Against Nature (13 page)

Here there was no longer any room for argument or discussion; there was no denying that he had an indefinable feeling of veneration and fear, that his artistic sense was subjugated by the nicely calculated scenes of Catholic ceremonial. His nerves shuddered at these memories, and then, in a sudden mood of revolt, a swift volte-face, ideas of monstrous depravity came to him – thoughts of the profanities foreseen in the Confessors' Manual, of the impure and ignominious ways in which holy water and consecrated oil could be abused.
³
An omnipotent God was now confronted by the upright figure of a powerful adversary, the Devil; and it seemed to Des Esseintes that a frightful glory must result from any crime committed in open church by a believer filled with dreadful merriment and sadistic joy, bent on blasphemy, resolved to desecrate and befoul the objects of veneration. The mad rites of magical ceremonies, black masses and witches' sabbaths, together with the horrors of demonic possession and exorcism, were enacted before his mind's eye; and he began to wonder if he were not guilty of sacrilege in possessing articles which had once been solemnly consecrated, such as altar cards, chasubles and custodials. This idea, that he was possibly living in a state of sin, filled him with a certain pride and satisfaction, not unmixed with delight in these sacrilegious acts – which might not be sacrilegious at all, and in any case were not very serious offences, seeing that he really loved these articles and did not put them to any depraved uses. He beguiled himself in this way with prudent, cowardly thoughts, the uncertainty of his soul preventing him from perpetrating overt crimes, robbing him of the necessary courage to commit real sins of real iniquity with real intent.

Eventually, little by little, this casuistic spirit left him. He then looked out, as it were, from the summit of his mind, over the panorama of the Church and her hereditary influence on humanity down the ages; he pictured her to himself in all her melancholy grandeur, proclaiming to mankind the horror of life, the inclemency of fate; preaching patience, contrition, the spirit of self-sacrifice; endeavouring to salve the sores of men by
pointing to the bleeding wounds of Christ; guaranteeing divine privileges and promising the better part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting the human creature to suffer, to offer to God as a holocaust his tribulations and his offences, his vicissitudes and his sorrows. He saw her become truly eloquent, speaking words full of sympathy for the poor, full of pity for the oppressed, full of menace for tyrants and oppressors.

At this point, Des Esseintes found his footing again. It is true that this admission of social corruption had his entire approval, but on the other hand, his mind revolted against the vague remedy of hope in a future life. Schopenhauer, in his opinion, came nearer to the truth.
⁴
His doctrine and the Church's started from a common point of view; he too took his stand on the iniquity and rottenness of the world; he too cried out in anguish with the
Imitation of Christ
:
⁵
‘Verily it is a pitiful thing to live on earth!' He too preached the nullity of existence, the advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that whatever it did, whichever way it turned, it would always remain unhappy – the poor because of the sufferings born of privation, the rich because of the unconquerable boredom engendered by abundance. The difference between them was that he offered you no panacea, beguiled you with no promises of a cure for your inevitable ills.

He did not drum into your ears the revolting dogma of original sin; he did not try to convince you of the superlative goodness of a God who protects the wicked, helps the foolish, crushes the young, brutalizes the old and chastises the innocent; he did not extol the benefits of a Providence which has invented the useless, unjust, incomprehensible and inept abomination that is physical pain. Indeed, far from endeavouring, like the Church, to justify the necessity of trials and torments, he exclaimed in his compassionate indignation: ‘If a God has made this world, I should hate to be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.'

Yes, it was undoubtedly Schopenhauer who was in the right. What, in fact, were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with his treatises on spiritual hygiene? He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when
all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity.

Setting off from the same starting-point as the
Imitation
, but without losing itself in mysterious mazes and unlikely by-paths, this theory reached the same conclusion, an attitude of resignation and drift.

However, if this resignation, frankly based on the recognition of a deplorable state of affairs and the impossibility of effecting any change, was accessible to the rich in intellect, that made it all the more difficult of attainment for the poor, whose clamorous wrath was more easily appeased by the kindly voice of religion.

These reflections took a load off Des Esseintes's mind; the great German's aphorisms calmed the tumult of his thoughts, while at the same time the points of contact between the two doctrines helped each to remind him of the other. Nor could he forget the poetic and poignant atmosphere of Catholicism in which he had been steeped as a boy, and whose essence he had absorbed through every pore.

These recurrences of belief, these fearful intimations of faith had been troubling him more particularly since his health had begun to deteriorate; they coincided with certain nervous disorders that had recently arisen.

Ever since his earliest childhood, he had been tormented by inexplicable revulsions, by shuddering fits which chilled him to the marrow and set his teeth on edge whenever, for instance, he saw a maid wringing out some wet linen. These instinctive reactions had continued down the years, and to this day it still caused him real suffering to hear a piece of stuff being torn in two, to rub his finger over a bit of chalk, to feel the surface of watered silk.

The excesses of his bachelor days and the abnormal strains put on his brain had aggravated his neurosis to an astonishing
degree and still further diluted the impoverished blood of his race. In Paris he had been obliged to have hydropathic treatment
⁶
for trembling of the hands and for atrocious neuralgic pains that seemed to cut his face in two, hammered away at his temples, stabbed at his eyelids and brought on fits of nausea he could only overcome by lying flat on his back in the dark.

These troubles had gradually disappeared, thanks to the steadier, quieter life he was leading; but now they were coming back in a different form and affecting every part of his body. The pains left his head to attack his stomach, which was hard and swollen, searing his innards with a red-hot iron and stimulating his bowels to no effect. Then a nervous cough, a dry, racking cough, always beginning at the same time and lasting precisely the same number of minutes, woke him as he lay in his bed, seizing him by the throat and nearly choking him. Finally he lost his appetite completely; the hot, gassy fires of heartburn flared up inside his body; he felt swollen and stifled, and could not bear the constriction of trouser-buttons or waistcoat-buckles after a meal.

He gave up drinking spirits, coffee and tea, put himself on a milk diet, tried applying cold water to his body, stuffed himself with asafoetida, valerian and quinine. He even went so far as to leave the house and go for strolls in the country, where the rainy weather had established peace and quiet, forcing himself to keep walking and take exercise. As a last resort, he laid aside his books for the time being; and the result was such surpassing boredom that he decided to occupy the idle hours with carrying out a project he had put off time and again since coming to Fontenay, partly out of laziness and partly out of dislike of the trouble involved.

No longer able to intoxicate himself afresh with the magical charms of style, to thrill to the delicious sorcery of the unusual epithet which, while retaining all its precision, opens up infinite perspectives to the imagination of the initiate, he made up his mind to complete the interior decoration of his thebaid by filling it with costly hothouse flowers, and so provide himself with a material occupation that would distract his thoughts, soothe his nerves and rest his brain. He also hoped that the sight of their
strange and splendid colours would compensate him to some extent for the loss of those real or fancied nuances of style which, on account of his literary dieting, he would now have to forget for a little while or for ever.

For a long time now he had despised the common, everyday varieties that blossom on the Paris market-stalls, in wet flower-pots, under green awnings or red umbrellas.

At the same time that his literary tastes and artistic preferences had become more refined, recognizing only such works as had been sifted and distilled by subtle and tormented minds, and at the same time that his distaste for accepted ideas had hardened into disgust, his love of flowers had rid itself of its residuum, its lees, had been clarified, so to speak, and purified.

It amused him to liken a horticulturist's shop to a microcosm in which every social category and class was represented – poor, vulgar slum-flowers, the gilliflower for instance, that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots; then pretentious, conventional, stupid flowers such as the rose, whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies; and lastly, flowers of charm and tremulous delicacy, exotic flowers exiled to Paris and kept warm in palaces of glass, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or the bourgeois blooms.
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Now, he could not help feeling a certain interest, a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks; on the other hand, he loathed
those that go with the cream-and-gold drawing-rooms in new houses; he kept his admiration, in fact, for the rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves.

But this deliberate choice he had made of hothouse flowers had itself been modified under the influence of his general ideas, of the definite conclusions he had now arrived at on all matters. In former days, in Paris, his inborn taste for the artificial had led him to neglect the real flower for its copy, faithfully and almost miraculously executed in indiarubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and velvet.

As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists, following Nature step by step, repeating her processes, taking the flower from its birth, leading it to maturity, imitating it even to its death, noting the most indefinable nuances, the most fleeting aspects of its awakening or its sleep, observing the pose of its petals, blown back by the wind or crumpled up by the rain, sprinkling its unfolding corolla with dewdrops of gum and adapting its appearance to the time of year – in full bloom when branches are bent under the weight of sap, or with a shrivelled cupula and a withered stem when petals are dropping off and leaves are falling.

This admirable artistry had long enthralled him, but now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.
²

He applied his mind to this problem, but did not have to search for long or go far afield, seeing that his house was in the very heart of the district which had attracted all the great flower-growers. He went straight off to visit the hothouses of Châtillon and the valley of Aunay, coming home tired out and cleaned out, wonder-struck at the floral follies he had seen, thinking of nothing but the varieties he had bought, haunted all the while by memories of bizarre and magnificient blooms.

Two days later the wagons arrived. List in hand, Des Esseintes called the roll, checking his purchases one by one.

First of all the gardeners unloaded from their carts a collection
of Caladiums, whose swollen, hairy stems supported huge heart-shaped leaves; though they kept a general air of kinship, no two of them were alike.

There were some remarkable specimens – some a pinkish colour like the Virginale, which seemed to have been cut out of oilskin or sticking-plaster; some all white like the Albane, which looked as if it had been fashioned out of the pleura of an ox or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Others, especially the one called Madame Mame, seemed to be simulating zinc, parodying bits of punched metal coloured emperor green and spattered with drops of oil-paint, streaks of red lead and white. Here, there were plants like the Bosphorus giving the illusion of starched calico spotted with crimson and myrtle green; there, others such as the Aurora Borealis flaunted leaves the colour of raw meat, with dark-red ribs and purplish fibrils, puffy leaves that seemed to be sweating blood and wine.

Between them, the Albane and Aurora Borealis represented the two temperamental extremes, apoplexy and chlorosis, in this particular family of plants.

The gardeners brought in still more varieties, this time affecting the appearance of a factitious skin covered with a network of counterfeit veins. Most of them, as if ravaged by syphilis or leprosy, displayed livid patches of flesh mottled with roseola, damasked with dartre; others had the bright pink colour of a scar that is healing or the brown tint of a scab that is forming; others seemed to have been puffed up by cauteries, blistered by burns; others again revealed hairy surfaces pitted with ulcers and embossed with chancres; and last of all there were some which appeared to be covered with dressings of various sorts, coated with black mercurial lard, plastered with green belladonna ointment, dusted over with the yellow flakes of iodoform powder.

Gathered together, these sickly blooms struck Des Esseintes as even more monstrous than when he had first come upon them, mixed up with others like hospital patients inside the glass walls of their conservatory wards.

‘Sapristi!' he exclaimed, in an access of enthusiasm.

Another plant, of a type similar to the Caladiums, the
Alocasia
Metallica
, roused him to still greater admiration. Covered with a coat of greenish bronze shot with glints of silver, it was the supreme masterpiece of artifice; anyone would have taken it for a bit of stove-pipe cut into a pike-head pattern by the makers.

Next the men unloaded several bunches of lozenge-shaped leaves, bottle-green in colour; from the midst of each bunch rose a stiff stem on top of which trembled a great ace of hearts, as glossy as a pepper; and then, as if in defiance of all the familiar aspects of plant life, there sprang from the middle of this bright vermilion heart a fleshy, downy tail, all white and yellow, straight in some cases, corkscrewing above the heart like a pig's tail in others.

This was the Anthurium, an aroid recently imported from Colombia; it belonged to a section of the same family as a certain Amorphophallus, a plant from Cochin-China with leaves the shape of fish-slices and long black stalks crisscrossed with scars like the limbs of a negro slave.

Des Esseintes could scarcely contain himself for joy.

Now they were getting a fresh batch of monstrosities down from the carts – the Echinopsis, thrusting its ghastly pink blossoms out of cotton-wool compresses, like the stumps of amputated limbs; the Nidularium, opening its sword-shaped petals to reveal gaping flesh-wounds; the
Tillandsia Lindeni
, trailing its jagged plough-shares the colour of wine-must; and the Cypripedium, with its complex, incoherent contours devised by some demented draughtsman. It looked rather like a clog or a tidy, and on top was a human tongue bent back with the string stretched tight, just as you may see it depicted in the plates of medical works dealing with diseases of the throat and mouth; two little wings, of a jujube red, which might almost have been borrowed from a child's toy windmill, completed this baroque combination of the underside of a tongue, the colour of wine lees and slate, and a glossy pocket-case with a lining that oozed drops of viscous paste.

He could not take his eyes off this unlikely-looking orchid from India, and the gardeners, irritated by all these delays, began reading out themselves the labels stuck in the pots they were bringing in.

Des Esseintes watched them open-mouthed, listening in amazement to the forbidding names of the various herbaceous plants – the
Encephalartos horridus
, a gigantic artichoke, an iron spike painted a rust colour, like the ones they put on park gates to keep trespassers from climbing over; the
Cocos Micania
, a sort of palm-tree, with a slim, indented stem, surrounded on all sides with tall leaves like paddles and oars; the
Zamia Lehmanni
, a huge pineapple, a monumental Cheshire cheese stuck in heath-mould and bristling on top with barbed javelins and native arrows; and the
Cibotium Spectabile
, challenging comparison with the weirdest nightmare and out-doing even its congeners in the craziness of its formation, with an enormous orang-outang's tail poking out of a cluster of palm-leaves – a brown, hairy tail twisted at the tip into the shape of a bishop's crozier.

But he did not linger over these plants, as he was waiting impatiently for the series which particularly fascinated him, those vegetable ghouls the carnivorous plants – the downy-rimmed Fly-trap of the Antilles, with its digestive secretions and its curved spikes that interlock to form a grille over any insect it imprisons; the Drosera of the peat-bogs, flaunting a set of glandulous hairs; the Sarracena and the Cephalothus, opening voracious gullets capable of consuming and digesting whole chunks of meat; and finally the Nepenthes, which in shape and form passes all the bounds of eccentricity.

With unwearying delight he turned in his hands the pot in which this floral extravaganza was quivering. It resembled the gum-tree in its long leaves of a dark, metallic green; but from the end of each leaf there hung a green string, an umbilical cord carrying a greenish-coloured pitcher dappled with purple markings, a sort of German pipe in porcelain, a peculiar kind of bird's nest that swayed gently to and fro, displaying an interior carpeted with hairs.

‘That really is a beauty,' murmured Des Esseintes.

But he had to cut short his display of pleasure, for now the gardeners, in a hurry to get away, were rapidly unloading the last of their plants, jumbling up tuberous Begonias and black Crotons flecked with spots of red lead like old iron.

Then he noticed that there was still one name left on his list,
the Cattleya of New Granada. They pointed out to him a little winged bell-flower of a pale lilac, an almost imperceptible mauve; he went up, put his nose to it and started back – for it gave out a smell of varnished deal, a toy-box smell that brought back horrid memories of New Year's Day when he was a child. He decided he had better be wary of it, and almost regretted having admitted among all the scentless plants he possessed this orchid with its unpleasantly reminiscent odour.

Once he was alone again, he surveyed the great tide of vegetation that had flooded into his entrance-hall, the various species all intermingling, crossing swords, creeses or spears with one another, forming a mass of green weapons, over which floated, like barbarian battle-flags, flowers of crude and dazzling colours.

The air in the room was getting purer, and soon, in a dark corner, down by the floor, a soft white light appeared. He went up to it and discovered that it came from a clump of Rhizomorphs which, as they breathed, shone like tiny night-lights.

‘These plants are really astounding,' he said to himself, stepping back to appraise the entire collection. Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible to imitate the work of human hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin.

‘It all comes down to syphilis in the end,'
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Des Esseintes reflected, as his gaze was drawn and held by the horrible markings of the Caladiums, over which a shaft of daylight was playing. And he had a sudden vision of the unceasing torments inflicted on humanity by the virus of distant ages. Ever since the beginning of the world, from generation to generation, all living creatures had handed down the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting disease that ravaged the ancestors of man and even ate into the bones of the old fossils that were being dug up at the present time.

Without ever abating, it had travelled down the ages, still raging to this day in the form of surreptitious pains, in the disguise of headaches or bronchitis, hysteria or gout. From time to time it came to the surface, generally singling out for attack ill-to-do, ill-fed people, breaking out in spots like pieces of gold, ironically crowning the poor devils with an almeh's diadem of sequins, adding insult to injury by stamping their skin with the very symbol of wealth and well-being.

And now here it was again, reappearing in all its pristine splendour on the brightly coloured leaves of these plants!

‘It is true,' continued Des Esseintes, going back to the starting point of his argument, ‘it is true that most of the time Nature is incapable of producing such depraved, unhealthy species alone and unaided; she supplies the raw materials, the seed and the soil, the nourishing womb and the elements of the plant, which man rears, shapes, paints and carves afterwards to suit his fancy.

‘Stubborn, muddle-headed and narrow-minded though she is, she has at last submitted, and her master has succeeded in changing the soil components by means of chemical reactions, in utilizing slowly matured combinations, carefully elaborated crossings, in employing cuttings and graftings skilfully and methodically, so that now he can make her put forth blossoms of different colours on the same branch, invents new hues for her, and modifies at will the age-old shapes of her plants. In short, he rough-hews her blocks of stone, finishes off her sketches, signs them with his stamp, impresses on them his artistic hall-mark.

‘There's no denying it,' he concluded; ‘in the course of a few years man can operate a selection which easy-going Nature could not conceivably make in less than a few centuries; without the shadow of a doubt, the horticulturists are the only true artists left to us nowadays.'