Drifting a Vau-L'eau (Dedalus European Classics)

by J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘But it’s all too late… my virility’s gone and marriage is impossible. My life has certainly been a failure. The best thing I can do,’ sighed M. Folantin, ‘is to go to bed and sleep.’ And as he turned back the sheets and arranged his pillows, his soul offered up a thanksgiving in celebration of the tranquilising benefits of an obliging bed.

  Notes

  1 The restaurant holds a particularly significant place in Huysmans’ writing, and his works feature a bewildering number of terms for them for which there is often no directly comparable word in English. This, coupled with the fact that these terms are in many cases now out-of-date and would be unfamiliar to a present-day audience obviously presents a problem for the translator. Nevertheless, I have tried to be consistent and use the same term in English for its corresponding term in French, and to discriminate between the various types of eating establishment that Huysmans mentions.

  2 Huysmans uses the term oignon (literally ‘onion’), the name given to a type of pocket watch common in the eighteenth century, which tended to be bulbous in form, hence its name.

  3 The medicine Huysmans refers to in the original is onguent populéum, a calming ointment made from poplar, often used in the treatment of hemorrhoids.

  4 The imagery used here is quite striking, both in literary and biographical terms. The Way of the Cross, or Stations of the Cross, is a ritual of the Catholic Church during Lent in which the events of the crucifixion of Christ are rehearsed and gone through, typically in fourteen successive stages (stations). Here, Huysmans’ use of the Way of the Cross as a comic device, making a parallel between Folantin’s prosaic sufferings and those of Christ, would have been quite a radical, and shocking, literary conceit at the time. From a biographical perspective the use of this imagery is also interesting in the light of Huysmans’ subsequent conversion, or reconversion, to Catholicism.

  5 Possibly an allusion to Eudore in Greek mythology, who was one of five sisters. When their beloved brother, Hyas, is killed, they die from grief and Zeus immortalises them by turning them into the stars that form the constellation of Taurus. According to this myth, rain is actually the sisters’ tears.

  6 A street in the sixth arrondissement of Paris running between the Rue de Sèvres, of which it is a continuation, and the Boulevard St Germain. The reference has an autobiographical hint to it: in 1856 Huysmans’s father died and the eight-year-old Huysmans and his mother went to live with her parents at 11 Rue de Sèvres. Huysmans’s mother remarried a year later, and her new husband ran a book bindery installed on the ground floor.

  7 When Huysmans began work at the Ministry of the Interior on 1 April 1866, as an employé de sixième classe, his salary was also fifteen hundred francs.

  8 Le Bal Bullier was a popular dance hall in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, at the Port Royal end of the Boulevard St Michel. Established by François Bullier in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was demolished after the Second World War and is now the site of the Centre Jean Sarrailh.

  9 A network of streets clustered around the Boulevard St Germain. The Rue de l’Egout is now subsumed into Rue Saint-Benoît, and the Rue Neuve-Guillemin and the Rue Buerrière were two narrow streets formerly running between the Rue de Four and the Rue de Vieux-Colombier. They were demolished to make way for the extension of the Rue de Rennes and no longer exist.

  10 In the original Huysmans uses the term femmes en carte, in other words prostitutes who were regulated by the police. They had to have regular medical check-ups that were recorded on a card which they had to carry at all times, hence the name. For a fuller analysis of the extent and range of nineteenth-century prostitution see Charles Bernheimer’s Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France, Duke University Press, 1997.

  11 It is difficult to appreciate how much the fear of venereal disease, more specifically syphilis, permeates the male consciousness in nineteenth-century France. Anxiety about syphilis was reflected in numerous novels of the fin-de-siècle period, and the list of well-known French writers whose deaths were related to syphilitic infection included Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Charles Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Henry Murger, and Alfred de Musset. Huysmans’ own private life was blighted by syphilis, it being thought that his mistress, Anna Meunier, had contracted the disease. After a long period of illness – the effects of which Huysmans recorded in his portrait of Louise Marles in his 1887 novel En rade (Stranded) – she was institutionalised in 1893 with “general paralysis of the insane”, a euphemism for late-stage syphilitic infection, and died in 1895.

  The incidence of syphilis increased dramatically in the 1870s and reached a peak in 1879-1880. In 1883, Dr Charles Mauriac, in his Leçons sur les maladies vénériennes professées à l’Hôpital du Midi, estimated that there were 5,000 new cases of syphilis in Paris each year, and by 1890, Emile Richard, in La prostitution à Paris, put the total number of syphilitics in Paris at 85,000. In 1879 the first chair in dermatology and syphilology was instituted at the Hôpital Saint-Louis, with Dr Alfred Fournier becoming its first incumbent. The statistics Fournier kept reveal the extent to which syphilis crossed class and gender boundaries, representing a real threat to the stability of the middle-class family. Of the 887 syphilitic women Fournier treated in 27 years, for example, 164 were “respectable” women who had caught the disease from their husbands, a figure that represents nearly 20 per cent of total cases treated. Dr Fournier was the first to propose a link between locomotor ataxia and syphilis, in a series of lectures he gave in 1875, and he would eventually publish a book on the subject, De l’Ataxie locomotrice d’origine syphilitique in 1882, the same year as the publication of À vau-l’eau.

  12 A vivandière, also known as a cantinière, was the French word for women who were attached to military regiments as sutlers or canteen keepers.

  13 I have translated this double simile literally, rather than using the conventional English formula “ate like a horse and drank like a fish”, because the expression Huysmans uses – bafrait comme un roulier et bouvait comme quatre – is not common in French and a literal translation emphasises the masculine implication in his comparison of her to an army sutler.

  14 Huysmans uses the rare slang word roussinait from roussiner, to break wind.

  15 Saint-Galmier, a commune in the Loire department in central France, is a spa town and the source of Badoit mineral water. According to Natural mineral waters: their properties and uses, published by the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1886, Saint-Galmier water “is useful in cases of dyspepsia, as it not only assists digestion but also increases the appetite.”

  Seltzer is a carbonated mineral water, originally from the area of Selters in Germany, long considered to have beneficial health properties. In 1886, the Royal College of Surgeons noted that Seltzer water “promotes the secretions of the skin and kidneys.”

  16 In the original Huysmans refers to the Maison Dubois. This was a Maison municipale de Santé, located at 200 Faubourg St. Denis in Paris, that specialised in looking after patients with mania. Gerard de Nerval was a patient during one of his bouts of madness, as was Théo Van Gogh, Vincent’s brother, after he effectively had a nervous breakdown. A short time before Huysmans began writing A vau-l’eau the art critic Louis Edmond Duranty, one of the early supporters of the Impressionist movement, had died in the Maison Dubois. As Huysmans was himself an art critic he was certainly familiar with Duranty, and in his review of the Exposition des Indépendants for 1880 (later collected in L’Art moderne, 1883), he praised Degas’s portrait of the “late-lamented” critic.

  II

  Neither the next day, nor the day after that, did M. Folantin’s unhappiness dissipate; he simply let himself drift, incapable of resisting this crushing feeling of depression. Mechanically, under a rainy sky, he would make his way to his office; then he would leave it, eat, and go to bed at nine, only to resume the following day the exact same routine; little by little he slid into complete spiritual apathy.
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  Then, one fine morning, he had an awakening. It seemed to him that he’d come out of his lethargy; it was a clear day and the sun glittered off windows damasked with frost – winter had returned but it was bright and dry; M. Folantin got out of bed, muttering ‘Damn it’s nippy!’ He felt more cheerful. ‘Never mind all that, I must try and find a cure for these attacks of hypochondria,’ he thought.

  After a long deliberation, he decided not to live such a confined existence anymore, and to vary his restaurants. But if these resolutions were easy to make, they were, conversely, difficult to put into practice. He lived in the Rue des Saints-Pères, and there were few restaurants nearby. The sixth arrondissement was pitiless when it came to bachelors. You really had to be an ordained priest in order to find supplies in this network of streets surrounding the church of Saint-Sulpice, then you qualified for the special dinners in tables d’hôtes17 reserved for the clergy. No religion, no grub – unless you were rich and frequented the houses of the posh. M. Folantin fulfilled neither of these conditions, and had to content himself with taking his meals at the few eating houses scattered here and there in his neighbourhood. It certainly seemed that this part of the arrondissement was inhabited only by married men or by their mistresses. ‘If only I had the courage to leave,’ sighed M. Folantin from time to time. But his office was here, and besides he’d been born here, his family had always lived here; all his memories were rooted in this quiet old district, already starting to be disfigured by the knocking through of new streets, by dismal boulevards that were baking in summer and freezing in winter, by bleak avenues that had Americanised the look of the area and destroyed its intimate charm forever, without bringing any benefits in exchange in terms of comfort, gaiety or life.

  ‘You have to cross the river to eat,’ M. Folantin kept telling himself, but he would be gripped by a profound feeling of disgust whenever he went to the Right Bank; besides, it was difficult to walk so far with his gammy leg, and he hated taking the omnibus. Added to which, the idea of making such a long trek every evening to find a meal irritated him. He preferred to try out all the wine shops and all the chop houses he hadn’t yet visited in the vicinity of his rooms.

  And so he immediately abandoned the eatery where he usually ate; first he frequented chop houses, putting himself in the hands of those waitresses whose nunlike uniforms evoked the image of a hospital refectory. He dined there for a few days, but his appetite, already rebuffed by the greasy aroma of the room, refused to even start on the tasteless meat, made blander still by a chicory and spinach poultice. And what a cheerless impression was given off by all that cold marble, by the doll-sized tables, the unchanging menus, the minuscule helpings and those tiny mouthfuls of bread. Squeezed together in two rows, face to face, the clients seemed to be playing chess, moving their utensils, their bottles, and their glasses into each other’s space for want of room; and M. Folantin, his nose in a newspaper, envied the sturdy jaws of his neighbours, who could chomp through the gristly bits of sirloin that eluded the fork’s probing. Sick of roasted meats he resorted to eggs; he would ask for them fried and well cooked; invariably they would bring them to him almost raw, and he would force himself to mop them up with a crust of bread, to scoop up with a little spoon raw yolks drowning in a sea of albumen. It was bad, it was expensive, and above all it was depressing. ‘That’s enough,’ thought M. Folantin, ‘let’s try somewhere else.’

  But everywhere it was the same; the drawbacks varied according to which feeding-stall you visited: at classier wine shops the food was better, the wine less bitter, the helpings larger, but generally speaking the meal took two hours, the waiter being busy serving the drunks propped at the bar below; besides, in this lamentable district the grub consisted of very basic fare, of cutlets and steaks for which you paid a high price because in order not to put you with the workers, the manager would shut you off in a separate room, lit by two gas brackets.

  Then, descending still further, if one frequented taprooms or bars of the lowest order, the customers were repulsive and the filth stupefying; the meat would be fetid, the rims of glasses still have lip marks on them, the knives tarnished and greasy, and the threadbare tablecloths stained with half-eaten egg yolks.

  M. Folantin wondered if all the changing around was worth it, seeing that everywhere the wine was adulterated with lead oxide18 and diluted with pump water, the eggs were never cooked how you wanted them, the steaks always lacked juice, and the boiled vegetables looked like prison leftovers; but he went in them anyway – ‘If I keep looking, I might find something’ – and he continued to roam among taverns and bars; except that instead of decreasing, his weariness increased, especially when, descending from his rooms, he would breathe in the aroma of soup on the staircase, see rays of light under the doors, pass people coming up from the cellar with bottles of wine, or hear the bustle of rushing feet in other rooms; everything, even the smell coming from the lodge where his concierge sat, elbows on table, the visor of his cap dulled by steam rising from his bowl of soup, intensified his regrets. He almost repented of having sacked Mother Chabanel, that odious sentry guard. ‘If I’d had the means I’d have kept her, in spite of her appalling manners,’ he thought.

  And he began to despair; to his spiritual ennui was now added physical debility. As a result of this lack of nourishment his health, already frail, foundered. He took to iron tonics, but all the powerful pills he swallowed only turned his stools black, without any other appreciable result. So he tried arsenic, but Fowler’s solution19 enfeebled his stomach rather than fortifying it; finally, as a last resort, he tried quinquina,20 which simply inflamed it; then he mixed the whole lot, blending each ingredient one with another, but it was a waste of effort; his money ran out, his apartment became a mass of boxes, droppers and phials, a bedroom pharmacy containing every form of citrate, phosphate, protocarbonate, lactate, sulphate of protoxide, iodide and iron proto-iodide; there were bottles of Pearson’s solution, Devergie’s mineral solution, Dioscorides’ herbal remedies, pills of arsenate of soda and gold arsenate, and tonic wines made from gentian and quinine, from coca and columba root!21

  ‘To think that all this is a joke, a complete waste of money…’ sighed M. Folantin, staring pitifully at these useless purchases; the concierge, even though he hadn’t been asked, was of the same opinion and was now even less conscientious than before when he dusted the room, feeling as a healthy man an evergrowing contempt for this emaciated tenant who kept himself alive by swallowing drugs.

  Meanwhile, M. Folantin’s existence continued its monotonous course. He couldn’t decide whether to go back to his first restaurant or not; one time he’d got as far as the door, but once there the smell of grilled food and the sight of a vat of purple chocolate cream had forced him to flee. He alternated between wine shops and chop houses, and once a week he would land up in an establishment specialising in bouillabaisse. The soup and the fish were tolerable, but there was no point asking for anything else off the menu, the meat being as dry as old boots and all the plates giving off an acrid smell of lamp oil.

  In order to whet an appetite blunted by the awful aperitifs served in cafés – absinthe (stinking of copper), vermouth (the dregs of sour white wine), Madeira (brandy adulterated with caramel or molasses), Malaga (sweetened plum wine), and bitters (cheap Eau de Botot mouthwash22 from the herbalists) – M. Folantin tried a stimulant that had worked in his childhood: every two days he went to the public baths. This practice pleased him above all because having two hours to kill between leaving the office and eating his evening meal, he could thus avoid returning home and having to remain booted and suited, watching the clock and waiting until it was time for dinner. And the first few times there were some blissful moments. He would sink down in the hot water, amusing himself by raising tempests and whipping up whirlpools with his fingers. He would gently doze off to the silvery splash of water dripping from the swan-necked taps and forming big circles that broke against the sides of the bath, then be jolted awake b
y the sound of bells ringing furiously in the corridors, followed by footsteps and the slamming of doors. Then the silence would return, broken only by the gentle dripping of the taps, and all his troubles would drift away; in the steam-filled cubicle he could daydream, and his thoughts would grow as hazy as the vapour, becoming as genial as they were vague.

  ‘Basically, it’s all been for the best,’ he’d tell himself drowsily. ‘My God hasn’t everyone got their troubles?’ He had, at any rate, avoided the most painful, the most pitiful: those of marriage. ‘I must have been feeling pretty low the night I bemoaned my bachelor state,’ he thought. ‘Imagine it, someone like me, who loves to curl up under the bed sheets, forced to keep still, to endure contact with a woman, in and out of season, to have to satisfy her when all I want is simply to sleep!’

  ‘Even so, if one didn’t have a child, if the woman was actually barren or very astute in these matters, it might not be so bad… but you can never be sure of anything and then it would mean endless sleepless nights and incessant worry. One day the brat howls because it’s cutting a tooth, the next because it isn’t; and the whole room stinks of sour milk and pee; at the very least you’d have to happen upon a good-natured woman, a girl who’s decent. Yes, and just see if that happens, Jean! With my customary bad luck I’d marry some stuck-up snob, a right cow who’d never stop reproaching me with her women’s problems after the birth.’