He used to lie down in the meadows, in the shadow of the tall hayricks, listening to the dull rumble of the water-mills and breathing in the fresh breezes coming from the Voulzie. Sometimes he would go as far as the peateries and the hamlet of Longueville with its green and black houses, or else he would scramble up the windswept hillsides from which he could survey an immense prospect. On the one hand he could look down on the Seine valley, winding away into the distance where it merged into the blue sky, and on the other he could see, far away on the horizon, the churches and the great tower of Provins, which seemed to tremble under the sun’s rays in a dusty golden haze.

He would spend hours reading or daydreaming, enjoying his fill of solitude until night fell; and by dint of pondering the same thoughts his intelligence grew sharper and his ideas gained in maturity and precision. At the end of every vacation he went back to his masters a more serious and a more stubborn boy. These changes did not escape their notice: shrewd and clearsighted men, accustomed by their profession to probing the inmost recesses of the human soul, they treated this lively but intractable mind with caution and reserve. They realized that this particular pupil of theirs would never do anything to add to the glory of their house; and as his family was rich and apparently uninterested in his future, they soon gave up any idea of turning his thoughts towards the profitable careers open to their successful scholars. Similarly, although he was fond of engaging with them in argument about theological doctrines whose niceties and subtleties intrigued him, they never even thought of inducing him to enter a religious order, for in spite of all their efforts his faith remained infirm. Finally, out of prudence and fear of the unknown, they let him pursue whatever studies pleased him and neglect the rest, not wishing to turn this independent spirit against them by subjecting him to the sort of irksome discipline imposed by lay tutors.

He therefore lived a perfectly contented life at school, scarcely aware of the priests’ fatherly control. He worked at his Latin and French books in his own way and in his own time; and although theology was not one of the subjects in the school syllabus, he finished the apprenticeship to this science which he had begun at the Château de Lourps, in the library left by his great-great-uncle Dom Prosper, a former Prior of the Canons Regular of Saint-Ruf.

The time came, however, to leave the Jesuit establishment, for he was nearly of age and would soon have to take possession of his fortune. When at last he reached his majority, his cousin and guardian, the Comte de Montchevrel, gave him an account of his stewardship. Relations between the two men did not last long, for there could be no point of contact between one so old and one so young. But while they lasted, out of curiosity, as a matter of courtesy, and for want of something to do, Des Esseintes saw a good deal of his cousin’s family; and he spent several desperately dull evenings at their town-house in he Rue de la Chaise, listening to female relatives old as the hills conversing about noble quarterings, heraldic moons and antiquated ceremonial.

Even more than these dowagers, the men gathered round their whist-tables revealed an unalterable emptiness of mind. These descendants of medieval warriors, these last scions of feudal families, appeared to Des Esseintes in the guise of crotchety, catarrhal old men, endlessly repeating insipid monologues and immemorial phrases. The fleur-de-lis, which you find if you cut the stalk of a fern, was apparently also the only thing that remained impressed on the softening pulp inside these ancient skulls.

The young man felt a surge of ineffable pity for these mummies entombed in their Pompadour catafalques behind rococo panelling; these crusty dotards who lived with their eyes for ever fixed upon a nebulous Canaan, an imaginary land of promise.

After a few experiences of this kind, he resolved, in spite of all the invitations and reproaches he might receive, never to set foot in this society again.

Instead, he took to mixing with young men of his own age and station.

Some of them, who like himself had been brought up in religious institutions, had been distinctively marked for life by the education they had received. They went to church regularly, took communion at Easter, frequented Catholic societies and shamefacedly concealed their sexual activities from each other as if they were heinous crimes. For the most part they were docile, good-looking ninnies, congenital dunces who had worn their masters’ patience thin, but had nonetheless satisfied their desire to send pious, obedient creatures out into the world.

The others, who had been educated in state schools or in lycèes, were less hypocritical and more adventurous, but they were no more interesting and no less narrow-minded than their fellows. These gay young men were mad on races and operettas, lansquenet and baccarat, and squandered fortunes on horses, cards, and all the other pleasures dear to empty minds. After a year’s trial, Des Esseintes was overcome by an immense distaste for the company of these men, whose debauchery struck him as being base and facile, entered into without discrimination or desire, indeed without any real stirring of the blood or stimulation of the nerves.

Little by little, he dropped these people and sought the society of men of letters, imagining that theirs must surely be kindred spirits with which his own mind would feel more at case. A fresh disappointment lay in store for him: he was revolted by their mean, spiteful judgements, their conversation that was as commonplace as a church-door, and the nauseating discussions in which they gauged the merit of a book by the number of editions it went through and the profits from its sale. At the same time, he discovered the free-thinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than the village cobbler’s.

His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with that of any author or scholar.

He felt irritable and ill at ease; exasperated by the triviality of the ideas normally bandied about, he came to resemble those people mentioned by Nicole4 who are sensitive to anything and everything. He was constantly coming across some new source of offence, wincing at the patriotic or political twaddle served up in the papers every morning, and exaggerating the importance of the triumphs which an omnipotent public reserves at all times and in all circumstances for works written without thought or style.

Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.

One passion and one only – woman – might have arrested the universal contempt that was taking hold of him, but that passion like the rest had been exhausted. He had tasted the sweets of the flesh like a crotchety invalid with a craving for food but a palate which soon becomes jaded. In the days when he had belonged to a set of young men-about-town, he had gone to those unconventional supper-parties where drunken women loosen their dresses at dessert and beat the table with their heads; he had hung around stage-doors, had bedded with singers and actresses, had endured, over and above the innate stupidity of the sex, the hysterical vanity common to women of the theatre. Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity, and helped to swell the funds of those agencies which supply dubious pleasures for a consideration. And finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses.

Try what he might, however, he could not shake off the overpowering tedium which weighed upon him. In desperation he had recourse to the perilous caresses of the professional virtuosos, but the only effect was to impair his health and exacerbate his nerves. Already he was getting pains at the back of his neck, and his hands were shaky: he could keep them steady enough when he was gripping a heavy object, but they trembled uncontrollably when holding something light such as a wineglass.5

The doctors he consulted terrified him with warnings that it was time he changed his way of life and gave up these practices which were sapping his vitality. For a little while he led a quiet life, but soon his brain took fire again and sent out a fresh call to arms. Like girls who at the onset of puberty hanker after weird or disgusting dishes, he began to imagine and then to indulge in unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures.