Là-bas

by J.-K. Huysmans

  CHAPTER II

  Nearly two years ago Durtal had ceased to associate with men of letters.They were represented in books and in the book-chat columns of magazinesas forming an aristocracy which had a monopoly on intelligence. Theirconversation, if one believed what one read, sparkled with effervescentand stimulating wit. Durtal had difficulty accounting to himself for thepersistence of this illusion. His sad experience led him to believe thatevery literary man belonged to one of two classes, the thoroughlycommercial or the utterly impossible.

  The first consisted of writers spoiled by the public, and drained dry inconsequence, but "successful." Ravenous for notice they aped the ways ofthe world of big business, delighted in gala dinners, gave formalevening parties, spoke of copyrights, sales, and long run plays, andmade great display of wealth.

  The second consisted of cafe loafers, "bohemians." Rolling on thebenches, gorged with beer they feigned an exaggerated modesty and at thesame time cried their wares, aired their genius, and abused theirbetters.

  There was now no place where one could meet a few artists and privately,intimately, discuss ideas at ease. One was at the mercy of the cafecrowd or the drawing-room company. One's interlocutor was listeningavidly to steal one's ideas, and behind one's back one was beingvituperated. And the women were always intruding.

  In this indiscriminate world there was no illuminating criticism,nothing but small talk, elegant or inelegant.

  Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate withthieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he brokeoff relations with his confreres.

  He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation withthem. Formerly when he accepted naturalism--airtight and unsatisfactoryas it was--he had been able to argue esthetics with them, but now!

  "The point is," Des Hermies was always telling him, "that there is abasic difference between you and the other realists, and no patched-upalliance could possibly be of long duration. You execrate the age andthey worship it. There is the whole matter. You were fated some day toget away from this Americanized art and attempt to create something lessvulgar, less miserably commonplace, and infuse a little spiritualityinto it.

  "In all your books you have fallen on our _fin de siecle_--our _queue dusiecle_--tooth and nail. But, Lord! a man soon gets tired of whackingsomething that doesn't fight back but merely goes its own way repeatingits offences. You needed to escape into another epoch and get yourbearings while waiting for a congenial subject to present itself. Thatexplains your spiritual disarray of the last few months and yourimmediate recovery as soon as you stumbled onto Giles de Rais."

  Des Hermies had diagnosed him accurately. The day on which Durtal hadplunged into the frightful and delightful latter mediaeval age had beenthe dawn of a new existence. The flouting of his actual surroundingsbrought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely reorganized hislife, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of contemporaryletters, in the chateau de Tiffauges with the monster Bluebeard, withwhom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous amity.

  Thus history had for Durtal supplanted the novel, whose forced banality,conventionality, and tidy structure of plot simply griped him. Yethistory, too, was only a peg for a man of talent to hang style andideas on, for events could not fail to be coloured by the temperamentand distorted by the bias of the historian.

  As for the documents and sources! Well attested as they might be, theywere all subject to revision, even to contradiction by others exhumedlater which were no less authentic than the first and which also butwaited their turn to be refuted by newer discoveries.

  In the present rage for grubbing around in dusty archives writing ofhistory served as an outlet for the pedantry of the moles who reworkedtheir mouldy findings and were duly rewarded by the Institute withmedals and diplomas.

  For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the mostinfantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with asphinx's head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnetswhich babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out whenthey took a tumble.

  Of course exactitude was impossible. Why should he dream of getting atthe whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able to givea full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that matter? Thebest he could do was to imagine himself in the midst of creatures ofthat other epoch, wearing their antique garb, thinking their thoughts,and then, having saturated himself with their spirit, to convey hisillusion by means of adroitly selected details.

  That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous oldgossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance andecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expandedbeyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinismsometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he wasnevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitationof time and made another age live anew before our eyes.

  Hysterical, garrulous, manneristic as he was, there was yet a truly epicsweep in certain passages of his History of France. The personages wereraised from the oblivion into which the dry-as-dust professors had sunkthem, and became live human beings. What matter, then, if Michelet wasthe least trustworthy of historians since he was the most personal andthe most evocative?

  As for the others, they simply ferreted around among the old statepapers, clipped them, and, following M. Taine's example, arranged,ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence,rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they weretrying to make. They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm andclaimed that they did not invent. True enough, but they did none theless distort history by the selection they employed. And how simply andsummarily they disposed of things! It was discovered that such and suchan event occurred in France in several communities, and straightway itwas decided that the whole country lived, acted, and thought in acertain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a certain year.

  No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked hisvision. They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as farfrom creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles ofmodern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.

  And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers. The depilators!taking all the hair off a real man's chest. They wrote ponderous tomesto prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villonand shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but aninn sign. Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as apriggishly honest and judicious man. One would say that in writing theirmonographs these historians feared to dishonour themselves by treatingof artists who had tasted somewhat fully and passionately of life. Hencethe expurgation of masterpieces that an artist might appear ascommonplace a bourgeois as his commentator.

  This rehabilitation school, today all-powerful, exasperated Durtal. Inwriting his study of Gilles de Rais he was not going to fall into theerror of these bigoted sustainers of middle-class morality. With hisideas of history he could not claim to give an exact likeness ofBluebeard, but he was not going to concede to the public taste formediocrity in well-and evil-doing by whitewashing the man.

  Durtal's material for this study consisted of: a copy of the memorialaddressed by the heirs of Gilles de Rais to the king, notes taken fromthe several true copies at Paris of the proceedings in the criminaltrial at Nantes, extracts from Vallet de Viriville's history of CharlesVII, finally the _Notice_ by Armand Gueraut and the biography of theabbe Bossard. These sufficed to bring before Durtal's eyes theformidable figure of that Satanic fifteenth century character who wasthe most artistically, exquisitely cruel, and the most scoundrelly ofmen.

  No one knew of the projected study but Des Hermies, whom Durtal sawnearly every day.

  They had met in the strangest of homes, that of Chantelouve, theCatholic historian, who boasted of receiving all classes of people. Andevery week in the so
cial season that drawing-room in the rue de Bagneuxwas the scene of a heterogeneous gathering of under sacristans, cafepoets, journalists, actresses, partisans of the cause of Naundorff,[1]and dabblers in equivocal sciences.

  [Footnote 1: A watchmaker who at the time of the July monarchy attemptedto pass himself off for Louis XVII.]

  This salon was on the edge of the clerical world, and many religiouscame here at the risk of their reputations. The dinners werediscriminately, if unconventionally, ordered. Chantelouve, rotund,jovial, bade everyone make himself at home. Now and then through hissmoked spectacles there stole an ambiguous look which might have givenan analyst pause, but the man's bonhomie, quite ecclesiastical, wasinstantly disarming. Madame was no beauty, but possessed a certainbizarre charm and was always surrounded. She, however, remained silentand did nothing to encourage her voluble admirers. As void of prudery asher husband, she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughtsevidently afar, to the boldest of conversational imprudences.

  At one of these evening parties, while La Rousseil, recently converted,howled a hymn, Durtal, sitting in a corner having a quiet smoke, hadbeen struck by the physiognomy and bearing of Des Hermies, who stood outsharply from the motley throng of defrocked priests and grubby poetspacked into Chantelouve's library and drawing-room.

  Among these smirking and carefully composed faces, Des Hermies,evidently a man of forceful individuality, seemed, and probably felt,singularly out of place. He was tall, slender, somewhat pale. His eyes,narrowed in a frown, had the cold blue gleam of sapphires. The nose wasshort and sharp, the cheeks smooth shaven. With his flaxen hair andVandyke he might have been a Norwegian or an Englishman in not very goodhealth. His garments were of London make, and the long, tight,wasp-waisted coat, buttoned clear up to the neck, seemed to enclose himlike a box. Very careful of his person, he had a manner all his own ofdrawing off his gloves, rolling them up with an almost inaudiblecrackling, then seating himself, crossing his long, thin legs, andleaning over to the right, reaching into the patch pocket on his leftside and bringing forth the embossed Japanese pouch which contained histobacco and cigarette papers.

  He was methodic, guarded, and very cold in the presence of strangers.His superior and somewhat bored attitude, not exactly relieved by hiscurt, dry laugh, awakened, at a first meeting, a serious antipathy whichhe sometimes justified by venomous words, by meaningless silences, byunspoken innuendoes. He was respected and feared at Chantelouve's, butwhen one came to know him one found, beneath his defensive shell, greatwarmth of heart and a capacity for true friendship of the kind that isnot expansive but is capable of sacrifice and can always be relied upon.

  How did he live? Was he rich or just comfortable? No one knew, and he,tight lipped, never spoke of his affairs. He was doctor of the Facultyof Paris--Durtal had chanced to see his diploma--but he spoke ofmedicine with great disdain. He said he had become convinced of thefutility of all he had been taught, and had thrown it over forhomeopathy, which in turn he had thrown over for a Bolognese system, andthis last he was now excoriating.

  There were times when Durtal could not doubt that his friend was anauthor, for Des Hermies spoke understandingly of tricks of the tradewhich one learns only after long experience, and his literary judgmentwas not that of a layman. When, one day, Durtal reproached him forconcealing his productions, he replied with a certain melancholy, "No, Icaught myself in time to choke down a base instinct, the desire ofresaying what has been said. I could have plagiarized Flaubert as wellas, if not better than, the poll parrots who are doing it, but I decidednot to. I would rather phrase abstruse medicaments of rare application;perhaps it is not very necessary, but at least it isn't cheap."

  What surprised Durtal was his friend's prodigious erudition. Des Hermieshad the run of the most out-of-the-way book shops, he was an authorityon antique customs and, at the same time, on the latest scientificdiscoveries. He hobnobbed with all the freaks in Paris, and from them hebecame deeply learned in the most diverse and hostile sciences. He, socold and correct, was almost never to be found save in the company ofastrologers, cabbalists, demonologists, alchemists, theologians, orinventors.

  Weary of the advances and the facile intimacies of artists, Durtal hadbeen attracted by this man's fastidious reserve. It was perfectlynatural that Durtal, surfeited with skin-deep friendships, should feeldrawn to Des Hermies, but it was difficult to imagine why Des Hermies,with his taste for strange associations, should take a liking toDurtal, who was the soberest, steadiest, most normal of men. Perhaps DesHermies felt the need of talking with a sane human being now and then asa relief. And, too, the literary discussions which he loved were out ofthe question with these addlepates who monologued indefatigably on thesubject of their monomania and their ego.

  At odds, like Durtal, with his confreres, Des Hermies could expectnothing from the physicians, whom he avoided, nor from the specialistswith whom he consorted.

  As a matter of fact there had been a juncture of two beings whosesituation was almost identical. At first restrained and on thedefensive, they had come finally to _tu-toi_ each other and establish arelation which had been a great advantage to Durtal. His family weredead, the friends of his youth married and scattered, and since hiswithdrawal from the world of letters he had been reduced to completesolitude. Des Hermies kept him from going stale and then, finding thatDurtal had not lost all interest in mankind, promised to introduce himto a really lovable old character. Of this man Des Hermies spoke much,and one day he said, "You really ought to know him. He likes the booksof yours which I have lent him, and he wants to meet you. You think I aminterested only in obscure and twisted natures. Well, you will findCarhaix really unique. He is the one Catholic with intelligence andwithout sanctimoniousness; the one poor man with envy and hatred fornone."