Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  In the course of his sedentary life, only two countries had exerted any attraction upon him – Holland and England. He had surrendered to the first of these two temptations; unable to resist any longer, he had left Paris one fine day and visited the cities of the Low Countries, one by one. On the whole, this tour had proved a bitter disappointment to him. He had pictured to himself a Holland such as Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade had painted, imagining for his own private pleasure ghettoes swarming with splendid figures as suntanned as cordovan leather, looking forward to stupendous village fairs with never-ending junketings in the country, and expecting to find the patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality which the old masters had depicted in their works.

  There was no denying that Haarlem and Amsterdam had fascinated him; the common people, seen in their natural unpolished state and their normal rustic surroundings, were very much like Van Ostade’s subjects, with their rowdy, untamed brats and their elephantine old gossips, big-bosomed and potbellied. But there was no sign of wild revelry or domestic drunkenness, and he had to admit that the paintings of the Dutch School exhibited in the Louvre had led him astray. They had in fact served as a spring-board from which he had soared into a dream world of false trails and impossible ambitions, for nowhere in this world had he found the fairyland of which he had dreamt; nowhere had he seen rustic youths and maidens dancing on a village green littered with wine casks, weeping with sheer happiness, jumping for joy and laughing so uproariously that they wet their petticoats and breeches.

  No, there was certainly nothing of the sort to be seen at present. Holland was just a country like any other, and what was more, a country entirely lacking in simplicity and geniality, for the Protestant faith was rampant there with all its stern hypocrisy and unbending solemnity.

  Still thinking of this past disappointment, he once more consulted his watch: there were only ten minutes now before his train left.

  ‘It’s high time to ask for my bill and go,’ he told himself. But the food he had eaten was lying heavy on his stomach, and his whole body felt incapable of movement.

  ‘Come now,’ he muttered, trying to screw up his courage. ‘Drink the stirrup-cup, and then you must be off.’

  He poured himself a brandy, and at the same time called for his bill. This was the signal for a black-coated individual to come up with a napkin over one arm and a pencil behind his ear – a sort of majordomo with a bald, eggshaped head, a rough beard shot with grey and a clean-shaven upper lip. He took up a concert-singer’s pose, one leg thrown forward, drew a note-book from his pocket, and fixing his gaze on a spot close to one of the hanging chandeliers, he made out the bill without even looking at what he was writing.

  ‘There you are, sir,’ he said, tearing a leaf from his pad and handing it to Des Esseintes, who was examining him with unconcealed curiosity, as if he were some rare animal. What an extraordinary creature, he thought, as he surveyed this phlegmatic Englishman, whose hairless lips reminded him, oddly enough, of an American sailor.

  At that moment the street door opened and some people came in, bringing with them a wet doggy smell. The wind blew clouds of steam back into the kitchen and rattled the unlatched door. Des Esseintes felt incapable of stirring a finger; a soothing feeling of warmth and lassitude was seeping into every limb, so that he could not even lift his hand to light a cigar.

  ‘Get up, man, and go,’ he kept telling himself, but these orders were no sooner given than countermanded. After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments such as he had suffered in Holland?

  Now he had only just time enough to run across to the station, but an immense aversion for the journey, an urgent longing to remain where he was, came over him with growing force and intensity. Lost in thought, he sat there letting the minutes slip by, thus cutting off his retreat.

  ‘If I went now,’ he said to himself, ‘I should have to dash up to the barriers and hustle the porters along with my luggage. What a tiresome business it would be!’

  And once again he told himself:

  ‘When you come to think of it, I’ve seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel. I’ve been steeped in English life ever since I left home, and it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality.5 As it is, I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have thought of repudiating my old convictions, to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any ninny that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Time to go home,’ he said. And this time he managed to get to his feet, left the tavern and told the cabby to drive him back to the Gare de Sceaux. Thence he returned to Fontenay with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks, feeling all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous journey.

  CHAPTER 12

  During the days that followed his return home, Des Esseintes browsed through the books in his library, and at the thought that he might have been parted from them for a long time he was filled with the same heart-felt satisfaction he would have enjoyed if he had come back to them after a genuine separation. Under the impulse of this feeling, he saw them in a new light, discovering beauties in them he had forgotten ever since he had bought and read them for the first time.

  Everything indeed – books, bric-à-brac and furniture – acquired a peculiar charm in his eyes. His bed seemed softer in comparison with the pallet he would have occupied in London; the discreet and silent service he got at home delighted him, exhausted as he was by the very thought of the noisy garrulity of hotel waiters; the methodical organization of his daily life appeared more admirable than ever, now that the hazard of travelling was a possibility.

  He steeped himself once more in this refreshing bath of settled habits, to which artificial regrets added a more bracing and more tonic quality.

  But it was his books that chiefly engaged his attention. He took them all down from their shelves and examined them before putting them back, to see whether, since his coming to Fontenay, the heat and damp had not damaged their bindings or spotted their precious papers.

  He began by going through the whole of his Latin library; then he rearranged the specialist works by Archelaus, Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully and Arnaud de Villanova1 dealing with the cabbala and the occult sciences; and lastly he checked all his modern books one by one. To his delight he discovered that they had one and all kept dry and were in good condition.

  This collection had cost him considerable sums of money, for the truth was that he could not bear to have his favourite authors printed on rag-paper, as they were in other people’s libraries, with characters like hobnails in a peasant’s boots.2

  In Paris in former days, he had had certain volumes set up just for himself and printed on hand-presses by specially hired workmen. Sometimes he would commission Perrin of Lyons, whose slim, clear types were well adapted for archaic reimpressions of old texts; sometimes he would send to England or America for new characters to print works of the present century; sometimes he would apply to a house at Lille which for hundreds of years had possessed a complete fount of Gothic letters; sometimes again he would commandeer the fine old Enschedé printing-works at Haarlem, whose foundry has preserved the stamps and matrices of the so-called lettres de civilité.

  He had done the same with the paper for his books. Deciding one fine day that he was tired of the ordinary expensive papers – silver from China, pearly gold from Japan, white from Whatman’s, greyish brown from Holland, buff from Turkey and the Seychal mills – and disgusted with the machine-made varieties, he had ordered special hand-made papers from the old mills at Vire where they still use pestles on
ce employed to crush hemp-seed. To introduce a little variety into his collection, he had at various times imported certain dressed fabrics from London – flock papers and rep papers – while to help mark his contempt for other bibliophiles, a Lübeck manufacturer supplied him with a glorified candle-paper, bluish in colour, noisy and brittle to the touch, in which the straw fibres were replaced by flakes of gold such as you find floating in Danzig brandy.

  In this way he had got together some unique volumes, always choosing unusual formats and having them clothed by Lortic, by Trautz-Bauzonnet, by Chambolle, by Capé’s successors, in irreproachable bindings of old silk, of embossed ox-hide, of Cape goat-skin – all full bindings, patterned and inlaid, lined with tabby or watered silk, adorned in ecclesiastic fashion with metal clasps and corners, sometimes even decorated by Gruel-Engelmann in oxidized silver and shining enamel.

  Thus he had had Baudelaire’s works printed with the admirable episcopal type of the old house of Le Clere, in a large format similar to that of a mass-book, on a very light Japanese felt, a bibulous paper as soft as elder-pith, its milky whiteness faintly tinged with pink. This edition, limited to a single copy and printed in a velvety China-ink black, had been dressed outside and lined inside with a mirific and authentic flesh-coloured pigskin, one in a thousand, dotted all over where the bristles had been and blind-tooled in black with designs of marvellous aptness chosen by a great artist.

  On this particular day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable volume down from his shelves and fondled it reverently, rereading certain pieces which in this simple but priceless setting seemed to him deeper and subtler than ever.

  His admiration for this author knew no bounds. In his opinion, writers had hitherto confined themselves to exploring the surface of the soul, or such underground passages as were easily accessible and well lit, measuring here and there the deposits of the seven deadly sins, studying the lie of the lodes and their development, recording for instance, as Balzac did, the stratification of a soul possessed by some monomaniacal passion – ambition or avarice, paternal love or senile lust.

  Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these analysts of human nature stopped short at the speculations, good or bad, classified by the Church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.

  Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

  There, near the breeding-ground of intellectual aberrations and diseases of the mind – the mystical tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

  He had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, and had listed the symptoms of souls visited by sorrow, singled out by spleen; he had shown how blight affects the emotions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away, and nothing remains but the barren memory of hardships, tyrannies and slights, suffered at the behest of a despotic and freakish fate.

  He had followed every phase of this lamentable autumn, watching the human creature, skilled in self-torment and adept in self-deception, forcing its thoughts to cheat one another in order to suffer more acutely, and ruining in advance, thanks to its powers of analysis and observation, any chance of happiness it might have.

  Then, out of this irritable sensitivity of soul, out of this bitterness of mind that savagely repulses the embarrassing attentions of friendship, the benevolent insults of charity, he witnessed the gradual and horrifying development of those middle-aged passions, those mature love-affairs where one partner goes on blowing hot when the other has already started blowing cold, where lassitude forces the amorous pair to indulge in filial caresses whose apparent juvenility seems something new, and in motherly embraces whose tenderness is not only restful but also gives rise, so to speak, to interesting feelings of remorse about a vague sort of incest.

  In a succession of magnificent pages he had exposed these hybrid passions, exacerbated by the impossibility of obtaining complete satisfaction, as well as the dangerous subterfuges of narcotic and toxic drugs, taken in the hope of deadening pain and conquering boredom. In a period when literature attributed man’s unhappiness almost exclusively to the misfortunes of unrequited love or the jealousies engendered by adulterous love, he had ignored these childish ailments and sounded instead those deeper, deadlier, longer-lasting wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt upon souls tortured by the present, disgusted by the past, terrified and dismayed by the future.

  The more Des Esseintes reread his Baudelaire, the more he appreciated the indescribable charm of this writer who, at a time when verse no longer served any purpose except to depict the external appearance of creatures and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible – thanks to a solid, sinewy style which, more than any other, possessed that remarkable quality, the power to define in curiously healthy terms the most fugitive and ephemeral of the unhealthy conditions of weary spirits and melancholy souls.

  After Baudelaire, the number of French books that had found their way on to his shelves was very limited. Without a doubt he was utterly insensible to the merits of those works it is good form to enthuse over. The ‘side-splitting mirth’ of Rabelais and the ‘common-sense humour’ of Molière had never brought so much as a smile to his lips; and the antipathy he felt to these buffooneries was so great that he did not hesitate to liken them, from the artistic point of view, to the knockabout turns given by the clowns at any country fair.

  As regards the poetry of past ages, he read very little apart from Villon, whose melancholy ballades he found rather touching, and a few odd bits of D’Aubigné that stirred his blood by the incredible virulence of their apostrophes and their anathemas.3

  As for prose, he had little respect for Voltaire and Rousseau, or even Diderot, whose vaunted ‘Salons’ struck him as remarkable for the number of moralizing inanities and stupid aspirations they contained. Out of hatred of all this twaddle, he confined his reading almost entirely to the exponents of Christian oratory, to Bourdaloue and Bossuet, whose sonorous and ornate periods greatly impressed him; but he was even fonder of tasting the pith and marrow of stern, strong phrases such as Nicole fashioned in his meditations, and still more Pascal, whose austere pessimism and agonized attrition went straight to his heart.4

  Apart from these few books, French literature, so far as his library was concerned, started at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  It fell into two distinct categories, one comprising ordinary profane literature, the other the works of Catholic writers – a very special literature, almost unknown to the general reader, and yet disseminated by enormous, long-established firms to the far corners of the earth.

  He had summoned up enough courage to explore these literary crypts, and as in the realm of secular literature, he had discovered, underneath a gigantic pile of insipidities, a few works written by true masters.

  The distinctive characteristic of this literature was the absolute immutability of its ideas and its idiom; just as the Church had perpetuated the primordial form of its sacred objects, so also it had kept intact the relics of its dogmas and piously preserved the reliquary that contained them – the oratorical style of the seventeenth century. As one of its own writers – Ozanam5 – declared, the Christian idiom had nothing to learn from the language of Rousseau, and should employ exclusively the style used by Bourdaloue and Bossuet.

&n
bsp; In spite of this declaration, the Church, showing a more tolerant spirit, winked at certain expressions, certain turns of phrase borrowed from the lay language of the same century; and as a result the Catholic idiom had to some extent purged itself of its massive periods, weighed down, especially in Bossuet’s case, by the inordinate length of its parentheses, the painful redundancy of its pronouns. But there the concessions had stopped, and indeed any more would doubtless have been superfluous, for with its ballast gone, this prose was quite adequate for the narrow range of subjects to which the Church restricted itself.

  Incapable of dealing with contemporary life, of making visible and palpable the simplest aspect of creatures and things, and ill fitted to explain the complicated ruses of a brain unconcerned about states of grace, this idiom was none the less excellent in the treatment of abstract subjects. Useful in the discussion of a controversy, in the qualification of a commentary, it also possessed more than any other the necessary authority to state dogmatically the value of a doctrine.

  Unfortunately, here as everywhere else, an immense army of pedants had invaded the sanctuary and by their ignorance and lack of talent debased its noble and uncompromising dignity. As a crowning disaster, several pious females had decided to try their hands at writing, and maladroit sacristies had joined with silly salons in extolling as works of genius the wretched prattlings of these women.

  Des Esseintes had been curious enough to read a number of these works, among them those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian general’s wife whose house in Paris attracted the most fervent of Catholics. Her writings had filled him with an infinite and overwhelming sense of boredom; they were worse than bad, they were banal; the abiding impression was of a lingering echo from a private chapel in which a clique of sanctimonious snobs could be heard muttering their prayers, asking in whispers for each other’s news and repeating with a portentous air a string of commonplaces on politics, the predictions of the barometer and the present state of the weather.