Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  The hearty, blustering type on the other hand, the handsome, full-blooded sort, the strapping he-men who scorn the formalities of life and rush straight for their goal, losing their heads completely, these generally delight in the vivid glare of the reds and yellows, in the percussion effect of the vermilions and chromes, which blind their eyes and intoxicate their senses.

  As for those gaunt, febrile creatures of feeble constitution and nervous disposition whose sensual appetite craves dishes that are smoked and seasoned, their eyes almost always prefer that most morbid and irritating of colours, with its acid glow and unnatural splendour – orange.

  There could therefore be no doubt whatever as to Des Esseintes’s final choice; but indubitable difficulties still remained to be solved. If red and yellow become more pronounced in artificial light, the same is not true of their compound, orange, which often flares up into a fiery nasturtium red.

  He carefully studied all its different shades by candlelight and finally discovered one which he considered likely to keep its balance and answer his requirements.

  Once these preliminaries were over, he made every effort to avoid, in his study at any rate, the use of Oriental rugs and fabrics, which had become so commonplace and vulgar now that upstart tradesmen could buy them in the bargain basement of any department-store.

  The walls he eventually decided to bind like books in large-grained crushed morocco: skins from the Cape glazed by means of strong steel plates under a powerful press.

  When the lining of the walls had been completed, he had the mouldings and the tall plinths lacquered a deep indigo, similar to the colour coachbuilders use for the panels of carriage bodies. The ceiling, which was slightly coved, was also covered in morocco; and set in the middle of the orange leather, like a huge circular window open to the sky, there was a piece of royal-blue silk from an ancient cope on which silver seraphim had been depicted in angelic flight by the weavers’ guild of Cologne.

  After everything had been arranged according to plan, these various colours came to a quiet understanding with each other at nightfall: the blue of the woodwork was stabilized and, so to speak, warmed up by the surrounding orange tints, which for their part glowed with undiminished brilliance, maintained and in a way intensified by the close proximity of the blue.

  As to furniture, Des Esseintes did not have to undertake any laborious treasure-hunts, in so far as the only luxuries he intended to have in this room were rare books and flowers. Leaving himself free to adorn any bare walls later on with a few drawings and paintings, he confined himself for the present to fitting up ebony bookshelves and bookcases round the greater part of the room, strewing tiger skins and blue fox furs about the floor, and installing beside a massive money-changer’s table of the fifteenth century, several deep-seated wing-armchairs and an old church lectern of wrought iron, one of those antique singing-desks on which deacons of old used to place the antiphonary and which now supported one of the weighty folios of Du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinatis.5

  The windows, with panes of bluish crackle-glass or gilded bottle-punts which shut out the view and admitted only a very dim light, were dressed with curtains cut out of old ecclesiastical stoles, whose faded gold threads were almost invisible against the dull red material.

  As a finishing touch, in the centre of the chimney-piece, which was likewise dressed in sumptuous silk from a Florentine dalmatic, and flanked by two Byzantine monstrances of gilded copper which had originally come from the Abbaye-au-Bois at Bièvre, there stood a magnificent triptych whose separate panels had been fashioned to resemble lace-work. This now contained, framed under glass, copied on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and marvellously illuminated, three pieces by Baudelaire: on the right and left, the sonnets La Mort des amants and L’Ennemi, and in the middle, the prose poem bearing the English title Anywhere out of the World.6

  CHAPTER 2

  After the sale of his goods, Des Esseintes kept on the two old servants who had looked after his mother and who between them had acted as steward and concierge at the Château de Lourps while it waited, empty and untenanted, for a buyer.

  He took with him to Fontenay this faithful pair who had been accustomed to a methodical sickroom routine, trained to administer spoonfuls of physic and medicinal brews at regular intervals and inured to the absolute silence of cloistered monks, barred from all communication with the outside world and confined to rooms where the doors and windows were always shut.

  The husband’s duty was to clean the rooms and go marketing; the wife’s to do all the cooking. Des Esseintes gave up the first floor of the house to them; but he made them wear thick felt slippers, had the doors fitted with tambours and their hinges well oiled, and covered the floors with long-pile carpeting, to make sure that he never heard the sound of their footsteps overhead.

  He also arranged a code of signals with them so that they should know what he needed by the number of long or short peals he rang on his bell; and he appointed a particular spot on his desk where the household account-book was to be left once a month while he was asleep. In short, he did everything he could to avoid seeing them or speaking to them more often than was absolutely necessary.

  However, since the woman would have to pass alongside the house occasionally to get to the woodshed, and he had no desire to see her commonplace silhouette through the window, he had a costume made for her of Flemish faille, with a white cap and a great black hood let down on the shoulders, such as the beguines still wear to this day at Ghent.1 The shadow of this coif gliding past in the twilight produced an impression of convent life, and reminded him of those peaceful, pious communities, those sleepy villages shut away in some hidden corner of the busy, wide-awake city.

  He went on to fix his mealtimes according to an unvarying schedule; the meals themselves were necessarily plain and simple, for the feebleness of his stomach no longer allowed him to enjoy heavy or elaborate dishes.

  At five o’clock in winter, after dusk had fallen, he ate a light breakfast of two boiled eggs, toast and tea; then he had lunch about eleven, drank coffee or sometimes tea and wine during the night and finally toyed with a little supper about five in the morning, before going to bed.

  These meals, the details and menu of which were decided once for all at the beginning of each season of the year, he ate at a table in the middle of a small room linked to his study by a corridor which was padded and hermetically sealed, to allow neither sound nor smell to pass from one to the other of the two rooms it connected.

  This dining-room resembled a ship’s cabin, with its ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and floorboards of pitch-pine, and the little window-opening let into the wainscoting like a porthole.

  Like those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other, this room had been inserted into a larger one, which was the real dining-room planned by the architect.

  This latter room was provided with two windows. One of these was now invisible, being hidden behind the bulkhead; but this partition could be lowered by releasing a spring, so that when fresh air was admitted it not only circulated around the pitch-pine cabin but entered it. The other was visible enough, as it was directly opposite the porthole cut into the wainscoting, but it had been rendered useless by a large aquarium occupying the entire space between the porthole and this real window in the real house-wall. Thus what daylight penetrated into the cabin had first to pass through the outer window, the panes of which had been replaced by a sheet of plate-glass, then through the water and finally through the fixed bull’s-eye in the porthole.2

  On autumn evenings, when the samovar stood steaming on the table and the sun had almost set, the water in the aquarium, which had been dull and turbid all morning, would turn red like glowing embers and shed a fiery, glimmering light upon the pale walls.

  Sometimes of an afternoon, when Des Esseintes happened to be already up and about, he would set in action the system of pipes and conduits which emptied the aquarium and refilled it with fresh
water, and then pour in a few drops of coloured essences, thus producing at will the various tints, green or grey, opaline or silvery, which real rivers take on according to the colour of the sky, the greater or less brilliance of the sun’s rays, the more or less imminent threat of rain – in a word, according to the season and the weather.

  He could then imagine himself between-decks in a brig, and gazed inquisitively at some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forwards behind the port-hole window and got entangled in artificial seaweed. At other times, while he was inhaling the smell of tar which had been introduced into the room before he entered it, he would examine a series of colour-prints on the walls, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd’s agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaiso and the River Plate, alongside framed notices giving the itineraries of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Line and the Lopez and Valéry Companies, as well as the freight charges and ports of call of the transatlantic mail-boats.

  Then, when he was tired of consulting these timetables, he would rest his eyes by looking at the chronometers and compasses, the sextants and dividers, the binoculars and charts scattered about on a side-table which was dominated by a single book, bound in sea-calf leather: the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,3 specially printed for him on laid paper of pure linen, hand picked and bearing a seagull water-mark.

  Finally he could take stock of the fishing-rods, the brown-tanned nets, the rolls of russet-coloured sails and the miniature anchor made of cork painted black, all piled higgledy-piggledy beside the door that led to the kitchen by way of a corridor padded, like the passage between dining-room and study, in such a way as to absorb any noises and smells.

  By these means he was able to enjoy quickly, almost simultaneously, all the sensations of a long sea-voyage, without ever leaving home; the pleasure of moving from place to place, a pleasure which in fact exists only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in experience of the present, this pleasure he could savour in full and in comfort, without fatigue or worry, in this cabin whose deliberate disorder, impermanent appearance and makeshift appointments corresponded fairly closely to the flying visits he paid it and the limited time he gave his meals, while it offered a complete contrast to his study, a permanent, orderly, well-established room, admirably equipped to maintain and uphold a stay-at-home existence.

  Travel, indeed, struck him as being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience. In his opinion it was perfectly possible to fulfil those desires commonly supposed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions, and this by the trifling subterfuge of producing a fair imitation of the object of those desires. Thus it is well known that nowadays, in restaurants famed for the excellence of their cellars, the gourmets go into raptures over rare vintages manufactured out of cheap wines treated according to Monsieur Pasteur’s method.4 Now, whether they are genuine or faked, these wines have the same aroma, the same colour, the same bouquet; and consequently the pleasure experienced in tasting these factitious, sophisticated beverages is absolutely identical with that which would be afforded by the pure, unadulterated wine, now unobtainable at any price.

  There can be no doubt that by transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similar in all respects to the pleasures of reality; no doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands; no doubt, either, that without stirring out of Paris it is possible to obtain the health-giving impression of sea-bathing – for all that this involves is a visit to the Bain Vigier, an establishment to be found on a pontoon moored in the middle of the Seine.

  There, by salting your bath-water and adding sulphate of soda with hydrochlorate of magnesium and lime in the proportions recommended by the Pharmacopoeia; by opening a box with a tight-fitting screw-top and taking out a ball of twine or a twist of rope, bought for the occasion from one of those enormous roperies whose warehouses and cellars reek with the smell of the sea and sea-ports; by breathing in the odours which the twine or the twist of rope is sure to have retained; by consulting a life-like photograph of the casino and zealously reading the Guide Joanne describing the beauties of the seaside resort where you would like to be; by letting yourself be lulled by the waves created in your bath by the backwash of the paddle-steamers passing close to the pontoon; by listening to the moaning of the wind as it blows under the arches of the Pont Royal and the dull rumble of the buses crossing the bridge just a few feet over your head; by employing these simple devices, you can produce an illusion of sea-bathing which will be undeniable, convincing and complete.

  The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself.

  As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius.5

  Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes. After all, what platitudinous limitations she imposes, like a tradesman specializing in a single line of business; what petty-minded restrictions, like a shopkeeper stocking one article to the exclusion of all others; what a monotonous store of meadows and trees, what a commonplace display of mountains and seas!

  In fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery under floodlighting; no cascade that cannot be imitated to perfection by hydraulic engineering; no rock that papier-mâché cannot counterfeit; no flower that carefully chosen taffeta and delicately coloured paper cannot match!

  There can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.

  After all, to take what among all her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among all her creations is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty – to wit, woman – has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth, a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?

  One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.

  The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons.

  It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found; and it can be stated without fear of contradiction that in his chosen province man has done as well
as the God in whom he believes.

  These thoughts occurred to Des Esseintes whenever the breeze carried to his ears the faint whistle of the toy trains that shuttle backwards and forwards between Paris and Sceaux. His house was only about a twenty minutes’ walk from the station at Fontenay, but the height at which it stood and its isolated position insulated it from the hullabaloo of the vile hordes that are inevitably attracted on Sundays to the purlieus of a railway station.

  As for the village itself, he had scarcely seen it. Only once, looking out of his window one night, had he examined the silent landscape stretching down to the foot of a hill which is surmounted by the batteries of the Bois de Verrières.

  In the darkness, on both right and left, rows of dim shapes could be seen lining the hillsides, dominated by other far-off batteries and fortifications whose high retaining-walls looked in the moonlight like silver-painted brows over dark eyes.

  The plain, lying partly in the shadow of the hills, appeared to have shrunk in size; and in the middle it seemed as if it were sprinkled with face-powder and smeared with coldcream. In the warm breeze that fanned the colourless grass and scented the air with cheap spicy perfumes, the moon-bleached trees rustled their pale foliage and with their trunks drew a shadow-pattern of black stripes on the white-washed earth, littered with pebbles that glinted like fragments of broken crockery.