Joris-Karl Huysmans'

AGAINST NATURE

 

Translated from À Rebours by Robert Baldick

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AGAINST NATURE

 

                                                            I must rejoice beyond the bounds

                                                            of time ... though the world may shudder at

                                                            my joy, and in its coarseness know

                                                            not what I mean.

                                                                                           JAN VAN RUYSBROECK

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Digital electronic transcription by John O’Loughlin

 

Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media

 

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PROLOGUE

 

JUDGING by the few portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps, the Floressas des Esseintes family had been composed in olden times of sturdy campaigners with forbidding faces.  Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders, they were an alarming sight with their piercing eyes, their sweeping mustachios, and their bulging chests filling the enormous cuirasses which they wore.

      These were the founders of the family; the portraits of their descendants were missing.  There was, in fact, a gap in the pictorial pedigree, with only one canvas to bridge it, only one face to join past and present.  It was a strange, sly face, with pale, drawn features; the cheekbones were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge, the hair was plastered down and bound with a string of pearls, and the thin, painted neck emerged from the starched pleats of a ruff.

      In this picture of one of the closest friends of the Duc d'Épernon and the Marquis d'O, the defects of an impoverished stock and the excess of lymph in the blood were already apparent.

      Since then, the degeneration of this ancient house had clearly followed a regular course, with the men becoming progressively less manly; and over the last two hundred years, as if to complete the ruinous process, the Des Esseintes had taken to intermarrying among themselves, thus using up what little vigour they had left.

      Now, of this family which had once been so large that it occupied nearly every domain in the Ile de France and La Brie, only one descendant was still living; the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung, with hollow cheeks, cold eyes of steely blue, a nose which was turned up but straight, and thin, papery hands.

      By some freak of heredity, this last scion of the family bore a striking resemblance to his distant ancestor the court favourite, for he had the same exceptionally fair pointed beard, and the same ambiguous expression, at once weary and wily.

      His childhood had been overshadowed by sickness.  However, despite the threat of scrofula and recurrent bouts of fever, he had succeeded in clearing the hurdle of adolescence with the aid of good nursing and fresh air; and after this his nerves had rallied, had overcome the languor and lethargy of chlorosis, and had brought his body to its full physical development.

      His mother, a tall, pale, silent woman, died of nervous exhaustion.  Then it was his father's turn to succumb to some obscure illness when Des Esseintes was nearly seventeen.

      There was no gratitude or affection associated with the memories he retained of his parents: only fear.  His father, who normally resided in Paris, was almost a complete stranger; and he remembered his mother chiefly as a still, supine figure in a darkened bedroom in the Château de Lourps.  It was only rarely that husband and wife met, and all that he could recall of these occasions was a drab impression of his parents sitting facing each other over a table that was lighted only be a deeply shaded lamp, for the Duchess had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise.  In the semi-darkness they would exchange one or two words at the most, and then the Duke would unconcernedly slip away to catch the first available train.

      At the Jesuit school to which Jean was sent to be educated, life was easier and pleasanter.  The good Fathers made a point of cosseting the boy, whose intelligence amazed them; but in spite of all their efforts, they could not get him to pursue a regular course of study.  He took readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in the Latin tongue; but on the other hand he was absolutely incapable of construing the simplest sentence in Greek, revealed no aptitude whatever for modern languages, and displayed blank incomprehension when anyone tried to teach him the first principles of science.

      His family showed little interest in his doings.  Occasionally his father would come to see him at school, but all he had to say was: 'Good day, goodbye, be good, and work hard.'  The summer holidays he spent at Lourps, but his presence in the Château failed to awaken his mother from her reveries; she scarcely noticed him, or if she did, gazed at him for a few moments with a sad smile and then sank back again into the artificial night which the heavy curtains drawn across the windows created in her bedroom.

      The servants were old and tired, and the boy was left to his own devices.  On rainy days he used to browse through the books in the library, and when it was fine he would spend the afternoon exploring the local countryside.

      His chief delight was to go down into the valley to Jutigny, a village lying at the foot of the hills, a little cluster of cottages wearing thatch bonnets decorated with sprigs of stonecrop and patches of moss.  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 clear-sighted 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 though 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 townhouse in the 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 their 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 forever 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 lycées, 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 east.  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 Nicole 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 only one - 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 pleasure 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.

      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.  But this was too much for him.  His overfatigued senses, as if satisfied that they had tasted every imaginable experience, sank into a state of lethargy; and impotence was not far off.

      When he came to his senses again, he found that he was utterly alone, completely disillusioned, abominably tired; and he longed to make an end of it all, prevented only by the cowardice of his flesh.

      The idea of hiding away far from human society, of shutting himself up in some snug retreat, of deadening the thunderous din of life's inexorable activity, just as people deadened the noise of traffic by laying down straw outside a sick person's house - this idea tempted him more than ever.

      Besides, there was another reason why he should lose no time in coming to a decision: taking stock of his fortune, he discovered to his horror that in extravagant follies and riotous living he had squandered the greater part of his patrimony, and that what remained was invested in land and brought in only a paltry revenue.

      He decided to sell the Château de Lourps, which he no longer visited and where he would leave behind him no pleasant memories or fond regrets.  He also realized his other assets and with the money he obtained bought sufficient government stocks to assure him of an annual income of fifty thousand francs, keeping back a tidy sum to buy and furnish the little house where he proposed to steep himself in peace and quiet for the rest of his life.

      He scoured the suburbs of Paris and eventually discovered a villa for sale on the hillside above Fontenay-aux-Roses, standing in a lonely spot close to the Fort and far from all neighbours.  This was the answer to his dreams, for in this district which had so far remained unspoilt by rampaging Parisians, he would be safe from molestation: the wretched state of communications, barely maintained by a comical railway at the far end of the town and a few little trams which came and went as they pleased, reassured him on this point.  Thinking of the new existence he was going to fashion for himself, he felt a glow of pleasure at the idea that here it would be too far out for the tidal wave of Parisian life to reach him, and yet near enough for the proximity of the capital to strengthen him in his solitude.  For, since a man has only to know he cannot get to a certain spot to be seized with a desire to go there, by not entirely barring the way back he was guarding against any hankering after human society, any nostalgic regrets.

      He set the local mason to work on the house he had bought; then suddenly, one day, without telling anyone of his plans, he got rid of his furniture, dismissed his servants, and disappeared without leaving any address with the concierge.