Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Even more than these dowagers, the men gathered round their whist-tables revealed an unalterable emptiness of mind. These descendants of medieval warriors, these last scions of feudal families, appeared to Des Esseintes in the guise of crotchety, catarrhal old men, endlessly repeating insipid monologues and immemorial phrases. The fleur-de-lis, which you find if you cut the stalk of a fern, was apparently also the only thing that remained impressed on the softening pulp inside these ancient skulls.

  The young man felt a surge of ineffable pity for these mummies entombed in their Pompadour catafalques behind rococo panelling; these crusty dotards who lived with their eyes for ever fixed upon a nebulous Canaan, an imaginary land of promise.

  After a few experiences of this kind, he resolved, in spite of all the invitations and reproaches he might receive, never to set foot in this society again.

  Instead, he took to mixing with young men of his own age and station.

  Some of them, who like himself had been brought up in religious institutions, had been distinctively marked for life by the education they had received. They went to church regularly, took communion at Easter, frequented Catholic societies and shamefacedly concealed their sexual activities from each other as if they were heinous crimes. For the most part they were docile, good-looking ninnies, congenital dunces who had worn their masters’ patience thin, but had nonetheless satisfied their desire to send pious, obedient creatures out into the world.

  The others, who had been educated in state schools or in lycèes, were less hypocritical and more adventurous, but they were no more interesting and no less narrow-minded than their fellows. These gay young men were mad on races and operettas, lansquenet and baccarat, and squandered fortunes on horses, cards, and all the other pleasures dear to empty minds. After a year’s trial, Des Esseintes was overcome by an immense distaste for the company of these men, whose debauchery struck him as being base and facile, entered into without discrimination or desire, indeed without any real stirring of the blood or stimulation of the nerves.

  Little by little, he dropped these people and sought the society of men of letters, imagining that theirs must surely be kindred spirits with which his own mind would feel more at case. A fresh disappointment lay in store for him: he was revolted by their mean, spiteful judgements, their conversation that was as commonplace as a church-door, and the nauseating discussions in which they gauged the merit of a book by the number of editions it went through and the profits from its sale. At the same time, he discovered the free-thinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than the village cobbler’s.

  His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with that of any author or scholar.

  He felt irritable and ill at ease; exasperated by the triviality of the ideas normally bandied about, he came to resemble those people mentioned by Nicole4 who are sensitive to anything and everything. He was constantly coming across some new source of offence, wincing at the patriotic or political twaddle served up in the papers every morning, and exaggerating the importance of the triumphs which an omnipotent public reserves at all times and in all circumstances for works written without thought or style.

  Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.

  One passion and one only – woman – might have arrested the universal contempt that was taking hold of him, but that passion like the rest had been exhausted. He had tasted the sweets of the flesh like a crotchety invalid with a craving for food but a palate which soon becomes jaded. In the days when he had belonged to a set of young men-about-town, he had gone to those unconventional supper-parties where drunken women loosen their dresses at dessert and beat the table with their heads; he had hung around stage-doors, had bedded with singers and actresses, had endured, over and above the innate stupidity of the sex, the hysterical vanity common to women of the theatre. Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity, and helped to swell the funds of those agencies which supply dubious pleasures for a consideration. And finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses.

  Try what he might, however, he could not shake off the overpowering tedium which weighed upon him. In desperation he had recourse to the perilous caresses of the professional virtuosos, but the only effect was to impair his health and exacerbate his nerves. Already he was getting pains at the back of his neck, and his hands were shaky: he could keep them steady enough when he was gripping a heavy object, but they trembled uncontrollably when holding something light such as a wineglass.5

  The doctors he consulted terrified him with warnings that it was time he changed his way of life and gave up these practices which were sapping his vitality. For a little while he led a quiet life, but soon his brain took fire again and sent out a fresh call to arms. Like girls who at the onset of puberty hanker after weird or disgusting dishes, he began to imagine and then to indulge in unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures. But this was too much for him. His overfatigued senses, as if satisfied that they had tasted every imaginable experience, sank into a state of lethargy; and impotence was not far off.

  When he came to his senses again, he found that he was utterly alone, completely disillusioned, abominably tired; and he longed to make an end of it all, prevented only by the cowardice of his flesh.

  The idea of hiding away far from human society, of shutting himself up in some snug retreat, of deadening the thunderous din of life’s inexorable activity, just as people deadened the noise of traffic by laying down straw outside a sick person’s house – this idea tempted him more than ever.

  Besides, there was another reason why he should lose no time in coming to a decision: taking stock of his fortune, he discovered to his horror that in extravagant follies and riotous living he had squandered the greater part of his patrimony, and that what remained was invested in land and brought in only a paltry revenue.

  He decided to sell the Château de Lourps, which he no longer visited and where he would leave behind him no pleasant memories or fond regrets. He also realized his other assets and with the money he obtained bought sufficient government stocks to assure him of an annual income of fifty thousand francs, keeping back a tidy sum to buy and furnish the little house where he proposed to steep himself in peace and quiet for the rest of his life.

  He scoured the suburbs of Paris and eventually discovered a villa for sale on the hillside above Fontenay-aux-Roses, standing in a lonely spot close to the Fort and far from all neighbours.6 This was the answer to his dreams, for in this district which had so far remained unspoilt by rampaging Parisians, he would be safe from molestation: the wretched state of communications, barely maintained by a comical railway at the far end of the town and a few little trams which came and went as they pleased, reassured him on this point. Thinking of the new existence he was going to fashion for himself, he felt a glow of pleasure at the idea that here he would be too far out for the tidal wave of Parisian life to reach him, and yet near enough for the proximity of the capital to strengthen him in his solitude. For, since a man has only to know he cannot get to a certain spot to be seized with a desire to go there, by not entirely barring the way back he was guarding against any hank
ering after human society, any nostalgic regrets.

  He set the local mason to work on the house he had bought; then suddenly, one day, without telling anyone of his plans, he got rid of his furniture, dismissed his servants and disappeared without leaving any address with the concierge.

  CHAPTER 1

  Over two months elapsed before Des Esseintes could immerse himself in the peaceful silence of his house at Fontenay, for purchases of all sorts still kept him perambulating the streets and ransacking the shops from one end of Paris to the other. And this was in spite of the fact that he had already made endless inquiries and given considerable thought to the matter before entrusting his new home to the decorators.

  He had long been a connoisseur of colours both simple and subtle. In former years, when he had been in the habit of inviting women to his house, he had fitted out a boudoir with delicate carved furniture in pale Japanese camphor-wood under a sort of canopy of pink Indian satin, so that their flesh borrowed soft warm tints from the light which hidden lamps filtered through the awning.

  This room, where mirror echoed mirror, and every wall reflected an endless succession of pink boudoirs, had been the talk of all his mistresses, who loved steeping their nakedness in this warm bath of rosy light and breathing in the aromatic odours given off by the camphor-wood. But quite apart from the beneficial effect which this tinted atmosphere had in bringing a ruddy flush to complexions worn and discoloured by the habitual use of cosmetics and the habitual abuse of the night hours, he himself enjoyed, in this voluptuous setting, peculiar satisfactions – pleasures which were in a way heightened and intensified by the recollection of past afflictions and bygone troubles.

  Thus, in hateful and contemptuous memory of his childhood, he had suspended from the ceiling of this room a little silver cage containing a cricket which chirped as other crickets had once chirped among the embers in the fireplaces at the Château de Lourps. Whenever he heard this familiar sound, all the silent evenings of constraint he had spent in his mother’s company and all the misery he had endured in the course of a lonely, unhappy childhood came back to haunt him. And when the movements of the woman he was mechanically caressing suddenly dispelled these memories and her words or laughter brought him back to the present reality of the boudoir, then his soul was swept by tumultuous emotions: a longing to take vengeance for the boredom inflicted on him in the past, a craving to sully what memories he retained of his family with acts of sensual depravity, a furious desire to expend his lustful frenzy on cushions of soft flesh and to drain the cup of sensuality to its last and bitterest dregs.

  At other times, when he was weighed down by splenetic boredom, and the rainy autumn weather brought on an aversion for the streets, for his house, for the dirty yellow sky and the tar-macadam clouds, then he took refuge in this room, set the cage swinging gently to and fro and watched its movements reflected ad infinitum in the mirrors on the walls, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage itself was not moving but that the boudoir was tossing and turning, waltzing round the house in a dizzy whirl of pink.

  Then, in the days when he had thought it necessary to advertise his individuality, he had decorated and furnished the public rooms of his house with ostentatious oddity. The drawing-room, for example, had been partitioned off into a series of niches, which were styled to harmonize vaguely, by means of subtly analogous colours that were gay or sombre, delicate or barbarous, with the character of his favourite works in Latin and French. He would then settle down to read in whichever of these niches seemed to correspond most exactly to the peculiar essence of the book which had taken his fancy.1

  His final caprice had been to fit up a lofty hall in which to receive his tradesmen. They used to troop in and take their places side by side in a row of church stalls; then he would ascend an imposing pulpit and preach them a sermon on dandyism,2 adjuring his bootmakers and tailors to conform strictly to his encyclicals on matters of cut, and threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they did not follow to the letter the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.

  By these means he won a considerable reputation as an eccentric – a reputation which he crowned by wearing suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats, by sticking a bunch of Parma violets in his shirt-front in lieu of a cravat and by entertaining men of letters to dinners which were greatly talked about. One of these meals, modelled on an eighteenth-century original, had been a funeral feast to mark the most ludicrous of personal misfortunes. The dining-room, draped in black, opened out on to a garden metamorphosed for the occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pines. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth adorned with baskets of violets and scabious; candelabra shed an eerie green light over the table and tapers flickered in the chandeliers.

  While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears.

  Dining off black-bordered plates, the company had enjoyed turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviare, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum-puddings, nectarines, pears in grape-juice syrup, mulberries and black heart-cherries. From dark-tinted glasses they had drunk the wines of Limagne and Roussillon, of Tenedos, Valdepeñ as and Oporto. And after coffee and walnut cordial, they had rounded off the evening with kvass, porter and stout.

  On the invitations, which were similar to those sent out before more solemn obsequies, this dinner was described as a funeral banquet in memory of the host’s virility, lately but only temporarily deceased.3

  In time, however, his taste for these extravagant caprices, of which he had once been so proud, died a natural death; and nowadays he shrugged his shoulders in contempt whenever he recalled the puerile displays of eccentricity he had given, the extraordinary clothes he had worn and the bizarre furnishing schemes he had devised. The new home he was now planning, this time for his own personal pleasure and not to astonish other people, was going to be comfortably though curiously appointed: a peaceful and unique abode specially designed to meet the needs of the solitary life he intended to lead.

  When the architect had fitted up the house at Fontenay in accordance with his wishes, and when all that remained was to settle the question of furniture and decoration, Des Esseintes once again gave long and careful consideration to the entire series of available colours.

  What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light.4 He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.

  Slowly, one by one, he went through the various colours.

  Blue, he remembered, takes on an artificial green tint by candlelight; if a dark blue like indigo or cobalt, it becomes black; if pale, it turns to grey; and if soft and true like turquoise, it goes dull and cold. There could, therefore, be no question of making it the keynote of a room, though it might be used to help out another colour.

  On the other hand, under the same conditions the iron greys grow sullen and heavy; the pearl greys lose their blue sheen and are metamorphosed into a dirty white; the browns become cold and sleepy; and as for the dark greens such as emperor green and myrtle green, they react like the dark blues and turn quite black. Only the pale greens remained – peacock green, for inst
ance, or the cinnabar and lacquer greens – but then artificial light kills the blue in them and leaves only the yellow, which for its part lacks clarity and consistency.

  Nor was there any point in thinking of such delicate tints as salmon pink, maize and rose; for their very effeminacy would run counter to his ideas of complete isolation. Nor again was it any use considering the various shades of purple, which with one exception lose their lustre in candlelight. That exception is plum, which somehow survives intact, but then what a muddy reddish hue it is, unpleasantly like lees of wine! Besides, it struck him as utterly futile to resort to this range of tints, in so far as it is possible to see purple by ingesting a specified amount of santonin, and thus it becomes a simple matter for anyone to change the colour of his walls without laying a finger on them.

  Having rejected all these colours, he was left with only three: red, orange and yellow.

  Of the three, he preferred orange, so confirming by his own example the truth of a theory to which he attributed almost mathematical validity: to wit, that there exists a close correspondence between the sensual make-up of a person with a truly artistic temperament and whatever colour that person reacts to most strongly and sympathetically.

  In fact, leaving out of account the majority of men, whose coarse retinas perceive neither the cadences peculiar to different colours nor the mysterious charm of their gradation; leaving out also those bourgeois optics that are insensible to the pomp and glory of the clear, bright colours; and considering only those people with delicate eyes that have undergone the education of libraries and art-galleries, it seemed to him an undeniable fact that anyone who dreams of the ideal, prefers illusion to reality and calls for veils to clothe the naked truth, is almost certain to appreciate the soothing caress of blue and its cognates, such as mauve, lilac and pearl grey, always provided they retain their delicacy and do not pass the point where they change their personalities and turn into pure violets and stark greys.