XIII
THE
weather had begun behaving in the most peculiar fashion. That year the seasons all overlapped, so that
after a period of squalls and mists, blazing skies, like sheets of white-hot
metal, suddenly appeared from over the horizon.
In a couple of days, without any transition whatever, the cold, dank
fogs and pouring rain were followed by a wave of torrid heat, an appallingly
sultry atmosphere. As if it were being
energetically poked with gigantic fire-irons, the sun glowed like an open
furnace, sending out an almost white light that burnt the eyes; fiery particles
of dust rose from the scorched roads, grilling the parched trees, browning the
dry grass. The glare reflected by
whitewashed walls and the flames kindled in windowpanes and zinc roofs were
absolutely blinding; the temperature of a foundry in full blast weighed down on
Des Esseintes' house.
Wearing next to nothing, he threw open a
window, to be hit full in the face by a fiery blast from outside; the
dining-room, where he next sought refuge, was like an oven, and the rarefied
air seemed to have reached boiling-point.
He sat down feeling utter despair, for the excitement that had kept his
mind busy with daydreams while he was sorting out his books had died away. Like every other victim of neurosis, he found
heat overpowering; his anaemia, held in check by the cold weather, got the
better of him again, taking the strength out of a body already debilitated by
copious perspiration.
With his shirt clinging to his moist back,
his perineum sodden, his arms and legs wet, and his forehead streaming with
sweat that ran down his cheeks like salty tears, Des Esseintes
lay back exhausted in his chair. Just
then he became aware of the meat on the table before him and the sight of it
sickened him; he ordered it to be taken away and boiled eggs brought instead. When these arrived, he tried to swallow some sippets dipped in the yolk, but they stuck in his
throat. Waves of nausea rose to his
lips, and when he drank a few drops of wine they pricked his stomach like
arrows of fire. He mopped his face,
where the sweat, which had been warm a few minutes before, was now running down
his temples in cold trickles; and he tried sucking bits of ice to stave off the
feeling of nausea - but all in vain.
Overcome with infinite fatigue, he slumped
helplessly against the table. After a
while he got to his feet, gasping for breath, but the sippets
had swollen and were slowly rising in his throat, choking him. Never had he felt so upset, so weak, so ill
at ease; on top of it all, his eyes were affected and he started seeing double,
with things spinning around in pairs; soon he lost his sense of distance, so
that his glass seemed miles away. He
told himself he was the victim of optical illusions, but even so he was unable
to shake them off. Finally he went and
lay down on the sofa in the sitting-room; but it promptly began pitching and
rolling like a ship at sea, and his nausea grew
worse. He got up again, this time
deciding to take a digestive to help down the eggs, which were still troubling
him.
Returning to the dining-room, he wryly
likened himself, there in his ship's cabin, to a traveller suffering from
seasickness. He staggered over to the
cupboard and looked at the mouth organ, but refrained from opening it; instead,
he reached up to the shelf above for a bottle of Benedictine - a bottle he kept
in the house on account of its shape, which he considered suggestive of ideas
at once pleasantly wanton and vaguely mystical.
But for the moment he remained unmoved,
and just stared dully at the squat, dark-green bottle, which normally conjured
up visions of medieval priories for him, with its antique monkish paunch, its
head and neck wrapped in a parchment cowl, its red seal quartered with three
silver mitres on a field azure and fastened to the neck with lead like a Papal
bull, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paper apparently yellowed and
faded with age: Liquor Monachorum Benedictinorum Abbatiæ Fiscanensis.
Under this truly monastic habit, certified
by a cross and the ecclesiastical initials D.O.M., and enclosed in parchment
and ligatures like an authentic charter, there slumbered a saffron-coloured
liqueur of exquisite delicacy. It gave
of a subtle aroma of angelica and hyssop mixed with seaweed whose iodine and
bromine content was masked with sugar; it stimulated the palate with a
spirituous fire hidden under an altogether virginal sweetness; and it flattered
the nostrils with a hint of corruption wrapped up in a caress that was at once
childlike and devout.
This hypocrisy resulting from the
extraordinary discrepancy between container and contents, between the
liturgical form of the bottle and the utterly feminine, utterly modern soul
inside it, had set him dreaming before now. Sitting with the bottle in front of him, he
had spent hours thinking about the monks who sold it, the Benedictines of the
Abbey of Fécamp who, belonging as they did to the
congregation of Saint-Maur, famous for its historical
researches, were subject to the Rule of St Benedict, yet did not follow the
observances of either the white monks of Cîteaux or
the black monks of Cluny. They forced themselves upon his imagination,
looking just as if they had come straight out of the Middle
Ages, growing medicinal herbs, heating retorts, distilling in alembics
sovereign cordials, infallible panaceas.
He took a sip of the liqueur and felt a
little better for a minute or two; but soon the fire a drop of wine had kindled
in his innards blazed up again. He threw
down his napkin and went back to his study, where he began pacing up and down;
he felt as if he were under the receiver of an air-pump in which a vacuum was
being gradually created, and a dangerously pleasant lethargy spread from his
brain into every limb. Unable to stand
any more of this, he pulled himself together and, for perhaps the first time
since his coming to Fontenay, sought refuge in the
garden, where he took shelter in the patch of shadow cast by a tree. Sitting on the grass, he gazed vacantly at
the rows of vegetables the servants had planted. But it was only after an hour's gazing that
he realized what they were, for a greenish mist floated before his eyes,
preventing him from seeing anything more than blurred, watery images which kept
changing colour and appearance.
In the end, however, he recovered his
balance and was able to distinguish clearly onions and cabbages in front,
further off a huge patch of lettuce, and at the back, all along the hedge, a
row of white lilies standing motionless in the sultry air.
A smile puckered his lips, for he suddenly
remembered the quaint comparison old Nicander once
made, from the point of view of shape, between the pistil of a lily and the
genitals of an ass, and also a passage in Albertus
Magnus where that miracle-worker expounds a most peculiar method of
discovering, with the aid of a lettuce, whether a girl is still a virgin.
These recollections cheered him up
somewhat, and he began looking around the garden, examining the plants that had
been withered by the heat and noticing how the baked earth was smoking under
the scorching, dusty rays of the sun.
Then, over the hedge separating the low-lying garden from the raised
roadway going up to the Fort, he caught sight of a bunch of boys rolling about
on the ground in the blazing sunshine.
He was fixing his attention on them when
another lad appeared on the scene. He
was smaller than the rest, and a really squalid specimen; his hair looked like
sandy seaweed, two green bubbles hung from his nose, and his lips were coated
with the disgusting white mess he was eating - skim-milk cheese spread on a
hunk of bread and sprinkled with chopped garlic.
Des Esseintes
sniffed the air, and a depraved longing, a perverse craving took hold of him;
the nauseating snack positively made his mouth water. He felt sure that his stomach, which rebelled
against all normal food, would digest this frightful titbit and his palate
enjoy it as much as a banquet.
He sprang to his feet, ran to the kitchen,
and ordered his servants to send to the village for a round loaf, some white
cheese, and a little garlic, explaining that he wanted a snack exactly like the
one the child was having. This done, he
went back to where he had been sitting under the tree.
The lads were fighting now, snatching bits
of bread from each other's hands, ramming them into their mouths and licking
their fingers afterwards. Kicks and
blows fell thick and fast, and the weaker boys were
knocked to the ground, where they lay thrashing about and crying as the broken
stones dug into their bottoms.
The sight put new life into Des Esseintes; the interest this fight aroused in him took his
mind off his own sickly condition. Faced
with the savage fury of these vicious brats, he reflected on the cruel and
abominable law of the struggle for life, and contemptible though these children
were, he could not help feeling sorry for them and thinking it would have been
better for them if their mothers had never borne them.
After all, what did their lives amount to
but impetigo, colic, fevers, measles, smacks, and slaps in childhood; degrading
jobs with plenty of kicks and curses at thirteen or so; deceiving mistresses,
foul diseases, and unfaithful wives in manhood; and then, in old age,
infirmities and death-agonies in workhouses or hospitals?
And the future, when you came to think of
it, was the same for all, and nobody with any sense would dream of envying
anybody else. For the rich, though the
setting was different, it was a case of the same passions, the same worries,
the same sorrows, the same diseases - and also the same paltry pleasures,
whether these were alcoholic, literary, or carnal. There was even a vague compensation for every
sort of suffering, a kind of rough justice that restored the balance of
unhappiness between the classes, granting the poor greater resistance to physical
ills that wreaked worse havoc on the feebler and thinner bodies of the rich.
What madness it was to beget children,
reflected Des Esseintes. And to think that the priestery,
who had taken a vow of sterility, had carried inconsistency to the point of
canonizing St Vincent de Paul because he saved innocent babes for useless
torments!
Thanks to his odious precautions, the man
had postponed for years to come the deaths of creatures devoid of thought or
feeling, so that later, having acquired a little understanding an a far greater
capacity for suffering, they could look into the future, could expect and dread
that death whose very name had hitherto been unknown to them, could even, in
some cases, call upon it to release them from the hateful life-sentences to
which he had condemned them in virtue of an absurd theological code.
And since the old man's death, his ideas
had won universal acceptance; for instance, children abandoned by their mothers
were given homes instead of being left to die quietly without knowing what was
happening; and yet the life that was kept for them would grow harder and
bleaker day by day. Similarly, under the
pretext of encouraging liberty and progress, society had discovered yet another
means of aggravating man's wretched lot, by dragging him from his home, rigging
him out in a ridiculous costume, putting specially designed weapons in his
hands, and reducing him to the same degrading slavery from which the negroes
were released out of pity - and all this to put him in a position to kill his
neighbour without risking the scaffold, as ordinary murderers do who operate
single-handed, without uniforms, and with quieter, poorer weapons.
What a peculiar age this was, Des Esseintes thought to himself, which, ostensibly in the
interests of humanity, strove to perfect anaesthetics in order to do away with
physical suffering, and at the same time concocted stimulants such as this to
aggravate moral suffering!
Ah! if in the
name of pity the futile business of procreation was ever to be abolished, the
time had surely come to do it. But here
again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homais stood in the way, ferocious and unreasonable.
Justice regarded as perfectly legitimate
the tricks that were used to prevent conception; it was a recognized,
acknowledged fact; there was never a couple in the land, no matter how
well-to-do, that did not send its children to the wash or use devices that
could be bought openly in the shops - devices nobody would ever dream of
condemning. And yet, if these natural or
mechanical subterfuges proved ineffectual, if the trickery failed, and if to
make good the failure recourse was had to more reliable methods, why then there
were not prisons, jails, or penitentiaries enough to accommodate the people
convicted out of hand, and in all good faith, by other individuals who the same
night, in the conjugal bed, used every trick they knew to avoid begetting brats
of their own.
It followed that the fraud itself was not
a crime, but that the attempt to make good its failure was.
In short, society regarded as a crime the
act of killing a creature endowed with life; and yet expelling a foetus simply
meant destroying an animal that was less developed, less alive, certainly less
intelligent and less prepossessing, than a dog or a cat, which could be strangled
at birth with impunity.
It should also be remarked, thought Des Esseintes, that to add to the justice of it all, it was not
the unskilful operator - who generally beat a speedy retreat - but the woman in
the case, the victim of his clumsiness, who paid the penalty for saving an
innocent creature from the misery of life.
All the same, it was a fantastically
prejudiced world that tried to outlaw operations so natural that the most
primitive of men, the South Sea islander, was led to
perform them by instinct alone.
Just then Des Esseintes'
manservant interrupted these charitable reflections of his by bringing him the
snack he had asked for on a silver-gilt salver.
His gorge rose at the sight; he had not the courage to take even a bite
at the bread, for his morbid appetite had deserted him. A dreadful feeling of debility came over him
again, but he was forced to get to his feet; the sun was moving around and
gradually encroaching on his patch of shadow, the heat becoming fiercer and
more oppressive.
"You see those children fighting in
the road?" he said to the man.
"Well, throw the thing to them.
And let's hope that the weaklings are badly mauled about, that they don't
get so much as a crumb of bread, and that on top of it all they're soundly
thrashed when they get home with their breeches torn and a couple of black eyes
to boot. That'll give them a foretaste
of the sort of life they can expect!"
And he went back into the house, where he sank limply into an armchair.
"Still, I really must see if there
isn't something I can eat," he muttered - and he tried soaking a biscuit
in a glass of old J.P. Cloete Constantia, of which he
still had a few bottles in his cellar.
This wine, the colour of singed onion
skins, and tasting of old malaga and port, but with a
sugary bouquet all its own and an aftertaste of grapes whose juices have been
condensed and sublimated by burning suns, had often braced him up and even
given new vigour to a stomach weakened by the fasting he was forced to
practise; but this time the cordial, usually so helpful, failed to have any
effect.
Next, in the hope that an emollient might
cool the hot irons that were burning his innards, he resorted to Nalifka, a Russian liqueur contained in a bottle covered
with a dull gold glaze; but this unctuous, raspberry-flavoured syrup was just
as ineffective. Alas, the time was long
past when Des Esseintes, then enjoying comparatively
good health, would get into a sledge he kept at home - this in the hottest
period of the year - and sit there wrapped in furs that he pulled tightly
around him, shivering to the best of his ability and saying through
deliberately chattering teeth: "What an icy wind! Why, it's freezing here, it's
freezing!" - until he almost convinced himself
that it really was cold.
Unfortunately, now that his sufferings
were real, these remedies were no longer of any avail.
Nor was it any use his having recourse to
laudanum; instead of acting as a sedative, it irritated his nerves and then
robbed him of his sleep. At one time he
had also resorted to opium and hashish in the hope of seeing visions, but these
two drugs had only brought on vomiting and violent nervous disorders; he had
been obliged to stop using them at once and, without the help of these crude
stimulants, to ask his brain, alone and unaided, to carry him far away from
everyday life into the land of dreams.
"What a day!" he groaned as he
mopped his neck, feeling what little strength was left in him melting away in
fresh floods of perspiration. A feverish
restlessness again prevented him from sitting still, so that once more he
wandered from room to room, trying one chair after another. Finally, tired of walking around the house,
he sank into his desk-chair, and resting his elbows on the desk, started idly
and unconsciously playing with an astrolabe that was being used as a
paperweight on top of a pile of books and notes.
He had bought this instrument, which was
made of engraved and gilded copper, of German workmanship and dating from the seventeenth
century, in a second-hand dealer's in Paris, after a visit he had paid to the Cluny Museum, where he had stood for hours enraptured by a
wonderful astrolabe of carved ivory, whose cabbalistic appearance had
captivated him.
The paperweight stirred up in him a whole
swarm of memories. Set in motion by the
sight of this little curio, his thoughts went from Fontenay
to
Then, still in memory, he left the Museum
and went for a stroll through the city streets, wandering along the Rue de Sommerard and Boulevard Saint-Michel, turning off into the
adjoining streets, and stopping outside certain establishment whose
multiplicity and peculiar appearance had often struck him.
Beginning with an astrolabe, this mental
excursion ended up in the low taverns of the Latin Quarter.
He remembered what a tremendous number of
these places there were all along the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and down the Odéon end of the Rue de Vaugirard;
sometimes they stood cheek by jowl like the old riddecks
of the Rue due Canal-aux-Harengs at Antwerp, lined up
along the pavement one after the other, all looking very much alike.
Through half-open doors and windows only
partially obscured by coloured panes or curtains, he could recall catching
glimpses of women walking up and down, dragging their feet and sticking their
necks out like so many geese; others sitting dejectedly on benches were wearing
their elbows out on marble-topped tables, lost in their thoughts and singing
softly to themselves, with their heads in their hands; yet others would be swaying
about in front of looking-glasses, patting with their fingertips the switches
of hair they had just dressed; others again would be emptying purses with
broken clasps of piles of silver and copper, and methodically arranging the
money in little heaps.
Most of them had heavy features, hoarse
voices, pendulous breasts, and painted eyes, and all of them, like automata
wound up at the same time with the same key, threw out the same invitations in
the same tone of voice, flashed the same smiles, made the same odd remarks, the
same peculiar comments.
Ideas began to link up in Des Esseintes' mind, and he found himself coming to a definite
conclusion, now that his memory had provided him, so to speak, with a
bird's-eye view of these crowded taverns and streets.
He grasped the true significance of all
these cafes, realized that they corresponded to the state of mind of an entire
generation, and saw that they offered him a synthesis of the age.
The symptoms were indeed plain and
undeniable; the licensed brothels were disappearing, and every time one of them
closed its doors, a tavern opened in its place.
This diminution of official prostitution
in favour of unofficial promiscuity was obviously to be accounted for by the
incomprehensible illusions to which men are subject in affairs of the flesh.
Monstrous as this might appear, the tavern
satisfied an ideal.
The fact was that although the utilitarian
tendencies handed down by heredity, and encouraged by the precocious
discourtesies and constant incivilities of school life, had made the younger
generation singularly boorish and also singularly cold and materialistic, it
had nonetheless kept, deep down in its heart, a little old-fashioned
sentimentality, a vague, stale, old-fashioned ideal of love.
The result was that nowadays, when its
blood caught fire, it could not stomach just walking in, taking its pleasure,
paying the bill, and walking out again.
This, in its eyes, was sheer bestiality, like a dog covering a bitch without
any preamble; besides, a man's vanity obtained no sort of satisfaction in these
houses of ill fame where there was no show of resistance, no semblance of
victory, no hope of preferential treatment, no possibility even of obtaining
liberal favours from a tradeswoman who measured out her caresses in proportion
to the price paid. On the other hand, to
court a girl in a tavern was to avoid wounding all these amorous
susceptibilities, all these sentimental feelings. There were always several men after a girl
like that, and those to whom she agreed, at a price, to grant a rendezvous,
honestly imagined that they were the object of an honorary distinction, a rare
favour.
Yet the staff of a
tavern were every bit as stupid and mercenary, as base and depraved, as
the staff of a brothel. Like the latter,
they drank without being thirsty, laughed without being amused, drooled over
the caresses of the filthiest workman, and went for each other hammer and tongs
at the slightest provocation. But in
spite of everything, the young men of Paris had still not learnt that from the
point of view of looks, dress, and technique, the waitresses in these taverns
were vastly inferior to the women cooped up in the luxurious sitting-rooms of
licensed houses.
Lord, what fools they must be, Des Esseintes used to think to himself, these young chaps who
hang around the beerhouses, because quite apart from
their ridiculous illusions, they actually come to forget the risks involved in
sampling shop- soiled goods of dubious quality, and to take no account of the
money spent on a fixed number of drinks priced beforehand by the landlady, the
time wasted in waiting for delivery of the goods, which are held back to raise
the price, and the perpetual shilly-shallying intended to start the money
flowing and keep it flowing.
This idiotic sentimentality combined with
ruthless commercialism clearly represented the dominant spirit of the age;
these same men who would have gouged anybody's eyes out to make a few coppers,
lost all their flair and shrewdness when it came to dealing with the shifty
tavern girls who harried them without pity and fleeced them without mercy. The wheels of industry turned, and families
cheated one another in the name of trade, only to let themselves by robbed of
money by their sons, who in turn allowed themselves to be swindled by these
women, who in the last resort were bled white by their own fancy men.
Over the whole of Paris, from east to west
and north to south, there stretched an unbroken network of confidence tricks, a
chain of organized thefts acting one upon the other - and all because, instead
of being served straight away, customers were kept waiting and left to cool
their heels.
The fact was that human wisdom was
essentially a matter of spinning things out, of saying no first and yes later;
for the best way of handling men has always been to keep putting them off.
"Ah, if only the same were true of my
stomach!" sighed Des Esseintes, as he was
suddenly doubled up with a spasm of pain that jolted his thoughts back to Fontenay from the distant regions they had been roaming.