Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  One morning, however, these noises died away; he felt in fuller possession of his faculties and asked his man to hand him a mirror. After a single glance it slipped from his hands. He scarcely knew himself; his face was an earthen colour, the lips dry and swollen, the tongue all furrowed, the skin wrinkled; his untidy hair and beard, which his servant had not trimmed since the beginning of his illness, added to the horrific impression created by the hollow cheeks and the big, watery eyes burning with a feverish brightness in this hairy death’s-head.

  This change in his facial appearance alarmed him more than his weakness, more than the uncontrollable fits of vomiting that thwarted his every attempt at taking food, more than the depression into which he was gradually sinking. He thought he was done for; but then, in spite of his overwhelming despondency, the energy of a man in desperate straits brought him to a sitting position in bed and gave him the strength to write a letter to his Paris doctor and order his servant to go to him immediately and bring him back with him, whatever the cost, the same day.

  His mood promptly changed from the darkest despair to the brightest hope. This doctor he had sent for was a famous specialist, a physician renowned for his successes in treating nervous disorders, and Des Esseintes told himself:

  ‘He must have cured plenty of cases that were more difficult and dangerous than mine. No, there’s no doubt about it – I shall be on my feet again in a few days’ time.’

  But soon this spirit of confidence was followed by a feeling of blank pessimism. He was convinced that no matter how learned or perspicacious they might be, doctors really knew nothing about nervous diseases, not even their causes. Like all the rest, this man would prescribe the inevitable zinc oxide and quinine, potassium bromide and valerian.

  ‘Who knows?’ he went on, clinging to a last, slender hope. ‘If these remedies have done me no good so far, it’s probably because I haven’t taken the proper doses.’

  In spite of everything, the prospect of obtaining some relief put new heart into him, but then fresh anxieties assailed him: perhaps the doctor was not in Paris, perhaps he would refuse to come and see him, perhaps his servant had not even succeeded in finding him. He began to lose heart again, jumping, from one minute to the next, from the most unreasonable hopefulness to the most illogical apprehension, exaggerating both his chances of sudden recovery and his fears of immediate danger. The hours slipped by and eventually, exhausted and in despair, convinced that the doctor would never come, he angrily told himself over and over again that if only he had been seen to in time he would undoubtedly have been saved. Then his anger at his servant’s inefficiency and his doctor’s callousness in apparently letting him die abated, and he finally took to blaming himself for having waited so long before sending for help, persuading himself that by now he would have been completely fit if, even the day before, he had insisted on having potent medicines and skilled attention.

  Little by little these alternating hopes and fears jostling around in his otherwise empty mind subsided, though not before the succession of swift changes had worn him out. He fell into a sleep of exhaustion broken by incoherent dreams, a sort of swoon interrupted by periods of barely conscious wakefulness. He had finally forgotten what he wanted and what he feared so completely that he was simply bewildered, and felt neither surprise nor pleasure, when the doctor suddenly came into the room.

  The man-servant had doubtless told him what kind of life Des Esseintes had been leading, and described the various symptoms he himself had been in a position to observe since the day he had found his master lying by the window, overcome by the potency of his perfumes, for he put hardly any questions to his patient, whose medical history over the past few years was in any case well known to him. But he examined him, sounded him and carefully scrutinized his urine, in which certain white streaks told him what one of the chief determining causes of his nervous trouble was. He wrote out a prescription, and after saying he would come again soon, took his leave without another word.

  His visit revived Des Esseintes’s spirits, but he was somewhat alarmed at the doctor’s silence and told his servant not to keep the truth from him any longer. The man assured him that the doctor had shown no signs of anxiety, and, suspicious as he was, Des Esseintes could detect no trace of prevarication in the old man’s expressionless face.

  His thoughts now became more cheerful; besides, his pains had gone and the weakness he felt in every limb had taken on a certain sweet languorous quality, at once vague and insinuating. What is more, he was both astounded and delighted at not being encumbered with drugs and medicine bottles, and a faint smile hovered over his lips when his servant eventually brought him a nourishing peptone enema and informed him that he was to repeat this injection three times every twenty-four hours.

  The operation was successfully carried out, and Des Esseintes could not help secretly congratulating himself on this experience which was, so to speak, the crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfilment. No one, he thought, would ever go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the norm.

  ‘How delightful it would be,’ he said to himself, ‘to go on with this simple diet after getting well again. What a saving of time, what a radical deliverance from the repugnance meat inspires in people without any appetite. What an absolute release from the boredom that invariably results from the necessarily limited choice of dishes! What a vigorous protest against the vile sin of gluttony! And last but not least, what a slap in the face for old Mother Nature, whose monotonous demands would be permanently silenced!’

  And talking to himself under his breath, he went on: ‘It would be easy enough to get up an appetite by swallowing a strong aperient. Then, when you felt you might reasonably say: ‘‘Isn’t it time for dinner? – I’m as hungry as a hunter,’’ all you’d have to do to lay the table would be to deposit the noble instrument on the cloth. And before you had time to say grace you’d have finished the meal – without any of the vulgar, bothersome business of eating.’

  A few days later, the servant brought him an enema altogether different in colour and smell from the peptone preparations.

  ‘But it’s not the same!’ exclaimed Des Esseintes, anxiously inspecting the liquid that had been poured into the apparatus. He asked for the menu as he might have done in a restaurant, and unfolding the doctor’s prescription, he read out:

  Cod-liver oil

  29 grammes

  Beef-tea

  200 grammes

  Burgundy

  200 grammes

  Yolk of one egg

  This set him thinking. On account of the ruinous condition of his stomach, he had never been able to take a serious interest in the art of cooking, but now he found himself working out recipes of a perverse epicurism. Then an intriguing idea crossed his mind. Perhaps the doctor had supposed that his patient’s unusual palate was already tired of the taste of peptone; perhaps, like a skilled chef, he had decided to vary the flavour of his concoctions, to prevent the monotony of the dishes leading to a complete loss of appetite. Once started on this line of thought, Des Esseintes began composing novel recipes and even planning meatless dinners for Fridays, increasing the doses of cod-liver oil and wine and crossing out the beef-tea because being meat it was expressly forbidden by the Church. But soon he had no need to deliberate any longer over these nourishing liquids, for the doctor gradually managed to stop his vomiting and to make him swallow through the ordinary channels a punch syrup containing powdered meat and giving off a vague aroma of cocoa that lingered pleasantly in his real mouth.

  Weeks went by and at last the stomach decided to function properly; from time to time fits of nausea would still recur, but these were effectively overcome with potions of ginger-beer and Rivière’s antemetic.

  Eventually, little by little, the organs recovered, and with the help of pepsins ordinar
y food was digested. Des Esseintes’s strength returned and he was able to get up and hobble around his bedroom, leaning on a stick and holding on to the furniture. But instead of being pleased with his progress, he forgot all his past sufferings, fretted over the time his convalescence was taking and accused the doctor of spinning it out. It was true that a few unsuccessful experiments had slowed things down; iron proved no more acceptable than quinquina, even when it was mixed with laudanum, and these drugs had to be replaced by arseniates – this after a fortnight had been wasted in useless efforts, as Des Esseintes angrily pointed out.

  At last the time came when he could stay up all afternoon and walk about the house unaided. Now his study began to get on his nerves; faults he had overlooked by force of habit struck him at once on coming back to the room after a long absence. The colours he had chosen to be seen by lamplight seemed at variance with one another in daylight; wondering how best to change them, he spent hours planning heterogeneous harmonies of hues, hybrid combinations of cloths and leathers.

  ‘I’m on the road to recovery, and no mistake,’ he told himself, noting the return of his former preoccupations, his old predilections.

  One morning, as he was looking at his blue and orange walls, dreaming of ideal hangings made of stoles designed for the Greek Church, of gold-fringed Russian dalmatics, of brocaded copes inscribed with Slavonic lettering in pearls or in precious stones from the Urals, the doctor came in and, following the direction of his patient’s gaze, asked him what he was thinking.

  Des Esseintes told him of his unrealizable ideals and was beginning to outline new experiments in colour, to talk about new combinations and contrasts that he meant to organize, when the doctor threw cold water on his enthusiasm by declaring in peremptory fashion that wherever he put his ideas into effect it would certainly not be in that house.

  Then, without giving him time to breathe, he stated that he had attended to the most urgent problem first by putting right the digestive functions, and that now he must tackle the general nervous trouble, which had not cleared up at all and to do so would require years of strict dieting and careful nursing. He concluded by saying that before trying any particular remedy, before embarking on any sort of hydropathic treatment – which in any case was impracticable at Fontenay – he would have to abandon this solitary existence, to go back to Paris, to lead a normal life again, above all to try and enjoy the same pleasures as other people.

  ‘But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy!’ retorted Des Esseintes indignantly.

  Ignoring this objection, the doctor simply assured him that this radical change of life he prescribed was in his opinion a matter of life and death – that it meant the difference between a good recovery on the one hand and insanity speedily followed by tuberculosis on the other.

  ‘So I have to choose between death and deportation!’ cried Des Esseintes in exasperation.

  The doctor, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world, smiled and made for the door without answering.

  CHAPTER 16

  Des Esseintes shut himself up in his bedroom and stopped his ears against the sound of hammering outside, where the removal men were nailing up the packing-cases his servants had got ready; every blow seemed to strike at his heart and send a stab of pain deep into his flesh. The sentence pronounced by the doctor was being executed; the dread of enduring all over again the sufferings he had recently undergone, together with the fear of an agonizing death, had had a more powerful effect on him than his hatred of the detestable existence to which medical jurisdiction condemned him.

  ‘And yet,’ he kept telling himself, ‘there are people who live on their own with no one to talk to, who spend their lives in quiet contemplation apart from human society, people like Trappists and prisoners in solitary confinement, and there’s nothing to show that those wise men and those poor wretches go either mad or consumptive.’

  These examples he had quoted to the doctor, but in vain; the latter had simply repeated, in a curt manner that excluded any further argument, that his verdict, which incidentally was in line with the opinions of every specialist in nervous disorders, was that only relaxation, amusement and enjoyment could have any effect on this complaint, which on the mental side remained entirely unaffected by chemical remedies. Finally, infuriated by his patient’s recriminations, he had stated once for all that he refused to go on treating him unless he agreed to a change of air and a move to more hygienic conditions.

  Des Esseintes had promptly gone to Paris to consult other specialists, to whom he had submitted his case with scrupulous impartiality; they had all unhesitatingly approved their colleague’s advice. Thereupon he had taken a flat that was still vacant in a new apartment-house, had come back to Fontenay and, white with rage, had ordered his servants to start packing.

  Buried deep in his armchair, he was now brooding over this unambiguous prescription which upset all his plans, broke all the ties binding him to his present life and buried all his future projects in oblivion. So his beatific happiness was over! So he must leave the shelter of this haven of his and put out to sea again in the teeth of that gale of human folly that had battered and buffeted him of old!

  The doctors spoke of amusement and relaxation, but with whom, with what, did they expect him to have fun and enjoy himself?

  Had he not outlawed himself from society? Had he heard of anybody else who was trying to organize a life like this, a life of dreamy contemplation? Did he know a single individual who was capable of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea, or whose soul was sensitive enough to understand Mallarmé and love Verlaine?

  Where and when should he look, into what social waters should he heave the lead, to discover a twin soul, a mind free of commonplace ideas, welcoming silence as a boon, ingratitude as a relief, suspicion as a haven and a harbour?

  In the society he had frequented before his departure for Fontenay? – But most of the squireens he had known in those days must since have reached new depths of boredom in the drawing-room, of stupidity at the gaming table and of depravity in the brothel. Most of them, too, must have got married; after treating themselves all their lives to the leavings of street-arabs, they now treated their wives to the leavings of street-walkers, for like a master of the first-fruits, the working class was the only one that did not feed on left-overs!

  ‘What a pretty change of partners, what a glorious game of general post this prudish society of ours is enjoying!’ muttered Des Esseintes.

  But then, the decayed nobility was done for; the aristocracy had sunk into imbecility or depravity. It was dying from the degeneracy of its scions, whose faculties had deteriorated with each succeeding generation till they now consisted of the instincts of gorillas at work in the skulls of grooms and jockeys; or else, like the Choiseul-Praslins, the Polignacs and the Chevreuses, it was wallowing in the mud of law-suits that brought it down to the same level of ignominy as the other classes.1

  The very mansions, age-old escutcheons, heraldic pomp and stately ceremonial of this ancient caste had disappeared. As its estates had stopped yielding revenue, they and the great country houses had been put up for auction, for there was never enough money to pay for all the dark venereal pleasures of the besotted descendants of the old families.

  The least scrupulous and the least obtuse among them threw all shame to the winds; they joined in shady deals, splashed about in the financial gutter and finished up like common criminals in the Assize Court, serving at least to add a little lustre to human justice, which, finding it impossible to maintain absolute impartiality, solved the problem by making them prison librarians.

  This passion for profits, this love of lucre, had also taken hold of another class, a class that had always leant upon the nobility – the clergy. At present, on the back page of every newspaper, you could see a corn-cure advertisement inserted by a priest. The monasteries had been turned into factories or distilleries, with e
very order manufacturing its specialities or selling the recipes. Thus the Cistercians derived their income from chocolate, Trappistine, semolina and tincture of arnica; the Marists from biphosphate of chalk for medicinal purposes and arquebus water; the Dominicans from antapoplectic elixir; the disciples of St Benedict from Benedictine; the monks of St Bruno from Chartreuse.

  Commercialism had invaded the cloisters, where, in lieu of antiphonaries, fat account-books lay on the lecterns. Like a foul leprosy, the present-day greed for gain was playing havoc with the Church, making the monks pore over inventories and invoices, turning the Superiors into confectioners and medicasters, the lay-brothers into common packers and base bottle-washers.

  And yet, in spite of everything, it was still only among the ecclesiastics that Des Esseintes could hope to enjoy relations in some degree of accordance with his tastes. In the company of canons, who were generally men of learning and good breeding, he might have spent some affable and agreeable evenings; but then he would have had to share their beliefs and not oscillate between sceptical ideas and sudden fits of faith which recurred from time to time under the impulse of his childhood memories.

  He would have had to hold identical views and refuse to acknowledge, as he readily did in his moments of enthusiasm, a Catholicism that was seasoned with a touch of magic, as in the reign of Henri III, and a touch of sadism, as in the closing years of the eighteenth century. This special brand of clericalism, this subtly depraved and perverse type of mysticism, to which he occasionally felt drawn, could not so much as be discussed with a priest, who would either have failed to understand him or would have instantly ordered him out of his sight in sheer horror.