XI

 

THE frightened servants immediately sent for the Fontenay doctor, who was completely baffled by Des Esseintes' condition.  He muttered a few medical terms, felt the patient's pulse, examined his tongue, tried in vain to get him to talk, ordered sedatives and rest, and promised to come back the next day.  But at this Des Esseintes summoned up enough strength to reprove his servants for their excessive zeal and to dismiss the intruder, who went off to tell the whole village about the house, the eccentric furnishings of which had left him dumbfounded and flabbergasted.

      To the amusement of the two domestics, who now no longer dared to budge from the pantry, their master recovered in a day or two; and they came upon him drumming on the windowpanes and casting anxious glances at the sky.  And then, one afternoon, he rang for them and gave orders that his bags were to be packed for a long journey.

      While the old man and his wife hunted out the things he said he would need, he paced feverishly up and down the cabin- style dining-room, consulted the timetables of the Channel steamers and scrutinized the clouds from his study window with an impatient yet satisfied air.

      For the past week, the weather had been atrocious.  Sooty rivers flowing across the grey plains of the sky carried along an endless succession of clouds, like so many boulders torn out of the earth.  Every now and then there would be a sudden downpour, and the valley would disappear under torrents of rain.

      But that particular day, the sky had changed in appearance: the floods of ink had dried up, the clouds had lost their rugged outlines, and the heavens were now covered with a flat, opaque film.  This film seemed to be falling ever lower, and at the same time the countryside was enveloped in a watery mist; the rain no longer cascaded down as it had done the day before, but fell in a fine, cold, unrelenting spray, swamping the lanes, submerging the roads, joining heaven and earth with its countless threads.  Daylight in the village dimmed to a ghastly twilight, while the village itself looked like a lake of mud, speckled by the quicksilver needles of rain pricking the surface of the slimy puddles.  From this desolate scene all colour had faded away, leaving only the roofs to glisten brightly above the supporting walls.

      "What terrible weather!" sighed the old manservant, as he laid on a chair the clothes his master had asked for, a suit ordered some time before from London.

      Des Esseintes made no reply except to rub his hands and sit down before a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks were displayed in the form of a fan.  For a few moments he hesitated between the various shades; then, taking into account the cheerless day, his cheerless clothes, and his cheerless destination, he picked out a pair in a drab silk and quickly pulled them on.  They were followed by the suit, a mottled check in mouse grey and lava grey, a pair of laced ankle-boots, a little bowler hat, a flax-blue Inverness cape.  In this attire, and accompanied by his manservant, who was bent under the burden of a trunk, an expanding valise, a carpet-bag, a hat-box, and a bundle of sticks and umbrellas rolled up in a travelling-rug, he made his way to the station.  There, he told his man that he could not say definitely when he would be back - in a year perhaps, or a month, or a week, or even sooner; gave instructions that during his absence nothing in the house should be moved or changed; handed over enough money to cover household expenses; and got into the train, leaving the bewildered old man standing awkward and agape behind the barrier.

      He was alone in his compartment.  Through the rainswept windows the countryside flashing past looked blurred and dingy, as if he were seeing it through an aquarium full of murky water.  Closing his eyes, Des Esseintes gave himself up to his thoughts.

      Once again, he told himself, the solitude he had longed for so ardently and finally obtained had resulted in appalling unhappiness, while the silence which he had once regarded as well-merited compensation for the nonsense he had listened to for years now weighed unbearably upon him.  One morning, he had woken up feeling as desperate as a man who finds himself locked in a prison cell; his lips trembled when he tried to speak, his eyes filled with tears, and he choked and spluttered like someone who has been weeping for hours.  Possessed by a sudden desire to move about, to look upon a human face, to talk to some other living creature, and to share a little in the life of ordinary folk, he actually summoned his servants on some pretext or other and asked them to stay with him.  But conversation was impossible, for apart from the fact that years of silence and sick-room routine had practically deprived the two old people of the power of speech, their master's habit of keeping them at a distance was surely calculated to loosen their tongues.  In any event, they were a dull-witted pair, and quite incapable of answering a question in anything but monosyllables.

      Surely had Des Esseintes realized that they could offer him no solace or relief than he was disturbed by a new phenomenon.  The works of Dickens, which he had recently read in the hope of soothing his nerves, but which had produced the opposite effect, slowly began to act upon him in an unexpected way, evoking visions of English life which he contemplated for hours on end.  Then, little by little, an idea insinuated itself into his mind - the idea of turning dream into reality, of travelling to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions; and this idea was allied with a longing to experience new sensations and thus afford some relief to a mind dizzy with hunger and drunk with fantasy.

      The abominably foggy and rainy weather fostered these thoughts by reinforcing the memories of what he had read, by keeping before his eyes the picture of a land of mist and mud, and by preventing any deviation from the direction his desires had taken.

      Finally he could stand it no longer, and he suddenly decided to go.  Indeed, he was in such a hurry to be off that he fled from home with hours to spare, eager to escape into the future and to plunge into the hurly-burly of the streets, the hubbub of crowded stations.

      "Now at last I can breathe," he said to himself, as the train waltzed to a stop under the dome of the Paris terminus, dancing its final pirouettes to the staccato accompaniment of the turntables.

      Once out in the street, on the Boulevard d'Enfer, he hailed a cab, rather enjoying the sensation of being cluttered up with trunks and travelling-rugs.  The cabby, resplendent in nut-brown trousers and scarlet waistcoat, was promised a generous tip, and this helped the two men to reach a speedy understanding.

      "You'll be paid by the hour," said Des Esseintes; and then, remembering that he wanted to buy a copy of Baedeker's or Murray's Guide to London, he added: "When you get to the Rue de Rivoli, stop outside Galignani's Messenger."

      The cab lumbered off, its wheels throwing up showers of slush.  The roadway was nothing but a swamp; the clouds hung so low that the sky seemed to be resting on the rooftops; the walls were streaming with water from top to bottom; the gutters were full to overflowing; and the pavements were coated with a slippery layer of mud the colour of gingerbread.  As the omnibuses swept by, groups of people on the pavement stood still, and women holding their umbrellas low and their skirts high flattened themselves against the shopwindows to avoid being splashed.

      The rain was slanting in at the windows, so that Des Esseintes had to pull up the glass; this was quickly streaked with trickles of water, while clots of mud spurted up from all sides of the cab like sparks from a firework.  Lulled by the monotonous sound of the rain beating down on his trunks and on the carriage roof, like sacks of peas being emptied out over his head,  Des Esseintes began dreaming of his coming journey.  The appalling weather struck him as an instalment of English life paid to him on account in Paris; and his mind conjured up a picture of London as an immense, sprawling, rain-drenched metropolis, stinking of soot and hot iron, and wrapped in a perpetual mantle of smoke and fog.  He could see in imagination a line of dockyards stretching away into the distance, full of cranes, capstans, and bales of merchandise, and swarming with men - some perched on the masts and sitting astride the yards, while hundreds of others, their heads down and bottoms up, were trundling casks along the quays and into the cellars.

      All this activity was going on in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark, slimy waters of an imaginary Thames, in the midst of a forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders piercing the pale, lowering clouds.  Up above, trains raced by at full speed; and down in the underground sewers, others rumbling along, occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of air-shafts.  And meanwhile, along every street, big or small, in an eternal twilight relieved only by the glaring infamies of modern advertising, there flowed an endless stream of traffic between two columns of earnest, silent Londoners, marching along with eyes fixed ahead and elbows glued to their sides.

      Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine which ground to powder millions of poor wretches - outcasts of fortune whom philanthropists urged, by way of consolation, to sing psalms and recite verses of the Bible.

      But then the vision vanished as the cab suddenly jolted him up and down on his seat.  He looked out of the windows and saw that night had fallen; the gas lamps were flickering in the fog, each surrounded by its dirty yellow halo, while strings of lights seemed to be swimming in the puddles and circling the wheels of the carriages that jogged along through a sea of filthy liquid fire.  Des Esseintes tried to see where he was and caught sight of the Arc du Carrousel; and at that very moment, for no reason except perhaps as a reaction from his recent imaginative flights, his mind fixed on the memory of an utterly trivial incident.  He suddenly remembered that, when the servant had packed his bags under his supervision, the man had forgotten to put a toothbrush with his other toilet necessaries.  He mentally reviewed the list of belongings which had been packed and found that everything else had been duly fitted into his portmanteau; but his annoyance at having left his toothbrush behind persisted until the cabby drew up and so broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets.

      He was now in the Rue de Rivoli, outside Galignani's Messenger.  There, on either side of a frosted-glass door whose panels were covered with lettering and with newspaper-cuttings and blue telegram-forms framed in passe-partout, were two huge windows crammed with books and picture-albums.  He went up to them, attracted by the sight of books bound in paper boards coloured butcher's-blue or cabbage-green and decorated along the seams with gold and silver flowers, as well as others covered in cloth dyed nut-brown, leek-green, lemon-yellow, or current-red, and stamped with black lines on the back and sides.  All this had an un-Parisian air about it, a mercantile flavour, coarser yet less contemptible than the impression produced by cheap French bindings.  Here and there, among open albums showing comic scenes by Du Maurier or John Leech and chromos of wild cross-country gallops by Caldecott, a few French novels were in fact to be seen, tempering this riot of brilliant colours with the safe, stolid vulgarity of their colours.

      Eventually, tearing himself away from this display, Des Esseintes pushed open the door and found himself in a vast bookshop crowded with people, where women sat unfolding maps and jabbering to each other in strange tongues.  An assistant brought him an entire collection of guidebooks, and he in turn sat down to examine these volumes, whose flexible covers bent between his fingers.  Glancing through them, he was suddenly struck by a page of Baedeker describing the London art- galleries.  The precise, laconic details given by the guide aroused his interest, but before long his attention wandered from the older English paintings to the modern works, which appealed to him more strongly.  He remembered certain examples he had seen at international exhibitions and thought that he might well come across them in London - pictures by Millais such as The Eve of St Agnes, with its moonlight effect of silvery-green tones; and weirdly coloured pictures by Watts, speckled with gamboge and indigo, and looking as if they had been sketched by an ailing Gustave Moreau, painted in by an anaemic Michelangelo, and retouched by a romantic Raphael.  Among other canvases he remembered a Curse of Cain, an Ida, and more than one 'Eve', in which the strange and mysterious amalgam of these three masters was informed by the personality, at once coarse and refined, of a dreamy, scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues.

      All these paintings were crowding into his memory when the shop-assistant, surprised to see a customer sitting daydreaming at table, asked him which of the guidebooks he had chosen.  For a moment Des Esseintes could not remember where he was, but then, with a word of apology for his absentmindedness, he bought a Baedeker and left the shop.

      Outside, he found it bitterly cold and wet, for the wind was blowing across the street and lashing the arcades with rain.

      "Drive over there," he told the cabby, pointing to a shop at the very end of the gallery, on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione, which with its brightly lit windows looked like a gigantic night-light burning cheerfully in the pestilential fog.

      This was the Bodega.  The sight which greeted Des Esseintes as he went in was of a long, narrow hall, its roof supported by cast-iron pillars and its walls lined with great casks standing upright on barrel-horses.  Hooped with iron, girdled with a sort of pipe-rack in which tulip-shaped glasses hung upside-down, and fitted at the bottom with an earthenware spigot, these barrels bore, besides a royal coat of arms, a coloured card giving details of the vintage they contained, the amount of wine they held, and the price of that wine by the hogshead, by the bottle, and by the glass.

      In the passage which was left free between these rows of barrels, under the hissing gas-jets of an atrocious iron-grey chandelier, there stood a line of tables loaded with baskets of Palmer's biscuits and stale, salty cakes, and plates heaped with mince-pies and sandwiches whose tasteless exteriors concealed burning mustard-plasters.  These tables, with chairs arranged on both sides, stretched to the far end of the cellar- like room, where still more hogsheads could be seen stacked against the walls, with smaller branded cask lying on top of them.

      The smell of alcohol assailed Des Esseintes' nostrils as he took a seat in this dormitory for strong wines.  Looking around him, he saw on one side a row of great casks with labels listing the entire range of ports, light or heavy in body, mahogany or amaranthine in colour, and distinguished by laudatory titles such as "Old Port", "Light Delicate", "Cockburn's Very Fine", and "Magnificent Old Regina"; and on the other side, standing shoulder to shoulder and rounding their formidable bellies, enormous barrels containing the martial wine of Spain in all its various forms, topaz-coloured sherries light and dark, sweet and dry - San Lucar, Vino de Pasto, Pale Dry, Oloroso, and Amontillado.

      The cellar was packed to the doors.  Leaning his elbow on the corner of a table, Des Esseintes sat waiting for the glass of port he had ordered of a barman busy opening explosive, eggshaped soda-bottles that looked like giant-sized capsules of gelatine or gluten such as chemists use to mask the taste of their more obnoxious medicines.

      All around him were swarms of English people.  There were pale, gangling clergymen with clean-shaven chins, round spectacles, and greasy hair, dressed in black from head to foot - soft hats at one extremity, laced shoes at the other, and, in between, incredibly long coats with little buttons running down the front.  There were laymen with bloated pork-butcher faces or bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, winy cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes, and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes.  Further away, at the far end of the wine-shop, a tow-haired stick of a man with a chin sprouting white hairs like an artichoke, was using a microscope to decipher the minute print of an English newspaper.  And facing him was a sort of American naval officer, stout and stocky, swarthy and bottle-nosed, a cigar stuck in the hairy orifice of his mouth, and his eyes sleepily contemplating the framed champagne advertisements on the walls - the trademarks of Perrier and Roederer, Heidsieck and Mumm, and the hooded head of a monk identified in Gothic lettering as Dom Pérignon of Reims.

      Des Esseintes began to feel somewhat stupefied in this heavy guard-room atmosphere.  His senses dulled by the monotonous chatter of these English people talking to one another, he drifted into a daydream, calling to mind some of Dickens' characters, who were so partial to the rich red port he saw in glasses all about him, and peopling the cellar in fancy with a new set of customers - imagining here Mr Wickfield's white hair and ruddy complexion, there the sharp, expressionless features and unfeeling eyes of

Mr Tulkinghorn, the grim lawyer of Bleak House.  These characters stepped right out of his memory to take their places in the Bodega, complete with all their mannerisms and gestures, for his recollections, revived by a recent reading of the novels, were astonishingly precise and detailed.  The Londoner's home as described by the novelist - well lighted, well heated, and well appointed, with bottles being slowly emptied by Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield, or Tom Pinch's sister, Ruth - appeared to him in the guise of a cosy ark sailing snugly through a deluge of soot and mire.  He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination, happy to be indoors, and believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs by the bridge behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames.  But his glass was empty now; and despite the warm fug in the cellar and the added heat from the smoke of pipes and cigars, he shivered slightly as he came back to reality and the foul, dank weather.

      He asked for a glass of Amontillado, but at the sight of this pale, dry wine, the English author's soothing stories and gentle lenitives gave place to the harsh revulsives and painful irritants provided by Edgar Allan Poe.  The spine-chilling nightmare of the cask of Amontillado, the story of the man walled up in an underground chamber, took hold of his imagination; and behind the kind, ordinary faces of the American and English customers in the Bodega he fancied he could detect foul, uncontrollable desires, dark and odious schemes.  But then he suddenly noticed that the place was emptying and that it was almost time for dinner; he paid his bill, got slowly to his feet, and in a slight daze made for the door.

      The moment he set foot outside, he got a wet slap in the face from the weather.  Swamped by the driving rain, the street lamps flickered feebly instead of shedding a steady light, while the sky seemed to have been taken down a few pegs, so that the clouds now hung below roof level.  Des Esseintes looked along the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, bathed in shadow and moisture, and imagined that he was standing in the dismal tunnel beneath the Thames.  But sharp pangs of hunger recalled him to reality and, going back to the cab, he gave the driver the address of the tavern in the Rue d'Amsterdam, by the Gare Saint-Lazare.

      It was now seven o'clock by his watch: he had just time enough to dine before catching his train, which was due to leave at eight-fifty.  He worked out how long the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven would take, added up the hours on his fingers, and finally told himself: "If the times given in the guide are correct, I shall arrive in London dead on twelve- thirty tomorrow afternoon."

      The cab came to a stop in front of the tavern.  Once again Des Esseintes got out, and made his way into a long hall, decorated with brown paint instead of the usual guilt mouldings, and divided by means of breast-high partitions into a number of compartments, rather like the loose-boxes in a stable.  In this narrow room, which broadened out near the door, a line of beer-pulls stood at attention along a counter spread with hams as brown as old violins, lobsters the colour of red lead, and salted mackerel, as well as slices of onion, raw carrot, and lemon, bunches of bay-leaves and thyme, juniper berries and peppercorns swimming in a thick sauce.

      One of the boxes was empty.  He took possession of it and hailed a young man in a black coat, who treated him to a ceremonious bow and a flow of incomprehensible words.  While the table was being laid, Des Esseintes inspected his neighbours.  As at the Bodega, he saw a crowd of islanders with china-blue eyes, crimson complexions, and earnest or arrogant expressions, skimming through foreign newspapers; but here there were a few women dining in pairs without male escorts, robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette- knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet.  They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rumpsteak pie - meat served hot in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a fruit tart.

      The voracity of these hearty trencerwomen brought back with a rush the appetite he had lost so long ago.  First, he ordered and enjoyed some thick, greasy oxtail soup; next, he examined the list of fish and asked for a smoked haddock, which also came up to his expectations; and then, goaded on by the sight of other people guzzling, he ate a huge helping of roast beef and potatoes and downed a couple of pints of ale, savouring the musky cowshed flavour of this fine pale beer.

      His hunger was now almost satisfied.  He nibbled a bittersweet chunk of blue Stilton, pecked at a rhubarb tart, and then, to make a change, quenched his thirst with porter, that black beer which tastes of liquorice with the sugar extracted.

      He drew a deep breath: not for years had he stuffed and swilled with such abandon.  It was, he decided, the change in his habits together with the choice of strange and satisfying dishes which had roused his stomach from its stupor.  He settled contentedly in his chair, lit a cigarette, and prepared to enjoy a cup of coffee laced with gin.

      Outside, the rain was still falling steadily; he could hear it pattering on the glass skylight at the far end of the room and cascading into the waterspouts.  Inside, no-one stirred; all were dozing like himself over their liqueur glasses, pleasantly conscious that they were in the dry.

      After a while, their tongues were loosened; and as most of them looked up in the air as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that these Englishmen were nearly all discussing the weather.  Nobody laughed or smiled, and their suits matched their expressions: all of them were sombrely dressed in grey cheviot with nankin-yellow or blotting-paper-pink stripes.  He cast a pleased look at his own clothes, which in colour and cut did not differ appreciably from those worn by the people around him, delighted to find that he was not out of keeping with these surroundings and that superficially at least he could claim to be a naturalized citizen of London.  Then he gave a start: what of the time?  He consulted his watch; it was ten minutes to eight.  He still had nearly half-an-hour to stay where he was, he told himself; and once again he fell to thinking over his plans.

      In the course of his sedentary life, only two countries had exerted any attraction upon him - Holland and England.  He had surrendered to the first of these two temptations; unable to resist any longer, he had left Paris one fine day and visited the cities of the Low Countries, one by one.  On the whole, this tour had proved a bitter disappointment to him.  He had pictured to himself a Holland such as Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade had painted, imagining for his own private pleasure ghettoes swarming with splendid figures as suntanned as cordovan leather, looking forward to stupendous village fairs with never-ending junketings in the country, and expecting to find the patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality which the old masters had depicted in their works.

      There was no denying that Haarlem and Amsterdam had fascinated him; the common people, seen in their natural unpolished state and their normal rustic surroundings, were very much like Van Ostade's subjects, with their rowdy, untamed brats and their elephantine old gossips, big-bosomed and pot- bellied.  But there was no sign of wild revelry or domestic drunkenness, and he had to admit that the paintings of the Dutch School exhibited in the Louvre had led him astray.  They had in fact served as a springboard from which he had soared into a dream world of false trails and impossible ambitions, for nowhere in this world had he found the fairyland of which he had dreamt; nowhere had he seen rustic youths and maidens dancing on a village green littered with wine casks, weeping with sheer happiness, jumping for joy, and laughing so uproariously that they wet their petticoats and breeches.

      No, there was certainly nothing of the sort to be seen at present.  Holland was just a country like any other and, what was more, a country entirely lacking in simplicity and geniality, for the Protestant faith was rampant there with all its stern hypocrisy and unbending solemnity.

      Still thinking of this past disappointment, he once more consulted his watch: there were only ten minutes now before his train left.

      "It's high time to ask for my bill and go," he told himself.  But the food he had eaten was lying heavy on his stomach, and his whole body felt incapable of movement.

      "Come now," he muttered, trying to screw up his courage.  "Drink the stirrup-cup, and then you must be off."

      He poured himself a brandy, and at the same time called for his bill.  This was the signal for a black-coated individual to come up with a napkin over one arm and a pencil behind his ear - a sort of majordomo with a bald, eggshaped head, a rough beard shot with grey, and a clean-shaven upper lip.  He took up a concert-singer's pose, one leg thrown forward, drew a notebook from his pocket, and, fixing his gaze on a spot close to one of the hanging chandeliers, he made out the bill without even looking at what he was writing.

      "There you are, sir," he said, tearing a leaf from his pad and handing it to Des Esseintes, who was examining him with unconcealed curiosity, as if he were some rare animal.  What an extraordinary creature, he thought, as he surveyed this phlegmatic Englishman, whose hairless lips reminded him, oddly enough, of an American sailor.

      At that moment the street door opened and some people came in, bringing with them a wet doggy smell.  The wind blew clouds of steam back into the kitchen and rattled the unlatched door.  Des Esseintes felt incapable of stirring a finger; a soothing feeling of warmth and lassitude was seeping into every limb, so that he could not even lift his hand to light a cigar.

      "Get up, man, and go," he kept telling himself, but these orders were no sooner given than countermanded.  After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair?  Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food, and even cutlery, were all about him?  What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments such as he had suffered in Holland?

      Now he had only just time enough to run across to the station, but an immense aversion for the journey, an urgent longing to remain where he was, came over him with growing force and intensity.  Lost in thought, he sat there letting the minutes slips by, thus cutting off his retreat.

      "If I went now," he said to himself, "I should have to dash up to the barriers and hustle the porters along with my luggage.  What a tiresome business it would be!"

      And once again he told himself:

      "When you come to think of it, I've seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel.  I've been steeped in English life ever since I left home, and it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality.  As it is, I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have thought of repudiating my old convictions, to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination, and to have believed like any ninny that it was necessary, interesting, and useful to travel abroad."

      He looked at his watch.

      "Time to go home," he said.  And this time he managed to get to his feet, left the tavern, and told the cabby to drive him back to the Gare de Sceaux.  Thence he returned to Fontenay with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas, and his sticks, feeling all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous journey.