Then, after a moment’s thought, she gave an understanding, motherly smile.

‘Ah, now I see! You rascal, so you like’em young, do you?’

Des Esseintes shrugged his shoulders.

‘No, you’re wide of the mark there,’ he said; ‘very wide of the mark. The truth is that I’m simply trying to make a murderer of the boy. See if you can follow my line of argument. The lad’s a virgin and he’s reached the age where the blood starts coming to the boil. He could, of course, just run after the little girls of his neighbourhood, stay decent and still have his bit of fun, enjoy his little share of the tedious happiness open to the poor. But by bringing him here, by plunging him into luxury such as he’s never known and will never forget, and by giving him the same treat every fortnight, I hope to get him into the habit of these pleasures which he can’t afford. Assuming that it will take three months for them to become absolutely indispensable to him – and by spacing them out as I do, I avoid the risk of jading his appetite – well, at the end of those three months, I stop the little allowance I’m going to pay you in advance for being nice to the boy. And to get the money to pay for his visits here, he’ll turn burglar, he’ll do anything if it helps him on to one of your divans in one of your gaslit rooms.

‘Looking on the bright side of things, I hope that, one fine day, he’ll kill the gentleman who turns up unexpectedly just as he’s breaking open his desk. On that day my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white.’

The woman gazed at him with open-eyed amazement.

‘Ah, there you are!’ he exclaimed, as he caught sight of Auguste sneaking back into the room, all red and sheepish, and hiding behind his Jewess. ‘Come on, my boy, it’s getting late. Say good night to the ladies.’

Going downstairs, he explained to him that once a fortnight he could pay a visit to Madame Laure’s without spending a sou. And then as they stood outside on the pavement, he looked the bewildered child in the face and said:

‘We shan’t see each other again. Hurry off home to your father, whose hand must be itching for work to do, and remember this almost evangelic dictum: Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.’

‘Good night, sir.’

‘One other thing. Whatever you do, show a little gratitude for what I’ve done for you, and let me know as soon as you can how you’re getting on – preferably through the columns of the Police Gazette.’

Now, sitting by the fire and stirring the glowing embers, he muttered to himself:

‘The little Judas! To think that I’ve never once seen his name in the papers! It’s true, of course, that I haven’t been able to play a close game, in that I couldn’t guard against certain obvious contingencies – the danger of old mother Laure swindling me, pocketing the money and not delivering the goods; the chance of one of the women taking a fancy to Auguste, so that when his three months were up she let him have his fun on the nod; and even the possibility that the handsome Jewess’s exotic vices had already scared the boy, who may have been too young and impatient to bear her slow preliminaries or enjoy her savage climaxes. So unless he’s been up against the law since I came to Fontenay and stopped reading the papers, I’ve been diddled.’

He got to his feet and took a few turns round the room.

‘That would be a pity, all the same,’ he went on, ‘because all I was doing was parabolizing secular instruction, allegorizing universal education, which is well on the way to turning everybody into a Langlois: instead of permanently and mercifully putting out the eyes of the poor, it does its best to force them wide open, so that they may see all around them lives of less merit and greater comfort, pleasures that are keener and more voluptuous, and therefore sweeter and more desirable.

‘And the fact is,’ he added, following this line of thought still further, ‘the fact is that, pain being one of the consequences of education, in that it grows greater and sharper with the growth of ideas, it follows that the more we try to polish the minds and refine the nervous systems of the under-privileged, the more we shall be developing in their hearts the atrociously active germs of hatred and moral suffering.’

The lamps were smoking. He turned them up and looked at his watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. He lit a cigarette and gave himself up again to the perusal, interrupted by his dreaming, of the old Latin poem, De Laude Castitatis, written in the reign of Gondebald by Avitus, Metropolitan Bishop of Vienne.1

CHAPTER 7

Beginning on the night when, for no apparent reason, he had conjured up the melancholy memory of Auguste Langlois, Des Esseintes lived his whole life over again.

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.

He had to live on himself, to feed on his own substance, like those animals that lie torpid in a hole all winter. Solitude had acted on his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a languor haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively submitted, without even trying to get away.

The confused mass of reading and meditation on artistic themes that he had accumulated since he had been on his own like a barrage to hold back the current of old memories, had suddenly been carried away, and the flood was let loose, sweeping away the present and the future, submerging everything under the waters of the past, covering his mind with a great expanse of melancholy, on the surface of which there drifted, like ridiculous bits of flotsam, trivial episodes of his existence, absurdly insignificant incidents.

The book he happened to be holding would fall into his lap, and he would give himself up to a fearful and disgusted review of his dead life, the years pivoting round the memory of Auguste and Madame Laure as around a solid fact, a stake planted in the midst of swirling waters. What a time that had been! – a time of elegant parties, of race-meetings and card-games, of love-potions ordered in advance and served punctually on the stroke of midnight in his pink boudoir! Faces, looks, meaningless words came back to him with the haunting persistence of those popular tunes you suddenly find yourself humming and just as suddenly and unconsciously you forget.

This phase lasted only a little while and then his memory took a siesta. He took advantage of this respite to immerse himself once more in his Latin studies, in the hope of effacing every sign, every trace of these recollections. But it was too late to call a halt; a second phase followed almost immediately on the first, a phase dominated by memories of his youth, and particularly the years he had spent with the Jesuit Fathers.

These memories were of a more distant period, yet they were clearer than the others, engraved more deeply and enduringly in his mind; the thickly wooded park, the long paths, the flower-beds, the benches – all the material details were conjured up before him.

Then the gardens filled up, and he heard the shouting of the boys at play, and the laughter of their masters as they joined in, playing tennis with their cassocks hitched up in front, or else chatting with their pupils under the trees without the slightest affectation or pomposity, just as if they were talking to friends of their own age.

He recalled that paternal discipline which deprecated any form of punishment, declined to inflict impositions of five hundred or a thousand lines, was content with having unsatisfactory work done over again while the others were at recreation, resorted more often than not to a mere reprimand and kept the child under active but affectionate surveillance, forever trying to please him, agreeing to whatever walks he suggested on Wednesday afternoons, seizing the opportunity afforded by all the minor feast-days of the Church to add cakes and wine to the ordinary bill of fare or to organize a picnic in the country – a discipline which consisted of reasoning with the pupil instead of brutalizing him, already treating him like a grown man yet still coddling him like a spoilt child.

In this way the Fathers managed to gain a real hold upon their pupils, to mould to some extent the minds they cultivated, to guide them in certain specific directions, to inculcate particular notions and to ensure the desired development of their ideas by means of an insinuating, ingratiating technique which they continued to apply in after-years, doing their best to keep track of their charges in adult life, backing them up in their careers and writing them affectionate letters such as the Dominican Lacordaire wrote to his former pupils at Sorrèze.1

Des Esseintes was well aware of the sort of conditioning to which he had been subjected, but he felt sure that in his case it had been without effect. In the first place, his captious and inquisitive character, his refractory and disputatious nature had saved him from being moulded by the good Fathers’ discipline or indoctrinated by their lessons. Then, once he had left school, his scepticism had grown more acute; his experience of the narrow-minded intolerance of Legitimist society, and his conversations with unintelligent churchwardens and uncouth priests whose blunders tore away the veil the Jesuits had so cunningly woven, had still further fortified his spirit of independence and increased his distrust of any and every form of religious belief.

He considered, in fact, that he had shaken off all his old ties and fetters, and that he differed from the products of lycées and lay boarding-schools in only one respect, namely that he retained pleasant memories of his school and his schoolmasters. And yet, now that he examined his conscience, he began to wonder whether the seed which had fallen on apparently barren ground was not showing signs of germinating.

As a matter of fact, for some days he had been in an indescribably peculiar state of mind. For a brief instant he would believe, and turn instinctively to religion; then, after a moment’s thought, his longing for faith would vanish, though he remained perplexed and uneasy.

Yet he was well aware, on looking into his heart, that he could never feel the humility and contrition of a true Christian; he knew beyond all doubt that the moment of which Lacordaire speaks, that moment of grace ‘when the last ray of light enters the soul and draws together to a common centre all the truths that lie scattered therein’, would never come for him. He felt nothing of that hunger for mortification and prayer without which, if we are to believe the majority of priests, no conversion is possible; nor did he feel any desire to invoke a God whose mercy struck him as extremely problematical. At the same time the affection he still had for his old masters led him to take an interest in their works and doctrines; and the recollection of those inimitable accents of conviction, the passionate voices of those highly intelligent men, made him doubt the quality and strength of his own intellect. The lonely existence he was leading, with no fresh food for thought, no novel experiences, no replenishment of ideas, no exchange of impressions received from the outside world, from mixing with other people and sharing in their life, this unnatural isolation which he stubbornly maintained, encouraged the re-emergence in the form of irritating problems of all manner of questions he had disregarded when he was living in Paris.

Reading the Latin works he loved, works almost all written by bishops and monks, had doubtless done something to bring on this crisis. Steeped in a monastic atmosphere and intoxicated by the fumes of incense, he had become over-excited, and by a natural association of ideas, these books had ended up by driving back the recollections of his life as a young man and bringing out his memories of the years he had spent as a boy with the Jesuit Fathers.

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Des Esseintes said to himself, after a searching attempt to discover how the Jesuit element had worked its way to the surface at Fontenay; ‘ever since boyhood, and without my knowing it, I’ve had this leaven inside me, ready to ferment; the taste I’ve always had for religious objects may be proof of this.’

However, he tried his hardest to persuade himself of the contrary, annoyed at finding that he was no longer master in his own house.