X

 

IN the course of that peculiar malady which ravages effete, enfeebled races, the crises are succeeded by sudden intervals of calm.  Though he could not understand why, Des Esseintes awoke one fine morning feeling quite fit and well, no hacking cough, no wedges being hammered into the back of his neck, but instead an ineffable sensation of well-being; his head had cleared and his thoughts too, which had been dull and opaque but were now turning bright and iridescent, like delicately coloured soap-bubbles.

      This state of affairs lasted some days; then all of a sudden, one afternoon, hallucinations of the sense of smell began to affect him.

      Noticing a strong scent of frangipane in the room, he looked to see if a bottle of the perfume was lying about unstoppered, but there was nothing of the sort to be seen.  He went into his study, then into the dining-room; the smell went with him.

      He rang for his servant.

      "Can't you smell something?" he asked.

      The man sniffed and said that he smelt nothing unusual.  There was no doubt about it: his nervous trouble had returned in the form of a new sort of sensual illusion.

      Irritated by the persistence of this imaginary aroma, he decided to steep himself in some real perfumes, hoping that this nasal homoeopathy might cure him or at least reduce the strength of the importunate frangipane.

      He went into his dressing-room.  There, beside an ancient font that he used as a washbasin, and under a long looking- glass in a wrought-iron frame that held the mirror imprisoned like still green water inside the moon-silvered curbstone of a well, bottles of all shapes and sizes were ranged in rows on ivory shelves.

      He placed them on a table and divided them into two categories: first, the simple perfumes, in other words the pure spirits and extracts; and secondly, the compound scents known by the generic name of bouquets.

      Sinking into an armchair, he gave himself up to his thoughts.

      For years now he had been an expert in the science of perfumes; he maintained that the sense of smell could procure pleasures equal to those obtained through sight or hearing, each of the senses being capable, by virtue of a natural aptitude supplemented by an erudite education, of perceiving new impressions, magnifying these tenfold, and co-ordinating them to compose the whole that constitutes a work of art.  After all, he argued, it was no more abnormal to have an art that consisted of picking out odorous fluids than it was to have other arts based on a selection of sound waves or the impact of variously coloured rays on the retina of the eye; only, just as no one, without a special intuitive faculty developed by study, could distinguish a painting by a great master from a paltry daub, or a Beethoven theme from a tune by Clapisson, so no one, without a preliminary initiation, could help confusing at first a bouquet created by a true artist with a potpourri concocted by a manufacturer for sale in grocers' shops and cheap bazaars.

      One aspect of this art of perfumery had fascinated him more than any other, and that was the degree of accuracy it was possible to reach in imitating the real thing.

      Hardly ever, in fact, are perfumes produced from the flowers whose names they bear; and any artist foolish enough to take his raw materials from Nature alone would get only a hybrid result, lacking both conviction and distinction, for the very good reason that the essence obtained by distillation from the flower itself cannot possibly offer more than a very distant, very vulgar analogy with the real aroma of the living flower, rooted in the ground and spreading its effluvia through the open air.

      Consequently, with the solitary exception of the inimitable jasmine, which admits of no counterfeit, no likeness, no approximation even, all the flowers in existence are represented to perfection by combinations of alcoholates and essences, extracting from the model its distinctive personality and adding that little something, that extra tang, that heady savour, that rare touch which makes a work of art.

      In short, the artist in perfumery completes the original natural odour, which, so to speak, he cuts and mounts as a jeweller improves and brings out the water of a precious stone.

      Little by little the arcana of this art, the most neglected of them all, had been revealed to Des Esseintes, who could now decipher its complex language that was as subtle as any human tongue, yet wonderfully concise under its apparent vagueness and ambiguity.

      To do this he had first had to master the grammar, to understand the syntax of smells, to get a firm grasp on the rules that govern them, and, once he was familiar with this dialect, to compare the works of the great masters, the Atkinsons and Lubins, the Chardins and Violets, the Legrands and Piesses, to analyse the construction of their sentences, to weigh the proportion of their words, to measure the arrangement of their periods.

      The next stage in his study of this idiom of essences had been to let experience come to the aid of theories that were too often incomplete and commonplace.

      Classical perfumery was indeed little diversified, practically colourless, invariably cast in a mould fashioned by chemists of olden times; it was still drivelling away, still clinging to its old alembics, when the Romantic epoch dawned and, no less than the other arts, modified it, rejuvenated it, made it more malleable and more supple.

      Its history followed that of the French language step by step.  The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet, and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the  rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us.  Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit.  Later still, the blasé, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and maréchale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period.  And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered new intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and, in short, resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieus, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

      But the language of scents had not remained stationary since the 1830 epoch.  It had continued to develop, had followed the march of the century, had advanced side-by-side with the other arts.  Like them, it had adapted itself to the whims of artists and connoisseurs, joining in the cult of things Chinese and Japanese, inventing scented albums, imitating the flower-posies of Takeoka, mingling lavender and clove to produce the perfume of the Rondeletia, marrying patchouli and camphor to obtain the singular aroma of China ink, combining citron, clove, and neroli to arrive at the odour of the Japanese Hovenia.

      Des Esseintes studied and analysed the spirit of these compounds and worked on an interpretation of these texts; for his own personal pleasure and satisfaction he took to playing the psychologist, to dismantling the mechanism of a work and reassembling it, to unscrewing the separate pieces forming the structure of a composite odour, and as a result of these operations his sense of smell had acquired an almost infallible flare.

      Just as a wine-merchant can recognize a vintage from the taste of a single drop; just as a hop-dealer, the moment he sniffs at a sack, can fix the precise value of the contents; just as a Chinese trader can tell at once the place of origin of the teas he has to examine, can say in what estate in the Bohea hills or in what Buddhist monastery each sample was grown and when the leaves were picked, can state precisely the degree of torrefaction involved and the effect produced on the tea by contact with plum blossom, with the Aglaia, with the Olea fragrans, indeed with any of the perfumes used to modify its flavour, to give it an unexpected piquancy, to improve its somewhat dry smell with a whiff of fresh and foreign flowers; so Des Esseintes, after one brief sniff at a scent, could promptly detail the amounts of its constituents, explain the psychology of its composition, perhaps even give the name of the artist who created it and marked it with the personal stamp of his style.

      It goes without saying that he possessed a collection of all the products used by perfumers; he even had some of the genuine Balsam of Mecca, a balm so rare that it can be obtained only in some regions of Arabia Petraea and remains a monopoly of the Grand Turk.

      Sitting now at his dressing-room table, he was toying with the idea of creating a new bouquet when he was afflicted with that sudden hesitation so familiar to writers who, after months of idleness, make ready to embark on a new work.

      Like Balzac, who was haunted by an absolute compulsion to blacken reams of paper in order to get his hand in, Des Esseintes felt that he ought to get back into practice with a few elementary exercises.  He thought of making some heliotrope and picked up two bottles of almond and vanilla; then he changed his mind and decided to try sweet pea instead.

      The relevant formula and working method escaped his memory, so that he had to proceed by trial and error.  He knew, of course, that in the fragrance of this particular flower, orange-blossom was the dominant element; and after trying various combinations he finally hit on the right tone by mixing the orange-blossom with tuberose and rose, binding the three together with a drop of vanilla.

      All his uncertainty vanished; a little fever of excitement took hold of him and he felt ready to set to work again.  First he made some tea with a compound of cassia and iris; then, completely sure of himself, he resolved to go ahead, to strike a reverberating chord whose majestic thunder would drown the whisper of that artful frangipane which was still stealing stealthily into the room.

      He handled, one after the other, amber, Tonquin musk, with its overpowering smell, and patchouli, the most pungent of all vegetable perfumes, whose flower, in its natural state, gives off an odour of mildew and mould.  Do what he would, however, visions of the eighteenth century haunted him: gowns with panniers and flounces danced before his eyes; Boucher, Venuses, all flesh and no bone, stuffed with pink cotton-wool, looked down at him from every wall; memories of the novel Thémidore, and especially of the exquisite Rosette with her skirts hoisted up in blushing despair, pursued him.  He sprang to his feet in a fury, and to rid himself of these obsessions he filled his lungs with that unadulterated essence of spikenard which is so dear to Orientals and so abhorrent to Europeans on account of its excessive valerian content.  He was stunned by the violence of the shock this gave him.  The filigree of the delicate scent which had been troubling him vanished as if it had been pounded with a hammer; and he took advantage of this respite to escape from past epochs and antiquated odours in order to engage, as he had been used to do in other days, in less restricted and more up-to-date operations.

      At one time he had enjoyed soothing his spirit with scented harmonies.  He would use effects similar to those employed by the poets, following as closely as possible the admirable arrangement of certain poems by Baudelaire such as L'Irréparable and Le Balcon, in which the last of the five lines in each verse echoes the first, returning like a refrain to drown the soul in infinite depths of melancholy and languor.  He used to roam haphazardly through the dreams conjured up for him by these aromatic stanzas, until he was suddenly brought back to his starting point, to the motif of his medication, by the recurrence of the initial theme, reappearing at fixed intervals in the fragrant orchestration of the poem.

      At present his ambition was to wander at will across a landscape full of changes and surprises, and he began with a simple phrase that was ample and sonorous, suddenly opening up an immense vista of countryside.

      With his vaporizers he injected into the room an essence composed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, and other flowers - an extract which, when it is distilled by a true artist, well merits the name it has been given of "extract of meadow blossoms".  Then into this meadow he introduced a carefully measured amalgam of tuberose, orange, and almond blossom; and immediately artificial lilacs came into being, while linden-trees swayed in the wind, shedding on the ground about them their pale emanations, counterfeited by the London extract of tilia.

      Once he had rouged out this background in its main outlines, so that it stretched away into the distance behind his closed eyelids, he sprayed the room with a light rain of essences that were half-human, half-feline, smacking of the petticoat, indicating the presence of woman in her paint and powder - stephanotis, ayapana, opopanax, chypre, champaka, schoenanthus - on which he superimposed a dash of syringa, to give the factitious, cosmetic, indoor life they evoked the natural appearance of laughing, sweating, rollicking pleasures out in the sun.

      Next he let these fragrant colours escape through a ventilator, keeping only the country scent, which he renewed, increasing the dose so as to force it to return like a ritornel at the end of each stanza.

      The women he had conjured up had gradually disappeared, and the countryside was once more uninhabited.  Then, as if by magic, the horizon was filled with factories, whose fearsome chimneys belched fire and flame like so many bowls of punch.

      A breath of industry, a whiff of chemical products now floated on the breeze he raised by fanning the air, though Nature still poured her sweet effluvia into this foul-smelling atmosphere.

      Des Esseintes was rubbing a pellet of styrax between his fingers, warming it so that it filled the room with a most peculiar smell, an odour at once repugnant and delightful, blending the delicious scent of the jonquil with the filthy stench of gutta-percha and coal tar.  He disinfected his hands, shut away his resin in a hermetically-sealed box, and the factories disappeared in their turn.

      Now, in the midst of the revivified effluvia of linden- trees and meadow flowers, he sprinkled a few drops of the perfume "New-Moan Hay", and on the magic spot momentarily stripped of its lilacs there rose piles of hay, bringing a new season with them, spreading summer about them in these delicate emanations.

      Finally, when he had sufficiently savoured this spectacle, he frantically scattered exotic perfumes around him, emptied his vaporizers, quickened all his concentrated essences and gave free rein to all his balms, with the result that the suffocating room was suddenly filled with an insanely sublimated vegetation, emitting powerful exhalations, impregnating an artificial breeze with raging alcoholates - an unnatural yet charming vegetation, paradoxically uniting tropical spices such as the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthorn, and vervain; defying climate and season to put forth trees of different smells and flowers of the most divergent colours and fragrances; creating out of the union or collision of all of these tones one common perfume, unnamed, unexpected, unusual, in which there reappeared, like a persistent refrain, the decorative phrase he had started with, the smell of the great meadow and the swaying lilacs and linden-trees.

      All of a sudden he felt a sharp stab of pain, as if a drill were boring into his temples.  He opened his eyes, to find himself back in the middle of his dressing-room, sitting at his table; he got up and, still in a daze, stumbled across to the window, which he pushed ajar.  A gust of air blew in and freshened up the stifling atmosphere that enveloped him.  He walked up and down to steady his legs, and as he went to and fro he looked up at the ceiling, on which crabs and salt-encrusted seaweed stood out in relief against a grained background as yellow as the sand on a beach.  A similar design adorned the plinths bordering the wall panels, which in their turn were covered with Japanese crape, a watery green in colour and slightly crumpled to imitate the surface of a river rippling in the wind, while down the gentle current floated a rose petal around which there twisted a swarm of little fishes sketched in with a couple of strokes of the pen.

      But his eyes were still heavy, and so he stopped pacing the short distance between font and bath and leaned his elbows on the windowsill.  Soon his head cleared, and after carefully putting the stoppers back in all his scent-bottles, he took the opportunity to tidy up his cosmetic preparations.  He had not touched these things since his arrival at Fontenay, and he was almost surprised to see once again this collection to which so many women had had recourse.  Phials and jars were piled on top of each other in utter confusion.  Here was a box of green porcelain containing schnouda, that marvellous white cream which, once it is spread on the cheeks, changing under the influence of the air to a delicate pink, then to a flesh colour so natural that it produces an entirely convincing illusion of a flushed complexion; there, lacquered jars inlaid with mother-of-pearl held Japanese gold and Athens green the colour of a blister-fly's wing, golds and greens that turn dark crimson as soon as they are moistened.  And beside pots of filbert paste, of harem serkis, of Kashmir-lily emulsions, of strawberry and elderberry lotions for the skin, next to little bottles full of China-ink and rose-water solutions for the eyes, lay an assortment of instruments fashioned out of ivory and mother-of pearl, silver and steel, mixed up with lucern brushes for the gums - pincers, scissors, strigils, stumps, hair-pads, powder- puffs, back-scratchers, beauty-spots, and files.

      He poked around among all this apparatus, bought long ago to please a mistress of his who used to go into raptures over certain aromatics and certain balms - an unbalanced, neurotic woman who loved to have her nipples macerated in scent, but who only really experienced complete and utter ecstasy when her scalp was scraped with a comb or when a lover's caresses were mingled with the smell of soot, of wet plaster from houses being built in rainy weather, or of dust thrown up by heavy raindrops in a summer thunderstorm.

      As he mused over these recollections, one memory in particular haunted him, stirring up a forgotten world of old thoughts and ancient perfumes - the memory of an afternoon he had spent with this woman at Pantin, partly for want of anything better to do and partly out of curiosity, at the house of one of her sisters.  While the two women were chattering away and showing each other their frocks, he had gone to the window and, through the dusty panes, had seen the muddy street stretching into the distance and heard it echo with the incessant beat of galoshes tramping through the puddles.

      This scene, though it belonged to a remote past, suddenly presented itself to him in astonishing detail.  Pantin was there before him, bustling and alive in the dead green water of the moon-rimmed mirror into which his unthinking gaze was directed.  An hallucination carried him away far from Fontenay; the looking-glass conjured up for him not only the Pantin street but also the thoughts that street had once evoked; and lost in a dream, he said over to himself the ingenious, melancholy, yet consoling anthem he had composed that day on getting back to Paris:

      "Yes, the season of the great rains is upon us; hearken to the song of the gutter-pipes retching under the pavements; behold the horse-dung floating in the bowls of coffee hollowed out of the macadam; everywhere the footbaths of the poor are overflowing.

      "Under the lowering sky, in the humid atmosphere, the houses ooze black sweat and their ventilators breathe foul odours; the horror of life becomes more apparent and the grip of spleen more oppressive; the seeds of iniquity that lie in every man's heart begin to germinate; a craving for filthy pleasures takes hold of the puritanical, and the minds of respected citizens are visited by criminal desires.

      "And yet here I am, warming myself in front of a blazing fire, while a basket of full-blown flowers on the table fills the room with the scent of benzoin, geranium, and vetiver.  In mid-November it is still springtime at Pantin in the Rue de Paris, and I can enjoy a quiet laugh at the expense of those timorous families who, in order to avoid the approach of winter, scuttle away at full speed to Antibes or to Cannes.

      "Inclement Nature has nothing to do with this extraordinary phenomenon; let it be said at once that it is to industry, and industry alone, that Pantin owes this factitious spring.

      "The truth is that these flowers are made of taffeta and mounted on binding wire, while the vernal fragrance has come filtering in through cracks in the window-frame from the neighbouring factories where the Pinaud and St James perfumes are made.

      "For the artisan worn out by the hard labour of the workshops, for the little clerk blessed with two many offspring, the illusion of enjoying a little fresh air is a practical possibility - thanks to these manufacturers.

      "Indeed, out of this fabulous counterfeit of the countryside, a sensible form of medical treatment could be developed.  At present, gay dogs suffering from consumption who are carted away to the south generally die down there, finished off by the change in their habits, by their nostalgic longing for the Parisian pleasures that have laid them low.  Here, in an artificial climate maintained by open stoves, their lecherous memories would come back to them in a mild and harmless form, as they breathed in the languid feminine emanations given off by the scent factories.  By means of this innocent deception, the physician could supply his patient platonically with the atmospheres of the boudoirs and brothels of Paris, in place of the deadly boredom of provincial life.  More often than not, all that would be needed to complete the cure would be for the sick man to show a little imagination.

      "Seeing that nowadays there is nothing wholesome left in this world of ours; seeing that the wine we drink and the freedom we enjoy are equally adulterate and derisory; and finally, seeing that it takes a considerable degree of goodwill to believe that the governing classes are worthy of respect and that the lower classes are worthy of help or pity, it seems to me," concluded Des Esseintes, "no more absurd or insane to ask of my fellow men a sum total of illusion barely equivalent to that which they expend every day on idiotic objects, to persuade themselves that the town of Pantin is an artificial Nice, a factitious Menton."

 

*

 

      "All that," he muttered, interrupted in his reflections by a sudden feeling of faintness, "doesn't alter the fact that I shall have to beware of these delicious, atrocious experiments, which are just wearing me out."

      He heaved a sigh.

      "Ah, well, that means more pleasures to cut down on, more precautions to take!" - and he shut himself up in his study, hoping that there he would find it easier to escape from the obsessive influence of all these perfumes.

      He threw the window wide open, delighted to take a bath of fresh air; but suddenly it struck him that the breeze was bringing with it a whiff of bergamot oil, mingled with a smell of jasmine, cassia, and rose-water.  He gave a gasp of horror, and began to wonder whether he might not be in the grip of one of those evil spirits they used to exorcize in the Middle Ages.  Meanwhile, the odour, though just as persistent, underwent a change.  A vague scent of tincture of Tolu, Peruvian balsam, and saffron, blended with a few drops of musk and amber, now floated up from the sleeping village at the foot of the hill; then all at once the metamorphosis took place, these scattered whiffs of perfume came together, and the familiar scent of frangipane, the elements of which his sense of smell had detected and recognized, spread from the valley of Fontenay all the way to the Fort, assailing his jaded nostrils, shaking anew his shattered nerves, and throwing him into such a state of prostration that he fell fainting, almost dying, across the windowsill.