Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  To this strange mixture was added a love of sugary piety revealed in translations of the Visions of Angela da Foligno, a book of unparalleled stupidity and fluidity, and selections from Jan van Ruysbroeck, a thirteenth-century mystic whose prose presented an incomprehensible but attractive amalgam of gloomy ecstasies, tender raptures and violent rages.

  All the affectation there was in Hello the bumptious pontiff had come out in a preface he wrote for this book. As he said himself, ‘extraordinary things can only be stammered out’ – and stammer he did, declaring that ‘the sacred obscurity in which Ruysbroeck spreads his eagle’s wings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for him the four horizons would be too close-fitting a garment’.

  Be that as it may, Des Esseintes felt drawn to this unbalanced but subtle mind; the fusion of the skilled psychologist with the pious pedant had proved impossible, and these jolts, these incoherences even, constituted the personality of the man.

  The recruits who joined his standard made up the little group of writers who operated on the colour-line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to the main body of the army; strictly speaking, they were rather the scouts of a religion that distrusted men of talent like Veuillot and Hello, for the simple reason that they were neither servile enough nor insipid enough. What it really wanted was soldiers who never reasoned why, regiments of those purblind mediocrities Hello used to attack with all the ferocity of one who had suffered their tyranny. Accordingly Catholicism had made haste to close the columns of its papers to one of its partisans, Léon Bloy,9 a savage pamphleteer who wrote in a style at once precious and furious, tender and terrifying, and to expel from its bookshops, as one plague-stricken and unclean, another author who had bawled himself hoarse singing its praises: Barbey d’Aurevilly.10

  Admittedly this latter writer was far too compromising, far too independent a son of the Church. In the long run, the others would always eat humble pie and fall back into line, but he was the enfant terrible the party refused to own, who went whoring through literature and brought his women half-naked into the sanctuary. It was only because of the boundless contempt Catholicism has for all creative talent that an excommunication in due and proper form had not outlawed this strange servant who, under the pretext of doing honour to his masters, broke the chapel windows, juggled with the sacred vessels and performed step-dances round the tabernacle.

  Two of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s works Des Esseintes found particularly enthralling: Un Prêtre marié and Les Diaboliques. Others, such as L’Ensorcelée, Le Chevalier des Touches and Une Vieille Maîtresse, were doubtless better balanced and more complete works, but they did not appeal so strongly to Des Esseintes who was really interested only in sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever.

  In these comparatively healthy volumes Barbey d’Aurevilly was constantly tacking to and fro between those two channels of Catholic belief which eventually run into one: mysticism and sadism. But in the two books which Des Esseintes was now glancing through, Barbey had thrown caution to the winds, had given rein to his steed, and had ridden full tilt down one road after another, as far as he could go.

  All the horrific mystery of the Middle Ages brooded over that improbable book Un Prêtre marié; magic was mixed up with religion, sorcery with prayer; while the God of original sin, more pitiless, more cruel than the Devil, submitted his innocent victim Calixte to uninterrupted torments, branding her with a red cross on the forehead, just as in olden times he had one of his angels mark the houses of the unbelievers he meant to kill.

  These scenes, like the fantasies of a fasting monk affected with delirium, were unfolded in the disjointed language of a fever patient. But unfortunately, among all the characters galvanized into an unbalanced life like so many Hoffmann Coppelias, there were some, the Néel de Néhou for instance, who seemed to have been imagined in one of those periods of prostration that always follow crises; and they were out of keeping in this atmosphere of melancholy madness, into which they introduced the same note of unintentional humour as is sounded by the little zinc lordling in hunting-boots who stands blowing his horn on the pedestal of so many mantelpiece clocks.

  After these mystical divagations, Barbey had enjoyed a period of comparative calm, but then a frightening relapse had occurred.

  The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ – all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been the more obstinate in its pursuit.

  In Un Prêtre marié, it was Christ whose temptations had been successful and whose praises were sung by Barbey d’Aurevilly; but in Les Diaboliques, the author had surrendered to the Devil, and it was Satan he extolled. At this point there appeared on the scene that bastard child of Catholicism which for centuries the Church has pursued with its exorcisms and its autos-da-fé – sadism.

  This strange and ill-defined condition cannot in fact arise in the mind of an unbeliever. It does not consist simply in riotous indulgence of the flesh, stimulated by bloody acts of cruelty, for in that case it would be nothing more than a deviation of the genetic instincts, a case of satyriasis developed to its fullest extent; it consists first and foremost in a sacrilegious manifestation, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in a wholly idealistic, wholly Christian aberration. There is also something in it of joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the wicked delight of disobedient children playing with forbidden things for no other reason than that their parents have expressly forbidden them to go near them.

  The truth of the matter is that if it did not involve sacrilege, sadism would have no raison d’être; on the other hand, since sacrilege depends on the existence of a religion, it cannot be deliberately and effectively committed except by a believer, for a man would derive no satisfaction whatever from profaning a faith that was unimportant or unknown to him.

  The strength of sadism then, the attraction it offers, lies entirely in the forbidden pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and the prayers that should go to God; it lies in the flouting of the precepts of Catholicism, which the sadist actually observes in topsy-turvy fashion when, in order to offend Christ the more grievously, he commits the sins Christ most expressly proscribed – profanation of holy things and carnal debauch.

  In point of fact, this vice to which the Marquis de Sade had given his name was as old as the Church itself; the eighteenth century, when it was particularly rife, had simply revived, by an ordinary atavistic process, the impious practices of the witches’ sabbath of medieval times – to go no further back in history.

  Des Esseintes had done no more than dip into the Malleus Maleficorum, that terrible code of procedure of Jacob Sprenger’s which permitted the Church to send thousands of necromancers and sorcerers to the stake; but that was enough to enable him to recognize in the witches’ sabbath all the obscenities and blasphemies of sadism. Besides the filthy orgies dear to the Evil One – nights devoted alternately to lawful and unnatural copulation, nights befouled by the bestialities of bloody debauch – he found the same parodies of religious processions, the same ritual threats and insults hurled at God, the same devotion to his Rival – as when the Black Mass was celebrated over a woman on all fours whose naked rump, repeatedly soiled, served as the altar, with the priest cursing the bread and wine, and the congregation derisively taking communion in the shape of a black host stamped with a picture of a he-goat.

  This same outpouring of foul-mouthed jests and degrading insults was to be seen in the works of the Marquis de Sade, who spiced his frightful sensualities with sacrilegious profanities. He would rail at Heaven, invoke Lucifer, call God an abject scoundrel
, a crazy idiot, spit on the sacrament of communion, do his best in fact to besmirch with vile obscenities a Divinity he hoped would damn him, at the same time declaring, as a further act of defiance, that that Divinity did not exist.

  This psychic condition Barbey d’Aurevilly came close to sharing. If he did not go as far as Sade in shouting atrocious curses at the Saviour; if, out of greater caution or greater fear, he always professed to honour the Church, he nonetheless addressed his prayers to the Devil in true medieval fashion, and in his desire to defy the Deity, likewise slipped into demonic erotomania, coining new sensual monstrosities, or even borrowing from La Philosophie dans le boudoir a certain episode which he seasoned with fresh condiments to make the story Le Dîner d’un athée.

  The extraordinary book that contained this tale was Des Esseintes’s delight; he had therefore had printed for him in bishop’s-purple ink, within a border of cardinal red, on a genuine parchment blessed by the Auditors of the Rota, a copy of Les Diaboliques set up in those lettres de civilité whose peculiar hooks and flourishes, curling up or down, assume a satanic appearance.

  Not counting certain poems of Baudelaire’s which, in imitation of the prayers chanted on the nights of the witches’ sabbath, took the form of infernal litanies, this book, among all the works of contemporary apostolic literature, was the only one to reveal that state of mind, at once devout and impious, towards which nostalgic memories of Catholicism, stimulated by fits of neurosis, had often impelled Des Esseintes.

  With Barbey d’Aurevilly, the series of religious writers came to an end. To tell the truth, this pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secular literature than to that other literature in which he claimed a place that was denied him. His wild romantic style, for instance, full of twisted expressions, outlandish turns of phrase and far-fetched similes, whipped up his sentences as they galloped across the page, farting and jangling their bells. In short, Barbey looked like a stallion among the geldings that filled the ultramontane stables.

  Such were Des Esseintes’s reflections as he dipped into the book, rereading a passage here and there; and then, comparing the author’s vigorous and varied style with the lymphatic, stereotyped style of his fellow writers, he was led to consider that evolution of language so accurately described by Darwin.

  Closely associated with the secular writers of his time, brought up in the Romantic school, familiar with the latest books and accustomed to reading modern publications, Barbey inevitably found himself in possession of an idiom which had undergone many profound modifications, and which had been largely renovated since the seventeenth century.

  The very opposite had been the case with the ecclesiastical writers; confined to their own territory, imprisoned within an identical, traditional range of reading, knowing nothing of the literary evolution of more recent times and absolutely determined, if need be, to pluck their eyes out rather than recognize it, they necessarily employed an unaltered and unalterable language, like that eighteenth-century language which the descendants of the French settlers in Canada normally speak and write to this day, no variation in vocabulary or phraseology having ever been possible in their idiom, cut off as it is from the old country and surrounded on all sides by the English tongue.

  Des Esseintes’s musings had reached this point when the silvery sound of a bell tinkling a little angelus told him that breakfast was ready. He left his books where they were, wiped his forehead and made for the dining-room, telling himself that of all the volumes he had been rearranging, the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly were still the only ones whose thought and style offered those gamey flavours and unhealthy spots, that bruised skin and sleepy taste which he so loved to savour in the decadent writers, both Latin and monastic, of olden times.

  CHAPTER 13

  The weather had begun behaving in the most peculiar fashion. That year the seasons all overlapped, so that after a period of squalls and mists, blazing skies, like sheets of white-hot metal, suddenly appeared from over the horizon. In a couple of days, without any transition whatever, the cold, dank fogs and pouring rain were followed by a wave of torrid heat, an appallingly sultry atmosphere. As if it were being energetically poked with gigantic fire-irons, the sun glowed like an open furnace, sending out an almost white light that burnt the eyes; fiery particles of dust rose from the scorched roads, grilling the parched trees, browning the dry grass. The glare reflected by whitewashed walls and the flames kindled in window-panes and zinc roofs were absolutely blinding; the temperature of a foundry in full blast weighed down on Des Esseintes’s house.

  Wearing next to nothing, he threw open a window, to be hit full in the face by a fiery blast from outside; the dining-room, where he next sought refuge, was like an oven, and the rarefied air seemed to have reached boiling-point. He sat down feeling utter despair, for the excitement that had kept his mind busy with daydreams while he was sorting out his books had died away. Like every other victim of neurosis, he found heat overpowering; his anaemia, held in check by the cold weather, got the better of him again, taking the strength out of a body already debilitated by copious perspiration.

  With his shirt clinging to his moist back, his perineum sodden, his arms and legs wet and his forehead streaming with sweat that ran down his cheeks like salty tears, Des Esseintes lay back exhausted in his chair. Just then he became aware of the meat on the table before him and the sight of it sickened him; he ordered it to be taken away and boiled eggs brought instead. When these arrived, he tried to swallow some sippets dipped in the yolk, but they stuck in his throat. Waves of nausea rose to his lips, and when he drank a few drops of wine they pricked his stomach like arrows of fire. He mopped his face, where the sweat, which had been warm a few minutes before, was now running down his temples in cold trickles; and he tried sucking bits of ice to stave off the feeling of nausea – but all in vain.

  Overcome with infinite fatigue, he slumped helplessly against the table. After a while he got to his feet, gasping for breath, but the sippets had swollen and were slowly rising in his throat, choking him. Never had he felt so upset, so weak, so ill at ease; on top of it all, his eyes were affected and he started seeing double, with things spinning round in pairs; soon he lost his sense of distance, so that his glass seemed miles away. He told himself he was the victim of optical illusions, but even so he was unable to shake them off. Finally he went and lay down on the sofa in the sitting-room; but it promptly began pitching and rolling like a ship at sea, and his nausea grew worse. He got up again, this time deciding to take a digestive to help down the eggs, which were still troubling him.

  Returning to the dining-room, he wryly likened himself, there in his ship’s cabin, to a traveller suffering from seasickness. He staggered over to the cupboard and looked at the mouth organ, but refrained from opening it; instead, he reached up to the shelf above for a bottle of Benedictine – a bottle he kept in the house on account of its shape, which he considered suggestive of ideas at once pleasantly wanton and vaguely mystical.

  But for the moment he remained unmoved, and just stared dully at the squat, dark-green bottle, which normally conjured up visions of medieval priories for him, with its antique monkish paunch, its head and neck wrapped in a parchment cowl, its red seal quartered with three silver mitres on a field azure and fastened to the neck with lead like a Papal bull, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paper apparently yellowed and faded with age: Liquor Monachorum Benedictinorum Abbatiae Fiscanensis.

  Under this truly monastic habit, certified by a cross and the ecclesiastical initials D. O. M., and enclosed in parchment and ligatures like an authentic charter, there slumbered a saffron-coloured liqueur of exquisite delicacy. It gave off a subtle aroma of angelica and hyssop mixed with seaweed whose iodine and bromine content was masked with sugar; it stimulated the palate with a spirituous fire hidden under an altogether virginal sweetness; and it flattered the nostrils with a hint of corruption wrapped up in a caress that was at once childlike and devout.

  Thi
s hypocrisy resulting from the extraordinary discrepancy between container and contents, between the liturgical form of the bottle and the utterly feminine, utterly modern soul inside it, had set him dreaming before now. Sitting with the bottle in front of him, he had spent hours thinking about the monks who sold it, the Benedictines of the Abbey of Fécamp who, belonging as they did to the congregation of Saint-Maur, famous for its historical researches, were subject to the Rule of St Benedict, yet did not follow the observances of either the white monks of Cîteaux or the black monks of Cluny. They forced themselves upon his imagination, looking just as if they had come straight out of the Middle Ages, growing medicinal herbs, heating retorts, distilling in alembics sovereign cordials, infallible panaceas.

  He took a sip of the liqueur and felt a little better for a minute or two; but soon the fire a drop of wine had kindled in his innards blazed up again. He threw down his napkin and went back into his study, where he began pacing up and down; he felt as if he were under the receiver of an air-pump in which a vacuum was being gradually created, and a dangerously pleasant lethargy spread from his brain into every limb. Unable to stand any more of this, he pulled himself together and, for perhaps the first time since his coming to Fontenay, sought refuge in the garden, where he took shelter in the patch of shadow cast by a tree. Sitting on the grass, he gazed vacantly at the rows of vegetables the servants had planted. But it was only after an hour’s gazing that he realized what they were, for a greenish mist floated before his eyes, preventing him from seeing anything more than blurred, watery images which kept changing colour and appearance.