Des Esseintes locked himself up in his bedroom, closing his ears to
the sounds of hammers on packing cases. Each stroke rent his heart,
drove a sorrow into his flesh. The physician's order was being
fulfilled; the fear of once more submitting to the pains he had
endured, the fear of a frightful agony had acted more powerfully on
Des Esseintes than the hatred of the detestable existence to which the
medical order condemned him.
Yet he told himself there were people who live without conversing with
anyone, absorbed far from the world in their own affairs, like
recluses and trappists, and there is nothing to prove that these
wretches and sages become madmen or consumptives. He had
unsuccessfully cited these examples to the doctor; the latter had
repeated, coldly and firmly, in a tone that admitted of no reply, that
his verdict, (confirmed besides by consultation with all the experts
on neurosis) was that distraction, amusement, pleasure alone might
make an impression on this malady whose spiritual side eluded all
remedy; and made impatient by the recriminations of his patient, he
for the last time declared that he would refuse to continue treating
him if he did not consent to a change of air, and live under new
hygienic conditions.
Des Esseintes had instantly betaken himself to Paris, had consulted
other specialists, had impartially put the case before them. All
having unhesitatingly approved of the action of their colleague, he
had rented an apartment in a new house, had returned to Fontenay and,
white with rage, had given orders to have his trunks packed.
Sunk in his easy chair, he now ruminated upon that unyielding order
which was wrecking his plans, breaking the strings of his present life
and overturning his future plans. His beatitude was ended. He was
compelled to abandon this sheltering haven and return at full speed
into the stupidity which had once attacked him.
The physicians spoke of amusement and distraction. With whom, and with
what did they wish him to distract and amuse himself?
Had he not banished himself from society? Did he know a single person
whose existence would approximate his in seclusion and contemplation?
Did he know a man capable of appreciating the fineness of a phrase,
the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea,--a man whose
soul was delicate and exquisite enough to understand Mallarme and love
Verlaine?
Where and when must he search to discover a twin spirit, a soul
detached from commonplaces, blessing silence as a benefit, ingratitude
as a solace, contempt as a refuge and port?
In the world where he had dwelt before his departure for Fontenay? But
most of the county squires he had associated with must since have
stultified themselves near card tables or ended upon the lips of
women; most by this time must have married; after having enjoyed,
during their life, the spoils of cads, their spouses now possessed the
remains of strumpets, for, master of first-fruits, the people alone
waste nothing.
"A pretty change--this custom adopted by a prudish society!" Des
Esseintes reflected.
The nobility had died, the aristocracy had marched to imbecility or
ordure! It was extinguished in the corruption of its descendants whose
faculties grew weaker with each generation and ended in the instincts
of gorillas fermented in the brains of grooms and jockeys; or rather,
as with the Choiseul-Praslins, Polignacs and Chevreuses, wallowed in
the mud of lawsuits which made it equal the other classes in
turpitude.
The mansions themselves, the secular escutcheons, the heraldic
deportment of this antique caste had disappeared. The land no longer
yielding anything was put up for sale, money being needed to procure
the venereal witchcraft for the besotted descendants of the old races.
The less scrupulous and stupid threw aside all sense of shame. They
weltered in the mire of fraud and deceit, behaved like cheap sharpers.
This eagerness for gain, this lust for lucre had even reacted on that
other class which had constantly supported itself on the nobility--the
clergy. Now one perceived, in newspapers, announcements of corn cures
by priests. The monasteries had changed into apothecary or liqueur
workrooms. They sold recipes or manufactured products: the Citeaux
order, chocolate; the trappists, semolina; the Maristes Brothers,
biphosphate of medicinal lime and arquebuse water; the jacobins, an
anti-apoplectic elixir; the disciples of Saint Benoit, benedictine;
the friars of Saint Bruno, chartreuse.
Business had invaded the cloisters where, in place of antiphonaries,
heavy ledgers reposed on reading-desks. Like leprosy, the avidity of
the age was ravaging the Church, weighing down the monks with
inventories and invoices.
And yet, in spite of everything, it was only among the ecclesiastics
that Des Esseintes could hope for pleasurable contract. In the society
of well-bred and learned canons, he would have been compelled to share
their faith, to refrain from floating between sceptical ideas and
transports of conviction which rose from time to time on the water,
sustained by recollections of childhood.
He would have had to muster identical opinions and never admit (he
freely did in his ardent moments) a Catholicism charged with a soupcon
of magic, as under Henry the Third, and with a dash of sadism, as at
the end of the last century. This special clericalism, this depraved
and artistically perverse mysticism towards which he wended could not
even be discussed with a priest who would not have understood them or
who would have banished them with horror.
For the twentieth time, this irresolvable problem troubled him. He
would have desired an end to this irresolute state in which he
floundered. Now that he was pursuing a changed life, he would have
liked to possess faith, to incrust it as soon as seized, to screw it
into his soul, to shield it finally from all those reflections which
uprooted and agitated it. But the more he desired it and the less his
emptiness of spirit was evident, the more Christ's visitation receded.
As his religious hunger augmented and he gazed eagerly at this faith
visible but so far off that the distance terrified him, ideas pressed
upon his active mind, driving back his will, rejecting, by common
sense and mathematical proofs, the mysteries and dogmas. He sadly told
himself that he would have to find a way to abstain from
self-discussion. He would have to learn how to close his eyes and let
himself be swept along by the current, forgetting those accursed
discoveries which have destroyed the religious edifice, from top to
bottom, since the last two centuries.
He sighed. It is neither the physiologists nor the infidels that
demolish Catholicism, but the priests, whose stupid works could
extirpate convictions the most steadfast.
A Dominican friar, Rouard de Card, had proved in a brochure entitled
"On the Adulteration of Sacramental Substances" that most masses were
not valid, because the elements used for worship had been adulterated
by the manufacturers.
For years, the holy oils had been adulterated with chicken fat; wax,
with burned bones; incense, with cheap resin and benzoin. But the
thing that was worse was that the substances, indispensable to the
holy sacrifice, the two substances without which no oblation is
possible, had also been debased: the wine, by numerous dilutions and
by illicit introductions of Pernambuco wood, danewort berries, alcohol
and alum; the bread of the Eucharist that must be kneaded with the
fine flour of wheat, by kidney beans, potash and pipe clay.
But they had gone even farther. They had dared suppress the wheat and
shameless dealers were making almost all the Host with the fecula of
potatoes.
Now, God refused to descend into the fecula. It was an undeniable fact
and a certain one. In the second volume of his treatise on moral
theology, Cardinal Gousset had dwelt at length on this question of the
fraud practiced from the divine point of view. And, according to the
incontestable authority of this master, one could not consecrate bread
made of flour of oats, buckwheat or barley, and if the matter of using
rye be less doubtful, no argument was possible in regard to the fecula
which, according to the ecclesiastic expression, was in no way fit for
sacramental purposes.
By means of the rapid manipulation of the fecula and the beautiful
appearance presented by the unleavened breads created with this
element, the shameless imposture had been so propagated that now the
mystery of the transubstantiation hardly existed any longer and the
priests and faithful were holding communion, without being aware of
it, with neutral elements.
Ah! far off was the time when Radegonda, Queen of France, had with her
own hands prepared the bread destined for the alters, or the time
when, after the customs of Cluny, three priests or deacons, fasting
and garbed in alb and amice, washed their faces and hands and then
picked out the wheat, grain by grain, grinding it under millstone,
kneading the paste in a cold and pure water and themselves baking it
under a clear fire, while chanting psalms.
"All this matter of eternal dupery," Des Esseintes reflected, "is not
conducive to the steadying of my already weakened faith. And how admit
that omnipotence which stops at such a trifle as a pinch of fecula or
a soupcon of alcohol?"
These reflections all the more threw a gloom over the view of his
future life and rendered his horizon more menacing and dark.
He was lost, utterly lost. What would become of him in this Paris
where he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to the
Saint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of
desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. And what
contact could exist between him and that bourgeois class which had
gradually climbed up, profiting by all the disasters to grow rich,
making use of all the catastrophes to impose respect on its crimes and
thefts.
After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money. Now
one saw the reign of the caliphates of commerce, the despotism of the
rue du Sentier, the tyranny of trade, bringing in its train venal
narrow ideas, knavish and vain instincts.
Viler and more dishonest than the nobility despoiled and the decayed
clergy, the bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous ostentations, their
braggadoccio, degrading these qualities by its lack of _savoir-vivre_;
the bourgeoisie stole their faults and converted them into
hypocritical vices. And, authoritative and sly, low and cowardly, it
pitilessly attacked its eternal and necessary dupe, the populace,
unmuzzled and placed in ambush so as to be in readiness to assault the
old castes.
It was now an acknowledged fact. Its task once terminated, the
proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The
bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its
wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession
to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of
all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists
had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of
the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live.
In painting, one now beheld a deluge of silliness; in literature, an
intemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to
credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a
dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue;
chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes
and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in the obscene
chambers.
It was the great American hulks transported to our continent. It was
the immense, the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of the
financier and the parvenu, beaming, like a pitiful sun, upon the
idolatrous town which wallowed on the ground the while it uttered
impure psalms before the impious tabernacle of banks.
"Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!" cried Des
Esseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked.
This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, "To think that all this is not a dream, to think
that I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of this
century!" To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims of
Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: "The
soul is pained by all things it thinks upon." But the words resounded
in his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui disintegrated,
lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, all
effective and gentle vigor.
He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availed
little in comforting him, that impossible faith in a future life alone
would pacify him.
An access of rage swept aside, like a hurricane, his attempts at
resignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideous
truth--nothing was left, all was in ruins. The bourgeoisie were
gormandizing on the solemn ruins of the Church which had become a
place of rendez-vous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns and
scandalous jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis and the Pale Christ
of Golgotha not going to prove their existence by commanding the
cataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed the
sinful cities? Was this degradation to continue to flow and cover with
its pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities and
shames?
The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaved men appeared, bringing
chests and carrying the furniture; then the door closed once more on
the servant who was removing packages of books.
Des Esseintes sank into a chair.
"I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of
human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose
dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the
Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of
life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by
the consoling beacons of ancient faith."
End of Project Gutenberg's Against The Grain, by Joris-Karl Huysmans
[Transcriber's Note, to forestall future queries:
This translation, as printed, omits two sections: chapter 6 entirely,
and a few paragraphs near the end of chapter 9 (totalling 2500 words,
or about 4%).
In chapter 6, Des Esseintes is relaxing in a wing-chair in front of
the fire, remembering an event. One evening in the Rue de Rivoli he
had befriended a young man, taken him to an expensive brothel, and
paid for his entertainment. He had explained to the madam how he
planned to turn the innocent young man into a murderer: by paying for
regular visits and making him accustomed to a luxury he could not
afford, then after three months stopping all payment. To maintain his
habit, he would be driven to burglary, and perhaps kill someone who
happened upon him. Des Esseintes' reflections have only the regret
that he did not pursue his scheme closely enough to ensure its
success.
Near the end of chapter 9, after musing upon the ventriloquist, Des
Esseintes recalls walking along the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg when he
was approached by a young man. He remembers this leading to an intense
relationship that he looks back upon with a disturbing ambivalence.
Huysmans expressed antipathy to the moral content of these passages in
a postface of 1903. ]