XV
AFTER
blazing up like a flash in the pan, Des Esseintes'
enthusiasm for his digester died down just as suddenly. His dyspepsia, banished for a little while,
began plaguing him again, while all this concentrated food was so binding and
brought on such an irritation of the bowels that he had to stop using the
apparatus straight away.
His illness promptly resumed its course,
accompanied by hitherto unknown symptoms.
The nightmares, the eye troubles, the hacking cough that came on at
fixed intervals as regular as clockwork, the throbbing of the arteries and
heart, and the cold sweats were now followed by aural illusions, the sort of
derangement that occurs only when the complaint has entered its final phase.
Consumed with a burning fever, Des Esseintes suddenly heard the sounds of running water, of
buzzing wasps; then these noises merged into one which resembled the humming of
a lathe, and this humming grew shriller and clearer until it eventually changed
into the silvery note of a bell.
At this point he felt his disordered brain
being carried away on waves of music and plunged into the religious atmosphere
of his adolescence. The chants he had
learnt from the Jesuit Fathers came back to him, recalling the college chapel
where they had been sung, and passing the hallucinations on to the senses of
sight and smell, which they enveloped in clouds of incense and the gloomy light
filtering through stained-glass windows under lofty vaults.
With the Fathers, the rites of religion
were performed with great pomp; an excellent organist and a remarkable choir
made sure that these pious exercises provided both spiritual edification and
aesthetic pleasure. The organist loved
the old masters, and on feast-days he would make his choice from Palestrina's
or Orlando Lasso's masses, Marcello's psalms,
Handel's oratorios, and Bach's motets, rejecting the sensuous, facile
compilations of Father Lambillotte, so popular with
the clergy, in favour of certain Laudi spirituali of the sixteenth century whose hieratic
beauty had many a time captivated Des Esseintes.
But above all else he had derived
ineffable pleasure from listening to plainsong, to which the organist had
remained faithful in defiance of current fashions.
This type of music, at present considered
an effete and barbarous form of the Christian liturgy, as an archaeological
curiosity, as a relic of the distant past, was of the idiom of the ancient
Church, the very soul of the Middle Ages; it was the sempiternal
prayer, sung and modulated in accord with the movements of the soul, the diuturnal hymn which had risen for centuries past towards
the Most High.
This traditional melody was the only one
which, with its powerful unison, its harmonies as massive and imposing as
blocks of freestone, could tone in with the old basilicas and fill their Romanesque
vaults, of which it seemed to be the
emanation, the very voice.
Time and again an awestruck Des Esseintes had bowed his head in response to an irresistible
impulse when the Christus factus est of the Gregorian
chant had soared up in the nave, whose pillars trembled amid the floating
clouds of incense, or when the faux-bourdon of the De Profundis
groaned forth, mournful as a stifled sob, poignant as a despairing appeal by
mankind bewailing its mortal destiny and imploring the tender mercy of its Saviour.
Compared with this magnificent chant,
created by the genius of the Church, as impersonal and anonymous as the organ
itself, whose inventor is unknown, all other religious music struck him as profane. At bottom,
in all the works of Jomelli and Porpora,
of Carissimi and Durante,
in the finest compositions of Handel and Bach, there was no real renunciation
of popular success, no real sacrifice of artistic effect, no real abdication of
human pride listening to itself at prayer; only in the imposing masses of Lesueur he had heard at Saint-Roch
did the true religious style come into its own again, solemn and august,
approaching the austere majesty of plainsong in its stark nudity.
Since then, utterly revolted by the
pretexts a Rossini and a Pergolese had thought up for
composing a Stabat Mater, by the
general invasion of liturgical art by fashionable artists, Des Esseintes had held aloof from all these equivocal
compositions tolerated by the over-indulgent Church.
The fact was that this indulgent attitude,
ostensibly intended to attract the faithful and really intended to attract
their money, had promptly resulted in a crop of arias borrowed from Italian
operas, contemptible cavatinas and objectionable
quadrilles, sung with full orchestra accompaniment, in churches converted into
boudoirs, by barnstormers bellowing away up in the roof, while down below the
ladies waged a war of fashion and went into raptures over the shrieks of the
mountebanks whose impure voices were defiling the sacred notes of the organ.
For years now he had steadfastly refused
to take part in these pious entertainments, preferring to recall his memories
of childhood, even regretting having heard certain of the great masters' Te Deums when he remembered that admirable Te Deum of
plainsong, that simple, that awe-inspiring hymn composed by some saint or
other, a St Ambrose or a St Hilary, who, without the complicated resources of
an orchestra, without the musical contrivances of modern science, displayed a
burning faith, a delirious joy, the faith and joy of all humanity, expressed in
ardent, confident, well-nigh celestial accents.
The odd thing was that Des Esseintes' ideas on music were in flagrant contradiction
with the theories he professed about the other arts. The only religious music he really approved
of was the monastic music of the Middle Ages, that
emaciated music which provoked an instinctive nervous reaction in him, like
certain pages of the old Christian Latinists; besides, as he himself admitted,
he was incapable of understanding whatever new devices the present-day masters
might have introduced into Catholic art.
In the first place, he had not studied
music with the same passionate enthusiasm that had drawn him to painting and
literature. He could play the piano as well
as the next man, and after long practice had learnt hoe to read a score more or
less efficiently; but he knew nothing of the harmony and the technique that
were necessary to be able really to appreciate every nuance, to understand
every subtlety, to derive the maximum pleasure from every refinement.
Then again, secular music is a promiscuous
art in that you cannot enjoy it at home, by yourself, as you can a book; to
savour it he would have had to join the mob of inveterate theatre-goers that
fills the Cirque d'Hiver, where under a broiling sun
and in a stifling atmosphere you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his
arms about and massacring disconnected snatches of Wagner to the huge delight
of an ignorant crowd.
He had never had the courage to plunge
into this mob-bath to listen to Berlioz, even though he admired some fragments
of his work for their passionate ardour and fiery spirit; and he was well aware
that there was not a single scene, not even a single phrase, in any of the
mighty Wagner's operas that could be divorced from its context with impunity.
Slices cut off and served up at a concert
lost all sense and meaning, for like characters in a book that are
complementary to one another and combine to reach the same goal, the same
conclusion, Wagner's melodies were used to define the characters of his
dramatis personae, to represent their thoughts, to express their visible or
secret motives, and their ingenious and persistent repetitions could only be
understood by an audience that followed the subject from the start and watched
the characters gradually taking shape and developing in a setting from which
they could not be removed without dying like branches cut from a tree.
Des Esseintes
was therefore convinced that of the mob of melomaniacs
who went into ecstasies every Sunday on the benches of the Cirque d'Hiver, barely twenty could tell what the orchestra was
murdering, even when the attendants were kind enough to stop chattering and
give it a chance of being heard.
Considering also that the intelligent
patriotism of the French made it impossible for any theatre in the country to
put on a Wagner opera, there was nothing left for the keen amateur who was
ignorant of the arcana of music and could not or
would not travel to Bayreuth but to stay at home, and this was the reasonable
course Des Esseintes had adopted.
On a different level, cheaper, more
popular music and isolated extracts from the old operas scarcely appealed to
him; the trivial little tunes of Auber and Boïeldieu, of Adam and Flotow,
and the rhetorical commonplaces turned out by such men as Ambrose Thomas and
Basin were just as repugnant to him as the antiquated sentimentalities and
vulgar graces of the Italians. He had
therefore resolutely abstained from all musical indulgence, and the only
pleasant memories he retained from these years of abstinence were of certain
chamber concerts at which he had heard some Beethoven and above all some
Schumann and Schubert which had stimulated his nerves in the same way as Poe's
most intimate and anguished poems.
Certain settings for the violoncello by
Schumann had left him positively panting with emotion, choking with hysteria;
but it was chiefly Schubert's Lieder that had excited him, carried him
away, then prostrated him as if he had been squandering
his nervous energy, indulging in a mystical debauch.
This music thrilled him to the very
marrow, reawakening a host of forgotten sorrows, of old grievances, in a heart
surprised at containing so many confused regrets and vague mortifications. This desolate music, surging up from the
uttermost depths of the soul, terrified and fascinated him at the same
time. He had never been able to hum Des
Matches Kluge without nervous tears rising to his eyes, for in this lament
there was something more than sadness, a note of despair that tore at his
heartstrings, something reminiscent of a dying love-affair in a melancholy
landscape.
Every time they came back to his lips,
these exquisite, funereal laments called to mind a suburban scene, a shabby,
silent piece of wasteland, and in the distance, lines of men and women,
harassed by the cares of life, shuffling away, bent double, into the twilight,
while he himself, steeped in bitterness and filled with disgust, felt alone in
the midst of tearful Nature, all alone, overcome by an unspeakable melancholy,
by an obstinate distress, the mysterious intensity of which precluded any
prospect of consolation, of pity, of repose.
Like the sound of a passing-bell, these mournful melodies haunted him
now that he lay in bed, exhausted by fever and tormented by an anxiety that was
all the more irresistible in that he could no longer discover its cause. He finally abandoned himself to the current
of his emotions, swept away by the torrent of anguish let loose by this music -
a torrent that was suddenly stemmed for a moment by the sound of the psalms
echoing slowly and softly in his head, whose aching temples felt as though they
were being beaten by the clappers of tolling bells.
One morning, however, these noises died
away; he felt in fuller possession of his faculties and asked his man to hand
him a mirror. After a single glance it
slipped from his hands. He scarcely knew
himself; his face was an earthen colour, the lips dry and swollen, the tongue
all furrowed, the skin wrinkled; his untidy hair and beard, which his servant
had not trimmed since the beginning of his illness, added to the horrific
impression created by the hollow cheeks and the big, watery eyes burning with a
feverish brightness in this hairy death's-head.
This change in his facial appearance
alarmed him more than his weakness, more than the uncontrollable fits of
vomiting that thwarted his every attempt at taking food, more than the
depression into which he was gradually sinking.
He thought he was done for; but then, in spite of his overwhelming
despondency, the energy of a man in desperate straits brought him to a sitting
position in bed and gave him the strength to write a letter to his Paris doctor
and order his servant to go to him immediately and bring him back with him,
whatever the cost, the same day.
His mood promptly changed from the darkest
despair to the brightest hope. This
doctor he had sent for was a famous specialist, a physician renowned for his
successes in treating nervous disorders, and Des Esseintes
told himself:
"He must have cured plenty of cases
that were more difficult and dangerous than mine. No, there's no doubt about it - I shall be on
my feet again in a few days' time."
But soon this spirit of confidence was
followed by a feeling of blank pessimism.
He was convinced that no matter how learned or perspicacious they might
be, doctors really knew nothing about nervous diseases, not even their
causes. Like all the rest, this man
would prescribe the inevitable zinc oxide and quinine, potassium bromide and
valerian.
"Who knows?" he went on,
clinging to a last, slender hope.
"If these remedies have done me no good so far, it's probably
because I haven't taken the proper doses."
In spite of everything, the prospect of obtaining
some relief put new heart into him, but then fresh anxieties assailed him:
perhaps the doctor was not in
Little by little these alternating hopes
and fears jostling around in his otherwise empty mind subsided, though not
before the succession of swift changes had worn him out. He fell into a sleep of exhaustion broken by
incoherent dreams, a sort of swoon interrupted by periods of barely conscious
wakefulness. He had finally forgotten
what he wanted and what he feared so completely that he was simply bewildered,
and felt neither surprise nor pleasure, when the doctor suddenly came into the
room.
The manservant had doubtless told him what
kind of life Des Esseintes had been leading, and
described the various symptoms he himself had been in a position to observe
since the day he had found his master lying by the window, overcome by the potency
of his perfumes, for he put hardly any questions to his patient, whose medical
history over the past few years was in any case well known to him. But he examined him, sounded him, and
carefully scrutinized his urine, in which certain white streaks told him what
one of the chief determining causes of his nervous trouble was. He wrote out a prescription, and after saying
he would come again soon, took his leave without another word.
His visit revived Des Esseintes'
spirits, but he was somewhat alarmed at the doctor's silence and told his
servant not to keep the truth from him any longer. The man assured him that the doctor had shown
no signs of anxiety, and, suspicious as he was, Des Esseintes
could detect no trace of prevarication in the old man's expressionless face.
His thoughts now became more cheerful;
besides, his pains had gone and the weakness he felt in every limb had taken on
a certain sweet languorous quality, at once vague and insinuating. What is more, he was both astounded and
delighted at not being encumbered with drugs and medicine bottles, and a faint
smile hovered over his lips when his servant eventually brought him a
nourishing peptone enema and informed him that he was to repeat this injection
three times every twenty-four hours.
The operation was successfully carried
out, and Des Esseintes could not help secretly
congratulating himself on this experience which was, so to speak, the crowning
achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the
artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its
supreme fulfilment. No one, he thought,
would ever go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the
ultimate deviation from the norm.
"How delightful it would be," he
said to himself, "to go on with this simple diet after getting well
again. What a saving of time, what a
radical deliverance from the repugnance meat inspires in people without any
appetite. What an absolute release from
the boredom that invariably results from the necessarily limited choice of
dishes! What a vigorous protest against
the vile sin of gluttony! And last but
not least, what a slap in the face for old Mother Nature, whose monotonous
demands would be permanently silenced!"
And talking to himself under his breath,
he went on: "It would be easy enough to get up an appetite by swallowing a strong aperients.
Then, when you felt you might reasonably say: 'Isn't it time for dinner?
- I'm as hungry as a hunter,' all you'd have to do to lay the table would be to
deposit the noble instrument on the cloth.
And before you had time to say grace you'd have finished the meal -
without any of the vulgar, bothersome business of eating."
A few days later, the servant brought him
an enema altogether different in colour and smell from the peptone
preparations.
"But it's not the same!"
exclaimed Des Esseintes, anxiously inspecting the
liquid that had been poured into the apparatus.
He asked for the menu as he might have done in a restaurant, and,
unfolding the doctor's prescription, he read out:
Cod-liver
oil 29 grammas
Beef-tea 200 grammas
Burgundy 200 grammas
Yolk of one egg
This set him thinking. On account of the ruinous condition of his
stomach, he had never been able to take a serious interest in the art of
cooking, but now he found himself working out recipes of a
perverse epicures. Then an
intriguing idea crossed his mind.
Perhaps the doctor had supposed that his patient's unusual palate was
already tired of the taste of peptone; perhaps, like a skilled chef, he decided
to vary the flavour of his concoctions, to prevent the monotony of the dishes
leading to a complete loss of appetite.
Once started on this line of thought, Des Esseintes
began composing novel recipes and even planning meatless dinners for Fridays,
increasing the doses of cod-liver oil and wine, and crossing out the beef-tea
because, being meat, it was expressly forbidden by the Church. But soon he had no need to deliberate any
longer over these nourishing liquids, for the doctor gradually managed to stop
his vomiting and to make him swallow through the ordinary channels a punch
syrup containing powdered meat and giving off a vague aroma of cocoa that
lingered pleasantly in his real mouth.
Weeks went by and at last the stomach
decided to function properly; from time to time fits of nausea would still
recur, but there were effectively overcome with potions of ginger-beer and
Rivera’s ant emetic.
Eventually, little by little, the organs
recovered, and with the help of pepsins ordinary food was digested. Des Esseintes'
strength returned and he was able to get up and hobble around his bedroom,
leaning on a stick and holding on to the furniture. But instead of being pleased with his
progress, his forgot all his past sufferings, fretted over the time his
convalescence was taking, and accused the doctor of spinning it out. It was true that a few unsuccessful
experiments had slowed things down; iron proved no more acceptable than
quincunx, even when it was mixed with laudanum, and these drugs had to be
replaced by arsenates - this affair a fortnight had been wasted in useless
efforts, as Des Esseintes angrily pointed out.
At last the time came when he could stay
up all afternoon and walk about the house unaided. Now his study began to get on his nerves;
faults he had overlooked by force of habit struck him at once on coming back to
the room after a long absence. The
colours he had chosen to be seen by lamplight seemed at variance with one
another in daylight; wondering how best to change them, he spent hours planning
heterogeneous harmonies of hues, hybrid combinations of cloths and leathers.
"I'm on the road to recovery, and no
mistake," he told himself, noting the return of his former preoccupations,
his old predilections.
One morning, as he was looking at his blue
and orange walls, dreaming of ideal hangings made of stoles designed for the
Greek Church, of gold-fringed Russian dalmatics, of brocaded copes inscribed
with Slavonic lettering in pearls or in precious stones from the Urals, the
doctor came in and, following the direction of his patient's gaze, asked him
what he was thinking.
Des Esseintes
told him of his unrealizable ideals and was beginning to outline new
experiments in colour, to talk about new combinations and contrasts that he
meant to organize, when the doctor threw cold water on his enthusiasm by
declaring in peremptory fashion that wherever he put his ideas into effect it
would certainly not be in that house.
Then, without giving him time to breathe,
he stated that he had attended to the most urgent problem first by putting
right the digestive functions, and that now he must tackle the general nervous
trouble, which had not cleared up at all and to do so would require years of
strict dieting and careful nursing. He
concluded by saying that before trying any particular remedy, before embarking
on any sort of hydropathic treatment - which in any
case was impracticable at Fontenay - he would have to
abandon this solitary existence, to go back to Paris, to lead a normal life again,
above all to true and enjoy the same pleasure as other people.
"But I just don't enjoy the pleasures
other people enjoy!" retorted Des Esseintes
indignantly.
Ignoring this objection, the doctor simply
assured him that this radical change of life he prescribed was in his opinion a
matter of life and death - that it meant the difference between a good recovery on the one hand and insanity speedily followed by
tuberculosis on the other.
"So I have to choose between death
and deportation!" cried Des Esseintes in
exasperation.
The doctor, who was imbued with all the
prejudices of a man of the world, smiled and make for the door without
answering.