Against Nature (22 page)

Next, in the hope that an emollient might cool the hot irons that were burning his innards, he resorted to Nalifka, a Russian liqueur contained in a bottle covered with a dull gold glaze; but this unctuous, raspberry-flavoured syrup was just as ineffective. Alas, the time was long past when Des Esseintes, then enjoying comparatively good health, would get into a sledge he kept at home – this in the hottest period of the year – and sit there wrapped in furs that he pulled tightly round him, shivering to the best of his ability and saying through deliberately chattering teeth: ‘What an icy wind! Why, it's freezing here, it's freezing!' – until he almost convinced himself that it really was cold.

Unfortunately, now that his sufferings were real, these remedies were no longer of any avail.

Nor was it any use his having recourse to laudanum; instead of acting as a sedative, it irritated his nerves and thus robbed him of his sleep. At one time he had also resorted to opium and hashish in the hope of seeing visions, but these two drugs had only brought on vomiting and violent nervous disorders; he had been obliged to stop using them at once and, without the help of these crude stimulants, to ask his brain, alone and unaided, to carry him far away from everyday life into the land of dreams.

‘What a day!' he groaned as he mopped his neck, feeling what little strength was left in him melting away in fresh floods of perspiration. A feverish restlessness again prevented him from sitting still, so that once more he wandered from room to room, trying one chair after another. Finally, tired of walking round the house, he sank into his desk-chair, and resting his elbows on the desk, started idly and unconsciously playing with an astrolabe that was being used as a paper-weight on top of a pile of books and notes.

He had bought this instrument, which was made of engraved and gilded copper, of German workmanship and dating from the seventeenth century, in a second-hand dealer's in Paris, after
a visit he had paid to the Cluny Museum, where he had stood for hours enraptured by a wonderful astrolabe of carved ivory, whose cabbalistic appearance had captivated him.

The paper-weight stirred up in him a whole swarm of memories. Set in motion by the sight of this little curio, his thoughts went from Fontenay to Paris, to the old curiosity shop where he had bought it, then back to the Thermes Museum; and he conjured up a mental picture of the ivory astrolabe while his eyes continued to dwell, though now unseeingly, on the copper astrolabe on his desk.

Then, still in memory, he left the Museum and went for a stroll through the city streets, wandering along the Rue de Sommerard and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, turning off into the adjoining streets and stopping outside certain establishments whose multiplicity and peculiar appearance had often struck him.

Beginning with an astrolabe, this mental excursion ended up in the low taverns of the Latin Quarter.

He remembered what a tremendous number of these places there were all along the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and down the Odéon end of the Rue de Vaugirard; sometimes they stood cheek by jowl like the old
riddecks
²
of the Rue du Canal-aux-Harengs at Antwerp, lined up along the pavement one after the other, all looking very much alike.

Through half-open doors and windows only partially obscured by coloured panes or curtains, he could recall catching glimpses of women walking up and down, dragging their feet and sticking their necks out like so many geese; others sitting dejectedly on benches were wearing their elbows out on marble-topped tables, lost in their thoughts and singing softly to themselves, with their heads in their hands; yet others would be swaying about in front of looking-glasses, patting with their fingertips the switches of hair they had just dressed; others again would be emptying purses with broken clasps of piles of silver and copper, and methodically arranging the money in little heaps.

Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, pendulous breasts, and painted eyes, and all of them, like automata wound
up at the same time with the same key, threw out the same invitations in the same tone of voice, flashed the same smiles, made the same odd remarks, the same peculiar comments.

Ideas began to link up in Des Esseintes's mind, and he found himself coming to a definite conclusion, now that his memory had provided him, so to speak, with a bird's-eye view of these crowded taverns and streets.

He grasped the true significance of all these cafés, realized that they corresponded to the state of mind of an entire generation and saw that they offered him a synthesis of the age.

The symptoms were indeed plain and undeniable; the licensed brothels were disappearing, and every time one of them closed its doors, a tavern opened in its place.

This diminution of official prostitution in favour of unofficial promiscuity was obviously to be accounted for by the incomprehensible illusions to which men are subject in affairs of the flesh.

Monstrous as this might appear, the tavern satisfied an ideal.

The fact was that although the utilitarian tendencies handed down by heredity, and encouraged by the precocious discourtesies and constant incivilities of school life, had made the younger generation singularly boorish and also singularly cold and materialistic, it had nonetheless kept, deep down in its heart, a little old-fashioned sentimentality, a vague, stale, old-fashioned ideal of love.

The result was that nowadays, when its blood caught fire, it could not stomach just walking in, taking its pleasure, paying the bill and walking out again. This, in its eyes, was sheer bestiality, like a dog covering a bitch without any preamble; besides, a man's vanity obtained no sort of satisfaction in these houses of ill fame where there was no show of resistance, no semblance of victory, no hope of preferential treatment, no possibility even of obtaining liberal favours from a tradeswoman who measured out her caresses in proportion to the price paid. On the other hand, to court a girl in a tavern was to avoid wounding all these amorous susceptibilities, all these sentimental feelings. There were always several men after a girl like that, and those to whom she agreed, at a price, to grant a
rendezvous, honestly imagined that they were the object of an honorary distinction, a rare favour.

Yet the staff of a tavern were every bit as stupid and mercenary, as base and depraved, as the staff of a brothel. Like the latter, they drank without being thirsty, laughed without being amused, drooled over the caresses of the filthiest workman and went for each other hammer and tongs at the slightest provocation. But in spite of everything, the young men of Paris had still not learnt that from the point of view of looks, dress and technique, the waitresses in these taverns were vastly inferior to the women cooped up in the luxurious sitting-rooms of licensed houses.

Lord, what fools they must be, Des Esseintes used to think to himself, these young chaps who hang around the beer-houses, because quite apart from their ridiculous illusions, they actually come to forget the risks involved in sampling shop-soiled goods of dubious quality, and to take no account of the money spent on a fixed number of drinks priced beforehand by the landlady, the time wasted in waiting for delivery of the goods, which are held back to raise the price, and the perpetual shillyshallying intended to start the money flowing and keep it flowing.

This idiotic sentimentality combined with ruthless commercialism clearly represented the dominant spirit of the age; these same men who would have gouged anybody's eyes out to make a few coppers, lost all their flair and shrewdness when it came to dealing with the shifty tavern girls who harried them without pity and fleeced them without mercy. The wheels of industry turned, and families cheated one another in the name of trade, only to let themselves be robbed of money by their sons, who in turn allowed themselves to be swindled by these women, who in the last resort were bled white by their own fancy men.

Over the whole of Paris, from east to west and north to south, there stretched an unbroken network of confidence tricks, a chain of organized thefts acting one upon the other – and all because, instead of being served straight away, customers were kept waiting and left to cool their heels.

The fact was that human wisdom was essentially a matter of spinning things out, of saying no first and yes later; for the best
way of handling men has always been to keep putting them off.

‘Ah, if only the same were true of my stomach!' sighed Des Esseintes, as he was suddenly doubled up with a spasm of pain that jolted his thoughts back to Fontenay from the distant regions they had been roaming.

He sent his man-servant off to Paris to buy one of these precious instruments, and with the help of the manufacturer's directions, he was able to instruct his cook how to chop some roast beef up into little pieces, put it dry into the digester, add a slice of leek and one of carrot, then screw down the lid and leave the whole thing to boil in a double saucepan for four hours.

At the end of that time you pressed the juice out of the threads of meat, and you drank a spoonful of this muddy, salty liquid that was left at the bottom of the digester. Then you felt something slipping down like warm marrow-fat, with a soothing, velvety caress.

This meat extract put a stop to the pains and nausea caused by hunger, and even stimulated the stomach so that it no longer refused to take in a few spoonfuls of soup.

Thanks to the digester, Des Esseintes's nervous trouble got no worse, and he told himself:

‘At any rate, that's so much gained; now perhaps the temperature will drop and the heavens scatter a little ash over that abominably enervating sun. If that happens I'll be able to hang on till the first fogs and frosts without too much difficulty.'

In his present state of apathy and bored inactivity, his library, which he had been unable to finish rearranging, got on his nerves. Tied as he was to his chair, he was confronted all the time with his profane books, stacked higgledy-piggledy on their shelves, leaning against each other, propping each other up or lying flat on their sides like a pack of cards. This disorder shocked him all the more in that it formed such a contrast to the perfect order of his religious works, carefully lined up on parade along the walls.

He tried to remedy this confusion, but after ten minutes' work he was bathed in sweat. The effort was obviously too much for him; utterly exhausted, he lay down on a couch and rang for his servant.

Following his instructions, the old man set to work, bringing him the books one by one so that he could examine each and say where it was to go.

This job did not take long, for Des Esseintes's library contained only a very limited number of contemporary lay works.

By dint of passing them through the critical apparatus of his mind, just as a metal worker passes strips of metal through a steel drawing-machine, from which they emerge thin and light, reduced to almost invisible threads, he had found in the end that none of his books could stand up to this sort of treatment, that none was sufficiently hardened to go through the next process, the reading-mill. Trying to eliminate the inferior works, he had in fact curtailed and practically sterilized his pleasure in reading, emphasizing more than ever the irremediable conflict between his ideas and those of the world into which chance had ordained that he should be born. Things had now got to the point where he found it impossible to discover a book that satisfied his secret longings; indeed, he even began to lose his admiration for the very works that had undoubtedly helped to sharpen his mind and make it so subtle and critical.

Yet his literary opinions had started from a very simple point
of view. For him, there were no such things as schools;
¹
the only thing that mattered to him was the writer's personality, and the only thing that interested him was the working of the writer's brain, no matter what subject he was tackling. Unfortunately this criterion of appreciation, so obviously just, was practically impossible to apply, for the simple reason that, however much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality, and ends by relegating all the rest to limbo.

This process of selection had taken place slowly in his case. At one time he had worshipped the great Balzac, but as his constitution had become unbalanced and his nerves had gained the upper hand, so his tastes had been modified and his preferences changed.

Soon indeed, and this although he realized how unjust he was being to the prodigious author of the
Comédie humaine
, he had given up so much as opening his books, put off by their robust health; other aspirations stirred him now, that were in a way almost indefinable.

By diligent self-examination, however, he realized first of all that to attract him a book had to have that quality of strangeness that Edgar Allan Poe called for; but he was inclined to venture further along this road, and to insist on Byzantine flowers of thought and deliquescent complexities of style; he demanded a disquieting vagueness that would give him scope for dreaming until he decided to make it still vaguer or more definite, according to the way he felt at the time. He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive patiently and even vainly to analyse.

Lastly, since leaving Paris, he had withdrawn further and further from reality and above all from the society of his day, which he regarded with ever-growing horror; this hatred he felt had inevitably affected his literary and artistic tastes, so that he
shunned as far as possible pictures and books whose subjects were confined to modern life.

The result was that, losing the faculty of admiring beauty in whatever guise it appeared, he now preferred, among Flaubert's works,
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
to
L'Education sentimentale
; among Goncourt's works,
La Faustin
to
Germinie Lacerteux
; among Zola's works,
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
to
L'Assommoir
.
²

This seemed to him a logical point of view; these books, not as topical of course but just as stirring and human as the others, let him penetrate further and deeper into the personalities of their authors, who revealed with greater frankness their most mysterious impulses, while they lifted him, too, higher than the rest, out of the trivial existence of which he was so heartily sick.

And then, reading these works, he could enter into complete intellectual fellowship with the writers who had conceived them, because at the moment of conception those writers had been in a state of mind analogous to his own.

The fact is that when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age.

Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, he is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena. Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.

In some cases there is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit of dream and fantasy, a more or less vivid vision of a future whose
image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs.

In Flaubert's case, there was a series of vast, imposing scenes, grandiose pageantries of barbaric splendour in which there participated creatures delicate and sensitive, mysterious and proud, women cursed, in all the perfection of their beauty, with suffering souls, in the depths of which he discerned atrocious delusions, insane aspirations, born of the disgust they already felt for the dreadful mediocrity of the pleasures awaiting them.

The personality of the great writer was revealed in all its splendour in those incomparable pages of
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
and
Salammbô
in which, leaving our petty modern civilization far behind, he conjured up the Asiatic glories of distant epochs, their mystic ardours and doldrums, the aberrations resulting from their idleness, the brutalities arising from their boredom – that oppressive boredom which emanates from opulence and prayer even before their pleasures have been fully enjoyed.

With Goncourt
³
it was a case of nostalgia for the eighteenth century, a longing to return to the elegant graces of a society that had vanished for ever. The gigantic backcloth of seas dashing against great backwaters, of deserts stretching away to infinity under blazing skies, found no place in his nostalgic masterpiece, which confined itself, within the precincts of an aristocratic park, to a boudoir warm with the voluptuous effluvia of a woman with a weary smile, a pouting expression and pensive, brooding eyes. Nor was the spirit with which he animated his characters the same spirit Flaubert breathed into his creations, a spirit revolted in advance by the inexorable certainty that no new happiness was possible; it was rather a spirit revolted after the event, by bitter experience, at the thought of all the fruitless efforts it had made to invent new spiritual relationships and to introduce a little variety into the immemorial pleasure that is repeated down the ages in the satisfaction, more or less ingeniously obtained, of lusting couples.

Although she lived in the late nineteenth century and was physically and effectively a modern, by virtue of ancestral influences La Faustin was a creature of the eighteenth century,
sharing to the full its spiritual perversity, its cerebral lassitude, its sensual satiety.

This book of Edmond de Goncourt's was one of Des Esseintes's favourites, for the dream-inducing suggestiveness he wanted abounded in this work, where beneath the printed line lurked another line visible only to the soul, indicated by an epithet that opened up vast vistas of passion, by a reticence that hinted at spiritual infinities no ordinary idiom could compass. The idiom used in this book was quite different from the language of Flaubert, inimitable in its magnificence; this style was penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle, careful to record the intangible impression that affects the senses and produces feeling, and skilled in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch that was itself extraordinarily complex. It was, in fact, the sort of style that is indispensable to decrepit civilizations which, in order to express their needs, and to whatever age they may belong, require new acceptations, new uses, new forms both of word and phrase.

In Rome, expiring paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language through Ausonius, through Claudian, above all through Rutilius, whose style, careful and scrupulous, sensuous and sonorous, presented an obvious analogy with the Goncourt brothers' style, especially when describing light and shade and colour.

In Paris, a phenomenon unique in literary history had come about; the moribund society of the eighteenth century, though it had been well provided with painters, sculptors, musicians and architects, all familiar with its tastes and imbued with its beliefs, had failed to produce a genuine writer capable of rendering its dying graces or manifesting the essence of its feverish pleasures, that were soon to be so cruelly expiated. It had had to wait for Goncourt, whose personality was made up of memories and regrets made still more poignant by the distressing spectacle of the intellectual poverty and base aspirations of his time, to resuscitate, not only in his historical studies but also in a nostalgic work like
La Faustin
, the very soul of the period, and to embody its neurotic charms in this actress, so painfully eager to torment her heart and torture her brain in
order to savour to the point of exhaustion the cruel revulsives of love and art.

In Zola the longing for some other existence took a different form. In him there was no desire to migrate to vanished civilizations, to worlds lost in the darkness of time; his sturdy, powerful temperament, enamoured of the luxuriance of life, of full-blooded vigour, of moral stamina, alienated him from the artificial graces and the painted pallors of the eighteenth century, as also from the hieratic pomp, the brutal ferocity and the effeminate, ambiguous dreams of the ancient East. On the day when he too had been afflicted with this longing, this craving which in fact is poetry itself, to fly far away from the contemporary society he was studying, he had fled to an idyllic region where the sap boiled in the sunshine; he had dreamt of fantastic heavenly copulations, of long earthly ecstasies, of fertilizing showers of pollen falling into the palpitating genitals of flowers; he had arrived at a gigantic pantheism, and with the Garden of Eden in which he placed his Adam and Eve he had created, perhaps unconsciously, a prodigious Hindu poem, singing the glories of the flesh, extolling, in a style whose broad patches of crude colour had something of the weird brilliance of Indian paintings, living animate matter, which by its own frenzied procreation revealed to man and woman the forbidden fruit of love, its suffocating spasms, its instinctive caresses, its natural postures.
⁴

With Baudelaire, these three masters had captured and moulded Des Esseintes's imagination more than any others; but through rereading them until he was saturated with their works and knew them completely by heart, he had eventually been obliged, to make it possible to absorb them again, to try and forget them, to leave them for a while undisturbed on his shelves.

Accordingly, he scarcely looked at them when his man handed them to him. He confined himself to pointing out where they should go, taking care to see that they were arranged in an orderly fashion and given plenty of elbow-room.

Next the man brought him another series of books which caused him rather more trouble. These were works of which he had gradually grown fonder, works which by their very defects
provided a welcome change from the perfect productions of greater writers. Here again, the process of elimination had led Des Esseintes to search through pages of uninspiring matter for odd sentences which would give him a shock as they discharged their electricity in a medium that seemed at first to be non-conducting.