Against The Grain by Joris Karl Huysmans
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15 AGAINST THE GRAIN
by
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Translated by John Howard
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 1
The Floressas Des Esseintes, to judge by the various portraits
preserved in the Chateau de Lourps, had originally been a family of
stalwart troopers and stern cavalry men. Closely arrayed, side by
side, in the old frames which their broad shoulders filled, they
startled one with the fixed gaze of their eyes, their fierce
moustaches and the chests whose deep curves filled the enormous shells
of their cuirasses.
These were the ancestors. There were no portraits of their descendants
and a wide breach existed in the series of the faces of this race.
Only one painting served as a link to connect the past and present--a
crafty, mysterious head with haggard and gaunt features, cheekbones
punctuated with a comma of paint, the hair overspread with pearls, a
painted neck rising stiffly from the fluted ruff.
In this representation of one of the most intimate friends of the Duc
d'Epernon and the Marquis d'O, the ravages of a sluggish and
impoverished constitution were already noticeable.
It was obvious that the decadence of this family had followed an
unvarying course. The effemination of the males had continued with
quickened tempo. As if to conclude the work of long years, the Des
Esseintes had intermarried for two centuries, using up, in such
consanguineous unions, such strength as remained.
There was only one living scion of this family which had once been so
numerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Ile-de-France
and La Brie. The Duc Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty,
with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and
delicate hands.
By a singular, atavistic reversion, the last descendant resembled the
old grandsire, from whom he had inherited the pointed, remarkably fair
beard and an ambiguous expression, at once weary and cunning.
His childhood had been an unhappy one. Menaced with scrofula and
afflicted with relentless fevers, he yet succeeded in crossing the
breakers of adolescence, thanks to fresh air and careful attention. He
grew stronger, overcame the languors of chlorosis and reached his full
development.
His mother, a tall, pale, taciturn woman, died of anaemia, and his
father of some uncertain malady. Des Esseintes was then seventeen
years of age.
He retained but a vague memory of his parents and felt neither
affection nor gratitude for them. He hardly knew his father, who
usually resided in Paris. He recalled his mother as she lay motionless
in a dim room of the Chateau de Lourps. The husband and wife would
meet on rare occasions, and he remembered those lifeless interviews
when his parents sat face to face in front of a round table faintly
lit by a lamp with a wide, low-hanging shade, for the _duchesse_ could
not endure light or sound without being seized with a fit of
nervousness. A few, halting words would be exchanged between them in
the gloom and then the indifferent _duc_ would depart to meet the
first train back to Paris.
Jean's life at the Jesuit school, where he was sent to study, was more
pleasant. At first the Fathers pampered the lad whose intelligence
astonished them. But despite their efforts, they could not induce him
to concentrate on studies requiring discipline. He nibbled at various
books and was precociously brilliant in Latin. On the contrary, he was
absolutely incapable of construing two Greek words, showed no aptitude
for living languages and promptly proved himself a dunce when obliged
to master the elements of the sciences.
His family gave him little heed. Sometimes his father visited him at
school. "How are you . . . be good . . . study hard . . . "--and he
was gone. The lad passed the summer vacations at the Chateau de
Lourps, but his presence could not seduce his mother from her
reveries. She scarcely noticed him; when she did, her gaze would rest
on him for a moment with a sad smile--and that was all. The moment
after she would again become absorbed in the artificial night with
which the heavily curtained windows enshrouded the room.
The servants were old and dull. Left to himself, the boy delved into
books on rainy days and roamed about the countryside on pleasant
afternoons.
It was his supreme delight to wander down the little valley to
Jutigny, a village planted at the foot of the hills, a tiny heap of
cottages capped with thatch strewn with tufts of sengreen and clumps
of moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he would
lie, listening to the hollow splashing of the mills and inhaling the
fresh breeze from Voulzie. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs,
to the green and black hamlet of Longueville, or climbed wind-swept
hillsides affording magnificent views. There, below to one side, as
far as the eye could reach, lay the Seine valley, blending in the
distance with the blue sky; high up, near the horizon, on the other
side, rose the churches and tower of Provins which seemed to tremble
in the golden dust of the air.
Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By
protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp,
his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form. After each vacation, Jean
returned to his masters more reflective and headstrong. These changes
did not escape them. Subtle and observant, accustomed by their
profession to plumb souls to their depths, they were fully aware of
his unresponsiveness to their teachings. They knew that this student
would never contribute to the glory of their order, and as his family
was rich and apparently careless of his future, they soon renounced
the idea of having him take up any of the professions their school
offered. Although he willingly discussed with them those theological
doctrines which intrigued his fancy by their subtleties and
hair-splittings, they did not even think of training him for the
religious orders, since, in spite of their efforts, his faith remained
languid. As a last resort, through prudence and fear of the harm he
might effect, they permitted him to pursue whatever studies pleased
him and to neglect the others, being loath to antagonize this bold and
independent spirit by the quibblings of the lay school assistants.
Thus he lived in perfect contentment, scarcely feeling the parental
yoke of the priests. He continued his Latin and French studies when
the whim seized him and, although theology did not figure in his
schedule, he finished his apprenticeship in this science, begun at the
Chateau de Lourps, in the library bequeathed by his grand-uncle, Dom
Prosper, the old prior of the regular canons of Saint-Ruf.
But soon the time came when he must quit the Jesuit institution. He
attained his majority and became master of his fortune. The Comte de
Montchevrel, his cousin and guardian, placed in his hands the title to
his wealth. There was no intimacy between them, for there was no
possible point of contact between these two men, the one young, the
other old. Impelled by curiosity, idleness or politeness, Des
Esseintes sometimes visited the Montchevrel family and spent some dull
evenings in their Rue de la Chaise mansion where the ladies, old as
antiquity itself, would gossip of quarterings of the noble arms,
heraldic moons and anachronistic ceremonies.
The men, gathered around whist tables, proved even more shallow and
insignificant than the dowagers; these descendants of ancient,
courageous knights, these last branches of feudal races, appeared to
Des Esseintes as catarrhal, crazy, old men repeating inanities and
time-worn phrases. A _fleur de lis_ seemed the sole imprint on the
soft pap of their brains.
The youth felt an unutterable pity for these mummies buried in their
elaborate hypogeums of wainscoting and grotto work, for these tedious
triflers whose eyes were forever turned towards a hazy Canaan, an
imaginary Palestine.
After a few visits with such relatives, he resolved never again to set
foot in their homes, regardless of invitations or reproaches.
Then he began to seek out the young men of his own age and set.
One group, educated like himself in religious institutions, preserved
the special marks of this training. They attended religious services,
received the sacrament on Easter, frequented the Catholic circles and
concealed as criminal their amorous escapades. For the most part, they
were unintelligent, acquiescent fops, stupid bores who had tried the
patience of their professors. Yet these professors were pleased to
have bestowed such docile, pious creatures upon society.
The other group, educated in the state colleges or in the _lycees_,
were less hypocritical and much more courageous, but they were neither
more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas
and races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortunes
on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to
brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an
overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to
him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent
reactions or excitement of nerves and blood.
He gradually forsook them to make the acquaintance of literary men, in
whom he thought he might find more interest and feel more at ease.
This, too, proved disappointing; he was revolted by their rancorous
and petty judgments, their conversation as obvious as a church door,
their dreary discussions in which they judged the value of a book by
the number of editions it had passed and by the profits acquired. At
the same time, he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of
the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might
stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans
whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.
His contempt for humanity deepened. He reached the conclusion that the
world, for the most part, was composed of scoundrels and imbeciles.
Certainly, he could not hope to discover in others aspirations and
aversions similar to his own, could not expect companionship with an
intelligence exulting in a studious decrepitude, nor anticipate
meeting a mind as keen as his among the writers and scholars.
Irritated, ill at ease and offended by the poverty of ideas given and
received, he became like those people described by Nicole--those who
are always melancholy. He would fly into a rage when he read the
patriotic and social balderdash retailed daily in the newspapers, and
would exaggerate the significance of the plaudits which a sovereign
public always reserves for works deficient in ideas and style.
Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert,
a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of
human stupidity.
A single passion, woman, might have curbed his contempt, but that,
too, had palled on him. He had taken to carnal repasts with the
eagerness of a crotchety man affected with a depraved appetite and
given to sudden hungers, whose taste is quickly dulled and surfeited.
Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavish
suppers where, at dessert, tipsy women would unfasten their clothing
and strike their heads against the tables; he had haunted the green
rooms, loved actresses and singers, endured, in addition to the
natural stupidity he had come to expect of women, the maddening vanity
of female strolling players. Finally, satiated and weary of this
monotonous extravagance and the sameness of their caresses, he had
plunged into the foul depths, hoping by the contrast of squalid misery
to revive his desires and stimulate his deadened senses.
Whatever he attempted proved vain; an unconquerable ennui oppressed
him. Yet he persisted in his excesses and returned to the perilous
embraces of accomplished mistresses. But his health failed, his
nervous system collapsed, the back of his neck grew sensitive, his
hand, still firm when it seized a heavy object, trembled when it held
a tiny glass.
The physicians whom he consulted frightened him. It was high time to
check his excesses and renounce those pursuits which were dissipating
his reserve of strength! For a while he was at peace, but his brain
soon became over-excited. Like those young girls who, in the grip of
puberty, crave coarse and vile foods, he dreamed of and practiced
perverse loves and pleasures. This was the end! As though satisfied
with having exhausted everything, as though completely surrendering to
fatigue, his senses fell into a lethargy and impotence threatened him.
He recovered, but he was lonely, tired, sobered, imploring an end to
his life which the cowardice of his flesh prevented him from
consummating.
Once more he was toying with the idea of becoming a recluse, of living
in some hushed retreat where the turmoil of life would be muffled--as
in those streets covered with straw to prevent any sound from reaching
invalids.
It was time to make up his mind. The condition of his finances
terrified him. He had spent, in acts of folly and in drinking bouts,
the greater part of his patrimony, and the remainder, invested in
land, produced a ridiculously small income.
He decided to sell the Chateau de Lourps, which he no longer visited
and where he left no memory or regret behind. He liquidated his other
holdings, bought government bonds and in this way drew an annual
interest of fifty thousand francs; in addition, he reserved a sum of
money which he meant to use in buying and furnishing the house where
he proposed to enjoy a perfect repose.
Exploring the suburbs of the capital, he found a place for sale at the
top of Fontenay-aux-Roses, in a secluded section near the fort, far
from any neighbors. His dream was realized! In this country place so
little violated by Parisians, he could be certain of seclusion. The
difficulty of reaching the place, due to an unreliable railroad
passing by at the end of the town, and to the little street cars which
came and went at irregular intervals, reassured him. He could picture
himself alone on the bluff, sufficiently far away to prevent the
Parisian throngs from reaching him, and yet near enough to the capital
to confirm him in his solitude. And he felt that in not entirely
closing the way, there was a chance that he would not be assailed by a
wish to return to society, seeing that it is only the impossible, the
unachievable that arouses desire.
He put masons to work on the house he had acquired. Then, one day,
informing no one of his plans, he quickly disposed of his old
furniture, dismissed his servants, and left without giving the
concierge any address.
Chapter 2
More than two months passed before Des Esseintes could bury himself in
the silent repose of his Fontenay abode. He was obliged to go to Paris
again, to comb the city in his search for the things he wanted to buy.
What care he took, what meditations he surrendered himself to, before
turning over his house to the upholsterers!
He had long been a connoisseur in the sincerities and evasions of
color-tones. In the days when he had entertained women at his home, he
had created a boudoir where, amid daintily carved furniture of pale,
Japanese camphor-wood, under a sort of pavillion of Indian rose-tinted
satin, the flesh would color delicately in the borrowed lights of the
silken hangings.
This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed each
other all along the walls, reflecting, as far as the eye could reach,
whole series of rose boudoirs, had been celebrated among the women who
loved to immerse their nudity in this bath of warm carnation, made
fragrant with the odor of mint emanating from the exotic wood of the
furniture.
Aside from the sensual delights for which he had designed this
chamber, this painted atmosphere which gave new color to faces grown
dull and withered by the use of ceruse and by nights of dissipation,
there were other, more personal and perverse pleasures which he
enjoyed in these languorous surroundings,--pleasures which in some way
stimulated memories of his past pains and dead ennuis.
As a souvenir of the hated days of his childhood, he had suspended
from the ceiling a small silver-wired cage where a captive cricket
sang as if in the ashes of the chimneys of the Chateau de Lourps.
Listening to the sound he had so often heard before, he lived over
again the silent evenings spent near his mother, the wretchedness of
his suffering, repressed youth. And then, while he yielded to the
voluptuousness of the woman he mechanically caressed, whose words or
laughter tore him from his revery and rudely recalled him to the
moment, to the boudoir, to reality, a tumult arose in his soul, a need
of avenging the sad years he had endured, a mad wish to sully the
recollections of his family by shameful action, a furious desire to
pant on cushions of flesh, to drain to their last dregs the most
violent of carnal vices.
On rainy autumnal days when melancholy oppressed him, when a hatred of
his home, the muddy yellow skies, the macadam clouds assailed him, he
took refuge in this retreat, set the cage lightly in motion and
watched it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until it
seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage no longer stirred, but that the
boudoir reeled and turned, filling the house with a rose-colored
waltz.
In the days when he had deemed it necessary to affect singularity, Des
Esseintes had designed marvelously strange furnishings, dividing his
salon into a series of alcoves hung with varied tapestries to relate
by a subtle analogy, by a vague harmony of joyous or sombre, delicate
or barbaric colors to the character of the Latin or French books he
loved. And he would seclude himself in turn in the particular recess
whose _decor_ seemed best to correspond with the very essence of the
work his caprice of the moment induced him to read.
He had constructed, too, a lofty high room intended for the reception
of his tradesmen. Here they were ushered in and seated alongside each
other in church pews, while from a pulpit he preached to them a sermon
on dandyism, adjuring his bootmakers and tailors implicitly to obey
his briefs in the matter of style, threatening them with pecuniary
excommunication if they failed to follow to the letter the
instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.
He acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced by
wearing costumes of white velvet, and gold-embroidered waistcoats, by
inserting, in place of a cravat, a Parma bouquet in the opening of his
shirt, by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, a
revival of the eighteenth century, celebrating the most futile of his
misadventures, was a funeral repast.
In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformed
garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with
basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, the
dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with
baskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which green
flames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.
To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude
negresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with
patterns of tears, served the guests.
Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian
rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black
pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice and
blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape
preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out
of dark glasses, wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas
and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvas
and porter and stout.
The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility--this was what he
had written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices.
But he was done with those extravagances in which he had once gloried.
Today, he was filled with a contempt for those juvenile displays, the
singular apparel, the appointments of his bizarre chambers. He
contented himself with planning, for his own pleasure, and no longer
for the astonishment of others, an interior that should be comfortable
although embellished in a rare style; with building a curious, calm
retreat to serve the needs of his future solitude.
When the Fontenay house was in readiness, fitted up by an architect
according to his plans, when all that remained was to determine the
color scheme, he again devoted himself to long speculations.
He desired colors whose expressiveness would be displayed in the
artificial light of lamps. To him it mattered not at all if they were
lifeless or crude in daylight, for it was at night that he lived,
feeling more completely alone then, feeling that only under the
protective covering of darkness did the mind grow really animated and
active. He also experienced a peculiar pleasure in being in a richly
illuminated room, the only patch of light amid the shadow-haunted,
sleeping houses. This was a form of enjoyment in which perhaps entered
an element of vanity, that peculiar pleasure known to late workers
when, drawing aside the window curtains, they perceive that everything
about them is extinguished, silent, dead.
Slowly, one by one, he selected the colors.
Blue inclines to a false green by candle light: if it is dark, like
cobalt or indigo, it turns black; if it is bright, it turns grey; if
it is soft, like turquoise, it grows feeble and faded.
There could be no question of making it the dominant note of a room
unless it were blended with some other color.
Iron grey always frowns and is heavy; pearl grey loses its blue and
changes to a muddy white; brown is lifeless and cold; as for deep
green, such as emperor or myrtle, it has the same properties as blue
and merges into black. There remained, then, the paler greens, such as
peacock, cinnabar or lacquer, but the light banishes their blues and
brings out their yellows in tones that have a false and undecided
quality.
No need to waste thought on the salmon, the maize and rose colors
whose feminine associations oppose all ideas of isolation! No need to
consider the violet which is completely neutralized at night; only the
red in it holds its ground--and what a red! a viscous red like the
lees of wine. Besides, it seemed useless to employ this color, for by
using a certain amount of santonin, he could get an effect of violet
on his hangings.
These colors disposed of, only three remained: red, orange, yellow.
Of these, he preferred orange, thus by his own example confirming the
truth of a theory which he declared had almost mathematical
correctness--the theory that a harmony exists between the sensual
nature of a truly artistic individual and the color which most vividly
impresses him.
Disregarding entirely the generality of men whose gross retinas are
capable of perceiving neither the cadence peculiar to each color nor
the mysterious charm of their nuances of light and shade; ignoring the
bourgeoisie, whose eyes are insensible to the pomp and splendor of
strong, vibrant tones; and devoting himself only to people with
sensitive pupils, refined by literature and art, he was convinced that
the eyes of those among them who dream of the ideal and demand
illusions are generally caressed by blue and its derivatives, mauve,
lilac and pearl grey, provided always that these colors remain soft
and do not overstep the bounds where they lose their personalities by
being transformed into pure violets and frank greys.
Those persons, on the contrary, who are energetic and incisive, the
plethoric, red-blooded, strong males who fling themselves unthinkingly
into the affair of the moment, generally delight in the bold gleams of
yellows and reds, the clashing cymbals of vermilions and chromes that
blind and intoxicate them.
But the eyes of enfeebled and nervous persons whose sensual appetites
crave highly seasoned foods, the eyes of hectic and over-excited
creatures have a predilection toward that irritating and morbid color
with its fictitious splendors, its acid fevers--orange.
Thus, there could be no question about Des Esseintes' choice, but
unquestionable difficulties still arose. If red and yellow are
heightened by light, the same does not always hold true of their
compound, orange, which often seems to ignite and turns to nasturtium,
to a flaming red.
He studied all their nuances by candlelight, discovering a shade
which, it seemed to him, would not lose its dominant tone, but would
stand every test required of it. These preliminaries completed, he
sought to refrain from using, for his study at least, oriental stuffs
and rugs which have become cheapened and ordinary, now that rich
merchants can easily pick them up at auctions and shops.
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