With the sharpening of his desire to withdraw from a hated age, he
felt a despotic urge to shun pictures representing humanity striving
in little holes or running to and fro in quest of money.
With his growing indifference to contemporary life he had resolved not
to introduce into his cell any of the ghosts of distastes or regrets,
but had desired to procure subtle and exquisite paintings, steeped in
ancient dreams or antique corruptions, far removed from the manner of
our present day.
For the delight of his spirit and the joy of his eyes, he had desired
a few suggestive creations that cast him into an unknown world,
revealing to him the contours of new conjectures, agitating the
nervous system by the violent deliriums, complicated nightmares,
nonchalant or atrocious chimerae they induced.
Among these were some executed by an artist whose genius allured and
entranced him: Gustave Moreau.
Des Esseintes had acquired his two masterpieces and, at night, used to
sink into revery before one of them--a representation of Salome,
conceived in this fashion:
A throne, resembling the high altar of a cathedral, reared itself
beneath innumerable vaults leaping from heavy Romanesque pillars,
studded with polychromatic bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with
lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace that, like a basilica, was at
once Mohammedan and Byzantine in design.
In the center of the tabernacle, surmounting an altar approached by
semi-circular steps, sat Herod the Tetrarch, a tiara upon his head,
his legs pressed closely together, his hands resting upon his knees.
His face was the color of yellow parchment; it was furrowed with
wrinkles, ravaged with age. His long beard floated like a white cloud
upon the star-like clusters of jewels constellating the orphrey robe
fitting tightly over his breast.
Around this form, frozen into the immobile, sacerdotal, hieratic pose
of a Hindoo god, burned perfumes wafting aloft clouds of incense which
were perforated, like phosphorescent eyes of beasts, by the fiery rays
of the stones set in the throne. Then the vapor rolled up, diffusing
itself beneath arcades where the blue smoke mingled with the gold
powder of the long sunbeams falling from the domes.
In the perverse odor of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
the temple, Salome, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command,
her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with her
face, slowly advances on her toes, to the rhythm of a stringed
instrument played by a woman seated on the ground.
Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the
lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod.
Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin. Her bracelets, her
girdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls,
flowered with silver and laminated with gold, the breastplate of
jewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents of
fire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea-rose: its jewels like
splendid insects with dazzling elytra, veined with carmine, dotted
with yellow gold, diapered with blue steel, speckled with peacock
green.
With a tense concentration, with the fixed gaze of a somnambulist, she
beholds neither the trembling Tetrarch, nor her mother, the fierce
Herodias who watches her, nor the hermaphrodite, nor the eunuch who
sits, sword in hand, at the foot of the throne--a terrible figure,
veiled to his eyes, whose breasts droop like gourds under his
orange-checkered tunic.
This conception of Salome, so haunting to artists and poets, had
obsessed Des Esseintes for years. How often had he read in the old
Bible of Pierre Variquet, translated by the theological doctors of the
University of Louvain, the Gospel of Saint Matthew who, in brief and
ingenuous phrases, recounts the beheading of the Baptist! How often
had he fallen into revery, as he read these lines:
But when Herod's birthday was kept, the
daughter of Herodias danced before them, and
pleased Herod.
Whereupon he promised with an oath to give
her whatsoever she would ask.
And she, being before instructed of her
mother, said: Give me here John Baptist's
head in a charger.
And the king was sorry: nevertheless, for
the oath's sake, and them which sat with him
at meat, he commanded it to be given her.
And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
And his head was brought in a charger, and
given to the damsel: and she brought it to
her mother.
But neither Saint Matthew, nor Saint Mark, nor Saint Luke, nor the
other Evangelists had emphasized the maddening charms and depravities
of the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooning
in the far-off mist of the centuries, not to be grasped by vulgar and
materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic
intellects made visionaries by their neuroticism; rebellious to
painters of the flesh, to Rubens who disguised her as a butcher's wife
of Flanders; a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded in
portraying the disquieting exaltation of this dancer, the refined
grandeur of this murderess.
In Gustave Moreau's work, conceived independently of the Testament
themes, Des Esseintes as last saw realized the superhuman and exotic
Salome of his dreams. She was no longer the mere performer who wrests
a cry of desire and of passion from an old man by a perverted twisting
of her loins; who destroys the energy and breaks the will of a king by
trembling breasts and quivering belly. She became, in a sense, the
symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal
Hysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by the
catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; the
monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, like
the Helen of antiquity, fatal to all who approach her, all who behold
her, all whom she touches.
Thus understood, she was associated with the theogonies of the Far
East. She no longer sprang from biblical traditions, could no longer
even be assimilated with the living image of Babylon, the royal
Prostitute of the Apocalypse, garbed like her in jewels and purple,
and painted like her; for she was not hurled by a fatidical power, by
a supreme force, into the alluring vileness of debauchery.
The painter, moreover, seems to have wished to affirm his desire of
remaining outside the centuries, scorning to designate the origin,
nation and epoch, by placing his Salome in this extraordinary palace
with its confused and imposing style, in clothing her with sumptuous
and chimerical robes, in crowning her with a fantastic mitre shaped
like a Phoenician tower, such as Salammbo bore, and placing in her
hand the sceptre of Isis, the tall lotus, sacred flower of Egypt and
India.
Des Esseintes sought the sense of this emblem. Had it that phallic
significance which the primitive cults of India gave it? Did it
enunciate an oblation of virginity to the senile Herod, an exchange of
blood, an impure and voluntary wound, offered under the express
stipulation of a monstrous sin? Or did it represent the allegory of
fecundity, the Hindoo myth of life, an existence held between the
hands of woman, distorted and trampled by the palpitant hands of man
whom a fit of madness seizes, seduced by a convulsion of the flesh?
Perhaps, too, in arming his enigmatic goddess with the venerated
lotus, the painter had dreamed of the dancer, the mortal woman with
the polluted Vase, from whom spring all sins and crimes. Perhaps he
had recalled the rites of ancient Egypt, the sepulchral ceremonies of
the embalming when, after stretching the corpse on a bench of jasper,
extracting the brain with curved needles through the chambers of the
nose, the chemists and the priests, before gilding the nails and teeth
and coating the body with bitumens and essences, inserted the chaste
petals of the divine flower in the sexual parts, to purify them.
However this may be, an irresistible fascination emanated from this
painting; but the water-color entitled _The Apparition_ was perhaps
even more disturbing.
There, the palace of Herod arose like an Alhambra on slender,
iridescent columns with moorish tile, joined with silver beton and
gold cement. Arabesques proceeded from lozenges of lapis lazuli, wove
their patterns on the cupolas where, on nacreous marquetry, crept
rainbow gleams and prismatic flames.
The murder was accomplished. The executioner stood impassive, his
hands on the hilt of his long, blood-stained sword.
The severed head of the saint stared lividly on the charger resting on
the slabs; the mouth was discolored and open, the neck crimson, and
tears fell from the eyes. The face was encircled by an aureole worked
in mosaic, which shot rays of light under the porticos and illuminated
the horrible ascension of the head, brightening the glassy orbs of the
contracted eyes which were fixed with a ghastly stare upon the dancer.
With a gesture of terror, Salome thrusts from her the horrible vision
which transfixes her, motionless, to the ground. Her eyes dilate, her
hands clasp her neck in a convulsive clutch.
She is almost nude. In the ardor of the dance, her veils had become
loosened. She is garbed only in gold-wrought stuffs and limpid stones;
a neck-piece clasps her as a corselet does the body and, like a superb
buckle, a marvelous jewel sparkles on the hollow between her breasts.
A girdle encircles her hips, concealing the upper part of her thighs,
against which beats a gigantic pendant streaming with carbuncles and
emeralds.
All the facets of the jewels kindle under the ardent shafts of light
escaping from the head of the Baptist. The stones grow warm, outlining
the woman's body with incandescent rays, striking her neck, feet and
arms with tongues of fire,--vermilions like coals, violets like jets
of gas, blues like flames of alcohol, and whites like star light.
The horrible head blazes, bleeding constantly, clots of sombre purple
on the ends of the beard and hair. Visible for Salome alone, it does
not, with its fixed gaze, attract Herodias, musing on her finally
consummated revenge, nor the Tetrarch who, bent slightly forward, his
hands on his knees, still pants, maddened by the nudity of the woman
saturated with animal odors, steeped in balms, exuding incense and
myrrh.
Like the old king, Des Esseintes remained dumbfounded, overwhelmed and
seized with giddiness, in the presence of this dancer who was less
majestic, less haughty but more disquieting than the Salome of the oil
painting.
In this insensate and pitiless image, in this innocent and dangerous
idol, the eroticism and terror of mankind were depicted. The tall
lotus had disappeared, the goddess had vanished; a frightful nightmare
now stifled the woman, dizzied by the whirlwind of the dance,
hypnotized and petrified by terror.
It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to her
ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage,
more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the
dulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of
will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, cultivated in
sacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses.
Des Esseintes thought that never before had a water color attained
such magnificent coloring; never before had the poverty of colors been
able to force jeweled corruscations from paper, gleams like stained
glass windows touched by rays of sunlight, splendors of tissue and
flesh so fabulous and dazzling. Lost in contemplation, he sought to
discover the origins of this great artist and mystic pagan, this
visionary who succeeded in removing himself from the world
sufficiently to behold, here in Paris, the splendor of these cruel
visions and the enchanting sublimation of past ages.
Des Esseintes could not trace the genesis of this artist. Here and
there were vague suggestions of Mantegna and of Jacopo de Barbari;
here and there were confused hints of Vinci and of the feverish colors
of Delacroix. But the influences of such masters remained negligible.
The fact was that Gustave Moreau derived from no one else. He remained
unique in contemporary art, without ancestors and without possible
descendants. He went to ethnographic sources, to the origins of myths,
and he compared and elucidated their intricate enigmas. He reunited
the legends of the Far East into a whole, the myths which had been
altered by the superstitions of other peoples; thus justifying his
architectonic fusions, his luxurious and outlandish fabrics, his
hieratic and sinister allegories sharpened by the restless perceptions
of a pruriently modern neurosis. And he remained saddened, haunted by
the symbols of perversities and superhuman loves, of divine
stuprations brought to end without abandonment and without hope.
His depressing and erudite productions possessed a strange
enchantment, an incantation that stirred one to the depths, just as do
certain poems of Baudelaire, caused one to pause disconcerted, amazed,
brooding on the spell of an art which leaped beyond the confines of
painting, borrowing its most subtle effects from the art of writing,
its most marvelous stokes from the art of Limosin, its most exquisite
refinements from the art of the lapidary and the engraver. These two
pictures of Salome, for which Des Esseintes' admiration was boundless,
he had hung on the walls of his study on special panels between the
bookshelves, so that they might live under his eyes.
But these were not the only pictures he had acquired to divert his
solitude.
Although he had surrendered to his servants the second story of his
house, which he himself never used at all, the ground floor had
required a number of pictures to fit the walls.
It was thus arranged:
A dressing room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one of the
corners of the house. One passed from the bedroom to the library, and
from the library into the dining room, which formed the other corner.
These rooms, whose windows looked out on the Aunay Valley, composed
one of the sides of the dwelling.
The other side of the house had four rooms arranged in the same order.
Thus, the kitchen formed an angle, and corresponded with the dining
room; a long corridor, which served as the entrance, with the library;
a small dressing room, with the bedroom; and the toilet, forming a
second angle, with the dressing room.
These rooms received the light from the side opposite the Aunay Valley
and faced the Towers of Croy and Chatillon.
As for the staircase, it was built outside, against one of the sides
of the house, and the footsteps of his servants in ascending or
descending thus reached Des Esseintes less distinctly.
The dressing room was tapestried in deep red. On the walls, in ebony
frames, hung the prints of Jan Luyken, an old Dutch engraver almost
unknown in France.
He possessed of the work of this artist, who was fantastic and
melancholy, vehement and wild, the series of his _Religious
Persecutions_, horrible prints depicting all the agonies invented by
the madness of religions: prints pregnant with human sufferings,
showing bodies roasting on fires, skulls slit open with swords,
trepaned with nails and gashed with saws, intestines separated from
the abdomen and twisted on spools, finger nails slowly extracted with
pincers, eyes gouged, limbs dislocated and deliberately broken, and
bones bared of flesh and agonizingly scraped by sheets of metal.
These works filled with abominable imaginings, offensive with their
odors of burning, oozing with blood and clamorous with cries of horror
and maledictions, gave Des Esseintes, who was held fascinated in this
red room, the creeping sensations of goose-flesh.
But in addition to the tremblings they occasioned, beyond the terrible
skill of this man, the extraordinary life which animates his
characters, one discovered, among his astonishing, swarming
throngs--among his mobs of people delineated with a dexterity which
recalled Callot, but which had a strength never possessed by that
amusing dauber--curious reconstructions of bygone ages. The
architecture, costumes and customs during the time of the Maccabeans,
of Rome under the Christian persecutions, of Spain under the
Inquisition, of France during the Middle Ages, at the time of Saint
Bartholomew and the Dragonnades, were studied with a meticulous care
and noted with scientific accuracy.
These prints were veritable treasures of learning. One could gaze at
them for hours without experiencing any sense of weariness. Profoundly
suggestive in reflections, they assisted Des Esseintes in passing many
a day when his books failed to charm him.
Luyken's life, too, fascinated him, by explaining the hallucination of
his work. A fervent Calvinist, a stubborn sectarian, unbalanced by
prayers and hymns, he wrote religious poetry which he illustrated,
paraphrased the psalms in verse, lost himself in the reading of the
Bible from which he emerged haggard and frenzied, his brain haunted by
monstrous subjects, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of the
Reformation and by its songs of terror and hate.
And he scorned the world, surrendering his wealth to the poor and
subsisting on a slice of bread. He ended his life in travelling, with
an equally fanatical servant, going where chance led his boat,
preaching the Gospel far and wide, endeavoring to forego nourishment,
and eventually becoming almost demented and violent.
Other bizarre sketches were hung in the larger, adjoining room, as
well as in the corridor, both of which had woodwork of red cedar.
There was Bresdin's _Comedy of Death_ in which, in the fantastic
landscape bristling with trees, brushwood and tufts of grass
resembling phantom, demon forms, teeming with rat-headed, pod-tailed
birds, on earth covered with ribs, skulls and bones, gnarled and
cracked willows rear their trunks, surmounted by agitated skeletons
whose arms beat the air while they intone a song of victory. A Christ
speeds across a clouded sky; a hermit in the depths of a cave
meditates, holding his head in his hands; one wretch dies, exhausted
by long privation and enfeebled by hunger, lying on his back, his legs
outstretched in front of a pond.
The _Good Samaritan_, by the same artist, is a large engraving on
stone: an incongruous medley of palms, sorbs and oaks grown together,
heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls,
covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake;
then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which a
stream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group;
then an elfin town appearing on the horizon of an exotic sky dotted
with birds and covered with masses of fleecy clouds.
It could be called the design of an uncertain, primitive Durer with an
opium-steeped brain. But although he liked the finesse of the detail
and the imposing appearance of this print, Des Esseintes had a special
weakness for the other frames adorning the room.
They were signed: Odilon Redon.
They enclosed inconceivable apparitions in their rough, gold-striped
pear-tree wood. A head of a Merovingian style, resting against a bowl,
a bearded man, at once resembling a Buddhist priest and an orator at a
public reunion, touching the ball of a gigantic cannon with his
fingers; a frightful spider revealing a human face in its body. The
charcoal drawings went even farther into dream terrors. Here, an
enormous die in which a sad eye winked; there, dry and arid
landscapes, dusty plains, shifting ground, volcanic upheavals catching
rebellious clouds, stagnant and livid skies. Sometimes the subjects
even seemed to have borrowed from the cacodemons of science, reverting
to prehistoric times. A monstrous plant on the rocks, queer blocks
everywhere, glacial mud, figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws,
beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled the
ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate man
still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with
the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs were
beyond anything imaginable; they leaped, for the most part, beyond the
limits of painting and introduced a fantasy that was unique, the
fantasy of a diseased and delirious mind.
And, indeed, certain of these faces, with their monstrous, insane
eyes, certain of these swollen, deformed bodies resembling carafes,
induced in Des Esseintes recollections of typhoid, memories of
feverish nights and of the shocking visions of his infancy which
persisted and would not be suppressed.
Seized with an indefinable uneasiness in the presence of these
sketches, the same sensation caused by certain _Proverbs_ of Goya
which they recalled, or by the reading of Edgar Allen Poe's tales,
whose mirages of hallucination and effects of fear Odilon Redon seemed
to have transposed to a different art, he rubbed his eyes and turned
to contemplate a radiant figure which, amid these tormenting sketches,
arose serene and calm--a figure of Melancholy seated near the disk of
a sun, on the rocks, in a dejected and gloomy posture.
The shadows were dispersed as though by an enchantment. A charming
sadness, a languid and desolate feeling flowed through him. He
meditated long before this work which, with its dashes of paint
flecking the thick crayon, spread a brilliance of sea-green and of
pale gold among the protracted darkness of the charcoal prints.
In addition to this series of the works of Redon which adorned nearly
every panel of the passage, he had hung a disturbing sketch by El
Greco in his bedroom. It was a Christ done in strange tints, in a
strained design, possessing a wild color and a disordered energy: a
picture executed in the painter's second manner when he had been
tormented by the necessity of avoiding imitation of Titian.
This sinister painting, with its wax and sickly green tones, bore an
affinity to certain ideas Des Esseintes had with regard to furnishing
a room.
According to him, there were but two ways of fitting a bedroom. One
could either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnal
delights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, a
sort of oratory.
For the first instance, the Louis XV style was inevitable for the
fastidious, for the cerebrally morbid. Only the eighteenth century had
succeeded in enveloping woman with a vicious atmosphere, imitating her
contours in the undulations and twistings of wood and copper,
accentuating the sugary languor of the blond with its clear and lively
_decors_, attenuating the pungency of the brunette with its tapestries
of aqueous, sweet, almost insipid tones.
He had once had such a room in Paris, with a lofty, white, lacquered
bed which is one stimulant the more, a source of depravity to old
roues, leering at the false chastity and hypocritical modesty of
Greuze's tender virgins, at the deceptive candor of a bed evocative of
babes and chaste maidens.
For the second instance,--and now that he wished to put behind him the
irritating memories of his past life, this was the only possible
expedient--he was compelled to design a room that would be like a
monastic cell. But difficulties faced him here, for he refused to
accept in its entirety the austere ugliness of those asylums of
penitence and prayer.
By dint of studying the problem in all its phases, he concluded that
the end to be attained could thus be stated: to devise a sombre effect
by means of cheerful objects, or rather to give a tone of elegance and
distinction to the room thus treated, meanwhile preserving its
character of ugliness; to reverse the practice of the theatre, whose
vile tinsel imitates sumptuous and costly textures; to obtain the
contrary effect by use of splendid fabrics; in a word, to have the
cell of a Carthusian monk which should possess the appearance of
reality without in fact being so.
Thus he proceeded. To imitate the stone-color of ochre and clerical
yellow, he had his walls covered with saffron silk; to stimulate the
chocolate hue of the dadoes common to this type of room, he used
pieces of violet wood deepened with amarinth. The effect was
bewitching, while recalling to Des Esseintes the repellant rigidity of
the model he had followed and yet transformed. The ceiling, in turn,
was hung with white, unbleached cloth, in imitation of plaster, but
without its discordant brightness. As for the cold pavement of the
cell, he was able to copy it, by means of a bit of rug designed in red
squares, with whitish spots in the weave to imitate the wear of
sandals and the friction of boots.
Into this chamber he introduced a small iron bed, the kind used by
monks, fashioned of antique, forged and polished iron, the head and
foot adorned with thick filigrees of blossoming tulips enlaced with
vine branches and leaves. Once this had been part of a balustrade of
an old hostel's superb staircase.
For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk the inside of
which could contain an urn and the outside a prayer book. Against the
wall, opposite it, he placed a church pew surmounted by a tall dais
with little benches carved out of solid wood. His church tapers were
made of real wax, procured from a special house which catered
exclusively to houses of worship, for Des Esseintes professed a
sincere repugnance to gas, oil and ordinary candles, to all modern
forms of illumination, so gaudy and brutal.
Before going to sleep in the morning, he would gaze, with his head on
the pillows, at his El Greco whose barbaric color rebuked the smiling,
yellow material and recalled it to a more serious tone. Then he could
easily imagine himself living a hundred leagues removed from Paris,
far from society, in cloistral security.
And, all in all, the illusion was not difficult, since he led an
existence that approached the life of a monk. Thus he had the
advantages of monasticism without the inconveniences of its vigorous
discipline, its lack of service, its dirt, its promiscuity and its
monotonous idleness. Just as he had transformed his cell into a
comfortable chamber, so had he made his life normal, pleasant,
surrounded by comforts, occupied and free.
Like a hermit he was ripe for isolation, since life harassed him and
he no longer desired anything of it. Again like a monk, he was
depressed and in the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with the
need of self-communion and with a desire to have nothing in common
with the profane who were, for him, the utilitarian and the imbecile.
Although he experienced no inclination for the state of grace, he felt
a genuine sympathy for those souls immured in monasteries, persecuted
by a vengeful society which can forgive neither the merited scorn with
which it inspires them, nor the desire to expiate, to atone by long
silences, for the ever growing shamelessness of its ridiculous or
trifling gossipings.