Chapter VIII · Front preview, printed pp. ix–xi
Horticulturalists are the only true artists…
Once alone, he surveyed this tide of vegetation breaking across his vestibule; they mingled one with another, crossing their swords, their krises, their lance-heads, forming a sheaf of green weapons above which floated, like barbarous pennants, flowers of blinding and harsh hue.
The air of the room grew rarefied; soon, in the obscurity of a corner, close to the floor, a light crept, white and soft. He reached it and perceived that these were Rhizomorphs which, in breathing, cast this nightlight glow.
"These plants are quite simply stupefying," he said to himself; then he stepped back and took in the whole mass at a single glance: his aim was achieved; not one of them seemed real; cloth, paper, porcelain, metal, appeared to have been lent by man to nature to allow her to create her monsters. When she had been unable to imitate human handiwork, she had been reduced to copying the internal membranes of animals, to borrowing the vivid tints of their putrefying flesh, the magnificent hideousness of their gangrene.
"It is true," continued des Esseintes, returning to the starting point of his reasoning, "it is true that most of the time nature is, on her own, incapable of engendering species so unwholesome and so perverse; she furnishes the raw material, the germ and the soil, the nourishing matrix and the elements of the plant, which man then raises, models, paints, sculpts to suit his will.
"However stubborn, however confused, however dull-witted she may be, she has submitted at last, and her master has succeeded in changing by chemical reactions the substances of the earth, in making use of combinations long ripened, of crossings slowly contrived, of methodical cuttings, of skillful grafts — and now he makes her produce flowers of different colors upon the same branch, invents new hues for her, modifies at will the age-old form of her plants, rough-hews the blocks, finishes the sketches, stamps them with his hallmark, impresses upon them his seal of art.
"There is no getting around it," he concluded, summing up his reflections; "man can, in a few years, bring about a selection that the lazy nature of things can never produce except after centuries; decidedly, as things stand, the horticulturalists are the only true artists."
He was a little weary, and he was stifling in this atmosphere of enclosed plants; the excursions he had undertaken these past few days had worn him out; the passage between open air and the warmth of the house, between the immobility of a cloistered life and the activity of a liberated existence, had been too abrupt; he left his vestibule and went to lie down upon his bed; but, absorbed by a single subject, as though wound by a spring, his mind, though asleep, continued to unwind its chain, and soon he tumbled into the somber delirium of a nightmare.
He found himself in the middle of a path through deep woods, at twilight; he was walking beside a woman he had never known nor seen; she was gaunt, with tow-colored hair, a bulldog face, freckles on her cheeks, and crooked teeth jutting forward beneath a snub nose. She wore the white apron of a servant, a long fichu crossed in bandolier fashion over her breast, half-boots of a Prussian soldier, a black bonnet trimmed with ruffles and adorned with a rosette. She had the look of a fairground woman, the appearance of a circus saltimbanque.
He asked himself who this woman was, whom he felt to have entered, to have been implanted for a long time already in his intimacy and in his life; he sought in vain her origin, her name, her calling, her reason for being; no memory came back to him of this inexplicable yet undeniable liaison.
He was still ransacking his memory when, suddenly, a strange figure appeared before them on horseback, trotted for a minute, and turned in the saddle.
At that, his blood ran cold and he stood rooted to the spot in horror. This ambiguous, sexless figure was green, and it opened, within violet eyelids, eyes of a cold and terrible clear blue; pustules surrounded its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, skeleton arms, bare to the elbows, emerged from ragged sleeves, trembling with fever, and the fleshless thighs shivered inside bucket-top boots, far too large.
The dreadful gaze fastened upon des Esseintes, penetrated him, froze him to the marrow; more frantic still, the bulldog woman pressed against him and howled like a dog at death's door, her head thrown back upon her rigid neck.
And at once he understood the meaning of the appalling vision. Before his eyes stood the image of the Great Pox.
Buy the paperback →Chapter IX · Front preview, printed pp. xiii–xv
Salacious preludes the Church condemns…
His ennui became boundless; the joy of possessing his stupendous floral displays had dried up; he was already jaded by their texture and their hues; then, despite the care he lavished upon them, most of his plants withered.
To distract himself and kill the interminable hours, he turned to his portfolios of prints and set about arranging his Goyas; the first states of certain plates from the Caprichos, proofs recognizable by their reddish tone, formerly bought at auction for their weight in gold, lifted his spirits, and he lost himself in them, following the fantasies of the painter, entranced by his vertiginous scenes, his witches astride cats, his women straining to wrench the teeth from a hanged man, his bandits, his succubi, his demons, and his dwarfs.
Goya's savage verve, his harsh and frenzied talent, held him fast; but the universal admiration his works had won put him off nonetheless, and he had renounced, years since, having them framed, for fear that by displaying them the first imbecile to come along would think it necessary to discharge his asininities and rapturize, in a manner entirely rehearsed, before them.
It was the same with his Rembrandts, which he examined from time to time on the sly; and indeed, if the finest melody in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, once the public takes to humming it, once the barrel organs seize upon it, the work of art that does not remain indifferent to false artists, that is not disputed by fools, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of a few, becomes, it too, by that very fact, for the initiate, polluted, banal, well-nigh repulsive.
This promiscuity of admiration was, moreover, one of the greatest sorrows of his life; incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him paintings and books formerly dear; confronted with the approval of the multitude, he would end by detecting imperceptible flaws in them, and he rejected them, wondering whether his nose was not losing its point, was not duping itself.
He closed up his portfolios and, once more, fell disoriented into spleen. In order to change the course of his thoughts, he tried emollient reading, attempted, with a view to refrigerating the brain, the solanaceae of art — read those books so charming to convalescents and the unwell, whom more tetanic works, richer in phosphates, would fatigue: the novels of Dickens.
But these volumes produced an effect contrary to the one he had expected: those chaste lovers, those Protestant heroines, buttoned to the chin, who loved one another among the stars, who contented themselves with lowering their eyes, blushing, weeping for happiness, while pressing each other's hands. At once this exaggeration of purity flung him into the opposite excess; by virtue of the law of contrasts, he leapt from one extreme to the other, recalled vibrant and full-bodied scenes, thought of human practices between couples, of mingled kisses, of columbine kisses, as ecclesiastical modesty designates them when they penetrate between the lips.
He broke off his reading, ruminated far from prudish England upon libertine peccadilloes, upon the salacious preludes that the Church condemns; a jolt struck him; the anaphrodisia of his brain and body, which he had believed definitive, dissolved; solitude acted once more upon the derangement of his nerves; he was obsessed yet again, not by religion itself but by the malice of the acts and sins it condemns; the habitual subject of its execrations and its threats alone held him; the carnal side, insensible for months, first stirred up by the nervous irritation of pious readings, then roused and set on its feet in a crisis of neurosis by English cant, reared up, and the stimulation of his senses carrying him backward, he floundered in the memory of his old cesspools.
He rose and, melancholically, opened a small vermeil box whose lid was strewn with aventurines. It was filled with violet bonbons; he took one and fingered it, thinking of the strange properties of this praline sweet, frosted as though with sugar; formerly, when his impotence was an established fact, when too he thought, without bitterness, without regret, without fresh desire, of women, he would place one of these bonbons on his tongue, let it melt, and suddenly there rose, with an infinite gentleness, very faint, very languishing recollections of old debaucheries.
These sweets, invented by Siraudin and designated by the ridiculous appellation of "Perles des Pyrénées," were a drop of sarcanthus perfume, a drop of feminine essence, crystallized in a morsel of sugar; they penetrated the papillae of the mouth, evoked memories of water opalescent with rare vinegars, of very deep kisses saturated with scent.
Ordinarily, he smiled, inhaling this amorous aroma, this shadow of caresses that laid a corner of nakedness in his brain and revived, for a second, the once-adored savor of certain women; today, they no longer acted in an undertone, no longer confined themselves to reviving the image of distant and confused disorders; they tore, on the contrary, the veils asunder, flung before his eyes the corporeal reality, pressing and brutal.
At the head of the procession of mistresses that the flavor of this bonbon helped to draw in certain strokes, one halted, displaying long white teeth, a satiny skin all rosy, a nose cut on the bias, the eyes of a mouse, hair cropped à la chien and blond. It was Miss Urania, an American, with a body well-proportioned, with sinewy legs, with muscles of steel, with arms of cast iron. She had been one of the most renowned acrobats of the Circus.
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