Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Finally, in the fifth century, there comes Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Him Des Esseintes knew only too well, for he was the most revered of all ecclesiastical writers, the founder of Christian orthodoxy, the man whom pious Catholics regard as an oracle, a sovereign authority. The natural consequence was that he never opened his books any more, even though he had proclaimed his loathing for this world in his Confessions, and, in his De Civitate Dei, to the accompaniment of pious groans, had tried to assuage the appalling distress of his time with sedative promises of better things to come in the afterlife. Even in his younger days, when he was studying theology, Des Esseintes had become sick and tired of Augustine’s sermons and jeremiads, his theories on grace and predestination, his fights against the schismatic sects.

  He was much happier dipping into the Psychomachia of Prudentius, the inventor of the allegorical poem, a genre destined to enjoy uninterrupted favour in the Middle Ages, or the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, sprinkled with quips and sallies, archaisms and enigmas, captivated him. He always enjoyed rereading the panegyrics in which the good Bishop invokes the pagan deities in support of his pompous praises; and in spite of himself, he had to admit to a weakness for the conceits and innuendoes in these poems, turned out by an ingenious mechanic who takes good care of his machine, keeps its component parts well oiled and if need be can invent new parts which are both intricate and useless.

  After Sidonius, he kept up his acquaintance with the panegyrist Merobaudes; with Sedulius, the author of rhymed poems and alphabetical hymns of which the Church has appropriated certain parts for use in her offices; with Marius Victor, whose gloomy treatise De Perversis Moribus is lit up here and there by lines that shine like phosphorus; with Paulinus of Pella, who composed that icy poem the Eucharisticon; and with Orientius, Bishop of Auch, who in the distichs of his Monitoria inveighs against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he declares, bring down disaster upon the peoples of the world.

  Des Esseintes lost nothing of his interest in the Latin language now that it was rotten through and through and hung like a decaying carcase, losing its limbs, oozing pus, barely keeping, in the general corruption of its body, a few sound parts, which the Christians removed in order to preserve them in the pickling brine of their new idiom.

  The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the awful period when appalling shocks convulsed the world. The barbarians were ravaging Gaul while Rome, sacked by the Visigoths, felt the chill of death invade her paralysed body and saw her extremities, the East and the West, thrashing about in pools of blood and growing weaker day by day.

  Amid the universal dissolution, amid the assassinations of Caesars occurring in rapid succession, amid the uproar and carnage covering Europe from end to end, a terrifying hurrah was suddenly heard which stilled every other noise, silenced every other voice. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men wrapped in ratskin cloaks and mounted on little horses, hideous Tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, hairless, jaundiced faces and chins furrowed with gashes and scars, rode hell-for-leather into the territories of the Lower Empire, sweeping all before them in their whirlwind advance.

  Civilization disappeared in the dust of their horses’ hooves, in the smoke of the fires they kindled. Darkness fell upon the world and the peoples trembled in consternation as they listened to the dreadful tornado pass by with a sound like thunder. The horde of Huns swept over Europe, threw itself on Gaul and was only halted on the plains of Châlons, where Aetius smashed it in a fearful encounter. The earth, gorged with blood, looked like a sea of crimson froth; two hundred thousand corpses barred the way and broke the impetus of the invading avalanche which, turned from its path, fell like a thunderbolt on Italy, whose ruined cities burned like blazing hay-ricks.

  The Western Empire crumbled under the shock; the doomed life it had been dragging out in imbecility and corruption was extinguished. It even looked as if the end of the universe were also at hand, for the cities Attila had overlooked were decimated by famine and plague. And the Latin language, like everything else, seemed to vanish from sight beneath the ruins of the old world.

  Years went by, and eventually the barbarian idioms began to acquire a definite shape, to emerge from their rude gangues, to grow into true languages. Meanwhile Latin, saved by the monasteries from death in the universal debacle, was confined to the cloister and the presbytery. Even so, a few poets appeared here and there to keep the flame burning, albeit slowly and dully – the African Dracontius with his Hexameron, Claudius Mamert with his liturgical poems and Avitus of Vienne. Then there were biographers such as Ennodius, who recounts the miracles of St Epiphanius, that shrewd and revered diplomatist, that upright and vigilant pastor, or Eugippius, who has recorded for us the incomparable life of St Severinus, that mysterious anchorite and humble ascetic who appeared like an angel of mercy to the peoples of his time, frantic with fear and suffering; writers such as Veranius of the Gévaudan, who composed a little treatise on the subject of continence, or Aurelian and Ferreolus, who compiled ecclesiastical canons; and finally historians such as Rotherius of Agde, famed for a history of the Huns which is now lost.

  There were far fewer works from the following centuries in Des Esseintes’s library. Still, the sixth century was represented by Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, whose hymns and Vexilla Regis, carved out of the ancient carcase of the Latin language and spiced with the aromatics of the Church, haunted his thoughts on certain days; also by Boethius, Gregory of Tours and Jornandes. As for the seventh and eighth centuries, apart from the Low Latin of such chroniclers as Fredegarius and Paul the Deacon, or of the poems contained in the Bangor Antiphonary, one of which – an alphabetical, monorhymed hymn in honour of St Comgall – he sometimes glanced at, literary output was restricted almost exclusively to Lives of the Saints, notably the legend of St Columban by the cenobite Jonas and that of Blessed Cuthbert compiled by the Venerable Bede from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarne. The result was that he confined himself to dipping at odd moments into the works of these hagiographers and rereading passages from the Lives of St Rusticula and St Radegonde, the former related by Defensorius, a Ligugé synodist, the latter by the naive and modest Baudonivia, a Poitiers nun.

  However, he found certain remarkable Latin works of Anglo-Saxon origin more to his taste: to wit, the whole series of enigmas by Aldhelm, Tatwin and Eusebius, those literary descendants of Symphosius, and above all the enigmas composed by St Boniface in acrostics where the answer was provided by the initial letters of each stanza.

  His predilection for Latin literature grew feebler as he neared the end of these two centuries, and he could summon up little enthusiasm for the turgid prose of the Carolingian Latinists, the Alcuins and the Eginhards. As specimens of the language of the ninth century, he contented himself with the chronicles by Freculf, Reginon and the anonymous writer of Saint-Gall; with the poem on the Siege of Paris contrived by Abbo le Courbé; and with the Hortulus, the didactic poem by the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose canto devoted to the glorification of the pumpkin as a symbol of fecundity tickled his sense of humour. Another work he appreciated was the poem by Ermold le Noir celebrating the exploits of Louis le Débonnaire, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, even sombre style, an iron idiom chilled in monastic waters but with flaws in the hard metal where feeling showed through; and another, a poem by Macer Floridus, De Viribus Herbarum, which he particularly enjoyed for its poetic recipes and the remarkable virtues it attributed to certain plants and flowers – to the aristolochia, for instance, which mixed with beef and laid on a pregnant woman’s abdomen invariably results in the birth of a male child, or borage, which served as a cordial makes the gloomiest guest merry, or the peony, whose powdered root is a lasting cure for epilepsy, or fennel, which applied to a woman’s bosom clears her urine and stimulates her sluggish periods.

  Except for a few special books which had not been classified; certain undated or modern texts; some cabbalistic, m
edical or botanical works; sundry odd volumes of Migne’s patrology, containing Christian poems to be found nowhere else, and of Wernsdorff’s anthology of the minor Latin poets; except for Meursius, Forberg’s manual of classical erotology, the moechialogy and the diaconals intended for the use of father-confessors, which he took down and dusted off at long intervals, his collection of Latin works stopped at the beginning of the tenth century.

  By that time, after all, the peculiar originality and elaborate simplicity of Christian Latinity had likewise come to an end. Henceforth the gibble-gabble of the philosophers and the scholiasts, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, would reign supreme. The sooty heaps of chronicles and history books, the leaden masses of cartularies, would steadily pile up, while the stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks, stirring the poetical left-overs of Antiquity into a pious stew, were already things of the past; the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery, had already closed down. The old editions so beloved of Des Esseintes tailed away to nothing – and making a prodigious jump of several centuries, he stacked the rest of his shelves with modern books which, without regard to the intermediate ages, brought him right down to the French language of the present day.5

  CHAPTER 4

  A carriage drew up late one afternoon outside the house at Fontenay. As Des Esseintes never had any visitors and the postman did not so much as approach this uninhabited region, since there were no newspapers, reviews or letters to be delivered, the servants hesitated, wondering whether they should answer the door or not. But when the bell was sent jangling violently against the wall, they ventured so far as to uncover the spy-hole let into the door, and beheld a gentleman whose entire breast was covered, from neck to waist, by a huge buckler of gold.

  They informed their master, who was at breakfast.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he said; ‘show the gentleman in’ – for he remembered having once given his address to a lapidary so that the man might deliver an article he had ordered.

  The gentleman bowed his way in, and on the pitch-pine floor of the dining-room he deposited his golden buckler, which rocked backwards and forwards, rising a little from the ground and stretching out at the end of a snake-like neck a tortoise’s head which, in a sudden panic, it drew back under its carapace.

  This tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours, and following with his eyes the silvery glints running across the weft of the wool, which was a combination of yellow and plum, he had thought what a good idea it would be to place on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints.

  Possessed by this idea, he had wandered at random through the streets as far as the Palais-Royal, where he glanced at Chevet’s display and suddenly struck his forehead – for there in the window was a huge tortoise in a tank. He had bought the creature; and once it had been left to itself on the carpet, he had sat down and subjected it to a long scrutiny, screwing up his eyes in concentration.

  Alas, there could be no doubt about it: the negro-brown tint, the raw Sienna hue of the shell, dimmed the sheen of the carpet instead of bringing out its colours; the predominating gleams of silver had now lost nearly all their sparkle and matched the cold tones of scraped zinc along the edges of this hard, lustreless carapace.

  He bit his nails, trying to discover a way of resolving the marital discord between these tints and preventing an absolute divorce. At last he came to the conclusion that his original idea of using a dark object moving to and fro to stir up the fires within the woollen pile was mistaken. The fact of the matter was that the carpet was still too bright, too garish, too new-looking; its colours had not yet been sufficiently toned down and subdued. The thing was to reverse his first plan and to deaden those colours, to dim them by the contrast of a brilliant object that would kill everything around it, drowning the gleams of silver in a golden radiance. Stated in these terms, the problem was easier to solve; and Des Esseintes accordingly decided to have his tortoise’s buckler glazed with gold.1

  Back from the workshop where the gilder had given it board and lodging, the reptile blazed as brightly as any sun, throwing out its rays over the carpet, whose tints turned pale and weak, and looking like a Visigothic shield tegulated with shining scales by a barbaric artist.

  At first, Des Esseintes was delighted with the effect he had achieved; but soon it struck him that this gigantic jewel was only half-finished and that it would not be really complete until it had been encrusted with precious stones.

  From a collection of Japanese art he selected a drawing representing a huge bunch of flowers springing from a single slender stalk, took it to a jeweller’s, sketched out a border to enclose this bouquet in an oval frame and informed the astonished lapidary that the leaves and petals of each and every flower were to be executed in precious stones and mounted on the actual shell of the tortoise.

  Choosing the stones gave him pause. The diamond, he told himself, has become terribly vulgar now that every businessman wears one on his little finger; Oriental emeralds and rubies are not so degraded and they dart bright tongues of fire, but they are too reminiscent of the green and red eyes of certain Paris buses fitted with headlamps in the selfsame colours; as for topazes, whether pink or yellow, they are cheap stones, dear to people of the small shopkeeper class who long to have a few jewel-cases to lock up in their mirror wardrobes. Similarly, although the Church has helped the amethyst to retain something of a sacerdotal character, at once unctuous and solemn, this stone too has been debased by use in the red ears and on the tubulous fingers of butchers’ wives whose ambition it is to deck themselves out at little cost with genuine, heavy jewels. Alone among these stones, the sapphire has kept its fires inviolate, unsullied by contact with commercial and financial stupidity. The glittering sparks playing over its cold, limpid water have as it were protected its discreet and haughty nobility against any defilement. But unfortunately in artificial light its bright flames lose their brilliance; the blue water sinks low and seems to go to sleep, to wake and sparkle again only at daybreak.

  It was clear that none of these stones satisfied Des Esseintes’s requirements; besides, they were all too civilized, too familiar. Instead he turned his attention to more startling and unusual gems; and after letting them trickle through his fingers, he finally made a selection of real and artificial stones which in combination would result in a fascinating and disconcerting harmony.

  He made up his bouquet in this way: the leaves were set with gems of a strong and definite green – asparagus-green chrysoberyls, leek-green peridots, olive-green olivines – and these sprang from twigs of almandine and uvarovite of a purplish red, which threw out flashes of harsh, brilliant light like the scales of tartar that glitter on the insides of wine-casks.

  For the flowers which stood out from the stem a long way from the foot of the spray, he decided on a phosphate blue; but he absolutely refused to consider the Oriental turquoise which is used for brooches and rings, and which, together with the banal pearl and the odious coral, forms the delight of the common herd.

  He chose only turquoises from the West – stones which, strictly speaking, are simply a fossil ivory impregnated with coppery substances and whose celadon blue looks thick, opaque and sulphurous, as if jaundiced with bile.

  This done, he could now go on to encrust the petals of such flowers as were in full bloom in the middle of his spray, those closest to the stem, with translucent minerals that gleamed with a glassy, sickly light and glinted with fierce, sharp bursts of fire.

  For this purpose he used only Ceylon cat’s-eyes, cymophanes and sapphirines – three stones which all sparkled with mysterious, deceptive flashes, painfully drawn from the icy depths of their turbid water: the cat’s-eye of a greenish grey streaked with co
ncentric veins which seem to shift and change position according to the way the light falls; the cymophane with blue waterings rippling across the floating, milky-coloured centre; the sapphirine which kindles bluish, phosphorescent fires against a dull, chocolate-brown background.

  The lapidary took careful notes as it was explained to him exactly where each stone was to be let in.

  ‘What about the edging of the shell?’ he then asked Des Esseintes.

  The latter had originally thought of a border of opals and hydrophanes. But these stones, interesting though they may be on account of their varying colour and vacillating fire, are too unstable and unreliable to be given serious consideration; the opal, in fact, has a positively rheumatic sensitivity, the play of its rays changing in accordance with changes in moisture or temperature, while the hydrophane will burn only in water and refuses to light up its grey fires unless it is wetted.

  He finally decided on a series of stones with contrasting colours – the mahogany-red hyacinth of Compostella followed by the sea-green aquamarine, the vinegar-pink balas ruby by the pale slate-coloured Sudermania ruby. Their feeble lustre would be sufficient to set off the dark shell but not enough to detract from the bunch of jewelled flowers which they were to frame in a slender garland of subdued brilliance.

  Now Des Esseintes sat gazing at the tortoise where it lay huddled in a corner of the dining-room, glittering brightly in the half-light.