Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Scarcely had Des Esseintes realized that they could offer him no solace or relief than he was disturbed by a new phenomenon. The works of Dickens, which he had recently read in the hope of soothing his nerves, but which had produced the opposite effect, slowly began to act upon him in an unexpected way, evoking visions of English life which he contemplated for hours on end. Then, little by little, an idea insinuated itself into his mind – the idea of turning dream into reality, of travelling to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions; and this idea was allied with a longing to experience new sensations and thus afford some relief to a mind dizzy with hunger and drunk with fantasy.

  The abominably foggy and rainy weather fostered these thoughts by reinforcing the memories of what he had read, by keeping before his eyes the picture of a land of mist and mud, and by preventing any deviation from the direction his desires had taken.

  Finally he could stand it no longer, and he had suddenly decided to go. Indeed, he was in such a hurry to be off that he fled from home with hours to spare, eager to escape into the future and to plunge into the hurly-burly of the streets, the hubbub of crowded stations.

  ‘Now at last I can breathe,’ he said to himself, as the train waltzed to a stop under the dome of the Paris terminus, dancing its final pirouettes to the staccato accompaniment of the turn-tables.

  Once out in the street, on the Boulevard d’Enfer, he hailed a cab, rather enjoying the sensation of being cluttered up with trunks and travelling-rugs. The cabby, resplendent in nut-brown trousers and scarlet waistcoat, was promised a generous tip, and this helped the two men to reach a speedy understanding.

  ‘You’ll be paid by the hour,’ said Des Esseintes; and then, remembering that he wanted to buy a copy of Baedeker’s or Murray’s Guide to London, he added: ‘When you get to the Rue de Rivoli, stop outside Galignani’s Messenger.’1

  The cab lumbered off, its wheels throwing up showers of slush. The roadway was nothing but a swamp; the clouds hung so low that the sky seemed to be resting on the rooftops; the walls were streaming with water from top to bottom; the gutters were full to overflowing; and the pavements were coated with a slippery layer of mud the colour of gingerbread. As the omnibuses swept by, groups of people on the pavement stood still, and women holding their umbrellas low and their skirts high flattened themselves against the shopwindows to avoid being splashed.

  The rain was slanting in at the windows, so that Des Esseintes had to pull up the glass; this was quickly streaked with trickles of water, while clots of mud spurted up from all sides of the cab like sparks from a firework. Lulled by the monotonous sound of the rain beating down on his trunks and on the carriage roof, like sacks of peas being emptied out over his head, Des Esseintes began dreaming of his coming journey. The appalling weather struck him as an instalment of English life paid to him on account in Paris; and his mind conjured up a picture of London as an immense, sprawling, rain-drenched metropolis, stinking of soot and hot iron, and wrapped in a perpetual mantle of smoke and fog. He could see in imagination a line of dockyards stretching away into the distance, full of cranes, capstans and bales of merchandise, and swarming with men – some perched on the masts and sitting astride the yards, while hundreds of others, their heads down and bottoms up, were trundling casks along the quays and into the cellars.

  All this activity was going on in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark, slimy waters of an imaginary Thames, in the midst of a forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders piercing the pale, lowering clouds. Up above, trains raced by at full speed; and down in the underground sewers, others rumbled along, occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of air-shafts. And meanwhile, along every street, big or small, in an eternal twilight relieved only by the glaring infamies of modern advertising, there flowed an endless stream of traffic between two columns of earnest, silent Londoners, marching along with eyes fixed ahead and elbows glued to their sides.

  Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine which ground to powder millions of poor wretches – outcasts of fortune whom philanthropists urged, by way of consolation, to sing psalms and recite verses of the Bible.

  But then the vision vanished as the cab suddenly jolted him up and down on the seat. He looked out of the windows and saw that night had fallen; the gas lamps were flickering in the fog, each surrounded by its dirty yellow halo, while strings of lights seemed to be swimming in the puddles and circling the wheels of the carriages that jogged along through a sea of filthy liquid fire. Des Esseintes tried to see where he was and caught sight of the Arc du Carrousel; and at that very moment, for no reason except perhaps as a reaction from his recent imaginative flights, his mind fixed on the memory of an utterly trivial incident. He suddenly remembered that, when the servant had packed his bags under his supervision, the man had forgotten to put a toothbrush with his other toilet necessaries. He mentally reviewed the list of belongings which had been packed and found that everything else had been duly fitted into his portmanteau; but his annoyance at having left his toothbrush behind persisted until the cabby drew up and so broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets.

  He was now in the Rue de Rivoli, outside Galignani’s Messenger. There, on either side of a frosted-glass door whose panels were covered with lettering and with newspaper-cuttings and blue telegram-forms framed in passe-partout, were two huge windows crammed with books and picture-albums. He went up to them, attracted by the sight of books bound in paper boards coloured butcher’s-blue or cabbage-green and decorated along the seams with gold and silver flowers, as well as others covered in cloth dyed nut-brown, leek-green, lemon-yellow or currant-red, and stamped with black lines on the back and sides. All this had an un-Parisian air about it, a mercantile flavour, coarser yet less contemptible than the impression produced by cheap French bindings. Here and there, among open albums showing comic scenes by Du Maurier or John Leech and chromos of wild cross-country gallops by Caldecott, a few French novels were in fact to be seen, tempering this riot of brilliant colours with the safe, stolid vulgarity of their covers.

  Eventually, tearing himself away from this display, Des Esseintes pushed open the door and found himself in a vast bookshop crowded with people, where women sat unfolding maps and jabbering to each other in strange tongues. An assistant brought him an entire collection of guidebooks, and he in turn sat down to examine these volumes, whose flexible covers bent between his fingers. Glancing through them, he was suddenly struck by a page of Baedeker describing the London art-galleries. The precise, laconic details given by the guide aroused his interest, but before long his attention wandered from the older English paintings to the modern works, which appealed to him more strongly. He remembered certain examples he had seen at international exhibitions and thought that he might well come across them in London – pictures by Millais such as The Eve of St Agnes, with its moonlight effect of silvery-green tones; and weirdly coloured pictures by Watts, speckled with gamboge and indigo, and looking as if they had been sketched by an ailing Gustave Moreau, painted in by an anaemic Michael Angelo and retouched by a romantic Raphael.2 Among other canvases he remembered a Curse of Cain, an Ida and more than one Eve, in which the strange and mysterious amalgam of these three masters was informed by the personality, at once coarse and refined, of a dreamy, scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues.

  All these paintings were crowding into his memory when the shop-assistant, surprised to see a customer sitting daydreaming at a table, asked him which of the guidebooks he had chosen. For a moment Des Esseintes could not remember where he was, but then, with a word of apology for his absentmindedness, he bought a Baedeker and left the shop.

  Outside, he found it bitterly cold and wet, for the wind was blowing across the street and lashing the
arcades with rain.

  ‘Drive over there,’ he told the cabby, pointing to a shop at the very end of the gallery, on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione, which with its brightly lit windows looked like a gigantic night-light burning cheerfully in the pestilential fog.

  This was the Bodega. The sight which greeted Des Esseintes as he went in was of a long, narrow hall, its roof supported by cast-iron pillars and its walls lined with great casks standing upright on barrel-horses. Hooped with iron, girdled with a sort of pipe-rack in which tulip-shaped glasses hung upside-down and fitted at the bottom with an earthenware spigot, these barrels bore, besides a royal coat of arms, a coloured card giving details of the vintage they contained, the amount of wine they held and the price of that wine by the hogshead, by the bottle and by the glass.

  In the passage which was left free between these rows of barrels, under the hissing gas-jets of an atrocious iron-grey chandelier, there stood a line of tables loaded with baskets of Palmer’s biscuits and stale, salty cakes, and plates heaped with mince-pies and sandwiches whose tasteless exteriors concealed burning mustard-plasters. These tables, with chairs arranged on both sides, stretched to the far end of this cellar-like room, where still more hogsheads could be seen stacked against the walls, with smaller branded casks lying on top of them.

  The smell of alcohol assailed Des Esseintes’ nostrils as he took a seat in this dormitory for strong wines. Looking around him, he saw on one side a row of great casks with labels listing the entire range of ports, light or heavy in body, mahogany or amaranthine in colour, and distinguished by laudatory titles such as ‘Old Port’, ‘Light Delicate’, ‘Cockburn’s Very Fine’ and ‘Magnificent Old Regina’; and on the other side, standing shoulder to shoulder and rounding their formidable bellies, enormous barrels containing the martial wine of Spain in all its various forms, topaz-coloured sherries light and dark, sweet and dry – San Lucar, Vino de Pasto, Pale Dry, Oloroso and Amontillado.

  The cellar was packed to the doors. Leaning his elbow on the corner of a table, Des Esseintes sat waiting for the glass of port he had ordered of a barman busy opening explosive, eggshaped soda-bottles that looked like giant-sized capsules of gelatine or gluten such as chemists use to mask the taste of their more obnoxious medicines.

  All around him were swarms of English people. There were pale, gangling clergymen with clean-shaven chins, round spectacles and greasy hair, dressed in black from head to foot – soft hats at one extremity, laced shoes at the other and in between, incredibly long coats with little buttons running down the front. There were laymen with bloated pork-butcher faces or bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, winy cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes. Further away, at the far end of the wine-shop, a tow-haired stick of a man with a chin sprouting white hairs like an artichoke, was using a microscope to decipher the minute print of an English newspaper. And facing him was a sort of American naval officer, stout and stocky, swarthy and bottle-nosed, a cigar stuck in the hairy orifice of his mouth, and his eyes sleepily contemplating the framed champagne advertisements on the walls – the trademarks of Perrier and Roederer, Heidsieck and Mumm, and the hooded head of a monk identified in Gothic lettering as Dom Pérignon of Reims.

  Des Esseintes began to feel somewhat stupefied in this heavy guard-room atmosphere. His senses dulled by the monotonous chatter of these English people talking to one another, he drifted into a daydream, calling to mind some of Dickens’s characters, who were so partial to the rich red port he saw in glasses all about him, and peopling the cellar in fancy with a new set of customers – imagining here Mr Wickfield’s white hair and ruddy complexion, there the sharp, expressionless features and unfeeling eyes of Mr Tulkinghorn, the grim lawyer of Bleak House. These characters stepped right out of his memory to take their places in the Bodega, complete with all their mannerisms and gestures, for his recollections, revived by a recent reading of the novels, were astonishingly precise and detailed. The Londoner’s home as described by the novelist – well lighted, well heated and well appointed, with bottles being slowly emptied by Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield or Tom Pinch’s sister Ruth3 – appeared to him in the guise of a cosy ark sailing snugly through a deluge of soot and mire. He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination, happy to be indoors, and believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs by the bridge behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames. But his glass was empty now; and despite the warm fug in the cellar and the added heat from the smoke of pipes and cigars, he shivered slightly as he came back to reality and the foul, dank weather.

  He asked for a glass of Amontillado, but at the sight of this pale dry wine, the English author’s soothing stories and gentle lenitives gave place to the harsh revulsives and painful irritants provided by Edgar Allan Poe. The spine-chilling nightmare of the cask of Amontillado,4 the story of the man walled up in an underground chamber, took hold of his imagination; and behind the kind, ordinary faces of the American and English customers in the Bodega he fancied he could detect foul, uncontrollable desires, dark and odious schemes. But then he suddenly noticed that the place was emptying and that it was almost time for dinner; he paid his bill, got slowly to his feet and in a slight daze made for the door.

  The moment he set foot outside, he got a wet slap in the face from the weather. Swamped by the driving rain, the street lamps flickered feebly instead of shedding a steady light, while the sky seemed to have been taken down a few pegs, so that the clouds now hung below roof level. Des Esseintes looked along the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, bathed in shadow and moisture, and imagined that he was standing in the dismal tunnel beneath the Thames. But sharp pangs of hunger recalled him to reality, and going back to the cab, he gave the driver the address of the tavern in the Rue d’Amsterdam, by the Gare Saint-Lazare.

  It was now seven o’clock by his watch: he had just time enough to dine before catching his train, which was due to leave at eight-fifty. He worked out how long the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven would take, added up the hours on his fingers and finally told himself: ‘If the times given in the guide are correct, I shall arrive in London dead on twelve-thirty tomorrow afternoon.’

  The cab came to a stop in front of the tavern. Once again Des Esseintes got out, and made his way into a long hall, decorated with brown paint instead of the usual gilt mouldings, and divided by means of breast-high partitions into a number of compartments, rather like the loose-boxes in a stable. In this narrow room, which broadened out near the door, a line of beer-pulls stood at attention along a counter spread with hams as brown as old violins, lobsters the colour of red lead, and salted mackerel, as well as slices of onion, raw carrot and lemon, bunches of bay-leaves and thyme, juniper berries and peppercorns swimming in a thick sauce.

  One of the boxes was empty. He took possession of it and hailed a young man in a black coat, who treated him to a ceremonious bow and a flow of incomprehensible words. While the table was being laid, Des Esseintes inspected his neighbours. As at the Bodega, he saw a crowd of islanders with china-blue eyes, crimson complexions and earnest or arrogant expressions, skimming through foreign newspapers; but here there were a few women dining in pairs without male escorts, robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet. They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rump-steak pie – meat served hot in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a fruit tart.

  The voracity of these hearty trencherwomen brought back with a rush the appetite he had lost so long ago. First, he ordered and enjoyed some thick, greasy oxtail soup; next, he examined the list of fish and asked for a smoked haddock, which also came up to his expectations; and then, goaded on by the sight of other people guzzling, he ate a huge helping of roast beef and potatoes and downed a couple of pints of ale, savouring the musky cowshed flavour of this fine pale beer.

  His hunger was now almost satisf
ied. He nibbled a bittersweet chunk of blue Stilton, pecked at a rhubarb tart and then, to make a change, quenched his thirst with porter, that black beer which tastes of liquorice with the sugar extracted.

  He drew a deep breath: not for years had he stuffed and swilled with such abandon. It was, he decided, the change in his habits together with the choice of strange and satisfying dishes which had roused his stomach from its stupor. He settled contentedly in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to enjoy a cup of coffee laced with gin.

  Outside, the rain was still falling steadily; he could hear it pattering on the glass skylight at the far end of the room and cascading into the water-spouts. Inside, no one stirred; all were dozing like himself over their liqueur glasses, pleasantly conscious that they were in the dry.

  After a while, their tongues were loosened; and as most of them looked up in the air as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that these Englishmen were nearly all discussing the weather. Nobody laughed or smiled, and their suits matched their expressions: all of them were sombrely dressed in grey cheviot with nankin-yellow or blotting-paper-pink stripes. He cast a pleased look at his own clothes, which in colour and cut did not differ appreciably from those worn by the people around him, delighted to find that he was not out of keeping with these surroundings and that superficially at least he could claim to be a naturalized citizen of London. Then he gave a start: what of the time? He consulted his watch; it was ten minutes to eight. He still had nearly half-an-hour to stay where he was, he told himself; and once again he fell to thinking over his plans.