remain softand do not overstep the bounds where they lose their personalities bybeing transformed into pure violets and frank greys. 

Those persons, on the contrary, who are energetic and incisive, theplethoric, red-blooded, strong males who fling themselves unthinkinglyinto the affair of the moment, generally delight in the bold gleams ofyellows and reds, the clashing cymbals of vermilions and chromes thatblind and intoxicate them. 

But the eyes of enfeebled and nervous persons whose sensual appetitescrave highly seasoned foods, the eyes of hectic and over-excitedcreatures have a predilection toward that irritating and morbid colorwith its fictitious splendors, its acid fevers--orange. 

Thus, there could be no question about Des Esseintes' choice, butunquestionable difficulties still arose. If red and yellow areheightened by light, the same does not always hold true of theircompound, orange, which often seems to ignite and turns to nasturtium, to a flaming red. 

He studied all their nuances by candlelight, discovering a shadewhich, it seemed to him, would not lose its dominant tone, but wouldstand every test required of it. These preliminaries completed, hesought to refrain from using, for his study at least, oriental stuffsand rugs which have become cheapened and ordinary, now that richmerchants can easily pick them up at auctions and shops. 

He finally decided to bind his walls, like books, with coarse-grainedmorocco, with Cape skin, polished by strong steel plates under apowerful press. 

When the wainscoting was finished, he had the moulding and highplinths painted in indigo, a lacquered indigo like that whichcoachmakers employ for carriage panels. The ceiling, slightly rounded, was also lined with morocco. In the center was a wide openingresembling an immense bull's eye encased in orange skin--a circle ofthe firmament worked out on a background of king blue silk on whichwere woven silver seraphim with out-stretched wings. This material hadlong before been embroidered by the Cologne guild of weavers for anold cope. 

The setting was complete. At night the room subsided into a restful, soothing harmony. The wainscoting preserved its blue which seemedsustained and warmed by the orange. And the orange remained pure, strengthened and fanned as it was by the insistent breath of theblues. 

Des Esseintes was not deeply concerned about the furniture itself. Theonly luxuries in the room were books and rare flowers. He limitedhimself to these things, intending later on to hang a few drawings orpaintings on the panels which remained bare; to place shelves and bookracks of ebony around the walls; to spread the pelts of wild beastsand the skins of blue fox on the floor; to install, near a massivefifteenth century counting-table, deep armchairs and an old chapelreading-desk of forged iron, one of those old lecterns on which thedeacon formerly placed the antiphonary and which now supported one ofthe heavy folios of Du Cange's _Glossarium mediae et infimaelatinitatis_. 

The windows whose blue fissured panes, stippled with fragments ofgold-edged bottles, intercepted the view of the country and onlypermitted a faint light to enter, were draped with curtains cut fromold stoles of dark and reddish gold neutralized by an almost deadrusset woven in the pattern. 

The mantel shelf was sumptuously draped with the remnant of aFlorentine dalmatica. Between two gilded copper monstrances ofByzantine style, originally brought from the old Abbaye-au-Bois deBievre, stood a marvelous church canon divided into three separatecompartments delicately wrought like lace work. It contained, underits glass frame, three works of Baudelaire copied on real vellum, withwonderful missal letters and splendid coloring: to the right and left, the sonnets bearing the titles of _La Mort des Amants_ and _L'Ennemi_;in the center, the prose poem entitled, _Anywhere Out of theWorld--n'importe ou, hors du monde_. 

 Chapter 3

After selling his effects, Des Esseintes retained the two olddomestics who had tended his mother and filled the offices of stewardand house porter at the Chateau de Lourps, which had remained desertedand uninhabited until its disposal. 

These servants he brought to Fontenay. They were accustomed to theregular life of hospital attendants hourly serving the patients theirstipulated food and drink, to the rigid silence of cloistral monks wholive behind barred doors and windows, having no communication with theoutside world. 

The man was assigned the task of keeping the house in order and ofprocuring provisions, the woman that of preparing the food. Hesurrendered the second story to them, forced them to wear heavy feltcoverings over their shoes, put sound mufflers along the well-oileddoors and covered their floor with heavy rugs so that he would neverhear their footsteps overhead. 

He devised an elaborate signal code of bells whereby his wants weremade known. He pointed out the exact spot on his bureau where theywere to place the account book each month while he slept. In short, matters were arranged in such wise that he would not be obliged to seeor to converse with them very often. 

Nevertheless, since the woman had occasion to walk past the house soas to reach the woodshed, he wished to make sure that her shadow, asshe passed his windows, would not offend him. He had designed for hera costume of Flemish silk with a white bonnet and large, black, lowered hood, such as is still worn by the nuns of Ghent. The shadowof this headdress, in the twilight, gave him the sensation of being ina cloister, brought back memories of silent, holy villages, deadquarters enclosed and buried in some quiet corner of a bustling town. 

The hours of eating were also regulated. His instructions in thisregard were short and explicit, for the weakened state of his stomachno longer permitted him to absorb heavy or varied foods. 

In winter, at five o'clock in the afternoon, when the day was drawingto a close, he breakfasted on two boiled eggs, toast and tea. Ateleven o'clock he dined. During the night he drank coffee, andsometimes tea and wine, and at five o'clock in the morning, beforeretiring, he supped again lightly. 

His meals, which were planned and ordered once for all at thebeginning of each season, were served him on a table in the middle ofa small room separated from his study by a padded corridor, hermetically sealed so as to permit neither sound nor odor to filterinto either of the two rooms it joined. 

With its vaulted ceiling fitted with beams in a half circle, itsbulkheads and floor of pine, and the little window in the wainscotingthat looked like a porthole, the dining room resembled the cabin of aship. 

Like those Japanese boxes which fit into each other, this room wasinserted in a larger apartment--the real dining room constructed bythe architect. 

It was pierced by two windows. One of them was invisible, hidden by apartition which could, however, be lowered by a spring so as to permitfresh air to circulate around this pinewood box and to penetrate intoit. The other was visible, placed directly opposite the porthole builtin the wainscoting, but it was blocked up. For a long aquariumoccupied the entire space between the porthole and the genuine windowplaced in the outer wall. Thus the light, in order to brighten theroom, traversed the window, whose panes had been replaced by a plateglass, the water, and, lastly, the window of the porthole. 

In autumn, at sunset, when the steam rose from the samovar on thetable, the water of the aquarium, wan and glassy all during themorning, reddened like blazing gleams of embers and lapped restlesslyagainst the light-colored wood. 

Sometimes, when it chanced that Des Esseintes was awake in theafternoon, he operated the stops of the pipes and conduits whichemptied the aquarium, replacing it with pure water. Into this, hepoured drops of colored liquids that made it green or brackish, opaline or silvery--tones similar to those of rivers which reflect thecolor of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the menace of rain--whichreflect, in a word, the state of the season and atmosphere. 

When he did this, he imagined himself on a brig, between decks, andcuriously he contemplated the marvelous, mechanical fish, wound likeclocks, which passed before the porthole or clung to the artificialsea-weed. While he inhaled the odor of tar, introduced into the roomshortly before his arrival, he examined colored engravings, hung onthe walls, which represented, just as at Lloyd's office and thesteamship agencies, steamers bound for Valparaiso and La Platte, andlooked at framed pictures on which were inscribed the itineraries ofthe Royal Mail Steam Packet, the Lopez and the Valery Companies, thefreight and port calls of the Atlantic mail boats. 

If he tired of consulting these guides, he could rest his eyes bygazing at the chronometers and sea compasses, the sextants, fieldglasses and cards strewn on a table on which stood a single volume, bound in sealskin. The book was "The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym", specially printed for him on laid paper, each sheet carefullyselected, with a sea-gull watermark. 

Or, he could look at fishing rods, tan-colored nets, rolls of russetsail, a tiny, black-painted cork anchor--all thrown in a heap near thedoor communicating with the kitchen by a passage furnished withcappadine silk which reabsorbed, just as in the corridor whichconnected the dining room with his study, every odor and sound. 

Thus, without stirring, he enjoyed the rapid motions of a long seavoyage. The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of factin retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it isbeing experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without thenecessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin whose studieddisorder, whose transitory appearance and whose seemingly temporaryfurnishings corresponded so well with the briefness of the time hespent there on his meals, and contrasted so perfectly with his study, a well-arranged, well-furnished room where everything betokened aretired, orderly existence. 

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imaginationcould easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It waspossible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurddesires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the objectof one's wishes. Every epicure nowadays enjoys, in restaurantscelebrated for the excellence of their cellars, wines of capital tastemanufactured from inferior brands treated by Pasteur's method. Forthey have the same aroma, the same color, the same bouquet as the rarewines of which they are an imitation, and consequently the pleasureexperienced in sipping them is identical. The originals, moreover, areusually unprocurable, for love or money. 

Transposing this insidious deviation, this adroit deceit into therealm of the intellect, there was not the shadow of a doubt thatfanciful delights resembling the true in every detail, could beenjoyed. One could revel, for instance, in long explorations whilenear one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, ifneed be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distantlands. One could enjoy the beneficent results of a sea bath, too, evenin Paris. All that is necessary is to visit the Vigier baths situatedin a boat on the Seine, far from the shore. 

There, the illusion of the sea is undeniable, imperious, positive. Itis achieved by salting the water of the bath; by mixing, according tothe Codex formula, sulphate of soda, hydrochlorate of magnesia andlime; by extracting from a box, carefully closed by means of a screw, a ball of thread or a very small piece of cable which had beenspecially procured from one of those great rope-making establishmentswhose vast warehouses and basements are heavy with odors of the seaand the port; by inhaling these perfumes held by the ball or the cableend; by consulting an exact photograph of the casino; by eagerlyreading the Joanne guide describing the beauties of the seashore whereone would wish to be; by being rocked on the waves, made by the eddyof fly boats lapping against the pontoon of baths; by listening to theplaint of the wind under the arches, or to the hollow murmur of theomnibuses passing above on the Port Royal, two steps away. 

The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeplyenough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting thedream reality for the reality itself. 

Artifice, besides, seemed to Des Esseintes the final distinctive markof man's genius. 

Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness ofher landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the consideratepatience of aesthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of thespecialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners ofthe tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of allothers. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banalagency of mountains and seas!

There is not one of her inventions, no matter how subtle or imposingit may be, which human genius cannot create; no Fontainebleau forest, no moonlight which a scenic setting flooded with electricity cannotproduce; no waterfall which hydraulics cannot imitate to perfection;no rock which pasteboard cannot be made to resemble; no flower whichtaffetas and delicately painted papers cannot simulate. 

There can be no doubt about it: this eternal, driveling, old woman isno longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replaceher by artifice. 

Closely observe that work of hers which is considered the mostexquisite, that creation of hers whose beauty is everywhere concededthe most perfect and original--woman. Has not man made, for his ownuse, an animated and artificial being which easily equals woman, fromthe point of view of plastic beauty? Is there a woman, whose form ismore dazzling, more splendid than the two locomotives that pass overthe Northern Railroad lines?

One, the Crampton, is an adorable, shrill-voiced blonde, a trim, gilded blonde, with a large, fragile body imprisoned in a glitteringcorset of copper, and having the long, sinewy lines of a cat. Herextraordinary grace is frightening, as, with the sweat of her hotsides rising upwards and her steel muscles stiffening, she puts inmotion the immense rose-window of her fine wheels and darts forward, mettlesome, along rapids and floods. 

The other, the Engerth, is a nobly proportioned dusky brunetteemitting raucous, muffled cries. Her heavy loins are strangled in acast-iron breast-plate. A monstrous beast with a disheveled mane ofblack smoke and with six low, coupled wheels! What irresistible powershe has when, causing the earth to tremble, she slowly and heavilydrags the unwieldy queue of her merchandise!

Unquestionably, there is not one among the frail blondes and majesticbrunettes of the flesh that can vie with their delicate grace andterrific strength. 

Such were Des Esseintes' reflections when the breeze brought him thefaint whistle of the toy railroad winding playfully, like a spinningtop, between Paris and Sceaux. His house was situated at a twentyminutes' walk from the Fontenay station, but the height on which itwas perched, its isolation, made it immune to the clatter of the noisyrabble which the vicinity of a railway station invariably attracts ona Sunday. 

As for the village itself, he hardly knew it. One night he had gazedthrough his window at the silent landscape which slowly unfolded, asit dipped to the foot of a slope, on whose summit the batteries of theVerrieres woods were trained. 

In the darkness, to left and right, these masses, dim and confused, rose tier on tier, dominated far off by other batteries and fortswhose high embankments seemed, in the moonlight, bathed in silveragainst the sombre sky. 

Where the plain did not fall under the shadow of the hills, it seemedpowdered with starch and smeared with white cold cream. In the warmair that fanned the faded grasses and exhaled a spicy perfume, thetrees, chalky white under the moon, shook their pale leaves, andseemed to divide their trunks, whose shadows formed bars of black onthe plaster-like ground where pebbles scintillated like glitteringplates. 

Because of its enameled look and its artificial air, the landscape didnot displease Des Esseintes. But since that afternoon spent atFontenay in search of a house, he had never ventured along its roadsin daylight. The verdure of this region inspired him with no interestwhatever, for it did not have the delicate and doleful charm of thesickly and pathetic vegetation which forces its way painfully throughthe rubbish heaps of the mounds which had once served as the rampartsof Paris. That day, in the village, he had perceived corpulent, bewhiskered _bourgeois_ citizens and moustached uniformed men withheads of magistrates and soldiers, which they held as stiffly asmonstrances in churches. And ever since that encounter, hisdetestation of the human face had been augmented. 

During the last month of his stay in Paris, when he was weary ofeverything, afflicted with hypochondria, the prey of melancholia, whenhis nerves had become so sensitive that the sight of an unpleasantobject or person impressed itself deeply on his brain--so deeply thatseveral days were required before the impression could be effaced--thetouch of a human body brushing against him in the street had been anexcruciating agony. 

The very sight of certain faces made him suffer. He considered thecrabbed expressions of some, insulting. He felt a desire to slap thefellow who walked, eyes closed, with such a learned air; the one whominced along, smiling at his image in the window panes; and the onewho seemed stimulated by a whole world of thought while devouring, with contracted brow, the tedious contents of a newspaper. 

Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted andanchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with thebusiness of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideasof politics--that base distraction of mediocrities--that he returnedenraged to his home and locked himself in with his books. 

He hated the new generation with all the energy in him. They werefrightful clodhoppers who seemed to find it necessary to talk andlaugh boisterously in restaurants and cafes. They jostled you onsidewalks without begging pardon. They pushed the wheels of theirperambulators against your legs, without even apologizing. 

 Chapter 4

A portion of the shelves which lined the walls of his orange and bluestudy was devoted exclusively to those Latin works assigned to thegeneric period of "The Decadence" by those whose minds have absorbedthe deplorable teachings of the Sorbonne. 

The Latin written in that era which professors still persist incalling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With itscarefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supplesyntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of allthe rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, wasconfined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the emptycommonplaces tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets; butit betrayed such a lack of curiosity and such a humdrum tediousness, such a drabness, feebleness and jaded solemnity that to find itsequal, it was necessary, in linguistic studies, to go to the Frenchstyle of the period of Louis XIV. 

The gentle Vergil, whom instructors call the Mantuan swan, perhapsbecause he was not born in that city, he considered one of the mostterrible pedants ever produced by antiquity. Des Esseintes wasexasperated by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheuswhom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who simpersabout bees, his Aeneas, that weak-willed, irresolute person who walkswith wooden gestures through the length of the poem. Des Esseinteswould gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which thosemarionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet'simpudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; theplain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the_Aeneid_, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; infine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses. The thinghe could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was theworkmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans andextending their syllabic quantities measured according to theunchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody. He disliked thetexture of those stiff verses, in their official garb, their abjectreverence for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbablecaesuras, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of adactyl against a spondee. 

Borrowed from the perfected forge of Catullus, this unvaryingversification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with uselesswords and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances, this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designatesnothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, all this impoverishedvocabulary of muffled, lifeless tones bored him beyond measure. 

It is no more than just to add that, if his admiration for Vergil wasquite restrained, and his attraction for Ovid's lucid outpourings evenmore circumspect, there was no limit to his disgust at the elephantinegraces of Horace, at the prattle of this hopeless lout who smirkinglyutters the broad, crude jests of an old clown. 

Neither was he pleased, in prose, with the verbosities, the redundantmetaphors, the ludicrous digressions of Cicero. There was nothing tobeguile him in the boasting of his apostrophes, in the flow of hispatriotic nonsense, in the emphasis of his harangues, in theponderousness of his style, fleshy but ropy and lacking in marrow andbone, in the insupportable dross of his long adverbs with which heintroduces phrases, in the unalterable formula of his adipose periodsbadly sewed together with the thread of conjunctions and, finally, inhis wearisome habits of tautology. Nor was his enthusiasm wakened forCaesar, celebrated for his laconic style. Here, on the contrary, wasdisclosed a surprising aridity, a sterility of recollection, anincredibly undue constipation. 

He found pasture neither among them nor among those writers who arepeculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who isless colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius;turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, inhis studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular ofthem all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite someroughshod verses, and by Persius, despite his mysterious insinuations. In neglecting Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the Plinies, Statius, Martial, even Terence and Plautus whose jargon full ofneologisms, compound words and diminutives, could please him, butwhose low comedy and gross humor he loathed, Des Esseintes only beganto be interested in the Latin language with Lucan. Here it wasliberated, already more expressive and less dull. This careful armor, these verses plated with enamel and studded with jewels, captivatedhim, but the exclusive preoccupation with form, the sonorities oftone, the clangor of metals, did not entirely conceal from him theemptiness of the thought, the turgidity of those blisters which embossthe skin of the _Pharsale_. 

Petronius was the author whom he truly loved and who caused himforever to abandon the sonorous ingenuities of Lucan, for he was akeen observer, a delicate analyst, a marvelous painter. Tranquilly, without prejudice or hate, he described Rome's daily life, recountingthe customs of his epoch in the sprightly little chapters of the_Satyricon_. 

Observing the facts of life, stating them in clear, definite form, herevealed the petty existence of the people, their happenings, theirbestialities, their passions. 

One glimpses the inspector of furnished lodgings who has inquiredafter the newly arrived travellers; bawdy houses where men prowlaround nude women, while through the half-open doors of the roomscouples can be seen in dalliance; the society of the time, in villasof an insolent luxury, a revel of richness and magnificence, or in thepoor quarters with their rumpled, bug-ridden folding-beds; impuresharpers, like Ascylte and Eumolpe in search of a rich windfall; oldincubi with tucked-up dresses and plastered cheeks of white lead andred acacia; plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen; women whoare the prey of hysterical attacks; hunters of heritages offeringtheir sons and daughters to debauched testators. All pass across thepages. They debate in the streets, rub elbows in the baths, beat eachother unmercifully as in a pantomime. 

And all this recounted in a style of strange freshness and precisecolor, drawing from all dialects, borrowing expressions from all thelanguages that were drifting into Rome, extending all the limits, removing all the handicaps of the so-called Great Age. He made eachperson speak his own idiom: the uneducated freedmen, the vulgar Latinargot of the streets; the strangers, their barbarous patois, thecorrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. Thesepeople are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims and ineptproverbs. 

This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without anypreoccupation, whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire, without the need of any studied end, or of morality; this storywithout intrigue or action, portraying the adventures of evil persons, analyzing with a calm finesse the joys and sorrows of these lovers andcouples, depicting life in a splendidly wrought language withoutsurrendering himself to any commentary, without approving or cursingthe acts and thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decrepitcivilization, of an empire that cracks, struck Des Esseintes. In thekeenness of the observation, in the firmness of the method, he foundsingular comparisons, curious analogies with the few modern Frenchnovels he could endure. 

Certainly, he bitterly regretted the _Eustion_ and the _Albutiae_, those two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciade Fulgence which areforever lost. But the bibliophile in him consoled the student, when hetouched with worshipful hands the superb edition of the _Satyricon_which he possessed, the octavo bearing the date 1585 and the name ofJ. Dousa of Leyden. 

Leaving Petronius, his Latin collection entered into the secondcentury of the Christian era, passed over Fronto, the declaimer, withhis antiquated terms; skipped the _Attic Nights_ of Aulus Gellius, hisdisciple and friend, --a clever, ferreting mind, but a writer entangledin a glutinous vase; and halted at Apuleius, of whose works he ownedthe first edition printed at Rome in 1469. 

This African delighted him. The Latin language was at its richest inthe _Metamorphoses_; it contained ooze and rubbish-strewn waterrushing from all the provinces, and the refuse mingled and wasconfused in a bizarre, exotic, almost new color. Mannerisms, newdetails of Latin society found themselves shaped into neologismsspecially created for the needs of conversation, in a Roman corner ofAfrica. He was amused by the southern exuberance and joviality of adoubtlessly corpulent man. He seemed a salacious, gay crony comparedwith the Christian apologists who lived in the same century--thesoporific Minucius Felix, a pseudo-classicist, pouring forth the stillthick emulsions of Cicero into his _Octavius_; nay, evenTertullian--whom he perhaps preserved for his Aldine edition, morethan for the work itself. 

Although he was sufficiently versed in theology, the disputes of theMontanists against the Catholic Church, the polemics against thegnostics, left him cold. Despite Tertullian's curious, concise stylefull of ambiguous terms, resting on participles, clashing withoppositions, bristling with puns and witticisms, dappled with vocablesculled from the juridical science and the language of the Fathers ofthe Greek Church, he now hardly ever opened the _Apologetica_ and the_Treatise on Patience_. At the most, he read several pages of _Deculta feminarum_, where Tertullian counsels women not to bedeckthemselves with jewels and precious stuffs, forbidding them the use ofcosmetics, because these attempt to correct and improve nature. 

These ideas, diametrically opposed to his own, made him smile. Thenthe role played by Tertullian, in his Carthage bishopric, seemed tohim suggestive in pleasant reveries. More even than his works did theman attract him. 

He had, in fact, lived in stormy times, agitated by frightfuldisorders, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing HighPriest of Emesa, Elagabalus, and he tranquilly prepared his sermons, his dogmatic writings, his pleadings, his homelies, while the RomanEmpire shook on its foundations, while the follies of Asia, while theordures of paganism were full to the brim. With the utmost sang-froid, he recommended carnal abstinence, frugality in food, sobriety indress, while, walking in silver powder and golden sand, a tiara on hishead, his garb figured with precious stones, Elagabalus worked, amidhis eunuchs, at womanish labor, calling himself the Empress andchanging, every night, his Emperor, whom he preferably chose amongbarbers, scullions and circus drivers. 

This antithesis delighted him. Then the Latin language, arrived at itssupreme maturity under Petronius, commenced to decay; the Christianliterature replaced it, bringing new words with new ideas, unemployedconstructions, strange verbs, adjectives with subtle meanings, abstract words until then rare in the Roman language and whose usageTertullian had been one of the first to adopt. 

But there was no attraction in this dissolution, continued afterTertullian's death by his pupil, Saint Cyprian, by Arnobius and byLactantius. There was something lacking; it made clumsy returns toCiceronian magniloquence, but had not yet acquired that special flavorwhich in the fourth century, and particularly during the centuriesfollowing, the odor of Christianity would give the pagan tongue, decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that the oldworld civilization collapsed, and the Empires, putrefied by the saniesof the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of the barbarians. 

Only one Christian poet, Commodianus, represented the third century inhis library. The _Carmen apologeticum_, written in 259, is acollection of instructions, twisted into acrostics, in popularhexameters, with caesuras introduced according to the heroic versestyle, composed without regard to quantity or hiatus and oftenaccompanied by such rhymes as the Church Latin would later supply insuch abundance. 

These sombre, tortuous, gamy verses, crammed with terms of ordinaryspeech, with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed andinterested him even more than the soft and already green style of thehistorians, Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victorus, Symmachus theletter writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler. Them he evenpreferred to the genuinely scanned lines, the spotted and superblanguage of Claudian, Rutilius and Ausonius. 

They were then the masters of art. They filled the dying Empire withtheir cries; the Christian Ausonius with his _Centon Nuptial_, and hisexuberant, embellished _Mosella_; Rutilius, with his hymns to theglory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks, hisjourney from Italy into Gaul and the impressions recorded along theway, the intervals of landscape reflected in the water, the mirage ofvapors and the movement of mists that enveloped the mountains. 

Claudian, a sort of avatar of Lucan, dominates the fourth century withthe terrible clarion of his verses: a poet forging a loud and sonoroushexameter, striking the epithet with a sharp blow amid sheaves ofsparks, achieving a certain grandeur which fills his work with apowerful breath. In the Occidental Empire tottering more and more inthe perpetual menace of the Barbarians now pressing in hordes at theEmpire's yielding gates, he revives antiquity, sings of the abductionof Proserpine, lays on his vibrant colors and passes with all historches alight, into the obscurity that was then engulfing his world. 

Paganism again lives in his verse, sounding its last fanfare, liftingits last great poet above the Christianity which was soon entirely tosubmerge the language, and which would forever be sole master of art. The new Christian spirit arose with Paulinus, disciple of Ausonius;Juvencus, who paraphrases the gospels in verse; Victorinus, author ofthe _Maccabees_; Sanctus Burdigalensis who, in an eclogue imitatedfrom Vergil, makes his shepherds Egon and Buculus lament the maladiesof their flock; and all the saints: Hilaire of Poitiers, defender ofthe Nicean faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has beencalled; Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homelies, the wearisomeChristian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacksthe cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and alreadypreaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against themonastic vows and celibacy of the priests. 

Finally, in the fifth century came Augustine, bishop of Hippo. DesEsseintes knew him only too well, for he was the Church's most reputedwriter, founder of Christian orthodoxy, considered an oracle andsovereign master by Catholics. He no longer opened the pages of thisholy man's works, although he had sung his disgust of the earth in the_Confessions_, and although his lamenting piety had essayed, in the_City of God_, to mitigate the frightful distress of the times bysedative promises of a rosier future. When Des Esseintes had studiedtheology, he was already sick and weary of the old monk's preachingsand jeremiads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combatsagainst the schisms. 

He preferred to thumb the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius, that firsttype of the allegorical poem which was later, in the Middle Ages, tobe used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris whosecorrespondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaismsand enigmas, allured him. He willingly re-read the panegyrics in whichthis bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of hisvainglorious eulogies; and, in spite of everything, he confessed aweakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were, by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheelsand invents intricate and useless parts. 

After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the panegyrist; Sedulius, authorof the rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of whichthe Church has appropriated for its services; Marius Victorius, whosegloomy treatise on the _Pervesity of the Times_ is illumed, here andthere, with verses that gleam with phosphorescence; Paulinus of Pella, poet of the shivering _Eucharisticon_; and Orientius, bishop of Auch, who, in the distichs of his _Monitories_, inveighs against thelicentiousness of women whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people. 

The interest which Des Esseintes felt for the Latin language did notpause at this period which found it drooping, thoroughly putrid, losing its members and dropping its pus, and barely preserving throughall the corruption of its body, those still firm elements which theChristians detached to marinate in the brine of their new language. 

The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the horrible epochwhen frightful motions convulsed the earth. The Barbarians sackedGaul. Paralyzed Rome, pillaged by the Visigoths, felt its life growfeeble, perceived its extremities, the occident and the orient, writhein blood and grow more exhausted from day to day. 

In this general dissolution, in the successive assassination of theCaesars, in the turmoil of carnage from one end of Europe to another, there resounded a terrible shout of triumph, stifling all clamors, silencing all voices. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of menastride on small horses, clad in rat-skin coats, monstrous Tartarswith enormous heads, flat noses, chins gullied with scars and gashes, and jaundiced faces bare of hair, rushed at full speed to envelop theterritories of the Lower Empire like a whirlwind. 

Everything disappeared in the dust of their gallopings, in the smokeof the conflagrations. Darkness fell, and the amazed people trembled, as they heard the fearful tornado which passed with thunder crashes. The hordes of Huns razed Europe, rushed toward Gaul, overran theplains of Chalons where Aetius pillaged it in an awful charge. Theplains, gorged with blood, foamed like a purple sea. Two hundredthousand corpses barred the way, broke the movement of this avalanchewhich, swerving, fell with mighty thunderclaps, against Italy whoseexterminated towns flamed like burning bricks. 

The Occidental Empire crumbled beneath the shock; the moribund lifewhich it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished. For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near; such citiesas had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague. The Latin language in its turn, seemed to sink under the world'sruins. 

Years hastened on. The Barbarian idioms began to be modulated, toleave their vein-stones and form real languages. Latin, saved in thedebacle by the cloisters, was confined in its usage to the conventsand monasteries. 

Here and there some poets gleamed, dully and coldly: the AfricanDracontius with his _Hexameron_, Claudius Memertius, with hisliturgical poetry; Avitus of Vienne; then, the biographers likeEnnodius, who narrates the prodigies of that perspicacious andvenerated diplomat, Saint Epiphanius, the upright and vigilant pastor;or like Eugippus, who tells of the life of Saint Severin, thatmysterious hermit and humble ascetic who appeared like an angel ofgrace to the distressed people, mad with suffering and fear; writerslike Veranius of Gevaudan who prepared a little treatise oncontinence; like Aurelianus and Ferreolus who compiled theecclesiastical canons; historians like Rotherius, famous for a losthistory of the Huns. 

Des Esseintes' library did not contain many works of the centuriesimmediately succeeding. Notwithstanding this deficiency, the sixthcentury was represented by Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers, whose hymnsand _Vexila regis_, carved out of the old carrion of the Latinlanguage and spiced with the aromatics of the Church, haunted him oncertain days; by Boethius, Gregory of Tours, and Jornandez. In theseventh and eighth centuries since, in addition to the low Latin ofthe Chroniclers, the Fredegaires and Paul Diacres, and the poemscontained in the Bangor antiphonary which he sometimes read for thealphabetical and mono-rhymed hymn sung in honor of Saint Comgill, theliterature limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints, to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and tothat of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from thenotes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself withglancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of thesehagiographers and in again reading several extracts from the lives ofSaint Rusticula and Saint Radegonda, related, the one by Defensorius, the other by the modest and ingenious Baudonivia, a nun of Poitiers. 

But the singular works of Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature allured himstill further. They included the whole series of riddles by Adhelme, Tatwine and Eusebius, who were descendants of Symphosius, andespecially the enigmas composed by Saint Boniface, in acrosticstrophes whose solution could be found in the initial letters of theverses. 

His interest diminished with the end of those two centuries. Hardlypleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, theAlcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of thelanguage of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall, Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written byAbbo le Courbe; with the didactic _Hortulus_, of the BenedictineWalafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourdas a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in whichErmold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, apoem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbiddingstyle and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws ofsentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the _De viribusherbarum_, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted himbecause of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which heascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, forexample, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lowerpart of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child;or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room, diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; orto the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her waterand stimulates the indolence of her periods. 

Apart from several special, unclassified volumes, modern or dateless, certain works on the Cabbala, medicine and botany, certain odd tomescontaining undiscoverable Christian poetry, and the anthology of theminor Latin poets of Wernsdorf; apart from _Meursius_, the manual ofclassical erotology of Forberg, and the diaconals used by confessors, which he dusted at rare intervals, his Latin library ended at thebeginning of the tenth century. 

And, in fact, the curiosity, the complicated naivete of the Christianlanguage had also foundered. The balderdash of philosophers andscholars, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, thenceforth held absolutesway. The sooty mass of chronicles and historical books andcartularies accumulated, and the stammering grace, the often exquisiteawkwardness of the monks, placing the poetic remains of antiquity in aragout, were dead. The fabrications of verbs and purified essences, ofsubstantives breathing of incense, of bizarre adjectives, coarselycarved from gold, with the barbarous and charming taste of Gothicjewels, were destroyed. The old editions, beloved by Des Esseintes, here ended; and with a formidable leap of centuries, the books on hisshelves went straight to the French language of the present century. 

 Chapter 5

The afternoon was drawing to its close when a carriage halted in frontof the Fontenay house. Since Des Esseintes received no visitors, andsince the postman never even ventured into these uninhabited parts, having no occasion to deliver any papers, magazines or letters, theservants hesitated before opening the door. Then, as the bell was rungfuriously again, they peered through the peep-hole cut into the wall, and perceived a man, concealed, from neck to waist, behind an immensegold buckler. 

They informed their master, who was breakfasting. 

"Ask him in, " he said, for he recalled having given his address to alapidary for the delivery of a purchase. 

The man bowed and deposited the buckler on the pinewood floor of thedining room. It oscillated and wavered, revealing the serpentine headof a tortoise which, suddenly terrified, retreated into its shell. 

This tortoise was a fancy which had seized Des Esseintes some timebefore his departure from Paris. Examining an Oriental rug, one day, in reflected light, and following the silver gleams which fell on itsweb of plum violet and alladin yellow, it suddenly occurred to him howmuch it would be improved if he could place on it some object whosedeep color might enhance the vividness of its tints. 

Possessed by this idea, he had been strolling aimlessly along thestreets, when suddenly he found himself gazing at the very object ofhis wishes. There, in a shop window on the Palais Royal, lay a hugetortoise in a large basin. He had purchased it. Then he had sat a longtime, with eyes half-shut, studying the effect. 

Decidedly, the Ethiopic black, the harsh Sienna tone of this shelldulled the rug's reflections without adding to it. The dominant silvergleams in it barely sparkled, crawling with lack-lustre tones of deadzinc against the edges of the hard, tarnished shell. 

He bit his nails while he studied a method of removing these discordsand reconciling the determined opposition of the tones. He finallydiscovered that his first inspiration, which was to animate the fireof the weave by setting it off against some dark object, waserroneous. In fact, this rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. Thecolors were not sufficiently subdued. He must reverse the process, dull the tones, and extinguish them by the contrast of a strikingobject, which would eclipse all else and cast a golden light on thepale silver. Thus stated, the problem was easier to solve. Hetherefore decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold. 

The tortoise, just returned by the lapidary, shone brilliantly, softening the tones of the rug and casting on it a gorgeous reflectionwhich resembled the irradiations from the scales of a barbaricVisigoth shield. 

At first Des Esseintes was enchanted with this effect. Then hereflected that this gigantic jewel was only in outline, that it wouldnot really be complete until it had been incrusted with rare stones. 

From a Japanese collection he chose a design representing a cluster offlowers emanating spindle-like, from a slender stalk. Taking it to ajeweler, he sketched a border to enclose this bouquet in an ovalframe, and informed the amazed lapidary that every petal and everyleaf was to be designed with jewels and mounted on the scales of thetortoise. 

The choice of stones made him pause. The diamond has becomenotoriously common since every tradesman has taken to wearing it onhis little finger. The oriental emeralds and rubies are lessvulgarized and cast brilliant, rutilant flames, but they remind one ofthe green and red antennae of certain omnibuses which carry signallights of these colors. As for topazes, whether sparkling or dim, theyare cheap stones, precious only to women of the middle class who liketo have jewel cases on their dressing-tables. And then, although theChurch has preserved for the amethyst a sacerdotal character which isat once unctuous and solemn, this stone, too, is abused on theblood-red ears and veined hands of butchers' wives who love to adornthemselves inexpensively with real and heavy jewels. Only thesapphire, among all these stones, has kept its fires undefiled by anytaint of commercialism. Its sparks, crackling in its limpid, colddepths have in some way protected its shy and proud nobility frompollution. Unfortunately, its fresh fire does not sparkle inartificial light: the blue retreats and seems to fall asleep, onlyawakening to shine at daybreak. 

None of these satisfied Des Esseintes at all. They were too civilizedand familiar. He let trickle through his fingers still moreastonishing and bizarre stones, and finally selected a number of realand artificial ones which, used together, should produce a fascinatingand disconcerting harmony. 

This is how he composed his bouquet of flowers: the leaves were setwith jewels of a pronounced, distinct green; the chrysoberyls ofasparagus green; the chrysolites of leek green; the olivines of olivegreen. They hung from branches of almandine and _ouwarovite_ of aviolet red, darting spangles of a hard brilliance like tartar micasgleaming through forest depths. 

For the flowers, separated from the stalk and removed from the bottomof the sheaf, he used blue cinder. But he formally waived thatoriental turquoise used for brooches and rings which, like the banalpearl and the odious coral, serves to delight people of no importance. He chose occidental turquoises exclusively, stones which, properlyspeaking, are only a fossil ivory impregnated with coppery substanceswhose sea blue is choked, opaque, sulphurous, as though yellowed bybile. 

This done, he could now set the petals of his flowers with transparentstones which had morbid and vitreous sparks, feverish and sharplights. 

He composed them entirely with Ceylon snap-dragons, cymophanes andblue chalcedony. 

These three stones darted mysterious and perverse scintillations, painfully torn from the frozen depths of their troubled waters. 

The snap-dragon of a greenish grey, streaked with concentric veinswhich seem to stir and change constantly, according to thedispositions of light. 

The cymophane, whose azure waves float over the milky tint swimming inits depths. 

The blue chalcedony which kindles with bluish phosphorescent firesagainst a dead brown, chocolate background. 

The lapidary made a note of the places where the stones were to beinlaid. "And the border of the shell?" he asked Des Esseintes. 

At first he had thought of some opals and hydrophanes; but thesestones, interesting for their hesitating colors, for the evasions oftheir flames, are too refractory and faithless; the opal has a quiterheumatic sensitiveness; the play of its rays alters according to thehumidity, the warmth or cold; as for the hydrophane, it only burns inwater and only consents to kindle its embers when moistened. 

He finally decided on minerals whose reflections vary; for theCompostelle hyacinth, mahogany red; the beryl, glaucous green; thebalas ruby, vinegar rose; the Sudermanian ruby, pale slate. Theirfeeble sparklings sufficed to light the darkness of the shell andpreserved the values of the flowering stones which they encircled witha slender garland of vague fires. 

Des Esseintes now watched the tortoise squatting in a corner of thedining room, shining in the shadow. 

He was perfectly happy. His eyes gleamed with pleasure at theresplendencies of the flaming corrollae against the gold background. Then, he grew hungry--a thing that rarely if ever happened to him--anddipped his toast, spread with a special butter, in a cup of tea, aflawless blend of Siafayoune, Moyoutann and Khansky--yellow teas whichhad come from China to Russia by special caravans. 

This liquid perfume he drank in those Chinese porcelains calledegg-shell, so light and diaphanous they are. And, as an accompanimentto these adorable cups, he used a service of solid silver, slightlygilded; the silver showed faintly under the fatigued layer of gold, which gave it an aged, quite exhausted and moribund tint. 

After he had finished his tea, he returned to his study and had theservant carry in the tortoise which stubbornly refused to budge. 

The snow was falling. By the lamp light, he saw the icy patterns onthe bluish windows, and the hoar-frost, like melted sugar, scintillating in the stumps of bottles spotted with gold. 

A deep silence enveloped the cottage drooping in shadow. 

Des Esseintes fell into revery. The fireplace piled with logs gaveforth a smell of burning wood. He opened the window slightly. 

Like a high tapestry of black ermine, the sky rose before him, blackflecked with white. 

An icy wind swept past, accelerated the crazy flight of the snow, andreversed the color order. 

The heraldic tapestry of heaven returned, became a true ermine, awhite flecked with black, in its turn, by the specks of darknessdispersed among the flakes. 

He closed the window. This abrupt transition from torrid warmth tocold winter affected him. He crouched near the fire and it occurred tohim that he needed a cordial to revive his flagging spirits. 

He went to the dining room where, built in one of the panels, was acloset containing a number of tiny casks, ranged side by side, andresting on small stands of sandal wood. 

This collection of barrels he called his mouth organ. 

A stem could connect all the spigots and control them by a singlemovement, so that once attached, he had only to press a buttonconcealed in the woodwork to turn on all the taps at the same time andfill the mugs placed underneath. 

The organ was now open. The stops labelled flute, horn, celestialvoice, were pulled out, ready to be placed. Des Esseintes sipped hereand there, enjoying the inner symphonies, succeeded in procuringsensations in his throat analogous to those which music gives to theear. 

Moreover, each liquor corresponded, according to his thinking, to thesound of some instrument. Dry curacoa, for example, to the clarinetwhose tone is sourish and velvety; _kummel_ to the oboe whose sonorousnotes snuffle; mint and anisette to the flute, at once sugary andpeppery, puling and sweet; while, to complete the orchestra, _kirschwasser_ has the furious ring of the trumpet; gin and whiskeyburn the palate with their strident crashings of trombones andcornets; brandy storms with the deafening hubbub of tubas; while thethunder-claps of the cymbals and the furiously beaten drum roll in themouth by means of the _rakis de Chio_. 

He also thought that the comparison could be continued, that quartetsof string instruments could play under the palate, with the violinsimulated by old brandy, fumous and fine, piercing and frail; thetenor violin by rum, louder and more sonorous; the cello by thelacerating and lingering ratafia, melancholy and caressing; with thedouble-bass, full-bodied, solid and dark as the old bitters. If onewished to form a quintet, one could even add a fifth instrument withthe vibrant taste, the silvery detached and shrill note of dry cuminimitating the harp. 

The comparison was further prolonged. Tone relationships existed inthe music of liquors; to cite but one note, benedictine represents, soto speak, the minor key of that major key of alcohols which aredesignated in commercial scores, under the name of green Chartreuse. 

These principles once admitted, he succeeded, after numerousexperiments, in enjoying silent melodies on his tongue, mute funeralmarches, in hearing, in his mouth, solos of mint, duos of ratafia andrum. 

He was even able to transfer to his palate real pieces of music, following the composer step by step, rendering his thought, hiseffects, his nuances, by combinations or contrasts of liquors, byapproximative and skilled mixtures. 

At other times, he himself composed melodies, executed pastorals withmild black-currant which evoked, in his throat, the trillings ofnightingales; with the tender chouva cocoa which sang saccharine songslike "The romance of Estelle" and the "Ah! Shall I tell you, mama, " ofpast days. 

But on this evening Des Esseintes was not inclined to listen to thismusic. He confined himself to sounding one note on the keyboard of hisorgan, by swallowing a little glass of genuine Irish whiskey. 

He sank into his easy chair and slowly inhaled this fermented juice ofoats and barley: a pronounced taste of creosote was in his mouth. 

Gradually, as he drank, his thought followed the now revivedsensitiveness of his palate, fitted its progress to the flavor of thewhiskey, re-awakened, by a fatal exactitude of odors, memories effacedfor years. 

This carbolic tartness forcibly recalled to him the same taste he hadhad on his tongue in the days when dentists worked on his gums. 

Once abandoned on this track, his revery, at first dispersed among allthe dentists he had known, concentrated and converged on one of themwho was more firmly engraved in his memory. 

It had happened three years ago. Seized, in the middle of the night, with an abominable toothache, he put his hand to his cheek, stumbledagainst the furniture, pacing up and down the room like a dementedperson. 

It was a molar which had already been filled; no remedy was possible. Only a dentist could alleviate the pain. He feverishly waited for theday, resolved to bear the most atrocious operation provided it wouldonly ease his sufferings. 

Holding a hand to his jaw, he asked himself what should be done. Thedentists who treated him were rich merchants whom one could not see atany time; one had to make an appointment. He told himself that thiswould never do, that he could not endure it. He decided to patronizethe first one he could find, to hasten to a popular tooth-extractor, one of those iron-fisted men who, if they are ignorant of the uselessart of dressing decaying teeth and of filling holes, know how to pullthe stubbornest stump with an unequalled rapidity. There, the officeis opened early in the morning and one is not required to wait. Seveno'clock struck at last. He hurried out, and recollecting the name of amechanic who called himself a dentist and dwelt in the corner of aquay, he rushed through the streets, holding his cheek with his handsrepressing the tears. 

Arrived in front of the house, recognizable by an immense woodensignboard where the name of "Gatonax" sprawled in enormouspumpkin-colored letters, and by two little glass cases where falseteeth were carefully set in rose-colored wax, he gasped for breath. Heperspired profusely. A horrible fear shook him, a trembling creptunder his skin; suddenly a calm ensued, the suffering ceased, thetooth stopped paining. 

He remained, stupefied, on the sidewalk; finally, he stiffened againstthe anguish, mounted the dim stairway, running up four steps at a timeto the fourth story. He found himself in front of a door where anenamel plate repeated, inscribed in sky-blue lettering, the name onthe signboard. He rang the bell and then, terrified by the great redspittles which he noticed on the steps, he faced about, resolved toendure his toothache all his life. At that moment an excruciating crypierced the partitions, filled the cage of the doorway and glued himto the spot with horror, at the same time that a door was opened andan old woman invited him to enter. 

His feeling of shame quickly changed to fear. He was ushered into adining room. Another door creaked and in entered a terrible grenadierdressed in a frock-coat and black trousers. Des Esseintes followed himto another room. 

From this instant, his sensations were confused. He vaguely rememberedhaving sunk into a chair opposite a window, having murmured, as he puta finger to his tooth: "It has already been filled and I am afraidnothing more can be done with it. "

The man immediately suppressed these explanations by introducing anenormous index finger into his mouth. Muttering beneath his waxedfang-like moustaches, he took an instrument from the table. 

Then the play began. Clinging to the arms of his seat, Des Esseintesfelt a cold sensation in his cheek, and began to suffer unheardagonies. Then he beheld stars. He stamped his feet frantically andbleated like a sheep about to be slaughtered. 

A snapping sound was heard, the molar had broken while beingextracted. It seemed that his head was being shattered, that his skullwas being smashed; he lost his senses, howled as loudly as he could, furiously defending himself from the man who rushed at him anew as ifhe wished to implant his whole arm in the depths of his bowels, brusquely recoiled a step and, lifting the tooth attached to the jaw, brutally let him fall back into the chair. Breathing heavily, his formfilling the window, he brandished at one end of his forceps, a bluetooth with blood at one end. 

Faint and prostrate, Des Esseintes spat blood into a basin, refusedwith a gesture, the tooth which the old woman was about to wrap in apiece of paper and fled, after paying two francs. Expectorating blood, in his turn, down the steps, he at length found himself in the street, joyous, feeling ten years younger, interested in every littleoccurrence. 

"Phew!" he exclaimed, saddened by the assault of these memories. Herose to dissipate the horrible spell of this vision and, returning toreality, began to be concerned with the tortoise. 

It did not budge at all and he tapped it. The animal was dead. Doubtless accustomed to a sedentary existence, to a humble life spentunderneath its poor shell, it had been unable to support the dazzlingluxury imposed on it, the rutilant cope with which it had beencovered, the jewels with which its back had been paved, like a pyx. 

 Chapter 6

With the sharpening of his desire to withdraw from a hated age, hefelt a despotic urge to shun pictures representing humanity strivingin little holes or running to and fro in quest of money. 

With his growing indifference to contemporary life he had resolved notto introduce into his cell any of the ghosts of distastes or regrets, but had desired to procure subtle and exquisite paintings, steeped inancient dreams or antique corruptions, far removed from the manner ofour present day. 

For the delight of his spirit and the joy of his eyes, he had desireda few suggestive creations that cast him into an unknown world, revealing to him the contours of new conjectures, agitating thenervous system by the violent deliriums, complicated nightmares, nonchalant or atrocious chimerae they induced. 

Among these were some executed by an artist whose genius allured andentranced him: Gustave Moreau. 

Des Esseintes had acquired his two masterpieces and, at night, used tosink into revery before one of them--a representation of Salome, conceived in this fashion:

A throne, resembling the high altar of a cathedral, reared itselfbeneath innumerable vaults leaping from heavy Romanesque pillars, studded with polychromatic bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted withlapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace that, like a basilica, was atonce Mohammedan and Byzantine in design. 

In the center of the tabernacle, surmounting an altar approached bysemi-circular steps, sat Herod the Tetrarch, a tiara upon his head, his legs pressed closely together, his hands resting upon his knees. 

His face was the color of yellow parchment; it was furrowed withwrinkles, ravaged with age. His long beard floated like a white cloudupon the star-like clusters of jewels constellating the orphrey robefitting tightly over his breast. 

Around this form, frozen into the immobile, sacerdotal, hieratic poseof a Hindoo god, burned perfumes wafting aloft clouds of incense whichwere perforated, like phosphorescent eyes of beasts, by the fiery raysof the stones set in the throne. Then the vapor rolled up, diffusingitself beneath arcades where the blue smoke mingled with the goldpowder of the long sunbeams falling from the domes. 

In the perverse odor of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere ofthe temple, Salome, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command, her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with herface, slowly advances on her toes, to the rhythm of a stringedinstrument played by a woman seated on the ground. 

Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences thelascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin. Her bracelets, hergirdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls, flowered with silver and laminated with gold, the breastplate ofjewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents offire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea-rose: its jewels likesplendid insects with dazzling elytra, veined with carmine, dottedwith yellow gold, diapered with blue steel, speckled with peacockgreen. 

With a tense concentration, with the fixed gaze of a somnambulist, shebeholds neither the trembling Tetrarch, nor her mother, the fierceHerodias who watches her, nor the hermaphrodite, nor the eunuch whosits, sword in hand, at the foot of the throne--a terrible figure, veiled to his eyes, whose breasts droop like gourds under hisorange-checkered tunic. 

This conception of Salome, so haunting to artists and poets, hadobsessed Des Esseintes for years. How often had he read in the oldBible of Pierre Variquet, translated by the theological doctors of theUniversity of Louvain, the Gospel of Saint Matthew who, in brief andingenuous phrases, recounts the beheading of the Baptist! How oftenhad he fallen into revery, as he read these lines:

 But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. 

 Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. 

 And she, being before instructed of her mother, said: Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger. 

 And the king was sorry: nevertheless, for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her. 

 And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison. 

 And his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her mother. 

But neither Saint Matthew, nor Saint Mark, nor Saint Luke, nor theother Evangelists had emphasized the maddening charms and depravitiesof the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooningin the far-off mist of the centuries, not to be grasped by vulgar andmaterialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanicintellects made visionaries by their neuroticism; rebellious topainters of the flesh, to Rubens who disguised her as a butcher's wifeof Flanders; a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded inportraying the disquieting exaltation of this dancer, the refinedgrandeur of this murderess. 

In Gustave Moreau's work, conceived independently of the Testamentthemes, Des Esseintes as last saw realized the superhuman and exoticSalome of his dreams. She was no longer the mere performer who wrestsa cry of desire and of passion from an old man by a perverted twistingof her loins; who destroys the energy and breaks the will of a king bytrembling breasts and quivering belly. She became, in a sense, thesymbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortalHysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by thecatalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; themonstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, likethe Helen of antiquity, fatal to all who approach her, all who beholdher, all whom she touches. 

Thus understood, she was associated with the theogonies of the FarEast. She no longer sprang from biblical traditions, could no longereven be assimilated with the living image of Babylon, the royalProstitute of the Apocalypse, garbed like her in jewels and purple, and painted like her; for she was not hurled by a fatidical power, bya supreme force, into the alluring vileness of debauchery. 

The painter, moreover, seems to have wished to affirm his desire ofremaining outside the centuries, scorning to designate the origin, nation and epoch, by placing his Salome in this extraordinary palacewith its confused and imposing style, in clothing her with sumptuousand chimerical robes, in crowning her with a fantastic mitre shapedlike a Phoenician tower, such as Salammbo bore, and placing in herhand the sceptre of Isis, the tall lotus, sacred flower of Egypt andIndia. 

Des Esseintes sought the sense of this emblem. Had it that phallicsignificance which the primitive cults of India gave it? Did itenunciate an oblation of virginity to the senile Herod, an exchange ofblood, an impure and voluntary wound, offered under the expressstipulation of a monstrous sin? Or did it represent the allegory offecundity, the Hindoo myth of life, an existence held between thehands of woman, distorted and trampled by the palpitant hands of manwhom a fit of madness seizes, seduced by a convulsion of the flesh?

Perhaps, too, in arming his enigmatic goddess with the veneratedlotus, the painter had dreamed of the dancer, the mortal woman withthe polluted Vase, from whom spring all sins and crimes. Perhaps hehad recalled the rites of ancient Egypt, the sepulchral ceremonies ofthe embalming when, after stretching the corpse on a bench of jasper, extracting the brain with curved needles through the chambers of thenose, the chemists and the priests, before gilding the nails and teethand coating the body with bitumens and essences, inserted the chastepetals of the divine flower in the sexual parts, to purify them. 

However this may be, an irresistible fascination emanated from thispainting; but the water-color entitled _The Apparition_ was perhapseven more disturbing. 

There, the palace of Herod arose like an Alhambra on slender, iridescent columns with moorish tile, joined with silver beton andgold cement. Arabesques proceeded from lozenges of lapis lazuli, wovetheir patterns on the cupolas where, on nacreous marquetry, creptrainbow gleams and prismatic flames. 

The murder was accomplished. The executioner stood impassive, hishands on the hilt of his long, blood-stained sword. 

The severed head of the saint stared lividly on the charger resting onthe slabs; the mouth was discolored and open, the neck crimson, andtears fell from the eyes. The face was encircled by an aureole workedin mosaic, which shot rays of light under the porticos and illuminatedthe horrible ascension of the head, brightening the glassy orbs of thecontracted eyes which were fixed with a ghastly stare upon the dancer. 

With a gesture of terror, Salome thrusts from her the horrible visionwhich transfixes her, motionless, to the ground. Her eyes dilate, herhands clasp her neck in a convulsive clutch. 

She is almost nude. In the ardor of the dance, her veils had becomeloosened. She is garbed only in gold-wrought stuffs and limpid stones;a neck-piece clasps her as a corselet does the body and, like a superbbuckle, a marvelous jewel sparkles on the hollow between her breasts. A girdle encircles her hips, concealing the upper part of her thighs, against which beats a gigantic pendant streaming with carbuncles andemeralds. 

All the facets of the jewels kindle under the ardent shafts of lightescaping from the head of the Baptist. The stones grow warm, outliningthe woman's body with incandescent rays, striking her neck, feet andarms with tongues of fire, --vermilions like coals, violets like jetsof gas, blues like flames of alcohol, and whites like star light. 

The horrible head blazes, bleeding constantly, clots of sombre purpleon the ends of the beard and hair. Visible for Salome alone, it doesnot, with its fixed gaze, attract Herodias, musing on her finallyconsummated revenge, nor the Tetrarch who, bent slightly forward, hishands on his knees, still pants, maddened by the nudity of the womansaturated with animal odors, steeped in balms, exuding incense andmyrrh. 

Like the old king, Des Esseintes remained dumbfounded, overwhelmed andseized with giddiness, in the presence of this dancer who was lessmajestic, less haughty but more disquieting than the Salome of the oilpainting. 

In this insensate and pitiless image, in this innocent and dangerousidol, the eroticism and terror of mankind were depicted. The talllotus had disappeared, the goddess had vanished; a frightful nightmarenow stifled the woman, dizzied by the whirlwind of the dance, hypnotized and petrified by terror. 

It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to herardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened thedulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power ofwill, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, cultivated insacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses. 

Des Esseintes thought that never before had a water color attainedsuch magnificent coloring; never before had the poverty of colors beenable to force jeweled corruscations from paper, gleams like stainedglass windows touched by rays of sunlight, splendors of tissue andflesh so fabulous and dazzling. Lost in contemplation, he sought todiscover the origins of this great artist and mystic pagan, thisvisionary who succeeded in removing himself from the worldsufficiently to behold, here in Paris, the splendor of these cruelvisions and the enchanting sublimation of past ages. 

Des Esseintes could not trace the genesis of this artist. Here andthere were vague suggestions of Mantegna and of Jacopo de Barbari;here and there were confused hints of Vinci and of the feverish colorsof Delacroix. But the influences of such masters remained negligible. The fact was that Gustave Moreau derived from no one else. He remainedunique in contemporary art, without ancestors and without possibledescendants. He went to ethnographic sources, to the origins of myths, and he compared and elucidated their intricate enigmas. He reunitedthe legends of the Far East into a whole, the myths which had beenaltered by the superstitions of other peoples; thus justifying hisarchitectonic fusions, his luxurious and outlandish fabrics, hishieratic and sinister allegories sharpened by the restless perceptionsof a pruriently modern neurosis. And he remained saddened, haunted bythe symbols of perversities and superhuman loves, of divinestuprations brought to end without abandonment and without hope. 

His depressing and erudite productions possessed a strangeenchantment, an incantation that stirred one to the depths, just as docertain poems of Baudelaire, caused one to pause disconcerted, amazed, brooding on the spell of an art which leaped beyond the confines ofpainting, borrowing its most subtle effects from the art of writing, its most marvelous stokes from the art of Limosin, its most exquisiterefinements from the art of the lapidary and the engraver. These twopictures of Salome, for which Des Esseintes' admiration was boundless, he had hung on the walls of his study on special panels between thebookshelves, so that they might live under his eyes. 

But these were not the only pictures he had acquired to divert hissolitude. 

Although he had surrendered to his servants the second story of hishouse, which he himself never used at all, the ground floor hadrequired a number of pictures to fit the walls. 

It was thus arranged:

A dressing room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one of thecorners of the house. One passed from the bedroom to the library, andfrom the library into the dining room, which formed the other corner. 

These rooms, whose windows looked out on the Aunay Valley, composedone of the sides of the dwelling. 

The other side of the house had four rooms arranged in the same order. Thus, the kitchen formed an angle, and corresponded with the diningroom; a long corridor, which served as the entrance, with the library;a small dressing room, with the bedroom; and the toilet, forming asecond angle, with the dressing room. 

These rooms received the light from the side opposite the Aunay Valleyand faced the Towers of Croy and Chatillon. 

As for the staircase, it was built outside, against one of the sidesof the house, and the footsteps of his servants in ascending ordescending thus reached Des Esseintes less distinctly. 

The dressing room was tapestried in deep red. On the walls, in ebonyframes, hung the prints of Jan Luyken, an old Dutch engraver almostunknown in France. 

He possessed of the work of this artist, who was fantastic andmelancholy, vehement and wild, the series of his _ReligiousPersecutions_, horrible prints depicting all the agonies invented bythe madness of religions: prints pregnant with human sufferings, showing bodies roasting on fires, skulls slit open with swords, trepaned with nails and gashed with saws, intestines separated fromthe abdomen and twisted on spools, finger nails slowly extracted withpincers, eyes gouged, limbs dislocated and deliberately broken, andbones bared of flesh and agonizingly scraped by sheets of metal. 

These works filled with abominable imaginings, offensive with theirodors of burning, oozing with blood and clamorous with cries of horrorand maledictions, gave Des Esseintes, who was held fascinated in thisred room, the creeping sensations of goose-flesh. 

But in addition to the tremblings they occasioned, beyond the terribleskill of this man, the extraordinary life which animates hischaracters, one discovered, among his astonishing, swarmingthrongs--among his mobs of people delineated with a dexterity whichrecalled Callot, but which had a strength never possessed by thatamusing dauber--curious reconstructions of bygone ages. Thearchitecture, costumes and customs during the time of the Maccabeans, of Rome under the Christian persecutions, of Spain under theInquisition, of France during the Middle Ages, at the time of SaintBartholomew and the Dragonnades, were studied with a meticulous careand noted with scientific accuracy. 

These prints were veritable treasures of learning. One could gaze atthem for hours without experiencing any sense of weariness. Profoundlysuggestive in reflections, they assisted Des Esseintes in passing manya day when his books failed to charm him. 

Luyken's life, too, fascinated him, by explaining the hallucination ofhis work. A fervent Calvinist, a stubborn sectarian, unbalanced byprayers and hymns, he wrote religious poetry which he illustrated, paraphrased the psalms in verse, lost himself in the reading of theBible from which he emerged haggard and frenzied, his brain haunted bymonstrous subjects, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of theReformation and by its songs of terror and hate. 

And he scorned the world, surrendering his wealth to the poor andsubsisting on a slice of bread. He ended his life in travelling, withan equally fanatical servant, going where chance led his boat, preaching the Gospel far and wide, endeavoring to forego nourishment, and eventually becoming almost demented and violent. 

Other bizarre sketches were hung in the larger, adjoining room, aswell as in the corridor, both of which had woodwork of red cedar. 

There was Bresdin's _Comedy of Death_ in which, in the fantasticlandscape bristling with trees, brushwood and tufts of grassresembling phantom, demon forms, teeming with rat-headed, pod-tailedbirds, on earth covered with ribs, skulls and bones, gnarled andcracked willows rear their trunks, surmounted by agitated skeletonswhose arms beat the air while they intone a song of victory. A Christspeeds across a clouded sky; a hermit in the depths of a cavemeditates, holding his head in his hands; one wretch dies, exhaustedby long privation and enfeebled by hunger, lying on his back, his legsoutstretched in front of a pond. 

The _Good Samaritan_, by the same artist, is a large engraving onstone: an incongruous medley of palms, sorbs and oaks grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake;then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which astream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group;then an elfin town appearing on the horizon of an exotic sky dottedwith birds and covered with masses of fleecy clouds. 

It could be called the design of an uncertain, primitive Durer with anopium-steeped brain. But although he liked the finesse of the detailand the imposing appearance of this print, Des Esseintes had a specialweakness for the other frames adorning the room. 

They were signed: Odilon Redon. 

They enclosed inconceivable apparitions in their rough, gold-stripedpear-tree wood. A head of a Merovingian style, resting against a bowl, a bearded man, at once resembling a Buddhist priest and an orator at apublic reunion, touching the ball of a gigantic cannon with hisfingers; a frightful spider revealing a human face in its body. Thecharcoal drawings went even farther into dream terrors. Here, anenormous die in which a sad eye winked; there, dry and aridlandscapes, dusty plains, shifting ground, volcanic upheavals catchingrebellious clouds, stagnant and livid skies. Sometimes the subjectseven seemed to have borrowed from the cacodemons of science, revertingto prehistoric times. A monstrous plant on the rocks, queer blockseverywhere, glacial mud, figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled theancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate manstill devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous withthe mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs werebeyond anything imaginable; they leaped, for the most part, beyond thelimits of painting and introduced a fantasy that was unique, thefantasy of a diseased and delirious mind. 

And, indeed, certain of these faces, with their monstrous, insaneeyes, certain of these swollen, deformed bodies resembling carafes, induced in Des Esseintes recollections of typhoid, memories offeverish nights and of the shocking visions of his infancy whichpersisted and would not be suppressed. 

Seized with an indefinable uneasiness in the presence of thesesketches, the same sensation caused by certain _Proverbs_ of Goyawhich they recalled, or by the reading of Edgar Allen Poe's tales, whose mirages of hallucination and effects of fear Odilon Redon seemedto have transposed to a different art, he rubbed his eyes and turnedto contemplate a radiant figure which, amid these tormenting sketches, arose serene and calm--a figure of Melancholy seated near the disk ofa sun, on the rocks, in a dejected and gloomy posture. 

The shadows were dispersed as though by an enchantment. A charmingsadness, a languid and desolate feeling flowed through him. Hemeditated long before this work which, with its dashes of paintflecking the thick crayon, spread a brilliance of sea-green and ofpale gold among the protracted darkness of the charcoal prints. 

In addition to this series of the works of Redon which adorned nearlyevery panel of the passage, he had hung a disturbing sketch by ElGreco in his bedroom. It was a Christ done in strange tints, in astrained design, possessing a wild color and a disordered energy: apicture executed in the painter's second manner when he had beentormented by the necessity of avoiding imitation of Titian. 

This sinister painting, with its wax and sickly green tones, bore anaffinity to certain ideas Des Esseintes had with regard to furnishinga room. 

According to him, there were but two ways of fitting a bedroom. Onecould either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnaldelights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, asort of oratory. 

For the first instance, the Louis XV style was inevitable for thefastidious, for the cerebrally morbid. Only the eighteenth century hadsucceeded in enveloping woman with a vicious atmosphere, imitating hercontours in the undulations and twistings of wood and copper, accentuating the sugary languor of the blond with its clear and lively_decors_, attenuating the pungency of the brunette with its tapestriesof aqueous, sweet, almost insipid tones. 

He had once had such a room in Paris, with a lofty, white, lacqueredbed which is one stimulant the more, a source of depravity to oldroues, leering at the false chastity and hypocritical modesty ofGreuze's tender virgins, at the deceptive candor of a bed evocative ofbabes and chaste maidens. 

For the second instance, --and now that he wished to put behind him theirritating memories of his past life, this was the only possibleexpedient--he was compelled to design a room that would be like amonastic cell. But difficulties faced him here, for he refused toaccept in its entirety the austere ugliness of those asylums ofpenitence and prayer. 

By dint of studying the problem in all its phases, he concluded thatthe end to be attained could thus be stated: to devise a sombre effectby means of cheerful objects, or rather to give a tone of elegance anddistinction to the room thus treated, meanwhile preserving itscharacter of ugliness; to reverse the practice of the theatre, whosevile tinsel imitates sumptuous and costly textures; to obtain thecontrary effect by use of splendid fabrics; in a word, to have thecell of a Carthusian monk which should possess the appearance ofreality without in fact being so. 

Thus he proceeded. To imitate the stone-color of ochre and clericalyellow, he had his walls covered with saffron silk; to stimulate thechocolate hue of the dadoes common to this type of room, he usedpieces of violet wood deepened with amarinth. The effect wasbewitching, while recalling to Des Esseintes the repellant rigidity ofthe model he had followed and yet transformed. The ceiling, in turn, was hung with white, unbleached cloth, in imitation of plaster, butwithout its discordant brightness. As for the cold pavement of thecell, he was able to copy it, by means of a bit of rug designed in redsquares, with whitish spots in the weave to imitate the wear ofsandals and the friction of boots. 

Into this chamber he introduced a small iron bed, the kind used bymonks, fashioned of antique, forged and polished iron, the head andfoot adorned with thick filigrees of blossoming tulips enlaced withvine branches and leaves. Once this had been part of a balustrade ofan old hostel's superb staircase. 

For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk the inside ofwhich could contain an urn and the outside a prayer book. Against thewall, opposite it, he placed a church pew surmounted by a tall daiswith little benches carved out of solid wood. His church tapers weremade of real wax, procured from a special house which cateredexclusively to houses of worship, for Des Esseintes professed asincere repugnance to gas, oil and ordinary candles, to all modernforms of illumination, so gaudy and brutal. 

Before going to sleep in the morning, he would gaze, with his head onthe pillows, at his El Greco whose barbaric color rebuked the smiling, yellow material and recalled it to a more serious tone. Then he couldeasily imagine himself living a hundred leagues removed from Paris, far from society, in cloistral security. 

And, all in all, the illusion was not difficult, since he led anexistence that approached the life of a monk. Thus he had theadvantages of monasticism without the inconveniences of its vigorousdiscipline, its lack of service, its dirt, its promiscuity and itsmonotonous idleness. Just as he had transformed his cell into acomfortable chamber, so had he made his life normal, pleasant, surrounded by comforts, occupied and free. 

Like a hermit he was ripe for isolation, since life harassed him andhe no longer desired anything of it. Again like a monk, he wasdepressed and in the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with theneed of self-communion and with a desire to have nothing in commonwith the profane who were, for him, the utilitarian and the imbecile. 

Although he experienced no inclination for the state of grace, he felta genuine sympathy for those souls immured in monasteries, persecutedby a vengeful society which can forgive neither the merited scorn withwhich it inspires them, nor the desire to expiate, to atone by longsilences, for the ever growing shamelessness of its ridiculous ortrifling gossipings. 

 Chapter 7

Ever since the night when he had evoked, for no apparent reason, awhole train of melancholy memories, pictures of his past life returnedto Des Esseintes and gave him no peace. 

He found himself unable to understand a single word of the books heread. He could not even receive impressions through his eyes. Itseemed to him that his mind, saturated with literature and art, refused to absorb any more. 

He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like sometorpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted uponhis brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, hismind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortege of vague reveries to whichhe passively submitted. 

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which hehad indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of oldmemories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistiblewave crashed into the present and future, submerging everythingbeneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity ofsorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd triflesand dull episodes of his life. 

The book he held in his hands fell to his knees. He abandoned himselfto the mood which dominated him, watching the dead years of his lifefilled with so many disgusts and fears, move past. What a life he hadlived! He thought of the evenings spent in society, the horse races, card parties, love affairs ordered in advance and served at the strokeof midnight, in his rose-colored boudoir! He recalled faces, expressions, vain words which obsessed him with the stubbornness ofpopular melodies which one cannot help humming, but which suddenly andinexplicably end by boring one. 

This phase had not lasted long. His memory gave him respite and heplunged again into his Latin studies, so as to efface the impressionsof such recollections. 

But almost instantly the rushing force of his memories swept him intoa second phase, that of his childhood, especially of the years spentat the school of the Fathers. 

Although more remote, they were more positive and more indeliblystamped on his brain. The leafy park, the long walks, the flower beds, the benches--all the actual details of the monastery rose before him, here in his room. 

The gardens filled and he heard the ringing cries of the students, mingling with the laughter of the professors as they played tennis, with their cassocks tucked up between their knees, or perhaps chattedunder the trees with the youngsters, without any posturing or hauteur, as though they were companions of the same age. 

He recalled the easy yoke of the monks who declined to administerpunishment by inflicting the committment of five hundred or a thousandlines while the others were at play, being satisfied with making thosedelinquents prepare the lesson that had not been mastered, and mostoften simply having recourse to a gentle admonition. They surroundedthe children with an active but gentle watch, seeking to please them, consenting to whatever expeditions they wished to take on Tuesdays, taking the occasion of every minor holiday not formally observed bythe Church to add cakes and wine to the ordinary fare, and toentertain them with picnics. It was a paternal discipline whosesuccess lay in the fact that they did not seek to domineer over thepupils, that they gossiped with them, treating them as men whileshowering them with the attentions paid a spoiled child. 

In this manner, the monks succeeded in assuming a real influence overthe youngsters; in molding, to some extent, the minds which they werecultivating; in directing them, in a sense; in instilling specialideas; in assuring the growth of their thoughts by insinuating, wheedling methods with which they continued to flatter them throughouttheir careers, taking pains not to lose sight of them in their laterlife, and by sending them affectionate letters like those which theDominican Lacordaire so skillfully wrote to his former pupils ofSorreze. 

Des Esseintes took note of this system which had been so fruitlesslyexpended on him. His stubborn, captious and inquisitive character, disposed to controversies, had prevented him from being modelled bytheir discipline or subdued by their lessons. His scepticism hadincreased after he left the precincts of the college. His associationwith a legitimist, intolerant and shallow society, his conversationswith unintelligent church wardens and abbots, whose blunders tore awaythe veil so subtly woven by the Jesuits, had still more fortified hisspirit of independence and increased his scorn for any faith whatever. 

He had deemed himself free of all bonds and constraints. Unlike mostgraduates of _lycees_ or private schools, he had preserved a vividmemory of his college and of his masters. And now, as he consideredthese matters, he asked himself if the seeds sown until now on barrensoil were not beginning to take root. 

For several days, in fact, his soul had been strangely perturbed. Atmoments, he felt himself veering towards religion. Then, at theslightest approach of reason, his faith would dissolve. Yet heremained deeply troubled. 

Analyzing himself, he was well aware that he would never possess atruly Christian spirit of humility and penitence. He knew without adoubt that he would never experience that moment of grace mentioned byLacordaire, "when the last shaft of light penetrates the soul andunites the truths there lying dispersed. " He never felt the need ofmortification and of prayer, without which no conversion in possible, if one is to believe the majority of priests. He had no desire toimplore a God whose forgiveness seemed most improbable. Yet thesympathy he felt for his old teachers lent him an interest in theirworks and doctrines. Those inimitable accents of conviction, thoseardent voices of men of indubitably superior intelligence returned tohim and led him to doubt his own mind and strength. Amid the solitudein which he lived, without new nourishment, without any freshexperiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchangeof sensations common to society, in this unnatural confinement inwhich he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay inParis were revived as active irritants. The reading of his belovedLatin works, almost all of them written by bishops and monks, haddoubtless contributed to this crisis. Enveloped in a convent-likeatmosphere, in a heady perfume of incense, his nervous brain had grownexcitable. And by an association of ideas, these books had driven backthe memories of his life as a young man, revealing in full light theyears spent with the Fathers. 

"There is no doubt about it, " Des Esseintes mused, as he reasoned thematter and followed the progress of this introduction of the Jesuiticspirit into Fontenay. "Since my childhood, although unaware of it, Ihave had this leaven which has never fermented. The weakness I havealways borne for religious subjects is perhaps a positive proof ofit. " But he sought to persuade himself to the contrary, disturbed atno longer being his own master. He searched for motives; it hadrequired a struggle for him to abandon things sacerdotal, since theChurch alone had treasured objects of art--the lost forms of pastages. Even in its wretched modern reproductions, she had preserved thecontours of the gold and silver ornaments, the charm of chalicescurving like petunias, and the charm of pyxes with their chaste sides;even in aluminum and imitation enamels and colored glasses, she hadpreserved the grace of vanished modes. In short, most of the preciousobjects now to be found in the Cluny museum, which have miraculouslyescaped the crude barbarism of the philistines, come from the ancientFrench abbeys. And just as the Church had preserved philosophy andhistory and letters from barbarism in the Middle Ages, so had shesaved the plastic arts, bringing to our own days those marvelousfabrics and jewelries which the makers of sacred objects spoil to thebest of their ability, without being able to destroy the originallyexquisite form. It followed, then, that there was nothing surprisingin his having bought these old trinkets, in his having, together witha number of other collectors, purchased such relics from the antiqueshops of Paris and the second-hand dealers of the provinces. 

But these reasons he evoked in vain. He did not wholly succeed inconvincing himself. He persisted in considering religion as a superblegend, a magnificent imposture. Yet, despite his convictions, hisscepticism began to be shattered. 

This was the singular fact he was obliged to face: he was lessconfident now than in childhood, when he had been directly under theinfluence of the Jesuits, when their instruction could not be shunned, when he was in their hands and belonged to them body and soul, withoutfamily ties, with no outside influence powerful enough to counteracttheir precepts. Moreover, they had inculcated in him a certaintendency towards the marvelous which, interned and exercised in theclose quarters of his fixed ideas, had slowly and obscurely developedin his soul, until today it was blossoming in his solitude, affectinghis spirit, regardless of arguments. 

By examining the process of his reasoning, by seeking to unite itsthreads and to discover its sources and causes, he concluded that hisprevious mode of living was derived from the education he hadreceived. Thus, his tendencies towards artificiality and his cravingfor eccentricity, were no more than the results of specious studies, spiritual refinements and quasi-theological speculations. They were, in the last analysis, ecstacies, aspirations towards an ideal, towardsan unknown universe as desirable as that promised us by the HolyScriptures. 

He curbed his thoughts sharply and broke the thread of hisreflections. 

"Well!" he thought, vexed, "I am even more affected than I hadimagined. Here am I arguing with myself like a very casuist!"

He was left pensive, agitated by a vague fear. Certainly, ifLacordaire's theory were sound, he had nothing to be afraid of, sincethe magic touch of conversion is not to be consummated in a moment. Tobring about the explosion, the ground must be constantly andassiduously mined. But just as the romancers speak of the thunderclapof love, so do theologians also speak of the thunderclap ofconversion. No one was safe, should one admit the truth of thisdoctrine. There was no longer any need of self-analysis, of payingheed to presentiments, of taking preventive measures. The psychologyof mysticism was void. Things were so because they were so, and thatwas all. 

"I am really becoming stupid, " thought Des Esseintes. "The very fearof this malady will end by bringing it on, if this continues. "

He partially succeeded in shaking off this influence. The memories ofhis life with the Jesuits waned, only to be replaced by otherthoughts. He was entirely dominated by morbid abstractions. Despitehimself, he thought of the contradictory interpretations of thedogmas, of the lost apostasies of Father Labbe, recorded in the workson the Decrees. Fragments of these schisms, scraps of these heresieswhich for centuries had divided the Churches of the Orient and theOccident, returned to him. 

Here, Nestorius denied the title of "Mother of God" to the Virginbecause, in the mystery of the Incarnation, it was not God but rathera human being she had nourished in her womb; there, Eutyches declaredthat Christ's image could not resemble that of other men, sincedivinity had chosen to dwell in his body and had consequently entirelyaltered the form of everything. Other quibblers maintained that theRedeemer had had no body at all and that this expression of the holybooks must be taken figuratively, while Tertullian put forth hisfamous, semi-materialistic axiom: "Only that which is not, has nobody; everything which is, has a body fitting it. " Finally, thisancient question, debated for years, demanded an answer: was Christhanged on the cross, or was it the Trinity which had suffered as onein its triple hypostasis, on the cross at Calvary? And mechanically, like a lesson long ago learned, he proposed the questions to himselfand answered them. 

For several days his brain was a swarm of paradoxes, subtleties andhair-splittings, a skein of rules as complicated as the articles ofthe codes that involved the sense of everything, indulged in puns andended in a most tenuous and singular celestial jurisprudence. Theabstract side vanished, in its turn, and under the influence of theGustave Moreau paintings of the wall, yielded to a concrete successionof pictures. 

Before him he saw marching a procession of prelates. Thearchimandrites and patriarchs, their white beards waving during thereading of the prayers, lifted golden arms to bless kneeling throngs. He saw silent files of penitents marching into dim crypts. Before himrose vast cathedrals where white monks intoned from pulpits. Just asDe Quincey, having taken a dose of opium and uttered the word "ConsulRomanus, " evoked entire pages of Livius, and beheld the solemn advanceof the consuls and the magnificent, pompous march of the Roman armies, so he, at a theological expression, paused breathless as he viewed theonrush of penitents and the churchly apparitions which detachedthemselves from the glowing depths of the basilica. These scenes heldhim enchanted. They moved from age to age, culminating in the modernreligious ceremonies, bathing his soul in a tender, mournful infinityof music. 

On this plane, no reasonings were necessary; there were no furthercontests to be endured. He had an indescribable impression of respectand fear. His artistic sense was conquered by the skillfullycalculated Catholic rituals. His nerves quivered at these memories. Then, in sudden rebellion, in a sudden reversion, monstrous ideas wereborn in him, fancies concerning those sacrileges warned against by themanual of the Father confessors, of the scandalous, impure desecrationof holy water and sacred oil. The Demon, a powerful rival, now stoodagainst an omnipotent God. A frightful grandeur seemed to DesEsseintes to emanate from a crime committed in church by a believerbent, with blasphemously horrible glee and sadistic joy, over suchrevered objects, covering them with outrages and saturating them inopprobrium. 

Before him were conjured up the madnesses of magic, of the black mass, of the witches' revels, of terrors of possessions and of exorcisms. Hereached the point where he wondered if he were not committing asacrilege in possessing objects which had once been consecrated: theChurch canons, chasubles and pyx covers. And this idea of a state ofsin imparted to him a mixed sensation of pride and relief. Thepleasures of sacrilege were unravelled from the skein of this idea, but these were debatable sacrileges, in any case, and hardly serious, since he really loved these objects and did not pollute them bymisuse. In this wise he lulled himself with prudent and cowardlythoughts, the caution of his soul forbidding obvious crimes anddepriving him of the courage necessary to the consummation offrightful and deliberate sins. 

Little by little this tendency to ineffectual quibbling disappeared. In his mind's eye he saw the panorama of the Church with itshereditary influence on humanity through the centuries. He imagined itas imposing and suffering, emphasizing to man the horror of life, theinfelicity of man's destiny; preaching patience, penitence and thespirit of sacrifice; seeking to heal wounds, while it displayed thebleeding wounds of Christ; bespeaking divine privileges; promising therichest part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting humanity tosuffer and to render to God, like a holocaust, its trials andoffenses, its vicissitudes and pains. Thus the Church grew trulyeloquent, the beneficent mother of the oppressed, the eternal menaceof oppressors and despots. 

Here, Des Esseintes was on firm ground. He was thoroughly satisfiedwith this admission of social ordure, but he revolted against thevague hope of remedy in the beyond. Schopenhauer was more true. Hisdoctrine and that of the Church started from common premises. He, too, based his system on the vileness of the world; he, too, like theauthor of the _Imitation of Christ_, uttered that grievous outcry:"Truly life on earth is wretched. " He, also, preached the nothingnessof life, the advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that nomatter what it does, in whatever direction it may turn, it must remainwretched, the poor by reason of the sufferings entailed by want, therich by reason of the unconquerable weariness engendered by abundance;but this philosophy promised no universal remedies, did not entice onewith false hopes, so as to minimize the inevitable evils of life. 

He did not affirm the revolting conception of original sin, nor did hefeel inclined to argue that it is a beneficent God who protects theworthless and wicked, rains misfortunes on children, stultifies theaged and afflicts the innocent. He did not exalt the virtues of aProvidence which has invented that useless, incomprehensible, unjustand senseless abomination, physical suffering. Far from seeking tojustify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments andafflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: "If a God has made thisworld, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchednesswould rend my heart. "

Ah! Schopenhauer alone was right. Compared with these treatises ofspiritual hygiene, of what avail were the evangelical pharmacopoeias?He did not claim to cure anything, and he offered no alleviation tothe sick. But his theory of pessimism was, in the end, the greatconsoler of choice intellects and lofty souls. He revealed society asit is, asserted woman's inherent stupidity, indicated the safestcourse, preserved you from disillusionment by warning you to restrainhopes as much as possible, to refuse to yield to their allurement, todeem yourself fortunate, finally, if they did not come toppling aboutyour ears at some unexpected moment. 

Traversing the same path as the _Imitation_, this theory, too, endedin similar highways of resignation and indifference, but without goingastray in mysterious labyrinths and remote roads. 

But if this resignation, which was obviously the only outcome of thedeplorable condition of things and their irremediability, was open tothe spiritually rich, it was all the more difficult of approach to thepoor whose passions and cravings were more easily satisfied by thebenefits of religion. 

These reflections relieved Des Esseintes of a heavy burden. Theaphorisms of the great German calmed his excited thoughts, and thepoints of contact in these two doctrines helped him to correlate them;and he could never forget that poignant and poetic Catholicism inwhich he had bathed, and whose essence he had long ago absorbed. 

These reversions to religion, these intimations of faith tormented himparticularly since the changes that had lately taken place in hishealth. Their progress coincided with that of his recent nervousdisorders. 

He had been tortured since his youth by inexplicable aversions, byshudderings which chilled his spine and made him grit his teeth, as, for example, when he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactionshad long persisted. Even now he suffered poignantly when he heard thetearing of cloth, the rubbing of a finger against a piece of chalk, ora hand touching a bit of moire. 

The excesses of his youthful life, the exaggerated tension of his mindhad strangely aggravated his earliest nervous disorder, and hadthinned the already impoverished blood of his race. In Paris, he hadbeen compelled to submit to hydrotherapic treatments for his tremblingfingers, frightful pains, neuralgic strokes which cut his face in two, drummed maddeningly against his temples, pricked his eyelidsagonizingly and induced a nausea which could be dispelled only bylying flat on his back in the dark. 

These afflictions had gradually disappeared, thanks to a moreregulated and sane mode of living. They now returned in another form, attacking his whole body. The pains left his head, but affected hisinflated stomach. His entrails seemed pierced by hot bars of iron. Anervous cough racked him at regular intervals, awakening and almoststrangling him in his bed. Then his appetite forsook him; gaseous, hotacids and dry heats coursed through his stomach. He grew swollen, waschoked for breath, and could not endure his clothes after each attemptat eating. 

He shunned alcoholic beverages, coffee and tea, and drank only milk. And he took recourse to baths of cold water and dosed himself withassafoetida, valerian and quinine. He even felt a desire to go out, and strolled about the country when the rainy days came to make itdesolate and still. He obliged himself to take exercise. As a lastresort, he temporarily abandoned his books and, corroded with ennui, determined to make his listless life tolerable by realizing a projecthe had long deferred through laziness and a dislike of change, sincehis installment at Fontenay. 

Being no longer able to intoxicate himself with the felicities ofstyle, with the delicious witchery of the rare epithet which, whileremaining precise, yet opens to the imagination of the initiateinfinite and distant vistas, he determined to give the finishingtouches to the decorations of his home. He would procure precioushot-house flowers and thus permit himself a material occupation whichmight distract him, calm his nerves and rest his brain. He also hopedthat the sight of their strange and splendid nuances would in somedegree atone for the fanciful and genuine colors of style which he wasfor the time to lose from his literary diet. 

 Chapter 8

He had always been passionately fond of flowers, but during hisresidence at Jutigny, that love had been lavished upon flowers of allsorts; he had never cultivated distinctions and discriminations inregard to them. Now his taste in this direction had grown refined andself-conscious. 

For a long time he had scorned the popular plants which grow in flatbaskets, in watered pots, under green awnings or under the redparasols of Parisian markets. 

Simultaneous with the refinement of his literary taste and hispreoccupations with art, which permitted him to be content only in thepresence of choice creations, distilled by subtly troubled brains, andsimultaneous with the weariness he began to feel in the presence ofpopular ideas, his love for flowers had grown purged of all impuritiesand lees, and had become clarified. 

He compared a florist's shop to a microcosm wherein all the categoriesof society are represented. Here are poor common flowers, the kindfound in hovels, which are truly at home only when resting on ledgesof garret windows, their roots thrust into milk bottles and old pans, like the gilly-flower for example. 

And one also finds stupid and pretentious flowers like the rose whichbelongs in the porcelain flowerpots painted by young girls. 

Then, there are flowers of noble lineage like the orchid, so delicateand charming, at once cold and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled inthe heated glass palaces of Paris, princesses of the vegetable kingdomliving in solitude, having absolutely nothing in common with thestreet plants and other bourgeois flora. 

He permitted himself to feel a certain interest and pity only for thepopular flowers enfeebled by their nearness to the odors of sinks anddrains in the poor quarters. In revenge he detested the bouquetsharmonizing with the cream and gold rooms of pretentious houses. Forthe joy of his eyes he reserved those distinguished, rare blooms whichhad been brought from distant lands and whose lives were sustained byartful devices under artificial equators. 

But this very choice, this predilection for the conservatory plantshad itself changed under the influence of his mode of thought. Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had ledhim to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicasfaithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with Indiarubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and silk. He was thepossessor of a marvelous collection of tropical plants, the result ofthe labors of skilful artists who knew how to follow nature andrecreate her step by step, taking the flower as a bud, leading it toits full development, even imitating its decline, reaching such apoint of perfection as to convey every nuance--the most fugitiveexpressions of the flower when it opens at dawn and closes at evening, observing the appearance of the petals curled by the wind or rumpledby the rain, applying dew drops of gum on its matutinal corollas;shaping it in full bloom, when the branches bend under the burden oftheir sap, or showing the dried stem and shrivelled cupules, whencalyxes are thrown off and leaves fall to the ground. 

This wonderful art had held him entranced for a long while, but now hewas dreaming of another experiment. 

He wished to go one step beyond. Instead of artificial flowersimitating real flowers, natural flowers should mimic the artificialones. 

He directed his ideas to this end and had not to seek long or go far, since his house lay in the very heart of a famous horticulturalregion. He visited the conservatories of the Avenue de Chatillon andof the Aunay valley, and returned exhausted, his purse empty, astonished at the strange forms of vegetation he had seen, thinking ofnothing but the species he had acquired and continually haunted bymemories of magnificent and fantastic plants. 

The flowers came several days later. 

Des Esseintes holding a list in his hands, verified each one of hispurchases. The gardeners from their wagons brought a collection ofcaladiums which sustained enormous heartshaped leaves on turgid hairystalks; while preserving an air of relationship with its neighbor, noone leaf repeated the same pattern. 

Others were equally extraordinary. The roses like the _Virginale_seemed cut out of varnished cloth or oil-silks; the white ones, likethe _Albano_, appeared to have been cut out of an ox's transparentpleura, or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Some, particularly the_Madame Mame_, imitated zinc and parodied pieces of stamped metalhaving a hue of emperor green, stained by drops of oil paint and byspots of white and red lead; others like the _Bosphorous_, gave theillusion of a starched calico in crimson and myrtle green; stillothers, like the _Aurora Borealis_, displayed leaves having the colorof raw meat, streaked with purple sides, violet fibrils, tumefiedleaves from which oozed blue wine and blood. 

The _Albano_ and the _Aurora_ sounded the two extreme notes oftemperament, the apoplexy and chlorosis of this plant. 

The gardeners brought still other varieties which had the appearanceof artificial skin ridged with false veins, and most of them looked asthough consumed by syphilis and leprosy, for they exhibited lividsurfaces of flesh veined with scarlet rash and damasked witheruptions. Some had the deep red hue of scars that have just closed orthe dark tint of incipient scabs. Others were marked with matterraised by scaldings. There were forms which exhibited shaggy skinshollowed by ulcers and relieved by cankers. And a few appearedembossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog lard, withgreen unguents of belladonna smeared with grains of dust and theyellow micas of iodoforme. 

Collected in his home, these flowers seemed to Des Esseintes moremonstrous than when he had beheld them, confused with others among theglass rooms of the conservatory. 

"_Sapristi!_" he exclaimed enthusiastically. 

A new plant, modelled like the Caladiums, the _Alocasia Metallica_, excited him even more. It was coated with a layer of bronze green onwhich glanced silver reflections. It was the masterpiece ofartificiality. It could be called a piece of stove pipe, cut by achimney-maker into the form of a pike head. 

The men next brought clusters of leaves, lozenge-like in shape andbottle-green in color. In the center rose a rod at whose end avarnished ace of hearts swayed. As though meaning to defy allconceivable forms of plants, a fleshy stalk climbed through the heartof this intense vermilion ace--a stalk that in some specimens wasstraight, in others showed ringlets like a pig's tail. 

It was the _Anthurium_, an aroid recently imported into France fromColumbia; a variety of that family to which also belonged an_Amorphophallus_, a Cochin China plant with leaves shaped likefish-knives, with long dark stems seamed with gashes, like lambsflecked with black. 

Des Esseintes exulted. 

They brought a new batch of monstrosities from the wagon:_Echinopses_, issuing from padded compresses with rose-colored flowersthat looked like the pitiful stumps; gaping _Nidularia_ revealingskinless foundations in steel plates; _Tillandsia Lindeni_, the colorof wine must, with jagged scrapers; _Cypripedia_, with complicatedcontours, a crazy piece of work seemingly designed by a crazyinventor. They looked like sabots or like a lady's work-table on whichlies a human tongue with taut filaments, such as one sees designed onthe illustrated pages of works treating of the diseases of the throatand mouth; two little side-pieces, of a red jujube color, whichappeared to have been borrowed from a child's toy mill completed thissingular collection of a tongue's underside with the color of slateand wine lees, and of a glossy pocket from whose lining oozed aviscous glue. 

He could not remove his eyes from this unnatural orchid which had beenbrought from India. Then the gardeners, impatient at hisprocrastinations, themselves began to read the labels fastened to thepots they were carrying in. 

Bewildered, Des Esseintes looked on and listened to the cacophonoussounds of the names: the _Encephalartos horridus_, a gigantic ironrust-colored artichoke, like those put on portals of chateaux to foilwall climbers; the _Cocos Micania_, a sort of notched and slender palmsurrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars; the _ZamiaLehmanni_, an immense pineapple, a wondrous Chester leaf, planted insweet-heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jaggedarrows; the _Cibotium Spectabile_, surpassing the others by thecraziness of its structure, hurling a defiance to revery, as itdarted, through the palmated foliage, an enormous orang-outang tail, ahairy dark tail whose end was twisted into the shape of a bishop'scross. 

But he gave little heed, for he was impatiently awaiting the series ofplants which most bewitched him, the vegetable ghouls, the carnivorousplants; the _Antilles Fly-Trap_, with its shaggy border, secreting adigestive liquid, armed with crooked prickles coiling around eachother, forming a grating about the imprisoned insect; the _Drosera_ ofthe peat-bogs, provided with glandular hair; the _Sarracena_ and the_Cephalothus_, opening greedy horns capable of digesting and absorbingreal meat; lastly, the _Nepenthes_, whose capricious appearancetranscends all limits of eccentric forms. 

He never wearied of turning in his hands the pot in which this floralextravagance stirred. It imitated the gum-tree whose long leaf of darkmetallic green it possessed, but it differed in that a green stringhung from the end of its leaf, an umbilic cord supporting a greenishurn, streaked with jasper, a sort of German porcelain pipe, a strangebird's nest which tranquilly swung about, revealing an interiorcovered with hair. 

"This is really something worth while, " Des Esseintes murmured. 

He was forced to tear himself away, for the gardeners, anxious toleave, were emptying the wagons of their contents and depositing, without any semblance of order, the tuberous _Begonias_ and black_Crotons_ stained like sheet iron with Saturn red. 

Then he perceived that one name still remained on his list. It was the_Cattleya_ of New Granada. On it was designed a little winged bell ofa faded lilac, an almost dead mauve. He approached, placed his noseabove the plant and quickly recoiled. It exhaled an odor of toy boxesof painted pine; it recalled the horrors of a New Year's Day. 

He felt that he would do well to mistrust it and he almost regrettedhaving admitted, among the scentless plants, this orchid which evokedthe most disagreeable memories. 

As soon as he was alone his gaze took in this vegetable tide whichfoamed in the vestibule. Intermingled with each other, they crossedtheir swords, their krisses and stanchions, taking on a resemblance toa green pile of arms, above which, like barbaric penons, floatedflowers with hard dazzling colors. 

The air of the room grew rarefied. Then, in the shadowy dimness of acorner, near the floor, a white soft light crept. 

He approached and perceived that the phenomenon came from the_Rhizomorphes_ which threw out these night-lamp gleams whilerespiring. 

"These plants are amazing, " he reflected. Then he drew back to let hiseye encompass the whole collection at a glance. His purpose wasachieved. Not one single specimen seemed real; the cloth, paper, porcelain and metal seemed to have been loaned by man to nature toenable her to create her monstrosities. When unable to imitate man'shandiwork, nature had been reduced to copying the inner membranes ofanimals, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, theirmagnificent corruptions. 

"All is syphilis, " thought Des Esseintes, his eye riveted upon thehorrible streaked stainings of the Caladium plants caressed by a rayof light. And he beheld a sudden vision of humanity consumed throughthe centuries by the virus of this disease. Since the world'sbeginnings, every single creature had, from sire to son, transmittedthe imperishable heritage, the eternal malady which has ravaged man'sancestors and whose effects are visible even in the bones of oldfossils that have been exhumed. 

The disease had swept on through the centuries gaining momentum. Iteven raged today, concealed in obscure sufferings, dissimulated undersymptoms of headaches and bronchitis, hysterics and gout. It crept tothe surface from time to time, preferably attacking the ill-nourishedand the poverty stricken, spotting faces with gold pieces, ironicallydecorating the faces of poor wretches, stamping the mark of money ontheir skins to aggravate their unhappiness. 

And here on the colored leaves of the plants it was resurgent in itsoriginal splendor. 

"It is true, " pursued Des Esseintes, returning to the course ofreasoning he had momentarily abandoned, "it is true that most oftennature, left alone, is incapable of begetting such perverse and sicklyspecimens. She furnishes the original substance, the germ and theearth, the nourishing womb and the elements of the plant which manthen sets up, models, paints, and sculpts as he wills. Limited, stubborn and formless though she be, nature has at last been subjectedand her master has succeeded in changing, through chemical reaction, the earth's substances, in using combinations which had been longmatured, cross-fertilization processes long prepared, in making use ofslips and graftings, and man now forces differently colored flowers inthe same species, invests new tones for her, modifies to his will thelong-standing form of her plants, polishes the rough clods, puts anend to the period of botch work, places his stamp on them, imposes onthem the mark of his own unique art. "

"It cannot be gainsaid, " he thought, resuming his reflections, "thatman in several years is able to effect a selection which slothfulnature can produce only after centuries. Decidedly the horticulturistsare the real artists nowadays. "

He was a little tired and he felt stifled in this atmosphere ofcrowded plants. The promenades he had taken during the last few dayshad exhausted him. The transition had been too sudden from the tepidatmosphere of his room to the out-of-doors, from the placidtranquillity of a reclusive life to an active one. He left thevestibule and stretched out on his bed to rest, but, absorbed by thisnew fancy of his, his mind, even in his sleep, could not lessen itstension and he was soon wandering among the gloomy insanities of anightmare. 

He found himself in the center of a walk, in the heart of the wood;twilight had fallen. He was strolling by the side of a woman whom hehad never seen before. She was emaciated and had flaxen hair, abulldog face, freckles on her cheeks, crooked teeth projecting under aflat nose. She wore a nurse's white apron, a long neckerchief, torn instrips on her bosom; half-shoes like those worn by Prussian soldiersand a black bonnet adorned with frillings and trimmed with a rosette. 

There was a foreign look about her, like that of a mountebank at afair. 

He asked himself who the woman could be; he felt that she had longbeen an intimate part of his life; vainly he sought her origin, hername, her profession, her reason for being. No recollection of thisliaison, which was inexplicable and yet positive, rewarded him. 

He was searching his past for a clue, when a strange figure suddenlyappeared on horse-back before them, trotting about for a moment andthen turning around in its saddle. Des Esseintes' heart almost stoppedbeating and he stood riveted to the spot with horror. He nearlyfainted. This enigmatic, sexless figure was green; through her violeteyelids the eyes were terrible in their cold blue; pimples surroundedher mouth; horribly emaciated, skeleton arms bared to the elbowsissued from ragged tattered sleeves and trembled feverishly; and theskinny legs shivered in shoes that were several sizes too large. 

The ghastly eyes were fixed on Des Esseintes, penetrating him, freezing his very marrow; wilder than ever, the bulldog woman threwherself at him and commenced to howl like a dog at the killing, herhead hanging on her rigid neck. 

Suddenly he understood the meaning of the frightful vision. Before himwas the image of Syphilis. 

Pursued by fear and quite beside himself, he sped down a pathway attop speed and gained a pavillion standing among the laburnums to theleft, where he fell into a chair, in the passage way. 

After a few moments, when he was beginning to recover his breath, thesound of sobbing made him lift his head. The bulldog woman was infront of him and, grotesque and woeful, while warm tears fell from hereyes, she told him that she had lost her teeth in her flight. As shespoke she drew clay pipes from the pocket of her nurse's apron, breaking them and shoving pieces of the stems into the hollows of hergums. 

"But she is really absurd, " Des Esseintes told himself. "These stemswill never stick. " And, as a matter of fact, they dropped out oneafter another. 

At this moment were heard the galloping sounds of an approachinghorse. A fearful terror pierced Des Esseintes. His limbs gave way. Thegalloping grew louder. Despair brought him sharply to his senses. Hethrew himself upon the woman who was stamping on the pipe bowls, entreating her to be silent, not to give notice of their presence bythe sound of her shoes. She writhed and struggled in his grip; he ledher to the end of the corridor, strangling her to prevent her fromcrying out. Suddenly he noticed the door of a coffee house, with greenVenetian shutters. It was unlocked; he pushed it, rushed in headlongand then paused. 

Before him, in the center of a vast glade, huge white pierrots wereleaping rabbit-like under the rays of the moon. 

Tears of discouragement welled to his eyes; never, no never would hesucceed in crossing the threshold. "I shall be crushed, " he thought. And as though to justify his fears, the ranks of tall pierrots swarmedand multiplied; their somersaults now covered the entire horizon, thewhole sky on which they landed now on their heads, now on their feet. 

Then the hoof beats paused. He was in the passage, behind a roundskylight. More dead than alive, Des Esseintes turned about and throughthe round window beheld projecting erect ears, yellow teeth, nostrilsfrom which breathed two jets of vapor smelling of phenol. 

He sank to the ground, renouncing all ideas of flight or ofresistance. He closed his eyes so as not to behold the horrible gazeof Syphilis which penetrated through the wall, which even pierced hisclosed lids, which he felt gliding over his moist spine, over his bodywhose hair bristled in pools of cold sweat. He waited for the worstand even hoped for the _coup de grace_ to end everything. A momentwhich seemed to last a century passed. Shuddering, he opened his eyes. Everything had vanished. Without any transition, as though by somestage device, a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance, a wan, dead, waste, gullied landscape. A light illumined this desolatesite, a peaceful white light that recalled gleams of phosphorusdissolved in oil. 

Something that stirred on the ground became a deathly pale, nude womanwhose feet were covered with green silk stockings. 

He contemplated her with curiosity. As though frizzed by overheatedirons, her hair curled, becoming straight again at the end; herdistended nostrils were the color of roast veal. Her eyes weredesirous, and she called to him in low tones. 

He had no time to answer, for already the woman was changing. Flamboyant colors passed and repassed in her eyes. Her lips werestained with a furious Anthurium red. The nipples of her breastsflashed, painted like two pods of red pepper. 

A sudden intuition came to him. "It is the Flower, " he said. And hisreasoning mania persisted in his nightmare. 

Then he observed the frightful irritation of the breasts and mouth, discovered spots of bister and copper on the skin of her body, andrecoiled bewildered. But the woman's eyes fascinated him and headvanced slowly, attempting to thrust his heels into the earth so asnot to move, letting himself fall, and yet lifting himself to reachher. Just as he touched her, the dark _Amorphophalli_ leaped up fromall sides and thrust their leaves into his abdomen which rose and felllike a sea. He had broken all the plants, experiencing a limitlessdisgust in seeing these warm, firm stems stirring in his hands. Suddenly the detested plants had disappeared and two arms sought toenlace him. A terrible anguish made his heart beat furiously, for theeyes, the horrible eyes of the woman, had become a clear, cold andterrible blue. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from herembrace, but she held him with an irresistible movement. He beheld thewild _Nidularium_ which yawned, bleeding, in steel plates. 

With his body he touched the hideous wound of this plant. He felthimself dying, awoke with a start, suffocating, frozen, mad with fearand sighing: "Ah! thank God, it was but a dream!"

 Chapter 9

These nightmares attacked him repeatedly. He was afraid to fallasleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey tofeverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressivedreams in which he tumbled down flights of stairs and felt himselfsinking, powerless, into abysmal depths. 

His nervous attacks, which had abated for several days, became acute, more violent and obstinate than ever, unearthing new tortures. 

The bed covers tormented him. He stifled under the sheets, his bodysmarted and tingled as though stung by swarms of insects. Thesesymptoms were augmented by a dull pain in his jaws and a throbbing inhis temples which seemed to be gripped in a vise. 

His alarm increased; but unfortunately the means of subduing theinexorable malady were not at hand. He had unsuccessfully sought toinstall a hydropathic apparatus in his dressing room. But theimpossibility of forcing water to the height on which his house wasperched, and the difficulty of procuring water even in the villagewhere the fountains functioned sparingly and only at certain hours ofthe day, caused him to renounce the project. Since he could not havefloods of water playing on him from the nozzle of a hose, (the onlyefficacious means of overcoming his insomnia and calming his nervesthrough its action on his spinal column) he was reduced to briefsprays or to mere cold baths, followed by energetic massages appliedby his servant with the aid of a horse-hair glove. 

But these measures failed to stem the march of his nervous disorder. At best they afforded him a few hours' relief, dearly paid for by thereturn of the attacks in an even more virulent form. 

His ennui passed all bounds. His pleasure in the possession of hiswonderful flowers was exhausted. Their textures and nuances palled onhim. Besides, despite the care he lavished on them, most of his plantsdrooped. He had them removed from his rooms, but in his state ofextreme excitability, their very absence exasperated him, for his eyeswere pained by the void. 

To while away the interminable hours, he had recourse to hisportfolios of prints, and arranged his Goyas. The first impressions ofcertain plates of the _Caprices_, recognizable as proofs by theirreddish hues, which he had bought at auction at a high price, comforted him, and he lost himself in them, following the painter'sfantasies, distracted by his vertiginous scenes, his witches astrideon cats, his women striving to pluck out the teeth of a hanged man, his bandits, his succubi, his demons and dwarfs. 

Then he examined his other series of etchings and aquatints, his_Proverbs_ with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wildrage, finally his plate of the Garot, of which he cherished amarvelous trial proof, printed on heavy water-marked paper, unmounted. 

Goya's savage verve and keenly fanciful talent delighted him, but theuniversal admiration his works had won nevertheless estranged himslightly. And for years he had refused to frame them for fear that thefirst blundering fool who caught sight of them might deem it necessaryto fly into banal and facile raptures before them. 

The same applied to his Rembrandts which he examined from time totime, half secretly; and if it be true that the loveliest tuneimaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the publicbegins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work ofart which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, whichis not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakeningthe enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate. 

This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatestsources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had foreverspoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects tohim, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions werenot growing blunted. 

He closed his portfolios and, completely disconcerted, again plungedinto melancholy. To divert the current of his thoughts and cool hisbrain, he sought books that would soothe him and turned to theromances of Dickens, those charming novels which are so satisfying toinvalids and convalescents who might grow fatigued by works of a moreprofound and vigorous nature. 

But they produced an effect contrary to his expectations. These chastelovers, these protesting heroines garbed to the neck, loved among thestars, confined themselves to lowered eyes and blushes, wept tears ofjoy and clasped hands--an exaggeration of purity which threw him intoan opposite excess. By the law of contrast, he leaped from one extremeto the other, let his imagination dwell on vibrant scenes betweenhuman lovers, and mused on their sensual kisses and passionateembraces. 

His mind wandered off from his book to worlds far removed from theEnglish prude: to wanton peccadilloes and salacious practicescondemned by the Church. He grew excited. The impotence of his mindand body which he had supposed final, vanished. Solitude again actedon his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religionitself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all itsobsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, whichhad been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then broughtto a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulatedsenses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories of hisold sin. 

He rose and pensively opened a little box of vermeil with a lid ofaventurine. 

It was filled with violet bonbons. He took one up and pressed itbetween his fingers, thinking of the strange properties of thissugary, frosted sweetmeat. When his virility had been impaired, whenthe thought of woman had roused in him no sharp regret or desire, hehad only to put one in his mouth, let it melt, and almost at once itinduced misty, languishing memories, infinitely tender. 

These bonbons invented by Siraudin and bearing the ridiculous name of"Perles des Pyrenees" were each a drop of sarcanthus perfume, a dropof feminine essence crystallized in a morsel of sugar. They penetratedthe papillae of the tongue, recalling the very savor of voluptuouskisses. 

Usually he smiled as he inhaled this love aroma, this shadow of acaress which for a moment restored the delights of women he had onceadored. Today they were not merely suggestive, they no longer servedas a delicate hint of his distant riotous past. They were becomepowerful, thrusting aside the veils, exposing before his eyes theimportunate, corporeal and brutal reality. 

At the head of the procession of mistresses whom the fragrance of thebonbons helped to place in bold relief, one paused, displaying longwhite teeth, a satiny rose skin, a snub nose, mouse-colored eyes, andclose-cropped blond hair. 

This was Miss Urania, an American, with a vigorous body, sinewy limbs, muscles of steel and arms of iron. 

She had been one of the most celebrated acrobats of the Circus. 

Des Esseintes had watched her attentively through many long evenings. At first, she had seemed to him what she really was, a strong andbeautiful woman, but the desire to know her never troubled him. Shepossessed nothing to recommend her in the eyes of a blase man, and yethe returned to the Circus, allured by he knew not what, importuned bya sentiment difficult to define. 

Gradually, as he watched her, a fantastic idea seized him. Hergraceful antics and arch feminine ways receded to the background ofhis mind, replaced by her power and strength which had for him all thecharm of masculinity. Compared with her, Des Esseintes seemed tohimself a frail, effeminate creature, and he began to desire her asardently as an anaemic young girl might desire some loutish Herculeswhose arms could crush her in a strong embrace. 

One evening he finally decided to communicate with her and dispatchedone of the attendants on this errand. Miss Urania deemed it necessarynot to yield before a preliminary courtship; but she showed herselfamenable, as it was common gossip that Des Esseintes was rich and thathis name was instrumental in establishing women. 

But as soon as his wishes were granted, his disappointment surpassedany he had yet experienced. He had persuaded himself that the Americanwoman would be as bestial and stupid as a wrestler at a county fair, and instead her stupidity was of an altogether feminine nature. Certainly, she lacked education and tact, had neither good sense norwit, and displayed an animal voracity at table, but she possessed allthe childish traits of a woman. Her manner and speech were coquettishand affected, those of a silly, scandal-loving young girl. There wasabsolutely nothing masculine about her. 

Furthermore, she was withdrawn and puritanical in her embraces, displaying none of the brute force he had dreaded yet longed for, andshe was subject to none of the perturbations of his sex. 

Des Esseintes inevitably returned to the masculine role he hadmomentarily abandoned. 

His impression of femininity, weakness, need of protection, of feareven, disappeared. The illusion was no longer possible! Miss Uraniawas an ordinary mistress, in no wise justifying the cerebral curiosityshe had at first awakened in him. 

Although the charm of her firm skin and magnificent beauty had atfirst astonished and captivated Des Esseintes, he lost no time interminating this liaison, for his impotence was prematurely hastenedby the frozen and prudish caresses of this woman. 

And yet she was the first of all the women he had loved, now flittingthrough his revery, to stand out. But if she was more stronglyimprinted on his memory than a host of others whose allurements hadbeen less spurious and more seductive, the reason must be ascribed toher healthy animalism, to her exuberance which contrasted sostrikingly with the perfumed anaemia of the others, a faint suggestionof which he found in the delicate Siraudin bonbon. 

Miss Urania haunted him by reason of her very difference, but almostinstantly, offended by the intrusion of this natural, crude aroma, theantithesis of the scented confection, Des Esseintes returned to morecivilized exhalations and his thoughts reverted to his othermistresses. They pressed upon him in a throng; but above them all rosea woman whose startling talents had satisfied him for months. 

She was a little, slender brunette, with black eyes and burnished hairparted on one side and sleeked down over her head. He had known her ina cafe where she gave ventriloqual performances. 

Before the amazed patrons, she caused her tiny cardboard figures, placed near each other on chairs, to talk; she conversed with theanimated mannikins while flies buzzed around the chandeliers. Then oneheard the rustling of the tense audience, surprised to find itselfseated and instinctively recoiling when they heard the rumbling ofimaginary carriages. 

Des Esseintes had been fascinated. He lost no time in winning over theventriloquist, tempting her with large sums of money. She delightedhim by the very contrast she exhibited to the American woman. Thisbrunette used strong perfumes and burned like a crater. Despite allher blandishments, Des Esseintes wearied of her in a few short hours. But this did not prevent him from letting himself be fleeced, for thephenomenon of the ventriloquist attracted him more than did the charmsof the mistress. 

Certain plans he had long pondered upon ripened, and he decided tobring them to fruition. 

One evening he ordered a tiny sphinx brought in--a sphinx carved fromblack marble and resting in the classic pose with outstretched pawsand erect head. He also purchased a chimera of polychrome clay; itbrandished its mane of hair, and its sides resembled a pair ofbellows. These two images he placed in a corner of the room. Then heextinguished the lamps, permitting the glowing embers to throw a dimlight around the room and to magnify the objects which were almostimmersed in gloom. 

Then he stretched out on a couch beside the woman whose motionlessfigure was touched by the ember gleams, and waited. 

With strange intonations that he had long and patiently taught her, she animated the two monsters; she did not even move her lips, she didnot even glance in their direction. 

And in the silence followed the marvelous dialogue of the Chimera andthe Sphinx; it was recited in deep guttural tones which were at firstraucous, then turned shrill and unearthly. 

"Here, Chimera, pause!"

"Never!"

Lulled by the admirable prose of Flaubert, he listened; he panted andshivering sensations raced through his frame, when the Chimera utteredthe magical and solemn phrase:

"New perfumes I seek, stranger flowers I seek, pleasures not yetdiscovered. "

Ah! it was to him that this voice, mysterious as an incantation, spoke; it was to him that this voice recounted her feverish agitationfor the unknown, her insatiable ideals, her imperative need to escapefrom the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines ofthought, to grope towards the mists of elusive, unattainable art. Thepoignant tragedy of his past failures rent his heart. Gently heclasped the silent woman at his side, he sought refuge in hernearness, like a child who is inconsolable; he was blind to thesulkiness of the comedienne obliged to perform off-scene, in herleisure moments, far from the spotlight. 

Their liaison continued, but his spells of exhaustion soon becameacute. His brain no longer sufficed to stimulate his benumbed body. Nolonger did his nerves obey his will; and now the crazy whims ofdotards dominated him. Terrified by the approach of a disastrousweakness in the presence of his mistress, he resorted to fear--thatoldest, most efficacious of excitants. 

A hoarse voice from behind the door would exclaim, while he held thewoman in his arms: "Open the door, woman, I know you're in there, andwith whom. Just wait, wait!" Instantly, like a libertine stirred byfear of discovery in the open, he recovered his strength and hurledhimself madly upon the ventriloquist whose voice continued to blusteroutside the room. In this wise he experienced the pleasures of apanic-stricken person. 

But this state, unfortunately, did not last long, and despite the sumshe paid her, the ventriloquist parted to offer herself to someone lessexigent and less complex. 

He had regretted her defection, and now, recalling her, the otherwomen seemed insipid, their childish graces and monotonous coquetrydisgusting him. 

In the ferment of his disordered brain, he delighted in mingling withthese recollections of his past, other more gloomy pleasures, astheology qualifies the evocation of past, disgraceful acts. With thephysical visions he mingled spiritual ardors brought into play andmotivated by his old readings of the casuists, of the Busembaums andthe Dianas, of the Liguoris and the Sanchezes, treating oftransgressions against the sixth and ninth commandments of theDecalogue. 

In awakening an almost divine ideal in this soul steeped in herprecepts--a soul possibly predisposed to the teachings of the Churchthrough hereditary influences dating back from the reign of Henry III, religion had also stirred the illegitimate, forbidden enjoyment of thesenses. Licentious and mystical obsessions haunted his brain, theymingled confusedly, and he would often be troubled by an unappeasabledesire to shun the vulgarities of the world and to plunge, far fromthe customs and modes held in such reverence, into convulsions andraptures which were holy or infernal and which, in either case, provedtoo exhausting and enervating. 

He would arise prostrate from such reveries, fatigued and all butlifeless. He would light the lamps and candles so as to flood the roomwith light, for he hoped that by so doing he might possibly diminishthe intolerably persistent and dull throbbing of his arteries whichbeat under his neck with redoubled strokes. 

 Chapter 10

During the course of this malady which attacks impoverished races, sudden calms succeed an attack. Strangely enough, Des Esseintes awokeone morning recovered; no longer was he tormented by the throbbing ofhis neck or by his racking cough. Instead, he had an ineffablesensation of contentment, a lightness of mind in which thought wassparklingly clear, turning from a turbid, opaque, green color to aliquid iridescence magical with tender rainbow tints. 

This lasted several days. Then hallucinations of odor suddenlyappeared. 

His room was aromatic with the fragrance of frangipane; he tried toascertain if a bottle were not uncorked--no! not a bottle was to befound in the room, and he passed into his study and thence to thekitchen. Still the odor persisted. 

Des Esseintes rang for his servant and asked if he smelled anything. The domestic sniffed the air and declared he could not detect anyperfume. There was no doubt about it: his nervous attacks had returnedagain, under the appearance of a new illusion of the senses. 

Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary aroma, he resolved to steephimself in real perfumes, hoping that this homeopathic treatment wouldcure him or would at least drown the persistent odor. 

He betook himself to his dressing room. There, near an old baptisterywhich he used as a wash basin, under a long mirror of forged iron, which, like the edge of a well silvered by the moon, confined thegreen dull surface of the mirror, were bottles of every conceivablesize and form, placed on ivory shelves. 

He set them on the table and divided them into two series: one of thesimple perfumes, pure extracts or spirits, the other of compoundperfumes, designated under the generic term of bouquets. 

He sank into an easy chair and meditated. 

He had long been skilled in the science of smell. He believed thatthis sense could give one delights equal to those of hearing andsight; each sense being susceptible, if naturally keen and if properlycultivated, to new impressions, which it could intensify, coordinateand compose into that unity which constitutes a creative work. And itwas not more abnormal and unnatural that an art should be called intoexistence by disengaging odors than that another art should be evokedby detaching sound waves or by striking the eye with diversely coloredrays. But if no person could discern, without intuition developed bystudy, a painting by a master from a daub, a melody of Beethoven fromone by Clapisson, no more could any one at first, without preliminaryinitiation, help confusing a bouquet invented by a sincere artist witha pot pourri made by some manufacturer to be sold in groceries andbazaars. 

In this art, the branch devoted to achieving certain effects byartificial methods particularly delighted him. 

Perfumes, in fact, rarely come from the flowers whose names they bear. The artist who dared to borrow nature's elements would only produce abastard work which would have neither authenticity nor style, inasmuchas the essence obtained by the distillation of flowers would bear buta distant and vulgar relation to the odor of the living flower, wafting its fragrance into the air. 

Thus, with the exception of the inimitable jasmine which it isimpossible to counterfeit, all flowers are perfectly represented bythe blend of aromatic spirits, stealing the very personality of themodel, and to it adding that nuance the more, that heady scent, thatrare touch which entitled a thing to be called a work of art. 

To resume, in the science of perfumery, the artist develops thenatural odor of the flowers, working over his subject like a jewelerrefining the lustre of a gem and making it precious. 

Little by little, the arcana of this art, most neglected of all, wasrevealed to Des Esseintes who could now read this language, asdiversified and insinuating as that of literature, this style with itsunexpected concision under its vague flowing appearance. 

To achieve this end he had first been compelled to master the grammarand understand the syntax of odors, learning the secret of the rulesthat regulate them, and, once familiarized with the dialect, hecompared the works of the masters, of the Atkinsons and Lubins, theChardins and Violets, the Legrands and Piesses; then he separated theconstruction of their phrases, weighed the value of their words andthe arrangement of their periods. 

Later on, in this idiom of fluids, experience was able to supporttheories too often incomplete and banal. 

Classic perfumery, in fact, was scarcely diversified, almost colorlessand uniformly issuing from the mold cast by the ancient chemists. Itwas in its dotage, confined to its old alambics, when the romanticperiod was born and had modified the old style, rejuvenating it, making it more supple and malleable. 

Step by step, its history followed that of our language. The perfumedLouis XIII style, composed of elements highly prized at that time, ofiris powder, musk, chive and myrtle water already designated under thename of "water of the angels, " was hardly sufficient to express thecavalier graces, the rather crude tones of the period which certainsonnets of Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later, with myrrh andolibanum, the mystic odors, austere and powerful, the pompous gestureof the great period, the redundant artifices of oratorial art, thefull, sustained harmonious style of Bossuet and the masters of thepulpit were almost possible. Still later, the sophisticated, ratherbored graces of French society under Louis XV, more easily found theirinterpretation in the almond which in a manner summed up this epoch;then, after the ennui and jadedness of the first empire, which misusedEau de Cologne and rosemary, perfumery rushed, in the wake of VictorHugo and Gautier, towards the Levant. It created orientalcombinations, vivid Eastern nosegays, discovered new intonations, antitheses which until then had been unattempted, selected and madeuse of antique nuances which it complicated, refined and assorted. Itresolutely rejected that voluntary decrepitude to which it had beenreduced by the Malesherbes, the Boileaus, the Andrieuxes and theBaour-Lormians, wretched distillers of their own poems. 

But this language had not remained stationery since the period of1830. It had continued to evolve and, patterning itself on theprogress of the century, had advanced parallel with the other arts. It, too, had yielded to the desires of amateurs and artists, receivingits inspiration from the Chinese and Japanese, conceiving fragrantalbums, imitating the _Takeoka_ bouquets of flowers, obtaining theodor of _Rondeletia_ from the blend of lavender and clove; thepeculiar aroma of Chinese ink from the marriage of patchouli andcamphor; the emanation of Japanese _Hovenia_ by compounds of citron, clove and neroli. 

Des Esseintes studied and analyzed the essences of these fluids, experimenting to corroborate their texts. He took pleasure in playingthe role of a psychologist for his personal satisfaction, in takingapart and re-assembling the machinery of a work, in separating thepieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his senseof smell had thereby attained a sureness that was all but perfect. 

Just as a wine merchant has only to smell a drop of wine to recognizethe grape, as a hop dealer determines the exact value of hops bysniffing a bag, as a Chinese trader can immediately tell the origin ofthe teas he smells, knowing in what farms of what mountains, in whatBuddhistic convents it was cultivated, the very time when its leaveswere gathered, the state and the degree of torrefaction, the effectupon it of its proximity to the plum-tree and other flowers, to allthose perfumes which change its essence, adding to it an unexpectedtouch and introducing into its dryish flavor a hint of distant freshflowers; just so could Des Esseintes, by inhaling a dash of perfume, instantly explain its mixture and the psychology of its blend, andcould almost give the name of the artist who had composed and given itthe personal mark of his individual style. 

Naturally he had a collection of all the products used by perfumers. He even had the real Mecca balm, that rare balm cultivated only incertain parts of Arabia Petraea and under the monopoly of the ruler. 

Now, seated in his dressing room in front of his table, he thought ofcreating a new bouquet; and he was overcome by that moment of waveringconfidence familiar to writers when, after months of inaction, theyprepare for a new work. 

Like Balzac who was wont to scribble on many sheets of paper so as toput himself in a mood for work, Des Esseintes felt the necessity ofsteadying his hand by several initial and unimportant experiments. Desiring to create heliotrope, he took down bottles of vanilla andalmond, then changed his idea and decided to experiment with sweetpeas. 

He groped for a long time, unable to effect the proper combinations, for orange is dominant in the fragrance of this flower. He attemptedseveral combinations and ended in achieving the exact blend by joiningtuberose and rose to orange, the whole united by a drop of vanilla. 

His hesitation disappeared. He felt alert and ready for work; now hemade some tea by blending cassie with iris, then, sure of histechnique, he decided to proceed with a fulminating phrase whosethunderous roar would annihilate the insidious odor of almond stillhovering over his room. 

He worked with amber and with Tonkin musk, marvelously powerful; withpatchouli, the most poignant of vegetable perfumes whose flower, inits habitat, wafts an odor of mildew. Try what he would, theeighteenth century obsessed him; the panier robes and furbelowsappeared before his eyes; memories of Boucher's _Venus_ haunted him;recollections of Themidor's romance, of the exquisite Rosette pursuedhim. Furious, he rose and to rid himself of the obsession, with allhis strength he inhaled that pure essence of spikenard, so dear toOrientals and so repulsive to Europeans because of its pronounced odorof valerian. He was stunned by the violence of the shock. As thoughpounded by hammer strokes, the filigranes of the delicate odordisappeared; he profited by the period of respite to escape the deadcenturies, the antiquated fumes, and to enter, as he formerly haddone, less limited or more recent works. 

He had of old loved to lull himself with perfumes. He used effectsanalogous to those of the poets, and employed the admirable order ofcertain pieces of Baudelaire, such as _Irreparable_ and _le Balcon_, where the last of the five lines composing the strophe is the echo ofthe first verse and returns, like a refrain, to steep the soul ininfinite depths of melancholy and languor. 

He strayed into reveries evoked by those aromatic stanzas, suddenlybrought to his point of departure, to the motive of his meditation, bythe return of the initial theme, reappearing, at stated intervals, inthe fragrant orchestration of the poem. 

He actually wished to saunter through an astonishing, diversifiedlandscape, and he began with a sonorous, ample phrase that suddenlyopened a long vista of fields for him. 

With his vaporizers, he injected an essence formed of ambrosia, lavender and sweet peas into this room; this formed an essence which, when distilled by an artist, deserves the name by which it is known:"extract of wild grass"; into this he introduced an exact blend oftuberose, orange flower and almond, and forthwith artificial lilacssprang into being, while the linden-trees rustled, their thinemanations, imitated by extract of London tilia, drooping earthward. 

Into this _decor_, arranged with a few broad lines, receding as far asthe eye could reach, under his closed lids, he introduced a light rainof human and half feline essences, possessing the aroma of petticoats, breathing of the powdered, painted woman, the stephanotis, ayapana, opopanax, champaka, sarcanthus and cypress wine, to which he added adash of syringa, in order to give to the artificial life of paintswhich they exhaled, a suggestion of natural dewy laughter andpleasures enjoyed in the open air. 

Then, through a ventilator, he permitted these fragrant waves toescape, only preserving the field which he renewed, compelling it toreturn in his strophes like a ritornello. 

The women had gradually disappeared. Now the plain had grown solitary. Suddenly, on the enchanted horizon, factories appeared whose tallchimneys flared like bowls of punch. 

The odor of factories and of chemical products now passed with thebreeze which was simulated by means of fans; nature exhaled its sweeteffluvia amid this putrescence. 

Des Esseintes warmed a pellet of storax, and a singular odor, at oncerepugnant and exquisite, pervaded the room. It partook of thedelicious fragrance of jonquil and of the stench of gutta percha andcoal oil. He disinfected his hands, inserted his resin in ahermetically sealed box, and the factories disappeared. 

Then, among the revived vapors of the lindens and meadow grass, hethrew several drops of new mown hay, and, amid this magic site for themoment despoiled of its lilacs, sheaves of hay were piled up, introducing a new season and scattering their fine effluence intothese summer odors. 

At last, when he had sufficiently enjoyed this sight, he suddenlyscattered the exotic perfumes, emptied his vaporizers, threw in hisconcentrated spirits, poured his balms, and, in the exasperated andstifling heat of the room there rose a crazy sublimated nature, aparadoxical nature which was neither genuine nor charming, reunitingthe tropical spices and the peppery breath of Chinese sandal wood andJamaica hediosmia with the French odors of jasmine, hawthorn andverbena. Regardless of seasons and climates he forced trees of diverseessences into life, and flowers with conflicting fragrances andcolors. By the clash of these tones he created a general, nondescript, unexpected, strange perfume in which reappeared, like an obstinaterefrain, the decorative phrase of the beginning, the odor of themeadows fanned by the lilacs and lindens. 

Suddenly a poignant pain seized him; he felt as though wimbles weredrilling into his temples. Opening his eyes he found himself in hisdressing room, seated in front of his table. Stupefied, he painfullywalked across the room to the window which he half opened. A puff ofwind dispelled the stifling atmosphere which was enveloping him. Toexercise his limbs, he walked up and down gazing at the ceiling wherecrabs and sea-wrack stood out in relief against a background as lightin color as the sands of the seashore. A similar _decor_ covered theplinths and bordered the partitions which were covered with Japanesesea-green crepe, slightly wrinkled, imitating a river rippled by thewind. In this light current swam a rose petal, around which circled aschool of tiny fish painted with two strokes of the brush. 

But his eyelids remained heavy. He ceased to pace about the shortspace between the baptistery and the bath; he leaned against thewindow. His dizziness ended. He carefully stopped up the vials, andused the occasion to arrange his cosmetics. Since his arrival atFontenay he had not touched them; and now was quite astonished tobehold once more this collection formerly visited by so many women. The flasks and jars were lying heaped up against each other. Here, aporcelain box contained a marvelous white cream which, when applied onthe cheeks, turns to a tender rose color, under the action of theair--to such a true flesh-color that it procures the very illusion ofa skin touched with blood; there, lacquer objects incrusted withmother of pearl enclosed Japanese gold and Athenian green, the colorof the cantharis wing, gold and green which change to deep purple whenwetted; there were jars filled with filbert paste, the serkis of theharem, emulsions of lilies, lotions of strawberry water and elders forthe complexion, and tiny bottles filled with solutions of Chinese inkand rose water for the eyes. There were tweezers, scissors, rouge andpowder-puffs, files and beauty patches. 

He handled this collection, formerly bought to please a mistress whoswooned under the influence of certain aromatics and balms, --anervous, unbalanced woman who loved to steep the nipples of herbreasts in perfumes, but who never really experienced a delicious andoverwhelming ecstacy save when her head was scraped with a comb orwhen she could inhale, amid caresses, the odor of perspiration, or theplaster of unfinished houses on rainy days, or of dust splashed byhuge drops of rain during summer storms. 

He mused over these memories, and one afternoon spent at Pantinthrough idleness and curiosity, in company with this woman at the homeof one of her sisters, returned to him, stirring in him a forgottenworld of old ideas and perfumes; while the two women prattled anddisplayed their gowns, he had drawn near the window and had seen, through the dusty panes, the muddy street sprawling before him, andhad heard the repeated sounds of galoches over the puddles of thepavement. 

This scene, already far removed, came to him suddenly, strangely andvividly. Pantin was there before him, animated and throbbing in thisgreenish and dull mirror into which his unseeing eyes plunged. Ahallucination transported him far from Fontenay. Beside reflecting thestreet, the mirror brought back thoughts it had once been instrumentalin evoking, and plunged in revery, he repeated to himself thisingenious, sad and comforting composition he had formerly written uponreturning to Paris:

"Yes, the season of downpours is come. Now behold water-spoutsvomiting as they rush over the pavements, and rubbish marinates inpuddles that fill the holes scooped out of the macadam. 

"Under a lowering sky, in the damp air, the walls of houses have blackperspiration and their air-holes are fetid; the loathsomeness ofexistence increases and melancholy overwhelms one; the seeds ofvileness which each person harbors in his soul, sprout. The cravingfor vile debaucheries seizes austere people and base desires growrampant in the brains of respectable men. 

"And yet I warm myself, here before a cheerful fire. From a basket ofblossoming flowers comes the aroma of balsamic benzoin, geranium andthe whorl-flowered bent-grass which permeates the room. In the verymonth of November, at Pantin, in the rue de Paris, springtimepersists. Here in my solitude I laugh at the fears of families which, to shun the approaching cold weather, escape on every steamer toCannes and to other winter resorts. 

"Inclement nature does nothing to contribute to this extraordinaryphenomenon. It must be said that his artificial season at Pantin isthe result of man's ingenuity. 

"In fact, these flowers are made of taffeta and are mounted on wire. The springtime odor filters through the window joints, exhaled fromthe neighboring factories, from the perfumeries of Pinaud and SaintJames. 

"For the workmen exhausted by the hard labors of the plants, for theyoung employes who too often are fathers, the illusion of a littlehealthy air is possible, thanks to these manufacturers. 

"So, from this fabulous subterfuge of a country can an intelligentcure arise. The consumptive men about town who are sent to the Southdie, their end due to the change in their habits and to the nostalgiafor the Parisian excesses which destroyed them. Here, under anartificial climate, libertine memories will reappear, the languishingfeminine emanations evaporated by the factories. Instead of the deadlyennui of provincial life, the doctor can thus platonically substitutefor his patient the atmosphere of the Parisian women and of boudoirs. Most often, all that is necessary to effect the cure is for thesubject to have a somewhat fertile imagination. 

"Since, nowadays, nothing genuine exists, since the wine one drinksand the liberty one boldly proclaims are laughable and a sham, sinceit really needs a healthy dose of good will to believe that thegoverning classes are respectable and that the lower classes areworthy of being assisted or pitied, it seems to me, " concluded DesEsseintes, "to be neither ridiculous nor senseless, to ask of myfellow men a quantity of illusion barely equivalent to what they spenddaily in idiotic ends, so as to be able to convince themselves thatthe town of Pantin is an artificial Nice or a Menton. 

"But all this does not prevent me from seeing, " he said, forced byweakness from his meditations, "that I must be careful to mistrustthese delicious and abominable practices which may ruin myconstitution. " He sighed. "Well, well, more pleasures to moderate, more precautions to be taken. "

And he passed into his study, hoping the more easily to escape thespell of these perfumes. 

He opened the window wide, glad to be able to breath the air. But itsuddenly seemed to him that the breeze brought in a vague tide ofbergamot with which jasmine and rose water were blent. Agitated, heasked himself whether he was not really under the yoke of one of thosepossessions exercised in the Middle Ages. The odor changed and wastransformed, but it persisted. A faint scent of tincture of tolu, ofbalm of Peru and of saffron, united by several drams of amber andmusk, now issued from the sleeping village and suddenly, themetamorphosis was effected, those scattered elements were blent, andonce more the frangipane spread from the valley of Fontenay as far asthe fort, assailing his exhausted nostrils, once more shattering hishelpless nerves and throwing him into such a prostration that he fellunconscious on the window sill. 

 Chapter 11

The servants were seized with alarm and lost no time in calling theFontenay physician who was completely at sea about Des Esseintes'condition. He mumbled a few medical terms, felt his pulse, examinedthe invalid's tongue, unsuccessfully sought to make him speak, prescribed sedatives and rest, promised to return on the morrow and, at the negative sign made by Des Esseintes who recovered enoughstrength to chide the zeal of his servants and to bid farewell to thisintruder, he departed and was soon retailing through the village theeccentricities of this house whose decorations had positively amazedhim and held him rooted to the spot. 

To the great astonishment of the domestics, who no longer dared stirfrom the servants' quarters, their master recovered in a few days, andthey surprised him drumming against the window panes, gazing at thesky with a troubled look. 

One afternoon the bells were peremptorily rung and Des Esseintescommanded his trunks to be packed for a long voyage. 

While the man and the woman were choosing, under his guidance, thenecessary equipment, he feverishly paced up and down the cabin of thedining room, consulted the timetables of the steamers, walked throughhis study where he continued to gaze at the clouds with an air at onceimpatient and satisfied. 

For a whole week, the weather had been atrocious. Streams of sootraced unceasing across the grey fields of the sky-masses of cloudslike rocks torn from the earth. 

At intervals, showers swept downward, engulfing the valley withtorrents of rain. 

Today, the appearance of the heavens had changed. The rivers of inkhad evaporated and vanished, and the harsh contours of the clouds hadsoftened. The sky was uniformly flat and covered with a brackish film. Little by little, this film seemed to drop, and a watery haze coveredthe country side. The rain no longer fell in cataracts as on thepreceding evening; instead, it fell incessantly, fine, sharp andpenetrating; it inundated the walks, covered the roads with itsinnumerable threads which joined heaven and earth. The livid sky threwa wan leaden light on the village which was now transformed into alake of mud pricked by needles of water that dotted the puddles withdrops of bright silver. In this desolation of nature, everything wasgray, and only the housetops gleamed against the dead tones of thewalls. 

"What weather!" sighed the aged domestic, placing on a chair theclothes which his master had requested of him--an outfit formerlyordered from London. 

Des Esseintes' sole response was to rub his hands and to sit down infront of a book-case with glass doors. He examined the socks which hadbeen placed nearby for his inspection. For a moment he hesitated onthe color; then he quickly studied the melancholy day and earnestlybethought himself of the effect he desired. He chose a pair the colorof feuillemort, quickly slipped them on, put on a pair of buttonedshoes, donned the mouse grey suit which was checquered with a lavagray and dotted with black, placed a small hunting cap on his head andthrew a blue raincoat over him. He reached the railway station, followed by the servant who almost bent under the weight of a trunk, avalise, a carpet bag, a hat box and a traveling rug containingumbrellas and canes. He informed his servant that the date of hisreturn was problematical, that he might return in a year, in a month, in a week, or even sooner, and enjoined him to change nothing in thehouse. He gave a sum of money which he thought would be necessary forthe upkeep of the house during his absence, and climbed into thecoach, leaving the old man astounded, arms waving and mouth gaping, behind the rail, while the train got under way. 

He was alone in his compartment; a vague and dirty country side, suchas one sees through an aquarium of troubled water, receded rapidlybehind the train which was lashed by the rain. Plunged in hismeditations, Des Esseintes closed his eyes. 

Once more, this so ardently desired and finally attained solitude hadended in a fearful distress. This silence which formerly would haveappeared as a compensation for the stupidities heard for years, nowweighed on him with an unendurable burden. One morning he hadawakened, as uneasy as a prisoner in his cell; his lips had sought toarticulate sounds, tears had welled to his eyes and he had found itimpossible to breathe, suffocating like a person who had sobbed forhours. 

Seized with a desire to walk, to behold a human figure, to speak tosomeone, to mingle with life, he had proceeded to call his domestics, employing a specious pretext; but conversation with them wasimpossible. Besides the fact that these old people, bowed down byyears of silence and the customs of attendants, were almost dumb, thedistance at which Des Esseintes had always kept them was hardlyconducive to inducing them to open their mouths now. Too, theypossessed dull brains and were incapable of answering his questionsother than by monosyllables. 

It was impossible, therefore, to find any solace in their society; buta new phenomenon now occurred. The reading of the novels of Dickens, which he had lately undertaken to soothe his nerves and which had onlyproduced effects the opposite of those hoped for, began slowly to actin an unexpected manner, bringing on visions of English existence onwhich he mused for hours; little by little, in these fictivecontemplations, ideas insinuated themselves, ideas of the voyagebrought to an end, of verified dreams on which was imposed the desireto experience new impressions, and thus escape the exhausting cerebraldebauches intent upon beating in the void. 

With its mist and rain, this abominable weather aided his thoughtsstill more, by reinforcing the memories of his readings, by placingunder his eyes the unfading image of a land of fog and mud, and byrefusing to let his ideas wander idly. 

One day, able to endure it no longer, he had instantly decided. Suchwas his haste that he even took flight before the designated time, forhe wished to shun the present moment, wished to find himself jostledand shouldered in the hubbub of crowded streets and railway stations. 

"I breathe!" he exclaimed when the train moderated its waltz andstopped in the Sceaux station rotunda, panting while its wheelsperformed its last pirouettes. 

Once in the boulevard d'Enfer, he hailed a coachman. In some strangemanner he extracted a pleasure from the fact that he was so hamperedwith trunks and rugs. By promising a substantial tip, he reached anunderstanding with the man of the brown trousers and red waistcoat. 

"At once!" he commanded. "And when you reach the rue de Rivoli, stopin front of _Galignani's Messenger_. " Before departing, he desired tobuy a Baedeker or Murray guide of London. 

The carriage got under way heavily, raising rings of mud around itswheels and moving through marsh-like ground. Beneath the gray skywhich seemed suspended over the house tops, water gushed down thethick sides of the high walls, spouts overflowed, and the streets werecoated with a slimy dirt in which passersby slipped. Thickset menpaused on sidewalks bespattered by passing omnibuses, and women, theirskirts tucked up to the knees, bent under umbrellas, flattenedthemselves against the shops to avoid being splashed. 

The rain entered diagonally through the carriage doors. Des Esseinteswas obliged to lift the carriage windows down which the water ran, while drops of mud furrowed their way like fireworks on each side ofthe _fiacre_. To the monotonous sound of sacks of peas shaking againsthis head through the action of the showers pattering against thetrunks and on the carriage rug, Des Esseintes dreamed of his voyage. This already was a partial realization of his England, enjoyed inParis through the means of this frightful weather: a rainy, colossalLondon smelling of molten metal and of soot, ceaselessly steaming andsmoking in the fog now spread out before his eyes; then rows of dockssprawled ahead, as far as the eye could reach, docks full of cranes, hand winches and bales, swarming with men perched on masts or astrideyard sails, while myriads of other men on the quays pushed hogsheadsinto cellars. 

All this was transpiring in vast warehouses along the river bankswhich were bathed by the muddy and dull water of an imaginary Thames, in a forest of masts and girders piercing the wan clouds of thefirmament, while trains rushed past at full speed or rumpledunderground uttering horrible cries and vomiting waves of smoke, andwhile, through every street, monstrous and gaudy and infamousadvertisements flared through the eternal twilight, and strings ofcarriages passed between rows of preoccupied and taciturn people whoseeyes stared ahead and whose elbows pressed closely against theirbodies. 

Des Esseintes shivered deliciously to feel himself mingling in thisterrible world of merchants, in this insulating mist, in thisincessant activity, in this pitiless gearing which ground millions ofthe disinherited, urged by the comfort-distilling philanthropists torecite Biblical verses and to sing psalms. 

Then the vision faded suddenly with a jolt of the _fiacre_ which madehim rebound in his seat. He gazed through the carriage windows. Nighthad fallen; gas burners blinked through the fog, amid a yellowishhalo; ribbons of fire swam in puddles of water and seemed to revolvearound wheels of carriages moving through liquid and dirty flame. Heendeavored to get his bearings, perceived the Carrousel and suddenly, unreasoningly, perhaps through the simple effect of the high fall fromfanciful spaces, his thought reverted to a very trivial incident. Heremembered that his domestic had neglected to put a tooth brush in hisbelongings. Then, he passed in review the list of objects packed up;everything had been placed in his valise, but the annoyance of havingomitted this brush persisted until the driver, pulling up, broke thechain of his reminiscences and regrets. 

He was in the rue de Rivoli, in front of _Galignani's Messenger_. Separated by a door whose unpolished glass was covered withinscriptions and with strips of passe-partout framing newspaperclippings and telegrams, were two vast shop windows crammed withalbums and books. He drew near, attracted by the sight of these booksbound in parrot-blue and cabbage-green paper, embossed with silver andgolden letterings. All this had an anti-Parisian touch, a mercantileappearance, more brutal and yet less wretched than those worthlessbindings of French books; here and there, in the midst of the openedalbums, reproducing humorous scenes from Du Maurier and John Leech, orthe delirious cavalcades of Caldecott, some French novels appeared, blending placid and satisfied vulgarities to these rich verjuice hues. He tore himself away from his contemplation, opened the door andentered a large library which was full of people. Seated strangersunfolded maps and jabbered in strange languages. A clerk brought him acomplete collection of guides. He, in turns, sat down to examine thebooks with their flexible covers. He glanced through them and pausedat a page of the Baedeker describing the London museums. He becameinterested in the laconic and exact details of the guide books, buthis attention wandered away from the old English paintings to themoderns which attracted him much more. He recalled certain works hehad seen at international expositions, and imagined that he mightpossibly behold them once more at London: pictures by Millais--the_Eve of Saint Agnes_ with its lunar clear green; pictures by Watts, strange in color, checquered with gamboge and indigo, picturessketched by a sick Gustave Moreau, painted by an anaemic MichaelAngelo and retouched by a Raphael submerged in blue. Among othercanvasses, he recalled a _Denunciation of Cain_, an _Ida_, some _Eves_where, in the strange and mysterious mixture of these three masters, rose the personality, at once refined and crude, of a learned anddreamy Englishman tormented by the bewitchment of cruel tones. 

These canvasses thronged through his memory. The clerk, astonished bythis client who was so lost to the world, asked him which of theguides he would take. Des Esseintes remained dumbfounded, then excusedhimself, bought a Baedeker and departed. The dampness froze him to thespot; the wind blew from the side, lashing the arcades with whips ofrain. "Proceed to that place, " he said to the driver, pointing withhis finger to the end of a passage where a store formed the angle ofthe rue de Rivoli and the rue Castiglione and, with its whitish panesof glass illumed from within, resembled a vast night lamp burningthrough the wretchedness of this mist, in the misery of this crazyweather. 

It was the _Bodega_. Des Esseintes strayed into a large room sustainedby iron pillars and lined, on each side of its walls, with tallbarrels placed on their ends upon gantries, hooped with iron, theirpaunches with wooden loopholes imitating a rack of pipes and fromwhose notches hung tulip-shaped glasses, upside down. The lower sideswere bored and hafted with stone cocks. These hogsheads painted with aroyal coat of arms displayed the names of their drinks, the contents, and the prices on colored labels and stated that they were to bepurchased by the cask, by the bottle or by the glass. 

In the passage between these rows of casks, under the gas jets whichflared at one end of an ugly iron-gray chandelier, tables covered withbaskets of Palmers biscuits, hard and salty cakes, plates piled withmince pies and sandwiches concealing strong, mustardy concoctionsunder their unsavory covers, succeeded each other between a row ofseats and as far as the end of this cellar which was lined with stillmore hogsheads carrying tiny barrels on their tops, resting on theirsides and bearing their names stamped with hot metal into the oak. 

An odor of alcohol assailed Des Esseintes upon taking a seat in thisroom heavy with strong wines. He looked about him. Here, the tuns wereplaced in a straight line, exhibiting the whole series of ports, thesweet or sour wines the color of mahogany or amaranth, anddistinguished by such laudatory epithets as _old port_, _lightdelicate_, _Cockburn's very fine_, _magnificent old Regina_. There, protruding formidable abdomens pressed closely against each other, huge casks contained the martial Spanish wines, sherry and itsderivatives, the _san lucar_, _pasto_, _pale dry_, _oloroso_ and_amontilla_. 

The cellar was filled with people. Leaning on his elbows on a cornerof the table, Des Esseintes sat waiting for his glass of port orderedof a gentleman who was opening explosive sodas contained in ovalbottles which recalled, while exaggerating, the capsules of gelatineand gluten used by pharmacies to conceal the taste of certainmedicines. 

Englishmen were everywhere, --awkward pale clergymen garbed in blackfrom head to foot, with soft hats, laced shoes, very long coats dottedin the front with tiny buttons, clean-shaved chins, round spectacles, greasy flat hair; faces of tripe dealers and mastiff snouts withapoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, vinous cheeks, blood-shot crazyeyes, whiskers that looked like those of some big monkeys; fartheraway, at the end of the wine store, a long row of tow-headedindividuals, their chins covered with white hair like the end of anartichoke, reading, through a microscope, the tiny roman type of anEnglish newspaper; opposite him, a sort of American commodore, dumpyand thick-set, with smoked skin and bulbous nose, was sleeping, acigar planted in the hairy aperture of his mouth. Opposite were frameshanging on the wall enclosing advertisements of Champagne, the trademarks of Perrier and Roederer, Heidsieck and Mumm, and a hooded headof a monk, with the name of Dom Perignon, Rheims, written in Gothiccharacters. 

A certain enervation enveloped Des Esseintes in this guard houseatmosphere; stunned by the prattle of the Englishmen conversing amongthemselves, he fell into a revery, evoking, before the purple portwhich filled the glasses, the creatures of Dickens that love thisdrink so very much, imaginatively peopling the cellar with newpersonages, seeing here, the white head of hair and the ruddycomplexion of Mr. Wickfield; there, the phlegmatic, crafty face andthe vengeful eye of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the melancholy solicitor in_Bleak House_. Positively, all of them broke away from his memory andinstalled themselves in the _Bodega_, with their peculiarcharacteristics and their betraying gestures. His memories, brought tolife by his recent readings, attained a startling precision. The cityof the romancer, the house illumined and warmed, so perfectly tendedand isolated, the bottles poured slowly by little Dorrit and DoraCopperfield and Tom Pinch's sister, appeared to him sailing like anark in a deluge of mire and soot. Idly he wandered through thisimaginary London, happy to be sheltered, as he listened to thesinister shrieks of tugs plying up and down the Thames. His glass wasempty. Despite the heavy fumes in this cellar, caused by the cigarsand pipes, he experienced a cold shiver when he returned to thereality of the damp and fetid weather. 

He called for a glass of amontillado, and suddenly, beside this pale, dry wine, the lenitive, sweetish stories of the English author wererouted, to be replaced by the pitiless revulsives and the grievousirritants of Edgar Allen Poe; the cold nightmares of _The Cask ofAmontillado_, of the man immured in a vault, assailed him; theordinary placid faces of American and English drinkers who occupiedthe room, appeared to him to reflect involuntary frightful thoughts, to be harboring instinctive, odious plots. Then he perceived that hewas left alone here and that the dinner hour was near. He payed hisbill, tore himself from his seat and dizzily gained the door. Hereceived a wet slap in the face upon leaving the place. The streetlamps moved their tiny fans of flame which failed to illuminate; thesky had dropped to the very houses. Des Esseintes viewed the arcadesof the rue de Rivoli, drowned in the gloom and submerged by water, andit seemed to him that he was in the gloomy tunnel under the Thames. Twitchings of his stomach recalled him to reality. He regained hiscarriage, gave the driver the address of the tavern in the rued'Amsterdam near the station, and looked at his watch: seven o'clock. He had just time to eat dinner; the train would not leave until tenminutes of nine, and he counted on his fingers, reckoning the hours oftravel from Dieppe to Newhaven, saying to himself: "If the figures ofthe timetable are correct, I shall be at London tomorrow attwelve-thirty. "

The _fiacre_ stopped in front of the tavern. Once more, Des Esseintesalighted and entered a long dark plain room, divided into partitionsas high as a man's waist, --a series of compartments resembling stalls. In this room, wider towards the door, many beer pumps stood on acounter, near hams having the color of old violins, red lobsters, marinated mackerel, with onions and carrots, slices of lemon, bunchesof laurel and thym, juniper berries and long peppers swimming in thicksauce. 

One of these boxes was unoccupied. He took it and called a youngblack-suited man who bent forward, muttering something in a jargon hecould not understand. While the cloth was being laid, Des Esseintesviewed his neighbors. They were islanders, just as at the _Bodega_, with cold faience eyes, crimson complexions, thoughtful or haughtyairs. They were reading foreign newspapers. The only ones eating wereunescorted women in pairs, robust English women with boyish faces, large teeth, ruddy apple cheeks, long hands and legs. They attacked, with genuine ardor, a rumpsteak pie, a warm meat dish cooked inmushroom sauce and covered with a crust, like a pie. 

After having lacked appetite for such a long time, he remained amazedin the presence of these hearty eaters whose voracity whetted hishunger. He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then heglanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock and, seized with asudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing theirfood, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated bythe flavor of a cow-shed which this fine, pale beer exhaled. 

His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenchedhis thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanishlicorice but which does not have its sugary taste. 

He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. Thischange of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakenedhis stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit acigarette and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had beenpoured. 

The rain continued to fall. He heard it patter on the panes whichformed a ceiling at the end of the room; it fell in cascades down thespouts. No one was stirring in the room. Everybody, utterly weary, wasindulging himself in front of his wine glass. 

Tongues were now wagging freely. As almost all the English men andwomen raised their eyes as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded thatthey were talking of the bad weather; not one of them laughed. Hethrew a delighted glance on their suits whose color and cut did notperceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense ofcontentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being, insome way, though superficially, a naturalized London citizen. Then hesuddenly started. "And what about the train?" he asked himself. Heglanced at his watch: ten minutes to eight. "I still have nearly ahalf-hour to remain here. " Once more, he began to muse upon the planhe had conceived. 

In his sedentary life, only two countries had ever attracted him:Holland and England. 

He had satisfied the first of his desires. Unable to keep away, onefine day he had left Paris and visited the towns of the Low Lands, oneby one. 

In short, nothing but cruel disillusions had resulted from this trip. He had fancied a Holland after the works of Teniers and Steen, ofRembrandt and Ostade, in his usual way imagining rich, unique andincomparable Ghettos, had thought of amazing kermesses, continualdebauches in the country sides, intent for a view of that patriarchalsimplicity, that jovial lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters. 

Certainly, Haarlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him. The unwashedpeople, seen in their country farms, really resembled those typespainted by Van Ostade, with their uncouth children and their old fatwomen, embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies. But of theunrestrained joys, the drunken family carousals, not a whit. He had toadmit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him. They hadsimply served as a springing board for his dreams. He had rushedforward on a false track and had wandered into capricious visions, unable to discover in the land itself, anything of that real andmagical country which he had hoped to behold, seeing nothing at all, on the plots of ground strewn with barrels, of the dances ofpetticoated and stockinged peasants crying for very joy, stampingtheir feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly. 

Decidedly nothing of all this was visible. Holland was a country justlike any other country, and what was more, a country in no wiseprimitive, not at all simple, for the Protestant religion with itsformal hypocricies and solemn rigidness held sway here. 

The memory of that disenchantment returned to him. Once more heglanced at his watch: ten minutes still separated him from the train'sdeparture. "It is about time to ask for the bill and leave, " he toldhimself. 

He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through his body. "Come!" he addressed himself, "let us drink and screw up our courage. "He filled a glass of brandy, while asking for the reckoning. Anindividual in black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort ofmajordomo with a bald and sharp head, a greying beard withoutmoustaches, came forward. A pencil rested behind his ear and heassumed an attitude like a singer, one foot in front of the other; hedrew a note book from his pocket, and without glancing at his paper, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, near a chandelier, wrote whilecounting. "There you are!" he said, tearing the sheet from his notebook and giving it to Des Esseintes who looked at him with curiosity, as though he were a rare animal. What a surprising John Bull, hethought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of hisshaved mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman of an American ship. 

At this moment, the tavern door opened. Several persons enteredbringing with them an odor of wet dog to which was blent the smell ofcoal wafted by the wind through the opened door. Des Esseintes wasincapable of moving a limb. A soft warm languor prevented him fromeven stretching out his hand to light a cigar. He told himself: "Comenow, let us get up, we must take ourselves off. " Immediate objectionsthwarted his orders. What is the use of moving, when one can travel ona chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromasand atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surroundedhim? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as hadhappened to him in Holland?

He had but sufficient time to race to the station. An overwhelmingaversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seizedhim with a more and more obvious and stubborn strength. Pensively, helet the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said tohimself, "Now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd intothe baggage room! What ennui! What a bore that would be!" Then herepeated to himself once more, "In fine, I have experienced and seenall I wished to experience and see. I have been filled with Englishlife since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go and, by anawkward trip, lose those imperishable sensations. How stupid of me tohave sought to disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy ofthe docile phantasmagories of my brain, like a very fool to havethought of the necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of anexcursion!"

"Well!" he exclaimed, consulting his watch, "it is now time to returnhome. "

This time, he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back tothe Sceaux station, and returned with his trunks, packages, valises, rugs, umbrellas and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physicalstimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his homeafter a long and dangerous voyage. 

 Chapter 12

During the days following his return, Des Esseintes contemplated hisbooks and experienced, at the thought that he might have beenseparated from them for a long period, a satisfaction as complete asthat which comes after a protracted absence. Under the touch of thissentiment, these objects possessed a renewed novelty to his mind, andhe perceived in them beauties forgotten since the time he hadpurchased them. 

Everything there, books, bric-a-brac and furniture, had an individualcharm for him. His bed seemed the softer by comparison with the hardbed he would have occupied in London. The silent, discreetministrations of his servants charmed him, exhausted as he was at thethought of the loud loquacity of hotel attendants. The methodicalorganization of his life made him feel that it was especially to beenvied since the possibility of traveling had become imminent. 

He steeped himself in this bath of habitude, to which artificialregrets insinuated a tonic quality. 

But his books chiefly preoccupied him. He examined them, re-arrangedthem on the shelves, anxious to learn if the hot weather and the rainshad damaged the bindings and injured the rare paper. 

He began by moving all his Latin books; then he arranged in a neworder the special works of Archelaus, Albert le Grand, Lully andArnaud de Villanova treating of cabbala and the occult sciences;finally he examined his modern books, one by one, and was happy toperceive that all had remained intact. 

This collection had cost him a considerable sum of money. He would notsuffer, in his library, the books he loved to resemble other similarvolumes, printed on cotton paper with the watermarks of _Auvergne_. 

Formerly in Paris he had ordered made, for himself alone, certainvolumes which specially engaged mechanics printed from hand presses. Sometimes, he applied to Perrin of Lyons, whose graceful, clear typewas suitable for archaic reprints of old books. At other times hedispatched orders to England or to America for the execution of modernliterature and the works of the present century. Still again, heapplied to a house in Lille, which for centuries had possessed acomplete set of Gothic characters; he also would send requisitions tothe old Enschede printing house of Haarlem whose foundry still has thestamps and dies of certain antique letters. 

He had followed the same method in selecting his papers. Finallygrowing weary of the snowy Chinese and the nacreous and gildedJapanese papers, the white Whatmans, the brown Hollands, thebuff-colored Turkeys and Seychal Mills, and equally disgusted with allmechanically manufactured sheets, he had ordered special laid paper inthe mould, from the old plants of Vire which still employ the pestlesonce in use to grind hemp. To introduce a certain variety into hiscollection, he had repeatedly brought from London prepared stuffs, paper interwoven with hairs, and as a mark of his disdain forbibliophiles, he had a Lubeck merchant prepare for him an improvedcandle paper of bottle-blue tint, clear and somewhat brittle, in thepulp of which the straw was replaced by golden spangles resemblingthose which dot Danzig brandy. 

Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books, adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by Lortic, byTrautz-Bauzonnet or Chambolle, by the successors of Cape, inirreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cow hide, Cape goat skin, in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs, protected bytabby or moire watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with claspsand corners, and sometimes even enamelled by Gruel Engelmann withsilver oxide and clear enamels. 

Thus, with the marvelous episcopal lettering used in the old house ofLe Clere, he had Baudelaire's works printed in a large formatrecalling that of ancient missals, on a very light and spongy Japanpaper, soft as elder pith and imperceptibly tinted with a light rosehue through its milky white. This edition, limited to one copy, printed with a velvety black Chinese ink, had been covered outside andthen recovered within with a wonderful genuine sow skin, chosen amonga thousand, the color of flesh, its surface spotted where the hairshad been and adorned with black silk stamped in cold iron inmiraculous designs by a great artist. 

That day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable book from his shelvesand handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces whichseemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more thanordinarily penetrating. 

His admiration for this writer was unqualified. According to him, until Baudelaire's advent in literature, writers had limitedthemselves to exploring the surfaces of the soul or to penetratinginto the accessible and illuminated caverns, restoring here and therethe layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, andnoting, like Balzac for example, the layers of strata in the soulpossessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, bypaternal stupidity, or by senile love. 

What had been treated heretofore was the abundant health of virtuesand of vices, the tranquil functioning of commonplace brains, and thepractical reality of contemporary ideas, without any ideal of sicklydepravation or of any beyond. In short, the discoveries of thoseanalysts had stopped at the speculations of good or evil classified bythe Church. It was the simple investigation, the conventionalexamination of a botanist minutely observing the anticipateddevelopment of normal efflorescence abounding in the natural earth. 

Baudelaire had gone farther. He had descended to the very bowels ofthe inexhaustible mine, had involved his mind in abandoned andunfamiliar levels, and come to those districts of the soul wheremonstrous vegetations of thought extend their branches. 

There, near those confines, the haunt of aberrations and of sickness, of the mystic lockjaw, the warm fever of lust, and the typhoids andvomits of crime, he had found, brooding under the gloomy clock ofEnnui, the terrifying spectre of the age of sentiments and ideas. 

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attainedthe October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of soulssummoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasingdecay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth areenfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseriesborne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligencesoppressed by a ridiculous destiny. 

He had pursued all the phases of that lamentable autumn, studying thehuman creature, quick to exasperation, ingenious in deceiving himself, compelling his thoughts to cheat each other so as to suffer the morekeenly, and frustrating in advance all possible joy by his faculty ofanalysis and observation. 

Then, in this vexed sensibility of the soul, in this ferocity ofreflection that repels the restless ardor of devotions and thewell-meaning outrages of charity, he gradually saw arising the horrorof those senile passions, those ripe loves, where one person yieldswhile the other is still suspicious, where lassitude denies suchcouples the filial caresses whose apparent youthfulness seems new, andthe maternal candors whose gentleness and comfort impart, in a sense, the engaging remorse of a vague incest. 

In magnificent pages he exposed his hybrid loves who were exasperatedby the impotence in which they were overwhelmed, the hazardous deceitsof narcotics and poisons invoked to aid in calming suffering andconquering ennui. At an epoch when literature attributed unhappinessof life almost exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love or tothe jealousies that attend adulterous love, he disregarded suchpuerile maladies and probed into those wounds which are more fatal, more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn inruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathingand the future frightens and menaces with despair. 

And the more Des Esseintes read Baudelaire, the more he felt theineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served onlyto portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeededin expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language;who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to definewith a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive andtentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls. 

After Baudelaire's works, the number of French books given place inhis shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent tothose works which it is fashionable to praise. "The broad laugh ofRabelais, " and "the deep comedy of Moliere, " did not succeed indiverting him, and the antipathy he felt against these farces was sogreat that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, tothe capers of circus clowns. 

As for old poetry, he read hardly anything except Villon, whosemelancholy ballads touched him, and, here and there, certain fragmentsfrom d'Aubigne, which stimulated his blood with the incrediblevehemence of their apostrophes and curses. 

In prose, he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmovedeven by Diderot, whose so greatly praised _Salons_ he found strangelysaturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred towardall this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to thereading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuetwhose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more, he relished suggestive ideas condensed into severe and strong phrases, such as those created by Nicole in his reflections, and especiallyPascal, whose austere pessimism and attrition deeply touched him. 

Apart from such books as these, French literature began in his librarywith the nineteenth century. 

This section was divided into two groups, one of which included theordinary, secular literature, and the other the Catholic literature, aspecial but little known literature published by large publishinghouses and circulated to the four corners of the earth. 

He had had the hardihood to explore such crypts as these, just as inthe secular art he had discovered, under an enormous mass of insipidwritings, a few books written by true masters. 

The distinctive character of this literature was the constantimmutability of its ideas and language. Just as the Church perpetuatedthe primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics ofher dogmas, piously retaining, as the frame that encloses them, theoratorical language of the celebrated century. As one of the Church'sown writers, Ozanam, has put it, the Christian style needed only tomake use of the dialect employed by Bourdaloue and by Bossuet to theexclusion of all else. 

In spite of this statement, the Church, more indulgent, closed itseyes to certain expressions, certain turns of style borrowed from thesecular language of the same century, and the Catholic idiom hadslightly purified itself of its heavy and massive phrases, especiallycleaning itself, in Bossuet, of its prolixity and the painful rallyingof its pronouns; but here ended the concessions, and others woulddoubtless have been purposeless for the prose sufficed without thisballast for the limited range of subjects to which the Church confineditself. 

Incapable of grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the mostsimple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualifiedto explain the complicated wiles of intellects indifferent to thebenefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent whenit treated of abstract subjects. It proved valuable in the argument ofcontroversy, in the demonstration of a theory, in the obscurity of acommentary and, more than any other style, had the necessary authorityto affirm, without any discussion, the intent of a doctrine. 

Unfortunately, here as everywhere, the sanctuary had been invaded by anumerous army of pedants who smirched by their ignorance and lack oftalent the Church's noble and austere attire. Further to profane it, devout women had interfered, and stupid sacristans and foolish_salons_ had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of suchwomen. 

Among such works, Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those ofMadame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvousof the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him withinsufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched:they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tinychapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking newsof one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeplymysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts andthe state of the weather. 

But there was even worse: a female laureate licensed by the Institute, Madame Augustus Craven, author of _Recit d'une soeur_, of _Eliane_ and_Fleaurange_, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press. Never, no, never, had Des Esseintes imagined that any person couldwrite such ridiculous nonsense. In the point of conception, thesebooks were so absurd, and were written in such a disgusting style, that by these tokens they became almost remarkable and rare. 

It was not at all among the works of women that Des Esseintes, whosesoul was completely jaded and whose nature was not inclined tosentimentality, could come upon a literary retreat suited to histaste. 

Yet he strove, with a diligence that no impatience could overcome, toenjoy the works of a certain girl of genius, the blue-stocking pucelleof the group, but his efforts miscarried. He did not take to the_Journal_ and the _Lettres_ in which Eugenie de Guerin celebrates, without discretion, the amazing talent of a brother who rhymed, withsuch cleverness and grace that one must go to the works of de Jouy andEcouchard Lebrun to find anything so novel and daring. 

He had also unavailingly attempted to comprehend the delights of thoseworks in which one may find such things as these:

 This morning I hung on papa's bed a cross which a little girl had given him yesterday. 

Or:

 Mimi and I are invited by Monsieur Roquiers to attend the consecration of a bell tomorrow. This does not displease me at all. 

Or wherein we find such important events as these:

 On my neck I have hung a medal of the Holy Virgin which Louise had brought me, as an amulet against cholera. 

Or poetry of this sort:

 O the lovely moonbeam which fell on the Bible I was reading!

And, finally, such fine and penetrating observations as these:

 When I see a man pass before a crucifix, lift his hat and make the sign of the Cross, I say to myself, 'There goes a Christian. '

And she continued in this fashion, without pause, until after Mauricede Guerin had died, after which his sister bewailed him in otherpages, written in a watery prose strewn here and there with bits ofpoems whose humiliating poverty ended by moving Des Esseintes to pity. 

Ah! it was hardly worth mentioning, but the Catholic party was not atall particular in the choice of its proteges and not at all artistic. Without exception, all these writers wrote in the pallid white proseof pensioners of a monastery, in a flowing movement of phrase which noastringent could counterbalance. 

So Des Esseintes, horror-stricken at such insipidities, entirelyforsook this literature. But neither did he find atonement for hisdisappointments among the modern masters of the clergy. These latterwere one-sided divines or impeccably correct controversialists, butthe Christian language in their orations and books had ended bybecoming impersonal and congealing into a rhetoric whose everymovement and pause was anticipated, in a sequence of periodsconstructed after a single model. And, in fact, Des Esseintesdiscovered that all the ecclesiastics wrote in the same manner, with alittle more or a little less abandon or emphasis, and there was seldomany variations between the bodiless patterns traded by Dupanloup orLandriot, La Bouillerie or Gaume, by Dom Gueranger or Ratisbonne, byFreppel or Perraud, by Ravignan or Gratry, by Olivain or Dosithee, byDidon or Chocarne. 

Des Esseintes had often pondered upon this matter. A really authentictalent, a supremely profound originality, a well-anchored conviction, he thought, was needed to animate this formal style which was toofrail to support any thought that was unforseen or any thesis that wasaudacious. 

Yet, despite all this, there were several writers whose burningeloquence fused and shaped this language, notably Lacordaire, who wasone of the few really great writers the Church had produced for manyyears. 

Immured, like his colleagues, in the narrow circle of orthodoxspeculations, likewise obliged to dissipate his energies in theexclusive consideration of those theories which had been expressed andconsecrated by the Fathers of the Church and developed by the mastersof the pulpit, he succeeded in inbuing them with novelty and inrejuvenating, almost in modifying them, by clothing them in a morepersonal and stimulating form. Here and there in his _Conferences deNotre-Dame_, were treasures of expression, audacious usages of words, accents of love, rapid movements, cries of joy and distractedeffusions. Then, to his position as a brilliant and gentle monk whoseingenuity and labors had been exhausted in the impossible task ofconciliating the liberal doctrines of society with the authoritariandogmas of the Church, he added a temperament of fierce love and suavediplomatic tenderness. In his letters to young men may be found thecaressing inflections of a father exhorting his sons with smilingreprimands, the well-meaning advice and the indulgent forgiveness. Some of these Des Esseintes found charming, confessing as they did themonk's yearning for affection, while others were even imposing whenthey sought to sustain courage and dissipate doubts by the inimitablecertainties of Faith. In fine, this sentiment of paternity, which gavehis pen a delicately feminine quality, lent to his prose acharacteristically individual accent discernible among all theclerical literature. 

After Lacordaire, ecclesiastics and monks possessing any individualitywere extremely rare. At the very most, a few pages of his pupil, theAbbe Peyreyve, merited reading. He left sympathetic biographies of hismaster, wrote a few loveable letters, composed treatises in thesonorous language of formal discourse, and delivered panegyrics inwhich the declamatory tone was too broadly stressed. Certainly theAbbe Peyreyve had neither the emotion nor the ardor of Lacordaire. Hewas too much a priest and too little a man. Yet, here and there in therhetoric of his sermons, flashed interesting effects of large andsolid phrasing or touches of nobility that were almost venerable. 

But to find writers of prose whose works justify close study, one wasobliged to seek those who had not submitted to Ordination; to thesecular writers whom the interests of Catholicism engaged and devotedto its cause. 

With the Comte de Falloux, the episcopal style, so stupidly handled bythe prelates, recruited new strength and in a manner recovered itsmasculine vigor. Under his guise of moderation, this academicianexuded gall. The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the_Correspondant_ and since collected into books, were mordant anddiscerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceivedas harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and wereastonishing in the intolerance of their convictions. 

A dangerous polemist because of his ambuscades, a shrewd logician, executing flanking movements and attacking unexpectedly, the Comte deFalloux had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death ofMadame Swetchine, whose tracts he had collected and whom he revered asa saint. 

But the true temperament of the writer was betrayed in the twobrochures which appeared in 1848 and 1880, the latter entitled_l'Unite nationale_. 

Moved by a cold rage, the implacable legitimist this time foughtopenly, contrary to his custom, and hurled against the infidels, inthe form of a peroration, such fulminating invectives as these:

"And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of humannature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds, emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of thesimian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied:you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be thehigh-priests of an abominable future!"

The other brochure bore the title _le Parti catholique_ and wasdirected against the despotism of the _Univers_ and against Veuillotwhose name he refused to mention. Here the sinuous attacks wereresumed, venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman, clad inblue answered the sharp physical blows of the fighter with scornfulsarcasms. 

These contestants represented the two parties of the Church, the twofactions whose differences were resolved into virulent hatreds. DeFalloux, the more haughty and cunning, belonged to the liberal campwhich already claimed Montalembert and Cochin, Lacordaire and DeBroglie. He subscribed to the principles of the _Correspondant_, areview which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the Churchwith a varnish of tolerance. Veuillot, franker and more open, scornedsuch masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultramontainedoctrines and confessed, with a certain compunction, the pitiless yokeof the Church's dogma. 

For the conduct of this verbal warfare, Veuillot had made himselfmaster of a special style, partly borrowed from La Bruyere and DuGros-Caillou. This half-solemn, half-slang style, had the force of atomahawk in the hands of this vehement personality. Strangelyheadstrong and brave, he had overwhelmed both free thinkers andbishops with this terrible weapon, charging at his enemies like abull, regardless of the party to which they belonged. Distrusted bythe Church, which would tolerate neither his contraband style nor hisfortified theories, he had nevertheless overawed everybody by hispowerful talent, incurring the attack of the entire press which heeffectively thrashed in his _Odeurs de Paris_, coping with everyassault, freeing himself with a kick of the foot of all the wretchedhack-writers who had presumed to attack him. 

Unfortunately, this undisputed talent only existed in pugilism. Atpeace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry andnovels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engagedin a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banallitanies and mumbling childish hymns. 

More formal, more constrained and more serious was the belovedapologist of the Church, Ozanam, the inquisitor of the Christianlanguage. Although he was very difficult to understand, Des Esseintesnever failed to be astonished by the insouciance of this writer, whospoke confidently of God's impenetrable designs, although he feltobliged to establish proof of the improbable assertions he advanced. With the utmost self-confidence, he deformed events, contradicted, with greater impudence even than the panegyrists of other parties, theknown facts of history, averred that the Church had never concealedthe esteem it had for science, called heresies impure miasmas, andtreated Buddhism and other religions with such contempt that heapologized for even soiling his Catholic prose by onslaught on theirdoctrines. 

At times, religious passion breathed a certain ardor into hisoratorical language, under the ice of which seethed a violent current;in his numerous writings on Dante, on Saint Francis, on the author of_Stabat Mater_, on the Franciscan poets, on socialism, on commerciallaw and every imaginable subject, this man pleaded for the defense ofthe Vatican which he held indefectible, and judged causes and opinionsaccording to their harmony or discord with those that he advanced. 

This manner of viewing questions from a single viewpoint was also themethod of that literary scamp, Nettement, whom some people would havemade the other's rival. The latter was less bigoted than the master, affected less arrogance and admitted more worldly pretentions. Herepeatedly left the literary cloister in which Ozanam had imprisonedhimself, and had read secular works so as to be able to judge of them. This province he entered gropingly, like a child in a vault, seeingnothing but shadow around him, perceiving in this gloom only the gleamof the candle which illumed the place a few paces before him. 

In this gloom, uncertain of his bearings, he stumbled at every turn, speaking of Murger who had "the care of a chiselled and carefullyfinished style"; of Hugo who sought the noisome and unclean and towhom he dared compare De Laprade; of Paul Delacroix who scorned therules; of Paul Delaroche and of the poet Reboul, whom he praisedbecause of their apparent faith. 

Des Esseintes could not restrain a shrug of the shoulders before thesestupid opinions, covered by a borrowed prose whose already worntexture clung or became torn at each phrase. 

In a different way, the works of Poujoulat and Genoude, Montalembert, Nicolas and Carne failed to inspire him with any definite interest. His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with thescholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duc de Broglie, nor washis penchant for the social and religious questions, even whenbroached by Henry Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter wherehe gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at theSacre-Coeur. He had not touched these books for a long time, and theperiod was already remote when he had thrown with his waste paper thepuerile lucubrations of the gloomy Pontmartin and the pitiful Feval;and long since he had given to his servants, for a certain vulgarusage, the short stories of Aubineau and Lasserre, in which arerecorded wretched hagiographies of miracles effected by Dupont ofTours and by the Virgin. 

In no way did Des Esseintes derive even a fugitive distraction fromhis boredom from this literature. The mass of books which he had oncestudied he had thrown into dim corners of his library shelves when heleft the Fathers' school. "I should have left them in Paris, " he toldhimself, as he turned out some books which were particularlyinsufferable: those of the Abbe Lamennais and that impervioussectarian so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the ComteJoseph de Maistre. 

A single volume remained on a shelf, within reach of his hand. It wasthe _Homme_ of Ernest Hello. This writer was the absolute opposite ofhis religious confederates. Almost isolated among the pious groupterrified by his conduct, Ernest Hello had ended by abandoning theopen road that led from earth to heaven. Probably disgusted by thedullness of the journey and the noisy mob of those pilgrims of letterswho for centuries followed one after the other upon the same highway, marching in each other's steps, stopping at the same places toexchange the same commonplace remarks on religion, on the ChurchFathers, on their similar beliefs, on their common masters, he haddeparted through the byways to wander in the gloomy glade of Pascal, where he tarried long to recover his breath before continuing on hisway and going even farther in the regions of human thought than theJansenist, whom he derided. 

Tortuous and precious, doctoral and complex, Hello, by the piercingcunning of his analysis, recalled to Des Esseintes the sharp, probinginvestigations of some of the infidel psychologists of the precedingand present century. In him was a sort of Catholic Duranty, but moredogmatic and penetrating, an experienced manipulation of themagnifying glass, a sophisticated engineer of the soul, a skillfulwatchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of apassion and elucidate it by details of the wheel work. 

In this oddly formed mind existed unsurmised relationships ofthoughts, harmonies and oppositions; furthermore, he affected a whollynovel manner of action which used the etymology of words as aspring-board for ideas whose associations sometimes became tenuous, but which almost constantly remained ingenious and sparkling. 

Thus, despite the awkwardness of his structure, he dissected with asingular perspicacity, the _Avare_, "the ordinary man, " and "thepassion of unhappiness, " revealing meanwhile interesting comparisonswhich could be constructed between the operations of photography andof memory. 

But such skill in handling this perfected instrument of analysis, stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of thetemperamental phases of this man. 

Still another existed. This mind divided itself in two parts andrevealed, besides the writer, the religious fanatic and Biblicalprophet. 

Like Hugo, whom he now and again recalled in distortions of phrasesand words, Ernest Hello had delighted in imitating Saint John ofPatmos. He pontificated and vaticinated from his retreat in the rueSaint-Sulpice, haranguing the reader with an apocalyptic languagepartaking in spots of the bitterness of an Isaiah. 

He affected inordinate pretentions of profundity. There were somefawning and complacent people who pretended to consider him a greatman, the reservoir of learning, the encyclopedic giant of the age. Perhaps he was a well, but one at whose bottom one often could notfind a drop of water. 

In his volume _Paroles de Dieu_, he paraphrased the Holy Scriptures, endeavoring to complicate their ordinarily obvious sense. In his otherbook _Homme_, and in his brochure _le Jour du Seigneur_, written in abiblical style, rugged and obscure, he sought to appear like avengeful apostle, prideful and tormented with spleen, but showedhimself a deacon touched with a mystic epilepsy, or like a talentedMaistre, a surly and bitter sectarian. 

But, thought Des Esseintes, this sickly shamelessness often obstructedthe inventive sallies of the casuist. With more intolerance than evenOzanam, he resolutely denied all that pertained to his clan, proclaimed the most disconcerting axioms, maintained with adisconcerting authority that "geology is returning toward Moses, " andthat natural history, like chemistry and every contemporary science, verifies the scientific truth of the Bible. The proposition on eachpage was of the unique truth and the superhuman knowledge of theChurch, and everywhere were interspersed more than perilous aphorismsand raging curses cast at the art of the last century. 

To this strange mixture was added the love of sanctimonious delights, such as a translation of the _Visions_ by Angele de Foligno, a book ofan unparalleled fluid stupidity, with selected works of Jean Rusbrockl'Admirable, a mystic of the thirteenth century whose prose offered anincomprehensible but alluring combination of dusky exaltations, caressing effusions, and poignant transports. 

The whole attitude of this presumptuous pontiff, Hello, had leapedfrom a preface written for this book. He himself remarked that"extraordinary things can only be stammered, " and he stammered in goodtruth, declaring that "the holy gloom where Rusbrock extends his eaglewings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for such as him the farhorizons would be a too narrow garment. "

However this might be, Des Esseintes felt himself intrigued towardthis ill-balanced but subtile mind. No fusion had been effectedbetween the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the veryjolts and incoherencies constituted the personality of the man. 

With him was recruited the little group of writers who fought on thefront battle line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to theregular army, but were more properly the scouts of a religion whichdistrusted men of such talent as Veuillot and Hello, because they didnot seem sufficiently submissive and shallow. What the Church reallydesires is soldiers who do not reason, files of such blind combatantsand such mediocrities as Hello describes with the rage of one who hassubmitted to their yoke. Thus it was that Catholicism had lost no timein driving away one of its partisans, an enraged pamphleteer who wrotein a style at once rare and exasperated, the savage Leon Bloy; andcaused to be cast from the doors of its bookshops, as it would aplague or a filthy vagrant, another writer who had made himself hoarsewith celebrating its praises, Barbey d'Aurevilly. 

It is true that the latter was too prone to compromise and notsufficiently docile. Others bent their heads under rebukes andreturned to the ranks; but he was the _enfant terrible_, and wasunrecognized by the party. In a literary way, he pursued women whom hedragged into the sanctuary. Nay, even that vast disdain was invoked, with which Catholicism enshrouds talent to prevent excommunicationfrom putting beyond the pale of the law a perplexing servant who, under pretext of honoring his masters, broke the window panes of thechapel, juggled with the holy pyxes and executed eccentric dancesaround the tabernacle. 

Two works of Barbey d'Aurevilly specially attracted Des Esseintes, the_Pretre marie_ and the _Diaboliques_. Others, such as the _Ensorcele_, the _Chevalier des touches_ and _Une Vieille Maitresse_, werecertainly more comprehensive and more finely balanced, but they leftDes Esseintes untouched, for he was really interested only inunhealthy works which were consumed and irritated by fever. 

In these all but healthy volumes, Barbey d'Aurevilly constantlyhesitated between those two pits which the Catholic religion succeedsin reconciling: mysticism and sadism. 

In these two books which Des Esseintes was thumbing, Barbey had lostall prudence, given full rein to his steed, and galloped at full speedover roads to their farthest limits. 

All the mysterious horror of the Middle Ages hovered over thatimprobable book, the _Pretre marie_; magic blended with religion, black magic with prayer and, more pitiless and savage than the Devilhimself, the God of Original Sin incessantly tortured the innocentCalixte, His reprobate, as once He had caused one of his angels tomark the houses of unbelievers whom he wished to slay. 

Conceived by a fasting monk in the grip of delirium, these scenes wereunfolded in the uneven style of a tortured soul. Unfortunately, amongthose disordered creatures that were like galvanized Coppelias ofHoffmann, some, like Neel de Nehou, seemed to have been imagined inmoments of exhaustion following convulsions, and were discordant notesin this harmony of sombre madness, where they were as comical andridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece. 

After these mystic divagations, the writer had experienced a period ofcalm. Then a terrible relapse followed. 

This belief that man is a Buridanesque donkey, a being balancedbetween two forces of equal attraction which successively remainvictorious and vanquished, this conviction that human life is only anuncertain combat waged between hell and heaven, this faith in twoopposite beings, Satan and Christ, was fatally certain to engendersuch inner discords of the soul, exalted by incessant struggle, excited at once by promises and menaces, and ending by abandoningitself to whichever of the two forces persisted in the pursuit themore relentlessly. 

In the _Pretre marie_, Barbey d'Aurevilly sang the praises of Christ, who had prevailed against temptations; in the _Diaboliques_, theauthor succumbed to the Devil, whom he celebrated; then appearedsadism, that bastard of Catholicism, which through the centuriesreligion has relentlessly pursued with its exorcisms and stakes. 

This condition, at once fascinating and ambiguous, can not arise inthe soul of an unbeliever. It does not merely consist in sinkingoneself in the excesses of the flesh, excited by outrageousblasphemies, for in such a case it would be no more than a case ofsatyriasis that had reached its climax. Before all, it consists insacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, ina wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. Italso is founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to thesatisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play withforbidden things, for no reason other than that they had beenforbidden to do so. 

In fact, if it did not admit of sacrilege, sadism would have no reasonfor existence. Besides, the sacrilege proceeding from the veryexistence of a religion, can only be intentionally and pertinentlyperformed by a believer, for no one would take pleasure in profaning afaith that was indifferent or unknown to him. 

The power of sadism and the attraction it presents, lies entirely thenin the prohibited enjoyment of transferring to Satan the praises andprayers due to God; it lies in the non-observance of Catholic preceptswhich one really follows unwillingly, by committing in deeper scorn ofChrist, those sins which the Church has especially cursed, such aspollution of worship and carnal orgy. 

In its elements, this phenomenon to which the Marquis de Sade hasbequeathed his name is as old as the Church. It had reared its head inthe eighteenth century, recalling, to go back no farther, by a simplephenomenon of atavism the impious practices of the Sabbath, thewitches' revels of the Middle Ages. 

By having consulted the _Malleus maleficorum_, that terrible code ofJacob Sprenger which permits the Church wholesale burnings ofnecromancers and sorcerers, Des Esseintes recognized in the witches'Sabbath, all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism. In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the nightssuccessively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies anddevoted to the bestialities of passion, he once more discovered theparody of the processions, the insults and eternal threats levelled atGod and the devotion bestowed upon His rival, while amid cursing ofthe wine and the bread, the black mass was being celebrated on theback of a woman on all fours, whose stained bare thighs served as thealtar from which the congregation received the communion from a blackgoblet stamped with an image of a goat. 

This profusion of impure mockeries and foul shames were marked in thecareer of the Marquis de Sade, who garnished his terrible pleasureswith outrageous sacrileges. 

He cried out to the sky, invoked Lucifer, shouted his contempt of God, calling Him rogue and imbecile, spat upon the communion, endeavored tocontaminate with vile ordures a Divinity who he prayed might damn him, the while he declared, to defy Him the more, that He did not exist. 

Barbey d'Aurevilly approached this psychic state. If he did notpresume as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious curses against theSaviour; if, more prudent or more timid, he claimed ever to honor theChurch, he none the less addressed his suit to the Devil as was donein medieval times and he, too, in order to brave God, fell intodemoniac nymphomania, inventing sensual monstrosities, even borrowingfrom bedroom philosophy a certain episode which he seasoned with newcondiments when he wrote the story _le Diner d'un athee_. 

This extravagant book pleased Des Esseintes. He had caused to beprinted, in violet ink and in a frame of cardinal purple, on a genuineparchment which the judges of the Rota had blessed, a copy of the_Diaboliques_, with characters whose quaint quavers and flourishes inturned up tails and claws affected a satanic form. 

After certain pieces of Baudelaire that, in imitation of the clamoroussongs of nocturnal revels, celebrated infernal litanies, this volumealone of all the works of contemporary apostolic literature testifiedto this state of mind, at once impious and devout, toward whichCatholicism often thrust Des Esseintes. 

With Barbey d'Aurevilly ended the line of religious writers; and intruth, that pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secularliterature than to the other with which he demanded a place that wasdenied him. His language was the language of disheveled romanticism, full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delightedwith extravagant comparisons and with whip strokes and phrases whichexploded, like the clangor of noisy bells, along the text. In short, d'Aurevilly was like a stallion among the geldings of theultramontaine stables. 

Des Esseintes reflected in this wise while re-reading, here and there, several passages of the book and, comparing its nervous and changingstyle with the fixed manner of other Church writers, he thought of theevolution of language which Darwin has so truly revealed. 

Compelled to live in a secular atmosphere, raised in the heart of theromantic school, constantly being in the current of modern literatureand accustomed to reading contemporary publications, Barbeyd'Aurevilly had acquired a dialect which although it had sustainednumerous and profound changes since the Great Age, had neverthelessrenewed itself in his works. 

The ecclesiastical writers, on the contrary, confined within specificlimitations, restricted to ancient Church literature, knowing nothingof the literary progress of the centuries and determined if need be toblind their eyes the more surely not to see, necessarily wereconstrained to the use of an inflexible language, like that of theeighteenth century which descendants of the French who settled inCanada still speak and write today, without change of phrasing orwords, having succeeded in preserving their original idiom byisolation in certain metropolitan centres, despite the fact that theyare enveloped upon every side by English-speaking peoples. 

Meanwhile the silvery sound of a clock that tolled the angelusannounced breakfast time to Des Esseintes. He abandoned his books, pressed his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that, among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbeyd'Aurevilly were the only ones whose ideas and style offered thegaminess he so loved to savor in the Latin and decadent, monasticwriters of past ages. 

 Chapter 13

As the season advanced, the weather, far from improving, grew worse. Everything seemed to go wrong that year. After the squalls and mists, the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheetiron. In two days, without transition, a torrid heat, an atmosphere offrightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days and thestreaming of the rains. As though stirred by furious pokers, the sunshowed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burningone's face. A hot dust rose from the roads, scorching the dry trees, and the yellowed lawns became a deep brown. A temperature like that ofa foundry hung over the dwelling of Des Esseintes. 

Half naked, he opened a window and received the air like a furnaceblast in his face. The dining room, to which he fled, was fiery, andthe rarefied air simmered. Utterly distressed, he sat down, for thestimulation that had seized him had ended since the close of hisreveries. 

Like all people tormented by nervousness, heat distracted him. And hisanaemia, checked by cold weather, again became pronounced, weakeninghis body which had been debilitated by copious perspiration. 

The back of his shirt was saturated, his perinaeum was damp, his feetand arms moist, his brow overflowing with sweat that ran down hischeeks. Des Esseintes reclined, annihilated, on a chair. 

The sight of the meat placed on the table at that moment caused hisstomach to rise. He ordered the food removed, asked for boiled eggs, and tried to swallow some bread soaked in eggs, but his stomach wouldhave none of it. A fit of nausea overcame him. He drank a few drops ofwine that pricked his stomach like points of fire. He wet his face;the perspiration, alternately warm and cold, coursed along histemples. He began to suck some pieces of ice to overcome his troubledheart--but in vain. 

So weak was he that he leaned against the table. He rose, feeling theneed of air, but the bread had slowly risen in his gullet and remainedthere. Never had he felt so distressed, so shattered, so ill at ease. To add to his discomfort, his eyes distressed him and he saw objectsin double. Soon he lost his sense of distance, and his glass seemed tobe a league away. He told himself that he was the play-thing ofsensorial illusions and that he was incapable of reacting. Hestretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by thetossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased. Herose to his feet, determined to rid himself, by means of a digestive, of the food which was choking him. 

He again reached the dining room and sadly compared himself, in thiscabin, to passengers seized with sea-sickness. Stumbling, he made hisway to the closet, examined the mouth organ without opening any of thestops, but instead took from a high shelf a bottle of benedictinewhich he kept because of its form which to him seemed suggestive ofthoughts that were at once gently wanton and vaguely mystic. 

But at this moment he remained indifferent, gazing with lack-lustre, staring eyes at this squat, dark-green bottle which, at other times, had brought before him images of the medieval priories by itsold-fashioned monkish paunch, its head and neck covered with aparchment hood, its red wax stamp quartered with three silver mitresagainst a field of azure and fastened at the neck, like a papal bull, with bands of lead, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paperthat seemed to have yellowed with age: _Liquor MonachorumBenedictinorum Abbatiae Fiscannensis_. 

Under this thoroughly abbatial robe, signed with a cross and theecclesiastic initials 'D. O. M. ', pressed in between its parchments andligatures, slept an exquisitely fine saffron-colored liquid. Itbreathed an aroma that seemed the quintessence of angelica and hyssopblended with sea-weeds and of iodines and bromes hidden in sweetessences, and it stimulated the palate with a spiritous ardorconcealed under a virginal daintiness, and charmed the sense of smellby a pungency enveloped in a caress innocent and devout. 

This deceit which resulted from the extraordinary disharmony betweencontents and container, between the liturgic form of the flask and itsso feminine and modern soul, had formerly stimulated Des Esseintes torevery and, facing the bottle, he was inclined to think at greatlength of the monks who sold it, the Benedictines of the Abbey ofFecamp who, belonging to the brotherhood of Saint-Maur which had beencelebrated for its controversial works under the rule of Saint Benoit, followed neither the observances of the white monks of Citeaux nor ofthe black monks of Cluny. He could not but think of them as being liketheir brethren of the Middle Ages, cultivating simples, heatingretorts and distilling faultless panaceas and prescriptions. 

He tasted a drop of this liquor and, for a few moments, had relief. But soon the fire, which the dash of wine had lit in his bowels, revived. He threw down his napkin, returned to his study, and pacedthe floor. He felt as if he were under a pneumatic clock, and anumbing weakness stole from his brain through his limbs. Unable toendure it longer, he betook himself to the garden. It was the firsttime he had done this since his arrival at Fontenay. There he foundshelter beneath a tree which radiated a circle of shadow. Seated onthe lawn, he looked around with a besotted air at the square beds ofvegetables planted by the servants. He gazed, but it was only at theend of an hour that he really saw them, for a greenish film floatedbefore his eyes, permitting him only to see, as in the depths ofwater, flickering images of shifting tones. 

But when he recovered his balance, he clearly distinguished the onionsand cabbages, a garden bed of lettuce further off, and, in thedistance along the hedge, a row of white lillies recumbent in theheavy air. 

A smile played on his lips, for he suddenly recalled the strangecomparison of old Nicandre, who likened, in the point of form, thepistils of lillies to the genital organs of a donkey; and he recalledalso a passage from Albert le Grand, in which that thaumaturgistdescribes a strange way of discovering whether a girl is still avirgin, by means of a lettuce. 

These remembrances distracted him somewhat. He examined the garden, interesting himself in the plants withered by the heat, and in the hotground whose vapors rose into the dusty air. Then, above the hedgewhich separated the garden below from the embankment leading to thefort, he watched the urchins struggling and tumbling on the ground. 

He was concentrating his attention upon them when another younger, sorry little specimen appeared. He had hair like seaweed covered withsand, two green bubbles beneath his nose, and disgusting lipssurrounded by a dirty white frame formed by a slice of bread smearedwith cheese and filled with pieces of scallions. 

Des Esseintes inhaled the air. A perverse appetite seized him. Thisdirty slice made his mouth water. It seemed to him that his stomach, refusing all other nourishment, could digest this shocking food, andthat his palate would enjoy it as though it were a feast. 

He leaped up, ran to the kitchen and ordered a loaf, white cheese andgreen onions to be brought from the village, emphasizing his desirefor a slice exactly like the one being eaten by the child. Then hereturned to sit beneath the tree. 

The little chaps were fighting with one another. They struggled forbits of bread which they shoved into their cheeks, meanwhile suckingtheir fingers. Kicks and blows rained freely, and the weakest, trampled upon, cried out. 

At this sight, Des Esseintes recovered his animation. The interest hetook in this fight distracted his thoughts from his illness. Contemplating the blind fury of these urchins, he thought of the crueland abominable law of the struggle of existence; and, although thesechildren were mean, he could not help being interested in theirfutures, yet could not but believe that it had been better for themhad their mothers never given them birth. 

In fact, all they could expect of life was rash, colic, fever, andmeasles in their earliest years; slaps in the face and degradingdrudgeries up to thirteen years; deceptions by women, sicknesses andinfidelity during manhood and, toward the last, infirmities andagonies in a poorhouse or asylum. 

And the future was the same for every one, and none in his good sensescould envy his neighbor. The rich had the same passions, the sameanxieties, the same pains and the same illnesses, but in a differentenvironment; the same mediocre enjoyments, whether alcoholic, literaryor carnal. There was even a vague compensation in evils, a sort ofjustice which re-established the balance of misfortune between theclasses, permitting the poor to bear physical suffering more easily, and making it difficult for the unresisting, weaker bodies of the richto withstand it. 

How vain, silly and mad it is to beget brats! And Des Esseintesthought of those ecclesiastics who had taken vows of sterility, yetwere so inconsistent as to canonize Saint Vincent de Paul, because hebrought vain tortures to innocent creatures. 

By means of his hateful precautions, Vincent de Paul had deferred foryears the death of unintelligent and insensate beings, in such a waythat when they later became almost intelligent and sentient to grief, they were able to anticipate the future, to await and fear that deathof whose very name they had of late been ignorant, some of them goingas far to invoke it, in hatred of that sentence of life which the monkinflicted upon them by an absurd theological code. 

And since this old man's death, his ideas had prevailed. Abandonedchildren were sheltered instead of being killed and yet their livesdaily became increasingly rigorous and barren! Then, under pretext ofliberty and progress, Society had discovered another means ofincreasing man's miseries by tearing him from his home, forcing him todon a ridiculous uniform and carry weapons, by brutalizing him in aslavery in every respect like that from which he had compassionatelyfreed the negro, and all to enable him to slaughter his neighborwithout risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operatesingle-handed, without uniforms and with weapons that are less swiftand deafening. 

Des Esseintes wondered if there had ever been such a time as ours. Ourage invokes the causes of humanity, endeavors to perfect anaesthesiato suppress physical suffering. Yet at the same time it prepares thesevery stimulants to increase moral wretchedness. 

Ah! if ever this useless procreation should be abolished, it were now. But here, again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homaisappeared strange and cruel. 

In the matter of generation, Justice finds the agencies for deceptionto be quite natural. It is a recognized and acknowledged fact. Thereis scarcely a home of any station that does not confide its childrento the drain pipes, or that does not employ contrivances that arefreely sold, and which it would enter no person's mind to prohibit. And yet, if these subterfuges proved insufficient, if the attemptmiscarried and if, to remedy matters, one had recourse to moreefficacious measures, ah! then there were not prisons enough, notmunicipal jails enough to confine those who, in good faith, werecondemned by other individuals who had that very evening, on theconjugal bed, done their utmost to avoid giving birth to children. 

The deceit itself was not a crime, it seemed. The crime lay in thejustification of the deceit. 

What Society considered a crime was the act of killing a being endowedwith life; and yet, in expelling a foetus, one destroyed an animalthat was less formed and living and certainly less intelligent andmore ugly than a dog or a cat, although it is permissible to stranglethese creatures as soon as they are born. 

It is only right to add, for the sake of fairness, thought DesEsseintes, that it is not the awkward man, who generally loses no timein disappearing, but rather the woman, the victim of his stupidity, who expiates the crime of having saved an innocent life. 

Yet was it right that the world should be filled with such prejudiceas to wish to repress manoeuvres so natural that primitive man, thePolynesian savage, for instance, instinctively practices them?

The servant interrupted the charitable reflections of Des Esseintes, who received the slice of bread on a plate of vermeil. Pains shotthrough his heart. He did not have the courage to eat this bread, forthe unhealthy excitement of his stomach had ceased. A sensation offrightful decay swept upon him. He was compelled to rise. The sunturned, and slowly fell upon the place that he had lately occupied. The heat became more heavy and fierce. 

"Throw this slice of bread to those children who are murdering eachother on the road, " he ordered his servant. "Let the weakest becrippled, be denied share in the prize, and be soundly thrashed intothe bargain, as they will be when they return to their homes with torntrousers and bruised eyes. This will give them an idea of the lifethat awaits them!"

And he entered the house and sank into his armchair. 

"But I must try to eat something, " he said. And he attempted to soak abiscuit in old Constantia wine, several bottles of which remained inhis cellar. 

That wine, the color of slightly burned onions, partaking of Malagaand Port, but with a specially luscious flavor, and an after-taste ofgrapes dried by fiery suns, had often comforted him, given a newenergy to his stomach weakened by the fasts which he was forced toundergo. But this cordial, usually so efficacious, now failed. Then hethought that an emollient might perhaps counteract the fiery painswhich were consuming him, and he took out the Nalifka, a Russianliqueur, contained in a bottle frosted with unpolished glass. Thisunctuous raspberry-flavored syrup also failed. Alas! the time was faroff when, enjoying good health, Des Esseintes had ridden to his housein the hot summer days in a sleigh, and there, covered with furswrapped about his chest, forced himself to shiver, saying, as helistened attentively to the chattering of his teeth: "Ah, how bitingthis wind is! It is freezing!" Thus he had almost succeeded inconvincing himself that it was cold. 

Unfortunately, such remedies as these had failed of their purpose eversince his sickness became vital. 

With all this, he was unable to make use of laudanum: instead ofallaying the pain, this sedative irritated him even to the degree ofdepriving him of rest. At one time he had endeavored to procurevisions through opium and hashish, but these two substances had led tovomitings and intense nervous disturbances. He had instantly beenforced to give up the idea of taking them, and without the aid ofthese coarse stimulants, demand of his brain alone to transport himinto the land of dreams, far, far from life. 

"What a day!" he said to himself, sponging his neck, feeling everyounce of his strength dissolve in perspiration; a feverish agitationstill prevented him from remaining in one spot; once more he walked upand down, trying every chair in the room in turn. Wearied of thestruggle, at last he fell against his bureau and leaning mechanicallyagainst the table, without thinking of anything, he touched anastrolabe which rested on a mass of books and notes and served as apaper weight. 

He had purchased this engraved and gilded copper instrument (it hadcome from Germany and dated from the seventeenth century) of asecond-hand Paris dealer, after a visit to the Cluny Museum, where hehad stood for a long while in ecstatic admiration before a marvelousastrolabe made of chiseled ivory, whose cabalistic appearanceenchanted him. 

This paper weight evoked many reminiscences within him. Aroused andactuated by the appearance of this trinket, his thoughts rushed fromFontenay to Paris, to the curio shop where he had purchased it, thenreturned to the Museum, and he mentally beheld the ivory astrolabe, while his unseeing eyes continued to gaze upon the copper astrolabe onthe table. 

Then he left the Museum and, without quitting the town, strolled downthe streets, wandered through the rue du Sommerard and the boulevardSaint-Michel, branched off into the neighboring streets, and pausedbefore certain shops whose quite extraordinary appearance andprofusion had often attracted him. 

Beginning with an astrolabe, this spiritual jaunt ended in the cafesof the Latin Quarter. 

He remembered how these places were crowded in the rueMonsieur-le-Prince and at the end of the rue de Vaugirard, touchingthe Odeon; sometimes they followed one another like the old _riddecks_of the Canal-aux-Harengs, at Antwerp, each of which revealed a front, the counterpart of its neighbor. 

Through the half-opened doors and the windows dimmed with coloredpanes or curtains, he had often seen women who walked about likegeese; others, on benches, rested their elbows on the marble tables, humming, their temples resting between their hands; still othersstrutted and posed in front of mirrors, playing with their false hairpomaded by hair-dressers; others, again, took money from their pursesand methodically sorted the different denominations in little heaps. 

Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, flabby necks andpainted eyes; and all of them, like automatons, moved simultaneouslyupon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with the same toneand uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections andthe same smile. 

Certain ideas associated themselves in the mind of Des Esseintes, whose reveries came to an end, now that he recalled this collection ofcoffee-houses and streets. 

He understood the significance of those cafes which reflected thestate of soul of an entire generation, and from it he discovered thesynthesis of the period. 

And, in fact, the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses ofprostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafebegan to operate. 

This restriction of prostitution which proved profitable toclandestine loves, evidently arose from the incomprehensible illusionsof men in the matter of carnal life. 

Monstrous as it may appear, these haunts satisfied an ideal. 

Although the utilitarian tendencies transmitted by heredity anddeveloped by the precocious rudeness and constant brutalities of thecolleges had made the youth of the day strangely crude and asstrangely positive and cold, it had none the less preserved, in theback of their heads, an old blue flower, an old ideal of a vague, souraffection. 

Today, when the blood clamored, youths could not bring themselves togo through the formality of entering, ending, paying and leaving; intheir eyes, this was bestiality, the action of a dog attacking a bitchwithout much ado. Then, too, vanity fled unsatisfied from these houseswhere there was no semblance of resistance; there was no victory, nohoped for preference, nor even largess obtained from the tradeswomanwho measured her caresses according to the price. On the contrary, thecourting of a girl of the cafes stimulated all the susceptibilities oflove, all the refinements of sentiment. One disputed with the othersfor such a girl, and those to whom she granted a rendezvous, inconsideration of much money, were sincere in imagining that they hadwon her from a rival, and in so thinking they were the objects ofhonorary distinction and favor. 

Yet this domesticity was as stupid, as selfish, as vile as that ofhouses of ill-fame. Its creatures drank without being thirsty, laughedwithout reason, were charmed by the caresses of a slut, quarrelled andfought for no reason whatever, despite everything. The Parisian youthhad not been able to see that these girls were, from the point ofplastic beauty, graceful attitudes and necessary attire, quiteinferior to the women in the bawdy houses! "My God, " Des Esseintesexclaimed, "what ninnies are these fellows who flutter around thecafes; for, over and above their silly illusions, they forget thedanger of degraded, suspicious allurements, and they are unaware ofthe sums of money given for affairs priced in advance by the mistress, of the time lost in waiting for an assignation deferred so as toincrease its value and cost, delays which are repeated to provide moretips for the waiters. "

This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practicalsense, represented the dominant motive of the age. These very personswho would have gouged their neighbors' eyes to gain ten _sous_, lostall presence of mind and discrimination before suspicious lookinggirls in restaurants who pitilessly harassed and relentlessly fleecedthem. Fathers devoted their lives to their businesses and labors, families devoured one another on the pretext of trade, only to berobbed by their sons who, in turn, allowed themselves to be fleeced bywomen who posed as sweethearts to obtain their money. 

In all Paris, from east to west and from north to south, there existedan unbroken chain of female tricksters, a system of organized theft, and all because, instead of satisfying men at once, these women wereskilled in the subterfuges of delay. 

At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in theprotraction of all things, in saying "no" before saying "yes, " for onecould manage people only by trifling with them. 

"Ah! if the same were but true of the stomach, " sighed Des Esseintes, racked by a cramp which instantly and sharply brought back his mind, that had roved far off, to Fontenay. 

 Chapter 14

Several days slowly passed thanks to certain measures which succeededin tricking the stomach, but one morning Des Esseintes could endurefood no longer, and he asked himself anxiously whether his alreadyserious weakness would not grow worse and force him to take to bed. Asudden gleam of light relieved his distress; he remembered that one ofhis friends, quite ill at one time, had made use of a Papin's digesterto overcome his anaemia and preserve what little strength he had. 

He dispatched his servant to Paris for this precious utensil, andfollowing the directions contained in the prospectus which themanufacturer had enclosed, he himself instructed the cook how to cutthe roast beef into bits, put it into the pewter pot, with a slice ofleek and carrot, and screw on the cover to let it boil for four hours. 

At the end of this time the meat fibres were strained. He drank aspoonful of the thick salty juice deposited at the bottom of the pot. Then he felt a warmth, like a smooth caress, descend upon him. 

This nourishment relieved his pain and nausea, and even strengthenedhis stomach which did not refuse to accept these few drops of soup. 

Thanks to this digester, his neurosis was arrested and Des Esseintessaid to himself: "Well, it is so much gained; perhaps the temperaturewill change, the sky will throw some ashes upon this abominable sunwhich exhausts me, and I shall hold out without accident till thefirst fogs and frosts of winter. "

In the torpor and listless ennui in which he was sunk, the disorder ofhis library, whose arrangement had never been completed, irritatedhim. Helpless in his armchair, he had constantly in sight the booksset awry on the shelves propped against each other or lying flat ontheir sides, like a tumbled pack of cards. This disorder offended himthe more when he contrasted it with the perfect order of his religiousworks, carefully placed on parade along the walls. 

He tried to clear up the confusion, but after ten minutes of work, perspiration covered him; the effort weakened him. He stretchedhimself on a couch and rang for his servant. 

Following his directions, the old man continued the task, bringingeach book in turn to Des Esseintes who examined it and directed whereit was to be placed. 

This task did not last long, for Des Esseintes' library contained buta very limited number of contemporary, secular works. 

They were drawn through his brain as bands of metal are drawn througha steel-plate from which they issue thin, light, and reduced to almostimperceptible wires; and he had ended by possessing only those bookswhich could submit to such treatment and which were so solidlytempered as to withstand the rolling-mill of each new reading. In hisdesire to refine, he had restrained and almost sterilized hisenjoyment, ever accentuating the irremediable conflict existingbetween his ideas and those of the world in which he had happened tobe born. He had now reached such a pass that he could no longerdiscover any writings to content his secret longings. And hisadmiration even weaned itself from those volumes which had certainlycontributed to sharpen his mind, making it so suspicious and subtle. 

In art, his ideas had sprung from a simple point of view. For himschools did not exist, and only the temperament of the writermattered, only the working of his brain interested him, regardless ofthe subject. Unfortunately, this verity of appreciation, worthy ofPalisse, was scarcely applicable, for the simple reason that, evenwhile desiring to be free of prejudices and passion, each personnaturally goes to the works which most intimately correspond with hisown temperament, and ends by relegating all others to the rear. 

This work of selection had slowly acted within him; not long ago hehad adored the great Balzac, but as his body weakened and his nervesbecame troublesome, his tastes modified and his admirations changed. 

Very soon, and despite the fact that he was aware of his injustice tothe amazing author of the _Comedie humaine_, Des Esseintes had reacheda point where he no longer opened Balzac's books; their healthy spiritjarred on him. Other aspirations now stirred in him, somehow becomingundefinable. 

Yet when he probed himself he understood that to attract, a work musthave that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allen Poe; but heventured even further on this path and called for Byzantine flora ofbrain and complicated deliquescences of language. He desired atroubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it atwill to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentarystate of his soul. In short, he desired a work of art both for what itwas in itself and for what it permitted him to endow it. He wished topass by means of it into a sphere of sublimated sensation which wouldarouse in him new commotions whose cause he might long and vainly seekto analyze. 

In short, since leaving Paris, Des Esseintes was removing himselffurther and further from reality, especially from the contemporaryworld which he held in an ever growing detestation. This hatred hadinevitably reacted on his literary and artistic tastes, and he wouldhave as little as possible to do with paintings and books whoselimited subjects dealt with modern life. 

Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately underwhatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's _Tentation desaint Antoine_ to his _Education sentimentale_; Goncourt's _Faustin_to his _Germinie Lacerteux_; Zola's _Faute de l'abbe Mouret_ to his_Assommoir_. 

This point of view seemed logical to him; these works less immediate, but just as vibrant and human, enabled him to penetrate farther intothe depths of the temperaments of these masters who revealed in themthe most mysterious transports of their being with a more sincereabandon; and they lifted him far above this trivial life which weariedhim so. 

In them he entered into a perfect communion of ideas with theirauthors who had written them when their state of soul was analogous tohis own. 

In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to liveis dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by anostalgia of some past century. 

Finding himself unable to harmonize, save at rare intervals, with theenvironment in which he lives and not discovering sufficientdistraction in the pleasures of observation and analysis, in theexamination of the environment and its people, he feels in himself thedawning of strange ideas. Confused desires for other lands awake andare clarified by reflection and study. Instincts, sensations andthoughts bequeathed by heredity, awake, grow fixed, assert themselveswith an imperious assurance. He recalls memories of beings and thingshe has never really known and a time comes when he escapes from thepenitentiary of his age and roves, in full liberty, into another epochwith which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony. 

With some, it is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilizations, to dead epochs; with others, it is an urge towards a fantastic future, to a more or less intense vision of a period about to dawn, whoseimage, by an effect of atavism of which he is unaware, is areproduction of some past age. 

In Flaubert this nostalgia is expressed in solemn and majesticpictures of magnificent splendors, in whose gorgeous, barbaric framesmove palpitating and delicate creatures, mysterious and haughty--womengifted, in the perfection of their beauty, with souls capable ofsuffering and in whose depths he discerned frightful derangements, madaspirations, grieved as they were by the haunting premonition of thedissillusionments their follies held in store. 

The temperament of this great artist is fully revealed in theincomparable pages of the _Tentation de saint Antoine_ and _Salammbo_where, far from our sorry life, he evokes the splendors of old Asia, the age of fervent prayer and mystic depression, of languorouspassions and excesses induced by the unbearable ennui resulting fromopulence and prayer. 

In de Goncourt, it was the nostalgia of the preceding century, areturn to the elegances of a society forever lost. The stupendoussetting of seas beating against jetties, of deserts stretching undertorrid skies to distant horizons, did not exist in his nostalgic workwhich confined itself to a boudoir, near an aulic park, scented withthe voluptuous fragrance of a woman with a tired smile, a perverselittle pout and unresigned, pensive eyes. The soul with which heanimated his characters was not that breathed by Flaubert into hiscreatures, no longer the soul early thrown in revolt by the inexorablecertainty that no new happiness is possible; it was a soul that hadtoo late revolted, after the experience, against all the uselessattempts to invent new spiritual liaisons and to heighten theenjoyment of lovers, which from immemorial times has always ended insatiety. 

Although she lived in, and partook of the life of our time, Faustin, by her ancestral influences, was a creature of the past century whosecerebral lassitude and sensual excesses she possessed. 

This book of Edmond de Goncourt was one of the volumes which DesEsseintes loved best, and the suggestion of revery which he demandedlived in this work where, under each written line, another line wasetched, visible to the spirit alone, indicated by a hint whichrevealed passion, by a reticence permitting one to divine subtlestates of soul which no idiom could express. And it was no longerFlaubert's language in its inimitable magnificence, but a morbid, perspicacious style, nervous and twisted, keen to note the impalpableimpression that strikes the senses, a style expert in modulating thecomplicated nuances of an epoch which in itself was singularlycomplex. In short, it was the epithet indispensable to decrepitcivilizations, no matter how old they be, which must have words withnew meanings and forms, innovations in phrases and words for theircomplex needs. 

At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmutedits language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whoseattentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in itsdescriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearingan affinity with the style of de Goncourt. 

At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. Thatmoribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters, musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had notbeen able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dyingelegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It hadbeen necessary to await the arrival of de Goncourt (whose temperamentwas formed of memories and regrets made more poignant by the sadspectacle of the intellectual poverty and the pitiful aspirations ofhis own time) to resuscitate, not only in his historical works, buteven more in _Faustin_, the very soul of that period; incarnating itsnervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and hersenses so as to savor to exhaustion the grievous revulsives of loveand of art. 

With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different. In him was nolonging for vanished ages, no aspiring toward worlds lost in the nightof time. His strong and solid temperament, dazzled with the luxurianceof life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from theartificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as wellas from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity and misty, effeminate dreams of the old orient. When he, too, had become obsessedby this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetryitself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he hadrushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantasticpassions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of fecund rains ofpollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in agigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with thisEdenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvelousHindoo poem, singing, in a style whose broad, crude strokes hadsomething of the bizarre brilliance of an Indian painting, the song ofthe flesh, of animated living matter revealing, to the human creature, by its passion for reproduction the forbidden fruits of love, itssuffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes. 

With Baudelaire, these three masters had most affected Des Esseintesin modern, French, secular literature. But he had read them so often, had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorbthem he had been compelled to lay them aside and let them remainunread on his shelves. 

Even now when the servant was arranging them for him, he did not careto open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the placethey were to occupy and seeing that they were properly classified andput away. 

The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed himmore. They were books toward which his taste had gradually veered, books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection ofmore vigorous writers. Here, too, Des Esseintes had reached the pointwhere he sought, among these troubled pages, only phrases whichdischarged a sort of electricity that made him tremble; theytransmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemedrefractory. 

Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasiticnor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory thatthe inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, thoughunfinished, distills a more irritating aperient and acid balm than theartist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it wasin their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of themost excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbidpsychological states, the most extravagant depravities of languagecharged, in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task ofcontaining the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas. 

Thus, after the masters, he betook himself to a few writers whoattracted him all the more because of the disdain in which they wereheld by the public incapable of understanding them. 

One of them was Paul Verlaine who had begun with a volume of verse, the _Poemes Saturniens_, a rather ineffectual book where imitations ofLeconte de Lisle jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, butthrough which already filtered the real personality of the poet insuch poems as the sonnet _Reve Familier_. 

In searching for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered, under thehesitant strokes of the sketches, a talent already deeply affected byBaudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on, acquiescedin by the peerless master; but the imitation was never flagrant. 

And in some of his books, _Bonne Chanson_, _Fetes Galantes_, _Romancessans paroles_, and his last volume, _Sagesse_, were poems where hehimself was revealed as an original and outstanding figure. 

With rhymes obtained from verb tenses, sometimes even from longadverbs preceded by a monosyllable from which they fell as from a rockinto a heavy cascade of water, his verses, divided by improbablecaesuras, often became strangely obscure with their audacious ellipsesand strange inaccuracies which none the less did not lack grace. 

With his unrivalled ability to handle metre, he had sought torejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnetinto the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which reston stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes hecorrupted it by using only masculine rhymes to which he seemedpartial. He had often employed a bizarre form--a stanza of three lineswhose middle verse was unrhymed, and a tiercet with but one rhyme, followed by a single line, an echoing refrain like "Dansons la Gigue"in _Streets_. He had employed other rhymes whose dim echoes arerepeated in remote stanzas, like faint reverberations of a bell. 

But his personality expressed itself most of all in vague anddelicious confidences breathed in hushed accents, in the twilight. Healone had been able to reveal the troubled Ultima Thules of the soul;low whisperings of thoughts, avowals so haltingly and murmuringlyconfessed that the ear which hears them remains hesitant, passing onto the soul languors quickened by the mystery of this suggestion whichis divined rather than felt. Everything characteristic of Verlaine wasexpressed in these adorable verses of the _Fetes Galantes_:

 Le soir tombait, un soir equivoque d'automne, Les belles se pendant reveuses a nos bras, Dirent alors des mots si specieux tout bas, Que notre ame depuis ce temps tremble et s'etonne

It was no longer the immense horizon opened by the unforgettableportals of Baudelaire; it was a crevice in the moonlight, opening on afield which was more intimate and more restrained, peculiar toVerlaine who had formulated his poetic system in those lines of whichDes Esseintes was so fond:

 Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance. Et tout le reste est litterature. 

Des Esseintes had followed him with delight in his most diversifiedworks. After his _Romances sans paroles_ which had appeared in ajournal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later inthose charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and coldaccents of Villon, singing of the Virgin, "removed from our days ofcarnal thought and weary flesh. " Des Esseintes often re-read _Sagesse_whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for aByzantine Madonna who, at a certain moment, changed into a distractedmodern Cydalise so mysterious and troubling that one could not knowwhether she aspired toward depravities so monstrous that they becameirresistible, or whether she moved in an immaculate dream where theadoration of the soul floated around her ever unavowed and ever pure. 

There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself tothem: Tristan Corbiere who, in 1873, in the midst of the generalapathy had issued a most eccentric volume entitled: _Les Amoursjaunes_. Des Esseintes who, in his hatred of the banal andcommonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly andthe most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with thiswork where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and wheredisconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as thelitanies of _Sommeil_, that they qualified their author for the nameof

 Obscene confesseur des devotes mort-nees. 

The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the negro dialect, was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasingphraseology, revelled in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman;then out of this jumble, laughable conceits and sly affectationsemerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out, like thesnapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hardrugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpectedneologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression andsuperbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his_Poemes Parisiens_, where Des Esseintes had discovered this profounddefinition of woman:

 Eternel feminin de l'eternel jocrisse

Tristan Corbiere had celebrated in a powerfully concise style, the Seaof Brittany, mermaids and the Pardon of Saint Anne. And he had evenrisen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled, apropos of theConlie camp, at the individuals whom he designated under the name of"foreigners of the Fourth of September. "

The raciness of which he was so fond, which Corbiere offered him inhis sharp epithets, his beauties which ever remained a trifle suspect, Des Esseintes found again in another poet, Theodore Hannon, a discipleof Baudelaire and Gautier, moved by a very unusual sense of theexquisite and the artificial. 

Unlike Verlaine whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire, especially on the psychological side, in his insidious nuances ofthought and skilful quintessence of sentiment, Theodore Hannonespecially descended from the master on the plastic side, by theexternal vision of persons and things. 

His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of DesEsseintes who, on misty or rainy days, enclosed himself in the retreatfancied by the poet and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of hisfabrics, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusivelymaterial sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, androse like a cantharides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense toward aBrussel idol with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes. 

With the exception of the works of these poets and of StephaneMallarme, which his servant was told to place to one side so that hemight classify them separately, Des Esseintes was but slightlyattracted towards the poets. 

Notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of hisverse which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters ofHugo seemed pale in comparison, Leconte de Lisle could no longersatisfy him. The antiquity so marvelously restored by Flaubertremained cold and immobile in his hands. Nothing palpitated in hisverses, which lacked depth and which, most often, contained no idea. Nothing moved in those gloomy, waste poems whose impassive mythologiesended by finally leaving him cold. Too, after having long delighted inGautier, Des Esseintes reached the point where he no longer cared forhim. The admiration he felt for this man's incomparable painting hadgradually dissolved; now he was more astonished than ravished by hisdescriptions. Objects impressed themselves upon Gautier's perceptiveeyes but they went no further, they never penetrated deeper into hisbrain and flesh. Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limitedhimself to reflecting surrounding objects with impersonal clearness. Certainly, Des Esseintes still loved the works of these two poets, ashe loved rare stones and precious objects, but none of the variationsof these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither beingevocative of revery, neither opening for him, at least, broad roads ofescape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours. 

These two books left him unsatisfied. And it was the same with Hugo;the oriental and patriarchal side was too conventional and barren todetain him. And his manners, at once childish and that of agrandfather, exasperated him. He had to go to the _Chansons des rueset des bois_ to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics. But howgladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this _tour deforce_ for a new work by Baudelaire which might equal the others, forhe, decidedly, was almost the only one whose verses, under theirsplendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance. In passingfrom one extreme to the other, from form deprived of ideas to ideasdeprived of form, Des Esseintes remained no less circumspect and cold. The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal, the analytical detours ofDuranty seduced him, but their administrative, colorless and aridlanguage, their static prose, fit at best for the wretched industry ofthe theatre, repelled him. Then their interesting works and theirastute analyses applied to brains agitated by passions in which he wasno longer interested. He was not at all concerned with generalaffections or points of view, with associations of common ideas, nowthat the reserve of his mind was more keenly developed and that he nolonger admitted aught but superfine sensations and catholic or sensualtorments. To enjoy a work which should combine, according to hiswishes, incisive style with penetrating and feline analysis, he had togo to the master of induction, the profound and strange Edgar AllenPoe, for whom, since the time when he re-read him, his preference hadnever wavered. 

More than any other, perhaps, he approached, by his intimate affinity, Des Esseintes' meditative cast of mind. 

If Baudelaire, in the hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered thereturn of the age of sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbidpsychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul. 

Under the emblematic title, _The Demon of Perversity_, he had been thefirst in literature to pry into the irresistible, unconscious impulsesof the will which mental pathology now explains more scientifically. He had also been the first to divulge, if not to signal the impressiveinfluence of fear which acts on the will like an anaesthetic, paralyzing sensibility and like the curare, stupefying the nerves. Itwas on the problem of the lethargy of the will, that Poe had centeredhis studies, analyzing the effects of this moral poison, indicatingthe symptoms of its progress, the troubles commencing with anxiety, continuing through anguish, ending finally in the terror which deadensthe will without intelligence succumbing, though sorely disturbed. Death, which the dramatists had so much abused, he had in some mannerchanged and made more poignant, by introducing an algebraic andsuperhuman element; but in truth, it was less the real agony of thedying person which he described and more the moral agony of thesurvivor, haunted at the death bed by monstrous hallucinationsengendered by grief and fatigue. With a frightful fascination, hedwelt on acts of terror, on the snapping of the will, coldly reasoningabout them, little by little making the reader gasp, suffocated andpanting before these feverish mechanically contrived nightmares. 

Convulsed by hereditary neurosis, maddened by a moral St. Vitus dance, Poe's creatures lived only through their nerves; his women, theMorellas and Ligeias, possessed an immense erudition. They weresteeped in the mists of German philosophy and the cabalistic mysteriesof the old Orient; and all had the boyish and inert breasts of angels, all were sexless. 

Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who had often been compared becauseof their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination ofmental maladies, differed radically in the affective conceptions whichheld such a large place in their works; Baudelaire with his iniquitousand debased loves--cruel loves which made one think of the reprisalsof an inquisition; Poe with his chaste, aerial loves, in which thesenses played no part, where only the mind functioned withoutcorresponding to organs which, if they existed, remained foreverfrozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in astifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as hisattention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked, likedelicious miasmas, somnambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to DesEsseintes a source of unwearying conjecture. But now that his nervousdisorders were augmented, days came when his readings broke his spiritand when, hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate Usher he washaunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror. 

Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touchedthese fearful elixirs, in the same way that he could no longer withimpunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of thegloomy Odilon Redon prints and the Jan Luyken horrors. And yet, whenhe felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull afterthese terrible American imported philtres. Then he betook himself toVilliers de L'Isle Adam in whose scattered works he noted seditiousobservations and spasmodic vibrations, but which no longer gave one, with the exception of his Claire Lenoir, such troubling horror. 

This Claire Lenoir which appeared in 1867 in the _Revue des lettres etdes arts_, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of_Histoires Moroses_ where against a background of obscure speculationsborrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred, Dr. TribulatBonhomet, solemn and childish, a Claire Lenoir, farcical and sinister, with blue spectacles, round and large as franc pieces, which coveredher almost dead eyes. 

This story centered about a simple adultery and ended with aninexpressible terror when Bonhomet, opening Claire's eyelids, as shelies in her death bed, and penetrating them with monstrous plummets, distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing thelover's decapitated head, while shouting a war song, like a Kanaka. 

Based on this more or less just observation that the eyes of certainanimals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, likephotographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyesbehold at the moment they expire, this story evidently derived fromPoe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique. 

This also applied to the _Intersigne_, which had later been joined tothe _Contes cruels_, a collection of indisputable talent in which wasfound _Vera_, which Des Esseintes considered a little masterpiece. 

Here, the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness; nolonger was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid, warm, almost celestial vision; it was in an identical genre, thereverse of the Beatrices and Legeias, those gloomy and dark phantomsengendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium. 

This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it nolonger treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects offear; on the contrary, it studied the exaltations of the will underthe impulse of a fixed idea; it demonstrated its power which oftensucceeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualitieson surrounding objects. 

Another book by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, _Isis_, seemed to him curiousin other respects. The philosophic medley of Clair Lenoir was evidentin this work which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal andtroubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and ropeladders--all the romanticism which Villiers de L'Isle Adam could neverrejuvenate in his _Elen_ and _Morgane_, forgotten pieces published byan obscure man, Sieur Francisque Guyon. 

The heroine of this book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to haveassimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allen Poe, andthe diplomatic sagacities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenanceof Bradamante abused by an antique Circe. These insoluble mixturesdeveloped a fuliginous vapor across which philosophic and literaryinfluences jostled, without being able to be regulated in the author'sbrain when he wrote the prolegomenae of this work which could not haveembraced less than seven volumes. 

But there was another side to Villiers' temperament. It was piercingand acute in an altogether different sense--a side of forbiddingpleasantry and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxicalmystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubriousand savage comedy which Swift possessed. A series of sketches, _lesDemoiselles de Bienfilatre_, _l'Affichage celeste_, _la Machine agloire_, and _le Plus beau diner du monde_, betrayed a singularlyinventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporaryand utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the agewere glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported DesEsseintes. 

No other French book had been written in this serious and bitterstyle. At the most, a tale by Charles Cros, _La science de l'amour_, printed long ago in the _Revue du Monde-Nouveau_, could astonish byreason of its chemical whims, by its affected humor and by its coldlyfacetious observations. But the pleasure to be extracted from thestory was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure. The firm, colored and often original style of Villiers had disappearedto give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of thefirst-comer. 

"Heavens! heavens! how few books are really worth re-reading, " sighedDes Esseintes, gazing at the servant who left the stool on which hehad been perched, to permit Des Esseintes to survey his books with asingle glance. 

Des Esseintes nodded his head. But two small books remained on thetable. With a sigh, he dismissed the old man, and turned over theleaves of a volume bound in onager skin which had been glazed by ahydraulic press and speckled with silver clouds. It was held togetherby fly-leaves of old silk damask whose faint patterns held that charmof faded things celebrated by Mallarme in an exquisite poem. 

These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the twofirst Parnassian books; it was printed on parchment paper and precededby this title: _Quelques vers de Mallarme_, designed in a surprisingcalligraphy in uncial letters, illuminated and relieved with gold, asin old manuscripts. 

Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, severalinvited him: _Les fenetres_, _l'epilogue_ and _Azur_; but one amongthem all, a fragment of the _Herodiade_, held him at certain hours ina spell. 

How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silentchamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Herodiade who, in thework of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dimwhite statue in a brazier extinguished by stones. 

The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hidthe temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crimeenshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerellewhites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity. 

At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; andshe lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicatelines which Mallarme makes her utter:

 O miroir! Eau froide par l'ennui dans ton cadre gelee Que de fois, et pendant les heures, desolee Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond, Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine! Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta severe fontaine, J'ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite!

These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in anage of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literarylife sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, incerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantinedelicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightlyconnected by an almost imperceptible thread. 

These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesiveand secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and boldtropes. 

Perceiving the remotest analogies, with a single term which by aneffect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the color andthe quality, he described the object or being to which otherwise hewould have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets soas to disengage all their facets and nuances, had he simply contentedhimself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded indispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind byanalogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was theattention of the reader diverted by the enumeration of the qualitieswhich the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced. Concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, theensemble, a unique and complete aspect. 

It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimateof art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlierworks, but Mallarme had boldly proclaimed it in a verse on TheophileGautier and in _l'Apres-midi du faune_, an eclogue where thesubtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressingverses suddenly pierced by this wild, rending faun cry:

 Alors m'eveillerai-je a la ferveur premiere, Droit et seul sous un flot antique de lumiere, Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour l'ingenuite. 

That line with the monosyllable _lys_ like a sprig, evoked the imageof something rigid, slender and white; it rhymed with the substantive_ingenuite_, allegorically expressing, by a single term, the passion, the effervescence, the fugitive mood of a virgin faun amorouslydistracted by the sight of nymphs. 

In this extraordinary poem, surprising and unthought of images leapedup at the end of each line, when the poet described the elations andregrets of the faun contemplating, at the edge of a fen, the tufts ofreeds still preserving, in its transitory mould, the form made by thenaiades who had occupied it. 

Then, Des Esseintes also experienced insidious delights in touchingthis diminutive book whose cover of Japan vellum, as white as curdledmilk, were held together by two silk bands, one of Chinese rose, theother of black. 

Hidden behind the cover, the black band rejoined the rose which restedlike a touch of modern Japanese paint or like a lascivious adjutantagainst the antique white, against the candid carnation tint of thebook, and enlaced it, united its sombre color with the light colorinto a light rosette. It insinuated a faint warning of that regret, avague menace of that sadness which succeeds the ended transports andthe calmed excitements of the senses. 

Des Esseintes placed _l'Apres-midi du faune_ on the table and examinedanother little book he had printed, an anthology of prose poems, atiny chapel, placed under the invocation of Baudelaire and opening onthe parvise of his poems. 

This anthology comprised a selection of _Gaspard de la nuit_ of thatfantastic Aloysius Bertrand who had transferred the behavior ofLeonard in prose and, with his metallic oxydes, painted littlepictures whose vivid colors sparkle like those of clear enamels. Tothis, Des Esseintes had joined _le Vox populi_ of Villiers, a superbpiece of work in a hammered, golden style after the manner of Lecontede Lisle and of Flaubert, and some selections from that delicate_livre de Jade_ whose exotic perfume of ginseng and of tea blends withthe odorous freshness of water babbling along the book, undermoonlight. 

But in this collection had been gathered certain poems resurrectedfrom defunct reviews: _le Demon de l'analogie_, _la Pipe_, _le Pauvreenfant pale_, _le Spectacle interrompu_, _le Phenomene futur_, andespecially _Plaintes d'automne_ and _Frisson d'hiver_ which wereMallarme's masterpieces and were also celebrated among themasterpieces of prose poems, for they united such a magnificentlydelicate language that they cradled, like a melancholy incantation ora maddening melody, thoughts of an irresistible suggestiveness, pulsations of the soul of a sensitive person whose excited nervesvibrate with a keenness which penetrates ravishingly and induces asadness. 

Of all the forms of literature, that of the prose poem was the formDes Esseintes preferred. Handled by an alchemist of genius, itcontained in its slender volume the strength of the novel whoseanalytic developments and descriptive redundancies it suppressed. Quite often, Des Esseintes had meditated on that disquietingproblem--to write a novel concentrated in a few phrases which shouldcontain the essence of hundreds of pages always employed to establishthe setting, to sketch the characters, and to pile up observations andminute details. Then the chosen words would be so unexchangeable thatthey would do duty for many others, the adjective placed in such aningenious and definite fashion that it could not be displaced, openingsuch perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on itssense at once precise and complex, could record the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of thecharacters, revealed by the gleams of this unique epithet. 

Thus conceived and condensed in a page or two, the novel could becomea communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, aspiritual collaboration agreed to between ten superior personsscattered throughout the universe, a delight offered to the refined, and accessible to them alone. 

To Des Esseintes, the prose poem represented the concrete juice ofliterature, the essential oil of art. 

That succulence, developed and concentrated into a drop, alreadyexisted in Baudelaire and in those poems of Mallarme which he readwith such deep joy. 

When he had closed his anthology, Des Esseintes told himself that hisbooks which had ended on this last book, would probably never haveanything added to it. 

In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in itsorganism, enfeebled by old ideas, exhausted by excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosities which make sick persons feverish, and yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline, eager torepair all the omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath the most subtlememories of grief in its death bed, was incarnate in Mallarme, in themost perfect exquisite manner imaginable. 

Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Poe; here were theirfine and powerful substances distilled and disengaging new flavors andintoxications. 

It was the agony of the old language which, after having become moldyfrom age to age, ended by dissolving, by reaching that deliquescenceof the Latin language which expired in the mysterious concepts and theenigmatical expressions of Saint Boniface and Saint Adhelme. 

The decomposition of the French language had been effected suddenly. In the Latin language, a long transition, a distance of four hundredyears existed between the spotted and superb epithet of Claudian andRutilius and the gamy epithet of the eighth century. In the Frenchlanguage, no lapse of time, no succession of ages had taken place; thestained and superb style of the de Goncourts and the gamy style ofVerlaine and Mallarme jostled in Paris, living in the same period, epoch and century. 

And Des Esseintes, gazing at one of the folios opened on his chapeldesk, smiled at the thought that the moment would soon come when anerudite scholar would prepare for the decadence of the French languagea glossary similar to that in which the savant, Du Cange, has notedthe last murmurings, the last spasms, the last flashes of the Latinlanguage dying of old age in the cloisters and sounding its deathrattle. 

 Chapter 15

Burning at first like a rick on fire, his enthusiasm for the digesteras quickly died out. Torpid at first, his nervous dyspepsiareappeared, and then this hot essence induced such an irritation inhis stomach that Des Esseintes was quickly compelled to stop using it. 

The malady increased in strength; peculiar symptoms attended it. Afterthe nightmares, hallucinations of smell, pains in the eye and deepcoughing which recurred with clock-like regularity, after the poundingof his heart and arteries and the cold perspiration, arose illusionsof hearing, those alterations which only reveal themselves in the lastperiod of sickness. 

Attacked by a strong fever, Des Esseintes suddenly heard murmurings ofwater; then those sounds united into one and resembled a roaring whichincreased and then slowly resolved itself into a silvery bell sound. 

He felt his delirious brain whirling in musical waves, engulfed in themystic whirlwinds of his infancy. The songs learned at the Jesuitsreappeared, bringing with them pictures of the school and the chapelwhere they had resounded, driving their hallucinations to theolfactory and visual organs, veiling them with clouds of incense andthe pallid light irradiating through the stained-glass windows, underthe lofty arches. 

At the Fathers, the religious ceremonies had been practiced with greatpomp. An excellent organist and remarkable singing director made anartistic delight of these spiritual exercises that were conducive toworship. The organist was in love with the old masters and on holidayscelebrated masses by Palestrina and Orlando Lasso, psalms by Marcello, oratorios by Handel, motets by Bach; he preferred to render the sweetand facile compilations of Father Lambillotte so much favored bypriests, the "Laudi Spirituali" of the sixteenth century whosesacerdotal beauty had often bewitched Des Esseintes. 

But he particularly extracted ineffable pleasures while listening tothe plain-chant which the organist had preserved regardless of newideas. 

That form which was now considered a decrepit and Gothic form ofChristian liturgy, an archaeological curiosity, a relic of ancienttime, had been the voice of the early Church, the soul of the MiddleAge. It was the eternal prayer that had been sung and modulated inharmony with the soul's transports, the enduring hymn uplifted forcenturies to the Almighty. 

That traditional melody was the only one which, with its strongunison, its solemn and massive harmonies, like freestone, was not outof place with the old basilicas, making eloquent the Romanesquevaults, whose emanation and very spirit they seemed to be. 

How often had Des Esseintes not thrilled under its spell, when the"Christus factus est" of the Gregorian chant rose from the nave whosepillars seemed to tremble among the rolling clouds from censers, orwhen the "De Profundis" was sung, sad and mournful as a suppressedsob, poignant as a despairing invocation of humanity bewailing itsmortal destiny and imploring the tender forgiveness of its Savior!

All religious music seemed profane to him compared with thatmagnificent chant created by the genius of the Church, anonymous asthe organ whose inventor is unknown. At bottom, in the works ofJomelli and Porpora, Carissimi and Durante, in the most wonderfulcompositions of Handel and Bach, there was never a hint of arenunciation of public success, or the sacrifice of an effect of art, or the abdication of human pride hearkening to its own prayer. 

At the most, the religious style, august and solemn, had crystallizedin Lesueur's imposing masses celebrated at Saint-Roch, tending toapproach the severe nudity and austere majesty of the old plain-chant. 

Since then, absolutely revolted by these pretexts at _Stabat Maters_devised by the Pergolesis and the Rossinis, by this intrusion ofprofane art in liturgic art, Des Esseintes had shunned those ambiguousworks tolerated by the indulgent Church. 

In addition, this weakness brought about by the desire for largecongregations had quickly resulted in the adoption of songs borrowedfrom Italian operas, of low cavatinas and indecent quadrilles playedin churches converted to boudoirs and surrendered to stage actorswhose voices resounded aloft, their impurity tainting the tones of theholy organ. 

For years he had obstinately refused to take part in these piousentertainments, contenting himself with his memories of childhood. Heeven regretted having heard the _Te Deum_ of the great masters, for heremembered that admirable plain-chant, that hymn so simple and solemncomposed by some unknown saint, a Saint Ambrose or Hilary who, lackingthe complicated resources of an orchestra and the musical mechanics ofmodern science, revealed an ardent faith, a delirious jubilation, uttered, from the soul of humanity, in the piercing and almostcelestial accents of conviction. 

Des Esseintes' ideas on music were in flagrant contradiction with thetheories he professed regarding the other arts. In religious music, heapproved only of the monastic music of the Middle Ages, that emaciatedmusic which instinctively reacted on his nerves like certain pages ofthe old Christian Latin. Then (he freely confessed it) he wasincapable of understanding the tricks that the contemporary mastershad introduced into Catholic art. And he had not studied music withthat passion which had led him towards painting and letters. He playedindifferently on the piano and after many painful attempts hadsucceeded in reading a score, but he was ignorant of harmony, of thetechnique needed really to understand a nuance, to appreciate afinesse, to savor a refinement with full comprehension. 

In other respects, when not read in solitude, profane music is apromiscuous art. To enjoy music, one must become part of that publicwhich fills the theatres where, in a vile atmosphere, one perceives aloutish-looking man butchering episodes from Wagner, to the hugedelight of the ignorant mob. 

He had always lacked the courage to plunge in this mob-bath so as tolisten to Berlioz' compositions, several fragments of which hadbewitched him by their passionate exaltations and their vigorousfugues, and he was certain that there was not one single scene, noteven a phrase of one of the operas of the amazing Wagner which couldwith impunity be detached from its whole. 

The fragments, cut and served on the plate of a concert, lost allsignificance and remained senseless, since (like the chapters of abook, completing each other and moving to an inevitable conclusion)Wagner's melodies were necessary to sketch the characters, toincarnate their thoughts and to express their apparent or secretmotives. He knew that their ingenious and persistent returns wereunderstood only by the auditors who followed the subject from thebeginning and gradually beheld the characters in relief, in a settingfrom which they could not be removed without dying, like branches tornfrom a tree. 

That was why he felt that, among the vulgar herd of melomaniacsenthusing each Sunday on benches, scarcely any knew the score that wasbeing massacred, when the ushers consented to be silent and permit theorchestra to be heard. 

Granted also that intelligent patriotism forbade a French theatre togive a Wagnerian opera, the only thing left to the curious who knownothing of musical arcana and either cannot or will not betakethemselves to Bayreuth, is to remain at home. And that was preciselythe course of conduct he had pursued. 

The more public and facile music and the independent pieces of the oldoperas hardly interested him; the wretched trills of Auber andBoieldieu, of Adam and Flotow and the rhetorical commonplaces ofAmbroise Thomas and the Bazins disgusted him as did the superannuatedaffectations and vulgar graces of Italians. That was why he hadresolutely broken with musical art, and during the years of hisabstention, he pleasurably recalled only certain programs of chambermusic when he had heard Beethoven, and especially Schumann andSchubert which had affected his nerves in the same manner as had themore intimate and troubling poems of Edgar Allen Poe. 

Some of Schubert's parts for violoncello had positively left himpanting, in the grip of hysteria. But it was particularly Schubert'slieders that had immeasurably excited him, causing him to experiencesimilar sensations as after a waste of nervous fluid, or a mysticdissipation of the soul. 

This music penetrated and drove back an infinity of forgottensufferings and spleen in his heart. He was astonished at being able tocontain so many dim miseries and vague griefs. This desolate music, crying from the inmost depths, terrified while charming him. Nevercould he repeat the "Young Girl's Lament" without a welling of tearsin his eyes, for in this plaint resided something beyond a merebroken-hearted state; something in it clutched him, something like aromance ending in a gloomy landscape. 

And always, when these exquisite, sad plaints returned to his lips, there was evoked for him a suburban, flinty and gloomy site where asuccession of silent bent persons, harassed by life, filed past intothe twilight, while, steeped in bitterness and overflowing withdisgust, he felt himself solitary in this dejected landscape, struckby an inexpressibly melancholy and stubborn distress whose mysteriousintensity excluded all consolation, pity and repose. Like afuneral-knell, this despairing chant haunted him, now that he was inbed, prostrated by fever and agitated by an anxiety so much the moreinappeasable for the fact that he could not discover its cause. Heended by abandoning himself to the torrent of anguishes suddenlydammed by the chant of psalms slowly rising in his tortured head. 

One morning, nevertheless, he felt more tranquil and requested theservant to bring a looking-glass. It fell from his hands. He hardlyrecognized himself. His face was a clay color, the lips bloated anddry, the tongue parched, the skin rough. His hair and beard, untendedsince his illness by the domestic, added to the horror of the sunkenface and staring eyes burning with feverish intensity in this skeletonhead that bristled with hair. More than his weakness, more than hisvomitings which began with each attempt at taking nourishment, morethan his emaciation, did his changed visage terrify him. He felt lost. Then, in the dejection which overcame him, a sudden energy forced himin a sitting posture. He had strength to write a letter to his Parisphysician and to order the servant to depart instantly, seek and bringhim back that very day. 

He passed suddenly from complete depression into boundless hope. Thisphysician was a celebrated specialist, a doctor renowned for his curesof nervous maladies "He must have cured many more dangerous cases thanmine, " Des Esseintes reflected. "I shall certainly be on my feet in afew days. " Disenchantment succeeded his confidence. Learned andintuitive though they be, physicians know absolutely nothing ofneurotic diseases, being ignorant of their origins. Like the others, this one would prescribe the eternal oxyde of zinc and quinine, bromide of potassium and valerian. He had recourse to another thought:"If these remedies have availed me little in the past, could it not bedue to the fact that I have not taken the right quantities?"

In spite of everything, this expectation of being cured cheered him, but then a new fear entered. His servant might have failed to find thephysician. Again he grew faint, passing instantly from the mostunreasoning hopes to the most baseless fears, exaggerating the chancesof a sudden recovery and his apprehensions of danger. The hours passedand the moment came when, in utter despair and convinced that thephysician would not arrive, he angrily told himself that he certainlywould have been saved, had he acted sooner. Then his rage against theservant and the physician whom he accused of permitting him to die, vanished, and he ended by reproaching himself for having waited solong before seeking aid, persuading himself that he would now bewholly cured had he that very last evening used the medicine. 

Little by little, these alternations of hope and alarms jostling inhis poor head, abated. The struggles ended by crushing him, and herelapsed into exhausted sleep interrupted by incoherent dreams, a sortof syncope pierced by awakenings in which he was barely conscious ofanything. He had reached such a state where he lost all idea ofdesires and fears, and he was stupefied, experiencing neitherastonishment or joy, when the physician suddenly arrived. 

The doctor had doubtless been apprised by the servant of DesEsseintes' mode of living and of the various symptoms observed sincethe day when the master of the house had been found near the window, overwhelmed by the violence of perfumes. He put very few questions tothe patient whom he had known for many years. He felt his pulse andattentively studied the urine where certain white spots revealed oneof the determining causes of nervousness. He wrote a prescription andleft without saying more than that he would soon return. 

This visit comforted Des Esseintes who none the less was frightened bythe taciturnity observed; he adjured his servant not to conceal thetruth from him any longer. But the servant declared that the doctorhad exhibited no uneasiness, and despite his suspicions, Des Esseintescould seize upon no sign that might betray a shadow of a lie on thetranquil countenance of the old man. 

Then his thoughts began to obsess him less; his suffering disappearedand to the exhaustion he had felt throughout his members was grafted acertain indescribable languor. He was astonished and satisfied not tobe weighted with drugs and vials, and a faint smile played on his lipswhen the servant brought a nourishing injection of peptone and toldhim he was to take it three times every twenty-four hours. 

The operation succeeded and Des Esseintes could not forbear tocongratulate himself on this event which in a manner crowned theexistence he had created. His penchant towards the artificial had now, though involuntarily, reached the supreme goal. 

Farther one could not go. The nourishment thus absorbed was theultimate deviation one could possibly commit. 

"How delicious it would be" he reflected, "to continue this simpleregime in complete health! What economy of time, what a pronounceddeliverance from the aversion which food gives those who lackappetite! What a complete riddance from the disgust induced by foodforcibly eaten! What an energetic protestation against the vile sin ofgluttony, what a positive insult hurled at old nature whose monotonousdemands would thus be avoided. "

And he continued, talking to himself half-aloud. One could easilystimulate desire for food by swallowing a strong aperitif. After thequestion, "what time is it getting to be? I am famished, " one wouldmove to the table and place the instrument on the cloth, and then, inthe time it takes to say grace, one could have suppressed the tiresomeand vulgar demands of the body. 

Several days afterwards, the servant presented an injection whosecolor and odor differed from the other. 

"But it is not the same at all!" Des Esseintes cried, gazing with deepfeeling at the liquid poured into the apparatus. As if in arestaurant, he asked for the card, and unfolding the physician'sprescription, read:

 Cod Liver Oil . . . . . . . . 20 grammes Beef Tea . . . . . . . . . . 200 grammes Burgundy Wine . . . . . . . . 200 grammes Yolk of one egg. 

He remained meditative. He who by reason of the weakened state of hisstomach had never seriously preoccupied himself with the art of thecuisine, was surprised to find himself thinking of combinations toplease an artificial epicure. Then a strange idea crossed his brain. Perhaps the physician had imagined that the strange palate of hispatient was fatigued by the taste of the peptone; perhaps he hadwished, like a clever chef, to vary the taste of foods and to preventthe monotony of dishes that might lead to want of appetite. Once inthe wake of these reflections, Des Esseintes sketched new recipes, preparing vegetable dinners for Fridays, using the dose of cod liveroil and wine, dismissing the beef tea as a meat food speciallyprohibited by the Church. But he had no occasion longer to ruminate onthese nourishing drinks, for the physician succeeded gradually incuring the vomiting attacks, and he was soon swallowing, in the normalmanner, a syrup of punch containing a pulverized meat whose faintaroma of cacao pleased his palate. 

Weeks passed before his stomach decided to function. The nauseareturned at certain moments, but these attacks were disposed of byginger ale and Rivieres' antiemetic drink. 

Finally the organs were restored. Meats were digested with the aid ofpepsines. Recovering strength, he was able to stand up and attempt towalk, leaning on a cane and supporting himself on the furniture. Instead of being thankful over his success, he forgot his past pains, grew irritated at the length of time needed for convalescence andreproached the doctor for not effecting a more rapid cure. 

At last the day came when he could remain standing for wholeafternoons. Then his study irritated him. Certain blemishes itpossessed, and which habit had accustomed him to overlook, now wereapparent. The colors chosen to be seen by lamp-light seemed discordantin full day. He thought of changing them and for whole hours hecombined rebellious harmonies of hues, hybrid pairings of cloth andleathers. 

"I am certainly on the road to recovery, " he reflected, taking note ofhis old hobbies. 

One morning, while contemplating his orange and blue walls, considering some ideal tapestries worked with stoles of the GreekChurch, dreaming of Russian orphrey dalmaticas and brocaded copesflowered with Slavonic letters done in Ural stones and rows of pearls, the physician entered and, noticing the patient's eyes, questionedhim. 

Des Esseintes spoke of his unrealizable longings. He commenced tocontrive new color schemes, to talk of harmonies and discords of toneshe meant to produce, when the doctor stunned him by peremptorilyannouncing that these projects would never be executed here. 

And, without giving him time to catch breath, he informed DesEsseintes that he had done his utmost in re-establishing the digestivefunctions and that now it was necessary to attack the neurosis whichwas by no means cured and which would necessitate years of diet andcare. He added that before attempting a cure, before commencing anyhydrotherapic treatment, impossible of execution at Fontenay, DesEsseintes must quit that solitude, return to Paris, and live anordinary mode of existence by amusing himself like others. 

"But the pleasures of others will not amuse me, " Des Esseintesindignantly cried. 

Without debating the matter, the doctor merely asserted that thisradical change was, in his eyes, a question of life or death, aquestion of health or insanity possibly complicated in the near futureby tuberculosis. 

"So it is a choice between death and the hulks!" Des Esseintesexasperatedly exclaimed. 

The doctor, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of theworld, smiled and reached the door without saying a word. 

 Chapter 16

Des Esseintes locked himself up in his bedroom, closing his ears tothe sounds of hammers on packing cases. Each stroke rent his heart, drove a sorrow into his flesh. The physician's order was beingfulfilled; the fear of once more submitting to the pains he hadendured, the fear of a frightful agony had acted more powerfully onDes Esseintes than the hatred of the detestable existence to which themedical order condemned him. 

Yet he told himself there were people who live without conversing withanyone, absorbed far from the world in their own affairs, likerecluses and trappists, and there is nothing to prove that thesewretches and sages become madmen or consumptives. He hadunsuccessfully cited these examples to the doctor; the latter hadrepeated, coldly and firmly, in a tone that admitted of no reply, thathis verdict, (confirmed besides by consultation with all the expertson neurosis) was that distraction, amusement, pleasure alone mightmake an impression on this malady whose spiritual side eluded allremedy; and made impatient by the recriminations of his patient, hefor the last time declared that he would refuse to continue treatinghim if he did not consent to a change of air, and live under newhygienic conditions. 

Des Esseintes had instantly betaken himself to Paris, had consultedother specialists, had impartially put the case before them. Allhaving unhesitatingly approved of the action of their colleague, hehad rented an apartment in a new house, had returned to Fontenay and, white with rage, had given orders to have his trunks packed. 

Sunk in his easy chair, he now ruminated upon that unyielding orderwhich was wrecking his plans, breaking the strings of his present lifeand overturning his future plans. His beatitude was ended. He wascompelled to abandon this sheltering haven and return at full speedinto the stupidity which had once attacked him. 

The physicians spoke of amusement and distraction. With whom, and withwhat did they wish him to distract and amuse himself?

Had he not banished himself from society? Did he know a single personwhose existence would approximate his in seclusion and contemplation?Did he know a man capable of appreciating the fineness of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, --a man whosesoul was delicate and exquisite enough to understand Mallarme and loveVerlaine?

Where and when must he search to discover a twin spirit, a souldetached from commonplaces, blessing silence as a benefit, ingratitudeas a solace, contempt as a refuge and port?

In the world where he had dwelt before his departure for Fontenay? Butmost of the county squires he had associated with must since havestultified themselves near card tables or ended upon the lips ofwomen; most by this time must have married; after having enjoyed, during their life, the spoils of cads, their spouses now possessed theremains of strumpets, for, master of first-fruits, the people alonewaste nothing. 

"A pretty change--this custom adopted by a prudish society!" DesEsseintes reflected. 

The nobility had died, the aristocracy had marched to imbecility orordure! It was extinguished in the corruption of its descendants whosefaculties grew weaker with each generation and ended in the instinctsof gorillas fermented in the brains of grooms and jockeys; or rather, as with the Choiseul-Praslins, Polignacs and Chevreuses, wallowed inthe mud of lawsuits which made it equal the other classes inturpitude. 

The mansions themselves, the secular escutcheons, the heraldicdeportment of this antique caste had disappeared. The land no longeryielding anything was put up for sale, money being needed to procurethe venereal witchcraft for the besotted descendants of the old races. 

The less scrupulous and stupid threw aside all sense of shame. Theyweltered in the mire of fraud and deceit, behaved like cheap sharpers. 

This eagerness for gain, this lust for lucre had even reacted on thatother class which had constantly supported itself on the nobility--theclergy. Now one perceived, in newspapers, announcements of corn curesby priests. The monasteries had changed into apothecary or liqueurworkrooms. They sold recipes or manufactured products: the Citeauxorder, chocolate; the trappists, semolina; the Maristes Brothers, biphosphate of medicinal lime and arquebuse water; the jacobins, ananti-apoplectic elixir; the disciples of Saint Benoit, benedictine;the friars of Saint Bruno, chartreuse. 

Business had invaded the cloisters where, in place of antiphonaries, heavy ledgers reposed on reading-desks. Like leprosy, the avidity ofthe age was ravaging the Church, weighing down the monks withinventories and invoices. 

And yet, in spite of everything, it was only among the ecclesiasticsthat Des Esseintes could hope for pleasurable contract. In the societyof well-bred and learned canons, he would have been compelled to sharetheir faith, to refrain from floating between sceptical ideas andtransports of conviction which rose from time to time on the water, sustained by recollections of childhood. 

He would have had to muster identical opinions and never admit (hefreely did in his ardent moments) a Catholicism charged with a soupconof magic, as under Henry the Third, and with a dash of sadism, as atthe end of the last century. This special clericalism, this depravedand artistically perverse mysticism towards which he wended could noteven be discussed with a priest who would not have understood them orwho would have banished them with horror. 

For the twentieth time, this irresolvable problem troubled him. Hewould have desired an end to this irresolute state in which hefloundered. Now that he was pursuing a changed life, he would haveliked to possess faith, to incrust it as soon as seized, to screw itinto his soul, to shield it finally from all those reflections whichuprooted and agitated it. But the more he desired it and the less hisemptiness of spirit was evident, the more Christ's visitation receded. As his religious hunger augmented and he gazed eagerly at this faithvisible but so far off that the distance terrified him, ideas pressedupon his active mind, driving back his will, rejecting, by commonsense and mathematical proofs, the mysteries and dogmas. He sadly toldhimself that he would have to find a way to abstain fromself-discussion. He would have to learn how to close his eyes and lethimself be swept along by the current, forgetting those accurseddiscoveries which have destroyed the religious edifice, from top tobottom, since the last two centuries. 

He sighed. It is neither the physiologists nor the infidels thatdemolish Catholicism, but the priests, whose stupid works couldextirpate convictions the most steadfast. 

A Dominican friar, Rouard de Card, had proved in a brochure entitled"On the Adulteration of Sacramental Substances" that most masses werenot valid, because the elements used for worship had been adulteratedby the manufacturers. 

For years, the holy oils had been adulterated with chicken fat; wax, with burned bones; incense, with cheap resin and benzoin. But thething that was worse was that the substances, indispensable to theholy sacrifice, the two substances without which no oblation ispossible, had also been debased: the wine, by numerous dilutions andby illicit introductions of Pernambuco wood, danewort berries, alcoholand alum; the bread of the Eucharist that must be kneaded with thefine flour of wheat, by kidney beans, potash and pipe clay. 

But they had gone even farther. They had dared suppress the wheat andshameless dealers were making almost all the Host with the fecula ofpotatoes. 

Now, God refused to descend into the fecula. It was an undeniable factand a certain one. In the second volume of his treatise on moraltheology, Cardinal Gousset had dwelt at length on this question of thefraud practiced from the divine point of view. And, according to theincontestable authority of this master, one could not consecrate breadmade of flour of oats, buckwheat or barley, and if the matter of usingrye be less doubtful, no argument was possible in regard to the feculawhich, according to the ecclesiastic expression, was in no way fit forsacramental purposes. 

By means of the rapid manipulation of the fecula and the beautifulappearance presented by the unleavened breads created with thiselement, the shameless imposture had been so propagated that now themystery of the transubstantiation hardly existed any longer and thepriests and faithful were holding communion, without being aware ofit, with neutral elements. 

Ah! far off was the time when Radegonda, Queen of France, had with herown hands prepared the bread destined for the alters, or the timewhen, after the customs of Cluny, three priests or deacons, fastingand garbed in alb and amice, washed their faces and hands and thenpicked out the wheat, grain by grain, grinding it under millstone, kneading the paste in a cold and pure water and themselves baking itunder a clear fire, while chanting psalms. 

"All this matter of eternal dupery, " Des Esseintes reflected, "is notconducive to the steadying of my already weakened faith. And how admitthat omnipotence which stops at such a trifle as a pinch of fecula ora soupcon of alcohol?"

These reflections all the more threw a gloom over the view of hisfuture life and rendered his horizon more menacing and dark. 

He was lost, utterly lost. What would become of him in this Pariswhere he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to theSaint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust ofdesuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. And whatcontact could exist between him and that bourgeois class which hadgradually climbed up, profiting by all the disasters to grow rich, making use of all the catastrophes to impose respect on its crimes andthefts. 

After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money. Nowone saw the reign of the caliphates of commerce, the despotism of therue du Sentier, the tyranny of trade, bringing in its train venalnarrow ideas, knavish and vain instincts. 

Viler and more dishonest than the nobility despoiled and the decayedclergy, the bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous ostentations, theirbraggadoccio, degrading these qualities by its lack of _savoir-vivre_;the bourgeoisie stole their faults and converted them intohypocritical vices. And, authoritative and sly, low and cowardly, itpitilessly attacked its eternal and necessary dupe, the populace, unmuzzled and placed in ambush so as to be in readiness to assault theold castes. 

It was now an acknowledged fact. Its task once terminated, theproletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. Thebourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to itswealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accessionto power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation ofall honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artistshad fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet ofthe eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live. 

In painting, one now beheld a deluge of silliness; in literature, anintemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had tocredit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased adot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue;chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapesand then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in the obscenechambers. 

It was the great American hulks transported to our continent. It wasthe immense, the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of thefinancier and the parvenu, beaming, like a pitiful sun, upon theidolatrous town which wallowed on the ground the while it utteredimpure psalms before the impious tabernacle of banks. 

"Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!" cried DesEsseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked. This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him. 

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "To think that all this is not a dream, to thinkthat I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of thiscentury!" To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims ofSchopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: "Thesoul is pained by all things it thinks upon. " But the words resoundedin his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui disintegrated, lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, alleffective and gentle vigor. 

He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availedlittle in comforting him, that impossible faith in a future life alonewould pacify him. 

An access of rage swept aside, like a hurricane, his attempts atresignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideoustruth--nothing was left, all was in ruins. The bourgeoisie weregormandizing on the solemn ruins of the Church which had become aplace of rendez-vous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns andscandalous jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis and the Pale Christof Golgotha not going to prove their existence by commanding thecataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed thesinful cities? Was this degradation to continue to flow and cover withits pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities andshames?

The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaved men appeared, bringingchests and carrying the furniture; then the door closed once more onthe servant who was removing packages of books. 

Des Esseintes sank into a chair. 

"I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves ofhuman mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whosedams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity theChristian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict oflife embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined bythe consoling beacons of ancient faith. "