Des Esseintes puzzled his brains to find the meaning of this emblem. Had it the phallic significance which the primordial religions of India attributed to it? Did it suggest to the old Tetrarch a sacrifice of virginity, an exchange of blood, an impure embrace asked for and offered on the express condition of a murder? Or did it represent the allegory of fertility, the Hindu myth of life, an existence held between the fingers of woman and clumsily snatched away by the fumbling hands of man, who is maddened by desire, crazed by a fever of the flesh?
Perhaps, too, in arming his enigmatic goddess with the revered lotus-blossom, the painter had been thinking of the dancer, the mortal woman, the soiled vessel, ultimate cause of every sin and every crime; perhaps he had remembered the sepulchral rites of ancient Egypt, the solemn ceremonies of embalmment, when practitioners and priests lay out the dead woman’s body on a slab of jasper, then with curved needles extract her brains through the nostrils, her entrails through an opening made in the left side, and finally, before gilding her nails and her teeth, before anointing the corpse with oils and spices, insert into her sexual parts, to purify them, the chaste petals of the divine flower.
Be that as it may, there was some irresistible fascination exerted by this painting; but the water-colour entitled The Apparition created perhaps an even more disturbing impression.
In this picture, Herod’s palace rose up like some Alhambra on slender columns iridescent with Moresque tiles, which appeared to be bedded in silver mortar and gold cement; arabesques started from lozenges of lapis lazuli to wind their way right across the cupolas, whose mother-of-pearl marquetry gleamed with rainbow lights and flashed with prismatic fires.
The murder had been done; now the executioner stood impassive, his hands resting on the pommel of his long, bloodstained sword.
The Saint’s decapitated head had left the charger where it lay on the flagstones and risen into the air, the eyes staring out from the livid face, the colourless lips parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood. A mosaic encircled the face, and also a halo of light whose rays darted out under the porticoes, emphasized the awful elevation of the head, and kindled a fire in the glassy eyeballs, which were fixed in what happened to be agonized concentration on the dancer.
With a gesture of horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her nailed to the spot, balanced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her right hand clawing convulsively at her throat.
She is almost naked; in the heat of the dance her veils have fallen away and her brocade robes slipped to the floor, so that now she is clad only in wrought metals and translucent gems. A gorgerin grips her waist like a corselet, and like an outsize clasp a wondrous jewel sparkles and flashes in the cleft between her breasts; lower down, a girdle encircles her hips, hiding the upper part of her thighs, against which dangles a gigantic pendant glistening with rubies and emeralds; finally, where the body shows bare between gorgerin and girdle, the belly bulges out, dimpled by a navel which resembles a graven seal of onyx with its milky hues and its rosy finger-nail tints.
Under the brilliant rays emanating from the Precursor’s head, every facet of every jewel catches fire; the stones burn brightly, outlining the woman’s figure in flaming colours, indicating neck, legs and arms with points of light, red as burning coals, violet as jets of gas, blue as flaming alcohol, white as moonbeams.
The dreadful head glows eerily, bleeding all the while, so that clots of dark red form at the ends of hair and beard. Visible to Salome alone, it embraces in its sinister gaze neither Herodias, musing over the ultimate satisfaction of her hatred, nor the Tetrarch, who, bending forward a little with his hands on his knees, is still panting with emotion, maddened by the sight and smell of the woman’s naked body, steeped in musky scents, anointed with aromatic balms, impregnated with incense and myrrh.
Like the old King, Des Esseintes invariably felt overwhelmed, subjugated, stunned when he looked at this dancing-girl, who was less majestic, less haughty, but more seductive than the Salome of the oil-painting.
In the unfeeling and unpitying statue, in the innocent and deadly idol, the lusts and fears of common humanity had been awakened; the great lotus-blossom had disappeared, the goddess vanished; a hideous nightmare now held in its choking grip an entertainer, intoxicated by the whirling movement of the dance, a courtesan, petrified and hypnotized by terror.
Here she was a true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charms – the charms of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-house of impiety.
It was Des Esseintes’s opinion that never before, in any period, had the art of water-colour produced such brilliant hues; never before had an aquarellist’s wretched chemical pigments been able to make paper sparkle so brightly with precious stones, shine so colourfully with sunlight filtered through stained-glass windows, glitter so splendidly with sumptuous garments, glow so warmly with exquisite fleshtints.
Deep in contemplation, he would try to puzzle out the antecedents of this great artist, this mystical pagan, this illuminee who could shut out the modern world so completely as to behold, in the heart of present-day Paris, the awful visions and magical apotheoses of other ages.
Des Esseintes found it hard to say who had served as his models; here and there, he could detect vague recollections of Mantegna and Jacopo de Barbari; here and there, confused memories of Da Vinci and feverish colouring reminiscent of Delacroix. But on the whole the influence of these masters on his work was imperceptible, the truth being that Gustave Moreau was nobody’s pupil. With no real ancestors and no possible descendants, he remained a unique figure in contemporary art. Going back to the beginning of racial tradition, to the sources of mythologies whose bloody enigmas he compared and unravelled; joining and fusing in one those legends which had originated in the Middle East only to be metamorphosed by the beliefs of other peoples, he could cite these researches to justify his architectonic mixtures, his sumptuous and unexpected combinations of dress materials and his hieratic allegories whose sinister quality was heightened by the morbid perspicuity of an entirely modern sensibility. He himself remained downcast and sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman passions and superhuman perversities, of divine debauches perpetrated without enthusiasm and without hope.
His sad and scholarly works breathed a strange magic, an incantatory charm which stirred you to the depths of your being like the sorcery of certain of Baudelaire’s poems, so that you were left amazed and pensive, disconcerted by this art which crossed the frontiers of painting to borrow from the writer’s art its most subtly evocative suggestions, from the enameller’s art its most wonderfully brilliant effects, from the lapidary’s and etcher’s art its most exquisitely delicate touches. These two pictures of Salome, for which Des Esseintes’ admiration knew no bounds, lived constantly before his eyes, hung as they were on the walls of his study, on panels reserved for them between the bookcases.
But these were by no means the only pictures he had bought in order to adorn his retreat. True, none were needed for the first and only upper storey of his house, since he had given it over to his servants and did not use any of its rooms; but the ground floor by itself demanded a good many to cover its bare walls.
This ground floor was divided as follows: a dressing-room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one corner of the building; from the bedroom you went into the library, and from the library into the dining-room, which occupied another corner.
These rooms, making up one side of the house, were set in a straight line, with their windows overlooking the valley of Aunay.
The other side of the building consisted of four rooms corresponding exactly to the first four in their lay-out. Thus the corner kitchen matched the dining-room, a big entrance-hall the library, a
sort of boudoir the bedroom and the closets the dressing-room.
All these latter rooms looked out on the opposite side to the valley of Aunay, towards the Tour du Croy and Châtillon.
As for the staircase, it was built against one end of the house, on the outside, so that the noise the servants made as they pounded up and down the steps was deadened and barely reached Des Esseintes’ ears.
He had had the boudoir walls covered with bright red tapestry and all round the room he had hung ebony-framed prints by Jan Luyken,3 an old Dutch engraver who was almost unknown in France.
He possessed a whole series of studies by this artist in lugubrious fantasy and ferocious cruelty: his Religious Persecutions, a collection of appalling plates displaying all the tortures which religious fanaticism has invented, revealing all the agonizing varieties of human suffering – bodies roasted over braziers, heads scalped with swords, trepanned with nails, lacerated with saws, bowels taken out of the belly and wound on to bobbins, finger-nails slowly removed with pincers, eyes put out, eyelids pinned back, limbs dislocated and carefully broken, bones laid bare and scraped for hours with knives.
These pictures, full of abominable fancies, reeking of burnt flesh, dripping with blood, echoing with screams and curses, made Des Esseintes’s flesh creep whenever he went into the red boudoir, and he remained rooted to the spot, choking with horror.
But over and above the shudders they provoked, over and above the frightening genius of the man and the extraordinary life he put into his figures, there were to be found in his astonishing crowd-scenes, in the hosts of people he sketched with a dexterity reminiscent of Callot but with a vigour that amusing scribbler never attained, remarkable reconstructions of other places and periods: buildings, costumes and manners in the days of the Maccabees, in Rome during the persecutions of the Christians, in Spain under the Inquisition, in France during the Middle Ages and at the time of the St Bartholomew massacres and the Dragonnades, were all observed with meticulous care and depicted with wonderful skill.
These prints were mines of interesting information and could be studied for hours on end without a moment’s boredom; extremely thought-provoking as well, they often helped Des Esseintes to kill time on days when he did not feel in the mood for reading.
The story of Luyken’s life also attracted him and incidentally explained the hallucinatory character of his work. A fervent Calvinist, a fanatical sectary, a zealot for hymns and prayers, he composed and illustrated religious poems, paraphrased the Psalms in verse, and immersed himself in Biblical study, from which he would emerge haggard and enraptured, his mind haunted by bloody visions, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of the Reformation, by its songs of terror and anger.
What is more, he despised the world, and this led him to give all he possessed to the poor, living on a crust of bread himself. In the end he had put to sea with an old maid-servant who was fanatically devoted to him, landing wherever his boat came ashore, preaching the Gospel to all and sundry, trying to live without eating – a man with little or nothing to distinguish him from a lunatic or a savage.
In the larger adjoining room, the vestibule, which was panelled in cedar-wood the colour of a cigar-box, other prints, other weird drawings hung in rows along the walls.
One of these was Bresdin’s Comedy of Death.4 This depicts an improbable landscape which bristles with trees, coppices and thickets in the shape of demons or phantoms and full of birds with rats’ heads and vegetable tails. From the ground, which is littered with vertebrae, ribs and skulls, there spring gnarled and shaky willow-trees, in which skeletons are perched, waving bouquets and chanting songs of victory, while a Christ flies away into a mackerel sky; a hermit meditates, with his head in his hands, at the back of a grotto; and a beggar dies of privation and hunger, stretched out on his back, his feet pointing to a stagnant pool.
Another was The Good Samaritan by the same artist, a lithograph of a huge pen-and-ink drawing. Here the scene is a fantastic tangle of palms, service-trees and oaks, growing all together in defiance of season and climate; a patch of virgin forest packed with monkeys, owls and screech-owls, and cumbered with old tree-stumps as unshapely as mandrake roots; a magic wood with a clearing in the centre affording a distant glimpse, first of the Samaritan and the wounded man, then of a river and finally of a fairytale city climbing up to the horizon to meet a strange sky dotted with birds, flecked with foaming billows, swelling, as it were, with cloudy waves.
It looked rather like the work of a primitive or an Albert Dürer of sorts, composed under the influence of opium; but much as Des Esseintes admired the delicacy of detail and the impressive power of this plate, he paused more often in front of the other pictures that decorated the room. These were all signed Odilon Redon.5
In their narrow gold-rimmed frames of unpainted pear-wood, they contained the most fantastic of visions: a Merovingian head balanced on a cup; a bearded man with something of the bonze about him and something of the typical speaker at public meetings, touching a colossal cannon-ball with one finger; a horrible spider with a human face lodged in the middle of its body. There were other drawings which plunged even deeper into the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions. Here there was an enormous dice blinking a mournful eye; there, studies of bleak and arid landscapes, of burnt-up plains, of earth heaving and erupting into fiery clouds, into livid and stagnant skies. Sometimes Redon’s subjects actually seemed to be borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times: a monstrous flora spread over the rocks, and among the ubiquitous boulders and glacier mud-streams wandered bipeds whose apish features – the heavy jaws, the protruding brows, the receding forehead, the flattened top of the skull – recalled the head of our ancestors early in the Quaternary Period, when man was still fructivorous and speechless, a contemporary of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the cave-bear. These drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.
In fact, there were some of these faces, dominated by great wild eyes, and some of these bodies, magnified beyond measure or distorted as if seen through a carafe of water, that evoked in Des Esseintes’s mind recollections of typhoid fever, memories which had somehow stayed with him of the feverish nights and frightful nightmares of his childhood.
Overcome by an indefinable malaise at the sight of these drawings – the same sort of malaise he experienced when he looked at certain rather similar Proverbs by Goya,6 or read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, whose terrifying or hallucinating effects Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed into a different art – he would rub his eyes and turn to gaze at a radiant figure which, in the midst of all these frenzied pictures, stood out calm and serene: the figure of Melancholy, seated on some rocks before a disk-like sun, in a mournful and despondent attitude.
His gloom would then be dissipated, as if by magic; a sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take possession of his thoughts, and he would meditate for hours in front of this work, which, with its splashes of gouache amid the heavy pencil-lines, introduced a refreshing note of liquid green and pale gold into the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings.
Besides this collection of Redon’s works, covering nearly every panel in the vestibule, he had hung in his bedroom an extravagant sketch by Theotocopuli,7 a study of Christ in which the drawing was exaggerated, the colouring crude and bizarre, the general effect one of frenzied energy, an example of the painter’s second manner, when he was obsessed by the idea of avoiding any further resemblance to Titian.
This sinister picture, with its boot-polish blacks and cadaverous greens, fitted in with certain ideas Des Esseintes held on the subject of bedroom furniture and decoration.
There were, in his opinion, only two ways of arranging a bedroom: you could either make it a place for sensual pleasure, for nocturnal delectation, or else you could fit it out as a place for sleep and solitude, a sett
ing for quiet meditation, a sort of oratory.
In the first case, the Louis-Quinze style was the obvious choice for people of delicate sensibility, exhausted by mental stimulation above all else. The eighteenth century is, in fact, the only age which has known how to develop woman in a wholly depraved atmosphere, shaping its furniture on the model of her charms, imitating her passionate contortions and spasmodic convulsions in the curves and convolutions of wood and copper, spicing the sugary languor of the blonde with its bright, light furnishings, and mitigating the salty savour of the brunette with tapestries of delicate, watery, almost insipid hues.
In his Paris house he had had a bedroom decorated in just this style, and furnished with the great white lacquered bed which provides that added titillation, that final touch of depravity so precious to the experienced voluptuary, excited by the spurious chastity and hypocritical modesty of the Greuze figures, by the pretended purity of a bed of vice apparently designed for innocent children and young virgins.
In the other case – and now that he meant to break with the irritating memories of his past life, this was the only one for him – the bedroom had to be turned into a facsimile of a monastery cell. But here difficulties piled up before him, for as far as he was concerned, he categorically refused to put up with the austere ugliness that characterizes all penitential prayer-houses.
After turning the question over in his mind, he eventually came to the conclusion that what he should try to do was this: to employ cheerful means to attain a drab end, or rather, to impress on the room as a whole, treated in this way, a certain elegance and distinction, while yet preserving its essential ugliness. He decided, in fact, to reverse the optical illusion of the stage, where cheap finery plays the part of rich and costly fabrics; to achieve precisely the opposite effect, by using magnificent materials to give the impression of old rags; in short, to fit up a Trappist’s cell that would look like the genuine article, but would of course be nothing of the sort.
Against Nature Page 10
