In the end, however, he recovered his balance and was able to distinguish clearly onions and cabbages in front, further off a huge patch of lettuce and at the back, all along the hedge, a row of white lilies standing motionless in the sultry air.
A smile puckered his lips, for he suddenly remembered the quaint comparison old Nicander once made, from the point of view of shape, between the pistil of a lily and the genitals of an ass, and also the passage in Albertus Magnus where that miracle-worker expounds a most peculiar method of discovering, with the aid of a lettuce, whether a girl is still a virgin.
These recollections cheered him up somewhat, and he began looking round the garden, examining the plants that had been withered by the heat and noticing how the baked earth was smoking under the scorching, dusty rays of the sun. Then, over the hedge separating the low-lying garden from the raised roadway going up to the Fort, he caught sight of a bunch of boys rolling about on the ground in the blazing sunshine.
He was fixing his attention on them when another lad appeared on the scene. He was smaller than the rest, and a really squalid specimen; his hair looked like sandy seaweed, two green bubbles hung from his nose and his lips were coated with the disgusting white mess he was eating – skim-milk cheese spread on a hunk of bread and sprinkled with chopped garlic.
Des Esseintes sniffed the air, and a depraved longing, a perverse craving took hold of him; the nauseating snack positively made his mouth water. He felt sure that his stomach, which rebelled against all normal food, would digest this frightful titbit and his palate enjoy it as much as a banquet.
He sprang to his feet, ran to the kitchen and ordered his servants to send to the village for a round loaf, some white cheese, and a little garlic, explaining that he wanted a snack exactly like the one the child was having. This done, he went back to where he had been sitting under the tree.
The lads were fighting now, snatching bits of bread from each other’s hands, ramming them into their mouths and licking their fingers afterwards. Kicks and blows fell thick and fast, and the weaker boys were knocked to the ground, where they lay thrashing about and crying as the broken stones dug into their bottoms.
The sight put new life into Des Esseintes; the interest this fight aroused in him took his mind off his own sickly condition. Faced with the savage fury of these vicious brats, he reflected on the cruel and abominable law of the struggle for life, and contemptible though these children were, he could not help feeling sorry for them and thinking it would have been better for them if their mothers had never borne them.
After all, what did their lives amount to but impetigo, colic, fevers, measles, smacks and slaps in childhood; degrading jobs with plenty of kicks and curses at thirteen or so; deceiving mistresses, foul diseases and unfaithful wives in manhood; and then, in old age, infirmities and death-agonies in workhouses or hospitals?
And the future, when you came to think of it, was the same for all, and nobody with any sense would dream of envying anybody else. For the rich, though the setting was different, it was a case of the same passions, the same worries, the same sorrows, the same diseases – and also the same paltry pleasures, whether these were alcoholic, literary or carnal. There was even a vague compensation for every sort of suffering, a kind of rough justice that restored the balance of unhappiness between the classes, granting the poor greater resistance to physical ills that wreaked worse havoc on the feebler and thinner bodies of the rich.
What madness it was to beget children, reflected Des Esseintes. And to think that the priestery, who had taken a vow of sterility, had carried inconsistency to the point of canonizing St Vincent de Paul because he saved innocent babes for useless torments!
Thanks to his odious precautions, the man had postponed for years to come the deaths of creatures devoid of thought or feeling, so that later, having acquired a little understanding and a far greater capacity for suffering, they could look into the future, could expect and dread that death whose very name had hitherto been unknown to them, could even, in some cases, call upon it to release them from the hateful life-sentence to which he had condemned them in virtue of an absurd theological code.
And since the old man’s death, his ideas had won universal acceptance; for instance, children abandoned by their mothers were given homes instead of being left to die quietly without knowing what was happening; and yet the life that was kept for them would grow harder and bleaker day by day. Similarly, under the pretext of encouraging liberty and progress, society had discovered yet another means of aggravating man’s wretched lot, by dragging him from his home, rigging him out in a ridiculous costume, putting specially designed weapons into his hands and reducing him to the same degrading slavery from which the negroes were released out of pity – and all this to put him in a position to kill his neighbour without risking the scaffold, as ordinary murderers do who operate single-handed, without uniforms and with quieter, poorer weapons.
What a peculiar age this was, Des Esseintes thought to himself, which, ostensibly in the interests of humanity, strove to perfect anaesthetics in order to do away with physical suffering, and at the same time concocted stimulants such as this to aggravate moral suffering!
Ah! if in the name of pity the futile business of procreation was ever to be abolished, the time had surely come to do it. But here again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homais1 stood in the way, ferocious and unreasonable.
Justice regarded as perfectly legitimate the tricks that were used to prevent conception; it was a recognized, acknowledged fact; there was never a couple in the land, no matter how well-to-do, that did not send its children to the wash or use devices that could be bought openly in the shops – devices nobody would ever dream of condemning. And yet, if these natural or mechanical subterfuges proved ineffectual, if the trickery failed and if to make good the failure recourse was had to more reliable methods, why then there were not prisons, jails or penitentiaries enough to accommodate the people convicted out of hand, and in all good faith, by other individuals who the same night, in the conjugal bed, used every trick they knew to avoid begetting brats of their own.
It followed that the fraud itself was not a crime, but that the attempt to make good its failure was.
In short, society regarded as a crime the act of killing a creature endowed with life; and yet expelling a foetus simply meant destroying an animal that was less developed, less alive, certainly less intelligent and less prepossessing, than a dog or a cat, which could be strangled at birth with impunity.
It should also be remarked, thought Des Esseintes, that to add to the justice of it all, it was not the unskilful operator – who generally beat a speedy retreat – but the woman in the case, the victim of his clumsiness, who paid the penalty for saving an innocent creature from the misery of life.
All the same, it was a fantastically prejudiced world that tried to outlaw operations so natural that the most primitive of men, the South Sea islander, was led to perform them by instinct alone.
Just then Des Esseintes’s man-servant interrupted these charitable reflections of his by bringing him the snack he had asked for on a silver-gilt salver. His gorge rose at the sight; he had not the courage to take even a bite at the bread, for his morbid appetite had deserted him. A dreadful feeling of debility came over him again, but he was forced to get to his feet; the sun was moving round and gradually encroaching on his patch of shadow, the heat becoming fiercer and more oppressive.
‘You see those children fighting in the road?’ he said to the man. ‘Well, throw the thing to them. And let’s hope that the weaklings are badly mauled about, that they don’t get so much as a crumb of bread, and that on top of it all they’re soundly thrashed when they get home with their breeches torn and a couple of black eyes to boot. That’ll give them a fore-taste of the sort of life they can expect!’ And he went back into the house, where he sank limply into an armchair.
‘Still, I really must see if there isn’t something I can eat,’ he muttered �
� and he tried soaking a biscuit in a glass of old J. P. Cloete Constantia, of which he still had a few bottles in his cellar.
This wine, the colour of singed onion skins, and tasting of old malaga and port, but with a sugary bouquet all its own and an after-taste of grapes whose juices have been condensed and sublimated by burning suns, had often braced him up and even given new vigour to a stomach weakened by the fasting he was forced to practise; but this time the cordial, usually so helpful, failed to have any effect.
Next, in the hope that an emollient might cool the hot irons that were burning his innards, he resorted to Nalifka, a Russian liqueur contained in a bottle covered with a dull gold glaze; but this unctuous, raspberry-flavoured syrup was just as ineffective. Alas, the time was long past when Des Esseintes, then enjoying comparatively good health, would get into a sledge he kept at home – this in the hottest period of the year – and sit there wrapped in furs that he pulled tightly round him, shivering to the best of his ability and saying through deliberately chattering teeth: ‘What an icy wind! Why, it’s freezing here, it’s freezing!’ – until he almost convinced himself that it really was cold.
Unfortunately, now that his sufferings were real, these remedies were no longer of any avail.
Nor was it any use his having recourse to laudanum; instead of acting as a sedative, it irritated his nerves and thus robbed him of his sleep. At one time he had also resorted to opium and hashish in the hope of seeing visions, but these two drugs had only brought on vomiting and violent nervous disorders; he had been obliged to stop using them at once and, without the help of these crude stimulants, to ask his brain, alone and unaided, to carry him far away from everyday life into the land of dreams.
‘What a day!’ he groaned as he mopped his neck, feeling what little strength was left in him melting away in fresh floods of perspiration. A feverish restlessness again prevented him from sitting still, so that once more he wandered from room to room, trying one chair after another. Finally, tired of walking round the house, he sank into his desk-chair, and resting his elbows on the desk, started idly and unconsciously playing with an astrolabe that was being used as a paper-weight on top of a pile of books and notes.
He had bought this instrument, which was made of engraved and gilded copper, of German workmanship and dating from the seventeenth century, in a second-hand dealer’s in Paris, after a visit he had paid to the Cluny Museum, where he had stood for hours enraptured by a wonderful astrolabe of carved ivory, whose cabbalistic appearance had captivated him.
The paper-weight stirred up in him a whole swarm of memories. Set in motion by the sight of this little curio, his thoughts went from Fontenay to Paris, to the old curiosity shop where he had bought it, then back to the Thermes Museum; and he conjured up a mental picture of the ivory astrolabe while his eyes continued to dwell, though now unseeingly, on the copper astrolabe on his desk.
Then, still in memory, he left the Museum and went for a stroll through the city streets, wandering along the Rue de Sommerard and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, turning off into the adjoining streets and stopping outside certain establishments whose multiplicity and peculiar appearance had often struck him.
Beginning with an astrolabe, this mental excursion ended up in the low taverns of the Latin Quarter.
He remembered what a tremendous number of these places there were all along the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and down the Odéon end of the Rue de Vaugirard; sometimes they stood cheek by jowl like the old riddecks2 of the Rue du Canal-aux-Harengs at Antwerp, lined up along the pavement one after the other, all looking very much alike.
Through half-open doors and windows only partially obscured by coloured panes or curtains, he could recall catching glimpses of women walking up and down, dragging their feet and sticking their necks out like so many geese; others sitting dejectedly on benches were wearing their elbows out on marble-topped tables, lost in their thoughts and singing softly to themselves, with their heads in their hands; yet others would be swaying about in front of looking-glasses, patting with their fingertips the switches of hair they had just dressed; others again would be emptying purses with broken clasps of piles of silver and copper, and methodically arranging the money in little heaps.
Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, pendulous breasts, and painted eyes, and all of them, like automata wound up at the same time with the same key, threw out the same invitations in the same tone of voice, flashed the same smiles, made the same odd remarks, the same peculiar comments.
Ideas began to link up in Des Esseintes’s mind, and he found himself coming to a definite conclusion, now that his memory had provided him, so to speak, with a bird’s-eye view of these crowded taverns and streets.
He grasped the true significance of all these cafés, realized that they corresponded to the state of mind of an entire generation and saw that they offered him a synthesis of the age.
The symptoms were indeed plain and undeniable; the licensed brothels were disappearing, and every time one of them closed its doors, a tavern opened in its place.
This diminution of official prostitution in favour of unofficial promiscuity was obviously to be accounted for by the incomprehensible illusions to which men are subject in affairs of the flesh.
Monstrous as this might appear, the tavern satisfied an ideal.
The fact was that although the utilitarian tendencies handed down by heredity, and encouraged by the precocious discourtesies and constant incivilities of school life, had made the younger generation singularly boorish and also singularly cold and materialistic, it had nonetheless kept, deep down in its heart, a little old-fashioned sentimentality, a vague, stale, old-fashioned ideal of love.
The result was that nowadays, when its blood caught fire, it could not stomach just walking in, taking its pleasure, paying the bill and walking out again. This, in its eyes, was sheer bestiality, like a dog covering a bitch without any preamble; besides, a man’s vanity obtained no sort of satisfaction in these houses of ill fame where there was no show of resistance, no semblance of victory, no hope of preferential treatment, no possibility even of obtaining liberal favours from a tradeswoman who measured out her caresses in proportion to the price paid. On the other hand, to court a girl in a tavern was to avoid wounding all these amorous susceptibilities, all these sentimental feelings. There were always several men after a girl like that, and those to whom she agreed, at a price, to grant a rendezvous, honestly imagined that they were the object of an honorary distinction, a rare favour.
Yet the staff of a tavern were every bit as stupid and mercenary, as base and depraved, as the staff of a brothel. Like the latter, they drank without being thirsty, laughed without being amused, drooled over the caresses of the filthiest workman and went for each other hammer and tongs at the slightest provocation. But in spite of everything, the young men of Paris had still not learnt that from the point of view of looks, dress and technique, the waitresses in these taverns were vastly inferior to the women cooped up in the luxurious sitting-rooms of licensed houses.
Lord, what fools they must be, Des Esseintes used to think to himself, these young chaps who hang around the beer-houses, because quite apart from their ridiculous illusions, they actually come to forget the risks involved in sampling shop-soiled goods of dubious quality, and to take no account of the money spent on a fixed number of drinks priced beforehand by the landlady, the time wasted in waiting for delivery of the goods, which are held back to raise the price, and the perpetual shillyshallying intended to start the money flowing and keep it flowing.
This idiotic sentimentality combined with ruthless commercialism clearly represented the dominant spirit of the age; these same men who would have gouged anybody’s eyes out to make a few coppers, lost all their flair and shrewdness when it came to dealing with the shifty tavern girls who harried them without pity and fleeced them without mercy. The wheels of industry turned, and families cheated one another in the name of trade, only to let themselves be robbed of m
oney by their sons, who in turn allowed themselves to be swindled by these women, who in the last resort were bled white by their own fancy men.
Over the whole of Paris, from east to west and north to south, there stretched an unbroken network of confidence tricks, a chain of organized thefts acting one upon the other – and all because, instead of being served straight away, customers were kept waiting and left to cool their heels.
The fact was that human wisdom was essentially a matter of spinning things out, of saying no first and yes later; for the best way of handling men has always been to keep putting them off.
‘Ah, if only the same were true of my stomach!’ sighed Des Esseintes, as he was suddenly doubled up with a spasm of pain that jolted his thoughts back to Fontenay from the distant regions they had been roaming.
CHAPTER 14
The next few days went by without too much trouble, thanks to various devices that were used to trick the stomach into acquiescence; but one morning the sauces which disguised the smell of fat and the aroma of blood rising from Des Esseintes’s meat proved unacceptable in themselves, and he anxiously asked himself whether his already alarming weakness was not going to get worse and force him to keep to his bed. Then, all of a sudden, a gleam of light shone through his distress: he remembered that one of his friends who had been very ill some time before had succeeded, by using a patent digester, in checking his anaemia, halting the wasting process and keeping what little strength remained in him.
He sent his man-servant off to Paris to buy one of these precious instruments, and with the help of the manufacturer’s directions, he was able to instruct his cook how to chop some roast beef up into little pieces, put it dry into the digester, add a slice of leek and one of carrot, then screw down the lid and leave the whole thing to boil in a double saucepan for four hours.
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