Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  A few moments later, just as he was beginning to get his breath back, the sound of sobbing made him look up. The bulldog woman stood before him, a grotesque and pitiful sight. She was weeping bitterly, complaining that she had lost her teeth in her flight and, taking a number of clay pipes out of her apron pocket, she proceeded to smash them up and stuff bits of the white stems into the holes in her gums.

  ‘But she’s mad!’ Des Esseintes said to himself; ‘those bits of stem will never hold’ – and, true enough, they all came dropping out of her jaws, one after the other.

  At that moment a galloping horse was heard approaching. Terror seized Des Esseintes and his legs went limp under him. But as the sound of hoofs came nearer, despair stung him to action like the crack of a whip; he flung himself upon the woman, who was now stamping on the pipe bowls, begging her to be quiet and not to betray them both by the noise of her boots. She struggled furiously, and he had to drag her to the end of the passage, throttling her to stop her crying out. Then, all of a sudden, he noticed a tap-room door with green-painted shutters and saw that it was unlatched; he pushed it open, dashed through – and stopped dead.

  In front of him, in the middle of a vast clearing, enormous white pierrots were jumping about like rabbits in the moonlight.

  Tears of disappointment welled up in his eyes; he would never, no, never be able to cross the threshold of that door.

  ‘I’d be trampled to death if I tried,’ he told himself – and as if to confirm his fears, the number of giant pierrots kept increasing; their bounds now filled the whole horizon and the whole sky, so that they bumped alternately against heaven and earth with their heads and their heels.

  Just then the sound of the horse’s hoofs stopped. It was there in the passage, behind a little round window; more dead than alive, Des Esseintes turned round and saw through the circular opening two pricked ears, a set of yellow teeth, a pair of nostrils breathing twin jets of vapour that stank of phenol.

  He sank to the ground, giving up all thought of resistance or flight; and he shut his eyes so as not to meet the dreadful gaze of the Pox, glaring at him from behind the wall, though even so he felt it forcing its way under his closed eyelids, gliding down his clammy back and travelling over the whole of his body, the hairs of which stood on end in pools of cold sweat. He was prepared for almost anything to happen and even hoped for the coup de grâce to make an end of it all. What seemed like a century, and was probably a minute, went by; then he opened his eyes again with a shudder of apprehension.

  Everything had vanished without warning; and like some transformation scene, some theatrical illusion, a hideous mineral landscape now lay before him, a wan, gullied landscape stretching away into the distance without a sign of life or movement. This desolate scene was bathed in light: a calm, white light, reminiscent of the glow of phosphorus dissolved in oil.

  Suddenly, down on the ground, something stirred – something which took the form of an ashen-faced woman, naked but for a pair of green silk stockings.

  He gazed at her inquisitively. Like horsehair crimped by over-hot irons, her hair was frizzy, with broken ends; two Nepenthes pitchers hung from her ears; tints of boiled veal showed in her half-opened nostrils. Her eyes gleaming ecstatically, she called to him in a low voice.

  He had no time to answer, for already the woman was changing; glowing colours lit up her eyes; her lips took on the fierce red of the Anthuriums; the nipples of her bosom shone as brightly as two red peppers.

  A sudden intuition came to him, and he told himself that this must be the Flower. His reasoning mania persisted even in this nightmare; and as in the daytime, it switched from vegetation to the Virus.

  He now noticed the frightening irritation of the mouth and breasts, discovered on the skin of the body spots of bistre and copper and recoiled in horror; but the woman’s eyes fascinated him, and he went slowly towards her, trying to dig his heels into the ground to hold himself back, and falling over deliberately, only to pick himself up again and go on. He was almost touching her when black Amorphophalli sprang up on every side and stabbed at her belly, which was rising and falling like a sea. He thrust them aside and pushed them back, utterly nauseated by the sight of these hot, firm stems twisting and turning between his fingers. Then, all of a sudden, the odious plants had disappeared and two arms were trying to enfold him. An agony of fear set his heart pounding madly, for the eyes, the woman’s awful eyes, had turned a clear, cold blue, quite terrible to see. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its swordblades gaping open to expose the bloody depths.

  His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him – and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear.

  ‘Thank God,’ he sobbed, ‘it was only a dream.’

  CHAPTER 9

  These nightmares recurred again and again, until he was afraid to go to sleep. He spent hours lying on his bed, sometimes the victim of persistent insomnia and feverish restlessness, at other times a prey to abominable dreams that were interrupted only when the dreamer was shocked into wakefulness by losing his footing, falling all the way downstairs or plunging helplessly into the depths of an abyss.

  His neurosis, which had been lulled to sleep for a few days, gained the upper hand again, showing itself more violent and more stubborn than ever, and taking on new forms.

  Now it was the bedclothes that bothered him; he felt stifled under the sheets, his whole body tingled unpleasantly, his blood boiled and his legs itched. To these symptoms were soon added a dull aching of the jaws and a feeling as if his temples were being squeezed in a vice.

  His anxiety and depression grew worse, and unfortunately the means of mastering this inexorable illness were lacking. He had tried to install a set of hydropathic appliances in his dressing-room, but without success: the impossibility of bringing water as high up the hill as his house, not to mention the difficulty of getting water in sufficient quantity in a village where the public fountains only produced a feeble trickle at fixed hours, thwarted this particular plan. Cheated of the jets of water which, shot at close range at the disks of his vertebral column, formed the only treatment capable of overcoming his insomnia and bringing back his peace of mind, he was reduced to brief aspersions in his bath or in his tub, mere cold affusions followed by an energetic rub-down that his valet gave him with a horsehair glove.

  But these substitute douches were far from checking the progress of his neurosis; at the very most they gave him a few hours’ relief, and dear-bought relief at that, considering that his nervous troubles soon returned to the attack with renewed vigour and violence.

  His boredom grew to infinite proportions. The pleasure he had felt in the possession of astonishing flowers was exhausted; their shapes and colours had already lost the power to excite him. Besides, in spite of all the care he lavished on them, most of his plants died; he had them removed from his rooms, but his irritability had reached such a pitch that he was exasperated by their absence and his eye continually offended by the empty spaces they had left.

  To amuse himself and while away the interminable hours, he turned to his portfolios of prints and began sorting out his Goyas. The first states of certain plates of the Caprices, proof engravings recognizable by their reddish tone, which he had bought long ago in the sale-room at ransom prices, put him in a good humour again; and he forgot everything else as he followed the strange fancies of the artist, delighting in his breathtaking pictures of bandits and succubi, devils and dwarfs, witches riding on cats and women trying to pull out the dead man’s teeth after a hanging.

  Next, he went through all the other series of Goya’s etchings and aquatints, his macabre Proverbs, his ferocious war-scenes, and finally his Garrotting, a plate of which he possessed a magnificent trial proof printed on thick, unsized paper, with the
wire-marks clearly visible.

  Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

  He felt the same about his Rembrandts, which he examined now and then on the quiet; and it is of course true that, just as the loveliest melody in the world becomes unbearably vulgar once the public start humming it and the barrel-organs playing it, so the work of art that appeals to charlatans, endears itself to fools, and is not content to arouse the enthusiasm of a few connoisseurs, is thereby polluted in the eyes of the initiate and becomes commonplace, almost repulsive.

  This sort of promiscuous admiration was in fact one of the most painful thorns in his flesh, for unaccountable vogues had utterly spoilt certain books and pictures for him that he had once held dear; confronted with the approbation of the mob, healways ended up by discovering some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and promptly rejected them, at the same time wondering whether his flair was not deserting him, his taste getting blunted.

  He shut his portfolios and once more fell into a mood of splenetic indecision. To change the trend of his thoughts, he began a course of emollient reading; tried to cool his brain with some of the solanaceae of literature;1 read those books that are so charmingly adapted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic or phosphatic works would only fatigue: the novels of Charles Dickens.

  But the Englishman’s works produced the opposite effect from what he had expected: his chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands, drove him to distraction. This exaggerated virtue made him react in the contrary direction; by virtue of the law of contrasts, he jumped from one extreme to the other, recalled scenes of full-blooded, earthy passion, and thought of common amorous practices such as the hybrid kiss, or the columbine kiss as ecclesiastical modesty calls it, where the tongue is brought into play.

  He put aside the book he was reading, put from him all thoughts of strait-laced Albion and let his mind dwell on the salacious seasoning, the prurient peccadilloes of which the Church disapproves. Suddenly he felt an emotional disturbance; his sexual insensibility of brain and body, which he had supposed to be complete and absolute, was shattered. Solitude was again affecting his tortured nerves, but this time it was not religion that obsessed him but the naughty sins religion condemns. The habitual subject of its threats and obsecrations was now the only thing that tempted him; the carnal side of his nature, which had lain dormant for months, had first been disturbed by his reading of pious works, then roused to wakefulness in an attack of nerves brought on by the English writer’s cant and was now all attention. With his stimulated senses carrying him back down the years, he had soon begun wallowing in the memory of his old dissipations.

  He got up, and with a certain sadness he opened a little silver-gilt box with a lid studded with aventurines.

  This box was full of purple bonbons. He took one out and idly fingered it, thinking about the strange properties of these sweets with their frosty coating of sugar. In former days, when his impotency had been established beyond doubt and he could think of woman without bitterness, regret or desire, he would place one of these bonbons on his tongue and let it melt; then, all of a sudden, and with infinite tenderness, he would be visited by dim, faded recollections of old debauches.

  These bonbons, invented by Siraudin2 and known by the ridiculous name of ‘Pearls of the Pyrenees’, consisted of a drop of schoenanthus scent or female essence crystallized in pieces of sugar; they stimulated the papillae of the mouth, evoking memories of water opalescent with rare vinegars and lingering kisses fragrant with perfume.

  Ordinarily he would smilingly drink in this amorous aroma, this shadow of former caresses which installed a little female nudity in a corner of his brain and revived for a second the savour of some woman, a savour he had once adored. But today the bonbons were no longer gentle in their effect and no longer confined themselves to evoking memories of distant, half-forgotten dissipations; on the contrary, they tore the veils down and thrust before his eyes the bodily reality in all its crudity and urgency.

  Heading the procession of mistresses that the taste of the bonbon helped to define in detail was a woman who paused in front of him, a woman with long white teeth, a sharp nose, mouse-coloured eyes and short-cropped yellow hair.

  This was Miss Urania, an American girl with a supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron.

  She had been one of the most famous acrobats at the Circus,3 where Des Esseintes had followed her performance night after night. The first few times, she had struck him as being just what she was, a strapping, handsome woman, but he had felt no desire to approach her; she had nothing to recommend her to the tastes of a jaded sophisticate, and yet he found himself returning to the Circus, drawn by some mysterious attraction, impelled by some indefinable urge.

  Little by little, as he watched her, curious fancies took shape in his mind. The more he admired her suppleness and strength, the more he thought he saw an artificial change of sex operating in her; her mincing movements and feminine affectations became ever less obtrusive, and in their place there developed the agile, vigorous charms of a male. In short, after being a woman to begin with, then hesitating in a condition verging on the androgynous, she seemed to have made up her mind and become an integral, unmistakable man.

  ‘In that case,’ Des Esseintes said to himself, ‘just as a great strapping fellow often falls for a slip of a girl, this hefty young woman should be instinctively attracted to a feeble, broken-down, short-winded creature like myself.’

  By dint of considering his own physique and arguing from analogy, he got to the point of imagining that he for his part was turning female; and at this point he was seized with a definite desire to possess the woman, yearning for her just as a chlorotic girl will hanker after a clumsy brute whose embrace could squeeze the life out of her.

  This exchange of sex between Miss Urania and himself had excited him tremendously. The two of them, so he said, were made for each other; and added to this sudden admiration for brute strength, a thing he had hitherto detested, there was also that extravagant delight in self-abasement which a common prostitute shows in paying dearly for the loutish caresses of a pimp.

  Meanwhile, before deciding to seduce the acrobat and see if his dreams could be made reality, he sought confirmation of these dreams in the facial expressions she unconsciously assumed, reading his own desires into the fixed, unchanging smile she wore on her lips as she swung on the trapeze.

  At last, one fine evening, he sent her a message by one of the circus attendants. Miss Urania deemed it necessary not to surrender without a little preliminary courting; however, she was careful not to appear over-shy, having heard that Des Esseintes was rich and that his name could help a woman in her career.

  But when at last his wishes were granted, he suffered immediate and immeasurable disappointment. He had imagined the American girl would be as blunt-witted and brutish as a fairground wrestler, but he found to his dismay that her stupidity was of a purely feminine order. It is true that she lacked education and refinement, possessed neither wit nor common sense, and behaved with bestial greed at table, but at the same time she still displayed all the childish foibles of a woman; she loved tittle-tattle and gewgaws as much as any petty-minded trollop, and it was clear that no transmutation of masculine ideas into her feminine person had occurred.

  What is more, she was positively puritanical in bed and treated Des Esseintes to none of those rough, athletic caresses he at once desired and dreaded; she was not subject, as he had for a moment hoped she might be, to sexual fluctuations. Perhaps, if he had probed deep into her unfee
ling nature, he might yet have discovered a penchant for some delicate, slightly built bedfellow with a temperament diametrically opposed to her own; but in that case it would have been a preference, not for a young girl, but for a merry little shrimp of a man, a spindle-shanked, funny-faced clown.

  There was nothing Des Esseintes could do but resume the man’s part he had momentarily forgotten; his feelings of femininity, of frailty, of dependence, of fear even, all disappeared. He could no longer shut his eyes to the truth, that Miss Urania was a mistress like any other, offering no justification for the cerebral curiosity she had aroused.

  Although, at first, her firm flesh and magnificent beauty had surprised Des Esseintes and held him spellbound, he was soon impatient to end their liaison and broke it off in a hurry, for his premature impotence was getting worse as a result of the woman’s icy caresses and prudish passivity.

  Nevertheless, of all the women in this unending procession of lascivious memories, she was the first to halt in front of him; but the fact was that if she had made a deeper impression on his memory than a host of others whose charms had been less fallacious and whose endearments had been less limited, that was because of the healthy, wholesome animal smell she exuded; her superabundant health was the very antipode of the anaemic, scented savour he could detect in the dainty Siraudin sweet.

  With her antithetical fragrance, Miss Urania was bound to take first place in his recollections, but almost immediately Des Esseintes, shaken for a moment by the impact of a natural, unsophisticated aroma, returned to more civilized scents and inevitably started thinking about his other mistresses. These now came crowding in on his memory, but with one woman standing out above the rest: the woman whose monstrous speciality had given him months of wonderful satisfaction.

  She was a skinny little thing, a dark-eyed brunette with greasy hair parted on one side near the temple like a boy’s, and plastered down so firmly that it looked as if it had been painted on to her head. He had come across her at a café where she entertained the customers with demonstrations of ventriloquism.