V
TOGETHER with the desire to escape from a hateful period of sordid
degradation, the longing to see no more pictures of the human form toiling in
Once he had cut himself
off from contemporary life, he had resolved to allow nothing to enter his
hermitage which might breed repugnance or regret; and so he had set his heart
on finding a few pictures of subtle, exquisite refinement, steeped in an
atmosphere of ancient fantasy, wrapped in an aura of antique corruption,
divorced from modern times and modern society.
For the delectation of
his mind and the delight of his eyes, he had decided to seek out evocative
works which would transport him to some unfamiliar world, point the way to new
possibilities, and shake up his nervous system by means of erudite fancies,
complicated nightmares, suave and sinister visions.
Among all the artists
he considered, there was one who sent him into raptures of delight, and that
was Gustave Moreau.
He had bought Moreau's two masterpieces, and night after night he would
stand dreaming in front of one of them, the picture of Salome.
This picture showed a
throne like the high altar of a cathedral standing beneath a vaulted ceiling -
a ceiling crossed by countless arches springing from thick-set, almost
Romanesque columns, encased in polychromatic brickwork, encrusted with mosaics,
set with lapis lazuli and sardonyx - in a palace
which resembled a basilica built in both the Moslem and the Byzantine styles.
In the centre of the
tabernacle set on the altar, which was approached by a flight of recessed steps
in the shape of a semi-circle, the Tetrach Herod was
seated, with a tiara on his head, his legs close together and his hands on his
knees.
His face was yellow and
parchment-like, furrowed with wrinkles, lined with years; his long beard
floated like a white cloud over the jewelled stars that studded the gold-laced
robe moulding his breast.
Round about this
immobile, statuesque figure, frozen like some Hindu god in a hieratic pose,
incense was burning, sending up clouds of vapour through which the fiery gems
set in the sides of the throne gleamed like the phosphorescent eyes of wild
animals. The clouds rose higher and
higher, swirling under the arches of the roof, where the blue smoke mingled
with the gold dust of the great beams of sunlight slanting down from the domes.
Amid the heady odour of
these perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the basilica, Salome slowly
glides forward on the points of her toes, her left arm stretched out in a
commanding gesture, her right bent back and holding a great lotus-blossom
beside her face, while a woman squatting on the floor strums the strings of a
guitar.
With a withdrawn,
solemn, almost august expression on her face, she begins the lascivious dance
which is to rouse the aged Herod's dormant senses; her breasts rise and fall,
the nipples hardening at the touch of her whirling necklaces; the strings of
diamonds glitter against her moist flesh; her bracelets, her belts, her rings
all spit out fiery sparks; and across her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls,
patterned with silver, spangled with gold, the jewelled cuirass, of which every
chain is a precious stone, seems to be ablaze with little snakes of fire,
swarming over the mat flesh, over the tea-rose skin, like gorgeous insects with
dazzling shards, mottled with carmine, spotted with pale yellow, speckled with
steel blue, striped with peacock green.
Her eyes fixed in the
concentrated gaze of a sleepwalker, she sees nothing of the Tetrach,
who sits there quivering, nor her mother, the ferocious Herodias,
who watches her every movement, nor the hermaphrodite or eunuch who stands
sabre in hand at the foot of the throne, a terrifying creature, veiled as far
as the eyes and with its sexless dugs hanging like gourds under its
orange-striped tunic.
The character of
Salome, a figure with a haunting fascination for artists and poets, had been an
obsession with him for years. Time and
again he had opened the old Bible of Pierre Variquet,
translated by the Doctors of Theology of the
'But when Herod's
birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced
before them, and pleased Herod.
'Whereupon,
he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask.
'And she, being before
instructed of her mother, said: "Give me here John Baptist's head in a
charger."
'And here the king was
sorry: nevertheless, for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat,
he commanded it to be given her.
'And he sent, and
beheaded John in the prison.
'And his head was
brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her
mother.'
But neither St Matthew,
nor St Mark, nor St Luke, nor any of the other sacred writers had enlarged on
the maddening charm and potent depravity of the dancer. She had always remained a dim and distant
figure, lost in a mysterious ecstasy far off in the mists of time, beyond the
reach of punctilious, pedestrian minds, and accessible only to brains shaken
and sharpened and rendered almost clairvoyant by neurosis; she had always
repelled the artistic advances of fleshy painters, such as Rubens who
travestied her as a Flemish butcher's wife; she had always passed the
comprehension of the writing fraternity, who never succeeded in rendering the
disquieting delirium of the dancer, the subtle grandeur of the murderess.
In Gustave
Moreau's work, which in conception went far beyond the data supplied by the New
Testament, Des Esseintes saw realized at long last
the weird and superhuman Salome of his dreams. Here she was no longer just the dancing-girl
who extorts a cry of lust and lechery from an old man by the lascivious
movements of her loins; who saps the morale and breaks the will of a king with
the heaving of her breasts, the twitching of her belly, the
quivering of her thighs. She had become,
as it were, the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal
Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties by the catalepsy
that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast,
indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the Helen of ancient
myth, everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that
she touches.
Viewed in this light,
she belonged to the Theogonies of the Far East; she
no longer had her origin in Biblical tradition; she could not even be likened
to the living image of Babylon, the royal harlot of Revelations, bedecked like
herself with precious stones and purple robes, with paint and perfume, for the
whore of Babylon was not thrust by a fateful power, by an irresistible force,
into the alluring iniquities of debauch.
Moreover, the painter
seemed to have wished to assert his intention of remaining outside the bounds
of time, of giving no precise indication of race or country or period, setting as
he did his Salome inside this extraordinary palace with its grandiose,
heterogeneous architecture, clothing her in sumptuous, fanciful robes, crowning
her with a nondescript diadem like Salammbo's, in the
shape of a Phoenician tower, and finally putting in her hand the sceptre of
Isis, the sacred flower of both Egypt and India, the great-lotus blossom.
Des Esseintes
puzzled his brains to find the meaning of this emblem. Had it the phallic significance which the
primordial religions of
Perhaps, too, in arming
his enigmatic goddess with the revered lotus-blossom, the painter had been
thinking of the dancer, the mortal woman, the soiled vessel, ultimate cause of
every sin and every crime; perhaps he had remembered the sepulchral rites of
ancient Egypt, the solemn ceremonies of embalmment, when practitioners and
priests lay out the dead woman's body on a slab of jasper, then with curved
needles extract her brains through the nostrils, her entrails through an
opening made in the left side, and finally, before gilding her nails and her
teeth, before anointing the corpse with oils and spices, insert into her sexual
parts, to purify them, the chaste petals of the divine flower.
Be that as it may,
there was some irresistible fascination exerted by this painting; but the
water-colour entitled The Apparition created perhaps an even more
disturbing impression.
In this picture,
Herod's palace rose up like some Alhambra on slender columns iridescent with Mooresque tiles, which appeared to be bedded in silver
mortar and gold cement; arabesques started from lozenges of lapis lazuli to
wind their way right across the cupolas, whose mother-of-pearl marquetry gleamed with rainbow lights and flashed with
prismatic fires.
The murder had been
done; now the executioner stood impassive, his hands resting on the pommel of
his long, blood-stained sword.
The Saint's decapitated
head had left the charger where it lay on the flagstones and risen
into the air, the eyes staring out from the livid face, the colourless lips
parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood. A mosaic encircled the face, and also a halo
of light whose rays darted out under the porticoes, emphasized the awful
elevation of the head, and kindled a fire in the glassy eyeballs, which were
fixed in what happened to be agonized concentration on the dancer.
With a gesture of
horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her
nailed to the spot, balanced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her
right hand clawing convulsively at her throat.
She is almost naked; in
the heat of the dance her veils have fallen away and her brocade robes slipped
to the floor, so that now she is clad only in wrought metals and translucent
gems. A gorgerin grips her waist like a
corselet, and like an outsize clasp a wondrous jewel sparkles and flashes in
the cleft between her breasts; lower down, a girdle encircles her hips, hiding
the upper part of her thighs, against which dangles a gigantic pendant
glistening with rubies and emeralds; finally, where the body shows bare between
gorgerin and girdle, the belly bulges out, dimpled by a navel which resembles a
graven seal of onyx with its milky hues and its rosy finger-nail tints.
Under the brilliant
rays emanating from the Precursor's head, every facet of every jewel catches
fire; the stones burn brightly, outlining the woman's figure in flaming colours,
indicating neck, legs, and arms with points of light, red as burning coals,
violet as jets of gas, blue as flaming alcohol, white as moonbeams.
The dreadful head glows
eerily, bleeding all the while, so that clots of dark red form at the ends of
hair and beard. Visible to Salome alone,
it embraces in its sinister gaze neither Herodias,
musing over the ultimate satisfaction of her hatred, nor the Tetrach, who, bending forward a little with his hands on
his knees, is still panting with emotion, maddened by the sight and smell of
the woman's naked body, steeped in musky scents, anointed with aromatic balms,
impregnated with incense and myrrh.
Like the Old King, Des Esseintes invariably felt overwhelmed, subjugated, stunned
when he looked at this dancing-girl, who was less majestic, less haughty, but
more seductive than the Salome of the oil-painting.
In the unfeeling and
unpitying statue, in the innocent and deadly idol, the lusts and fears of
common humanity had been awakened; the great lotus-blossom had disappeared, the
goddess vanished; a hideous nightmare now held in its choking grip an
entertainer, intoxicated by the whirling movement of the dance, a courtesan,
petrified and hypnotized by terror.
Here she was a true
harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came
to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than
before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully,
subjugated his will more surely with her charms - the charms of a great
venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-house of impiety.
It was Des Esseintes' opinion that never before, in any period, had
the art of water-colour produced such brilliant hues; never before had an
aquarellist's wretched chemical pigments been able to make paper sparkle so
brightly with precious stones, shine so colourfully with sunlight filtered
through stained-glass windows, glitter so splendidly with sumptuous garments, glow so warmly with exquisite flesh-tints.
Deep in contemplation,
he would try to puzzle out the antecedents of this great artist, this mystical
pagan, this illuminee who could shut out the modern
world so completely as to behold, in the heart of present-day
Des Esseintes
found it hard to say who had served as his models; here and there, he could
detect vague recollections of Mantegna and Jacopo de Barbari; here and there, confused memories of Da Vinci and feverish colouring reminiscent of
Delacroix. But on the whole the
influence of these masters on his work was imperceptible,
the truth being that Gustave Moreau was nobody's
pupil. With no real ancestors and no
possible descendants, he remained a unique figure in contemporary art. Going back to the beginning of racial
tradition, to the sources of mythologies who bloody enigmas he compared and
unravelled; joining and fusing in one those legends which had originated in the
Middle East only to be metamorphosed by the beliefs of other peoples, he could
cite these researches to justify his architectonic mixtures, his sumptuous and
unexpected combinations of dress materials, and his hieratic allegories whose
sinister quality was heightened by the morbid perspicuity of an entirely modern
sensibility. He himself remained
downcast and sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman passions and
superhuman perversities, of divine debauches perpetrated without enthusiasm and
without hope.
His sad and scholarly
works breathed a strange magic, an incantatory charm which stirred you to the
depths of your being like the sorcery of certain of Baudelaire's poems, so that
you were left amazed and pensive, disconcerted by this art which crossed the
frontiers of painting to borrow from the writer's art its most subtly evocative
suggestions, from the enameller's art its most wonderfully brilliant effects,
from the lapidary's and etcher's art its most exquisitely delicate
touches. These two pictures of Salome,
for which Des Esseintes' admiration knew no bounds,
lived constantly before his eyes, hung as they were on the walls of his study,
on panels reserved for them between the bookcases.
But these were by no
means the only pictures he had bought in order to adorn his retreat. True, none were needed for the first and only
upper storey of his house, since he had given it over to his servants and did
not use any of its rooms; but the ground floor by itself demanded a good many
to cover its bare walls.
This ground floor was
divided as follows: a dressing-room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied
one corner of the building; from the bedroom you went into the library, and from the library into the dining-room, which
occupied another corner.
These rooms, making up
one side of the house, were set in a straight line, with their windows
overlooking the
The other side of the
building consisted of four rooms correspondingly exactly to the first four in
their lay-out. Thus the corner kitchen
matched the dining-room, a big entrance-hall the library, a sort of boudoir the
bedroom, and the closets the dressing-room.
All these latter rooms
looked out on the opposite side to the
As for the staircase,
it was built against one end of the house, on the outside, so that the noise
the servants made as they pounded up and down the steps was deadened and barely
reached Des Esseintes' ears.
He had had the boudoir
walls covered with bright red tapestry and all round the room he had hung
ebony-framed prints by Jan Luyken, an old Dutch engraver who was almost unknown in
He possessed a whole
series of studies by this artist in lugubrious fantasy and ferocious cruelty:
his Religious Persecutions, a collection of appalling plates displaying
all the tortures which religious fanaticism has invented, revealing all the
agonizing varieties of human suffering - bodies roasted over braziers, heads
scalped with swords, trepanned with nails, lacerated with saws, bowels taken
out of the belly and wound on to bobbins, finger-nails slowly removed with
pincers, eyes put out, eyelids pinned back, limbs dislocated and carefully
broken, bones laid bare and scraped for hours with knives.
These pictures, full of
abominable fancies, reeking of burnt flesh, dripping with blood, echoing with
screams and curses, made Des Esseintes' flesh creep
whenever he went into the red boudoir, and he remained rooted to the spot,
choking with horror.
But over and above the shudders
they provoked, over and above the frightening genius of the man and the
extraordinary life he put into his figures, there were to be found in his
astonishing crowd-scenes, in the hosts of people he sketched with a dexterity
reminiscent of Callot but with a vigour that amusing
scribbler never attained, remarkable reconstructions of other places and
periods; buildings, costumes, and manners in the days of the Maccabees, in Rome during the persecutions of the
Christians, in Spain under the Inquisition, in France during the Middle Ages
and at the time of the St Bartholomew massacres and the Dragonnades,
were all observed with meticulous care and depicted with wonderful skill.
These prints were mines
of interesting information and could be studied for hours on end without a
moment's boredom; extremely thought-provoking as well, they often helped Des Esseintes to kill time on days when he did not feel in the
mood for reading.
The story of Luyken's life also attracted him and incidentally explained
the hallucinatory character of his work.
A fervent Calvinist, a fanatical sectarian, a zealot for hymns and
prayers, he composed and illustrated religious poems, paraphrased the Psalms in
verse, and immersed himself in Biblical study, from which he would emerge
haggard and enraptures, his mind haunted by bloody visions, his mouth twisted
by the maledictions of the Reformation, by its songs of terror and anger.
What is more, he
despised the world, and this led him to give all he possessed to the poor,
living on a crust of bread himself. In
the end he had put to sea with an old maidservant who was fanatically devoted
to him, landing wherever his boat came ashore, preaching the Gospel to all and
sundry, trying to live without eating - a man with little or nothing to
distinguish him from a lunatic or a savage.
In the larger adjoining
room, the vestibule, which was panelled in cedar-wood the colour of a
cigar-box, other prints, other weird drawings hung in rows along the walls.
One of these was Bresdin's Comedy of Death. This depicts an improbable landscape which
bristles with trees, coppices, and thickets in the shape of demons or phantoms
and full of birds with rats' heads and vegetable tails. From the ground, which is littered with
vertebrae, ribs, and skulls, there spring gnarled and shaky willow-trees, in
which skeletons are perched, waving bouquets and chanting songs of victory,
while a Christ flies away into a mackerel sky; a hermit meditates, with his
head in his hands, at the back of a grotto; and a beggar dies of privation and
hunger, stretched out on his back, his feet pointing to a stagnant pool.
Another was The Good
Samaritan by the same artist, a lithograph of a huge pen-and-ink
drawing. Here the scene is a fantastic
tangle of palms, service-trees, and oaks, growing all together in defiance of
season and climate; a patch of virgin forest packed with monkeys, owls, and
screech-owls, and cumbered with old tree-stumps as unshapely
as mandrake roots; a magic wood with a clearing in the centre affording a distant
glimpse, first of the Samaritan and the wounded man, then of a river, and
finally of a fairytale city climbing up to the horizon to meet a strange sky
dotted with birds, flecked with foaming billows, swelling, as it were, with
cloudy waves.
It looked rather like
the work of a primitive or an Albert Durer of sorts,
composed under the influence of opium; but much as Des Esseintes
admired the delicacy of detail and the impressive power of this plate, he
paused more often in front of the other pictures that decorated the room. There were all signed Odilon
Redon.
In their narrow
gold-rimmed frames of unpainted pearwood, they
contained the most fantastic of visions: a Merovingian head balanced on a cup;
a bearded man with something of the bonze about him and something of the
typical speaker at public meetings, touching a colossal cannon-ball with one
finger; a horrible spider with a human face lodged in the middle of its
body. 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' 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
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 the collection
of Redon's works, covering nearly every panel in the
vestibule, he had hung in his bedroom an extravagant sketch by Theotocopuli, 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 delectations, 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 envelop 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 blond 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 finished 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
churchwarden's 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.