Against Nature (16 page)

Now, in the midst of the revivified effluvia of linden-trees
and meadow flowers, he sprinkled a few drops of the perfume ‘New-mown Hay', and on the magic spot momentarily stripped of its lilacs there rose piles of hay, bringing a new season with them, spreading summer about them in these delicate emanations.

Finally, when he had sufficiently savoured this spectacle, he frantically scattered exotic perfumes around him, emptied his vaporizers, quickened all his concentrated essences and gave free rein to all his balms, with the result that the suffocating room was suddenly filled with an insanely sublimated vegetation, emitting powerful exhalations, impregnating an artificial breeze with raging alcoholates – an unnatural yet charming vegetation, paradoxically uniting tropical spices such as the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthorn and vervain; defying climate and season to put forth trees of different smells and flowers of the most divergent colours and fragrances; creating out of the union or collision of all these tones one common perfume, unnamed, unexpected, unusual, in which there reappeared, like a persistent refrain, the decorative phrase he had started with, the smell of the great meadow and the swaying lilacs and linden-trees.

All of a sudden he felt a sharp stab of pain, as if a drill were boring into his temples. He opened his eyes, to find himself back in the middle of his dressing-room, sitting at his table; he got up and, still in a daze, stumbled across to the window, which he pushed ajar. A gust of air blew in and freshened up the stifling atmosphere that enveloped him. He walked up and down to steady his legs, and as he went to and fro he looked up at the ceiling, on which crabs and salt-encrusted seaweed stood out in relief against a grained background as yellow as the sand on a beach. A similar design adorned the plinths bordering the wall panels, which in their turn were covered with Japanese crape, a watery green in colour and slightly crumpled to imitate the surface of a river rippling in the wind, while down the gentle current floated a rose petal round which there twisted and turned a swarm of little fishes sketched in with a couple of strokes of the pen.

But his eyes were still heavy, and so he stopped pacing the short distance between font and bath and leaned his elbows on the window-sill. Soon his head cleared, and after carefully putting the stoppers back in all his scent-bottles, he took the opportunity to tidy up his cosmetic preparations. He had not touched these things since his arrival at Fontenay, and he was almost surprised to see once again this collection to which so many women had had recourse. Phials and jars were piled on top of each other in utter confusion. Here was a box of green porcelain containing schnouda, that marvellous white cream which, once it is spread on the cheeks, changes under the influence of the air to a delicate pink, then to a flesh colour so natural that it produces an entirely convincing illusion of a flushed complexion; there, lacquered jars inlaid with mother-of-pearl held Japanese gold and Athens green the colour of a blisterfly's wing, golds and greens that turn dark crimson as soon as they are moistened. And beside pots of filbert paste, of harem serkis, of Kashmir-lily emulsions, of strawberry and elderberry lotions for the skin, next to little bottles full of China-ink and rose-water solutions for the eyes, lay an assortment of instruments fashioned out of ivory and mother-of-pearl, silver and steel, mixed up with lucern brushes for the gums – pincers, scissors, strigils, stumps, hair-pads, powder-puffs, back-scratchers, beauty-spots and files.

He poked around among all this apparatus, bought long ago to please a mistress of his who used to go into raptures over certain aromatics and certain balms – an unbalanced, neurotic woman who loved to have her nipples macerated in scent, but who only really experienced complete and utter ecstasy when her scalp was scraped with a comb or when a lover's caresses were mingled with the smell of soot, of wet plaster from houses being built in rainy weather, or of dust thrown up by heavy rain-drops in a summer thunderstorm.

As he mused over these recollections, one memory in particular haunted him, stirring up a forgotten world of old thoughts and ancient perfumes – the memory of an afternoon he had spent with this woman at Pantin, partly for want of anything better to do and partly out of curiosity, at the house of one of
her sisters. While the two women were chattering away and showing each other their frocks, he had gone to the window and, through the dusty panes, had seen the muddy street stretching into the distance and heard it echo with the incessant beat of galoshes tramping through the puddles.

This scene, though it belonged to a remote past, suddenly presented itself to him in astonishing detail. Pantin was there before him, bustling and alive in the dead green water of the moon-rimmed mirror into which his unthinking gaze was directed.
⁵
An hallucination carried him away far from Fontenay; the looking-glass conjured up for him not only the Pantin street but also the thoughts that street had once evoked; and lost in a dream, he said over to himself the ingenious, melancholy, yet consoling anthem he had composed that day on getting back to Paris:

‘Yes, the season of the great rains is upon us; hearken to the song of the gutter-pipes retching under the pavements; behold the horse-dung floating in the bowls of coffee hollowed out of the macadam; everywhere the foot-baths of the poor are overflowing.

‘Under the lowering sky, in the humid atmosphere, the houses ooze black sweat and their ventilators breathe foul odours; the horror of life becomes more apparent and the grip of spleen more oppressive; the seeds of iniquity that lie in every man's heart begin to germinate; a craving for filthy pleasures takes hold of the puritanical, and the minds of respected citizens are visited by criminal desires.

‘And yet here I am, warming myself in front of a blazing fire, while a basket of full-blown flowers on the table fills the room with the scent of benzoin, geranium and vetiver. In mid-November it is still springtime at Pantin in the Rue de Paris, and I can enjoy a quiet laugh at the expense of those timorous families who, in order to avoid the approach of winter, scuttle away at full speed to Antibes or to Cannes.

‘Inclement Nature has nothing to do with this extraordinary phenomenon; let it be said at once that it is to industry, and industry alone, that Pantin owes this factitious spring.

‘The truth is that these flowers are made of taffeta and
mounted on binding wire, while this vernal fragrance has come filtering in through cracks in the window-frame from the neighbouring factories where the Pinaud and St James perfumes are made.

‘For the artisan worn out by the hard labour of the workshops, for the little clerk blessed with too many offspring, the illusion of enjoying a little fresh air is a practical possibility – thanks to these manufacturers.

‘Indeed, out of this fabulous counterfeit of the countryside a sensible form of medical treatment could be developed. At present, gay dogs suffering from consumption who are carted away to the south generally die down there, finished off by the change in their habits, by their nostalgic longing for the Parisian pleasures that have laid them low. Here, in an artificial climate maintained by open stoves, their lecherous memories would come back to them in a mild and harmless form, as they breathed in the languid feminine emanations given off by the scent factories. By means of this innocent deception, the physician could supply his patient platonically with the atmosphere of the boudoirs and brothels of Paris, in place of the deadly boredom of provincial life. More often than not, all that would be needed to complete the cure would be for the sick man to show a little imagination.

‘Seeing that nowadays there is nothing wholesome left in this world of ours; seeing that the wine we drink and the freedom we enjoy are equally adulterate and derisory; and finally, seeing that it takes a considerable degree of goodwill to believe that the governing classes are worthy of respect and that the lower classes are worthy of help or pity, it seems to me,' concluded Des Esseintes, ‘no more absurd or insane to ask of my fellow men a sum total of illusion barely equivalent to that which they expend every day on idiotic objects, to persuade themselves that the town of Pantin is an artificial Nice, a factitious Menton.'

He heaved a sigh.

‘Ah, well, that means more pleasures to cut down on, more precautions to take!' – and he shut himself up in his study, hoping that there he would find it easier to escape from the obsessive influence of all these perfumes.

He threw the window wide open, delighted to take a bath of fresh air; but suddenly it struck him that the breeze was bringing with it a whiff of bergamot oil, mingled with a smell of jasmine, cassia and rose-water. He gave a gasp of horror, and began to wonder whether he might not be in the grip of one of those evil spirits they used to exorcize in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile the odour, though just as persistent, underwent a change. A vague scent of tincture of Tolu, Peruvian balsam and saffron, blended with a few drops of musk and amber, now floated up from the sleeping village at the foot of the hill; then all at once the metamorphosis took place, these scattered whiffs of perfume came together, and the familiar scent of frangipane, the elements of which his sense of smell had detected and recognized, spread from the valley of Fontenay all the way to the Fort, assailing his jaded nostrils, shaking anew his shattered nerves and throwing him into such a state of prostration that he fell fainting, almost dying, across the window-sill.

To the amazement of the two domestics, who now no longer dared to budge from the pantry, their master recovered in a day or two; and they came upon him drumming on the windowpanes and casting anxious glances at the sky. And then, one afternoon, he rang for them and gave orders that his bags were to be packed for a long journey.

While the old man and his wife hunted out the things he said he would need, he paced feverishly up and down the cabin-style dining-room, consulted the timetables of the Channel steamers and scrutinized the clouds from his study window with an impatient yet satisfied air.

For the past week, the weather had been atrocious. Sooty rivers flowing across the grey plains of the sky carried along an endless succession of clouds, like so many boulders torn out of the earth. Every now and then there would be a sudden downpour, and the valley would disappear under torrents of rain.

But that particular day, the sky had changed in appearance: the floods of ink had dried up, the clouds had lost their rugged
outlines and the heavens were now covered with a flat, opaque film. This film seemed to be falling ever lower, and at the same time the countryside was enveloped in a watery mist; the rain no longer cascaded down as it had done the day before, but fell in a fine, cold, unrelenting spray, swamping the lanes, submerging the roads, joining heaven and earth with its countless threads. Daylight in the village dimmed to a ghastly twilight, while the village itself looked like a lake of mud, speckled by the quicksilver needles of rain pricking the surface of the slimy puddles. From this desolate scene all colour had faded away, leaving only the roofs to glisten brightly above the supporting walls.

‘What terrible weather!' sighed the old man-servant, as he laid on a chair the clothes his master had asked for, a suit ordered some time before from London.

Des Esseintes made no reply except to rub his hands and sit down before a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks was displayed in the form of a fan. For a few moments he hesitated between the various shades; then, taking into account the cheerless day, his cheerless clothes and his cheerless destination, he picked out a pair in a drab silk and quickly pulled them on. They were followed by the suit, a mottled check in mouse grey and lava grey, a pair of laced ankle-boots, a little bowler hat and a flax-blue Inverness cape. In this attire, and accompanied by his man-servant, who was bent under the burden of a trunk, an expanding valise, a carpet-bag, a hat-box, and a bundle of sticks and umbrellas rolled up in a travelling-rug, he made his way to the station. There, he told his man that he could not say definitely when he would be back – in a year perhaps, or a month, or a week, or even sooner; gave instructions that during his absence nothing in the house should be moved or changed; handed over enough money to cover household expenses; and got into the train, leaving the bewildered old man standing awkward and agape behind the barrier.

He was alone in his compartment. Through the rain-swept windows the countryside flashing past looked blurred and dingy, as if he were seeing it through an aquarium full of murky water. Closing his eyes, Des Esseintes gave himself up to his thoughts.

Once again, he told himself, the solitude he had longed for so ardently and finally obtained had resulted in appalling unhappiness, while the silence which he had once regarded as well-merited compensation for the nonsense he had listened to for years now weighed unbearably upon him. One morning, he had woken up feeling as desperate as a man who finds himself locked in a prison cell; his lips trembled when he tried to speak, his eyes filled with tears and he choked and spluttered like someone who has been weeping for hours. Possessed by a sudden desire to move about, to look upon a human face, to talk to some other living creature, and to share a little in the life of ordinary folk, he actually summoned his servants on some pretext or other and asked them to stay with him. But conversation was impossible, for apart from the fact that years of silence and sick-room routine had practically deprived the two old people of the power of speech, their master's habit of keeping them at a distance was scarcely calculated to loosen their tongues. In any event, they were a dull-witted pair, and quite incapable of answering a question in anything but monosyllables.

Scarcely had Des Esseintes realized that they could offer him no solace or relief than he was disturbed by a new phenomenon. The works of Dickens, which he had recently read in the hope of soothing his nerves, but which had produced the opposite effect, slowly began to act upon him in an unexpected way, evoking visions of English life which he contemplated for hours on end. Then, little by little, an idea insinuated itself into his mind – the idea of turning dream into reality, of travelling to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions; and this idea was allied with a longing to experience new sensations and thus afford some relief to a mind dizzy with hunger and drunk with fantasy.

The abominably foggy and rainy weather fostered these thoughts by reinforcing the memories of what he had read, by keeping before his eyes the picture of a land of mist and mud, and by preventing any deviation from the direction his desires had taken.

Finally he could stand it no longer, and he had suddenly decided to go. Indeed, he was in such a hurry to be off that he
fled from home with hours to spare, eager to escape into the future and to plunge into the hurly-burly of the streets, the hubbub of crowded stations.

‘Now at last I can breathe,' he said to himself, as the train waltzed to a stop under the dome of the Paris terminus, dancing its final pirouettes to the staccato accompaniment of the turn-tables.

Once out in the street, on the Boulevard d'Enfer, he hailed a cab, rather enjoying the sensation of being cluttered up with trunks and travelling-rugs. The cabby, resplendent in nut-brown trousers and scarlet waistcoat, was promised a generous tip, and this helped the two men to reach a speedy understanding.

‘You'll be paid by the hour,' said Des Esseintes; and then, remembering that he wanted to buy a copy of Baedeker's or Murray's Guide to London, he added: ‘When you get to the Rue de Rivoli, stop outside
Galignani's Messenger
.'
¹

The cab lumbered off, its wheels throwing up showers of slush. The roadway was nothing but a swamp; the clouds hung so low that the sky seemed to be resting on the rooftops; the walls were streaming with water from top to bottom; the gutters were full to overflowing; and the pavements were coated with a slippery layer of mud the colour of gingerbread. As the omnibuses swept by, groups of people on the pavement stood still, and women holding their umbrellas low and their skirts high flattened themselves against the shopwindows to avoid being splashed.

The rain was slanting in at the windows, so that Des Esseintes had to pull up the glass; this was quickly streaked with trickles of water, while clots of mud spurted up from all sides of the cab like sparks from a firework. Lulled by the monotonous sound of the rain beating down on his trunks and on the carriage roof, like sacks of peas being emptied out over his head, Des Esseintes began dreaming of his coming journey. The appalling weather struck him as an instalment of English life paid to him on account in Paris; and his mind conjured up a picture of London as an immense, sprawling, rain-drenched metropolis, stinking of soot and hot iron, and wrapped in a perpetual mantle of smoke and fog. He could see in imagination a line of dockyards
stretching away into the distance, full of cranes, capstans and bales of merchandise, and swarming with men – some perched on the masts and sitting astride the yards, while hundreds of others, their heads down and bottoms up, were trundling casks along the quays and into the cellars.

All this activity was going on in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark, slimy waters of an imaginary Thames, in the midst of a forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders piercing the pale, lowering clouds. Up above, trains raced by at full speed; and down in the underground sewers, others rumbled along, occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of air-shafts. And meanwhile, along every street, big or small, in an eternal twilight relieved only by the glaring infamies of modern advertising, there flowed an endless stream of traffic between two columns of earnest, silent Londoners, marching along with eyes fixed ahead and elbows glued to their sides.

Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine which ground to powder millions of poor wretches – outcasts of fortune whom philanthropists urged, by way of consolation, to sing psalms and recite verses of the Bible.

But then the vision vanished as the cab suddenly jolted him up and down on the seat. He looked out of the windows and saw that night had fallen; the gas lamps were flickering in the fog, each surrounded by its dirty yellow halo, while strings of lights seemed to be swimming in the puddles and circling the wheels of the carriages that jogged along through a sea of filthy liquid fire. Des Esseintes tried to see where he was and caught sight of the Arc du Carrousel; and at that very moment, for no reason except perhaps as a reaction from his recent imaginative flights, his mind fixed on the memory of an utterly trivial incident. He suddenly remembered that, when the servant had packed his bags under his supervision, the man had forgotten to put a toothbrush with his other toilet necessaries. He mentally reviewed the list of belongings which had been packed and found that everything else had been duly fitted into his portman­
teau; but his annoyance at having left his toothbrush behind persisted until the cabby drew up and so broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets.

He was now in the Rue de Rivoli, outside
Galignani's Messenger
. There, on either side of a frosted-glass door whose panels were covered with lettering and with newspaper-cuttings and blue telegram-forms framed in passe-partout, were two huge windows crammed with books and picture-albums. He went up to them, attracted by the sight of books bound in paper boards coloured butcher's-blue or cabbage-green and decorated along the seams with gold and silver flowers, as well as others covered in cloth dyed nut-brown, leek-green, lemon-yellow or currant-red, and stamped with black lines on the back and sides. All this had an un-Parisian air about it, a mercantile flavour, coarser yet less contemptible than the impression produced by cheap French bindings. Here and there, among open albums showing comic scenes by Du Maurier or John Leech and chromos of wild cross-country gallops by Caldecott, a few French novels were in fact to be seen, tempering this riot of brilliant colours with the safe, stolid vulgarity of their covers.

Eventually, tearing himself away from this display, Des Esseintes pushed open the door and found himself in a vast bookshop crowded with people, where women sat unfolding maps and jabbering to each other in strange tongues. An assistant brought him an entire collection of guidebooks, and he in turn sat down to examine these volumes, whose flexible covers bent between his fingers. Glancing through them, he was suddenly struck by a page of Baedeker describing the London art-galleries. The precise, laconic details given by the guide aroused his interest, but before long his attention wandered from the older English paintings to the modern works, which appealed to him more strongly. He remembered certain examples he had seen at international exhibitions and thought that he might well come across them in London – pictures by Millais such as
The Eve of St Agnes
, with its moonlight effect of silvery-green tones; and weirdly coloured pictures by Watts, speckled with gamboge and indigo, and looking as if they had been sketched by an ailing Gustave Moreau, painted in by an
anaemic Michael Angelo and retouched by a romantic Raphael.
²
Among other canvases he remembered a
Curse of Cain
, an
Ida
and more than one
Eve
, in which the strange and mysterious amalgam of these three masters was informed by the personality, at once coarse and refined, of a dreamy, scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues.

All these paintings were crowding into his memory when the shop-assistant, surprised to see a customer sitting daydreaming at a table, asked him which of the guidebooks he had chosen. For a moment Des Esseintes could not remember where he was, but then, with a word of apology for his absentmindedness, he bought a Baedeker and left the shop.

Outside, he found it bitterly cold and wet, for the wind was blowing across the street and lashing the arcades with rain.

‘Drive over there,' he told the cabby, pointing to a shop at the very end of the gallery, on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione, which with its brightly lit windows looked like a gigantic night-light burning cheerfully in the pestilential fog.

This was the Bodega. The sight which greeted Des Esseintes as he went in was of a long, narrow hall, its roof supported by cast-iron pillars and its walls lined with great casks standing upright on barrel-horses. Hooped with iron, girdled with a sort of pipe-rack in which tulip-shaped glasses hung upside-down and fitted at the bottom with an earthenware spigot, these barrels bore, besides a royal coat of arms, a coloured card giving details of the vintage they contained, the amount of wine they held and the price of that wine by the hogshead, by the bottle and by the glass.

In the passage which was left free between these rows of barrels, under the hissing gas-jets of an atrocious iron-grey chandelier, there stood a line of tables loaded with baskets of Palmer's biscuits and stale, salty cakes, and plates heaped with mince-pies and sandwiches whose tasteless exteriors concealed burning mustard-plasters. These tables, with chairs arranged on both sides, stretched to the far end of this cellar-like room, where still more hogsheads could be seen stacked against the walls, with smaller branded casks lying on top of them.