At the end of that time you pressed the juice out of the threads of meat, and you drank a spoonful of this muddy, salty liquid that was left at the bottom of the digester. Then you felt something slipping down like warm marrow-fat, with a soothing, velvety caress.
This meat extract put a stop to the pains and nausea caused by hunger, and even stimulated the stomach so that it no longer refused to take in a few spoonfuls of soup.
Thanks to the digester, Des Esseintes’s nervous trouble got no worse, and he told himself:
‘At any rate, that’s so much gained; now perhaps the temperature will drop and the heavens scatter a little ash over that abominably enervating sun. If that happens I’ll be able to hang on till the first fogs and frosts without too much difficulty.’
In his present state of apathy and bored inactivity, his library, which he had been unable to finish rearranging, got on his nerves. Tied as he was to his chair, he was confronted all the time with his profane books, stacked higgledy-piggledy on their shelves, leaning against each other, propping each other up or lying flat on their sides like a pack of cards. This disorder shocked him all the more in that it formed such a contrast to the perfect order of his religious works, carefully lined up on parade along the walls.
He tried to remedy this confusion, but after ten minutes’ work he was bathed in sweat. The effort was obviously too much for him; utterly exhausted, he lay down on a couch and rang for his servant.
Following his instructions, the old man set to work, bringing him the books one by one so that he could examine each and say where it was to go.
This job did not take long, for Des Esseintes’s library contained only a very limited number of contemporary lay works.
By dint of passing them through the critical apparatus of his mind, just as a metal worker passes strips of metal through a steel drawing-machine, from which they emerge thin and light, reduced to almost invisible threads, he had found in the end that none of his books could stand up to this sort of treatment, that none was sufficiently hardened to go through the next process, the reading-mill. Trying to eliminate the inferior works, he had in fact curtailed and practically sterilized his pleasure in reading, emphasizing more than ever the irremediable conflict between his ideas and those of the world into which chance had ordained that he should be born. Things had now got to the point where he found it impossible to discover a book that satisfied his secret longings; indeed, he even began to lose his admiration for the very works that had undoubtedly helped to sharpen his mind and make it so subtle and critical.
Yet his literary opinions had started from a very simple point of view. For him, there were no such things as schools;1 the only thing that mattered to him was the writer’s personality, and the only thing that interested him was the working of the writer’s brain, no matter what subject he was tackling. Unfortunately this criterion of appreciation, so obviously just, was practically impossible to apply, for the simple reason that, however much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality, and ends by relegating all the rest to limbo.
This process of selection had taken place slowly in his case. At one time he had worshipped the great Balzac, but as his constitution had become unbalanced and his nerves had gained the upper hand, so his tastes had been modified and his preferences changed.
Soon indeed, and this although he realized how unjust he was being to the prodigious author of the Comédie humaine, he had given up so much as opening his books, put off by their robust health; other aspirations stirred him now, that were in a way almost indefinable.
By diligent self-examination, however, he realized first of all that to attract him a book had to have that quality of strangeness that Edgar Allan Poe called for; but he was inclined to venture further along this road, and to insist on Byzantine flowers of thought and deliquescent complexities of style; he demanded a disquieting vagueness that would give him scope for dreaming until he decided to make it still vaguer or more definite, according to the way he felt at the time. He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive patiently and even vainly to analyse.
Lastly, since leaving Paris, he had withdrawn further and further from reality and above all from the society of his day, which he regarded with ever-growing horror; this hatred he felt had inevitably affected his literary and artistic tastes, so that he shunned as far as possible pictures and books whose subjects were confined to modern life.
The result was that, losing the faculty of admiring beauty in whatever guise it appeared, he now preferred, among Flaubert’s works, La Tentation de Saint Antoine to L’Education sentimentale; among Goncourt’s works, La Faustin to Germinie Lacerteux; among Zola’s works, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret to L’Assommoir.2
This seemed to him a logical point of view; these books, not as topical of course but just as stirring and human as the others, let him penetrate further and deeper into the personalities of their authors, who revealed with greater frankness their most mysterious impulses, while they lifted him, too, higher than the rest, out of the trivial existence of which he was so heartily sick.
And then, reading these works, he could enter into complete intellectual fellowship with the writers who had conceived them, because at the moment of conception those writers had been in a state of mind analogous to his own.
The fact is that when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age.
Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, he is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena. Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.
In some cases there is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit of dream and fantasy, a more or less vivid vision of a future whose image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs.
In Flaubert’s case, there was a series of vast, imposing scenes, grandiose pageantries of barbaric splendour in which there participated creatures delicate and sensitive, mysterious and proud, women cursed, in all the perfection of their beauty, with suffering souls, in the depths of which he discerned atrocious delusions, insane aspirations, born of the disgust they already felt for the dreadful mediocrity of the pleasures awaiting them.
The personality of the great writer was revealed in all its splendour in those incomparable pages of La Tentation de Saint Antoine and Salammbô in which, leaving our petty modern civilization far behind, he conjured up the Asiatic glories of distant epochs, their mystic ardours and doldrums, the aberrations resulting from their idleness, the brutalities arising from their boredom – that oppressive boredom which emanates from opulence and prayer even before their pleasures have been fully enjoyed.
With Goncourt3 it was a case of nostalgia for the eighteenth century, a longing to return to the elegant graces of a society that had vanished for ever. The gigantic backcloth of seas dashing against great backwaters, of deserts stretching away to infinity under blazing skies, found no place in his nostalgic masterpiece, which confin
ed itself, within the precincts of an aristocratic park, to a boudoir warm with the voluptuous effluvia of a woman with a weary smile, a pouting expression and pensive, brooding eyes. Nor was the spirit with which he animated his characters the same spirit Flaubert breathed into his creations, a spirit revolted in advance by the inexorable certainty that no new happiness was possible; it was rather a spirit revolted after the event, by bitter experience, at the thought of all the fruitless efforts it had made to invent new spiritual relationships and to introduce a little variety into the immemorial pleasure that is repeated down the ages in the satisfaction, more or less ingeniously obtained, of lusting couples.
Although she lived in the late nineteenth century and was physically and effectively a modern, by virtue of ancestral influences La Faustin was a creature of the eighteenth century, sharing to the full its spiritual perversity, its cerebral lassitude, its sensual satiety.
This book of Edmond de Goncourt’s was one of Des Esseintes’s favourites, for the dream-inducing suggestiveness he wanted abounded in this work, where beneath the printed line lurked another line visible only to the soul, indicated by an epithet that opened up vast vistas of passion, by a reticence that hinted at spiritual infinities no ordinary idiom could compass. The idiom used in this book was quite different from the language of Flaubert, inimitable in its magnificence; this style was penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle, careful to record the intangible impression that affects the senses and produces feeling, and skilled in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch that was itself extraordinarily complex. It was, in fact, the sort of style that is indispensable to decrepit civilizations which, in order to express their needs, and to whatever age they may belong, require new acceptations, new uses, new forms both of word and phrase.
In Rome, expiring paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language through Ausonius, through Claudian, above all through Rutilius, whose style, careful and scrupulous, sensuous and sonorous, presented an obvious analogy with the Goncourt brothers’ style, especially when describing light and shade and colour.
In Paris, a phenomenon unique in literary history had come about; the moribund society of the eighteenth century, though it had been well provided with painters, sculptors, musicians and architects, all familiar with its tastes and imbued with its beliefs, had failed to produce a genuine writer capable of rendering its dying graces or manifesting the essence of its feverish pleasures, that were soon to be so cruelly expiated. It had had to wait for Goncourt, whose personality was made up of memories and regrets made still more poignant by the distressing spectacle of the intellectual poverty and base aspirations of his time, to resuscitate, not only in his historical studies but also in a nostalgic work like La Faustin, the very soul of the period, and to embody its neurotic charms in this actress, so painfully eager to torment her heart and torture her brain in order to savour to the point of exhaustion the cruel revulsives of love and art.
In Zola the longing for some other existence took a different form. In him there was no desire to migrate to vanished civilizations, to worlds lost in the darkness of time; his sturdy, powerful temperament, enamoured of the luxuriance of life, of full-blooded vigour, of moral stamina, alienated him from the artificial graces and the painted pallors of the eighteenth century, as also from the hieratic pomp, the brutal ferocity and the effeminate, ambiguous dreams of the ancient East. On the day when he too had been afflicted with this longing, this craving which in fact is poetry itself, to fly far away from the contemporary society he was studying, he had fled to an idyllic region where the sap boiled in the sunshine; he had dreamt of fantastic heavenly copulations, of long earthly ecstasies, of fertilizing showers of pollen falling into the palpitating genitals of flowers; he had arrived at a gigantic pantheism, and with the Garden of Eden in which he placed his Adam and Eve he had created, perhaps unconsciously, a prodigious Hindu poem, singing the glories of the flesh, extolling, in a style whose broad patches of crude colour had something of the weird brilliance of Indian paintings, living animate matter, which by its own frenzied procreation revealed to man and woman the forbidden fruit of love, its suffocating spasms, its instinctive caresses, its natural postures.4
With Baudelaire, these three masters had captured and moulded Des Esseintes’s imagination more than any others; but through rereading them until he was saturated with their works and knew them completely by heart, he had eventually been obliged, to make it possible to absorb them again, to try and forget them, to leave them for a while undisturbed on his shelves.
Accordingly, he scarcely looked at them when his man handed them to him. He confined himself to pointing out where they should go, taking care to see that they were arranged in an orderly fashion and given plenty of elbow-room.
Next the man brought him another series of books which caused him rather more trouble. These were works of which he had gradually grown fonder, works which by their very defects provided a welcome change from the perfect productions of greater writers. Here again, the process of elimination had led Des Esseintes to search through pages of uninspiring matter for odd sentences which would give him a shock as they discharged their electricity in a medium that seemed at first to be non-conducting.
Imperfection itself pleased him, provided it was neither base nor parasitic, and it may be that there was a certain amount of truth in his theory that the minor writer of the decadence, the writer who is incomplete but nonetheless individual, distils a balm more irritant, more sudorific, more acid than the author of the same period who is truly great and truly perfect. In his opinion, it was in their confused efforts that you could find the most exalted flights of sensibility, the most morbid caprices of psychology, the most extravagant aberrations of language called upon in vain to control and repress the effervescent salts of ideas and feelings.
It was therefore inevitable that, after the masters, he should turn to certain minor writers whom he found all the more attractive and endearing by reason of the contempt in which they were held by a public incapable of understanding them.
One of these writers, Paul Verlaine,5 had made his début a good many years before with a volume of verse, Poèmes saturniens, a work which might almost be described as feeble, in which pastiches of Leconte de Lisle rubbed shoulders with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but which already revealed in certain pieces, such as the sonnet Mon Rêve familier, the real personality of the poet.
Looking for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered underlying the unsureness of these early efforts a talent already profoundly marked by Baudelaire, whose influence had since become more obvious, though the borrowings Verlaine had made from his generous master had never amounted to flagrant thefts.
Moreover, some of his later books, La Bonne Chanson, Fêtes galantes, Romances sans paroles and finally his last volume, Sagesse, contained poems in which a writer of originality was revealed, standing out against the mass of his fellow authors.
Furnished with rhymes provided by the tenses of verbs, and sometimes even by lengthy adverbs preceded by a monosyllable, from which they fell like a heavy cascade of water dropping from a stone ledge, his lines, divided by unlikely caesuras, were often singularly obscure, with their daring ellipses and curious solecisms that were yet not without a certain grace.
Handling metre better than anyone, he had tried to rejuvenate the stereotyped forms of poetry, the sonnet for example, which he turned upside down, like those Japanese fish in coloured earthenware that are stood gills down on their pedestals, or which he perverted by coupling only masculine rhymes, for which he seemed to have a special affection. Similarly and not infrequently he had adopted a weird form such as a stanza of three lines with the middle one left unrhymed, or a mono-rhyme tercet followed by a single line serving as a refrain and echoing itself, like the line ‘Dansons la gigue’ in the poem Streets. He had used other rhythms too whose faint beat could be only half-heard behind the stanzas, like the muffled sound of a bell.
But his original
ity lay above all in his ability to communicate deliciously vague confidences in a whisper in the twilight. He alone had possessed the secret of hinting at certain strange spiritual aspirations, of whispering certain thoughts, of murmuring certain confessions, so softly, so quietly, so haltingly that the ear that caught them was left hesitating, and passed on to the soul a languor made more pronounced by the vagueness of these words that were guessed at rather than heard. The essence of Verlaine’s poetry could be found in those wonderful lines from his Fêtes galantes:
Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d’automne:
Les belles se pendant rêveuses à nos bras,
Dirent alors des mots si spécieux, tout bas,
Que notre âme depuis ce temps tremble et s’étonne.6
This was not the vast horizon revealed through the portals of Baudelaire’s unforgettable poetry, but rather a glimpse of a moonlit scene, a more limited, intimate view peculiar to the author who, incidentally, had formulated his poetic method in a few lines of which Des Esseintes was particularly fond:
Car nous voulons la nuance encore,
Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance
…
Et tout le reste est littérature.7
Des Esseintes had gladly followed him through all his varied works. After the publication of his Romances sans paroles, distributed by the printing-office of a newspaper at Sens, Verlaine had written nothing for quite a time; then, in charming verses that echoed the gentle, naive accents of Villon, he had reappeared, singing the Virgin’s praises, ‘far from our days of carnal spirit and weary flesh’. Often Des Esseintes would reread this book, Sagesse, allowing the poems it contained to inspire in him secret reveries, impossible dreams of an occult passion for a Byzantine Madonna able to change at a given moment into a Cydalisa who had strayed by accident into the nineteenth century; she was so mysterious and so alluring that it was impossible to tell whether she was longing to indulge in depravities so monstrous that, once accomplished they would become irresistible, or whether she herself was soaring heavenwards in an immaculate dream, in which the adoration of the soul would float about her in a love for ever unconfessed, for ever pure.
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