XIV

 

THE next few days went by without too much trouble, thanks to various devices that were used to trick the stomach into acquiescence; but one morning the sauces which disguised the smell of fat and the aroma of blood rising from Des Esseintes' meat proved unacceptable in themselves, and he anxiously asked himself whether his already alarming weakness was not going to get worse and force him to keep to his bed.  Then, all of a sudden, a gleam of light shone through his distress: he remembered that one of his friends who had been very ill some time before had succeeded, by using a patent digester, in checking his anaemia, halting the wasting process, and keeping what little strength remained in him.

      He sent his manservant off to Paris to buy one of these precious instruments, and the with the help of the manufacturer's directions, he was able to instruct his cook how to chop some roast beef up into little pieces, put it dry into the digester, add a slice of leek and one of carrot, then screw down the lid and leave the whole thing to boil in a double saucepan for four hours.

      At the end of that time you pressed the juice out of the threads of meat, and you drank a spoonful of this muddy, salty liquid that was left at the bottom of the digester.  Then you felt something slipping down like warm marrowfat, with a soothing, velvety caress.

      This meat extract put a stop to the pains and nausea caused by hunger, and even stimulated the stomach so that it no longer refused to take in a few spoonfuls of soup.

      Thanks to the digester, Des Esseintes' nervous trouble got no worse, and he told himself:

      "At any rate, that's so much gained; now perhaps the temperature will drop and the heavens scatter a little ash over that abominably enervating sun.  If that happens I'll be able to hang on till the first fogs and frosts without too much difficulty."

      In his present state of apathy and bored inactivity, his library, which he had been unable to finish rearranging, got on his nerves.  Tied as he was to his chair, he was confronted all the time with his profane books, stacked higgledy-piggledy on their shelves, leaning against each other, propping each other up, or lying flat on their sides like a pack of cards.  This disorder shocked him all the more in that it formed such a contrast to the perfect order of his religious works, carefully lined up on parade along the walls.

      He tried to remedy this confusion, but after ten minutes' work he was bathed in sweat.  The effort was obviously too much for him; utterly exhausted, he lay down on a couch and rang for his servant.

      Following his instructions, the old man set to work, bringing him the books one by one so that he could examine each and say where it was to go.

      This job did not take long, for Des Esseintes' library contained only a very limited number of contemporary lay works.

      By dint of passing them through the critical apparatus of his mind, just as a metalworker passes strips of metal through a steel drawing-machine, from which they emerge then and light, reduced to almost invisible threads, he had found in the end that none of his books could stand up to this sort of treatment, that none was sufficiently hardened to go through the next process, the reading-mill.  Trying to eliminate the inferior works, he had in fact curtailed and practically sterilized his pleasure in reading, emphasizing more than ever the irremediable conflict between his ideas and those of the world into which chance had ordained that he should be born.  Things had now got to the point where he found it impossible to discover a book that satisfied his secret longings; indeed, he even began to lose his admiration for the very works that had undoubtedly helped to sharpen his mind and make it so subtle and critical.

      Yet his literary opinions had started from a very simple point of view.  For him, there were no such things as schools; the only thing that mattered to him was the writer's personality, and the only thing that interested him was the working of the writer's brain, no matter what subject he was tackling.  Unfortunately, this criterion of appreciation, so obviously just, was practically impossible to apply, for the simple reason that, however much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality, and ends by relegating all the rest to limbo.

      This process of selection had taken place slowly in his case.  At one time he had worshipped the great Balzac, but as his constitution had become unbalanced and his nerves had gained the upper hand, so his tastes had been modified and his preferences changed.

      Soon indeed, and this although he realized how unjust he was being to the prodigious author of the Comédie humaine, he had given up so much as opening his books, put off by their robust health; other aspirations stirred him now, that were in a way almost indefinable.

      By diligent self-examination, however, he realized first of all that to attract him a book had to have that quality of strangeness that Edgar Allan Poe called for; but he was inclined to venture further along this road, and to insist on Byzantine flowers of thought and deliquescent complexities of style; he demanded a disquieting vagueness that would give him scope for dreaming until he decided to make it still vaguer or more definite, according to the way he felt at the time.  He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow upon it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive patiently and even vainly to analyse.

      Lastly, since leaving Paris, he had withdrawn further and further from reality and above all from the society of his day, which he regarded with ever-growing horror; this hatred he felt had inevitably affected his literary and artistic tastes, so that he shunned as far as possible pictures and books whose subjects were confined to modern life.

      The result was that, losing the faculty of admiring beauty in whatever guise it appeared, he now preferred, among Flaubert's works, La Tentation de Saint Antoine to L'Éducation sentimentale; among Goncourt's works, La Faustin to Germinie Lacerteux; among Zola's works, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret to L'Assommoir.

      This seemed to him a logical point of view; these books, not as topical of course but just as stirring and human as the others, let him penetrate further and deeper into the personalities of their authors, who revealed with greater frankness their most mysterious impulses, while they lifted him, too, higher than the rest, out of the trivial existence of which he was so heartily sick.

      And then, reading these works, he could enter into complete intellectual fellowship with the writers who had conceived them, because at the moment of conception those writers had been in a state of mind analogous to his own.

      The fact is that when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age.

      Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, he is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena.  Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study.  Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape, and assert themselves with imperious authority.  He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.

      In some cases there is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit of dream and fantasy, a more or less vivid vision of a future whose image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs.

      In Flaubert's case, there was a series of vast, imposing scenes, grandiose pageantries of barbaric splendour in which there participated creatures delicate and sensitive, mysterious and proud, women cursed, in all the perfection of their beauty, with suffering souls, in the depths of which he discerned atrocious delusions, insane aspirations, born of the disgust they already felt for the dreadful mediocrity of the pleasures awaiting them.

      The personality of the great writer was revealed in all its splendour in those incomparable pages of La Tentation de Saint Antoine and Salammbô in which, leaving our petty modern civilization far behind, he conjured up the Asiatic glories of distant epochs, their mystic ardours and doldrums, the aberrations resulting from their idleness, the brutalities arising from their boredom - that oppressive boredom which emanates from opulence and prayer even before their pleasures have been fully enjoyed.

      With Goncourt, it was a case of nostalgia for the eighteenth century, a longing to return to the elegant graces of a society that had vanished for ever.  The gigantic backcloth of seas dashing against great backwaters, of deserts stretching away to infinity under blazing skies, found no place in his nostalgic masterpiece, which confined itself, within the precincts of an aristocratic park, to a boudoir warm with the voluptuous effluvia of a woman with a weary smile, a pouting expression, and pensive, brooding eyes.  Nor was the spirit with which he animated his characters the same spirit Flaubert breathed into his creations, a spirit revolted in advance by the inexorable certainty that no new happiness was possible; it was rather a spirit revolted after the event, by bitter experience, at the thought of all the fruitless efforts it had made to invent new spiritual relationships and to introduce a little variety into the immemorial pleasure that is repeated down the ages in the satisfaction, more or less ingeniously obtained, of lusting couples.

      Although she lived in the late nineteenth century and was physically and effectively a modern, by virtue of ancestral influences La Faustin was a creature of the eighteenth century, sharing to the full its spiritual perversity, its cerebral lassitude, its sensual satiety.

      This book of Edmond de Goncourt's was one of Des Esseintes' favourites, for the dream-inducing suggestiveness he wanted abounded in this work, where beneath the printed line lurked another line visible only to the soul, indicated by an epithet that opened up vast vistas of passion, by a reticence that hinted at spiritual infinities no ordinary idiom could compass.  The idiom used in this book was quite different from the language of Flaubert, inimitable in its magnificence; this style was penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle, careful to record the intangible impression that affects the senses and produces feeling, and skilled in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch that was itself extraordinarily complex.  It was, in fact, the sort of style that is indispensable to decrepit civilizations which, in order to express their needs, and to whatever age they may belong, require new acceptations, new uses, new forms both of word and phrase.

      In Rome, expiring paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language through Ausonius, through Claudian, above all through Rutilius, whose style, careful and scrupulous, sensuous and sonorous, presented an obvious analogy with the Goncourt brothers' style, especially when describing light and shade and colour.

      In Paris, a phenomenon unique in literary history had come about; the moribund society of the eighteenth century, though it had been well provided with painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects, all familiar with its tastes and imbued with its beliefs, had failed to produce a genuine writer capable of rendering its dying graces or manifesting the essence of its feverish pleasures, that were soon to be so cruelly expiated.  It had had to wait for Goncourt, whose personality was made up of memories and regrets made still more poignant by the distressing spectacle of the intellectual poverty and base aspirations of his time, to resuscitate, not only in his historical studies but also in a nostalgic work like La Faustin, the very soul of the period, and to embody its neurotic charms in this actress, so painfully eager to torment her heart and torture her brain in order to savour to the point of exhaustion the cruel revulsives of love and art.

      In Zola the longing for some other existence took a different form.  In him there was no desire to migrate to vanished civilizations, to worlds lost in the darkness of time; his sturdy, powerful temperament, enamoured of the luxuriance of life, of full-blooded vigour, of moral stamina, alienated him from the artificial graces and the painted pallors of the eighteenth century, as also from the hieratic pomp, the brutal ferocity, and the effeminate, ambiguous dreams of the ancient East.  On the day when he too had been afflicted with the longing, this craving which in fact is poetry itself, to fly far away from the contemporary society he was studying, he had fled to an idyllic region where the sap boiled in the sunshine; he had dreamt of fantastic heavenly copulations, of long earthly ecstasies, of fertilizing showers of pollen falling into the palpitating genitals of flowers; he had arrived at a gigantic pantheism, and with the Garden of Eden in which he placed his Adam and Eve he had created, perhaps unconsciously, a prodigious Hindu poem, singing the glories of the flesh, extolling, in a style whose broad patches of crude colour had something of the weird brilliance of Indian paintings, living animate matter, which by its own frenzied procreation revealed to man and woman the forbidden fruit of love, its suffocating spasms, its instinctive caresses, its natural postures.

      With Baudelaire, these three masters had captured and moulded Des Esseintes' imagination more than any others; but through re-reading them until he was saturated with their works and knew them completely by heart, he had eventually been obliged, to make it possible to absorb them again, to try and forget them, to leave them for a while undisturbed on his shelves.

      Accordingly, he scarcely looked at them when his man handed them to him.  He confined himself to pointing out where they should go, taking care to see that they were arranged in an orderly fashion and given plenty of elbow-room.

      Next the man brought him another series of books which caused him rather more trouble.  These were works of which he had gradually grown fonder, works which by their very defects provided a welcome change from the perfect productions of greater writers.  Here again, the process of elimination led Des Esseintes to search through pages of uninspiring matter for odd sentences which would give him a shock as they discharged their electricity in a medium that seemed at first to be non- conducting.

      Imperfection itself pleased him, provided it was neither base nor parasitic, and it may be that there was a certain amount of truth in his theory that the minor writer of the decadence, the writer who is incomplete but nonetheless individual, distils a balm more irritant, more sudorific, more acid than the author of the same period who is truly great and truly perfect.  In his opinion, it was in their confused efforts that you could find the more exalted flights of sensibility, the most morbid caprices of psychology, the most extravagant aberrations of language called upon in vain to control and repress the effervescent salts of ideas and feelings.

      It was therefore inevitable that, after the masters, he should turn to certain minor writers whom he found all the more attractive and endearing by reason of the contempt in which they were held by a public incapable of understanding them.

      One of these writers, Paul Verlaine, had made his début a good many years before with a volume of verse, Poèmes saturniens, a work which might almost be described as feeble, in which pastiches of Leconte de Lisle rubbed shoulders with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but which already revealed in certain pieces, such as the sonnet Mon Rêve familier, the real personality of the poet.

      Looking for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered underlying the unsureness of these early efforts a talent already profoundly marked by Baudelaire, whose influence had since become more obvious, though the borrowings Verlaine had made from his generous master had never amounted to flagrant thefts.

      Moreover, some of his later books, La Bonne Chanson, Fêtes galantes, Romances sans paroles, and finally his last volume, Sagesse, contained poems in which a writer of originality was revealed, standing out against the mass of his fellow authors.

      Furnished with rhymes provided by the tenses of verbs, and sometimes even by lengthy adverbs preceded by a monosyllable, from which they fell like a heavy cascade of water dropping from a stone ledge, his lines, divided by unlikely caesuras, were often singularly obscure, with their daring ellipses and curious solecisms that were yet not without a certain grace.

      Handling metre better than anyone, he had tried to rejuvenate the stereotyped forms of poetry, the sonnet for example, which he turned upside down, like those Japanese fish in coloured earthenware that are stood gills down on their pedestals, or which he perverted by coupling only masculine rhymes, for which he seemed to have a special affection.  Similarly and not infrequently he had adopted a weird form such as a stanza of three lines with the middle one left unrhymed, or a monorhyme tercet followed by a single line serving as a refrain and echoing itself, like the line 'Dansons la gigue' in the poem Streets.  He had used other rhythms too whose faint beat could be only half-heard behind the stanzas, like the muffled sound of a bell.

      But his originality lay above all in his ability to communicate deliciously vague confidences in a whisper in the twilight.  He alone had possessed the secret of hinting at certain strange spiritual aspirations, of whispering certain thoughts, of murmuring certain confessions, so softly, so quietly, so haltingly that the ear that caught them was left hesitating, and passed on to the soul a languor made more pronounced by the vagueness of these works that were guessed at rather than heard.  The essence of Verlaine's poetry could be found in those wonderful lines from his Fêtes galantes:

 

                                             Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d'automne:

                                             Les belles se pendant rêveuses à nos bras,

                                             Dirent alors des mots so spécieux, tout bas,

                                             Que notre âme depuis ce temps tremble et s'étonne.

[Night was falling, an equivocal autumn night: the fair ones hanging dreamily to our arms whispered words so specious that ever since our soul has been trembling and amazed.]

 

      This was not the vast horizon revealed through the portals of Baudelaire's unforgettable poetry, but rather a glimpse of a moonlit scene, a more limited, intimate view peculiar to the author who, incidentally, had formulated his poetic method in a few lines of which Des Esseintes was particularly fond:

 

                                                     Car nous voulons la nuance encore

                                                     Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance.

                                                     .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

 

                                                     Et tout le reste est littérature.

[For we still want light and shade, not colour, nothing but light and shade ... and all the rest is literature.]

 

      Des Esseintes had gladly followed him through all his varied works.  After the publication of his Romances sans paroles, distributed by the printing-office of a newspaper at Sens, Verlaine had written nothing for quite a time; then, in charming verses that echoed the gentle, naive accents of Villon, he had reappeared, singing the Virgin's praises, "far from our days of carnal spirit and weary flesh".  Often Des Esseintes would re-read this book, Sagesse, allowing the poems it contained to inspire in him secret reveries, impossible dreams of an occult passion for a Byzantine Madonna able to change at a given moment into a Cydalisa who had strayed by accident into the nineteenth century; she was so mysterious and so alluring that it was impossible to tell whether she was longing to indulge in depravities so monstrous that, once accomplished, they would become irresistible, or whether she herself was soaring heavenwards in an immaculate dream, in which the adoration of the soul would float about her in a love for ever unconfessed, for ever pure.

      There were others poets, too, who could still excite his interest and admiration.  One of these was Tristan Corbière, who in 1873, amid general indifference, had published a fantastically eccentric book of verse entitled Les Amours jaunes.  Des Esseintes, who, in his hatred of all that was trite and vulgar, would have welcomed the most outrageous follies, the most bizarre extravagances, spent many happy hours with this book in which droll humour was combined with turbulent energy, and in which lines of disconcerting brilliance occurred in poems of wonderful obscurity.  There were the litanies in his Sommeil, for instance, where he described sheep at one point as the

 

                                                     Obscène confesseur des dévotes mort-nées.

[Obscene confessor of fair bigots still-born.]

     

      It was scarcely French; the poet was talking "pidgin", using a telegram idiom, suppressing far too many verbs, trying to be waggish, and indulging in cheap commercial-traveller jokes; but then, out of this jungle of comical conceits and smirking witticisms there would suddenly rise a sharp cry of pain, like the sound of a violoncello string breaking.  What is more, in this rugged, arid, utterly fleshless style, bristling with unusual terms and unexpected neologisms, there sparkled and flashed many a felicitous expression, many a stray line that had lost its rhyme but was nonetheless superb.  Finally, to say nothing of his Poèmes parisiens, from which Des Esseintes used to quote this profound definition of woman:

 

                                                            Éternel feminin de l'éternel jocrisse,

[Eternal feminine of the eternal fool.]

     

Tristan Corbière had, in a style of almost incredible concision, sung of the seas of Brittany, the sailors seraglios, the Pardon of St Anne, and had even attained the eloquence of passionate hatred in the insults he heaped, when speaking of the camp at Conlie, on the individuals whom he described as "mountebanks of the Fourth of September".

      The gamy flavour which Des Esseintes loved, and which was offered him by this poet of the condensed epithet and the perpetually suspect charm, he found also in another poet, Théodore Hannon, a disciple of Baudelaire and Gautier who was actuated by a very special understanding of studied elegances and factitious pleasures.

      Unlike Verlaine, who was directly descended from Baudelaire, without any cross-breeding, especially in his psychology, in the sophistical slant of his thought, in the skilled distillation of his feelings, Théodore Hannon's kinship with the master could be seen chiefly in the plastic side of his poetry, in his external view of people and things.

      His delightful corruptness corresponded with Des Esseintes' tastes, and when it was foggy or raining the latter would often shut himself up in the retreat imagined by this poet and intoxicate his eyes with the shimmer of his fabrics, with the sparkle of his jewels, with all his exclusively material luxuries, which helped to excite his brain and rose like cantharides in a cloud of warm incense towards a Brussels idol with a painted face and a belly tanned with perfumes.

      With the exception of these authors and of Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he instructed his man to put on one side, to be set in a class apart, Des Esseintes was only very moderately drawn to the poets.

      In spite of his magnificent formal qualities, in spite of the imposing majesty of his verse, which had such a splendid air that even Hugo's hexameters seemed dull and drab in comparison, Leconte de Lisle could now no longer satisfy him.  The ancient world which Flaubert had resuscitated with such marvellous success remained cold and lifeless in his hands.  Nothing stirred in his poetry; it was all a facade with, most of the time, not a single idea to prop it up.  There was no life in these empty poems, and their frigid mythologies ended up by repelling him.

      Similarly, after cherishing him for many years, Des Esseintes was beginning to lose interest in Gautier's work; his admiration for the incomparable painter of word-pictures that Gautier was had recently been diminishing day by day, so that now he was more astonished than delighted by his almost apathetic descriptions.  Outside objects had made a lasting impression on his remarkably perceptive eye, but that impression had become localized, had failed to penetrate any further into brain or body; like a marvellous reflector, he had always confined himself to sending back the image of his surroundings with impersonal precision.

      Of course, Des Esseintes still appreciated the works of these two poets, in the same way that he appreciated rare jewels or precious substances; but none of the variations of these brilliant instrumentalists could now enrapture any more, for none possessed the makings of a dream, none opened up, at least for him, one of those lively vistas that enabled him to speed the weary flight of the hours.

      He used to put their books down feeling hungry and unsatisfied, and the same was true of Hugo's.  The Oriental, patriarchal aspect was too trite and hollow to retain his interest, while the nursery-maidish, grandfatherly pose annoyed him intensely.  It was not until he came to the Chansons des rues et des bois that he could unreservedly enjoy the impeccable jugglery of Hugo's prosody; and even then, he would gladly have given all these tours de force for a new work of Baudelaire's of the same quality as the old, for the latter was without doubt almost the only author whose verses, underneath their splendid shell, contained a balsamic and nutritious kernel.

      Jumping from one extreme to the other, from form bereft of ideas to ideas bereft of form, left Des Esseintes just as circumspect and critical.  The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal and the analytical amplifications of Duranty aroused his interest, but their arid, colourless, bureaucratic style, their utterly commonplace prose, fit for nothing better than the ignoble industry of the stage, repelled him.  Besides, the most interesting of their delicate analytical operations were performed, when all was said and done, on brains fired by passions that no longer moved him.  Little he cared about ordinary emotions or common associations of ideas, now that his mind had grown so overstocked and had no room for anything but superfine sensations, religious doubts, and sensual anxieties.

      In order to enjoy a literature that united, just as he wished, an incisive style and a subtle, feline skill in analysis, he had to wait till he reached that master of induction, the wise and wonderful Edgar Allan Poe, for whom his admiration had not suffered in the least from re-reading his work.

      Better perhaps than anyone else, Poe possessed those intimate affinities that could satisfy the requirements of Des Esseintes' mind.

      If Baudelaire had made out among the hieroglyphics of the soul the critical age of thought and feeling, it was Poe who, in the sphere of morbid psychology, had carried out the closest scrutiny of the will.

      In literature he had been the first, under the emblematic title The Imp of the Perverse, to study those irresistible impulses which the will submits to without fully understanding them, and which cerebral pathology can now explain with a fair degree of certainty; he had been the first again, if not to point out, at least to make known the depressing influence fear had on the will, which it affects in the same way as anaesthetics which paralyse the senses and curare which cripples the motory nerves.  It was on this last subject, this lethargy of the will, that he had concentrated his studies, analysing the effects of this moral poison and indicating the symptoms of its progress - mental disturbances beginning with anxiety, developing into anguish, and finally culminating in a terror that stupefies the faculties of volition, yet without the intellect, however badly shaken it may be, giving way.

      As for death, which the dramatists had so grossly abused, he had in a way given it a sharper edge, a new look, by introducing into it an algebraic and superhuman element; though to tell the truth, it was not so much the physical agony of the dying he described as the moral agony of the survivor, haunted beside the death-bed by the monstrous hallucinations engendered by grief and fatigue.  With awful fascination he dwelt on the effects of terror, on the failures of willpower, and discussed them with clinical objectivity, making the reader's flesh creep, his throat contract, his mouth go dry at the recital of these mechanically devised nightmares of a fevered brain.

      Convulsed by hereditary neuroses, maddened by moral choreas, his characters lived on their nerves; his women, his Morellas and Ligeias, possessed vast learning steeped in the mists of German philosophy and in the cabbalistic mysteries of the ancient East, and all of them had the inert, boyish breasts of angels, all were, so to speak, unsexed.

      Baudelaire and Poe, whose two minds had often been compared on account of their poetic inspiration and the penchant their shared for the examination of mental diseases, differed radically in the emotional concepts which played a large part in their works - Baudelaire with his thirsty, ruthless passion, whose disgusted cruelty recalled the tortures of the Inquisition, and Poe with his chaste, ethereal amours, in which the senses had no share and only the brain was roused, followed by none of the lower organs, which, if they existed at all, remained forever frozen and virgin.

      This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in a stifling atmosphere, this spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention wandered, the prey of his imagination, which sprayed about him, like delicious miasmas, angelic, dream-like apparitions, was Des Esseintes a source of indefatigable conjectures; but now that his neurosis had grown worse, there were days when reading these works exhausted him, when it left him with his hands trembling and his ears cocked, overcome, like the unfortunate Usher, by an unreasoning fear, an unspoken terror.

      He therefore had to hold himself in check and only rarely indulge in these formidable elixirs, just as he could no longer visit with impunity his red entrance-hall and feast his eyes on the horrors of Odilon Redon and the tortures of Jan Luyken.

      And yet, when he was in this frame of mind, almost anything he read seemed insipid after these terrible philtres imported from America.  He would therefore turn to Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, in whose scattered writings he discovered observations just as unorthodox, vibrations just as spasmodic, but which, except perhaps in Claire Lenoir, did not convey such an overwhelming sense of horror.

      Published in 1867 in the Revue des lettres et des arts, this Claire Lenoir was the first of a series of stories linked together by the generic title of Histoires moroses.  Against a background of abstruse speculations borrowed from old Hegel, there moved two deranged individuals, a Doctor Tribulat Bonhomet who was pompous and puerile, and a Claire Lenoir who was droll and sinister, with blue spectacles as big and round as five-franc pieces covering her almost lifeless eyes.

      This story concerned a commonplace case of adultery, but ended on a note of indescribable terror when Bonhomet, uncovering the pupils of Claire's eyes as she lay on her deathbed, and probing them with monstrous instruments, saw clearly reflected on the retina a picture of the husband brandishing at arm's length the severed head of the lover and, like a Kanaka, howling a triumphant war-chant.

      Based on the more or less valid observation that, until decomposition sets in, the eyes of certain animals, oxen for instance, preserve like photographic plates the image of the people and things lying at the moment of death within the range of their last look, the tale obviously owed a great deal to those of Edgar Allan Poe, from which it derived its wealth of punctilious detail and its horrific atmosphere.

      The same was true of L'Intersigne, which had later been incorporated in the Contes cruels, a collection of stories of indisputable talent which also included Véra, a tale Des Esseintes regarded as a little masterpiece.

      Here the hallucination was endowed with an exquisite tenderness; there was nothing here of the American author's gloomy mirages, but a well-nigh heavenly vision of sweetness and warmth, which in an identical style formed the antithesis of Poe's Beatrices and Ligeias, those pale, unhappy phantoms engendered by the inexorable nightmare of black opium.

      This story too brought into play the operations of the will, but it no longer showed it undermined and brought low by fear; on the contrary, it studied its intoxication under the influence of a conviction which had become an obsession, and it also demonstrated its power, which was so great that it could saturate the atmosphere and impose its beliefs on surrounding objects.

      Another book of Villiers', Isis, he considered remarkable for different reasons.  The philosophical lumber that littered Claire Lenoir also cluttered up this book, which contained an incredible hotchpotch of vague, verbose observations on the one hand and reminiscences of hoary melodramas on the other - oubliettes, daggers, rope-ladders, in fact all the romantic bric-a-brac that would reappear, looking just as old-fashioned, in Villiers' Elën and Morgane, long-forgotten works published by a Monsieur Francisque Guyon, an obscure little printer in Saint-Brieuc.

      The heroine of this book, a Marquise Tullia Fabriana, who was supposed to have assimilated the Chaldean learning of Poe's women and the diplomatic sagacity of Stendhal's Sanseverina- Taxis, not content with all this, had also assumed the enigmatic expression of a Bradamante crossed with an antique Circe.  These incompatible mixtures gave rise to a smoky vapour in which philosophical and literary influences jostled each other around, without managing to sort themselves out in the author's mind by the time he began writing the prolegomena to this work, which was intended to fill no less than seven volumes.

      But there was another side to Villiers' personality, altogether clearer and sharper, marked by grim humour and ferocious banter; when this side was uppermost, the result was not one of Poe's paradoxical mystifications, but a lugubriously comic jeering similar to Swift's bitter raillery.  A whole series of tales, Les Demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, L'Affichage céleste, La Machine à gloire and Le plus beau dîner du monde, revealed a singularly inventive and satirical sense of humour.  All the filthiness of contemporary utilitarian ideas, all the money-grubbing ignominy of the age were glorified in stories whose pungent irony sent Des Esseintes into raptures of delight.

      In this realm of biting, poker-faced satire, no other book existed in France.  The next best thing was a story by Charles Cros, La Science de l'amour, originally published in the Revue du Monde Nouveau, which was calculated to astonish the reader with its chemical extravagances, its tight-lipped humour, its icily comic observations; but the pleasure it gave was only relative, for in execution it was fatally defective.  Villiers' style, solid, colourful, often original, had disappeared, to be supplanted by a sort of sausage-meat scraped from the table of some literary pork-butcher.

      "Lord, how few books there are that are worth reading again!" sighed Des Esseintes, watching his man as he climbed down the stepladder he had been perched on and stood to one side to let his master have a clear view of all the bookshelves.

      Des Esseintes gave a nod of approval.  There was now only two thin booklets left on the table.  Dismissing the old man with a wave of his hand, he began looking through one of these, comprised of a few pages bound in onager-sin that had been glazed under a hydraulic press, dappled in watercolour with silver clouds, and provided with end-papers of old lampas, the floral pattern of which, now rather dim with age, had that faded charm which Mallarmé extolled in a truly delightful poem.

      These pages, nine in all, had been taken out of unique copies of the first two Parnasses, printed on parchment, and preceded by the title-page bearing the words: Quelques vers de Mallarmé, executed by a remarkable calligrapher in uncial letters, coloured and picked out, like those in ancient manuscripts, with specks of gold.

      Among the eleven pieces brought together between these covers, a few, Les Fenêtres, L'Épilogue, and Azur, he found extremely attractive, but there was one in particular, a fragment of Hérodiade, that seemed to lay a magic spell on him at certain times.

      Often of an evening, sitting in the dim light his lamp shed over the silent room, he had imagined he felt her brush past him - that same Herodias who in Gustave Moreau's picture had withdrawn into the advancing shadows, so that nothing could be seen but the vague shape of a white statue in the midst of a feebly glowing brazier of jewels.

      The darkness hid the blood, dimmed the bright colours and gleaming gold, enveloped the far corners of the temple in gloom, concealed the minor actor in the criminal drama where they stood wrapped in their dark garments, and, sparing only the white patches in the watercolour, drew the woman from the scabbard of her jewels and emphasized her nakedness.

      His eyes were irresistibly drawn towards her, following the familiar outlines of her body until she came to life again before him, bringing to his lips those sweet, strange words that Mallarmé puts into her mouth:

 

                                             .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . O mirroir!

                                             Eau froide par l'ennui dans ton cadre gelée

                                             Que de fois et pendant les heures, désolée

                                             Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont

                                             Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond,

                                             Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine,

                                             Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta sévère fontaine,

                                             J'ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité!

[Oh mirror! cold water frozen by boredom within your frame, how many times, for hours on end, saddened by dreams and searching for my memories, which are like dead leaves in the deep hole beneath your glassy surface, have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost! But, oh horror! on certain evenings, in your cruel pool, I have recognized the bareness of my disordered dream!]

 

      He loved these verses as he loved all the works of this poet who, in an age of universal suffrage and a time of commercial greed, lived outside the world of letters, sheltered from the raging folly all around him by his lofty scorn; taking pleasure, far from society, in the caprices of the mind and the visions of his brain; refining upon thoughts that were already subtle enough, grafting Byzantine niceties on them, perpetuating them in deductions that were barely hinted at and loosely linked by an imperceptible thread.

      These precious, interwoven ideas he knotted together with an adhesive style, a unique, hermetic language, full of contracted phrases, elliptical constructions, audacious tropes.

      Sensitive to the remotest affinities, he would often use a term that by analogy suggested at once form, scent, colour, quality, and brilliance, to indicate a creature or thing to which he would have had to attach a host of different epithets in order to bring out all its various aspects and qualities, if it had merely been referred to by its technical name.  By this means he managed to do away with the formal statement of a comparison that the reader's mind made by itself as soon as it had understood the symbol, and he avoided dispersing the reader's attention over all the several qualities that a row of adjectives would have presented one by one, concentrating it instead on a single word, a single entity, producing, as in the case of a picture, a unique and comprehensive impression, an overall view.

      The result was a wonderfully condensed style, an essence of literature, a sublimate of art.  It was a style that Mallarmé had first employed only sparingly in his earliest works, and then used openly and audaciously in a piece he wrote on Théophile Gautier and in L'Après-midi d'un faune, an ecologue in which the subtleties of sensual pleasure were unfolded in mysterious, tender verse, suddenly interrupted by this bestial, frenzied cry of the faun:

 

                                             Alors m'éveillerai-je à la feveur première,

                                             Droit et seul sous un flot antique de lumière,

                                             Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour l'ingénuité.

[Then shall I awake to the original fervour, upright and alone in an ancient flood of light, lilies! and one of you for innocence.]

 

      This last line, which with the monosyllable Lys! carried over from the previous line, conjured up a picture of something tall, white, and rigid, and the meaning of which was made even clearer by the choice of the noun ingénuité to provide the rhyme, expressed in an allegorical manner and in a single word the passion, the effervescence, the momentary excitement of the virgin faun, maddened with desire by the sight of the nymphs.

      In this extraordinary poem, new and surprising images occurred in almost every line when the poet came to describe the longings and regrets of the goat-footed god, standing on the edge of the swamp and looking at the clumps of rushes that still retained an ephemeral impression of the rounded forms of the naiads who had rested there.

      Des Esseintes also derived a certain perverse pleasure from handling this minute volume, whose covers, made of Japanese felt as white as curdled milk, were fastened with two silk cords, one China pink, the other black.

      Concealed behind the covers, the black ribbon met the pink ribbon, which was busy adding a note of silken luxury, a suggestion of modern Japanese rouge, a hint of eroticism, to the antique whiteness, the virginal pallor of the book, and embraced it, joining  together in a dainty bow its own sombre hue and the other's lighter colour, and thereby giving a discreet intimation, a vague warning, of the melancholy regrets that follow the appeasement of sexual desire, the abatement of sensual frenzy.

      Des Esseintes put L'Après-midi d'un faune back on the table and began glancing through another slim volume which he had had printed for his personal pleasure - an anthology of prose poetry, a little chapel dedicated to Baudelaire and opening on to the cathedral square of his poems.

      This anthology included selected passages from the Gaspard de la nuit of that whimsical author Aloysious Bertrand, who applied Leonardo da Vinci's methods to prose and painted with his metal oxides a series of little pictures whose brilliant colours shine like bright enamels.  To these Des Esseintes had added Villiers' Vox populi, a superb piece struck in a style of gold with the effigies of Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, and a few extracts from the dainty Livre de jade whose exotic perfume of ginseng and tea is mingled with the fresh fragrance of the moonlit waters that ripple through the book from cover to cover.

      But this was not all.  The collection also contained sundry pieces rescued from extinct reviews: Le Démon de l'analogie, La Pipe, Le Pauvre Enfant pâle, Le Spectacle interrompu, Le Phénomène futur, and above all Plainte d'automne and Frisson d'hiver.  These were Mallarmé's masterpieces and also ranked among the masterpieces of prose poetry, for they combined a style so magnificently contrived that in itself it was as soothing as a melancholy incantation, an intoxicating melody, with irresistibly suggestive thoughts, the soul-throbs of a sensitive artist whose quivering nerves vibrate with an intensity that fills you with painful ecstasy.

      Of all forms of literature, the prose poem was Des Esseintes' favourite.  Handled by an alchemist of genius it should, he maintained, contain within its small compass and in concentrated form the substance of a novel, while dispensing with the latter's long-winded analyses and superfluous descriptions.  Many were the times that Des Esseintes had pondered over the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohobated juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters, and piling up useful observations and incidental details.  The words chosen for a work of this sort would be so unalterable that they would take the place of all the others; every adjective would be sited with such ingenuity and finality that it could never be legally evicted, and would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on its meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end, and also ascertain the present, reconstruct the past, and divine the future of the characters in the light of this one epithet.

      The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed in a page or two, would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.

      In short, the prose poem represented in Des Esseintes' eyes the dry juice, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art.

      This succulent extract concentrated in a single drop could already by found in Baudelaire, and also in those poems of Mallarmé's that he savoured with such rare delight.

      When he had closed his anthology, the last book in his library, Des Esseintes told himself that in all probability he would never add another to his collection.

      The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted on its deathbed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied in Mallarmé in the most consummate and exquisite fashion.

      Here, carried to the further limits of expression, was the quintessence of Baudelaire and Poe; here their refined and potent substances had been distilled yet again to give off new savours, new intoxications.

      This was the death-agony of the old tongue which, after going a little greener every century, had now reached the point of dissolution, the same stage of deliquescence as the Latin language when it breathed its last in the mysterious concepts and enigmatic phrases of St Boniface and St Adhelm.

      The only difference was that the decomposition of the French language had occurred suddenly and speedily.  In Latin, there had been a lengthy period of transition, a gap of four hundred years, between the superbly variegated idiom of Claudian and Rutilius and the gamy idiom of the eighth century.  In French, on the contrary, there had been no lapse of time, no intervening sequence of centuries; the superbly variegated style of the Goncourts and the gamy style of Verlaine and Mallarmé rubbed shoulders in Paris, where they existed at the same time, in the same period, in the same century.

      And Des Esseintes smiled to himself as he glanced at one of the folios lying open on his church lectern, thinking that the time would come when a learned professor would compile for the decadence of the French language a glossary like the one in which the erudite Du Cange had recorded the last stammerings, the last paroxysms, the last brilliant sallies of the Latin language as it perished of old age in the depths of the medieval monasteries.