Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  To the amazement of a packed audience that was half-frightened by what it heard, she took a set of cardboard puppets perched on chairs like a row of Pandean pipes and gave a voice to each in turn; she conversed with dummies that seemed almost alive, while in the auditorium itself flies could be heard buzzing around and the silent spectators noisily whispering among themselves; finally, she had a line of non-existent carriages rolling up the room from the door to the stage, and passing so close to the audience that they instinctively started back and were momentarily surprised to find themselves sitting indoors.

  Des Esseintes had been fascinated, and a whole crop of new ideas sprouted in his brain. First of all he lost no time in firing off a broadside of banknotes to subjugate the ventriloquist, who attracted him by the very fact of the contrast she presented to the American girl. The brunette reeked of skilfully contrived scents, heady and unhealthy perfumes, and she burned like the crater of a volcano. In spite of all his subterfuges, Des Esseintes had worn himself out in a few hours; yet he none the less allowed her to go on fleecing him, for it was not so much the woman as the artiste that appealed to him. Besides, the plans he had in view were ripe for execution, and he decided it was time to carry out a hitherto impracticable project.

  One night he had a miniature sphinx brought in, carved in black marble and couched in the classic pose, its paws stretched out and its head held rigidly upright, together with a chimera in coloured terra-cotta, flaunting a bristling mane, darting ferocious glances from its eyes and lashing flanks as swollen as a blacksmith’s bellows with its tail. He placed one of these mythical beasts at either end of the bedroom and put out the lamps, leaving only the red embers glowing in the hearth, to shed a dim light that would exaggerate the size of objects almost submerged in the semi-darkness. This done, he lay down on the bed beside the ventriloquist, whose set face was lit up by the glow of a half-burned log, and waited.

  With strange intonations that he had made her rehearse beforehand for hours, she gave life and voice to the monsters, without so much as moving her lips, without even looking in their direction.

  There and then, in the silence of the night, began the marvellous dialogue of the Chimera and the Sphinx,4 spoken in deep, guttural voices, now raucous, now piercingly clear, like voices from another world.

  ‘Here, Chimera, stop!’

  ‘No, that I will never do.’

  Spellbound by Flaubert’s wonderful prose, he listened in breathless awe to the terrifying duet, shuddering from head to foot when the Chimera pronounced the solemn and magical sentence:

  ‘I seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untasted.’

  Ah! it was to him that this voice, as mysterious as an incantation, was addressed; it was to him that it spoke of the feverish desire for the unknown, the unsatisfied longing for an ideal, the craving to escape from the horrible realities of life, to cross the frontiers of thought, to grope after a certainty, albeit without finding one, in the misty upper regions of art! The paltriness of his own efforts was borne in upon him and cut him to the heart. He clasped the woman beside him in a gentle embrace, clinging to her like a child wanting to be comforted, never even noticing the sullen expression of the actress forced to play a scene, to practise her profession, at home, in her leisure moments, far from the footlights.

  Their liaison continued, but before long Des Esseintes’s sexual fiascos became more frequent; the effervescence of his mind could no longer melt the ice in his body, his nerves would no longer heed the commands of his will, and he was obsessed by the lecherous vagaries common in old men. Feeling more and more doubtful of his sexual powers when he was with this mistress of his, he had recourse to the most effective adjuvant known to old and undependable voluptuaries – fear.

  As he lay holding the woman in his arms, a husky, drunken voice would roar from behind the door:

  ‘Open up, damn you! I know you’ve got a cully in there with you! But just you wait a minute, you slut, and you’ll get what’s coming to you!’

  Straight away, like those lechers who are stimulated by the fear of being caught flagrante delicto in the open air, on the river bank, in the Tuileries Gardens, in a public lavatory or on a park bench, he would temporarily recover his powers and hurl himself upon the ventriloquist, whose voice went blustering on outside the room. He derived extraordinary pleasure from this panic-stricken hurry of a man running a risk, interrupted and hustled in his fornication.

  Unfortunately these special performances soon came to an end; in spite of the fantastic fees he paid her, the ventriloquist sent him packing, and the very same night gave herself to a fellow with less complicated whims and more reliable loins.

  Des Esseintes had been sorry to lose her, and the memory of her artifices made other women seem insipid; even the corrupt graces of depraved children appeared tame in comparison, and he came to feel such contempt for their monotonous grimaces that he could not bring himself to tolerate them any longer.

  Brooding over these disappointments one day as he was walking by himself along the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg, he was accosted near the Invalides by a youth who asked him which was the quickest way to get to the Rue de Babylone. Des Esseintes showed him which road to take, and as he was crossing the esplanades too, they set off together.

  The young fellow’s voice, as with unreasonable persistence he asked for fuller instructions – ‘So you think if I went to the left it would take longer; but I was told that if I cut across the Avenue I’d get there sooner’ – was both timid and appealing, very low and very gentle.

  Des Esseintes ran his eyes over him.5 He looked as though he had just left school, and was poorly clad in a little cheviot jacket too tight round the hips and barely reaching below the small of the back, a pair of close-fitting black breeches, a turn-down collar and a flowing cravat, dark-blue with thin white stripes, tied in a loose bow. In his hand he was carrying a stiff-backed school-book, and on his head was perched a brown, flat-brimmed bowler.

  The face was somewhat disconcerting; pale and drawn, with fairly regular features topped by long black hair, it was lit up by two great liquid eyes, ringed with blue and set close to the nose, which was dotted with a few golden freckles; the mouth was small, but spoilt by fleshy lips with a line dividing them in the middle like a cherry.

  They gazed at each other for a moment; then the young man dropped his eyes and came closer, brushing his companion’s arm with his own. Des Esseintes slackened his pace, taking thoughtful note of the youth’s mincing walk.

  From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful friendship that somehow lasted several months. Des Esseintes could not think of it now without a shudder; never had he submitted to more delightful or more stringent exploitation, never had he run such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress.

  Among the memories that visited him in his solitude, the recollection of this mutual attachment dominated all the rest. All the leaven of insanity that a brain over-stimulated by neurosis can contain was fermenting within him; and in his pleasurable contemplation of these memories, in his morose delectation, as the theologians call this recurrence of past iniquities, he added to the physical visions spiritual lusts kindled by his former readings of what such casuists as Busenbaum and Diana, Liguori and Sanchez had to say about sins against the sixth and ninth commandments.

  While implanting an extra-human ideal in this soul of his, which it had thoroughly impregnated and which a hereditary tendency dating from the reign of Henri III had possibly preconditioned, the Christian religion had also instilled an unlawful ideal of voluptuous pleasure; licentious and mystical obsessions merged together to haunt his brain, which was affected with a stubborn longing to escape the vulgarities of life and, ignoring the dictates of consecrated custom, to plunge into new and original ecstasies, into paroxysms celestial or accursed, but equally exhausting in the waste of phosphorus they involved.

  At present, when he came out of one of these reveries, he fel
t worn out, completely shattered, half dead; and he promptly lit all the candles and lamps, flooding the room with light, imagining that like this he would hear less distinctly than in the dark the dull, persistent, unbearable drum-beat of his arteries, pounding away under the skin of his neck.

  CHAPTER 10

  In the course of that peculiar malady which ravages effete, enfeebled races, the crises are succeeded by sudden intervals of calm. Though he could not understand why, Des Esseintes awoke one fine morning feeling quite fit and well; no hacking cough, no wedges being hammered into the back of his neck, but instead an ineffable sensation of well-being; his head had cleared and his thoughts too, which had been dull and opaque but were now turning bright and iridescent, like delicately coloured soap-bubbles.

  This state of affairs lasted some days; then all of a sudden, one afternoon, hallucinations of the sense of smell began to affect him.

  Noticing a strong scent of frangipane in the room, he looked to see if a bottle of the perfume was lying about unstoppered, but there was nothing of the sort to be seen. He went into his study, then into the dining-room; the smell went with him.

  He rang for his servant.

  ‘Can’t you smell something?’ he asked.

  The man sniffed and said that he smelt nothing unusual. There was no doubt about it: his nervous trouble had returned in the form of a new sort of sensual illusion.

  Irritated by the persistence of this imaginary aroma, he decided to steep himself in some real perfumes, hoping that this nasal homoeopathy might cure him or at least reduce the strength of the importunate frangipane.

  He went into his dressing-room. There, beside an ancient font that he used as a wash-basin, and under a long looking-glass in a wrought-iron frame that held the mirror imprisoned like still green water inside the moon-silvered curb-stone of a well, bottles of all shapes and sizes were ranged in rows on ivory shelves.

  He placed them on a table and divided them into two categories: first, the simple perfumes, in other words the pure spirits and extracts; and secondly, the compound scents known by the generic name of bouquets.

  Sinking into an armchair, he gave himself up to his thoughts.

  For years now he had been an expert in the science of perfumes;1 he maintained that the sense of smell could procure pleasures equal to those obtained through sight or hearing, each of the senses being capable, by virtue of a natural aptitude supplemented by an erudite education, of perceiving new impressions, magnifying these tenfold and co-ordinating them to compose the whole that constitutes a work of art. After all, he argued, it was no more abnormal to have an art that consisted of picking out odorous fluids than it was to have other arts based on a selection of sound waves or the impact of variously coloured rays on the retina of the eye; only, just as no one, without a special intuitive faculty developed by study, could distinguish a painting by a great master from a paltry daub, or a Beethoven theme from a tune by Clapisson, so no one, without a preliminary initiation, could help confusing at first a bouquet created by a true artist with a potpourri concocted by a manufacturer for sale in grocers’ shops and cheap bazaars.

  One aspect of this art of perfumery had fascinated him more than any other, and that was the degree of accuracy it was possible to reach in imitating the real thing.

  Hardly ever, in fact, are perfumes produced from the flowers whose names they bear; and any artist foolish enough to take his raw materials from Nature alone would get only a hybrid result, lacking both conviction and distinction, for the very good reason that the essence obtained by distillation from the flower itself cannot possibly offer more than a very distant, very vulgar analogy with the real aroma of the living flower, rooted in the ground and spreading its effluvia through the open air.

  Consequently, with the solitary exception of the inimitable jasmine, which admits of no counterfeit, no likeness, no approximation even, all the flowers in existence are represented to perfection by combinations of alcoholates and essences, extracting from the model its distinctive personality and adding that little something, that extra tang, that heady savour, that rare touch which makes a work of art.

  In short, the artist in perfumery completes the original natural odour, which, so to speak, he cuts and mounts as a jeweller improves and brings out the water of a precious stone.

  Little by little the arcana of this art, the most neglected of them all, had been revealed to Des Esseintes, who could now decipher its complex language that was as subtle as any human tongue, yet wonderfully concise under its apparent vagueness and ambiguity.

  To do this he had first had to master the grammar, to understand the syntax of smells, to get a firm grasp on the rules that govern them, and, once he was familiar with this dialect, to compare the works of the great masters, the Atkinsons and Lubins, the Chardins and Violets, the Legrands and Piesses, to analyse the construction of their sentences, to weigh the proportion of their words, to measure the arrangement of their periods.

  The next stage in his study of this idiom of essences had been to let experience come to the aid of theories that were too often incomplete and commonplace.

  Classical perfumery was indeed little diversified, practically colourless, invariably cast in a mould fashioned by chemists of olden times; it was still drivelling away, still clinging to its old alembics, when the Romantic epoch dawned and, no less than the other arts, modified it, rejuvenated it, made it more malleable and more supple.

  Its history followed that of the French language step by step. The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period – orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water – was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blasé, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and maréchale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier2 and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered new intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians,3 the vulgar distillers of its poems.

  But the language of scents had not remained stationary since the 1830 epoch. It had continued to develop, had followed the march of the century, had advanced side-by-side with the other arts. Like them, it had adapted itself to the whims of artists and connoisseurs, joining in the cult of things Chinese and Japanese, inventing scented albums, imitating the flower-posies of Takeoka, mingling lavender and clove to produce the perfume of the Rondeletia, marrying patchouli and camphor to obtain the singular aroma of China ink, combining citron, clove and neroli to arrive at the odour of the Japanese Hovenia.

  Des Esseintes studied and analysed the spirit of these compounds and worked on an interpretation of these texts; for his own personal pleasure and satisfaction he took to playing the psychologist, to dismantling the mechanism of a work and reassembling it, to unscrewing the separate pieces forming the structure of a composite odour, and as a result of these operations his sense of smell had acquired an almost infallible flair.

  Just as a wine-merchant can recognize a vintage from the taste of a single drop; just as a hop-dealer, the moment he sniffs at a sack, can fix the precise value of the contents; just as a Chinese trader can tell at once the place of origin of the t
eas he has to examine, can say on what estate in the Bohea hills or in what Buddhist monastery each sample was grown and when the leaves were picked, can state precisely the degree of torrefaction involved and the effect produced on the tea by contact with plum blossom, with the Aglaia, with the Olea fragrans, indeed with any of the perfumes used to modify its flavour, to give it an unexpected piquancy, to improve its somewhat dry smell with a whiff of fresh and foreign flowers; so Des Esseintes, after one brief sniff at a scent, could promptly detail the amounts of its constituents, explain the psychology of its composition, perhaps even give the name of the artist who created it and marked it with the personal stamp of his style.

  It goes without saying that he possessed a collection of all the products used by perfumers; he even had some of the genuine Balsam of Mecca, a balm so rare that it can be obtained only in certain regions of Arabia Petraea and remains a monopoly of the Grand Turk.

  Sitting now at his dressing-room table, he was toying with the idea of creating a new bouquet when he was afflicted with that sudden hesitation so familiar to writers who, after months of idleness, make ready to embark on a new work.

  Like Balzac, who was haunted by an absolute compulsion to blacken reams of paper in order to get his hand in, Des Esseintes felt that he ought to get back into practice with a few elementary exercises. He thought of making some heliotrope and picked up two bottles of almond and vanilla; then he changed his mind and decided to try sweet pea instead.

  The relevant formula and working method escaped his memory, so that he had to proceed by trial and error. He knew, of course, that in the fragrance of this particular flower, orange-blossom was the dominant element; and after trying various combinations he finally hit on the right tone by mixing the orange-blossom with tuberose and rose, binding the three together with a drop of vanilla.