I
OVER two months elapsed before Des Esseintes
could immerse himself in the peaceful silence of his house at Fontenay, for purchases of all sorts still kept him
perambulating the streets and ransacking the shops from one end of Paris to the
other. And this was in spite of the fact
that he had already made endless inquiries and given considerable thought to
the matter before entrusting his new home to the decorators.
He had long been a connoisseur
of colours both simple and subtle. In
former years, when he had been in the habit of inviting women to his house, he
had fitted out a boudoir with delicate carved furniture in pale Japanese
camphor-wood under a sort of canopy of pink Indian satin, so that their flesh
borrowed soft warm tints from the light which hidden lamps filtered through the
awning.
This room, where mirror
echoed mirror, and every wall reflected an endless succession of pink boudoirs,
had been the talk of all his mistresses, who loved steeping their nakedness in
this warm bath of rosy light and breathing in the aromatic odours given off by
the camphor-wood. But quite apart from
the beneficial effect which this tinted atmosphere had in bringing a ruddy
flush to complexions worn and discoloured by the habitual use of cosmetics and
the habitual abuse of the night hours, he himself enjoyed, in this voluptuous
setting, peculiar satisfactions - pleasures which were in a way heightened and
intensified by the recollection of past afflictions and bygone troubles.
Thus, in hateful and
contemptuous memory of his childhood, he had suspended from the ceiling of this
room a little silver cage containing a cricket which chirped as other crickets
had once chirped among the embers in the fireplaces at the Château de Lourps. Whenever he
heard this familiar sound, all the silent evenings of constraint he had spent
in his mother's company and all the misery he had endured in the course of a
lonely, unhappy childhood came back to haunt him. And when the movements of the woman he was
mechanically caressing suddenly dispelled these memories and her words or
laughter brought him back to the present reality of the boudoir, then he soul
was swept by tumultuous emotions: a longing to take vengeance for the boredom
inflicted on him in the past, a craving to sully what memories he retained of
his family with acts of sensual depravity, a furious desire to expend his
lustful frenzy on cushions of soft flesh and to drain the cup of sensuality to
its last and bitterest dregs.
At other times, when he
was weighed down by splenetic boredom, and the rainy autumn weather brought on
an aversion for the streets, for his house, for the dirty yellow sky and the
tar-macadam clouds, then he took refuge in this room, set the cage swinging
gently to and fro and watched its movements reflected ad infinitum in
the mirrors on the walls, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage
itself was not moving but that the boudoir was tossing and turning, waltzing
round the house in a dizzy whirl of pink.
Then, in the days when
he had thought it necessary to advertise his individuality, he had decorated
and furnished the public rooms of his house with ostentatious oddity. The drawing-room, for example, had been partitioned
off into a series of niches, which were styled to harmonize vaguely, by means
of subtly analogous colours that were gay or sombre, delicate or barbarous,
with the character of his favourite works in Latin and French. He would then settle down to read in
whichever of these niches seemed to correspond most exactly to the peculiar
essence of the book which had taken his fancy.
His final caprice had
been to fit up a lofty hall in which to receive his tradesmen. They used to troop in and take their places
side by side in a row of church stalls; then he would ascend an imposing pulpit
and preach them a sermon on dandyism, adjuring his bootmakers
and tailors to conform strictly to his encyclicals in matters of cut, and
threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they did not follow to the
letter the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.
By these means he won a
considerable reputation as an eccentric - a reputation which he crowned by
wearing suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats, by sticking a bunch
of Parma violets in his shirt-front in lieu of a cravat, and by entertaining
men of letters to dinners which were greatly talked about. One of these meals, modelled on an
eighteenth- century original, had been a funeral feast to mark the most
ludicrous of personal misfortunes. The
dining-room, draped in black, opened out on to a garden metamorphosed for the
occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with
black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses
and pines. The dinner itself was served
on a black cloth adorned with baskets of violets and scabious;
candelabra shed an eerie green light over the table and tapers flickered in the
chandeliers.
While a hidden orchestra
played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in
cloth of silver embroidered with tears.
Dining off
black-bordered plates, the company had enjoyed turtle soup, Russian rye bread,
ripe olives from
On the invitations,
which were similar to those sent out before more solemn obsequies, this dinner
was described as a funeral banquet in memory of the host's virility, lately but
only temporarily deceased.
In time, however, his
taste for these extravagant caprices, of which he had once been so proud, died
a natural death; and nowadays he shrugged his shoulders in contempt whenever he
recalled the puerile displays of eccentricity he had given, the extraordinary
clothes he had worn, and the bizarre furnishing schemes he had devised. The new home he was now planning, this time
for his own personal pleasure and not to astonish other people, was going to be
comfortably though curiously appointed: a peaceful and unique abode specially
designed to meet the needs of the solitary life he intended to lead.
When the architect had
fitted up the house at Fontenay in accordance with
his wishes, and when all that remained was to settle the question of furniture
and decoration, Des Esseintes once again gave long
and careful consideration to the entire series of available colours.
What he wanted was
colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked
crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding
that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly
roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a
peculiar pleasure from being in a well lighted room when all the surrounding
houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity
may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction
familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains
to find that all around them the world is dark, silent, and dead.
Slowly, one by one, he
went through the various colours.
Blue he remembered,
takes on an artificial green tint by candlelight; if a dark blue like indigo or
cobalt, it becomes black; if pale, it turns to grey; and if soft and true like
turquoise, it goes dull and cold. There
could, therefore, be no question of making it the keynote of a room, though it
might be used to help out another colour.
On the other hand,
under the same conditions the iron greys grow sullen and heavy; the pearl greys
lose their blue sheen and are metamorphosed into a dirty white; the browns
become cold and sleepy; and as for the dark greens such as emperor green and
myrtle green, they react like the dark blues and turn quite black. Only the pale greens remained - peacock
green, for instance, or the cinnabar and lacquer greens - but then artificial
light kills the blue in them and leaves only the yellow, which for its part
lacks clarity and consistency.
Nor was there any point
in thinking of such delicate tints as salmon pink, maize, and rose; for their
very effeminacy would run counter to his ideas of complete isolation. Now again was it any use considering the
various shades of purple, which with one exception lose their lustre in
candlelight. That exception is plum,
which somehow survives intact, but then what a muddy reddish hue it is,
unpleasantly like lees of wine! Besides,
it struck him as utterly futile to resort to this range of tints, in so far as
it is possible to see purple by ingesting a specified amount of santonin, and thus it becomes a simple matter for anyone to
change the colour of his walls without laying a finger on them.
Having rejected all
these colours, he was left with only three: red, orange, and yellow.
Of the three, he
preferred orange, so confirming by his own example the truth of a theory to
which he attributed almost mathematical validity: to wit, that there exists a
close correspondence between the sensual make-up of a person with a truly
artistic temperament and whatever colour that person reacts to most strongly
and sympathetically.
In fact, leaving out of
account the majority of men, whose coarse retinas perceive neither the cadences
peculiar to different colours nor the mysterious charm of their gradation;
leaving out also those bourgeois optics that are insensible to the pomp and
glory of the clear, bright colours; and considering only those people with
delicate eyes that have undergone the education of libraries and art-galleries,
it seemed to him an undeniable fact that anyone who dreams of the ideal,
prefers illusion to reality, and calls for veils to clothe the naked truth, is
almost certain to appreciate the soothing caress of blue and its cognates, such
as mauve, lilac, and pearl grey, always provided they retain their delicacy and
do not pass the point where they change their personalities and turn into pure
violets and stark greys.
The hearty, blustering
type on the other hand, the handsome, full-blooded sort,
the strapping he-men who scorn the formalities of life and rush straight for
their goal, losing their heads completely, these generally delight in the vivid
glare of the reds and yellows, in the percussion effect of the vermilions and
chromes, which blind their eyes and intoxicate their senses.
As for those gaunt,
febrile creatures of feeble constitution and nervous disposition whose sensual
appetite craves dishes that are smoked and seasoned, their eyes almost always
prefer that most morbid and irritating of colours, with its acid glow and
unnatural splendour - orange.
There could therefore
be no doubt whatever as to Des Esseintes' final
choice; but indubitable difficulties still remained to be solved. If red and yellow become more pronounced in
artificial light, the same is not true of their compound, orange, which often
flares up into a fiery nasturtium red.
He carefully studied
all its different shades by candlelight and finally discovered one which he
considered likely to keep its balance and answer his requirements.
Once these
preliminaries were over, he made every effort to avoid, in his study at any
rate, the use of Oriental rugs and fabrics, which had become so commonplace and
vulgar now that upstart tradesmen could buy them in the bargain basement of any
department-store.
The walls he eventually
decided to bind like books in large-grained crushed morocco: skins from the
Cape glazed by means of strong steel plates under a powerful press.
When the lining of the
walls had been completed, he had the mouldings and the tall plinths lacquered a
deep indigo, similar to the colour coachbuilders use for the panels of carriage
bodies. The ceiling, which was slightly
covered, was also covered in morocco; and set in the middle of the orange
leather, like a huge circular window open to the sky, there was a piece of
royal-blue silk from an ancient cope on which silver seraphim had been depicted
in angelic flight by the weavers' guild of Cologne.
After everything had
been arranged according to plan, these various colours came to a quiet
understanding with each other at nightfall: the blue of the woodwork was
stabilized and, so to speak, warmed up by the surrounding orange tints, which
for their part glowed with undiminished brilliance, maintained and in a way
intensified by the close proximity of the blue.
As to furniture, Des Esseintes did not have to undertake any laborious
treasure-hunts, in so far as the only luxuries he intended to have in this room
were rare books and flowers. Leaving
himself free to adorn any bare walls later on with a few drawings and
paintings, he confined himself for the present to fitting up ebony bookshelves
and bookcases round the greater part of the room, strewing tiger skins and blue
fox furs about the floor, and installing beside a massive moneychanger's table
of the fifteenth century, several deep-seated wing-armchairs and an old church
lectern of wrought iron, one of those antique singing-desks on which deacons of
old used to place the antiphonary and which now supported one of the weighty
folios of Du Cange's Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinatis.
The windows, with panes
of bluish crackle-glass or gilded bottle-punts which shut out the view and
admitted only a very dim light, were dressed with curtains cut out of old
ecclesiastical stoles, whose faded gold threads were almost invisible against
the dull red material.
As a finishing touch,
in the centre of the chimney-piece, which was likewise dressed in sumptuous
silk from a Florentine dalmatic, and flanked by two Byzantine monstrances of gilded copper which had originally come from
the Abbaye-au-Bois at Bievre,
there stood a magnificent triptych whose separate panels had been fashioned to
resemble lace-work. This now contained,
framed under glass, copied on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and
marvellously illuminated, three pieces by Baudelaire:
on the right and left, the sonnets La Mort des amants
and L'Ennemi, and in the middle, the prose
poem bearing the English title Anywhere out of the World.