VI
BURIED deep in a vast wing-chair, his feet resting on the pear-
shaped, silver-guilt supports of the andirons, his slippers toasting in front
of the crackling logs that shot out bright tongues of flame as if they felt the
furious blast of a bellows, Des Esseintes put the old
quarto he had been reading down on a table, stretched himself, lit a cigarette,
and gave himself up to a delicious reverie.
His mind was soon going full tilt in pursuit of certain recollections
which had lain low for months, but which had suddenly be started by a name
recurring, for no apparent reason, to his memory.
Once again he could
see, with surprising clearness, his friend D'Aigurande's
embarrassment when he had been forced to confess to a gathering of confirmed
bachelors that he had just completed the final arrangements for his
wedding. There was a general outcry, and
his friends tried to dissuade him with a frightening description of the horrors
of sharing a bed. But it was all in
vain: he had taken leave of his senses, believed that his future wife was a
woman of intelligence, and maintained that he had discovered in her quite
exceptional qualities of tenderness and devotion.
Des Esseintes
had been the one among all these young men to encourage him in his resolve, and
this he did as soon as he learnt that his friend's fiancée wanted to live on
the corner of a newly constructed boulevard, in one of those modern flats built
on a circular plan.
Persuaded of the
merciless power of petty vexations, which can have a more baneful effect on
sanguine souls than the great tragedies of life, and taking account of the fact
that D'Aigurande had no private means, while his
wife's dowry was practically non-existent, he saw in this innocent whim an
endless source of ridiculous misfortunes.
As he had foreseen, D'Aigurande proceeded to buy rounded pieces of furniture -
console-tables sawn away at the back to form a semi-circle, curtain-poles
curved like bows, carpets cut on a crescent pattern - until he had furnished
the whole flat with things made to order.
He spent twice as much as anybody else; and then, when his wife, finding
herself short of money for new dresses, got tired of
living in this rotunda, and took herself off to a flat with ordinary square
rooms at a lower rent, not a single piece of furniture would fit in or stand up
properly. Soon the bothersome things
were giving rise to endless annoyances; the bond between husband and wife,
already worn thin by the inevitable irritations of a shared life, grew more
tenuous week by week; and there were angry scenes and mutual recriminations as
they came to realize the impossibility of living in a sitting-room where sofas
and console-tables would not go against the walls and wobbled at the slightest
touch, however many blocks and wedges were used to steady them. There was not enough money to pay for alterations,
and even if there had been, these would have been almost impossible to carry
out. Everything became a ground for high
words and squabbles, from the drawers that had stuck in the rickety furniture
to the petty thefts of the maidservant, who took advantage of the constant
quarrels between her master and mistress to raid the cash-box. In short, their life became unbearable; he
went out in search of amusement, while she looked to adultery to provide
compensation for the drizzly dreariness of her life. Finally, by mutual consent, they cancelled
their lease and petitioned for a legal separation.
"My plan of
campaign was right in every particular," Des Esseintes
had told himself on hearing the news, with the satisfaction of a strategist
whose manoeuvres, worked out long beforehand, have resulted in victory.
Now, sitting by his
fireside and thinking about the break- up of this couple whose union he had
encouraged with his good advice, he threw a fresh armful of wood into the
hearth and promptly started dreaming again.
More memories,
belonging to the same order of ideas, now came crowding in on him.
Some years ago, he
remembered he had been walking along the Rue de Rivoli
one evening, when he had come across a young scamp of sixteen or so, a
peaky-faced, sharp-eyed child, as attractive in his way as any girl. He was sucking hard at a cigarette, the paper
of which had burst where bits of the coarse tobacco were poking through. Cursing away, the boy was striking kitchen
matches on his thigh; not one of them would light and soon he had used them all
up. Catching sight of Des Esseintes, who was standing watching him, he came up,
touched his cap, and politely asked for a light. Des Esseintes
offered him some of his own scented Dubèques, got
into conversation with the boy, and persuaded him to tell the story of his
life.
Nothing could have been
more banal: his name was Auguste Langlois,
he worked for a cardboard-manufacturer, he had lost his mother, and his father
beat him black and blue.
Des Esseintes
listened thoughtfully.
"Come and have a
drink," he said, and took him to a cafe where he regaled him with a few
glasses of heady punch. These the boy
drank without a word.
"Look here,"
said Des Esseintes suddenly; "how would you like
a bit of fun tonight? I'll foot the
bill, of course." And he had taken
the youngster off to an establishment on the third floor of a house in the Rue Mosnier, where a certain Madame Laure
kept an assortment of pretty girls in a series of crimson cubicles furnished
with circular mirrors, couches, and wash-basins.
There a wonderstruck Auguste, twisting his cap in his hands, had stood gaping at
a battalion of women whose painted mouths opened all together to exclaim:
"What a duck! Isn't he sweet!"
"But dearie, you're not old enough," said a big brunette, a
girl with prominent eyes and a hook nose who occupied at Madame Laure's the indispensable position of the handsome Jewess.
Meanwhile Des Esseintes, who was obviously quite at home in this place,
had made himself comfortable and was quietly chatting with the mistress of the
house. But he broke off for a moment to
speak to the boy.
"Don't be so
scared, stupid," he said. "Go
on, take your pick - remember this is on me."
He gave a gentle push
to the lad, who flopped on to a divan between two of the women. At a sign from Madame Laure,
they drew a little closer together, covering Auguste's
knees with their peignoires and cuddling up to him so
that he breathed in the warm, heady scent of their powdered shoulders. He was sitting quite still now, flushed and
dry-mouthed, his downcast eyes darting from under their lashes inquisitive
glances that were all directed at the upper part of the girls' thighs.
Vanda,
the handsome Jewess, suddenly gave him a kiss and a little good advice, telling
him to do whatever his parents told him, while all the time her hands were
wandering over the boy's body; his expression changed and he lay back in a kind
of swoon, with his head on her breast.
"So it's not on
your own account that you've come here tonight," said Madame Laure to Des Esseintes. "But where the devil did you get hold of
that baby?" she added, as Auguste disappeared
with the handsome Jewess.
"Why, in the
street, my dear."
"But you're not
tight," muttered the old lady.
Then, after a moment's thought, she gave an understanding, motherly
smile.
"Ah, now I
see! You rascal, 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 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 underprivileged, 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