Against Nature (21 page)

Such were Des Esseintes's reflections as he dipped into the book, rereading a passage here and there; and then, comparing the author's vigorous and varied style with the lymphatic, stereotyped style of his fellow writers, he was led to consider that evolution of language so accurately described by Darwin.

Closely associated with the secular writers of his time, brought up in the Romantic school, familiar with the latest books and accustomed to reading modern publications, Barbey inevitably found himself in possession of an idiom which had undergone many profound modifications, and which had been largely renovated since the seventeenth century.

The very opposite had been the case with the ecclesiastical writers; confined to their own territory, imprisoned within an identical, traditional range of reading, knowing nothing of the literary evolution of more recent times and absolutely determined, if need be, to pluck their eyes out rather than recognize it, they necessarily employed an unaltered and unalterable language, like that eighteenth-century language which the descendants of the French settlers in Canada normally speak and write to this day, no variation in vocabulary or phraseology having ever been possible in their idiom, cut off as it is from the old country and surrounded on all sides by the English tongue.

Des Esseintes's musings had reached this point when the silvery sound of a bell tinkling a little angelus told him that breakfast was ready. He left his books where they were, wiped his forehead and made for the dining-room, telling himself that of all the volumes he had been rearranging, the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly were still the only ones whose thought and style offered those gamey flavours and unhealthy spots, that bruised skin and sleepy taste which he so loved to savour in the decadent writers, both Latin and monastic, of olden times.

Wearing next to nothing, he threw open a window, to be hit full in the face by a fiery blast from outside; the dining-room, where he next sought refuge, was like an oven, and the rarefied air seemed to have reached boiling-point. He sat down feeling utter despair, for the excitement that had kept his mind busy with daydreams while he was sorting out his books had died away. Like every other victim of neurosis, he found heat overpowering; his anaemia, held in check by the cold weather, got the better of him again, taking the strength out of a body already debilitated by copious perspiration.

With his shirt clinging to his moist back, his perineum sodden, his arms and legs wet and his forehead streaming with sweat that ran down his cheeks like salty tears, Des Esseintes lay back exhausted in his chair. Just then he became aware of the meat
on the table before him and the sight of it sickened him; he ordered it to be taken away and boiled eggs brought instead. When these arrived, he tried to swallow some sippets dipped in the yolk, but they stuck in his throat. Waves of nausea rose to his lips, and when he drank a few drops of wine they pricked his stomach like arrows of fire. He mopped his face, where the sweat, which had been warm a few minutes before, was now running down his temples in cold trickles; and he tried sucking bits of ice to stave off the feeling of nausea – but all in vain.

Overcome with infinite fatigue, he slumped helplessly against the table. After a while he got to his feet, gasping for breath, but the sippets had swollen and were slowly rising in his throat, choking him. Never had he felt so upset, so weak, so ill at ease; on top of it all, his eyes were affected and he started seeing double, with things spinning round in pairs; soon he lost his sense of distance, so that his glass seemed miles away. He told himself he was the victim of optical illusions, but even so he was unable to shake them off. Finally he went and lay down on the sofa in the sitting-room; but it promptly began pitching and rolling like a ship at sea, and his nausea grew worse. He got up again, this time deciding to take a digestive to help down the eggs, which were still troubling him.

Returning to the dining-room, he wryly likened himself, there in his ship's cabin, to a traveller suffering from seasickness. He staggered over to the cupboard and looked at the mouth organ, but refrained from opening it; instead, he reached up to the shelf above for a bottle of Benedictine – a bottle he kept in the house on account of its shape, which he considered suggestive of ideas at once pleasantly wanton and vaguely mystical.

But for the moment he remained unmoved, and just stared dully at the squat, dark-green bottle, which normally conjured up visions of medieval priories for him, with its antique monkish paunch, its head and neck wrapped in a parchment cowl, its red seal quartered with three silver mitres on a field azure and fastened to the neck with lead like a Papal bull, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paper apparently yellowed and faded with age:
Liquor Monachorum Benedictinorum Abbatiae Fiscanensis
.

Under this truly monastic habit, certified by a cross and the ecclesiastical initials D. O. M., and enclosed in parchment and ligatures like an authentic charter, there slumbered a saffron-coloured liqueur of exquisite delicacy. It gave off a subtle aroma of angelica and hyssop mixed with seaweed whose iodine and bromine content was masked with sugar; it stimulated the palate with a spirituous fire hidden under an altogether virginal sweetness; and it flattered the nostrils with a hint of corruption wrapped up in a caress that was at once childlike and devout.

This hypocrisy resulting from the extraordinary discrepancy between container and contents, between the liturgical form of the bottle and the utterly feminine, utterly modern soul inside it, had set him dreaming before now. Sitting with the bottle in front of him, he had spent hours thinking about the monks who sold it, the Benedictines of the Abbey of Fécamp who, belonging as they did to the congregation of Saint-Maur, famous for its historical researches, were subject to the Rule of St Benedict, yet did not follow the observances of either the white monks of Cîteaux or the black monks of Cluny. They forced themselves upon his imagination, looking just as if they had come straight out of the Middle Ages, growing medicinal herbs, heating retorts, distilling in alembics sovereign cordials, infallible panaceas.

He took a sip of the liqueur and felt a little better for a minute or two; but soon the fire a drop of wine had kindled in his innards blazed up again. He threw down his napkin and went back into his study, where he began pacing up and down; he felt as if he were under the receiver of an air-pump in which a vacuum was being gradually created, and a dangerously pleasant lethargy spread from his brain into every limb. Unable to stand any more of this, he pulled himself together and, for perhaps the first time since his coming to Fontenay, sought refuge in the garden, where he took shelter in the patch of shadow cast by a tree. Sitting on the grass, he gazed vacantly at the rows of vegetables the servants had planted. But it was only after an hour's gazing that he realized what they were, for a greenish mist floated before his eyes, preventing him from seeing anything more than blurred, watery images which kept changing colour and appearance.

In the end, however, he recovered his balance and was able to distinguish clearly onions and cabbages in front, further off a huge patch of lettuce and at the back, all along the hedge, a row of white lilies standing motionless in the sultry air.

A smile puckered his lips, for he suddenly remembered the quaint comparison old Nicander once made, from the point of view of shape, between the pistil of a lily and the genitals of an ass, and also the passage in Albertus Magnus where that miracle-worker expounds a most peculiar method of discovering, with the aid of a lettuce, whether a girl is still a virgin.

These recollections cheered him up somewhat, and he began looking round the garden, examining the plants that had been withered by the heat and noticing how the baked earth was smoking under the scorching, dusty rays of the sun. Then, over the hedge separating the low-lying garden from the raised roadway going up to the Fort, he caught sight of a bunch of boys rolling about on the ground in the blazing sunshine.

He was fixing his attention on them when another lad appeared on the scene. He was smaller than the rest, and a really squalid specimen; his hair looked like sandy seaweed, two green bubbles hung from his nose and his lips were coated with the disgusting white mess he was eating – skim-milk cheese spread on a hunk of bread and sprinkled with chopped garlic.

Des Esseintes sniffed the air, and a depraved longing, a perverse craving took hold of him; the nauseating snack positively made his mouth water. He felt sure that his stomach, which rebelled against all normal food, would digest this frightful titbit and his palate enjoy it as much as a banquet.

He sprang to his feet, ran to the kitchen and ordered his servants to send to the village for a round loaf, some white cheese, and a little garlic, explaining that he wanted a snack exactly like the one the child was having. This done, he went back to where he had been sitting under the tree.

The lads were fighting now, snatching bits of bread from each other's hands, ramming them into their mouths and licking their fingers afterwards. Kicks and blows fell thick and fast, and the weaker boys were knocked to the ground, where they lay
thrashing about and crying as the broken stones dug into their bottoms.

The sight put new life into Des Esseintes; the interest this fight aroused in him took his mind off his own sickly condition. Faced with the savage fury of these vicious brats, he reflected on the cruel and abominable law of the struggle for life, and contemptible though these children were, he could not help feeling sorry for them and thinking it would have been better for them if their mothers had never borne them.

After all, what did their lives amount to but impetigo, colic, fevers, measles, smacks and slaps in childhood; degrading jobs with plenty of kicks and curses at thirteen or so; deceiving mistresses, foul diseases and unfaithful wives in manhood; and then, in old age, infirmities and death-agonies in workhouses or hospitals?

And the future, when you came to think of it, was the same for all, and nobody with any sense would dream of envying anybody else. For the rich, though the setting was different, it was a case of the same passions, the same worries, the same sorrows, the same diseases – and also the same paltry pleasures, whether these were alcoholic, literary or carnal. There was even a vague compensation for every sort of suffering, a kind of rough justice that restored the balance of unhappiness between the classes, granting the poor greater resistance to physical ills that wreaked worse havoc on the feebler and thinner bodies of the rich.

What madness it was to beget children, reflected Des Esseintes. And to think that the priestery, who had taken a vow of sterility, had carried inconsistency to the point of canonizing St Vincent de Paul because he saved innocent babes for useless torments!

Thanks to his odious precautions, the man had postponed for years to come the deaths of creatures devoid of thought or feeling, so that later, having acquired a little understanding and a far greater capacity for suffering, they could look into the future, could expect and dread that death whose very name had hitherto been unknown to them, could even, in some cases, call upon it to release them from the hateful life-sentence to which
he had condemned them in virtue of an absurd theological code.

And since the old man's death, his ideas had won universal acceptance; for instance, children abandoned by their mothers were given homes instead of being left to die quietly without knowing what was happening; and yet the life that was kept for them would grow harder and bleaker day by day. Similarly, under the pretext of encouraging liberty and progress, society had discovered yet another means of aggravating man's wretched lot, by dragging him from his home, rigging him out in a ridiculous costume, putting specially designed weapons into his hands and reducing him to the same degrading slavery from which the negroes were released out of pity – and all this to put him in a position to kill his neighbour without risking the scaffold, as ordinary murderers do who operate single-handed, without uniforms and with quieter, poorer weapons.

What a peculiar age this was, Des Esseintes thought to himself, which, ostensibly in the interests of humanity, strove to perfect anaesthetics in order to do away with physical suffering, and at the same time concocted stimulants such as this to aggravate moral suffering!

Ah! if in the name of pity the futile business of procreation was ever to be abolished, the time had surely come to do it. But here again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homais
¹
stood in the way, ferocious and unreasonable.

Justice regarded as perfectly legitimate the tricks that were used to prevent conception; it was a recognized, acknowledged fact; there was never a couple in the land, no matter how well-to-do, that did not send its children to the wash or use devices that could be bought openly in the shops – devices nobody would ever dream of condemning. And yet, if these natural or mechanical subterfuges proved ineffectual, if the trickery failed and if to make good the failure recourse was had to more reliable methods, why then there were not prisons, jails or penitentiaries enough to accommodate the people convicted out of hand, and in all good faith, by other individuals who the same night, in the conjugal bed, used every trick they knew to avoid begetting brats of their own.

It followed that the fraud itself was not a crime, but that the attempt to make good its failure was.

In short, society regarded as a crime the act of killing a creature endowed with life; and yet expelling a foetus simply meant destroying an animal that was less developed, less alive, certainly less intelligent and less prepossessing, than a dog or a cat, which could be strangled at birth with impunity.

It should also be remarked, thought Des Esseintes, that to add to the justice of it all, it was not the unskilful operator – who generally beat a speedy retreat – but the woman in the case, the victim of his clumsiness, who paid the penalty for saving an innocent creature from the misery of life.

All the same, it was a fantastically prejudiced world that tried to outlaw operations so natural that the most primitive of men, the South Sea islander, was led to perform them by instinct alone.

Just then Des Esseintes's man-servant interrupted these charitable reflections of his by bringing him the snack he had asked for on a silver-gilt salver. His gorge rose at the sight; he had not the courage to take even a bite at the bread, for his morbid appetite had deserted him. A dreadful feeling of debility came over him again, but he was forced to get to his feet; the sun was moving round and gradually encroaching on his patch of shadow, the heat becoming fiercer and more oppressive.

‘You see those children fighting in the road?' he said to the man. ‘Well, throw the thing to them. And let's hope that the weaklings are badly mauled about, that they don't get so much as a crumb of bread, and that on top of it all they're soundly thrashed when they get home with their breeches torn and a couple of black eyes to boot. That'll give them a fore-taste of the sort of life they can expect!' And he went back into the house, where he sank limply into an armchair.

‘Still, I really must see if there isn't something I can eat,' he muttered – and he tried soaking a biscuit in a glass of old J. P. Cloete Constantia, of which he still had a few bottles in his cellar.

This wine, the colour of singed onion skins, and tasting of old malaga and port, but with a sugary bouquet all its own and an
after-taste of grapes whose juices have been condensed and sublimated by burning suns, had often braced him up and even given new vigour to a stomach weakened by the fasting he was forced to practise; but this time the cordial, usually so helpful, failed to have any effect.