XVI
DES ESSEINTES shut himself up in his bedroom and stopped his ears
against the sound of hammering outside, where the removal men were nailing up
the packing-cases his servants had got ready; every blow seemed to strike at
his heart and send a stab of pain deep into his flesh. The sentence pronounced by the doctor was
being executed; the dread of enduring all over again the sufferings he had
recently undergone, together with the fear of an agonizing death, had had a
more powerful effect on him that his hatred of the detestable existence to
which medical jurisdiction condemned him.
"And yet," he
kept telling himself, "there are people who live on their own with no one
to talk to, who spend their lives in quiet contemplation apart from human
society, people like Rapists and prisoners in solitary confinement, and there's
nothing to show that those wise men and those poor wretches go either mad or
consumptive."
These examples he had
quoted to the doctor, but in vain; the latter had simply repeated, in a curt
manner that excluded any further argument, that his verdict, which incidentally
was in line with the opinions of every specialist in nervous disorders, was
that only relaxation, amusement, and enjoyment could have any effect on this
complaint, which on the mental side remained entirely unaffected by chemical
remedies. Finally, infuriated by his
patient's recriminations, he had stated once [and] for all that he refused to
go on treating him unless he agreed to a change of air and a move to more
hygienic conditions.
Des Esseintes
had promptly gone to
Buried deep in his
armchair, he was now brooding over this unambiguous prescription which upset
all his plans, broke all the ties binding him to his present life, and buried
all his future projects in oblivion. So
his beatific happiness was over! So he
must leave the shelter of this haven of his and put out to sea again in the
teeth of that gale of human folly that had battered and buffeted him of old!
The doctors spoke of
amusement and relaxation, but with whom, with what, did they expect him to have
fun and enjoy himself?
Had he not outlawed
himself from society? Had he heard of
anybody else who was trying to organize a life like this, a life of dreamy
contemplation? Did he know a single individual
who was capable of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a
painting, the quintessence of an idea, or whose soul was sensitive enough to
understand Mallarmé and love Verlaine?
Where and when should
he look, into what social waters should he heave the lead, to discover a twin
soul, a mind free of commonplace ideas, welcoming silence as a boon,
ingratitude as a relief, suspicion as a haven and a harbour?
In the society he had
frequented before his departure for Fontenay? - But
most of the squire’s he had known in those days must since have reached new
depths of boredom in the drawing-room, of stupidity at the gaming table, and of
depravity in the brothel. Most of them,
too, must have got married; after treating themselves all their lives to the
leavings of street-Arabs, they now treated their wives to the leavings of
streetwalkers, for like a master of the first- fruits, the working class was
the only one that did not feed on leftovers!
"What a pretty
change of partners, what a glorious game of general post this prudish society
of ours is enjoying!" muttered Des Esseintes.
But then, the decayed
nobility was done for; the aristocracy had sunk into imbecility or
depravity. It was dying from the
degeneracy of its scions, whose faculties had deteriorated with each succeeding
generation till they now consisted of the instincts of gorillas at work in the
skulls of grooms and jockeys; or else, like the Choiseul-Praslins,
the Polignacs, and Chevreuses,
it was wallowing in the mud of lawsuits that brought it down to the same level
of ignominy as the other classes.
The very mansions,
age-old escutcheons, heraldic pomp, and stately ceremonial of this ancient
caste had disappeared. As its estates
had stopped yielding revenue, they and the great country houses had been put up
for auction, for there was never enough money to pay for all the dark venereal
pleasures of the besotted descendants of the old families.
The least scrupulous
and the least obtuse among them threw all shame to the winds; they joined in
shady deals, splashed about in the financial gutter, and finished up like
common criminals in the Assize Court, serving at least to add a little lustre
to human justice, which, finding it impossible to maintain absolute
impartiality, solved the problem by making them prison librarians.
This passion for
profits, this love of lucre, had also taken hold of another class, a class that
had always leant upon the nobility - the clergy. At present, on the back page of every
newspaper, you could see a corn-cure advertisement inserted by a priest. The monasteries had been turned into
factories or distilleries, with every order manufacturing its specialities or
selling its recipes. Thus the
Cistercians derived their income from chocolate, Trappistine,
semolina, and tincture of arnica; the Marists from biphosphate
of chalk for medicinal purposes and arquebus water;
the Dominicans from antapoplectic elixir; the
disciples of St Benedict from Benedictine; the monks of St Bruno from
Chartreuse.
Commercialism had
invaded the cloisters, where, in lieu of antiphonaries, fat account-books lay
on the lecterns. Like a foul leprosy,
the present-day greed for gain was playing havoc with the Church, making the
monks pore over inventories and invoices, turning the Superiors into
confectioners and medicasters, the lay-brothers into
common packers and base bottle-washers.
And yet, in spite of
everything, it was still only among the ecclesiastics that Des Esseintes could hope to enjoy relations in some degree of accordance
with his tastes. In the company of
canons, who were generally men of learning and good breeding, he might have
spent some affable and agreeable evenings; but then he would have had to share
their beliefs and not oscillate between sceptical ideas and sudden fits of
faith which recurred from time to time under the impulse of his childhood
memories.
He would have had to
hold identical views and refuse to acknowledge, as he readily did in his
moments of enthusiasm, a Catholicism that was seasoned with a touch of magic,
as in the reign of Henri III, and a touch of sadism, as in the closing years of
the eighteenth century. This special
brand of clericalism, this subtly depraved and perverse type of mysticism, to
which he occasionally felt drawn, could not so much as be discussed with a
priest, who would either have failed to understand him or would have instantly
ordered him out of his sight in sheer horror.
For the twentieth time
this insoluble problem tormented him. He
would have dearly loved to escape form the state of doubt and suspicion against
which he had struggled in vain at Fontenay; now that
he was forced to turn over a new leaf, he would have liked to force himself to
possess the faith, to glue it down as soon as he had it, to fasten it with
clamps to his soul, in short to protect it against all those reflections that
tend to shake and dislodge it. But the
more he longed for it, the less the void in his mind was filled and the longer
the visitation of Christ was delayed.
Indeed, in proportion as his hunger for religion increased and he
passionately craved, as a ransom for the future and a help in his new life,
this faith that now showed itself to him, though the distance separating him
from it appalled him, doubts crowded into his fevered mind, upsetting his
unsteady will, rejecting on grounds of common sense and by mathematical
demonstration the mysteries and dogmas of the Church.
"It ought to be
possible to stop arguing with yourself," he told himself miserably;
"it ought to be possible to shut your, let yourself drift along with the
stream, and forget all those damnable discoveries that have blasted religion
from top to bottom in the last two hundred years.
"And yet," he
sighed, "it isn't really the physiologists or the sceptics who are
demolishing Catholicism; it's the priests themselves, whose clumsy writings
would shake the firmest convictions."
Among the Dominicans,
for instance, there was a Doctor of Theology, the Reverend Father Rouard de Card, a preaching friar who, in a booklet entitled
The Adulteration of the Sacramental Substances, had proved beyond all
doubt that the majority of Masses were null and void, simply because the
materials used by the priest were sophisticated by certain dealers.
For years now, the holy
oil had been adulterated with poultry-fat; the taper wax with burnt bones; the
incense with common resin and old benzoin. But what was worse was that the two
substances that were indispensable for the holy sacrifice, the two substances
without which no oblation was possible, had also been adulterated: the wine by
repeated diluting and the illicit addition of Pernambuco
bark, elderberries, alcohol, alum, salicylate, and
litharge; the bread, that bread of the Eucharist which should be made from the
finest of wheats, with bean-flour, potash, and
pipe-clay!
And now they had gone
even further; they had had the effrontery to leave out the wheat altogether,
and most hosts were made by shameless dealers out of potato-flour!
Now God refused to come
down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable
fact. In the second volume of his Moral
Theology, His Eminence Cardinal Gousset had also
dealt at length with this question of fraud from the divine point of view;
according to this unimpeachable authority it was quite impossible to consecrate
bread made of oatmeal, buckwheat, or barley, and if there was at least some
doubt in the case of rye bread, there could be no doubt or argument about
potato-flour, which, to use the ecclesiastic phrase, was in no sense a
competent substance for the Blessed Sacrament.
Because of the easy
manipulation of this flour and the attractive appearance of the wafers made
with it, this outrageous swindle had become so common that they mystery of
transubstantiation scarcely existed any longer and both priests and faithful
communicated, all unwittingly, with neutral species.
Ah, the days were far
distant when Radegonde, Queen of France, used to make
the altar-bread with her own hands; the days when, according to the custom at Cluny, three fasting priests or deacons, clad in alb and
amice, after washing face and fingers, sorted out the wheat grain by grain,
crushed it under a millstone, kneaded the dough with pure, cold water, and
baked it themselves over a bright fire, singing psalms all the while.
"Still, there's no
denying," Des Esseintes told himself, "that
the prospect of being constantly hoodwinked at the communion table itself isn't
calculated to consolidate beliefs that are already far from steady. Besides, how can you accept the idea of an
omnipotent deity balked by a pinch of potato- flour and a drop of
alcohol?"
These thoughts made his
future look gloomier than ever, his horizon darker and more threatening.
It was clear that no
haven of refuge or sheltering shore was left to him. What was to become of him in this city of
After the aristocracy
of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth, the caliphate of
the counting-house, the despotism of the Rue du Sentier, the tyranny of commerce with its narrow-minded,
venal ideas, its selfish, rascally instincts.
More cunning and
contemptible than the impoverished aristocracy and the discredited clergy, the
bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous love of show and their old-world
arrogance, which it cheapened through its own lack of taste, and stole their
natural defects, which it turned into hypocritical vices. Overbearing and underhand in behaviour, base
and cowardly in character, it ruthlessly shot down its perennial and essential
dupe, the mob, which it had previously unmuzzled and
sent flying at the throats of the old castes.
Now it was all
over. Once it had done it job, the plebs
had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial
bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his
money and the contagiousness of his stupidity.
The result of his rise to power had been the suppression of all
intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the destruction of all art; in fact,
artists and writers in their degradation had fallen on their knees and were
covering with ardent kisses the stinking feet of the high-placed jobbers and
low-bred satraps on whose charity they depended for a living.
In painting, the result
was a deluge of lifeless inanities; in literature, a torrent of hackneyed
phrases and conventional ideas - honesty to flatter the shady speculator,
integrity to please the swindler who hunted for a dowry for his son while
refusing to pay his daughter's, and chastity to satisfy the anti-clerical who
accused the clergy of rape and lechery when he himself was forever haunting the
local brothel, a stupid hypocrite without even the excuse of deliberate
depravity, sniffing at the greasy water in the washbasins and the hot, spicy
smell of dirty petticoats.
This was the vast
bagnio of
"Well, crumble
then, society! perish, old world!" cried Des Esseintes, roused to indignation by the ignominious
spectacle he had conjured up - and the sound of his voice broke the oppressive
spell the nightmare had laid on him.
"Ah!" he
groaned, "To think that all this isn't just a bad dream! To think that I'm about to
rejoin the base and servile riffraff of the age!"
To soothe his wounded
spirit he called upon the consoling maxims of Schopenhauer, and repeated to
himself Pascal's sorrowful maxim: "The soul sees nothing that does not
distress it on reflection"; but the words echoed in his mind like
meaningless voices, his weariness of spirit breaking them up, stripping them of
all significance, all sedative virtue, all effective and soothing force.
He realized at last
that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him, that only the
impossible belief in a future life could bring him peace of mind.
A fit of rage swept
away like a hurricane all his would-be resignation, all his attempted
indifference. He could no longer shut
his eyes to the fact that there was nothing to be done, nothing whatever, that
it was all over; the bourgeois were guzzling like picnickers from paper bags
among the imposing ruins of the Church - ruins which had become a place of
assignation, a pile of debris defiled by unspeakable jokes and scandalous
jests. Could it be that the terrible God
of Genesis and the pale martyr of Golgotha would not prove their existence once
[and] for all by renewing the cataclysms of old, by rekindling the rain of fire
that once consumed those accursed towns, the cities of the plain? Could it be that this slime would go on
spreading until it covered with its pestilential filth this old world where now
only seeds of iniquity sprang up and only harvests of shame were gathered?
The door suddenly flew
open. In the distance, framed in the
opening, some men in cocked hats appeared with clean-shaven cheeks and tufts of
hair on their chins, trundling packing-cases along and moving furniture; then
the door closed again behind the manservant, who disappeared carrying a bundle
of books.
Des Esseintes
collapsed into a chair.
"In two days' time
I shall be in
