VII
BEGINNING on the night when, for no apparent reason, he had conjured
up the melancholy memory of Auguste Langlois, Des Esseintes lived his
whole life over again.
He found he was now
incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very
eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and
art, refused to absorb any more.
He had to live on
himself, to feed on his own substance, like those animals that lie torpid in a
hole all winter. Solitude had acted on
his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a
languor haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his
intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively
submitted, without even trying to get away.
The confused mass of
reading and meditation on artistic themes that he had accumulated since he had
been on his own like a barrage to hold back the current of old memories, had
suddenly been carried away, and the flood was let loose, sweeping away the
present and the future, submerging everything under the waters of the past,
covering his mind with a great expanse of melancholy, on the surface of which
there drifted, like ridiculous bits of flotsam, trivial episodes of his
existence, absurdly insignificant incidents.
The book he happened to
be holding would fall into his lap, and he would give himself up to a fearful
and disgusted review of his dead life, the years pivoting round the memory of Auguste and Madame Laure as
around a solid fact, a stake planted in the midst of swirling waters. What a time that had been! - a time of
elegant parties, of race-meetings and card-games, of love-potions ordered in
advance and served punctually on the stroke of midnight in his pink
boudoir! Faces, looks, meaningless words
came back to him with the haunting persistence of those popular tunes you
suddenly find yourself humming and just as suddenly and unconsciously you
forget.
This phase lasted only
a little while and then his memory took a siesta. He took advantage of this respite to immerse
himself once more in his Latin studies, in the hope of effacing every sign,
every trace of these recollections. But
it was too late to call a halt; a second phase followed almost immediately on
the first, a phase dominated by memories of his youth, and particularly the
years he had spent with the Jesuit Fathers.
These memories were of
a more distant period, yet they were clearer than the others, engraved more
deeply and enduringly in his mind; the thickly-wooded park, the long paths, the
flower-beds, the benches - all the material details were conjured up before
him.
Then the gardens filled
up, and he heard the shouting of the boys at play, and the laughter of their
masters as they joined in, playing tennis with their cassocks hitched up in front,
or else chatting with their pupils under the trees without the slightest
affectation or pomposity, just as if they were talking to friends of their own
age.
He recalled that
paternal discipline which deprecated any form of punishment, declined to inflict
impositions of five hundred or a thousand lines, was content with having
unsatisfactory work done over again while the others were at recreation,
resorted more often than not to a mere reprimand, and kept the child under
active but affectionate surveillance, forever trying to please him, agreeing to
whatever walks he suggested on Wednesday afternoons, seizing the opportunity
afforded by all the minor feast-days of the Church to add cakes and wine to the
ordinary bill of fare or to organize a picnic in the country - a discipline
which consisted of reasoning with the pupil instead of brutalizing him, already
treating him like a grown man yet still coddling him like a spoilt child.
In this way the Fathers
managed to gain a real hold upon their pupils, to mould to some extent the
minds they cultivated, to guide them in certain specific directions, to
inculcate particular notions, and to ensure the desired development of their
ideas by means of an insinuating, ingratiating technique which they continued to
apply in after-years, doing their best to keep track of their charges in adult
life, backing them up in their careers, and writing them affectionate letters
such as the Dominican Lacordaire wrote to his former
pupils at Sorreze.
Des Esseintes
was well aware of the sort of conditioning to which he had been subjected, but
he felt sure that in his case it had been without effect. In the first place, his captious and
inquisitive character, his refractory and disputatious nature had saved him
from being moulded by the good Fathers' discipline or indoctrinate by their
lessons. Then, once he had left school,
his scepticism had grown more acute; his experience of the narrow-minded
intolerance of Legitimist society, and his conversations with unintelligent
churchwardens and uncouth priests whose blunders tore away the veil the Jesuits
had so cunningly woven, had still further fortified his spirit of independence
and increased his distrust of any and every form of religious belief.
He considered, in fact,
that he had shaken off all his old tied and fetters, and that he differed from
the products of lycées and lay
boarding-schools in only one respect, namely that he retained pleasant memories
of his school and his schoolmasters. And
yet, now that he examined his conscience, he began to wonder whether the seed
which had fallen on apparently barren ground was not showing signs of
germinating.
As a matter of fact,
for some days he had been in an indescribably peculiar state of mind. For a brief instant he would believe, and
turn instinctively to religion; then, after a moment's thought, his longing for
faith would vanish, though he remained perplexed and uneasy.
Yet he was well aware,
on looking into his heart, that he could never feel the humility and contrition
of a true Christian; he knew beyond all doubt that the moment of which Lacordaire speaks, that moment of grace "when the last
ray of light enters the soul and draws together to a common centre all the
truths that lie scattered therein", would never come for him. He felt nothing of that hunger for
mortification and prayer without which, if we are to believe the majority of
priests, no conversion is possible; nor did he feel any desire to invoke a God
whose mercy struck him as extremely problematical. At the same time the affection he still had
for his old masters led him to take an interest in their works and doctrines;
and the recollection of those inimitable accents of conviction, the passionate
voices of those highly intelligent men, made him doubt the quality and strength
of his own intellect. The lonely
existence he was leading, with no fresh food for thought, no novel experiences,
no replenishment of ideas, no exchange of impressions received from the outside
world, from mixing with other people and sharing in their life, this unnatural
isolation which he stubbornly maintained, encouraged the re-emergence in the
form of irritating problems of all manner of questions he had disregarded when
he was living in Paris.
Reading the Latin works
he loved, works almost all written by bishops and monks, had doubtless done
something to bring on this crisis.
Steeped in a monastic atmosphere and intoxicated by the fumes of
incense, he had become over-excited, and by a natural association of ideas,
these books had ended up by driving back the recollections of his life as a
young man and bringing out his memories of the years he had spent as a boy with
the Jesuit Fathers.
"There's no doubt
about it," Des Esseintes said to himself, after
a searching attempt to discover how the Jesuit element had worked its way to
the surface at Fontenay; "ever since boyhood,
and without my knowing it, I've had this leaven inside me, ready to ferment;
the taste I've always had for religious objects may be proof of this."
However, he tried his
hardest to persuade himself of the contrary, annoyed at finding that he was no
longer master in his own house. Hunting
for more acceptable explanations of his ecclesiastical predilections, he told
himself he had been obliged to turn to the Church, in that the Church was the
only body to have preserved the art of past centuries, the lost beauty of the
ages. She had kept unchanged, even in
shoddy modern reproductions, the goldsmiths' traditional forms; preserved the
charm of chalices as slender as petunias, of pyxes
simply and exquisitely styled; retained, even in aluminium, in fake enamel, in
coloured glass, the grace of the patterns of olden days. Indeed, most of the precious objects which
were kept in the
But however much he
dwelt on these motives, he could not quite manage to convince
himself. It was true that, after careful
thought, he still regarded the Christian religion as a superb legend, a
magnificent imposture; and yet, in spite of all his excuses and explanations,
his scepticism was beginning to crack.
Odd as it might seem,
the fact remained that he was not as self-confident now as in his youth, when
the Jesuits' supervision had been direct and their teaching inescapable, when
he had been entirely in their hands, belonging to them body and soul, without
any family ties or outside influences to counteract their ascendancy. What is more, they had implanted in him a
certain taste for things supernatural which had slowly and imperceptibly taken
root in his soul, was now blossoming out in these
secluded conditions, and was inevitably having an effect on his silent mind,
tied to the treadmill of certain fixed ideas.
By dint of examining
his thought-processes, of trying to join together the threads of his ideas and
trace them back to their sources, he came to the conclusion that his activities
in the course of his social life had all originated in the education he had
received. Thus his penchant for
artificiality and his love of eccentricity could surely be explained as the
results of sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties,
semi-theological speculations; fundamentally, they
were ardent aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards
a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.
He pulled himself up
short, and broke this chain of reflections.
"Come, now,"
he told himself angrily. "I've got
it worse than I thought: here I am arguing with myself like a casuist."
He remained pensive,
troubled by a nagging fear. Obviously,
if Lacordaire's theory was correct, he had nothing to
worry about, seeing that the magic of conversion was not worked at a single
stroke; to produce the explosion the ground had to be patiently and thoroughly
mined. But if the novelists talked about
love at first sight, there were also a number of theologians who spoke of
conversion as of something equally sudden and overwhelming. Supposing that they were right, it followed
that nobody could be sure he would never succumb. There was no longer any point in practising
self-analysis, paying attention to presentiments or taking preventive measures:
the psychology of mysticism was non-existent.
Things happened because they happened, and that was the end of it.
"Dammit, I'm going crazy," Des Esseintes
said to himself.
"My dread of the disease will bring on the disease itself if I keep
this up."
He managed to shake of
this fear to some extent, and his memories of boyhood faded away; but other
morbid symptoms supervened. Now it was
the subjects of theological disputations that haunted him to the exclusion of
everything else. The school garden, the
lessons, the Jesuits might never have been, his mind was so completely
dominated by abstractions; in spite of himself, he began pondering over some of
the contradictory interpretations of dogma and the long-forgotten apostasies
recorded in Father Labbe's work on the Councils of
the Church. Odd scraps of these schisms
and heresies, which for centuries had divided the Western and
For several days in
succession, his brain was a seething mass of paradoxes and sophisms, a tangle
of split hairs, a maze of rules as complicated as the clauses of a law, open to
every conceivable interpretation and every kind of quibble, and leading up to a
system of celestial jurisprudence of positively baroque subtlety. Then these abstract obsessions left him, and
a whole series of plastic impressions took their place, under the influence of the
Gustave Moreau pictures hanging on the walls.
He saw a procession of
prelates passing before his eyes, a line of archimandrites and patriarchs
lifting their golden arms to bless the kneeling multitudes, or wagging their
white beards as they read or prayed aloud; he saw silent penitents filing into
crypts; he saw great cathedrals rising up with white-robed monks thundering
from their pulpits. Just as De Quincey, after a dose of opium, had only to hear the words
"Consul Romanus" to conjure up whole pages
of Livy, to see the consuls coming forward in solemn
procession or witness the Roman legions moving off in pompous array, so Des Esseintes would be left gasping with amazement as some
theological expression evoked visions of surging multitudes and episcopal figures silhouetted against the fiery windows of
their basilicas. Apparitions like these
kept him entranced, hurrying in imagination from age to age, and coming down at
last to the religious ceremonies of modern times, to the accompaniment of
endless waves of music, mournful and tender.
Here there was no
longer any room for argument or discussion; there was no denying that he had an
indefinable feeling of veneration and fear, that his artistic sense was
subjugated by the nicely calculated scenes of Catholic ceremonial. His nerves shuddered at these memories, and
then, in a sudden mood of revolt, a swift volte-face, ideas of monstrous
depravity came to him - thoughts of the profanities foreseen in the Confessors'
Manual, of the impure and ignominious ways in which holy water and consecrated
oil could be abused. An omnipotent God
was not confronted by the upright figure of a powerful adversary, the Devil;
and it seemed to Des Esseintes that a frightful glory
must result from any crime committed in open church by a believer filled with
dreadful merriment and sadistic joy, bent on blasphemy, resolved to desecrate
and befoul the objects of veneration.
The mad rites of magical ceremonies, black masses, and witches' sabbaths, together with the horrors of demonic possession
and exorcism, were enacted before his mind's eye; and he began to wonder if he
were not guilty of sacrilege in possessing articles which had once been
solemnly consecrated, such as altar cards, chasubles, and custodials. This idea, that he was possibly living in a
state of sin, filled him with a certain pride and satisfaction, not unmixed
with delight in these sacrilegious acts - which might not be sacrilegious at
all, and in any case were not very serious offences, seeing that he really loved
these articles and did not put them to any depraved uses. He beguiled himself in this way with prudent,
cowardly thoughts, the uncertainty of his soul preventing him from perpetrating
overt crimes, robbing him of the necessary courage to commit real sins of real
iniquity with real intent.
Eventually, little by
little, this casuistic spirit left him.
He then looked out, as it were, from the summit of his mind, over the
panorama of the Church and her hereditary influence on humanity down the ages;
he pictured her to himself in all her melancholy grandeur, proclaiming to
mankind the horror of life, the inclemency of fate; preaching patience,
contrition, the spirit of self-sacrifice; endeavouring to salve the sores of
men by pointing to the bleeding wounds of Christ; guaranteeing divine privilege
and promising the better part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting the human
creature to suffer, to offer to God as a holocaust his tribulations and his
offences, his vicissitudes and his sorrows.
He saw her become truly eloquent, speaking words full of sympathy for
the poor, full of pity for the oppressed, full of menace for tyrants and
oppressors.
At this point, Des Esseintes found his footing again. It is true that this admission of social
corruption had his entire approval, but on the other hand, his mind revolted
against the vague remedy of hope in a future life. Schopenhauer, in his opinion, came nearer to
the truth. His doctrine and the Church's
started from a common point of view; he too took his stand on the iniquity and
rottenness of the world; he too cried out in anguish with the Imitation of
Christ: "Verily it is a pitiful thing to live on earth!" He too preached the nullity of existence, the
advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that whatever it did, whichever way
it turned, it would always remain unhappy - the poor because of the sufferings
born of privation, the rich because of the unconquerable boredom engendered by
abundance. The difference between them
was that he offered you no panacea, beguiled you with no promise of a cure for
your inevitable ills.
He did not drum into
your ears the revolting dogma of original sin; he did not try to convince you
of the superlative goodness of a God who protects the wicked, helps the
foolish, crushes the young, brutalizes the old, and chastises the innocent; he
did not extol the benefits of a Providence which has invented the useless,
unjust, incomprehensible, and inept abomination that is physical pain. Indeed, far from endeavouring, like the Church,
to justify the necessity of trials and torments, he exclaimed in his
compassionate indignation: "If a God has made this world, I should hate to
be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart."
Yes, it was undoubtedly
Schopenhauer who was in the right. What,
in fact, were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with his treatises on
spiritual hygiene? He claimed no cures,
offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his
theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls;
it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women,
pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching
you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were
sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not
constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity.
Setting off from the
same starting-point as the Imitation, but without losing itself in
mysterious mazes and unlikely bypaths, this theory reached the same conclusion,
an attitude of resignation and drift.
However, if this
resignation, frankly based on the recognition of a deplorable state of affairs
and the impossibility of effecting any change, was accessible to the rich in
intellect, that made it all the more difficult of attainment for the poor,
whose clamorous wrath was more easily appeased by the kindly voice of religion.
These reflections took
a load off Des Esseintes' mind; the great German's aphorisms
calmed the tumult of his thoughts, while at the same time the points of contact
between the two doctrines helped each to remind him of the other. Nor could he forget the poetic and poignant
atmosphere of Catholicism in which he had been steeped as a boy, and whose
essence he had absorbed through every pore.
These recurrences of
belief, these fearful intimations of faith had been troubling him more
particularly since his health had begun to deteriorate; they coincided with
certain nervous disorders that had recently arisen.
Ever since his earliest
childhood, he had been tormented by inexplicable revulsions, by shuddering fits
which chilled him to the marrow and set his teeth on edge whenever, for
instance, he saw a maid wringing out some wet linen. These instinctive reactions had continued
down the years, and to this day it still caused him real suffering to hear a
piece of stuff being torn in two, to rub his finger over a bit of chalk, to
feel the surface of watered silk.
The excesses of his bachelor
days and the abnormal strains put on his brain had aggravated his neurosis to
an astonishing degree and still further diluted the impoverished blood of his
race. In
These troubles had
gradually disappeared, thanks to the steadier, quieter life he was leading; but
now they were coming back in a different form and affecting every part of his
body. The pains left his head to attack
his stomach, which was hard and swollen, searing his innards with a red-hot iron
and stimulating his bowels to no effect.
Then a nervous cough, a dry, racking cough, always beginning at the same
time and lasting precisely the same number of minutes, woke him as he lay in
his bed, seizing him by the throat and nearly choking him. Finally he lost his appetite completely; the
hot, gassy fires of heartburn flared up inside his body; he felt swollen and
stifled, and could not bear the constriction of trouser-buttons or
waistcoat-buckles after a meal.
He gave up drinking
spirits, coffee, and tea, put himself on a milk diet, tried applying cold water
to his body, stuffed himself with asafoetida,
valerian, and quinine. He even went so
far as to leave the house and go for strolls in the country, where the rainy
weather had established peace and quiet, forcing himself to keep walking and
take exercise. As a last resort, he laid
aside his books for the time being; and the result was such surpassing boredom
that he decided to occupy the idle hours with carrying out a project he had put
off time and again since coming to Fontenay, partly
out of laziness and partly out of dislike of the trouble involved.
No longer able to
intoxicate himself afresh with the magical charms of style, to thrill to the
delicious sorcery of the unusual epithet which, while retaining all its
precision, opens up infinite perspectives to the imagination of the initiate,
he made up his mind to complete the interior decoration of his thebaid by filling it with costly hothouse flowers, and so
provide himself with a material occupation that would distract his thoughts,
soothe his nerves, and rest his brain.
He also hoped that the sight of their strange and splendid colours would
compensate him to some extent for the loss of those real or fancied nuances of
style which, on account of his literary dieting, he would now have to forget
for a little while or for ever.