Several days slowly passed thanks to certain measures which succeeded
in tricking the stomach, but one morning Des Esseintes could endure
food no longer, and he asked himself anxiously whether his already
serious weakness would not grow worse and force him to take to bed. A
sudden gleam of light relieved his distress; he remembered that one of
his friends, quite ill at one time, had made use of a Papin's digester
to overcome his anaemia and preserve what little strength he had.
He dispatched his servant to Paris for this precious utensil, and
following the directions contained in the prospectus which the
manufacturer had enclosed, he himself instructed the cook how to cut
the roast beef into bits, put it into the pewter pot, with a slice of
leek and carrot, and screw on the cover to let it boil for four hours.
At the end of this time the meat fibres were strained. He drank a
spoonful of the thick salty juice deposited at the bottom of the pot.
Then he felt a warmth, like a smooth caress, descend upon him.
This nourishment relieved his pain and nausea, and even strengthened
his stomach which did not refuse to accept these few drops of soup.
Thanks to this digester, his neurosis was arrested and Des Esseintes
said to himself: "Well, it is so much gained; perhaps the temperature
will change, the sky will throw some ashes upon this abominable sun
which exhausts me, and I shall hold out without accident till the
first fogs and frosts of winter."
In the torpor and listless ennui in which he was sunk, the disorder of
his library, whose arrangement had never been completed, irritated
him. Helpless in his armchair, he had constantly in sight the books
set awry on the shelves propped against each other or lying flat on
their sides, like a tumbled pack of cards. This disorder offended him
the more when he contrasted it with the perfect order of his religious
works, carefully placed on parade along the walls.
He tried to clear up the confusion, but after ten minutes of work,
perspiration covered him; the effort weakened him. He stretched
himself on a couch and rang for his servant.
Following his directions, the old man continued the task, bringing
each book in turn to Des Esseintes who examined it and directed where
it was to be placed.
This task did not last long, for Des Esseintes' library contained but
a very limited number of contemporary, secular works.
They were drawn through his brain as bands of metal are drawn through
a steel-plate from which they issue thin, light, and reduced to almost
imperceptible wires; and he had ended by possessing only those books
which could submit to such treatment and which were so solidly
tempered as to withstand the rolling-mill of each new reading. In his
desire to refine, he had restrained and almost sterilized his
enjoyment, ever accentuating the irremediable conflict existing
between his ideas and those of the world in which he had happened to
be born. He had now reached such a pass that he could no longer
discover any writings to content his secret longings. And his
admiration even weaned itself from those volumes which had certainly
contributed to sharpen his mind, making it so suspicious and subtle.
In art, his ideas had sprung from a simple point of view. For him
schools did not exist, and only the temperament of the writer
mattered, only the working of his brain interested him, regardless of
the subject. Unfortunately, this verity of appreciation, worthy of
Palisse, was scarcely applicable, for the simple reason that, even
while desiring to be free of prejudices and passion, each person
naturally goes to the works which most intimately correspond with his
own temperament, and ends by relegating all others to the rear.
This work of selection had slowly acted within him; not long ago he
had adored the great Balzac, but as his body weakened and his nerves
became troublesome, his tastes modified and his admirations changed.
Very soon, and despite the fact that he was aware of his injustice to
the amazing author of the _Comedie humaine_, Des Esseintes had reached
a point where he no longer opened Balzac's books; their healthy spirit
jarred on him. Other aspirations now stirred in him, somehow becoming
undefinable.
Yet when he probed himself he understood that to attract, a work must
have that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allen Poe; but he
ventured even further on this path and called for Byzantine flora of
brain and complicated deliquescences of language. He desired a
troubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it at
will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary
state of his soul. In short, he desired a work of art both for what it
was in itself and for what it permitted him to endow it. He wished to
pass by means of it into a sphere of sublimated sensation which would
arouse in him new commotions whose cause he might long and vainly seek
to analyze.
In short, since leaving Paris, Des Esseintes was removing himself
further and further from reality, especially from the contemporary
world which he held in an ever growing detestation. This hatred had
inevitably reacted on his literary and artistic tastes, and he would
have as little as possible to do with paintings and books whose
limited subjects dealt with modern life.
Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately under
whatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's _Tentation de
saint Antoine_ to his _Education sentimentale_; Goncourt's _Faustin_
to his _Germinie Lacerteux_; Zola's _Faute de l'abbe Mouret_ to his
_Assommoir_.
This point of view seemed logical to him; these works less immediate,
but just as vibrant and human, enabled him to penetrate farther into
the depths of the temperaments of these masters who revealed in them
the most mysterious transports of their being with a more sincere
abandon; and they lifted him far above this trivial life which wearied
him so.
In them he entered into a perfect communion of ideas with their
authors who had written them when their state of soul was analogous to
his own.
In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to live
is dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a
nostalgia of some past century.
Finding himself unable to harmonize, save at rare intervals, with the
environment in which he lives and not discovering sufficient
distraction in the pleasures of observation and analysis, in the
examination of the environment and its people, he feels in himself the
dawning of strange ideas. Confused desires for other lands awake and
are clarified by reflection and study. Instincts, sensations and
thoughts bequeathed by heredity, awake, grow fixed, assert themselves
with an imperious assurance. He recalls memories of beings and things
he has never really known and a time comes when he escapes from the
penitentiary of his age and roves, in full liberty, into another epoch
with which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony.
With some, it is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilizations,
to dead epochs; with others, it is an urge towards a fantastic future,
to a more or less intense vision of a period about to dawn, whose
image, by an effect of atavism of which he is unaware, is a
reproduction of some past age.
In Flaubert this nostalgia is expressed in solemn and majestic
pictures of magnificent splendors, in whose gorgeous, barbaric frames
move palpitating and delicate creatures, mysterious and haughty--women
gifted, in the perfection of their beauty, with souls capable of
suffering and in whose depths he discerned frightful derangements, mad
aspirations, grieved as they were by the haunting premonition of the
dissillusionments their follies held in store.
The temperament of this great artist is fully revealed in the
incomparable pages of the _Tentation de saint Antoine_ and _Salammbo_
where, far from our sorry life, he evokes the splendors of old Asia,
the age of fervent prayer and mystic depression, of languorous
passions and excesses induced by the unbearable ennui resulting from
opulence and prayer.
In de Goncourt, it was the nostalgia of the preceding century, a
return to the elegances of a society forever lost. The stupendous
setting of seas beating against jetties, of deserts stretching under
torrid skies to distant horizons, did not exist in his nostalgic work
which confined itself to a boudoir, near an aulic park, scented with
the voluptuous fragrance of a woman with a tired smile, a perverse
little pout and unresigned, pensive eyes. The soul with which he
animated his characters was not that breathed by Flaubert into his
creatures, no longer the soul early thrown in revolt by the inexorable
certainty that no new happiness is possible; it was a soul that had
too late revolted, after the experience, against all the useless
attempts to invent new spiritual liaisons and to heighten the
enjoyment of lovers, which from immemorial times has always ended in
satiety.
Although she lived in, and partook of the life of our time, Faustin,
by her ancestral influences, was a creature of the past century whose
cerebral lassitude and sensual excesses she possessed.
This book of Edmond de Goncourt was one of the volumes which Des
Esseintes loved best, and the suggestion of revery which he demanded
lived in this work where, under each written line, another line was
etched, visible to the spirit alone, indicated by a hint which
revealed passion, by a reticence permitting one to divine subtle
states of soul which no idiom could express. And it was no longer
Flaubert's language in its inimitable magnificence, but a morbid,
perspicacious style, nervous and twisted, keen to note the impalpable
impression that strikes the senses, a style expert in modulating the
complicated nuances of an epoch which in itself was singularly
complex. In short, it was the epithet indispensable to decrepit
civilizations, no matter how old they be, which must have words with
new meanings and forms, innovations in phrases and words for their
complex needs.
At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted
its language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whose
attentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in its
descriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearing
an affinity with the style of de Goncourt.
At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. That
moribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters,
musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had not
been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying
elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It had
been necessary to await the arrival of de Goncourt (whose temperament
was formed of memories and regrets made more poignant by the sad
spectacle of the intellectual poverty and the pitiful aspirations of
his own time) to resuscitate, not only in his historical works, but
even more in _Faustin_, the very soul of that period; incarnating its
nervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and her
senses so as to savor to exhaustion the grievous revulsives of love
and of art.
With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different. In him was no
longing for vanished ages, no aspiring toward worlds lost in the night
of time. His strong and solid temperament, dazzled with the luxuriance
of life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from the
artificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as well
as from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity and misty,
effeminate dreams of the old orient. When he, too, had become obsessed
by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetry
itself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he had
rushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantastic
passions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of fecund rains of
pollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in a
gigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with this
Edenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvelous
Hindoo poem, singing, in a style whose broad, crude strokes had
something of the bizarre brilliance of an Indian painting, the song of
the flesh, of animated living matter revealing, to the human creature,
by its passion for reproduction the forbidden fruits of love, its
suffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes.
With Baudelaire, these three masters had most affected Des Esseintes
in modern, French, secular literature. But he had read them so often,
had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorb
them he had been compelled to lay them aside and let them remain
unread on his shelves.
Even now when the servant was arranging them for him, he did not care
to open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the place
they were to occupy and seeing that they were properly classified and
put away.
The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed him
more. They were books toward which his taste had gradually veered,
books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection of
more vigorous writers. Here, too, Des Esseintes had reached the point
where he sought, among these troubled pages, only phrases which
discharged a sort of electricity that made him tremble; they
transmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemed
refractory.
Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasitic
nor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory that
the inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, though
unfinished, distills a more irritating aperient and acid balm than the
artist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it was
in their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of the
most excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbid
psychological states, the most extravagant depravities of language
charged, in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task of
containing the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas.
Thus, after the masters, he betook himself to a few writers who
attracted him all the more because of the disdain in which they were
held by the public incapable of understanding them.
One of them was Paul Verlaine who had begun with a volume of verse,
the _Poemes Saturniens_, a rather ineffectual book where imitations of
Leconte de Lisle jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but
through which already filtered the real personality of the poet in
such poems as the sonnet _Reve Familier_.
In searching for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered, under the
hesitant strokes of the sketches, a talent already deeply affected by
Baudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on, acquiesced
in by the peerless master; but the imitation was never flagrant.
And in some of his books, _Bonne Chanson_, _Fetes Galantes_, _Romances
sans paroles_, and his last volume, _Sagesse_, were poems where he
himself was revealed as an original and outstanding figure.
With rhymes obtained from verb tenses, sometimes even from long
adverbs preceded by a monosyllable from which they fell as from a rock
into a heavy cascade of water, his verses, divided by improbable
caesuras, often became strangely obscure with their audacious ellipses
and strange inaccuracies which none the less did not lack grace.
With his unrivalled ability to handle metre, he had sought to
rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet
into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which rest
on stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes he
corrupted it by using only masculine rhymes to which he seemed
partial. He had often employed a bizarre form--a stanza of three lines
whose middle verse was unrhymed, and a tiercet with but one rhyme,
followed by a single line, an echoing refrain like "Dansons la Gigue"
in _Streets_. He had employed other rhymes whose dim echoes are
repeated in remote stanzas, like faint reverberations of a bell.
But his personality expressed itself most of all in vague and
delicious confidences breathed in hushed accents, in the twilight. He
alone had been able to reveal the troubled Ultima Thules of the soul;
low whisperings of thoughts, avowals so haltingly and murmuringly
confessed that the ear which hears them remains hesitant, passing on
to the soul languors quickened by the mystery of this suggestion which
is divined rather than felt. Everything characteristic of Verlaine was
expressed in these adorable verses of the _Fetes Galantes_:
Le soir tombait, un soir equivoque
d'automne,
Les belles se pendant reveuses a nos
bras,
Dirent alors des mots si specieux tout
bas,
Que notre ame depuis ce temps
tremble et s'etonne
It was no longer the immense horizon opened by the unforgettable
portals of Baudelaire; it was a crevice in the moonlight, opening on a
field which was more intimate and more restrained, peculiar to
Verlaine who had formulated his poetic system in those lines of which
Des Esseintes was so fond:
Car nous voulons la nuance encore,
Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance.
Et tout le reste est litterature.
Des Esseintes had followed him with delight in his most diversified
works. After his _Romances sans paroles_ which had appeared in a
journal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later in
those charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and cold
accents of Villon, singing of the Virgin, "removed from our days of
carnal thought and weary flesh." Des Esseintes often re-read _Sagesse_
whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for a
Byzantine Madonna who, at a certain moment, changed into a distracted
modern Cydalise so mysterious and troubling that one could not know
whether she aspired toward depravities so monstrous that they became
irresistible, or whether she moved in an immaculate dream where the
adoration of the soul floated around her ever unavowed and ever pure.
There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself to
them: Tristan Corbiere who, in 1873, in the midst of the general
apathy had issued a most eccentric volume entitled: _Les Amours
jaunes_. Des Esseintes who, in his hatred of the banal and
commonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly and
the most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with this
work where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and where
disconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as the
litanies of _Sommeil_, that they qualified their author for the name
of
Obscene confesseur des devotes mort-nees.
The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the negro dialect,
was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasing
phraseology, revelled in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman;
then out of this jumble, laughable conceits and sly affectations
emerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out, like the
snapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hard
rugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpected
neologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression and
superbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his
_Poemes Parisiens_, where Des Esseintes had discovered this profound
definition of woman:
Eternel feminin de l'eternel jocrisse
Tristan Corbiere had celebrated in a powerfully concise style, the Sea
of Brittany, mermaids and the Pardon of Saint Anne. And he had even
risen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled, apropos of the
Conlie camp, at the individuals whom he designated under the name of
"foreigners of the Fourth of September."
The raciness of which he was so fond, which Corbiere offered him in
his sharp epithets, his beauties which ever remained a trifle suspect,
Des Esseintes found again in another poet, Theodore Hannon, a disciple
of Baudelaire and Gautier, moved by a very unusual sense of the
exquisite and the artificial.
Unlike Verlaine whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire,
especially on the psychological side, in his insidious nuances of
thought and skilful quintessence of sentiment, Theodore Hannon
especially descended from the master on the plastic side, by the
external vision of persons and things.
His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of Des
Esseintes who, on misty or rainy days, enclosed himself in the retreat
fancied by the poet and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of his
fabrics, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusively
material sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, and
rose like a cantharides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense toward a
Brussel idol with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes.
With the exception of the works of these poets and of Stephane
Mallarme, which his servant was told to place to one side so that he
might classify them separately, Des Esseintes was but slightly
attracted towards the poets.
Notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of his
verse which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters of
Hugo seemed pale in comparison, Leconte de Lisle could no longer
satisfy him. The antiquity so marvelously restored by Flaubert
remained cold and immobile in his hands. Nothing palpitated in his
verses, which lacked depth and which, most often, contained no idea.
Nothing moved in those gloomy, waste poems whose impassive mythologies
ended by finally leaving him cold. Too, after having long delighted in
Gautier, Des Esseintes reached the point where he no longer cared for
him. The admiration he felt for this man's incomparable painting had
gradually dissolved; now he was more astonished than ravished by his
descriptions. Objects impressed themselves upon Gautier's perceptive
eyes but they went no further, they never penetrated deeper into his
brain and flesh. Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limited
himself to reflecting surrounding objects with impersonal clearness.
Certainly, Des Esseintes still loved the works of these two poets, as
he loved rare stones and precious objects, but none of the variations
of these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither being
evocative of revery, neither opening for him, at least, broad roads of
escape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours.
These two books left him unsatisfied. And it was the same with Hugo;
the oriental and patriarchal side was too conventional and barren to
detain him. And his manners, at once childish and that of a
grandfather, exasperated him. He had to go to the _Chansons des rues
et des bois_ to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics. But how
gladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this _tour de
force_ for a new work by Baudelaire which might equal the others, for
he, decidedly, was almost the only one whose verses, under their
splendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance. In passing
from one extreme to the other, from form deprived of ideas to ideas
deprived of form, Des Esseintes remained no less circumspect and cold.
The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal, the analytical detours of
Duranty seduced him, but their administrative, colorless and arid
language, their static prose, fit at best for the wretched industry of
the theatre, repelled him. Then their interesting works and their
astute analyses applied to brains agitated by passions in which he was
no longer interested. He was not at all concerned with general
affections or points of view, with associations of common ideas, now
that the reserve of his mind was more keenly developed and that he no
longer admitted aught but superfine sensations and catholic or sensual
torments. To enjoy a work which should combine, according to his
wishes, incisive style with penetrating and feline analysis, he had to
go to the master of induction, the profound and strange Edgar Allen
Poe, for whom, since the time when he re-read him, his preference had
never wavered.
More than any other, perhaps, he approached, by his intimate affinity,
Des Esseintes' meditative cast of mind.
If Baudelaire, in the hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the
return of the age of sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid
psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.
Under the emblematic title, _The Demon of Perversity_, he had been the
first in literature to pry into the irresistible, unconscious impulses
of the will which mental pathology now explains more scientifically.
He had also been the first to divulge, if not to signal the impressive
influence of fear which acts on the will like an anaesthetic,
paralyzing sensibility and like the curare, stupefying the nerves. It
was on the problem of the lethargy of the will, that Poe had centered
his studies, analyzing the effects of this moral poison, indicating
the symptoms of its progress, the troubles commencing with anxiety,
continuing through anguish, ending finally in the terror which deadens
the will without intelligence succumbing, though sorely disturbed.
Death, which the dramatists had so much abused, he had in some manner
changed and made more poignant, by introducing an algebraic and
superhuman element; but in truth, it was less the real agony of the
dying person which he described and more the moral agony of the
survivor, haunted at the death bed by monstrous hallucinations
engendered by grief and fatigue. With a frightful fascination, he
dwelt on acts of terror, on the snapping of the will, coldly reasoning
about them, little by little making the reader gasp, suffocated and
panting before these feverish mechanically contrived nightmares.
Convulsed by hereditary neurosis, maddened by a moral St. Vitus dance,
Poe's creatures lived only through their nerves; his women, the
Morellas and Ligeias, possessed an immense erudition. They were
steeped in the mists of German philosophy and the cabalistic mysteries
of the old Orient; and all had the boyish and inert breasts of angels,
all were sexless.
Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who had often been compared because
of their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination of
mental maladies, differed radically in the affective conceptions which
held such a large place in their works; Baudelaire with his iniquitous
and debased loves--cruel loves which made one think of the reprisals
of an inquisition; Poe with his chaste, aerial loves, in which the
senses played no part, where only the mind functioned without
corresponding to organs which, if they existed, remained forever
frozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in a
stifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his
attention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked, like
delicious miasmas, somnambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to Des
Esseintes a source of unwearying conjecture. But now that his nervous
disorders were augmented, days came when his readings broke his spirit
and when, hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate Usher he was
haunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror.
Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touched
these fearful elixirs, in the same way that he could no longer with
impunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of the
gloomy Odilon Redon prints and the Jan Luyken horrors. And yet, when
he felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull after
these terrible American imported philtres. Then he betook himself to
Villiers de L'Isle Adam in whose scattered works he noted seditious
observations and spasmodic vibrations, but which no longer gave one,
with the exception of his Claire Lenoir, such troubling horror.
This Claire Lenoir which appeared in 1867 in the _Revue des lettres et
des arts_, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of
_Histoires Moroses_ where against a background of obscure speculations
borrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred, Dr. Tribulat
Bonhomet, solemn and childish, a Claire Lenoir, farcical and sinister,
with blue spectacles, round and large as franc pieces, which covered
her almost dead eyes.
This story centered about a simple adultery and ended with an
inexpressible terror when Bonhomet, opening Claire's eyelids, as she
lies in her death bed, and penetrating them with monstrous plummets,
distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing the
lover's decapitated head, while shouting a war song, like a Kanaka.
Based on this more or less just observation that the eyes of certain
animals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, like
photographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyes
behold at the moment they expire, this story evidently derived from
Poe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique.
This also applied to the _Intersigne_, which had later been joined to
the _Contes cruels_, a collection of indisputable talent in which was
found _Vera_, which Des Esseintes considered a little masterpiece.
Here, the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness; no
longer was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid,
warm, almost celestial vision; it was in an identical genre, the
reverse of the Beatrices and Legeias, those gloomy and dark phantoms
engendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium.
This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it no
longer treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects of
fear; on the contrary, it studied the exaltations of the will under
the impulse of a fixed idea; it demonstrated its power which often
succeeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualities
on surrounding objects.
Another book by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, _Isis_, seemed to him curious
in other respects. The philosophic medley of Clair Lenoir was evident
in this work which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal and
troubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and rope
ladders--all the romanticism which Villiers de L'Isle Adam could never
rejuvenate in his _Elen_ and _Morgane_, forgotten pieces published by
an obscure man, Sieur Francisque Guyon.
The heroine of this book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to have
assimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allen Poe, and
the diplomatic sagacities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenance
of Bradamante abused by an antique Circe. These insoluble mixtures
developed a fuliginous vapor across which philosophic and literary
influences jostled, without being able to be regulated in the author's
brain when he wrote the prolegomenae of this work which could not have
embraced less than seven volumes.
But there was another side to Villiers' temperament. It was piercing
and acute in an altogether different sense--a side of forbidding
pleasantry and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxical
mystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious
and savage comedy which Swift possessed. A series of sketches, _les
Demoiselles de Bienfilatre_, _l'Affichage celeste_, _la Machine a
gloire_, and _le Plus beau diner du monde_, betrayed a singularly
inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary
and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age
were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported Des
Esseintes.
No other French book had been written in this serious and bitter
style. At the most, a tale by Charles Cros, _La science de l'amour_,
printed long ago in the _Revue du Monde-Nouveau_, could astonish by
reason of its chemical whims, by its affected humor and by its coldly
facetious observations. But the pleasure to be extracted from the
story was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure.
The firm, colored and often original style of Villiers had disappeared
to give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of the
first-comer.
"Heavens! heavens! how few books are really worth re-reading," sighed
Des Esseintes, gazing at the servant who left the stool on which he
had been perched, to permit Des Esseintes to survey his books with a
single glance.
Des Esseintes nodded his head. But two small books remained on the
table. With a sigh, he dismissed the old man, and turned over the
leaves of a volume bound in onager skin which had been glazed by a
hydraulic press and speckled with silver clouds. It was held together
by fly-leaves of old silk damask whose faint patterns held that charm
of faded things celebrated by Mallarme in an exquisite poem.
These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the two
first Parnassian books; it was printed on parchment paper and preceded
by this title: _Quelques vers de Mallarme_, designed in a surprising
calligraphy in uncial letters, illuminated and relieved with gold, as
in old manuscripts.
Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, several
invited him: _Les fenetres_, _l'epilogue_ and _Azur_; but one among
them all, a fragment of the _Herodiade_, held him at certain hours in
a spell.
How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent
chamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Herodiade who, in the
work of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dim
white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones.
The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid
the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime
enshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerelle
whites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity.
At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; and
she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate
lines which Mallarme makes her utter:
O miroir!
Eau froide par l'ennui dans ton cadre
gelee
Que de fois, et pendant les heures,
desolee
Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs
qui sont
Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au
trou profond,
Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre
lointaine!
Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta
severe fontaine,
J'ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite!
These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in an
age of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literary
life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity,
delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, in
cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantine
delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightly
connected by an almost imperceptible thread.
These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive
and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold
tropes.
Perceiving the remotest analogies, with a single term which by an
effect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the color and
the quality, he described the object or being to which otherwise he
would have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets so
as to disengage all their facets and nuances, had he simply contented
himself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded in
dispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind by
analogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was the
attention of the reader diverted by the enumeration of the qualities
which the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced.
Concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, the
ensemble, a unique and complete aspect.
It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimate
of art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlier
works, but Mallarme had boldly proclaimed it in a verse on Theophile
Gautier and in _l'Apres-midi du faune_, an eclogue where the
subtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressing
verses suddenly pierced by this wild, rending faun cry:
Alors m'eveillerai-je a la ferveur
premiere,
Droit et seul sous un flot antique de
lumiere,
Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour
l'ingenuite.
That line with the monosyllable _lys_ like a sprig, evoked the image
of something rigid, slender and white; it rhymed with the substantive
_ingenuite_, allegorically expressing, by a single term, the passion,
the effervescence, the fugitive mood of a virgin faun amorously
distracted by the sight of nymphs.
In this extraordinary poem, surprising and unthought of images leaped
up at the end of each line, when the poet described the elations and
regrets of the faun contemplating, at the edge of a fen, the tufts of
reeds still preserving, in its transitory mould, the form made by the
naiades who had occupied it.
Then, Des Esseintes also experienced insidious delights in touching
this diminutive book whose cover of Japan vellum, as white as curdled
milk, were held together by two silk bands, one of Chinese rose, the
other of black.
Hidden behind the cover, the black band rejoined the rose which rested
like a touch of modern Japanese paint or like a lascivious adjutant
against the antique white, against the candid carnation tint of the
book, and enlaced it, united its sombre color with the light color
into a light rosette. It insinuated a faint warning of that regret, a
vague menace of that sadness which succeeds the ended transports and
the calmed excitements of the senses.
Des Esseintes placed _l'Apres-midi du faune_ on the table and examined
another little book he had printed, an anthology of prose poems, a
tiny chapel, placed under the invocation of Baudelaire and opening on
the parvise of his poems.
This anthology comprised a selection of _Gaspard de la nuit_ of that
fantastic Aloysius Bertrand who had transferred the behavior of
Leonard in prose and, with his metallic oxydes, painted little
pictures whose vivid colors sparkle like those of clear enamels. To
this, Des Esseintes had joined _le Vox populi_ of Villiers, a superb
piece of work in a hammered, golden style after the manner of Leconte
de Lisle and of Flaubert, and some selections from that delicate
_livre de Jade_ whose exotic perfume of ginseng and of tea blends with
the odorous freshness of water babbling along the book, under
moonlight.
But in this collection had been gathered certain poems resurrected
from defunct reviews: _le Demon de l'analogie_, _la Pipe_, _le Pauvre
enfant pale_, _le Spectacle interrompu_, _le Phenomene futur_, and
especially _Plaintes d'automne_ and _Frisson d'hiver_ which were
Mallarme's masterpieces and were also celebrated among the
masterpieces of prose poems, for they united such a magnificently
delicate language that they cradled, like a melancholy incantation or
a maddening melody, thoughts of an irresistible suggestiveness,
pulsations of the soul of a sensitive person whose excited nerves
vibrate with a keenness which penetrates ravishingly and induces a
sadness.
Of all the forms of literature, that of the prose poem was the form
Des Esseintes preferred. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it
contained in its slender volume the strength of the novel whose
analytic developments and descriptive redundancies it suppressed.
Quite often, Des Esseintes had meditated on that disquieting
problem--to write a novel concentrated in a few phrases which should
contain the essence of hundreds of pages always employed to establish
the setting, to sketch the characters, and to pile up observations and
minute details. Then the chosen words would be so unexchangeable that
they would do duty for many others, the adjective placed in such an
ingenious and definite fashion that it could not be displaced, opening
such perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on its
sense at once precise and complex, could record the present,
reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the
characters, revealed by the gleams of this unique epithet.
Thus conceived and condensed in a page or two, the novel could become
a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a
spiritual collaboration agreed to between ten superior persons
scattered throughout the universe, a delight offered to the refined,
and accessible to them alone.
To Des Esseintes, the prose poem represented the concrete juice of
literature, the essential oil of art.
That succulence, developed and concentrated into a drop, already
existed in Baudelaire and in those poems of Mallarme which he read
with such deep joy.
When he had closed his anthology, Des Esseintes told himself that his
books which had ended on this last book, would probably never have
anything added to it.
In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its
organism, enfeebled by old ideas, exhausted by excesses of syntax,
sensitive only to the curiosities which make sick persons feverish,
and yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline, eager to
repair all the omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath the most subtle
memories of grief in its death bed, was incarnate in Mallarme, in the
most perfect exquisite manner imaginable.
Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Poe; here were their
fine and powerful substances distilled and disengaging new flavors and
intoxications.
It was the agony of the old language which, after having become moldy
from age to age, ended by dissolving, by reaching that deliquescence
of the Latin language which expired in the mysterious concepts and the
enigmatical expressions of Saint Boniface and Saint Adhelme.
The decomposition of the French language had been effected suddenly.
In the Latin language, a long transition, a distance of four hundred
years existed between the spotted and superb epithet of Claudian and
Rutilius and the gamy epithet of the eighth century. In the French
language, no lapse of time, no succession of ages had taken place; the
stained and superb style of the de Goncourts and the gamy style of
Verlaine and Mallarme jostled in Paris, living in the same period,
epoch and century.
And Des Esseintes, gazing at one of the folios opened on his chapel
desk, smiled at the thought that the moment would soon come when an
erudite scholar would prepare for the decadence of the French language
a glossary similar to that in which the savant, Du Cange, has noted
the last murmurings, the last spasms, the last flashes of the Latin
language dying of old age in the cloisters and sounding its death
rattle.