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

by J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘No, but to be fair, each state, married or single, has its anxieties and worries; and besides, it’s contemptible to have kids when you don’t have any money. It means condemning them to the contempt of others when they grow up; it means throwing them into the disgusting struggle of existence, unarmed and defenceless; it means persecuting and punishing these innocents by forcing them to relive the miserable life of their father. Well, at least the unhappy line of Folantins will die out with me.’ And, much consoled, M. Folantin, once he’d finished his bath, would uncomplainingly lap up his dishwater soup, and pick apart his damp, spongy piece of meat.

  One way or another he reached the end of winter and life became more tolerable; the intimate attraction of home life ceased and M. Folantin no longer yearned so fervently for his cosy snoozes by the fireside; his long walks along the quays recommenced.

  Already the trees were notched with little yellow leaves; the Seine, reflecting the dappled azure of the sky, flowed by, sliced up into big sheets of blue and white by the Bateaux Mouches.23 The surrounding decor appeared to have been retouched.24 The two great scenic backdrops – one consisting of the Pavilion de Flore and the entire façade of the Louvre; the other, the row of tall houses stretching to the Palais de l’Institut – had been brought back to life, as if repainted, and their newly-stretched canvases revealed in outline, against a soft ultramarine blue, the pepperpot turrets of the Palais de Justice, the needle-thin steeple of Sainte-Chapelle, and the spire and towers of Notre-Dame.

  M. Folantin loved this part of the quay, between the Rue du Bac and the Rue Dauphine; he would choose a cigar at the tobacconist near the Rue de Beaune and wander along slowly, one day going to the left, leafing through the boxes mounted on the parapets of the Seine, and another day to the right, browsing the shelves of open-air bookstalls.

  Most of the books piled in the boxes were bookshop rejects, out-of-date stock, stillborn novels about high society women, recounting in gossipy style the mishaps of a tragic love affair, the duels, murders and suicides; others propounded theses attributing every vice to the nobility and every virtue to the working class; others still had a religious aim, they were adorned by endorsements from Monsignor So-and-So, and their sticky, mucilaginous prose was thinned out with spoonfuls of holy water.

  All these novels had been written by unquestionable imbeciles, and M. Folantin would hurry past them, pausing for breath only in front of volumes of verse, whose pages fluttered at the slightest breeze. These were less tatty and less dirty since no one ever opened them. M. Folantin felt a charitable compassion for these neglected collections. And there were so many of them, so very many! Old ones, dating from the entry of Malek-Adel25 into the world of letters; young ones, graduates of the Victor Hugo Romantic school of poetry, singing about the sweet month of Messidor,26 about shady woods, about the divine charms of a young girl who, in her private life, was probably a streetwalker. And all of this stuff had once been read to a small circle of friends, and the poor authors had rejoiced, not in anticipation of a resounding success or huge sales, dear God no, but only of a little word of praise from the discerning or the well-read; but nothing had come of it, not even a bit of respect. The odd hackneyed plaudit, here and there, in some rag, or a risible letter from the Great Master himself, religiously conserved inside the book’s covers, and that had been all.

  ‘The saddest thing about it,’ thought M. Folantin, ‘is that these unfortunates could justifiably curse the reading public, because there’s no such thing as literary justice; their verses were no better or worse than those that sold and carried their authors into the Institute.’27

  Daydreaming in this fashion, M. Folantin, would relight his cigar, recognising the weather-beaten bouquinistes who stood chatting by their stalls, as they had the year before. He would recognise, too, the booklovers he’d seen trudging the whole length of the quay the previous spring, and the sight of these people he didn’t know charmed him. They all seemed congenial to him; he imagined them as benign eccentrics, decent people quietly going through life without making a fuss, and he envied them. ‘If only I was like them,’ he would think; and in fact he’d already tried to imitate them and become a bibliophile. He’d consulted catalogues, leafed through lists and read specialised publications, but he’d never discovered any interesting items, and besides he guessed that their possession wouldn’t fill the hole of boredom that was slowly eating through his entire being. ‘Alas, the taste for books can’t be taught,’ and in any case, apart from the out-of-print editions that his feeble resources prevented him from buying, there were few books M. Folantin wished to purchase. He liked neither cloak-and-dagger novels nor novels of adventure, and he also detested the anemic potboilers of those such as Cherbuliez and Feuillet;28 he was only interested in books that were about things in real life, so his library was small, fifty volumes in all, which he knew by heart. And this dearth of books to read wasn’t the least of his annoyances. He’d tried in vain to interest himself in history, but all those complicated explanations of simple things neither captivated nor convinced him. So he would rummage around haphazardly, with little hope of unearthing a book that he could add to his collection.

  Even so, this walk distracted him, and when he tired of knocking the dust off printed volumes, he’d lean over the parapet, and the sight of boats with their tarred hulls, cabins painted leek-green, and main masts lowered, pleased him; he would stand there enchanted, contemplating a casserole pot simmering on a cast-iron stove in the open air, the inevitable black-and-white dog running, its tail cocked, the length of a barge, and blond-haired children seated by the tiller, hair in their eyes and fingers in their mouths.

  ‘It would be fun to live like that,’ he thought, smiling in spite of himself at such childish longings, and he even felt sympathetic towards the fishermen sitting immobile in a row, separated one from another by boxes of maggots.

  On such evenings he felt fitter and younger. He would consult his watch, and if there was enough time before dinner, he would cross the road and follow the pavement opposite to that he’d just left, going back up the line of houses. He would saunter along, eyeing the spines of books aligned on stalls outside the shops, going into raptures over ancient bindings, their boards covered in red morocco and embossed with gilded coats of arms; but these were enclosed in glass cases, like precious things that only the initiated could touch; and so he would wander on, studying shops full of old oak that had been patched up so often there was nothing left of the original; old Rouen plates manufactured at Les Batignolles; huge platters of Moustiers faience fired at Versailles; landscapes by Hobbema29 – a little brook, a watermill, a house topped by red roof tiles and fanned by a cluster of trees swathed in a streak of yellow light – paintings that were amazingly imitated by an artist who had got under the skin of old Meindert himself, but was incapable of assimilating the style of another master or of producing an original painting of his own. M. Folantin would try to pierce the gloomy depths of these shops with a quick glance through their open doors, but he never saw any customers, only an old woman would usually be sitting amid a jumble of objects in which she’d reserved a niche for herself, and, bored stiff, she would open her mouth in a gigantic yawn that was taken up by a cat perched on a small table.

  ‘All the same, it’s funny how sellers of bric-a-brac vary,’ thought M. Folantin. ‘On the rare occasions I’ve walked through the quarters of the Right Bank, I’ve never seen a dear old lady like this one behind the window of her junkshop; there, I’ve noticed they are invariably tall, striking creatures in their late thirties, with carefully pomaded hair and faces plastered in makeup.’

  A vague hint of prostitution hung around these shops whose female proprietors would cut short the haggling of their customers with a meaningful wink. ‘But there you go, the old easygoing attitude has disappeared; besides, the centre of the trade is shifting: nowadays all the antique dealers and antiquarian booksellers in this area are just marking time, and as soon as their leases e
xpire they’ll flee to the other side of the river. Ten years from now brasseries and cafés will have taken over all the ground-floor premises on the quay. There’s no doubt about it, Paris is turning into a sinister Chicago.’ And by now totally depressed, M. Folantin kept repeating to himself: ‘Let’s make the most of the time left to us, before the crass vulgarity of the New World takes over completely.’

  He resumed his roaming, stopping in front of print shops with their displays of eighteenth-century prints; but, in truth, neither the coloured engravings of that period nor the black-and-white engravings in the English style exhibited next to them in most of the windows held much interest for him, and he missed the prints of Flemish interiors, nowadays relegated to cardboard boxes on account of the infatuation of collectors for the French school.

  When he was tired of mooching around junkshops, to vary the scene he would go into the telegraph office of a newspaper, a room lined with drawings and paintings representing belly-dancers and Italian women doing the tarantella, babies being kissed by their mothers, and mediaeval pages strumming mandolins under balconies, a whole series evidently destined for the decoration of lampshades; he would turn away and move on, preferring rather to look at the photographs of murderers, generals and actresses, the kind of people whose crimes, massacres or popular songs had made them famous for a few days.

  But these exhibitions weren’t, in truth, very entertaining, and M. Folantin, going out into the Rue de Beaune, was more impressed by the insatiable appetites of coachmen sitting in pubs, and he felt something like a pang of hunger. Those platefuls of beef lying on thick beds of cabbage, those small but substantial dishes filled with Irish stew, those triangles of Brie and those brimming glasses, whetted his appetite, and these men with their cheeks bulging with huge mouthfuls of bread, their big hands holding their knives point upwards, and their leather caps rising and falling in time with their jaws, excited him and he hurried on, trying to preserve this feeling of voraciousness on the way; unfortunately, as soon as he sat down at a restaurant, his stomach would turn and he’d look pitifully at his uneaten steak and wonder why he bothered marinading quassia amara30 in a carafe at work to aid his digestion.

  Even so, walks like this deflected his gloomiest thoughts, and so he spent summer evenings like this, strolling along the Seine before dinner, and once he’d finished his meal, sitting outside a café. He would smoke, breathing in a little cool air, and despite his distaste for Viennese beer, which seemed to be brewed, Flanders style, from bitter aloe and boxwood,31 he’d lap up a couple of bocks, having little desire to go to bed.

  As for the days themselves, they were less heavy going during the summer. Shirt sleeves rolled, he would doze away in his office, listening vaguely to his colleague’s stories, waking only to fan himself with a calendar, working as little as possible, and planning his walks. His wintertime reluctance to leave his warm office, to run around outside, dine, feet still soaking wet, and then return to his cold rooms, was a thing of the past. By contrast, he felt a relief at escaping from his office, which stank of that smell of dust and mustiness given off by boxes of files, bundles of paper and pots of ink.

  Added to which, his rooms were tidier; the janitor no longer had to lay a fire and if the bed continued to be lumpy and badly made up, it mattered little, since M. Folantin slept naked on top of the sheets and blankets.

  The thought that, living on his own, he could stretch out on those sultry nights when one sweats as if in a sauna, when one tosses and turns between damp sheets, also cheered him up. ‘I pity those in a couple,’ he thought, as he rolled over in search of a cooler spot. And at times like these, destiny seemed to him a little more charitable, a little less obdurate.

  Notes

  17 A table d’hôte was a restaurant that offered a limited range of meals from a set menu, but as a consequence they were usually cheaper than restaurants where you could order what you liked from a larger menu.

  18 During the nineteenth century wines were subject to being unscrupulously adulterated by litharge, one of the natural mineral forms of lead oxide. As The Philosophical Magazine of 1806 put it, the addition of lead oxide deprived bad quality wines of “their bitterness and pungency” and rendered them “mild and pleasant to the taste”, but the practice also “induced some avaricious speculators to raise the price of their wines.”

  19 Fowler’s solution, or Liquor Arsenicalis, was a solution containing 1% arsenic trioxide, originally developed in the 1780s by Dr Thomas Fowler at Stafford Infirmary. It was often prescribed during the nineteenth century as a tonic and even as an aphrodisiac.

  20 Quinquina an aromatic tonic wine, containing quinine, of which Dubonnet is perhaps the most well-known brand. In some cases adverse reactions to quinine can lead to constipation or diarrhoea.

  21 This list of potions, lotions, pills and powders covers a range of genuine and spurious medicaments that were available at the time. It would be impossible to give a full account of the actual or supposed medical properties of the substances listed here – which is in any case intended partly for comic effect – but many of them are tonics or stimulants, or related to problems of digestion and the excretory function. Pearson’s Solution and Devergie’s mineral solution, both arsenic-based tonics, were felt to be more acceptable substitutes for Fowler’s solution (see note above), which by the mid-nineteenth century was considered dangerously strong. Dioscorides’ herbal remedies were taken from De Materia Medica, written by the Greek physician and herbalist Dioscorides in AD70, and long seen as an authoritative work on the medicinal use of herbs.

  22 Eau de Botot was developed in 1755 by Edme François Julien Botot, physician to Louis XV, as an hygenic aid for teeth and gums. Its ingredients included cinnamon, star anise and cloves.

  23 Bateaux Mouches are open-topped excursion boats that run up and down the Seine in Paris. They were originally manufactured in the boatyards of the Mouche area of Lyon, hence the name.

  24 Huysmans uses the extended metaphor of painting to give vibrancy to a real life scene, as if a painting was a truer representation of reality than reality itself. This kind of paradox would be further developed and explored in À rebours (Against Nature) of 1884. Oscar Wilde, who was much influenced by À rebours, would give the idea its most extreme expression in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, in which he famously quipped that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

  25 The reference to Malek-Adel is a little confusing. It actually has its source in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), in the first chapter of which, “The Year 1817”, Hugo writes that “Claire d’Albe and Malek-Adel were masterpieces [and] Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the epoch.” Sophie Cottin (1770-1807) did write a novel called Claire d’Albe (1788), but not, however, one called Malek-Adel. Hugo’s mistake, repeated by Huysmans, was due to the fact that in 1824 Giacomo Meyerbeer had projected (though he never completed) an opera entitled Malek-Adel, based on Cottin’s crusader novel Mathilde, ou Mémoires tirés de l’histoire de croisades (1805), in which the sister of Richard the Lionheart, Mathilde, falls for Saladin’s brother, Malek-Adel.

  26 Messidor was the tenth month of the French Republican calendar and was the equivalent to mid-June to mid-July.

  27 The Institut de France in Paris is a learned society, formed in 1795. It groups together five académies covering the arts and sciences, most notably the Académie française, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, the Académie des sciences, and the Académie des beaux-arts. This reference to the Institute seems to have been prompted in Folantin’s mind by the sight of the Palais de l’Institut, a large and impressive building located next to the Seine, which he’d been looking at earlier.

  28 Charles Victor Cherbuliez (1829-1899) was a prolific and popular French novelist, who was elected to the Académie française in 1881. In a letter to Guy de Maupassant of 1882, Huysmans described Cherbuliez as one of his literary “bêtes noires”. Octave Feuillet (1821-1890) was a French nov
elist and dramatist elected to the Académie française in 1862. In the original, Huysmans uses the term bouillon de veau, literally “veal broth”, to describe the bloodless style of the two writers, and a few years later in Là-bas (1891) he would dismiss them both as novelists who peddled old-fashioned Romantic nonsense, describing their work as lanugineuse, meaning downy or fluffy.

  29 Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709) was a famous landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age. Huysmans mentioned Hobbema in the first piece of his writing he ever published, an article on contemporary landscape painting that appeared in the Revue Mensuelle of 1867. He would remain a lifelong admirer of Flemish and Dutch realist painters.

  30 Quassia amara, from the Jamaican quassia tree (picraena excelsa), is one of the bitterest substances found in nature and is often taken in the form of an infusion to aid digestion. As the properties of quassia aren’t common knowledge, I have slightly expanded the text to clarify the allusion.

  31 It is difficult to get the precise sense of Huysmans’ allusion in the original, but his point seems to be that Viennese beers, like Flemish beers, seemed to have a more pronounced bitter flavour than French ones.

  III

  Soon the overpowering heatwaves abated, the long days grew shorter, the air cooled, the gamey skies of high summer lost their blue and furred up, as if with mould. Autumn was returning, bringing with it fog and rain; M. Folantin foresaw the prospect of inexorable evenings and, alarmed, drew up fresh plans.

  First, he resolved to break his antisocial habits, to try out other tables d’hôtes, to make friends with fellow diners, to even frequent theatres.

  He got his wish: one day, just outside his office, he met a man he’d known in the past. For a whole year they’d eaten side by side, warning each other about dubious or badly-cooked dishes, loaning one another their newspapers, debating the merits of the various iron tonics they took, drinking tar water32 together for a month, issuing their predictions about changes in the weather, and seeking out between them possible diplomatic allies for France.