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

by J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘If only I had a passion of some kind; if I loved women, or my work; if I liked coffee, dominoes or cards, I could eat out,’ he thought, ‘because I’d never spend long enough at home. But alas, nothing amuses me, nothing interests me; and what’s more my stomach is wrecked! Ah, it hardly needs to be said, but those who have enough money in their pockets to feed themselves, and who cannot eat for lack of appetite, are as much to be pitied as those unfortunates who haven’t a penny to appease their hunger.’

  Notes

  32 Tar water was originally a traditional medieval tonic made with pine tar. Despite its foul taste, and the fact that it was considered by medical experts to be a quack remedy, it had a renewed vogue in the Victorian era.

  33 The Grands Écoles were training schools for various bodies of civil servants (engineers, teachers, lawyers, and so on). Designed to channel entry into the civil service, they effectively ensured a path to higher administrative office.

  34 Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard the Lionheart) is a comic opera by the Belgian composer André Grétry. Based on a legend about King Richard I’s captivity in Austria and his rescue by the troubadour Blondel de Nesle, it is generally seen as Grétry’s masterpiece; Pré aux Clercs (The Clerks’ Meadow) is a light opera set in the sixteenth century, written by Ferdinand Hérold in 1832.

  35 This is analogous to Proust’s madeleine moment. In Huysmans’ case, a particular sound heard in the present, brings back memories and tastes of the forgotten past.

  36 It was common practice for theatres and opera houses to hire a group of people, referred to as a claque, to applaud in order to stimulate or provoke a positive response from the audience.

  37 Whether consciously or unconsciously, the phrase Huysmans used in the original – toutes ces romances lui semblaient troubadour et dessus de pendule – echoes a description in the Goncourts’s novel Manette Salomon (1867), in which a dancer’s movements are described as being des poses de dessus de pendule et de troubadourisme.

  38 The image Huysmans has in mind is not that conveyed by Gustave Caillebotte in his famous painting, which shows workmen kneeling and scraping varnish off a parquet floor. The reference is to a later stage in the work, where, after waxing or polishing the floor, the workmen would don rags on their feet and ‘skate’ around buffing the floor to a polished shine.

  39 François Vatel (1631-1671), was a renowned pastry cook in the service of Prince Louis II of Bourbon-Condé, credited, incorrectly, with inventing crème chantilly. He became infamous for committing suicide on the day of a reception in honour of Louis XIV at Chantilly, reputedly, according to Madame de Sevigné, because of a slight he received after the late delivery of the fish to be served at the meal.

  40 Benoît Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) was one of the most famous French actors of his day. He spent much of his career at the Theatre-Français, where his son, Jean Coquelin (1865-1944) would go on to be director.

  41 The Carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, now the Place Michel-Debré, was at the junction of the Rue du Dragon and the Rue du Four in the sixth arrondissement of Paris.

  42 Creosote is a chemical formed by the distillation of tar, and is typically used as a preservative or an antiseptic. During the nineteenth century it was employed in a number of medical preparations, often diluted in wine to aid ingestion. One medical journal described its benefits as follows: “It is claimed for creosote that it relieves the cough, diminishes expectoration, lowers the fever, checks night sweats, improves the appetite and digestion and diminishes the tendency to diarrhoea.” (Kingston Medical Quarterly, 1900).

  43 Manganese is a mineral which was used in some nineteenth-century preparations. It was believed to have a similar therapeutic quality to iron, and was often used in tonics.

  44 Another of Huysmans’s critical references to the progressive Haussmannisation of Paris. He lamented the destruction of the network of small streets that made way for Haussmann’s large Boulevards.

  45 In 1865, during the reconstruction of Paris by Louis Napoleon, the rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée, (now rue Auguste-Comte) was extended into the Jardin de Luxembourg, cutting off about seven hectares, including a large part of the old nursery garden.

  46 In the original Huysmans uses the term cabinet à cinq centimes. This was a small public toilet, described as ‘odourless’, which was erected in the Place Saint-Sulpice during the 1870s.

  47 Huysmans uses the word trinckhall, from the German trinkhall, meaning a refreshment stall. These had a certain vogue, but the word has dropped out of use in French almost entirely.

  48 The seminary was located at 9 Place Saint-Sulpice, but was forced to leave in 1906, shortly before Huysmans’ death, following the legal separation of Church and State. The building is now occupied by the Centre des Finances Publiques.

  49 The word Huysmans uses in the original, dévotes, is somewhat ambiguous in that it can mean ‘devout or pious’, but it also has a slang meaning of ‘bigoted churchwoman’. In his subsequent novel, À rebours, Huysmans also used the word in its pejorative, rather than its literal sense.

  50 This seems to be an autobiographical memory. The Maison Bailly was a furniture removals firm based at 10 Place Saint-Sulpice. According to a newspaper report it received a young wild boar from one of its clients as a gift during the 1850s. Rather than eating it, however, the manager decided to keep it on a collar and chain in the courtyard, where it began to attract public attention. The boar, which was named Jack, was placid with regular visitors it recognised, but would chase off dogs or people it didn’t like the look of. The firm kept the boar for ten years, and it was during this period that the young Huysmans, if this account is indeed autobiographical, became one of Jack’s regular visitors.

  51 Folantin’s sudden mania for redecorating his apartment anticipates the full-scale makeovers of des Esseintes in À rebours.

  52 The Bon Marché is a large department store in Paris. It was founded in 1852 by Aristide Boucicaut.

  53 The Maison du Petit Saint-Thomas, was a shop on the Rue du Bac in Paris. It would initiate many of the practices that would become standard for larger department stores that followed, such as low prices, mail order, and seasonal sales. Aristide Boucicaut, the founder of the Bon Marché, had worked at the Petit Saint-Thomas as a young man.

  54 Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), was a Dutch genre painter; David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), was a Flemish artist, born in Antwerp; both were renowned for their paintings of scenes from everyday life. Huysmans often used their unpretentious and down-to-earth realism as a standard which he compared other artists to and which he used to denigrate what he saw as the pompous, overblown style of Academic painters who worked in the classical mode.

  IV

  One evening, as he was picking at some eggs that smelt of farts, the concierge presented him with a funeral notice, worded thus:

  The nuns of the Community of Saint Agatha entreat you most humbly to commend to God in your prayers, and at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the soul of their beloved Sister Ursule, Aurelie Bougeard, who died 7 September 1880, in the sixty-second year of her age and the thirty- fifth of her Holy Profession as a choir nun, 55 fortified by the Sacraments of Our Holy Mother Church.

  De profundis!

  Sweet Heart of Mary, be my salvation!

  (300 days indulgence.)

  This was one of his relations, who he had last seen in his childhood; not once, in twenty years, had he given her a thought, yet the death of this woman struck him deeply: she had been his last surviving relative, and he felt more alone now she had died in the depths of the provinces. He envied her life of calm and quiet, and he regretted having lost his faith. ‘What better occupation than prayer? What better avocation than confession? What better release than the practice of religion? In the evening you go to church, you lose yourself in meditation, and the miseries of life become as nothing; not to mention that Sundays just slip by in lengthy services, in languorous canticles and vespers, because depression has no hold over
the souls of the pious.’

  ‘Yes, but why are the consolations of religion only fit for simpletons? Why did the Church want to elevate the most absurd beliefs into dogmatic truths? There’s no way I can accept either the virginity of an expectant mother, or the divinity of a comestible prepared by a breadmaker,’56 and besides, the intolerance of the clergy revolted him. ‘And yet mysticism alone could heal the wound that torments me. All the same, it would be wrong to point out to the faithful the futility of their devotions, because if they can accept all the vexations, all the afflictions of their present life as a passing trial they are happy indeed. Ah, Aunt Ursule must have died with no regrets, convinced that infinite joy was at hand.’

  He thought about her, tried to recall her features, but his memory had retained no trace of them; so, in order to get a little closer to her, to share a little in the life she’d led, he re-read the strange but revealing chapter in Les Misérables on the Petit-Picpus convent.57

  ‘By heaven, that’s a high price to pay for the improbable happiness of a future life,’ he thought. To him, the convent seemed like a house of correction, like a place of desolation and terror. ‘Well, I’m not having any of that; I don’t envy the lot of Aunt Ursule any more; but either way, one person’s misfortune is no consolation for the misfortunes of another, and at the moment the nosh from the patisserie is becoming inedible.’

  Two days later, he received another blast of cold water to the head.

  As a change from dinners comprised of a salad and dessert, he returned to a restaurant; even though there was nobody there, the service was slow and the wine smelt of benzine.

  ‘Well, one’s not crushed by other diners here, that’s something at least,’ M. Folantin thought, by way of consolation.

  The door opened and a breeze fanned the back of his neck; he heard a loud rustling of skirts and then a shadow fell across his table. A woman was standing in front of him, pulling out the chair on the struts of which he was resting his feet. She sat down and laid her veil and gloves next to his glass.

  ‘The devil take her!’ he grumbled, ‘she’s spoiled for choice, all the tables are empty and she comes right up and installs herself at mine!’

  Instinctively, he raised his eyes from the plate he was staring at, and couldn’t help inspecting his neighbour. She had a small, monkey-like face, a dimpled chin with a rather large, voluble mouth beneath a turned-up nose, and the slight hint of a black moustache on her top lip; despite her somewhat flirtatious appearance, she nevertheless seemed polite and reserved.

  From time to time she would dart a glance at him, and in a very soft voice ask him to pass the water or the bread. In spite of his shyness, M. Folantin was obliged to respond to a few questions she put to him; gradually a conversation between them began, and by dessert they were both complaining, not knowing what else to say, about the bitter wind that was whistling outside and freezing their legs.

  “This is the sort of weather where it would be nice not to have to sleep alone…” said the woman dreamily.

  This remark flabbergasted M. Folantin, who thought it best not to reply.

  “Don’t you think so, Monsieur?” she pursued.

  “Dear God!… Mademoiselle…” And like a coward who throws down his weapons to avoid getting into a fight with his opponent, M. Folantin blurted out that he was chaste, that his needs were few, that he desired a tranquil life, not a sensual one.

  “Is that so?” she said, looking him straight in the eye. He grew confused, particularly as her protruding bosom gave off an aroma of New Mown Hay58 and musk.59

  “I’m not twenty any more, and frankly I no longer have any pretensions to that sort of thing – if indeed I ever did – I’m too old for it now.” And he pointed to his bald patch, his livid complexion and his clothes, which were long out of fashion.

  “Come off it, you’re joking, you’re making yourself older than you are.” And she added that she didn’t like younger men, that she preferred men who were mature, because they knew how to conduct themselves with a woman.

  “No doubt… no doubt,” stammered M. Folantin as he asked for the bill; the woman did not pull out her purse, and he realised that he would have to pay. He settled up with the smirking waiter for the two dinners, and was just about to bid the woman ‘Good day’ on the doorstep, when she calmly took his arm.

  “You’re taking me with you, aren’t you Monsieur?”

  He searched for a way out, some excuse to avoid taking the fatal step, but he was confused, and he grew weak under the gaze of this woman whose perfumes went to his head.

  “I can’t,” he finally replied “I can’t bring women up to my rooms.”

  “So come to my place.” And she pressed herself against him, coaxingly, claiming she had a nice fire in her room. Then, seeing M. Folantin’s gloomy expression, she sighed: “What is it, don’t you like me?”

  “But I do, Madame, I do… it’s just that one can find a woman attractive without having to…”

  She began to laugh. “You are funny,” she said and kissed him.

  M. Folantin felt ashamed to be kissed like this in the open street; he sensed how grotesque it must seem, an old lame man being fawned over in public by a whore. He quickened his pace, wanting to avoid her caresses, but at the same time fearing that if he tried to flee she’d create a ludicrous scene and draw a crowd.

  “It’s here,” she said, and she pushed him gently, walking behind him and cutting off his retreat. He went up to the third floor, but, contrary to the woman’s promises, he saw no lit fire in her room.

  He looked, very sheepishly, round the room, the walls of which seemed to tremble in the quivering gleam of a candle; a room with furniture upholstered in blue wool and a divan with an Algerian rug on it. A muddy boot was lying under a chair and a pair of kitchen tongs under the table opposite it; here and there, advertising posters for brands of semolina and colour chromos of innocent-looking babies smeared with soup were stuck to the wall with pins; the base of a foot warmer could be seen beneath the half-lowered grate in the fireplace, and laid out on the imitation marble mantelpiece above it, next to an alarm clock and a dirty glass, was a blob of pomade on a playing card, some tobacco, and a piece of newspaper with some hair on it.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” said the woman, and despite his refusal to undress, she tugged at the sleeves of his overcoat and seized his hat.

  “J. F.” she said, looking at the initials on the lining, “I bet your name is Jules.”

  He confessed his name was Jean.

  “That’s not such a bad name. Now then…” and she forced him to sit down on the couch and jumped onto his lap.

  “Tell me, darling, what are you going to give me as glove money?”60

  M. Folantin reluctantly took a five franc coin from his pocket, and she promptly spirited it away.

  “Come on, you can easily spare me another. I’ll undress and you’ll see how nice I can be.”

  M. Folantin gave in, all the while protesting that he’d prefer it if she wasn’t naked; and then she kissed him so skilfully that a touch of his youthful ardour came back to him, he forgot his resolutions and lost his head; after a while, as he was taking his time trying to satisfy her, she said: “Don’t bother about me… don’t bother about me. Just do your business.”

  * * * * * * * * * * * *

  M. Folantin came down from the whore’s room profoundly sick at heart, and as he made his way home he took in at a glance the desolate horizon of his life; he understood now the futility of trying to change course, the sterility of enthusiasms and exertions; you had to let yourself drift with the flow; ‘Schopenhauer was right,’ he thought: ‘ “Man’s life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom.”61 So it’s a waste of effort trying to speed up or slow down the movement of the scales: all you can do is fold your arms and try to sleep; it was a mistake to want to revive my past life, to go to the theatre, to smoke a fine cigar, to drink tonics and chase after women; it was a mistake to lea
ve one bad restaurant in order to go to another no less bad, and after all that to end up eating rotten vol-au-vents from a patisserie!’

  As he was reasoning like this he reached his lodgings. ‘Great, I’ve got no matches,’ he thought, rummaging in his pockets as he climbed the stairs; when he entered his room an icy blast struck him in the face, and as he advanced into the darkness, he sighed: ‘The simplest thing is to go back again to the old eatery, to return tomorrow to the awful fold. Well, one thing’s certain, there’s no such thing as the best for people with no money, for them, only the worst arrives.’62

  Notes

  55 The designation “choir nun” doesn’t mean a nun who was a member of the choir, or rather the term isn’t limited to that, and relates as much to their status and function within the convent. Although they got their name as choir nuns because they had to sing the Office three times a day, their duties included educational work, and the recitation throughout the day of the Liturgy of the Hours. For this reason they were excused from the more manual labour involved in the upkeep of the convent, which was carried out by lay nuns.

  56 In the second edition of the book, published in 1894 after his conversion to Catholicism, Huysmans deleted this passage about the virgin birth and the purity of the hosts. He replaced it with the words, “It’s true that if one had faith… yes, but I don’t any more;” in order to emphasise that his subsequent conversion was actually a re-conversion. The word ‘mysticism’ in the next sentence was replaced with ‘religion’ in the 1894 edition.

  57 Although Hugo originally based the fictional Petit-Picpus convent on that of the Bénédictines du Saint-Sacrement in the Latin Quarter, he changed its name and location in Les Misérables as he didn’t want to run the risk of offending the censors. In the chapter entitled “Austerites”, Hugo described how the nuns “deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations in their cells, of which they must never speak”.