IX

 

THESE nightmares recurred again and again, until he was afraid to go to sleep.  He spent hours lying on his bed, sometimes the victim of persistent insomnia and feverish restlessness, at other times a prey to abominable dreams that were interrupted only when the dreamer was shocked into wakefulness by losing his footing, falling all the way downstairs, or plunging helplessly into the depths of an abyss.

      His neurosis, which had been lulled to sleep for a few days, gained the upper hand again, showing itself more violent and more stubborn than ever, and taking on new forms.

      Now it was the bedclothes that bothered him; he felt stifled under the sheets, his whole body tingled unpleasantly, his blood boiled and his legs itched.  To these symptoms were soon added a dull aching of the jaws and a feeling as if his temples were being squeezed in a vice.

      His anxiety and depression grew worse, and unfortunately the means of mastering this inexorable illness were lacking.  He had tried to install a set of hydropathic appliances in his dressing-room, but without success: the impossibility of bringing water as high up the hill as his house, not to mention the difficulty of getting water in sufficient quantity in a village where the public fountains only produced a feeble trickle at fixed hours, thwarted this particular plan.  Cheated of the jets of water which, shot at close range at the disks of his vertebral column, formed the only treatment capable of overcoming his insomnia and bringing back his peace of mind, he was reduced to brief aspersions in his bath or in his tub, mere cold affusions followed by an energetic rub-down that his valet gave him with a horsehair glove.

      But these substitute douches were far from checking the progress of his neurosis; at the very most they gave him a few hours' relief, and dear-bought relief at that, considering that his nervous troubles soon returned to the attack with renewed vigour and violence.

      His boredom grew to infinite proportions.  The pleasure he had felt in the possession of astonishing flowers was exhausted; their shapes and colours had already lost the power to excite him.  Besides, in spite of all the care he lavished on them, most of his plants died; he had them removed from his rooms, but his irritability had reached such a pitch that he was exasperated by their absence and his eye continually offended by the empty spaces they had left.

      To amuse himself and while away the interminable hours, he turned to his portfolios of prints and began sorting out his Goyas.  The first states of certain plates of the Caprices, proof engravings recognizable by their reddish tone, which he had bought long ago in the sale-room at ransom prices, put him in a good humour again; and he forgot everything else as he followed the strange fancies of the artist, delighting in his breathtaking pictures of bandits and succubi, devils and dwarfs, witches riding on cats and women trying to pull out the dead man's teeth after a hanging.

      Next, he went through all the other series of Goya's etchings and aquatints, his macabre Proverbs, his ferocious war-scenes, and finally his Garrotting, a plate of which he possessed a magnificent trial proof printed on thick, unsized paper, with the wire-marks clearly visible.

      Goya's savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes.  On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

      He felt the same about his Rembrandts, which he examined now and then on the quiet; and it is of course true that, just as the loveliest melody in the world becomes unbearably vulgar once the public start humming it and the barrel-organs playing it, so the work of art that appeals to charlatans, endears itself to fools, and is not content to arouse the enthusiasm of a few connoisseurs, is thereby polluted in the eyes of the initiate and becomes commonplace, almost repulsive.

      This sort of promiscuous admiration was in fact one of the most painful thorns in his flesh, for unaccountable vogues had utterly spoilt certain books and pictures for him that he had once held dear; confronted with the approbation of the mob, he always ended up by discovering some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and promptly rejected them, at the same time wondering whether his flair was not deserting him, his taste getting blunted.

      He shut his portfolios and once more fell into a mood of splenetic indecision.  To change the trend of his thoughts, he began a course of emollient reading; tried to cool his brain with some of the solanaceae of literature; read those books that are so charmingly adapted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic or phosphatic works would only fatigue: the novels of Charles Dickens.

      But the Englishman's works produced the opposite effect from what he had expected: his chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands, drove him to distraction.  This exaggerated virtue made him react in the contrary direction; by virtue of the law of contrasts, he jumped from one extreme to the other, recalled scenes of full- blooded, earthy passion, and thought of common amorous practices such as the hybrid kiss, or the columbine kiss as ecclesiastical modesty calls it, where the tongue is brought into play.

      He put aside the book he was reading, put from his all thoughts of strait-laced Albion, and let him mind dwell on the salacious seasoning, the prurient peccadilloes of which the Church disapproves.  Suddenly he felt an emotional disturbance; his sexual insensibility of brain and body, which he had supposed to be complete and absolute, was shattered.  Solitude was again affecting his tortured nerves, but this time it was not religion that obsessed him but the naughty sins religion condemns.  The habitual subject of its threats and obsecrations was now the only thing that tempted him; the carnal side of his nature, which had lain dormant for months, had first been disturbed by his reading of pious works, then roused to wakefulness in an attack of nerves brought on by the English writer's cant, and was now all attention.  With his stimulated senses carrying him back down the years, he had soon begun wallowing in the memory of his old dissipations.

      He got up, and with a certain sadness he opened a little silver-gilt box with a lid studded with aventurines.

      This box was full of purple bonbons.  He took one out and idly fingered it, thinking about the strange properties of these sweets with their frosty coating of sugar.  In former days, when his impotency had been established beyond doubt and he could think of woman without bitterness, regret, or desire, he would place one of these bonbons on his tongue and let it melt; then, all of a sudden, and with infinite tenderness, he would be visited by dim, faded recollections of old debauches.

      These bonbons, invented by Siraudin and known by the ridiculous name of 'Pearls of the Pyrenees', consisted of a drop of schoenanthus scent or female essence crystallized in pieces of sugar; they stimulated the papillae of the mouth, evoking memories of water opalescent with rare vinegars and lingering kisses fragrant with perfume.

      Ordinarily he would smilingly drink in this amorous aroma, this shadow of former caresses which installed a little female nudity in a corner of his brain and revived for a second the savour of some woman, a savour he had once adored.  But today the bonbons were no longer gentle in their effect and no longer confined themselves to evoking memories of distant, half- forgotten dissipations; on the contrary, they tore the veils down and thrust before his eyes the bodily reality in all its crudity and urgency.

      Heading the procession of mistresses that the taste of the bonbon helped to define in detail was a woman who paused in front of him, a woman with long white teeth, a sharp nose, mouse-coloured eyes, and short-cropped yellow hair.

      This was Miss Urania, an American girl with a supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron.

      She had been one of the most famous acrobats at the Circus, where Des Esseintes had followed her performance night after night.  The first few times, she had struck him as being just what she was, a strapping, handsome woman, but he had felt no desire to approach her; she had nothing to recommend her to the tastes of a jaded sophisticate, and yet he found himself returning to the Circus, drawn by some mysterious attraction, impelled by some indefinable urge.

      Little by little, as he watched her, curious fancies took shape in his mind.  The more he admired her suppleness and strength, the more he thought he saw an artificial change of sex operating in her; her mincing movements and feminine affectations became ever less obtrusive, and in their place there developed the agile, vigorous charms of a male.  In short, after being a woman to begin with, then hesitating in a condition verging on the androgynous, she seemed to have made up her mind and become an integral, unmistakable man.

      "In that case," Des Esseintes said to himself, "just as a great strapping fellow often falls for a strip of a girl, this hefty young woman should be instinctively attracted to a feeble, broken-down, short-winded creature like myself."

      By dint of considering his own physique and arguing from analogy, he got to the point of imagining that he for his part was turning female; and at this point he was seized with a definite desire to possess the woman, yearning for her just as a chlorotic girl will hanker after a clumsy brute whose embrace could squeeze the life out of her.

      This exchange of sex between Miss Urania and himself had excited him tremendously.  The two of them, so he said, were made for each other; and added to this sudden admiration for brute strength, a thing he had hitherto detested, there was also that extravagant delight in self-abasement which a common prostitute shows in paying dearly for the loutish caresses of a pimp.

      Meanwhile, before deciding to seduce the acrobat and see if his dreams could be made reality, he sought confirmation of these dreams in the facial expressions she unconsciously assumed, reading his own desires into the fixed, unchanging smile she wore on her lips as she swung on the trapeze.

      At last, one fine evening, he sent her a message by one of the circus attendants.  Miss Urania deemed it necessary not to surrender without a little preliminary courting; however, she was careful not to appear over-shy, having heard that Des Esseintes was rich and that his name could help a woman in her career.

      But when at last his wishes were granted, he suffered immediate and immeasurable disappointment.  He had imagined the American girl would be as blunt-witted and brutish as a fairground wrestler, but he found to his dismay that her stupidity was of a purely feminine order.  It is true that she lacked education and refinement, possessed neither wit nor commonsense, and behaved with bestial greed at table, but at the same time she still displayed all the childish foibles of a woman; she loved tittle-tattle and gewgaws as much as any petty-minded trollop, and it was clear that no transmutation of masculine ideas into her feminine person had occurred.

      What is more, she was positively puritanical in bed and treated Des Esseintes to none of those rough, athletic caresses he at once desired and dreaded; she was not subject, as he had for a moment hoped she might be, to sexual fluctuations.  Perhaps, if he had probed deep into her unfeeling nature, he might yet have discovered a penchant for some delicate, slightly-built bedfellow with a temperament diametrically opposed to her own; but in that case it would have been a preference, not for a young girl, but for a merry little shrimp of a man, a spindle-shanked, funny-faced clown.

      There was nothing Des Esseintes could do but resume the man's part he had momentarily forgotten; his feelings of femininity, of frailty, of dependence, of fear even, all disappeared.  He could no longer shut his eyes to the truth, that Miss Urania was a mistress like any other, offering no justification for the cerebral curiosity she had aroused.

      Although, at first, her firm flesh and magnificent beauty had surprised Des Esseintes and held him spellbound, he was soon impatient to end their liaison and broke it off in a hurry, for his premature impotence was getting worse as a result of the woman's icy caresses and prudish passivity.

      Nevertheless, of all the women in this unending procession of lascivious memories, she was the first to halt in front of him; but the fact was that if she had made a deeper impression on his memory than a host of others whose charms had been less fallacious and whose endearments had been less limited, that was because of the healthy, wholesome animal smell she exuded; her superabundant health was the very antipode of the anaemic, scented savour he could detect in the dainty Siraudin sweet.

      With her antithetical fragrance, Miss Urania was bound to take first place in his recollections, but almost immediately Des Esseintes, shaken for a moment by the impact of a natural, unsophisticated aroma, returned to more civilized scents and inevitably started thinking about his other mistresses.  These now came crowding in on his memory, but with one woman standing out above the rest: the woman whose monstrous speciality had given him months of wonderful satisfaction.

      She was a skinny little thing, a dark-eyed brunette with greasy hair parted on one side near the temple like a boy's, and plastered down so firmly that it looked as if it had been painted on to her head.  He had come across her at a café where she entertained the customers with demonstrations of ventriloquism.

      To the amusement of a packed audience that was half- frightened by what it heard, she took a set of cardboard puppets perched on chairs like a row of Pandean pipes and gave a voice to each in turn; she conversed with dummies that seemed almost alive, while in the auditorium itself flies could be heard buzzing around and the silent spectators noisily whispering among themselves; finally, she had a line of non- existent carriages rolling up the room from the door to the stage, and passing so close to the audience that they instinctively started back and were momentarily surprised to find themselves sitting indoors.

      Des Esseintes had been fascinated, and a whole crop of new ideas sprouted in his brain.  First of all he lost no time in firing of a broadside of banknotes to subjugate the ventriloquist, who attracted him by the very fact of the contrast she presented to the American girl.  The brunette reeked of skilfully contrived scents, heady and unhealthy perfumes, and she burned like the crater of a volcano.  In spite of all his subterfuges, Des Esseintes had worn himself out in a few hours; yet he nonetheless allowed her to go on fleecing him, for it was not so much the woman as the artiste that appealed to him.  Besides, the plans he had in view were ripe for execution, and he decided it was time to carry out a hitherto impracticable project.

      One night he had a miniature sphinx brought in, carved in black marble and couched in the classic pose, its paws stretched out and its head held rigidly upright, together with a chimera in coloured terra-cotta, flaunting a bristling mane, darting ferocious glances from its eyes, and lashing flanks as swollen as a blacksmith's bellows with its tail.  He placed one of these mythical beasts at either end of the bedroom and put out the lamps, leaving only the red embers glowing in the hearth, to shed a dim light that would exaggerate the size of objects almost submerged in the semi-darkness.  This done, he lay down on the bed beside the ventriloquist, whose set face was lit up by the glow of a half-burned log, and waited.

      With strange intonations that he had made her rehearse beforehand for hours, she gave life and voice to the monsters, without so much as moving her lips, without even looking in their direction.

      There and then, in the silence of the night, began the marvellous dialogue of the Chimera and the Sphinx, spoken in deep, guttural voices, now raucous, now piercingly clear, like voices from another world.

      "Here, Chimera, stop!"

      "No, that I will never do."

      Spellbound by Flaubert's wonderful prose, he listened in breathless awe to the terrifying duet, shuddering from head to foot when the Chimera pronounced the solemn and magical sentence:

      "I seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untasted."

      Ah! it was to him that this voice, as mysterious as an incantation, was addressed; it was to him that it spoke of the feverish desire for the unknown, the unsatisfied longing for an ideal, the craving to escape from the horrible realities of life, to cross the frontiers of thought, to grope after a certainty, albeit without feeling one, in the misty upper regions of art!  The paltriness of his own efforts was borne in upon him and cut him to the heart.  He clasped the woman beside him in a gentle embrace, clinging to her like a child wanting to be comforted, never even noticing the solemn expression of the actress forced to play a scene, to practise her profession, at home, in her leisure moments, far from the footlights.

      Their liaison continued, but before long Des Esseintes' sexual fiascos became more frequent; the effervescence of his mind could no longer melt the ice in his body, his nerves would no longer heed the commands of his will, and he was obsessed by the lecherous vagaries common to old men.  Feeling more and more doubtful of his sexual powers when he was with this mistress of his, he had recourse to the most effective adjuvant known to old and undependable voluptuaries - fear.

      As he lay holding the woman in his arms, a husky, drunken voice would roar from behind the door:

      "Open up, damn you!  I know you've got a cully in there with you!  But just you wait a minute, you slut, and you'll get what's coming to you!"

      Straightaway, like those lechers who are stimulated by the fear of being caught flagrante delicto in the open air, on the riverbank, in the Tuileries Gardens, in a public lavatory or on a park bench, he would temporarily recover his powers and hurl himself upon the ventriloquist, whose voice went blustering on outside the room.  He derived extraordinary pleasure from this panic-stricken hurry of a man running a risk, interrupted and hustled in his fornication.

      Unfortunately, these special performances soon came to an end; in spite of the fantastic fees he paid her, the ventriloquist sent him packing, and the very same night gave herself to a fellow with less complicated whims and more reliable loins.

      Des Essentes had been sorry to lose her, and the memory of her artifices made other women seem insipid; even the corrupt graces of depraved children appeared tame in comparison, and he came to feel such contempt for their monotonous grimaces that he could not bring himself to tolerate them any longer.

      Brooding over these disappointments one day as he was walking by himself along the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg, he was accosted near the Invalides by a youth who asked him which was the quickest way to get to the Rue de Babylone.  Des Esseintes showed him which road to take, and as he was crossing the esplanade too, they set off together.

      The young fellow's voice, as with unreasonable persistence he asked for fuller instructions - "So you think if I went to the left it would take longer; but I was told that if I cut across the Avenue I'd get there sooner" - was both timid and appealing, very low and very gentle.

      Des Esseintes ran his eyes over him.  He looked as though he had just left school, and was poorly clad in a little cheviot jacket too tight around the hips and barely reaching below the small of the back, a pair of close-fitting black breeches, a turn-down collar and a flowing cravat, dark-blue with thin white stripes, tied in a loose bow.  In his hand he was carrying a stiff-backed school-book, and on his head was perched a brown, flat-brimmed bowler.

      The face was somewhat disconcerting; pale and drawn, with fairly regular features topped by long black hair, it was lit up by two great liquid eyes, tinged with blue and set close to the nose, which was dotted with a few golden freckles; the mouth was small, but spoilt by fleshy lips with a line dividing them in the middle like a cherry.

      They gazed at each other for a moment; then the young man dropped his eyes and came closer, brushing his companion's arm with his own.  Des Esseintes slackened his pace, taking thoughtful note of the youth's mincing walk.

      From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful friendship that somehow lasted several months.  Des Esseintes could not think of it now without a shudder; never had he submitted to more delightful or more stringent exploitation, never had he ran such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress.

      Among the memories that visited him in his solitude, the recollection of this mutual attachment dominated all the rest.  All the leaven of insanity that a brain over-stimulated by neurosis can contain was fermenting within him; and in his pleasurable contemplation of these memories, in his morose delectation, as the theologians call this recurrence of past iniquities, he added to the physical visions spiritual lusts kindled by his former readings of what such casuists as Busenbaum and Diana, Liguori and Sanchez had to say about sins against the sixth and ninth commandments.

      While implanting an extra-human ideal in this soul of his, which it had thoroughly impregnated and which a hereditary tendency dating from the reign of Henri III had possibly preconditioned, the Christian religion had also instilled an unlawful ideal of voluptuous pleasure; licentious and mystical obsessions merged together to haunt his brain, which was affected with a stubborn longing to escape the vulgarities of life and, ignoring the dictates of consecrated custom, to plunge into new and original ecstasies, into paroxysms celestial or accursed, but equally exhausting in the waste of phosphorous they involved.

      At present, when he came out of one of these reveries, he felt worn out, completely shattered, half dead; and he promptly lit all the candles and lamps, flooding the room with light, imagining that like this he would hear less distinctly than in the dark the dull, persistent, unbearable drumbeat of his arteries, pounding away under the skin of his neck.