VIII
DES
ESSEINTES had always been excessively fond of flowers, but this passion of his,
which at Jutigny had originally embraced all flowers
without distinction of species or genus, had finally become more
discriminating, limiting itself to a single caste.
For along time now he had despised the
common, everyday varieties that blossom on the Paris market-stalls, in wet
flowerpots, under green awnings or red umbrellas.
At the same time that his literary tastes
and artistic preferences had become more refined, recognizing only such works
as had been sifted and distilled by subtle and tormented minds, and at the same
time that his distaste for accepted ideas had hardened into disgust, his love
of flowers had rid itself of its residuum, its lees, had been clarified, so to
speak, and purified.
It amused him to liken a horticulturist's
shop to a microcosm in which every social category and class was represented -
poor, vulgar slum-flowers, the gillyflower for instance, that are really at
home only on the windowsill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into
milk-cans or old earthenware pots; then pretentious, conventional, stupid
flowers such as the rose, whose proper place is in pots concealed inside
porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies; and lastly, flowers of charm and
tremulous delicacy, exotic flowers exiled to Paris and kept warm in palaces of
glass, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having
nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or the bourgeois blossoms.
Now, he could not help feeling a certain
interest, a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums
under the foul breath of sewers and sinks; on the other hand, he loathed those
that go with the cream-and-gold drawing-rooms in new houses; he kept his admiration,
in fact, for the rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive
with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated
stoves.
But this deliberate choice he had made of
hothouse flowers had itself been modified under the influence of his general
ideas, of the definite conclusions he had now arrived at on all matters. In former days, in Paris, his inborn taste
for the artificial had led him to neglect the real flower for its copy,
faithfully and almost miraculously executed in indiarubber
and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and velvet.
As a result, he possessed a wonderful
collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists,
following Nature step by step, repeating her processes, taking the flower form
its birth, leading it to maturity, imitating it even to its death, nothing the
most indefinable nuances, the most fleeting aspects of its awakening or its
sleep, observing the pose of its petals, blown back by the wind or crumpled up
by the rain, sprinkling its unfolding corolla with dewdrops of gum, and
adapting its appearance to the time of year - in full bloom when branches are
bent under the weight of sap, or with a shrivelled cupola and a withered stem
when petals are dropping off and leaves are falling.
This admirable artistry had long
enthralled him, but now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of
artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would
look like fakes.
He applied his mind to this problem, but
did not have to search for long or go far afield,
seeing that his house was in the very heart of the district which had attracted
all the great flower-growers. He went
straight off to visit the hothouses of Châtillon and
the valley of Aunay, coming home tired out and
cleaned out, wonderstruck at the floral follies he had seen, thinking of
nothing but the varieties he had bought, haunted all the while by memories of
bizarre and magnificent blooms.
Two days later the waggons
arrived. List in hand, Des Esseintes called the roll, checking his purchases one by
one.
First of all the gardener unloaded from
their cars a collection of Caladiums, whose swollen, hairy stems supported huge
heart-shaped leaves; though they kept a general air of kinship, no two of them
were alike.
There were some remarkable specimens -
some a pinkish colour like the Virginale, which
seemed to have been cut out of oilskin or sticking-plaster; some all white like
the Albane, which looked as if it had been fashioned
out of the pleura of an ox or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Others, especially the one called Madame Mame, seemed to be simulating zinc, parodying bits of
punched metal coloured emperor green and spattered with drops of oil-paint,
streaks of red lead and white. Here,
there were plants like the Bosphorous giving the
illusion of starched calico spotted with crimson and myrtle green; there,
others such as the Aurora Borealis flaunted leaves the colour of raw meat, with
dark-red ribs and purplish fibrils, puffy leaves that seemed to be sweating
blood and wine.
Between them, the Albane
and Aurora Borealis represented the two temperamental extremes, apoplexy and chlorosis, in this particular family of plants.
The gardeners brought in still more
varieties, this time affecting the appearance of factitious skin covered with a
network of counterfeit veins. Most of
them, as if ravaged by syphilis or leprosy, displayed lived patches of flesh
mottled with roseola, demasked
with dartre; others had the bring pink colour of a
scar that is healing or the brown tint of a scab that is forming; others seemed
to have been puffed up by cauteries, blistered by
burns; others again revealed hairy surfaces pitted with ulcers and embossed
with chancres; and last of all there were some which appeared to be covered
with dressings of various sorts, coated with black mercurial lard, plastered
with green belladonna ointment, dusted over with the yellow flakes of iodoform powder.
Gathered together, these sickly blooms
struck Des Esseintes as even more monstrous than when
he had first come upon them, mixed up with others like hospital patients inside
the glass walls of their conservatory wards.
"Sapristi!"
he exclaimed, in an access of enthusiasm.
Another plant, of a type similar to the
Caladiums, the Alocastia Metallica, roused him to still greater admiration. Covered with a coat of greenish bronze shot
with glints of silver, it was the supreme masterpiece of artifice; anyone would
have taken it for a bit of stovepipe cut into a pikehead
pattern by the makers.
Next the men unloaded several bunches of
lozenge-shaped leaves, bottle-green in colour; from the midst of each bunch
rose a stiff stem on top of which trembled a great ace of hearts, as glossy as
a pepper; and then, as if in defiance of all the familiar aspects of plant
life, there sprang from the middle of this bright vermilion heart a fleshy,
downy tail, all white and yellow, straight in some cases, corkscrewing above
the heart like a pig's tail in others.
This was the Anthurium,
an aroid recently imported from
Des Esseintes
could scarcely contain himself for joy.
Now they were getting a fresh batch of
monstrosities down from the carts - the Echinopis,
thrusting its ghastly pink blossoms out of cotton-wool compresses, like the
stumps of amputated limbs; the Nidularium, opening
its sword-shaped petals to reveal gaping flesh-wounds; the Tillandsia
Lindeni. trailing its
jagged ploughshares the colour of wine-must; and the Cypripedium, with its
complex, incoherent contours devised by some demented draughtsman. It looked rather like a clog or a tidy, and
on top was a human tongue bent back with the string stretched tight, just as
you may see it depicted in the plates of medical works dealing with diseases of
the throat and mouth; two little wings, of a jujube red, which might almost
have been borrowed from a child's toy windmill, completed this baroque
combination of the underside of a tongue, the colour of wine lees and slate,
and a glossy pocketcase with a lining that oozed
drops of viscous paste.
He could not take his eyes off this
unlikely-looking orchid from India, and the gardeners, irritated by all these
delays, began reading out themselves the labels stuck in the pots they were
bringing in.
Des Esseintes
watched them open-mouthed, listening in amazement to the forbidden names of the
various herbaceous plants - the Encephalartos
horridus, a gigantic artichoke, an iron spike
painted a rust colour, like the ones they put on park gates to keep trespassers
from climbing over; the Cocos Micania, a sort of palm-tree with a slim, indented
stem, surrounded on all sides with tall leaves like paddles and oars; the Zamia
Lehmanni, a huge pineapple, a monumental Cheshire
cheese stuck in hearth-mould and bristling on top with barbed javelins and
native arrows; and the Cibotium Spectabile, challenging comparison with the weirdest
nightmare and outdoing even its congeners in the craziness of its formation,
with an enormous orang-utan’s tail poking out of a cluster of palm-leaves - a
brown, hairy tail twisted at the tip into the shape of a bishop's crozier.
But he did not linger over these plants,
as he was waiting impatiently for the series which particularly fascinated him,
those vegetable ghouls the carnivorous plants - the downy-rimmed Fly-trap of
the Antilles, with its digestive secretions and its curved spikes that
interlock to form a grille over any insect it imprisons; the Drosera of the peat-bogs, flaunting a set of glandulous
hairs; the Sarrecena and the Cephalothus,
opening voracious gullets capable of consuming and digesting whole chunks of
meat; and finally the Nepenthes, which in shape and form passes all the bounds
of eccentricity.
With unwearying
delight he turned in his hands the pot in which this floral extravaganza was
quivering. It resembled the gum-tree in
its long leaves of a dark, metallic green; but from the end of each leaf there
hung a green string, an umbilical cord carrying a greenish-coloured pitcher
dappled with purple markings, a sort of German pipe in porcelain, a peculiar
kind of bird's nest that swayed gently to and fro, displaying an interior
carpeted with hairs.
"That really is a beauty,"
murmured Des Esseintes.
But he had to cut short his display of
pleasure, for now the gardeners, in a hurry to get away, were rapidly unloading
the last of their plants, jumbling up tuberous Begonias and black Crotons
flecked with spots of red lead like old iron.
Then he noticed that there was still one
name left on his list, the Cattleya of New
Granada. They pointed out to him a
little winged bell-flower of a pale lilac, an almost imperceptible mauve; he
went up, put his nose to it, and started back - for it gave out a smell of
varnished deal, a toy-box smell that brought back horrid memories of New Year's
Day when he was a child. He decided he
had better be wary of it, and almost regretted having admitted among all the
scentless plants he possessed this orchid with its unpleasantly reminiscent
odour.
Once he was alone again, he surveyed the
great tide of vegetation that had flooded into his entrance-hall, the various
species all intermingling, crossing swords, cresses, or spears with one
another, forming a mass of green weapons, over which floated, like barbarian
battle-flags, flowers of crude and dazzling colours.
The air in the room was getting purer, and
soon, in a dark corner, down by the floor, a soft white light appeared. He went up to it and discovered that it came
from a clump of Rhizomorphs which, as they breathed,
shone like tiny night-lights.
"These plants are really astounding,"
he said to himself, stepping back to appraise the entire collection. Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of
them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain, and metal had been lent
by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible to
imitate the work of human hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes
of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the
hideous splendours of their gangrened skin.
"It all comes down to syphilis in the
end," Des Esseintes reflected, as his gaze was
drawn and held by the horrible markings of the Caladiums, over which a shaft of
daylight was playing. And he had a
sudden vision of the unceasing torments inflicted on humanity by the virus of
distant ages. Ever since the beginning
of the world, from generation to generation, all living creatures had handed
down the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting disease that ravaged the
ancestors of man and even ate into the bones of the old fossils that were being
dug up at the present time.
Without ever abating, it had travelled
down the ages, still raging to this day in the form of surreptitious pains, in
the disguise of headaches or bronchitis, hysteria or gout. From time to time it came to the surface,
generally singling out for attack ill-to-do, ill-fed people, breaking out in
spots like pieces of gold, ironically crowning the poor devils with an almeh's diadem of sequins, adding insult to injury by
stamping their skin with the very symbol of wealth and well-being.
And now here it was again, reappearing in
all its pristine splendour on the brightly coloured leaves of these plants!
"It is true," continued Des Esseintes, going back to the starting point of his
argument, "it is true that most of the time Nature is incapable of
producing such depraved, unhealthy species alone and unaided; she supplies the
raw materials, the seed and the soil, the nourishing womb and the elements of
the plant, which man rears, shapes, paints, and carves afterwards to suit his
fancy.
"Stubborn,
muddle-headed. and narrow-minded though she is, she has at last
submitted, and her master has succeeded in changing the soil components by
means of chemical reactions, in utilizing slowly matured combinations, carefully
elaborated crossings, in employing cuttings and graftings
skilfully and methodically, so that now he can make her put forth blossoms of
different colours on the same branch, invents new hues for her, and modifies at
will the age-old shapes of her plants.
In short, he rough-hews her blocks of stone, finishes off her sketches,
signs them with his stamp, impresses on them his
artistic hallmark.
"There's no denying it," he
concluded; "in the course of a few years man can operate a selection which
easy-going Nature could not conceivably make in less than a few centuries;
without the shadow of a doubt, the horticulturists are the only true artists
left to us nowadays."
He was a little tired and felt stifled in
this hothouse atmosphere; all the outings he had had in the last few days had
exhausted him; the transition between the immobility of a sequestered life and
the activity of an outdoor existence had been too sudden. He left the hall and went to lie down on his
bed; but, engrossed in a single subject, as if wound up by a spring, his mind
went on playing out its chain even in sleep, and he soon fell victim to the
sombre fantasies of a nightmare.
He was walking along the middle of a path
through a forest at dusk, beside a woman he had never met, never even seen
before. She was tall and thin, with
tow-like hair, a bulldog face, freckled cheeks, irregular teeth projecting
under a snub nose; she was wearing a maid's white apron, a long scarlet
kerchief draped across her breast, a Prussian soldier's half boots, a black
bonnet trimmed with ruches and a cabbage-bow.
She looked rather like a booth-keeper at a
fair, or a member of some travelling circus.
He asked himself who this woman was whom
he felt to have been deeply and intimately associated with his life for a long
time, and he tried to remember her origins, her name, her occupation, her
significance - but all in vain, for no recollection came to him of this
inexplicable yet undeniable liaison.
He was still searching his memory when
suddenly a strange figure appeared before them on horseback, went ahead for a
minute at a gentle trot, then turned round in the saddle.
His blood froze and he stood rooted to the
spot in utter horror. The rider was an
equivocal, sexless creature with a green skin and terrifying eyes of a cold,
clear blue shining out from under purple lids; there were pustules all around
its mouth; two amazing thin arms, like the arms of a skeleton, bare to the
elbows and shaking with fever, projected from its ragged sleeves, and its
fleshless thighs twitched and shuddered in jackboots that were far too wide for
them.
Its awful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, piercing him, freezing him to the marrow, while
the bulldog woman, even more terrified than he was, clung to him and howled
blue murder, her head thrown back and her neck rigid.
At once he understood the meaning of the
dreadful vision. He had before his eyes
the image of the Pox.
Utterly panic-stricken, beside himself
with fear, he dashed down a side path and ran for dear life until he got to a
summerhouse standing on the left among some laburnums. Safely inside, he dropped into a chair in the
passage.
A few moments later, just as he was
beginning to get his breath back, the sound of sobbing made him look up. The bulldog woman stood before him, a
grotesque and pitiful sight. She was
weeping bitterly, complaining that she had lost her teeth in her flight, and,
taking a number of clay pipes out of her apron pocket, she proceeded to smash
them up and stuff bits of the white stems into the holes in her gums.
"But she's mad!" Des Esseintes said to himself; "those bits of stem will
never hold" - and, true enough, they all came
dropping out of her jaws, one after the other.
At that moment a galloping horse was heard
approaching. Terror seized Des Esseintes and his legs went limp under him. But as the sound of hoofs came nearer,
despair stung him to action like the crack of a whip; he flung himself upon the
woman, who was now stamping on the pipe bowls, begging her to be quiet and not
to betray them both by the noise of her boots.
She struggled furiously, and he had to drag her to the end of the
passage, throttling her to stop her crying out.
Then, all of a sudden, he noticed a tap-room door with green-painted
shutters and saw that it was unlatched; he pushed it open, dashed through - and
stopped dead.
In front of him, in the middle of a vast
clearing, enormous white pierrots
were jumping about like rabbits in the moonlight.
Tears of disappointment welled up in his
eyes; he would never, no, never be able to cross the
threshold of that door.
"I'd be trampled to death if I
tried," he told himself - and as if to confirm his fears, the number of
giant pierrots kept
increasing; their bounds now filled the whole horizon and the whole sky, so
that they bumped alternately against heaven and earth with their heads and
their heels.
Just then the sound of the horse's hoofs
stopped. It was there in the passage,
behind a little round window; more dead than alive, Des Esseintes
turned around and saw through the circular opening two pricked ears, a set of
yellow teeth, a pair of nostrils breathing twin jets of vapour that stank of
phenol.
He sank to the ground, giving up all
thought of resistance or flight; and he shut his eyes so as not to meet the
dreadful gaze of the Pox, glaring at him from behind the wall, though even so
he felt it forcing its way under his closed eyelids, gliding down his clammy
back, and travelling over the whole of his body, the hairs of which stood on
end in pools of cold sweat. He was
prepared for almost anything to happen and even hoped for the coup de grâce to make an end of it all. What seemed like a century, and was probably
a minute, went by; then he opened his eyes again with
a shudder of apprehension.
Everything had vanished without warning;
and like some transformation scene, some theatrical illusion, a hideous mineral
landscape now lay before him, a wan, gullied landscape stretching away into the
distance without a sign of life or movement.
This desolate scene was bathed in light: a calm,
white light, reminiscent of the glow of phosphorous dissolved in oil.
Suddenly, down on the ground, something
stirred - something which took the form of an ashen-faced woman, naked but for
a pair of green silk stockings.
He gazed at her inquisitively. Like horsehair crimped by over-hot irons, her
hair was frizzy, with broken ends; two Nepenthes pitchers hung from her ears;
tints of boiled veal showed in her half-opened nostrils. Her eyes gleaming ecstatically, she called to
him in a low voice.
He had no time to answer, for already the
woman was changing; glowing colours lit up her eyes; her lips took on the
fierce red of the Anthuriums; the nipples of her
bosom shone as brightly as two red peppers.
A sudden intuition came to him, and he
told himself that this must be the Flower.
His reasoning mania persisted even in this nightmare; and as in the
daytime, it switched from vegetation to the Virus.
He now noticed the frightening irritation
of the mouth and breasts, discovered on the skin of the body spots of bistre
and copper, and recoiled in horror; but the woman's eyes fascinated him, and he
went slowly towards her, trying to dig his heels into the ground to hold
himself back, and falling over deliberately, only to pick himself up again and
go on. He was almost touching her when
black Amorphophalli sprang up on every side and
stabbed at her belly, which was rising and falling like a sea. He thrust them aside and pushed them back,
utterly nauseated by the sight of these hot, firm stems twisting and turning
between his fingers. Then, all of a
sudden, the odious plants had disappeared and two arms were trying to enfold
him. An agony of fear set his heart
pounding madly, for the eyes, the woman's awful eyes, had turned a clear, cold
blue, quite terrible to see. He made a
superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible
movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage
Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs,
with its swordblades gaping open to expose the bloody
depths.
His body almost touching the hideous
flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from her - and awoke with a
start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear.
"Thank God," he sobbed, "it
was only a dream."