Against Nature (12 page)

In short, although he had no vocation for the state of grace, he was conscious of a genuine fellow-feeling for those who were shut up in religious houses, persecuted by a vindictive society that cannot forgive either the proper contempt they feel for it or their averred intention of redeeming and expiating by years of silence the ever-increasing licentiousness of its silly, senseless conversations.

Once again he could see, with surprising clearness, his friend D'Aigurande's embarrassment when he had been forced to confess to a gathering of confirmed bachelors that he had just completed the final arrangements for his wedding. There was a general outcry, and his friends tried to dissuade him with a frightening description of the horrors of sharing a bed. But it was all in vain: he had taken leave of his senses, believed that his future wife was a woman of intelligence and maintained that he had discovered in her quite exceptional qualities of tenderness and devotion.

Des Esseintes had been the only one among all these young men to encourage him in his resolve, and this he did as soon as he learnt that his friend's fiancée wanted to live on the corner of a newly constructed boulevard, in one of those modern flats built on a circular plan.

Persuaded of the merciless power of petty vexations, which can have a more baneful effect on sanguine souls than the great tragedies of life, and taking account of the fact that D'Aigurande
had no private means, while his wife's dowry was practically non-existent, he saw in this innocent whim an endless source of ridiculous misfortunes.

As he had foreseen, D'Aigurande proceeded to buy rounded pieces of furniture – console-tables sawn away at the back to form a semi-circle, curtain-poles curved like bows, carpets cut on a crescent pattern – until he had furnished the whole flat with things made to order. He spent twice as much as anybody else; and then, when his wife, finding herself short of money for new dresses, got tired of living in this rotunda, and took herself off to a flat with ordinary square rooms at a lower rent, not a single piece of furniture would fit in or stand up properly. Soon the bothersome things were giving rise to endless annoyances; the bond between husband and wife, already worn thin by the inevitable irritations of a shared life, grew more tenuous week by week; and there were angry scenes and mutual recriminations as they came to realize the impossibility of living in a sitting-room where sofas and console-tables would not go against the walls and wobbled at the slightest touch, however many blocks and wedges were used to steady them. There was not enough money to pay for alterations, and even if there had been, these would have been almost impossible to carry out. Everything became a ground for high words and squabbles, from the drawers that had stuck in the rickety furniture to the petty thefts of the maid-servant, who took advantage of the constant quarrels between her master and mistress to raid the cash-box. In short, their life became unbearable; he went out in search of amusement, while she looked to adultery to provide compensation for the drizzly dreariness of her life. Finally, by mutual consent, they cancelled their lease and petitioned for a legal separation.

‘My plan of campaign was right in every particular,' Des Esseintes had told himself on hearing the news, with the satisfaction of a strategist whose manoeuvres, worked out long beforehand, have resulted in victory.

Now, sitting by his fireside and thinking about the break-up of this couple whose union he had encouraged with his good advice, he threw a fresh armful of wood into the hearth and promptly started dreaming again.

More memories, belonging to the same order of ideas, now came crowding in on him.

Some years ago, he remembered he had been walking along the Rue de Rivoli one evening, when he had come across a young scamp of sixteen or so, a peaky-faced, sharp-eyed child, as attractive in his way as any girl. He was sucking hard at a cigarette, the paper of which had burst where bits of the coarse tobacco were poking through. Cursing away, the boy was striking kitchen matches on his thigh; not one of them would light and soon he had used them all up. Catching sight of Des Esseintes, who was standing watching him, he came up, touched his cap and politely asked for a light. Des Esseintes offered him some of his own scented Dubèques, got into conversation with the boy and persuaded him to tell the story of his life.

Nothing could have been more banal: his name was Auguste Langlois, he worked for a cardboard-manufacturer, he had lost his mother and his father beat him black and blue.

Des Esseintes listened thoughtfully.

‘Come and have a drink,' he said, and took him to a café where he regaled him with a few glasses of heady punch. These the boy drank without a word.

‘Look here,' said Des Esseintes suddenly; ‘how would you like a bit of fun tonight? I'll foot the bill, of course.' And he had taken the youngster off to an establishment on the third floor of a house in the Rue Mosnier, where a certain Madame Laure kept an assortment of pretty girls in a series of crimson cubicles furnished with circular mirrors, couches and wash-basins.

There a wonderstruck Auguste, twisting his cap in his hands, had stood gaping at a battalion of women whose painted mouths opened all together to exclaim:

‘What a duck! Isn't he sweet!'

‘But dearie, you're not old enough,' said a big brunette, a girl with prominent eyes and a hook nose who occupied at Madame Laure's the indispensable position of the handsome Jewess.

Meanwhile Des Esseintes, who was obviously quite at home in this place, had made himself comfortable and was quietly chatting with the mistress of the house. But he broke off for a moment to speak to the boy.

‘Don't be so scared, stupid,' he said. ‘Go on, take your pick – remember this is on me.'

He gave a gentle push to the lad, who flopped on to a divan between two of the women. At a sign from Madame Laure, they drew a little closer together, covering Auguste's knees with their peignoirs and cuddling up to him so that he breathed in the warm, heady scent of their powdered shoulders. He was sitting quite still now, flushed and dry-mouthed, his downcast eyes darting from under their lashes inquisitive glances that were all directed at the upper part of the girls' thighs.

Vanda, the handsome Jewess, suddenly gave him a kiss and a little good advice, telling him to do whatever his parents told him, while all the time her hands were wandering over the boy's body; his expression changed and he lay back in a kind of swoon, with his head on her breast.

‘So it's not on your own account that you've come here tonight,' said Madame Laure to Des Esseintes. ‘But where the devil did you get hold of that baby?' she added, as Auguste disappeared with the handsome Jewess.

‘Why, in the street, my dear.'

‘But you're not tight,' muttered the old lady. Then, after a moment's thought, she gave an understanding, motherly smile.

‘Ah, now I see! You rascal, so you like'em young, do you?'

Des Esseintes shrugged his shoulders.

‘No, you're wide of the mark there,' he said; ‘very wide of the mark. The truth is that I'm simply trying to make a murderer of the boy. See if you can follow my line of argument. The lad's a virgin and he's reached the age where the blood starts coming to the boil. He could, of course, just run after the little girls of his neighbourhood, stay decent and still have his bit of fun, enjoy his little share of the tedious happiness open to the poor. But by bringing him here, by plunging him into luxury such as he's never known and will never forget, and by giving him the same treat every fortnight, I hope to get him into the habit of these pleasures which he can't afford. Assuming that it will take three months for them to become absolutely indispensable to him – and by spacing them out as I do, I avoid the risk of jading his appetite – well, at the end of those three months, I stop the
little allowance I'm going to pay you in advance for being nice to the boy. And to get the money to pay for his visits here, he'll turn burglar, he'll do anything if it helps him on to one of your divans in one of your gaslit rooms.

‘Looking on the bright side of things, I hope that, one fine day, he'll kill the gentleman who turns up unexpectedly just as he's breaking open his desk. On that day my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white.'

The woman gazed at him with open-eyed amazement.

‘Ah, there you are!' he exclaimed, as he caught sight of Auguste sneaking back into the room, all red and sheepish, and hiding behind his Jewess. ‘Come on, my boy, it's getting late. Say good night to the ladies.'

Going downstairs, he explained to him that once a fortnight he could pay a visit to Madame Laure's without spending a sou. And then as they stood outside on the pavement, he looked the bewildered child in the face and said:

‘We shan't see each other again. Hurry off home to your father, whose hand must be itching for work to do, and remember this almost evangelic dictum: Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.'

‘Good night, sir.'

‘One other thing. Whatever you do, show a little gratitude for what I've done for you, and let me know as soon as you can how you're getting on – preferably through the columns of the Police Gazette.'

Now, sitting by the fire and stirring the glowing embers, he muttered to himself:

‘The little Judas! To think that I've never once seen his name in the papers! It's true, of course, that I haven't been able to play a close game, in that I couldn't guard against certain obvious contingencies – the danger of old mother Laure swindling me, pocketing the money and not delivering the goods; the chance of one of the women taking a fancy to Auguste, so that when his three months were up she let him have his fun on the nod; and even the possibility that the handsome Jewess's exotic
vices had already scared the boy, who may have been too young and impatient to bear her slow preliminaries or enjoy her savage climaxes. So unless he's been up against the law since I came to Fontenay and stopped reading the papers, I've been diddled.'

He got to his feet and took a few turns round the room.

‘That would be a pity, all the same,' he went on, ‘because all I was doing was parabolizing secular instruction, allegorizing universal education, which is well on the way to turning everybody into a Langlois: instead of permanently and mercifully putting out the eyes of the poor, it does its best to force them wide open, so that they may see all around them lives of less merit and greater comfort, pleasures that are keener and more voluptuous, and therefore sweeter and more desirable.

‘And the fact is,' he added, following this line of thought still further, ‘the fact is that, pain being one of the consequences of education, in that it grows greater and sharper with the growth of ideas, it follows that the more we try to polish the minds and refine the nervous systems of the under-privileged, the more we shall be developing in their hearts the atrociously active germs of hatred and moral suffering.'

The lamps were smoking. He turned them up and looked at his watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. He lit a cigarette and gave himself up again to the perusal, interrupted by his dreaming, of the old Latin poem,
De Laude Castitatis
, written in the reign of Gondebald by Avitus, Metropolitan Bishop of Vienne.
¹

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.

He had to live on himself, to feed on his own substance, like those animals that lie torpid in a hole all winter. Solitude had acted on his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a languor haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively submitted, without even trying to get away.

The confused mass of reading and meditation on artistic themes that he had accumulated since he had been on his own like a barrage to hold back the current of old memories, had suddenly been carried away, and the flood was let loose, sweeping away the present and the future, submerging everything under the waters of the past, covering his mind with a great expanse of melancholy, on the surface of which there drifted, like ridiculous bits of flotsam, trivial episodes of his existence, absurdly insignificant incidents.

The book he happened to be holding would fall into his lap, and he would give himself up to a fearful and disgusted review of his dead life, the years pivoting round the memory of Auguste and Madame Laure as around a solid fact, a stake planted in the midst of swirling waters. What a time that had been! – a
time of elegant parties, of race-meetings and card-games, of love-potions ordered in advance and served punctually on the stroke of midnight in his pink boudoir! Faces, looks, meaningless words came back to him with the haunting persistence of those popular tunes you suddenly find yourself humming and just as suddenly and unconsciously you forget.

This phase lasted only a little while and then his memory took a siesta. He took advantage of this respite to immerse himself once more in his Latin studies, in the hope of effacing every sign, every trace of these recollections. But it was too late to call a halt; a second phase followed almost immediately on the first, a phase dominated by memories of his youth, and particularly the years he had spent with the Jesuit Fathers.

These memories were of a more distant period, yet they were clearer than the others, engraved more deeply and enduringly in his mind; the thickly wooded park, the long paths, the flower-beds, the benches – all the material details were conjured up before him.

Then the gardens filled up, and he heard the shouting of the boys at play, and the laughter of their masters as they joined in, playing tennis with their cassocks hitched up in front, or else chatting with their pupils under the trees without the slightest affectation or pomposity, just as if they were talking to friends of their own age.

He recalled that paternal discipline which deprecated any form of punishment, declined to inflict impositions of five hundred or a thousand lines, was content with having unsatisfactory work done over again while the others were at recreation, resorted more often than not to a mere reprimand and kept the child under active but affectionate surveillance, forever trying to please him, agreeing to whatever walks he suggested on Wednesday afternoons, seizing the opportunity afforded by all the minor feast-days of the Church to add cakes and wine to the ordinary bill of fare or to organize a picnic in the country – a discipline which consisted of reasoning with the pupil instead of brutalizing him, already treating him like a grown man yet still coddling him like a spoilt child.

In this way the Fathers managed to gain a real hold upon their
pupils, to mould to some extent the minds they cultivated, to guide them in certain specific directions, to inculcate particular notions and to ensure the desired development of their ideas by means of an insinuating, ingratiating technique which they continued to apply in after-years, doing their best to keep track of their charges in adult life, backing them up in their careers and writing them affectionate letters such as the Dominican Lacordaire wrote to his former pupils at Sorrèze.
¹

Des Esseintes was well aware of the sort of conditioning to which he had been subjected, but he felt sure that in his case it had been without effect. In the first place, his captious and inquisitive character, his refractory and disputatious nature had saved him from being moulded by the good Fathers' discipline or indoctrinated by their lessons. Then, once he had left school, his scepticism had grown more acute; his experience of the narrow-minded intolerance of Legitimist society, and his conversations with unintelligent churchwardens and uncouth priests whose blunders tore away the veil the Jesuits had so cunningly woven, had still further fortified his spirit of independence and increased his distrust of any and every form of religious belief.

He considered, in fact, that he had shaken off all his old ties and fetters, and that he differed from the products of
lycées
and lay boarding-schools in only one respect, namely that he retained pleasant memories of his school and his schoolmasters. And yet, now that he examined his conscience, he began to wonder whether the seed which had fallen on apparently barren ground was not showing signs of germinating.

As a matter of fact, for some days he had been in an indescribably peculiar state of mind. For a brief instant he would believe, and turn instinctively to religion; then, after a moment's thought, his longing for faith would vanish, though he remained perplexed and uneasy.

Yet he was well aware, on looking into his heart, that he could never feel the humility and contrition of a true Christian; he knew beyond all doubt that the moment of which Lacordaire speaks, that moment of grace ‘when the last ray of light enters the soul and draws together to a common centre all the truths
that lie scattered therein', would never come for him. He felt nothing of that hunger for mortification and prayer without which, if we are to believe the majority of priests, no conversion is possible; nor did he feel any desire to invoke a God whose mercy struck him as extremely problematical. At the same time the affection he still had for his old masters led him to take an interest in their works and doctrines; and the recollection of those inimitable accents of conviction, the passionate voices of those highly intelligent men, made him doubt the quality and strength of his own intellect. The lonely existence he was leading, with no fresh food for thought, no novel experiences, no replenishment of ideas, no exchange of impressions received from the outside world, from mixing with other people and sharing in their life, this unnatural isolation which he stubbornly maintained, encouraged the re-emergence in the form of irritating problems of all manner of questions he had disregarded when he was living in Paris.

Reading the Latin works he loved, works almost all written by bishops and monks, had doubtless done something to bring on this crisis. Steeped in a monastic atmosphere and intoxicated by the fumes of incense, he had become over-excited, and by a natural association of ideas, these books had ended up by driving back the recollections of his life as a young man and bringing out his memories of the years he had spent as a boy with the Jesuit Fathers.

‘There's no doubt about it,' Des Esseintes said to himself, after a searching attempt to discover how the Jesuit element had worked its way to the surface at Fontenay; ‘ever since boyhood, and without my knowing it, I've had this leaven inside me, ready to ferment; the taste I've always had for religious objects may be proof of this.'

However, he tried his hardest to persuade himself of the contrary, annoyed at finding that he was no longer master in his own house. Hunting for more acceptable explanations of his ecclesiastical predilections, he told himself he had been obliged to turn to the Church, in that the Church was the only body to have preserved the art of past centuries, the lost beauty of the ages. She had kept unchanged, even in shoddy modern
reproductions, the goldsmiths' traditional forms; preserved the charm of chalices as slender as petunias, of pyxes simply and exquisitely styled; retained, even in aluminium, in fake enamel, in coloured glass, the grace of the patterns of olden days. Indeed, most of the precious objects which were kept in the Cluny Museum, and which by some miracle had escaped the bestial savagery of the sansculottes, came from the old abbeys of France. Just as in the Middle Ages the Church saved philosophy, history and literature from barbarism, so she had safeguarded the plastic arts and brought down to modern times those marvellous examples of costume and jewellery which present-day ecclesiastical furnishers did their best to spoil, though they could never quite succeed in destroying the original qualities of form and style. There was therefore no cause for surprise in the fact that he had hunted eagerly for these antique curios, and that like many another collector he had bought relics of this sort from Paris antiquaries and country dealers.

But however much he dwelt on these motives, he could not quite manage to convince himself. It was true that, after careful thought, he still regarded the Christian religion as a superb legend; a magnificent imposture; and yet, in spite of all his excuses and explanations, his scepticism was beginning to crack.

Odd as it might seem, the fact remained that he was not as self-confident now as in his youth, when the Jesuits' supervision had been direct and their teaching inescapable, when he had been entirely in their hands, belonging to them body and soul, without any family ties or outside influences to counteract their ascendancy. What is more, they had implanted in him a certain taste for things supernatural which had slowly and imperceptibly taken root in his soul, was now blossoming out in these secluded conditions, and was inevitably having an effect on his silent mind, tied to the treadmill of certain fixed ideas.

By dint of examining his thought-processes, of trying to join together the threads of his ideas and trace them back to their sources, he came to the conclusion that his activities in the course of his social life had all originated in the education he had received. Thus his penchant for artificiality and his love of eccentricity could surely be explained as the results of
sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties, semi-theological speculations; fundamentally, they were ardent aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.

He pulled himself up short, and broke this chain of reflections.

‘Come, now,' he told himself angrily. ‘I've got it worse than I thought: here I am arguing with myself like a casuist.'

He remained pensive, troubled by a nagging fear. Obviously, if Lacordaire's theory was correct, he had nothing to worry about, seeing that the magic of conversion was not worked at a single stroke; to produce the explosion the ground had to be patiently and thoroughly mined. But if the novelists talked about love at first sight, there were also a number of theologians who spoke of conversion as of something equally sudden and overwhelming. Supposing that they were right, it followed that nobody could be sure he would never succumb. There was no longer any point in practising self-analysis, paying attention to presentiments or taking preventive measures: the psychology of mysticism was non-existent. Things happened because they happened, and that was the end of it.

‘Dammit, I'm going crazy,' Des Esseintes said to himself. ‘My dread of the disease will bring on the disease itself if I keep this up.'

He managed to shake off this fear to some extent, and his memories of boyhood faded away; but other morbid symptoms supervened. Now it was the subjects of theological disputations that haunted him to the exclusion of everything else. The school garden, the lessons, the Jesuits might never have been, his mind was so completely dominated by abstractions; in spite of himself, he began pondering over some of the contradictory interpretations of dogma and the long-forgotten apostasies recorded in Father Labbe's work on the Councils of the Church. Odd scraps of these schisms and heresies, which for centuries had divided the Western and Eastern Churches, came back to mind. Here, for instance, was Nestorius denying Mary's right to the title of Mother of God because, in the mystery of the Incarnation, it was not the God but the man she had carried in her womb; and
there was Eutyches maintaining that Christ could not have looked like other men, since the Godhead had elected domicile in his body and had thereby changed his nature utterly and completely. Then there were some other quibblers asserting that the Redeemer had had no body at all and that references to his body in the Holy Books should be understood figuratively; Tertullian could be heard positing his famous quasi-materialistic axiom: ‘Anything which lacks a body does not exist; everything which exists has a body of its own'; and finally that hoary old question debated year after year came up again: ‘Was Christ alone nailed to the cross, or did the Trinity, one in three persons, suffer in its triple hypostasis on the gibbet of Calvary?' All these problems teased and tormented him; and automatically, as if he were repeating a lesson he had learnt by heart, he kept asking himself the questions and responding with the answers.

For several days in succession, his brain was a seething mass of paradoxes and sophisms, a tangle of split hairs, a maze of rules as complicated as the clauses of a law, open to every conceivable interpretation and every kind of quibble, and leading up to a system of celestial jurisprudence of positively baroque subtlety. Then these abstract obsessions left him, and a whole series of plastic impressions took their place, under the influence of the Gustave Moreau pictures hanging on the walls.

He saw a procession of prelates passing before his eyes, a line of archimandrites and patriarchs lifting their golden arms to bless the kneeling multitudes, or wagging their white beards as they read or prayed aloud; he saw silent penitents filing into crypts; he saw great cathedrals rising up with white-robed monks thundering from their pulpits. Just as De Quincey,
²
after a dose of opium, had only to hear the words ‘Consul Romanus' to conjure up whole pages of Livy, to see the consuls coming forward in solemn procession or witness the Roman legions moving off in pompous array, so Des Esseintes would be left gasping with amazement as some theological expression evoked visions of surging multitudes and episcopal figures silhouetted against the fiery windows of their basilicas. Apparitions like these kept him entranced, hurrying in imagination from age to age, and coming down at last to the religious ceremonies of
modern times, to the accompaniment of endless waves of music, mournful and tender.