III

 

ONE section of the bookshelves lining the walls of Des Esseintes' blue and orange study was filled with nothing but Latin works - works which minds drilled into conformity be repetitious university lectures lump together under the generic name of 'The Decadence'.

      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 schoolmastering 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 Aristæus who blubbers about bees, and his Æneas, 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 Æneid, 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 allotments of words weighed and measured according to the unalterable laws of a dry, pedantic prosody; it was the structures 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; 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 laconicism, 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, Quintillian 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 a 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.

      Noting what he saw as he saw it, he set forth the day-to- day existences 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 around 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 around 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 Atticæ 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 in 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, 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 daydreams.  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, adjective 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 gamy 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 with 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 around 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 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 Machaboei; with Sanctus Burdigalensis, who in an ecologue 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 Virgilantius 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.  Him Des Esseintes knew only too well, for he was the most revered of all ecclesiastical writers, the founder of Christian orthodoxy, the man whom pious Catholics regard as an oracle, a sovereign authority.  The natural consequence was that he never opened his books anymore, even though he had proclaimed his loathing for this world in his Confessions, and, in his De Civitate Dei, to the accompaniment of pious groans, had tried to assuage the appalling distress of his time with sedative promises of better things to come in the afterlife.  Even in his younger days, when he was studying theology, Des Esseintes had become sick and tired of Augustine's sermons and jeremiads, his theories on grace and predestination, his fights against the schismatic sects.

      He was much happier dipping into the Psychomachia of Prudentius, the inventor of the allegorical poem, a genre destined to enjoy uninterrupted favour in the Middle Ages, or the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, sprinkled with quips and sallies, archaisms and enigmas, captivated him.  He always enjoyed re-reading the panegyrics in which the good Bishop invokes the pagan deities in support of his pompous praises; and in spite of himself, he had to admit to a weakness for the conceits and innuendoes in these poems, turned out by an ingenious mechanic who takes good care of his machine, keeps its component parts well oiled, and if need be can invent new parts which are both intricate and useless.

      After Sidonius, he kept up his acquaintance with the panegyrist Merobaudes; with Sedulius, the author of rhymed poems and alphabetical hymns of which the Church has appropriated certain parts for use in her offices; with Marius Victor, whose gloomy treatise De Perversis Moribus is lit up here and there by lines that shine like phosphorus; with Paulinus of Pella, who composed that icy poem the Eucharisticon; and with Orientius, Bishop of Auch, who in the distichs of his Monitoria inveighs against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he declares, bring down disaster upon the peoples of the world.

      Des Esseintes lost nothing of his interest in the Latin language now that it was rotten through and through and hung like a decaying carcase, losing its limbs, oozing pus, barely keeping, in the general corruption of its body, a few sound parts, which the Christians removed in order to preserve them in the pickling brine of their new idiom.

      The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the awful period when appalling shocks convulsed the world.  The barbarians were ravaging Gaul while Rome, sacked by the Visigoths, felt the chill of death invade her paralysed body and saw her extremities, the East and the West, thrashing about in pools of blood and growing weaker day by day.

      Amid the universal dissolution, amid the assassinations of Caesars occurring in rapid succession, amid the uproar and carnage covering Europe from end to end, a terrifying hurrah was suddenly heard which stilled every other noise, silenced every other voice.  On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men wrapped in ratskin cloaks and mounted on little horses, hideous Tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, hairless, jaundiced faces, and chins furrowed with gashes and scars, rode hell-for-leather into the territories of the Lower Empire, sweeping all before them in their whirlwind advance.

      Civilization disappeared in the dust of their horses' hooves, in the smoke of the fires they kindled.  Darkness fell upon the world and the peoples trembled in consternation as they listened to the dreadful tornado pass by with a sound like thunder.  The horde of Huns swept over Europe, threw itself on Gaul, and was only halted on the plains of Châlons, where Ætius smashed it in a fearful encounter.  The earth, gorged with blood, looked like a sea of crimson froth; two hundred thousand corpses barred the way and broke the impetus of the invading avalanche which, turned from its path, fell like a thunderbolt on Italy, whose ruined cities burned like blazing hayricks.

      The Western Empire crumbled under the shock; the doomed life it had been dragging out in imbecility and corruption was extinguished.  It even looked as if the end of the universe were also at hand, for the cities Attila had overlooked were decimated by famine and plague.  And the Latin language, like everything else, seemed to vanish from sight beneath the ruins of the old world.

      Years went by, and eventually the barbarian idioms began to acquire a definite shape, to emerge from their rude gangues, two grow into true languages.  Meanwhile Latin, saved by the monasteries from death in the universal debacle, was confined to the cloister and the presbytery.  Even so, a few poets appeared here and there to keep the flame burning, albeit slowly and dully - the African Dracontius with his Hexameron, Claudius Mamert with his liturgical poems, and Avitus of Vienne.  Then there were biographers such as Ennodius, who recounts the miracles of St Epiphanius, that shrewd and revered diplomatist, that upright and vigilant pastor, or Eugippius, who has recorded for us the incomparable life of St Severinus, that mysterious anchorite and humble ascetic who appeared like an angel of mercy to the peoples of his time, frantic with fear and suffering; writers such as Veranius of the Gévaudan, who composed a little treatise on the subject of continence, or Aurelian and Ferreolus, who compiled ecclesiastical canons; and finally historians such as Rotherius of Agde, famed for a history of the Huns which is now lost.

      There were far fewer works from the following centuries in Des Esseintes' library.  Still, the sixth century was represented by Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, whose hymns and Vexilla Regis, carved out of the ancient carcase of the Latin language and spiced with the aromatics of the Church, haunted his thoughts on certain days; also by Boethius, Gregory of Tours, and Jornandes.  As for the seventh and eight centuries, apart from the Low Latin of such chroniclers as Fredegarius and Paul the Deacon, or of the poems contained in the Bangor Antiphonary, one of which - an alphabetical, monorhymed hymn in honour of St Comgall - he sometimes glanced at, literary output was restricted almost exclusively to Lives of the Saints, notably the legend of St Columban by the cenobite Jonas and that of Blessed Cuthbert compiled by the Venerable Bede from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarne.  The result was that he confined himself to dipping at odd moments into the works of these hagiographers and re-reading passages from the Lives of St Rusticula and St Radegonde, the former related by Defensorius, a Ligugé synodist, the latter by the naive and modest Baudonivia, a Poitiers nun.

      However, he found certain remarkable Latin works of Anglo-Saxon origin more to his taste: to wit, the whole series of enigmas by Aldhelm, Tatwin, and Eusebius, those literary descendants of Symphosius, and above all the enigmas composed by St Boniface in acrostics where the answer was provided by the initial letters of each stanza.

      His predilection for Latin literature grew feebler as he neared the end of these two centuries, and he could summon up little enthusiasm for the turgid prose of the Carolingian Latinists, the Alcuins and the Eginhards.  As specimens of the language of the ninth century, he contented himself with the chronicles by Freculf, Reginon, and the anonymous writer of Saint-Gall; with the poem of the Siege of Paris contrived by Abbo le Courbé; and with the Hortulus, the didactic poem by the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose canto devoted to the glorification of the pumpkin as a symbol of fecundity tickled his sense of humour.  Another work he appreciated was the poem by Ermold le Noir celebrating the exploits of Louis le Débonnaire, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, even sombre style, an iron idiom chilled in monastic waters but with flaws in the hard metal where feeling showed through; and another, a poem by Macer Floridus, De Viribus Herbarum, which he particularly enjoyed for its poetic recipes and the remarkable virtues it attributed to certain plants and flowers - to the aristolochia, for instance, which mixed with beef and laid on a pregnant woman's abdomen invariably results in the birth of a male child, or borage, which served as a cordial makes the gloomiest guest merry, or the peony, whose powdered root is a lasting cure for epilepsy, or fennel, which applied to a woman's bosom clears her urine and stimulates her sluggish periods.

      Except for a few special books which had not been classified; certain undated or modern texts; some cabbalistic, medical, or botanical works; sundry odd volumes of Migne's patrology, containing Christian poems to be found nowhere else, and of Wernsdorff's anthology of the minor Latin poets; except for Meursius, Forberg's manual of classical erotology, the moechialogy and the diaconals intended for the use of father-confessors, which he took down and dusted off at long intervals, his collection of Latin works stopped at the beginning of the tenth century.

      By that time, after all, the peculiar originality and elaborate simplicity of Christian Latinity had likewise come to an end.  Henceforth the gibble-gabble of the philosophers and the scholiasts, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, would reign supreme.  The sooty heaps of chronicles and history books, the leaden masses of cartularies, would steadily pile up, while the stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks, stirring the poetical leftovers of Antiquity into a pious stew, were already things of the past; the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery, had already closed down.  The old editions so beloved of Des Esseintes tailed away to nothing - and making a prodigious jump of several centuries, he stacked the rest of his shelves with modern books which, without regard to the intermediate ages, brought him right down to the French language of the present day.