He gave up drinking spirits, coffee and tea, put himself on a milk diet, tried applying cold water to his body, stuffed himself with asafoetida, valerian and quinine. He even went so far as to leave the house and go for strolls in the country, where the rainy weather had established peace and quiet, forcing himself to keep walking and take exercise. As a last resort, he laid aside his books for the time being; and the result was such surpassing boredom that he decided to occupy the idle hours with carrying out a project he had put off time and again since coming to Fontenay, partly out of laziness and partly out of dislike of the trouble involved.
No longer able to intoxicate himself afresh with the magical charms of style, to thrill to the delicious sorcery of the unusual epithet which, while retaining all its precision, opens up infinite perspectives to the imagination of the initiate, he made up his mind to complete the interior decoration of his thebaid by filling it with costly hothouse flowers, and so provide himself with a material occupation that would distract his thoughts, soothe his nerves and rest his brain. He also hoped that the sight of their strange and splendid colours would compensate him to some extent for the loss of those real or fancied nuances of style which, on account of his literary dieting, he would now have to forget for a little while or for ever.
CHAPTER 8
Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers, but this passion of his, which at Jutigny had originally embraced all flowers without distinction of species or genus, had finally become more discriminating, limiting itself to a single caste.
For a long time now he had despised the common, everyday varieties that blossom on the Paris market-stalls, in wet flower-pots, under green awnings or red umbrellas.
At the same time that his literary tastes and artistic preferences had become more refined, recognizing only such works as had been sifted and distilled by subtle and tormented minds, and at the same time that his distaste for accepted ideas had hardened into disgust, his love of flowers had rid itself of its residuum, its lees, had been clarified, so to speak, and purified.
It amused him to liken a horticulturist’s shop to a microcosm in which every social category and class was represented – poor, vulgar slum-flowers, the gilliflower for instance, that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots; then pretentious, conventional, stupid flowers such as the rose, whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies; and lastly, flowers of charm and tremulous delicacy, exotic flowers exiled to Paris and kept warm in palaces of glass, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or the bourgeois blooms.1
Now, he could not help feeling a certain interest, a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks; on the other hand, he loathed those that go with the cream-and-gold drawing-rooms in new houses; he kept his admiration, in fact, for the rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves.
But this deliberate choice he had made of hothouse flowers had itself been modified under the influence of his general ideas, of the definite conclusions he had now arrived at on all matters. In former days, in Paris, his inborn taste for the artificial had led him to neglect the real flower for its copy, faithfully and almost miraculously executed in indiarubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and velvet.
As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists, following Nature step by step, repeating her processes, taking the flower from its birth, leading it to maturity, imitating it even to its death, noting the most indefinable nuances, the most fleeting aspects of its awakening or its sleep, observing the pose of its petals, blown back by the wind or crumpled up by the rain, sprinkling its unfolding corolla with dewdrops of gum and adapting its appearance to the time of year – in full bloom when branches are bent under the weight of sap, or with a shrivelled cupula and a withered stem when petals are dropping off and leaves are falling.
This admirable artistry had long enthralled him, but now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.2
He applied his mind to this problem, but did not have to search for long or go far afield, seeing that his house was in the very heart of the district which had attracted all the great flower-growers. He went straight off to visit the hothouses of Châtillon and the valley of Aunay, coming home tired out and cleaned out, wonder-struck at the floral follies he had seen, thinking of nothing but the varieties he had bought, haunted all the while by memories of bizarre and magnificient blooms.
Two days later the wagons arrived. List in hand, Des Esseintes called the roll, checking his purchases one by one.
First of all the gardeners unloaded from their carts a collection of Caladiums, whose swollen, hairy stems supported huge heart-shaped leaves; though they kept a general air of kinship, no two of them were alike.
There were some remarkable specimens – some a pinkish colour like the Virginale, which seemed to have been cut out of oilskin or sticking-plaster; some all white like the Albane, which looked as if it had been fashioned out of the pleura of an ox or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Others, especially the one called Madame Mame, seemed to be simulating zinc, parodying bits of punched metal coloured emperor green and spattered with drops of oil-paint, streaks of red lead and white. Here, there were plants like the Bosphorus giving the illusion of starched calico spotted with crimson and myrtle green; there, others such as the Aurora Borealis flaunted leaves the colour of raw meat, with dark-red ribs and purplish fibrils, puffy leaves that seemed to be sweating blood and wine.
Between them, the Albane and Aurora Borealis represented the two temperamental extremes, apoplexy and chlorosis, in this particular family of plants.
The gardeners brought in still more varieties, this time affecting the appearance of a factitious skin covered with a network of counterfeit veins. Most of them, as if ravaged by syphilis or leprosy, displayed livid patches of flesh mottled with roseola, damasked with dartre; others had the bright pink colour of a scar that is healing or the brown tint of a scab that is forming; others seemed to have been puffed up by cauteries, blistered by burns; others again revealed hairy surfaces pitted with ulcers and embossed with chancres; and last of all there were some which appeared to be covered with dressings of various sorts, coated with black mercurial lard, plastered with green belladonna ointment, dusted over with the yellow flakes of iodoform powder.
Gathered together, these sickly blooms struck Des Esseintes as even more monstrous than when he had first come upon them, mixed up with others like hospital patients inside the glass walls of their conservatory wards.
‘Sapristi!’ he exclaimed, in an access of enthusiasm.
Another plant, of a type similar to the Caladiums, the Alocasia Metallica, roused him to still greater admiration. Covered with a coat of greenish bronze shot with glints of silver, it was the supreme masterpiece of artifice; anyone would have taken it for a bit of stove-pipe cut into a pike-head pattern by the makers.
Next the men unloaded several bunches of lozenge-shaped leaves, bottle-green in colour; from the midst of each bunch rose a stiff stem on top of which trembled a great ace of hearts, as glossy as a pepper; and then, as if in defiance of all the familiar aspects of plant life, there sprang from the middle of this bright vermilion heart a fleshy, downy tail, all white and yellow, straight in some cases, corkscrewing above the heart like a pig’s tail in others.
This was the Anthurium, an aroid recently imported from Colombia; it belonged to a section of the same family as a certain Amorphophallus, a plant from Cochin-China with leaves the shape of fish-slices and long black stalks crisscrossed with scars like the limbs of a negro slave.
Des Esseintes could scarcely contain himself for joy.
Now they were getting a fresh batch of monstrosities down from the carts – the Echinopsis, thrusting its ghastly pink blossoms out of cotton-wool compresses, like the stumps of amputated limbs; the Nidularium, opening its sword-shaped petals to reveal gaping flesh-wounds; the Tillandsia Lindeni, trailing its jagged plough-shares the colour of wine-must; and the Cypripedium, with its complex, incoherent contours devised by some demented draughtsman. It looked rather like a clog or a tidy, and on top was a human tongue bent back with the string stretched tight, just as you may see it depicted in the plates of medical works dealing with diseases of the throat and mouth; two little wings, of a jujube red, which might almost have been borrowed from a child’s toy windmill, completed this baroque combination of the underside of a tongue, the colour of wine lees and slate, and a glossy pocket-case with a lining that oozed drops of viscous paste.
He could not take his eyes off this unlikely-looking orchid from India, and the gardeners, irritated by all these delays, began reading out themselves the labels stuck in the pots they were bringing in.
Des Esseintes watched them open-mouthed, listening in amazement to the forbidding names of the various herbaceous plants – the Encephalartos horridus, a gigantic artichoke, an iron spike painted a rust colour, like the ones they put on park gates to keep trespassers from climbing over; the Cocos Micania, a sort of palm-tree, with a slim, indented stem, surrounded on all sides with tall leaves like paddles and oars; the Zamia Lehmanni, a huge pineapple, a monumental Cheshire cheese stuck in heath-mould and bristling on top with barbed javelins and native arrows; and the Cibotium Spectabile, challenging comparison with the weirdest nightmare and out-doing even its congeners in the craziness of its formation, with an enormous orang-outang’s tail poking out of a cluster of palm-leaves – a brown, hairy tail twisted at the tip into the shape of a bishop’s crozier.
But he did not linger over these plants, as he was waiting impatiently for the series which particularly fascinated him, those vegetable ghouls the carnivorous plants – the downy-rimmed Fly-trap of the Antilles, with its digestive secretions and its curved spikes that interlock to form a grille over any insect it imprisons; the Drosera of the peat-bogs, flaunting a set of glandulous hairs; the Sarracena and the Cephalothus, opening voracious gullets capable of consuming and digesting whole chunks of meat; and finally the Nepenthes, which in shape and form passes all the bounds of eccentricity.
With unwearying delight he turned in his hands the pot in which this floral extravaganza was quivering. It resembled the gum-tree in its long leaves of a dark, metallic green; but from the end of each leaf there hung a green string, an umbilical cord carrying a greenish-coloured pitcher dappled with purple markings, a sort of German pipe in porcelain, a peculiar kind of bird’s nest that swayed gently to and fro, displaying an interior carpeted with hairs.
‘That really is a beauty,’ murmured Des Esseintes.
But he had to cut short his display of pleasure, for now the gardeners, in a hurry to get away, were rapidly unloading the last of their plants, jumbling up tuberous Begonias and black Crotons flecked with spots of red lead like old iron.
Then he noticed that there was still one name left on his list, the Cattleya of New Granada. They pointed out to him a little winged bell-flower of a pale lilac, an almost imperceptible mauve; he went up, put his nose to it and started back – for it gave out a smell of varnished deal, a toy-box smell that brought back horrid memories of New Year’s Day when he was a child. He decided he had better be wary of it, and almost regretted having admitted among all the scentless plants he possessed this orchid with its unpleasantly reminiscent odour.
Once he was alone again, he surveyed the great tide of vegetation that had flooded into his entrance-hall, the various species all intermingling, crossing swords, creeses or spears with one another, forming a mass of green weapons, over which floated, like barbarian battle-flags, flowers of crude and dazzling colours.
The air in the room was getting purer, and soon, in a dark corner, down by the floor, a soft white light appeared. He went up to it and discovered that it came from a clump of Rhizomorphs which, as they breathed, shone like tiny night-lights.
‘These plants are really astounding,’ he said to himself, stepping back to appraise the entire collection. Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible to imitate the work of human hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes of animals’ organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin.
‘It all comes down to syphilis in the end,’3 Des Esseintes reflected, as his gaze was drawn and held by the horrible markings of the Caladiums, over which a shaft of daylight was playing. And he had a sudden vision of the unceasing torments inflicted on humanity by the virus of distant ages. Ever since the beginning of the world, from generation to generation, all living creatures had handed down the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting disease that ravaged the ancestors of man and even ate into the bones of the old fossils that were being dug up at the present time.
Without ever abating, it had travelled down the ages, still raging to this day in the form of surreptitious pains, in the disguise of headaches or bronchitis, hysteria or gout. From time to time it came to the surface, generally singling out for attack ill-to-do, ill-fed people, breaking out in spots like pieces of gold, ironically crowning the poor devils with an almeh’s diadem of sequins, adding insult to injury by stamping their skin with the very symbol of wealth and well-being.
And now here it was again, reappearing in all its pristine splendour on the brightly coloured leaves of these plants!
‘It is true,’ continued Des Esseintes, going back to the starting point of his argument, ‘it is true that most of the time Nature is incapable of producing such depraved, unhealthy species alone and unaided; she supplies the raw materials, the seed and the soil, the nourishing womb and the elements of the plant, which man rears, shapes, paints and carves afterwards to suit his fancy.
‘Stubborn, muddle-headed and narrow-minded though she is, she has at last submitted, and her master has succeeded in changing the soil components by means of chemical reactions, in utilizing slowly matured combinations, carefully elaborated crossings, in employing cuttings and graftings skilfully and methodically, so that now he can make her put forth blossoms of different colours on the same branch, invents new hues for her, and modifies at will the age-old shapes of her plants. In short, he rough-hews her blocks of stone, finishes off her sketches, signs them with his stamp, impresses on them his artistic hall-mark.
‘There’s no denying it,’ he concluded; ‘in the course of a few years man can operate a selection which easy-going Nature could not conceivably make in less than a few centuries; without the shadow of a doubt, the horticulturists are the only true artists left to us nowadays.’
He was a little tired and felt stifled in this hothouse atmosphere; all the outings he had had in the last few days had exhausted him; the transition between the immobility of a sequestered life and the activity of an outdoor existence had been too sudden. He left the hall and went to lie down on his bed; but, engrossed in a single subject, as if wound up by a spring, his mind went on paying out its chain even in sleep, and he soon fell victim to the sombre fantasies of a nightmare.
He was walking along the middle of a path through a forest at dusk, beside a woman he had never met, never even seen before. She was tall and thin, with tow-like hair, a bulldog face, freckled cheeks, irregular teeth projecting under a snub nose; she was wearing a maid’s white apron, a long scarlet kerchief draped across her breast, a Prussian soldier’s half-boots, a black bonnet trimmed with ruches and a cabbage-bow.
She looked rather like a booth-keeper at a fair, or a member of some travelling circus.
He was still searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared before them on horseback, went ahead for a minute at a gentle trot, then turned round in the saddle.
His blood froze and he stood rooted to the spot in utter horror. The rider was an equivocal, sexless creature with a green skin and terrifying eyes of a cold, clear blue shining out from under purple lids; there were pustules all round its mouth; two amazingly thin arms, like the arms of a skeleton, bare to the elbows and shaking with fever, projected from its ragged sleeves, and its fleshless thighs twitched and shuddered in jack-boots that were far too wide for them.
Its awful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, piercing him, freezing him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, even more terrified than he was, clung to him and howled blue murder, her head thrown back and her neck rigid.
At once he understood the meaning of the dreadful vision. He had before his eyes the image of the Pox.
Utterly panic-stricken, beside himself with fear, he dashed down a side path and ran for dear life until he got to a summerhouse standing on the left among some laburnums. Safely inside, he dropped into a chair in the passage.
Against Nature Page 13
