The other was visible enough, as it was directly opposite the porthole cut into the wainscoting, but it had been rendered useless by a large aquarium occupying the entire space between the porthole and this real window in the real house-wall. Thus what daylight penetrated into the cabin had first to pass through the outer window, the panes of which had been replaced by a sheet of plate-glass, then through the water and finally through the fixed bull’s-eye in the porthole.2
On autumn evenings, when the samovar stood steaming on the table and the sun had almost set, the water in the aquarium, which had been dull and turbid all morning, would turn red like glowing embers and shed a fiery, glimmering light upon the pale walls.
Sometimes of an afternoon, when Des Esseintes happened to be already up and about, he would set in action the system of pipes and conduits which emptied the aquarium and refilled it with fresh water, and then pour in a few drops of coloured essences, thus producing at will the various tints, green or grey, opaline or silvery, which real rivers take on according to the colour of the sky, the greater or less brilliance of the sun’s rays, the more or less imminent threat of rain – in a word, according to the season and the weather.
He could then imagine himself between-decks in a brig, and gazed inquisitively at some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forwards behind the port-hole window and got entangled in artificial seaweed. At other times, while he was inhaling the smell of tar which had been introduced into the room before he entered it, he would examine a series of colour-prints on the walls, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd’s agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaiso and the River Plate, alongside framed notices giving the itineraries of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Line and the Lopez and Valéry Companies, as well as the freight charges and ports of call of the transatlantic mail-boats.
Then, when he was tired of consulting these timetables, he would rest his eyes by looking at the chronometers and compasses, the sextants and dividers, the binoculars and charts scattered about on a side-table which was dominated by a single book, bound in sea-calf leather: the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,3 specially printed for him on laid paper of pure linen, hand picked and bearing a seagull water-mark.
Finally he could take stock of the fishing-rods, the brown-tanned nets, the rolls of russet-coloured sails and the miniature anchor made of cork painted black, all piled higgledy-piggledy beside the door that led to the kitchen by way of a corridor padded, like the passage between dining-room and study, in such a way as to absorb any noises and smells.
By these means he was able to enjoy quickly, almost simultaneously, all the sensations of a long sea-voyage, without ever leaving home; the pleasure of moving from place to place, a pleasure which in fact exists only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in experience of the present, this pleasure he could savour in full and in comfort, without fatigue or worry, in this cabin whose deliberate disorder, impermanent appearance and makeshift appointments corresponded fairly closely to the flying visits he paid it and the limited time he gave his meals, while it offered a complete contrast to his study, a permanent, orderly, well-established room, admirably equipped to maintain and uphold a stay-at-home existence.
Travel, indeed, struck him as being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience. In his opinion it was perfectly possible to fulfil those desires commonly supposed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions, and this by the trifling subterfuge of producing a fair imitation of the object of those desires. Thus it is well known that nowadays, in restaurants famed for the excellence of their cellars, the gourmets go into raptures over rare vintages manufactured out of cheap wines treated according to Monsieur Pasteur’s method.4 Now, whether they are genuine or faked, these wines have the same aroma, the same colour, the same bouquet; and consequently the pleasure experienced in tasting these factitious, sophisticated beverages is absolutely identical with that which would be afforded by the pure, unadulterated wine, now unobtainable at any price.
There can be no doubt that by transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similar in all respects to the pleasures of reality; no doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands; no doubt, either, that without stirring out of Paris it is possible to obtain the health-giving impression of sea-bathing – for all that this involves is a visit to the Bain Vigier, an establishment to be found on a pontoon moored in the middle of the Seine.
There, by salting your bath-water and adding sulphate of soda with hydrochlorate of magnesium and lime in the proportions recommended by the Pharmacopoeia; by opening a box with a tight-fitting screw-top and taking out a ball of twine or a twist of rope, bought for the occasion from one of those enormous roperies whose warehouses and cellars reek with the smell of the sea and sea-ports; by breathing in the odours which the twine or the twist of rope is sure to have retained; by consulting a life-like photograph of the casino and zealously reading the Guide Joanne describing the beauties of the seaside resort where you would like to be; by letting yourself be lulled by the waves created in your bath by the backwash of the paddle-steamers passing close to the pontoon; by listening to the moaning of the wind as it blows under the arches of the Pont Royal and the dull rumble of the buses crossing the bridge just a few feet over your head; by employing these simple devices, you can produce an illusion of sea-bathing which will be undeniable, convincing and complete.
The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself.
As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius.5
Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes. After all, what platitudinous limitations she imposes, like a tradesman specializing in a single line of business; what petty-minded restrictions, like a shopkeeper stocking one article to the exclusion of all others; what a monotonous store of meadows and trees, what a commonplace display of mountains and seas!
In fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery under floodlighting; no cascade that cannot be imitated to perfection by hydraulic engineering; no rock that papier-mâché cannot counterfeit; no flower that carefully chosen taffeta and delicately coloured paper cannot match!
There can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.
After all, to take what among all her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among all her creations is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty – to wit, woman – has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth, a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?
One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.
The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons.
It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found; and it can be stated without fear of contradiction that in his chosen province man has done as well as the God in whom he believes.
These thoughts occurred to Des Esseintes whenever the breeze carried to his ears the faint whistle of the toy trains that shuttle backwards and forwards between Paris and Sceaux. His house was only about a twenty minutes’ walk from the station at Fontenay, but the height at which it stood and its isolated position insulated it from the hullabaloo of the vile hordes that are inevitably attracted on Sundays to the purlieus of a railway station.
As for the village itself, he had scarcely seen it. Only once, looking out of his window one night, had he examined the silent landscape stretching down to the foot of a hill which is surmounted by the batteries of the Bois de Verrières.
In the darkness, on both right and left, rows of dim shapes could be seen lining the hillsides, dominated by other far-off batteries and fortifications whose high retaining-walls looked in the moonlight like silver-painted brows over dark eyes.
The plain, lying partly in the shadow of the hills, appeared to have shrunk in size; and in the middle it seemed as if it were sprinkled with face-powder and smeared with coldcream. In the warm breeze that fanned the colourless grass and scented the air with cheap spicy perfumes, the moon-bleached trees rustled their pale foliage and with their trunks drew a shadow-pattern of black stripes on the white-washed earth, littered with pebbles that glinted like fragments of broken crockery.
On account of its artificial, made-up appearance, Des Esseintes found this landscape not unattractive; but since that first afternoon he had spent house-hunting in the village of Fontenay, he had never once set foot in its streets by day. The greenery of this part of the country had no appeal whatever for him, lacking as it did even that languid, melancholy charm possessed by the pitiful, sickly vegetation clinging pathetically to life on the suburban rubbish-heaps near the ramparts. And then, on that same day, in the village itself, he had caught sight of bewhiskered bourgeois with protuberant paunches and mustachioed individuals in fancy dress, whom he took to be magistrates and army officers, carrying their heads as proudly as a priest would carry a monstrance; and after that experience his detestation of the human face had grown even fiercer than before.
During the last months of his residence in Paris, at a time when, sapped by disillusionment, depressed by hypochondria and weighed down by spleen, he had been reduced to such a state of nervous sensitivity that the sight of a disagreeable person or thing was deeply impressed upon his mind and it took several days even to begin removing the imprint, the human face as glimpsed in the street had been one of the keenest torments he had been forced to endure.
It was a fact that he suffered actual pain at the sight of certain physiognomies, that he almost regarded the benign or crabbed expressions on some faces as personal insults, and that he felt sorely tempted to box the ears of, say, one worthy he saw strolling along with his eyes shut in donnish affectation, another who smiled at his reflection as he minced past the shop-windows and yet another who appeared to be pondering a thousand-and-one weighty thoughts as he knit his brows over the rambling articles and sketchy news-items in his paper.
He could detect such inveterate stupidity, such hatred of his own ideas, such contempt for literature and art and everything he held dear, implanted and rooted in these mean mercenary minds, exclusively preoccupied with thoughts of swindling and money-grubbing and accessible only to that ignoble distraction of mediocre intellects, politics, that he would go home in a fury and shut himself up with his books.
Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafés, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs.
CHAPTER 3
One section of the bookshelves lining the walls of Des Esseintes’s blue and orange study was filled with nothing but Latin works – works which minds drilled into conformity by repetitious university lectures lump together under the generic name of ‘the Decadence’.1
The truth was that the Latin language, as it was written during the period which the academics still persist in calling the Golden Age, held scarcely any attraction for him. That restricted idiom with its limited stock of almost invariable constructions; without suppleness of syntax, without colour, without even light and shade; pressed flat along all its seams and stripped of the crude but often picturesque expressions of earlier epochs – that idiom could, at a pinch, enunciate the pompous platitudes and vague commonplaces endlessly repeated by the rhetoricians and poets of the time, but it was so tedious and unoriginal that in the study of linguistics you had to come down to the French style current in the age of Louis XIV to find another idiom so wilfully debilitated, so solemnly tiresome and dull.
Among other authors, the gentle Virgil, he whom the school-mastering fraternity call the Swan of Mantua, presumably because that was not his native city, impressed him as being one of the most appalling pedants and one of the most deadly bores that Antiquity ever produced; his well-washed, beribboned shepherds taking it in turns to empty over each other’s heads jugs of icy-cold sententious verse, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who blubbers about bees and his Aeneas, that irresolute, garrulous individual who strides up and down like a puppet in a shadow-theatre, making wooden gestures behind the ill-fitting, badly oiled screen of the poem, combined to irritate Des Esseintes. He might possibly have tolerated the dreary nonsense these marionettes spout into the wings; he might even have excused the impudent plagiarizing of Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius, as well as the outright theft Macrobius has revealed to us of the whole of the Second Book of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from a poem of Pisander’s; he might in fact have put up with all the indescribable fatuity of this rag-bag of vapid verses; but what utterly exasperated him was the shoddy workmanship of the tinny hexameters, with their statutory allotment of words weighed and measured according to the unalterable laws of a dry, pedantic prosody; it was the structure of the stiff and starchy lines in their formal attire and their abject subservience to the rule of grammar; it was the way in which each and every line was mechanically bisected by the inevitable caesura and finished off with the invariable shock of dactyl striking spondee.
Borrowed as it was from the system perfected by Catullus, that unchanging prosody, unimaginative, inexorable, stuffed full of useless words and phrases, dotted with pegs that fitted only too foreseeably into corresponding holes, that pitiful device of the Homeric epithet, used time and again without ever indicating or describing anything, and that poverty-stricken vocabulary with its dull, dreary colours, all caused him unspeakable torment.
It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid’s limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace’s vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown, was absolutely limitless.
In prose, he was no more enamoured of the long-winded style, the redundant metaphors and the rambling digressions of old Chick-Pea,2 the bombast of his apostrophes, the wordiness of his patriotic perorations, the pomposity of his harangues, the heaviness of his style, well fed and well covered, but weak-boned and running to fat, the intolerable insignificance of his long introductory adverbs, the monotonous uniformity of his adipose periods clumsily tied together with conjunctions, and finally his wearisome predilection for tautology, all signally failed to endear him to Des Esseintes. Nor was Caesar, with his reputation for laconism, any more to his taste than Cicero; for he went to the other extreme, and offended by his pop-gun pithiness, his jotting-pad brevity, his unforgivable, unbelievable constipation.
The fact of the matter was that he could find mental pabulum neither among these writers nor among those who for some reason are the delight of dilettante scholars: Sallust who is at least no more insipid than the rest, Livy who is pompous and sentimental, Seneca who is turgid and colourless, Suetonius who is larval and lymphatic and Tacitus, who with his studied concision is the most virile, the most biting, the most sinewy of them all. In poetry, Juvenal, despite a few vigorous lines, and Persius, for all his mysterious innuendoes, both left him cold. Leaving aside Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the two Plinys, Statius, Martial of Bilbilis, Terence even and Plautus, whose jargon with its plentiful neologisms, compounds, and diminutives attracted him, but whose low wit and salty humour repelled him, Des Esseintes only began to take an interest in the Latin language when he came to Lucan, in whose hands it took on new breadth, and became brighter and more expressive. The fine craftsmanship of Lucan’s enamelled and jewelled verse won his admiration; but the poet’s exclusive preoccupation with form, bell-like stridency and metallic brilliance did not entirely hide from his eyes the bombastic blisters disfiguring the Pharsalia, or the poverty of its intellectual content.
The author he really loved, and who made him abandon Lucan’s resounding tirades for good, was Petronius.
Petronius was a shrewd observer, a delicate analyst, a marvellous painter; dispassionately, with an entire lack of prejudice or animosity, he described the everyday life of Rome, recording the manners and morals of his time in the lively little chapters of the Satyricon.3
Noting what he saw as he saw it, he set forth the day-to-day existence of the common people, with all its minor events, its bestial incidents, its obscene antics.
Here we have the Inspector of Lodgings coming to ask for the names of any travellers who have recently arrived; there, a brothel where men circle round naked women standing beside placards giving their price, while through half-open doors couples can be seen disporting themselves in the bedrooms. Elsewhere, in villas full of insolent luxury where wealth and ostentation run riot, as also in the mean inns described throughout the book, with their unmade trestle beds swarming with fleas, the society of the day has its fling – depraved ruffians like Ascyltus and Eumolpus, out for what they can get; unnatural old men with their gowns tucked up and their cheeks plastered with white lead and acacia rouge; catamites of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women having hysterics; legacy-hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lusts of rich testators, all these and more scurry across the pages of the Satyricon, squabbling in the streets, fingering one another in the baths, beating one another up like characters in a pantomime.
All this is told with extraordinary vigour and precise colouring, in a style that makes free of every dialect, that borrows expressions from all the languages imported into Rome, that extends the frontiers and breaks the fetters of the so-called Golden Age, that makes every man talk in his own idiom – uneducated freedmen in vulgar Latin, the language of the streets; foreigners in their barbaric lingo, shot with words and phrases from African, Syrian and Greek; and stupid pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, in a rhetorical jargon of invented words. There are lightning sketches of all these people, sprawled round a table, exchanging the vapid pleasantries of drunken revellers, trotting out mawkish maxims and stupid saws, their heads turned towards Trimalchio, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company chamber-pots, discourses on the state of his bowels, farts to prove his point and begs his guests to make themselves at home.
This realistic novel, this slice cut from Roman life in the raw, with no thought, whatever people may say, of reforming or satirizing society, and no need to fake a conclusion or point a moral; this story with no plot or action in it, simply relating the erotic adventures of certain sons of Sodom, analysing with smooth finesse the joys and sorrows of these loving couples, depicting in a splendidly wrought style, without affording a single glimpse of the author, without any comment whatever, without a word of approval or condemnation of his characters’ thoughts and actions, the vices of a decrepit civilization, a crumbling Empire – this story fascinated Des Esseintes; and in its subtle style, acute observation and solid construction he could see a curious similarity, a strange analogy with the few modern French novels he could stomach.
Naturally enough he bitterly regretted the loss of the Eustion and the Albutia, those two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciades Fulgentius which have vanished for ever; but the bibliophile in him consoled the scholar, as he reverently handled the superb copy he possessed of the Satyricon, in the octavo edition of 1585 printed by J. Dousa at Leyden.
After Petronius, his collection of Latin authors came to the second century of the Christian era, skipped tub-thumping Fronto with his old-fashioned expressions, clumsily restored and unsuccessfully renovated, passed over the Noctes Atticae of his friend and disciple Aulus Gellius, a sagacious and inquisitive mind, but a writer bogged down in a glutinous style, and stopped only for Apuleius, whose works he had in the editio princeps, in folio, printed at Rome in 1469.
This African author gave him enormous pleasure. The Latin language reached the top of the tide in his Metamorphoses, sweeping along in a dense flood fed by tributary waters from every province, and combining them all in a bizarre, exotic, almost incredible torrent of words; new mannerisms and new details of Latin society found expression in neologisms called into being to meet conversational requirements in an obscure corner of Roman Africa. What was more, Des Esseintes was amused by Apuleius’ exuberance and joviality – the exuberance of a southerner and the joviality of a man who was beyond all question fat. He had the air of a lecherous boon companion compared with the Christian apologists living in the same century – the soporific Minucius Felix for instance, a pseudo-classic in whose Octavius Cicero’s oily phrases have grown thicker and heavier, and even Tertullian, whom he kept more perhaps for the sake of the Aldine edition of his works than for the works themselves.
Although he was perfectly at home with theological problems,4 the Montanist wrangles with the Catholic Church and the polemics against Gnosticism left him cold; so, despite the interest of Tertullian’s style, a compact style full of amphibologies, built on participles, shaken by antitheses, strewn with puns and speckled with words borrowed from the language of jurisprudence or the Fathers of the Greek Church, he now scarcely ever opened the Apologeticus or the De Patientia; at the very most he sometimes read a page or two of the De Cultu Feminarum where Tertullian exhorts women not to adorn their persons with jewels and precious stuffs, and forbids them to use cosmetics because these attempt to correct and improve on Nature.
These ideas, diametrically opposed to his own, brought a smile to his lips, and he recalled the part played by Tertullian as Bishop of Carthage, a role which he considered pregnant with pleasant day-dreams. It was, in fact, the man more than his works that attracted him.
Living in times of appalling storm and stress, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing high-priest of Emesa, Elagabalus, he had gone on calmly writing his sermons, his dogmatic treatises, his apologies and homilies, while the Roman Empire tottered, and while the follies of Asia and the vices of paganism swept all before them. With perfect composure he had gone on preaching carnal abstinence, frugality of diet, sobriety of dress, at the same time as Elagabalus was treading in silver dust and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara and his clothes studded with jewels, working at women’s tasks in the midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picked for choice from among his barbers, scullions and charioteers.
This contrast delighted Des Esseintes. He knew that this was the point at which the Latin language, which had attained supreme maturity in Petronius, began to break up; the literature of Christianity was asserting itself, matching its novel ideas with new words, unfamiliar constructions, unknown verbs, adjectives of super-subtle meaning and finally abstract nouns, which had hitherto been rare in the Roman tongue and which Tertullian had been one of the first to use.
However, this deliquescence, which was carried on after Tertullian’s death by his pupil St Cyprian, by Arnobius, by the obscure Lactantius, was an unattractive process. It was a slow and partial decay, retarded by awkward attempts to return to the emphasis of Cicero’s periods; as yet it had not acquired that special gamey flavour which in the fourth century – and even more in the following centuries – the odour of Christianity was to give to the pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World, falling apart while the Empires succumbed to the barbarian onslaught and the accumulated pus of ages.
The art of the third century was represented in his library by a single Christian poet, Commodian of Gaza. His Carmen Apologeticum, written in the year 259, is a collection of moral maxims twisted into acrostics, composed in rude hexameters, divided by a caesura after the fashion of heroic verse, written without any respect for quantity or hiatus and often provided with the sort of rhymes of which church Latin could later offer numerous examples.
This strained, sombre verse, this mild, uncivilized poetry, full of everyday expressions and words robbed of their original meaning, appealed to him; it interested him even more than the already over-ripe, delightfully decadent style of the historians Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victor, the letter-writer Symmachus and the compilator and grammarian Macrobius, and he even preferred it to the properly scanned verse and the superbly variegated language of Claudian, Rutilius and Ausonius.
These last were in their day the masters of their art; they filled the dying Empire with their cries – the Christian Ausonius with his Cento Nuptialis and his long, elaborate poem on the Moselle; Rutilius with his hymns to the glory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks and his account of a journey across the Alps into Gaul, in which he sometimes manages to convey certain visual impressions, the landscapes hazily reflected in water, the mirage effect of the vapours, the mists swirling round the mountain tops.
As for Claudian, he appears as a sort of avatar of Lucan, dominating the entire fourth century with the tremendous trumpeting of his verse; a poet hammering out a brilliant, sonorous hexameter on his anvil, beating out each epithet with a single blow amid showers of sparks, attaining a certain grandeur, filling his work with a powerful breath of life. With the Western Empire crumbling to its ruin all about him, amid the horror of the repeated massacres occurring on every side, and under the threat of invasion by the barbarians now pressing in their hordes against the creaking gates of the Empire, he calls Antiquity back to life, sings of the Rape of Proserpine, daubs his canvas with glowing colours and goes by with all his lights blazing through the darkness closing in upon the world.
Paganism lives again in him, sounding its last proud fanfare, lifting its last great poet high above the floodwaters of Christianity which are henceforth going to submerge the language completely and hold absolute and eternal sway over literature – with Paulinus, the pupil of Ausonius; with the Spanish priest Juvencus, who paraphrases the Gospels in verse; with Victorinus, author of the Machabaei; with Sanctus Burdigalensis, who in an eclogue imitated from Virgil makes the herdsmen Egon and Buculus bewail the maladies afflicting their flocks. Then there are the saints, a whole series of saints – Hilary of Poitiers, who championed the faith of Nicaea and was called the Athanasius of the West; Ambrosius, the author of indigestible homilies, the tiresome Christian Cicero; Damasus, the manufacturer of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate; and his adversary Vigilantius of Comminges, who attacks the cult of the saints, the abuse of miracles, the practice of fasting, and already preaches against monastic vows and the celibacy of the priesthood, using arguments that will be repeated down the ages.
Finally, in the fifth century, there comes Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.
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