There were other drawings which plunged even deeper into the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions. Here there was an enormous dice blinking a mournful eye; there, studies of bleak and arid landscapes, of burnt-up plains, of earth heaving and erupting into fiery clouds, into livid and stagnant skies. Sometimes Redon’s subjects actually seemed to be borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times: a monstrous flora spread over the rocks, and among the ubiquitous boulders and glacier mud-streams wandered bipeds whose apish features – the heavy jaws, the protruding brows, the receding forehead, the flattened top of the skull – recalled the head of our ancestors early in the Quaternary Period, when man was still fructivorous and speechless, a contemporary of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the cave-bear. These drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.

In fact, there were some of these faces, dominated by great wild eyes, and some of these bodies, magnified beyond measure or distorted as if seen through a carafe of water, that evoked in Des Esseintes’s mind recollections of typhoid fever, memories which had somehow stayed with him of the feverish nights and frightful nightmares of his childhood.

Overcome by an indefinable malaise at the sight of these drawings – the same sort of malaise he experienced when he looked at certain rather similar Proverbs by Goya,6 or read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, whose terrifying or hallucinating effects Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed into a different art – he would rub his eyes and turn to gaze at a radiant figure which, in the midst of all these frenzied pictures, stood out calm and serene: the figure of Melancholy, seated on some rocks before a disk-like sun, in a mournful and despondent attitude.

His gloom would then be dissipated, as if by magic; a sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take pos­session of his thoughts, and he would meditate for hours in front of this work, which, with its splashes of gouache amid the heavy pencil-lines, introduced a refreshing note of liquid green and pale gold into the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings.

Besides this collection of Redon’s works, covering nearly every panel in the vestibule, he had hung in his bedroom an extravagant sketch by Theotocopuli,7 a study of Christ in which the drawing was exaggerated, the colouring crude and bizarre, the general effect one of frenzied energy, an example of the painter’s second manner, when he was obsessed by the idea of avoiding any further resemblance to Titian.

This sinister picture, with its boot-polish blacks and cadaverous greens, fitted in with certain ideas Des Esseintes held on the subject of bedroom furniture and decoration.

There were, in his opinion, only two ways of arranging a bedroom: you could either make it a place for sensual pleasure, for nocturnal delectation, or else you could fit it out as a place for sleep and solitude, a setting for quiet meditation, a sort of oratory.

In the first case, the Louis-Quinze style was the obvious choice for people of delicate sensibility, exhausted by mental stimulation above all else. The eighteenth century is, in fact, the only age which has known how to develop woman in a wholly depraved atmosphere, shaping its furniture on the model of her charms, imitating her passionate contortions and spasmodic convulsions in the curves and convolutions of wood and copper, spicing the sugary languor of the blonde with its bright, light furnishings, and mitigating the salty savour of the brunette with tapestries of delicate, watery, almost insipid hues.

In his Paris house he had had a bedroom decorated in just this style, and furnished with the great white lacquered bed which provides that added titillation, that final touch of depravity so precious to the experienced voluptuary, excited by the spurious chastity and hypocritical modesty of the Greuze figures, by the pretended purity of a bed of vice apparently designed for innocent children and young virgins.

In the other case – and now that he meant to break with the irritating memories of his past life, this was the only one for him – the bedroom had to be turned into a facsimile of a monastery cell. But here difficulties piled up before him, for as far as he was concerned, he categorically refused to put up with the austere ugliness that characterizes all penitential prayer-houses.

After turning the question over in his mind, he eventually came to the conclusion that what he should try to do was this: to employ cheerful means to attain a drab end, or rather, to impress on the room as a whole, treated in this way, a certain elegance and distinction, while yet preserving its essential ugliness. He decided, in fact, to reverse the optical illusion of the stage, where cheap finery plays the part of rich and costly fabrics; to achieve precisely the opposite effect, by using magnificent materials to give the impression of old rags; in short, to fit up a Trappist’s cell that would look like the genuine article, but would of course be nothing of the sort.

He set about it in the following way: to imitate the yellow distemper beloved by church and state alike, he had the walls hung with saffron silk; and to represent the chocolate-brown dado normally found in this sort of room, he covered the lower part of the walls with strips of kingwood, a dark-brown wood with a purple sheen. The effect was delightful, recalling – though not too clearly – the unattractive crudity of the model he was copying and adapting. The ceiling was similarly covered with white holland, which had the appearance of plaster without its bright, shiny look; as for the cold tiles of the floor, he managed to hit them off quite well, thanks to a carpet patterned in red squares, with the wood dyed white in places where sandals and boots could be supposed to have left their mark.

He furnished this room with a little iron bedstead, a mock hermit’s bed, made of old wrought iron, but highly polished and set off at head and foot with an intricate design of tulips and vine-branches intertwined, a design taken from the balustrade of the great staircase of an old mansion.

By way of a bedside table, he installed an antique priedieu, the inside of which could hold a chamber-pot while the top supported a euchologion; against the opposite wall he set a churchwardens’ pew, with a great openwork canopy and misericords carved in the solid wood; and to provide illumination, he had some altar candlesticks fitted with real wax tapers which he bought from a firm specializing in ecclesiastical requirements, for he professed a genuine antipathy to all modern forms of lighting, whether paraffin, shale-oil, stearin candles or gas, finding them all too crude and garish for his liking.

Before falling asleep in the morning, as he lay in bed with his head on the pillow, he would gaze at his Theotocopuli, whose harsh colouring did something to dampen the gaiety of the yellow silk hangings and put them in a graver mood; and at these times he found it easy to imagine that he was living hundreds of miles from Paris, far removed from the world of men, in the depths of some secluded monastery.

After all, it was easy enough to sustain this particular illusion, in that the life he was leading was very similar to the life of a monk. He thus enjoyed all the benefits of cloistered confinement while avoiding the disadvantages – the army-style discipline, the lack of comfort, the dirt, the promiscuity, the monotonous idleness. Just as he had made his cell into a warm, luxurious bedroom, so he had ensured that his everyday existence should be pleasant and comfortable, sufficiently occupied and in no way restricted.

Like an eremite, he was ripe for solitude, exhausted by life and expecting nothing more of it; like a monk again, he was overwhelmed by an immense weariness, by a longing for peace and quiet, by a desire to have no further contact with the heathen, who in his eyes comprised all utilitarians and fools.

In short, although he had no vocation for the state of grace, he was conscious of a genuine fellow-feeling for those who were shut up in religious houses, persecuted by a vindictive society that cannot forgive either the proper contempt they feel for it or their averred intention of redeeming and expiating by years of silence the ever-increasing licentiousness of its silly, senseless conversations.

CHAPTER 6

Buried deep in a vast wing-chair, his feet resting on the pear-shaped, silver-gilt supports of the andirons, his slippers toasting in front of the crackling logs that shot out bright tongues of flame as if they felt the furious blast of a bellows, Des Esseintes put the old quarto he had been reading down on a table, stretched himself, lit a cigarette and gave himself up to a delicious reverie. His mind was soon going full tilt in a pursuit of certain recollections which had lain low for months, but which had suddenly been started by a name recurring, for no apparent reason, to his memory.

Once again he could see, with surprising clearness, his friend D’Aigurande’s embarrassment when he had been forced to confess to a gathering of confirmed bachelors that he had just completed the final arrangements for his wedding. There was a general outcry, and his friends tried to dissuade him with a frightening description of the horrors of sharing a bed. But it was all in vain: he had taken leave of his senses, believed that his future wife was a woman of intelligence and maintained that he had discovered in her quite exceptional qualities of tenderness and devotion.

Des Esseintes had been the only one among all these young men to encourage him in his resolve, and this he did as soon as he learnt that his friend’s fiancée wanted to live on the corner of a newly constructed boulevard, in one of those modern flats built on a circular plan.

Persuaded of the merciless power of petty vexations, which can have a more baneful effect on sanguine souls than the great tragedies of life, and taking account of the fact that D’Aigurande had no private means, while his wife’s dowry was practically non-existent, he saw in this innocent whim an endless source of ridiculous misfortunes.

As he had foreseen, D’Aigurande proceeded to buy rounded pieces of furniture – console-tables sawn away at the back to form a semi-circle, curtain-poles curved like bows, carpets cut on a crescent pattern – until he had furnished the whole flat with things made to order. He spent twice as much as anybody else; and then, when his wife, finding herself short of money for new dresses, got tired of living in this rotunda, and took herself off to a flat with ordinary square rooms at a lower rent, not a single piece of furniture would fit in or stand up properly. Soon the bothersome things were giving rise to endless annoyances; the bond between husband and wife, already worn thin by the inevitable irritations of a shared life, grew more tenuous week by week; and there were angry scenes and mutual recriminations as they came to realize the impossibility of living in a sitting-room where sofas and console-tables would not go against the walls and wobbled at the slightest touch, however many blocks and wedges were used to steady them. There was not enough money to pay for alterations, and even if there had been, these would have been almost impossible to carry out. Everything became a ground for high words and squabbles, from the drawers that had stuck in the rickety furniture to the petty thefts of the maid-servant, who took advantage of the constant quarrels between her master and mistress to raid the cash-box. In short, their life became unbearable; he went out in search of amusement, while she looked to adultery to provide compensation for the drizzly dreariness of her life. Finally, by mutual consent, they cancelled their lease and petitioned for a legal separation.

‘My plan of campaign was right in every particular,’ Des Esseintes had told himself on hearing the news, with the satisfaction of a strategist whose manoeuvres, worked out long beforehand, have resulted in victory.

Now, sitting by his fireside and thinking about the break-up of this couple whose union he had encouraged with his good advice, he threw a fresh armful of wood into the hearth and promptly started dreaming again.

More memories, belonging to the same order of ideas, now came crowding in on him.

Some years ago, he remembered he had been walking along the Rue de Rivoli one evening, when he had come across a young scamp of sixteen or so, a peaky-faced, sharp-eyed child, as attractive in his way as any girl. He was sucking hard at a cigarette, the paper of which had burst where bits of the coarse tobacco were poking through. Cursing away, the boy was striking kitchen matches on his thigh; not one of them would light and soon he had used them all up. Catching sight of Des Esseintes, who was standing watching him, he came up, touched his cap and politely asked for a light. Des Esseintes offered him some of his own scented Dubèques, got into conversation with the boy and persuaded him to tell the story of his life.

Nothing could have been more banal: his name was Auguste Langlois, he worked for a cardboard-manufacturer, he had lost his mother and his father beat him black and blue.

Des Esseintes listened thoughtfully.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he said, and took him to a café where he regaled him with a few glasses of heady punch. These the boy drank without a word.

‘Look here,’ said Des Esseintes suddenly; ‘how would you like a bit of fun tonight? I’ll foot the bill, of course.’ And he had taken the youngster off to an establishment on the third floor of a house in the Rue Mosnier, where a certain Madame Laure kept an assortment of pretty girls in a series of crimson cubicles furnished with circular mirrors, couches and wash-basins.

There a wonderstruck Auguste, twisting his cap in his hands, had stood gaping at a battalion of women whose painted mouths opened all together to exclaim:

‘What a duck! Isn’t he sweet!’

‘But dearie, you’re not old enough,’ said a big brunette, a girl with prominent eyes and a hook nose who occupied at Madame Laure’s the indispensable position of the handsome Jewess.

Meanwhile Des Esseintes, who was obviously quite at home in this place, had made himself comfortable and was quietly chatting with the mistress of the house. But he broke off for a moment to speak to the boy.

‘Don’t be so scared, stupid,’ he said. ‘Go on, take your pick – remember this is on me.’

He gave a gentle push to the lad, who flopped on to a divan between two of the women. At a sign from Madame Laure, they drew a little closer together, covering Auguste’s knees with their peignoirs and cuddling up to him so that he breathed in the warm, heady scent of their powdered shoulders. He was sitting quite still now, flushed and dry-mouthed, his downcast eyes darting from under their lashes inquisitive glances that were all directed at the upper part of the girls’ thighs.

Vanda, the handsome Jewess, suddenly gave him a kiss and a little good advice, telling him to do whatever his parents told him, while all the time her hands were wandering over the boy’s body; his expression changed and he lay back in a kind of swoon, with his head on her breast.

‘So it’s not on your own account that you’ve come here tonight,’ said Madame Laure to Des Esseintes. ‘But where the devil did you get hold of that baby?’ she added, as Auguste disappeared with the handsome Jewess.

‘Why, in the street, my dear.’

‘But you’re not tight,’ muttered the old lady.