All his uncertainty vanished; a little fever of excitement took hold of him and he felt ready to set to work again. First he made some tea with a compound of cassia and iris; then, completely sure of himself, he resolved to go ahead, to strike a reverberating chord whose majestic thunder would drown the whisper of that artful frangipane which was still stealing stealthily into the room.
He handled, one after the other, amber, Tonquin musk, with its overpowering smell, and patchouli, the most pungent of all vegetable perfumes, whose flower, in its natural state, gives off an odour of mildew and mould. Do what he would, however, visions of the eighteenth century haunted him: gowns with panniers and flounces danced before his eyes; Boucher Venuses, all flesh and no bone, stuffed with pink cotton-wool, looked down at him from every wall; memories of the novel Thémidore,4 and especially of the exquisite Rosette with her skirts hoisted up in blushing despair, pursued him. He sprang to his feet in a fury, and to rid himself of these obsessions he filled his lungs with that unadulterated essence of spikenard which is so dear to Orientals and so abhorrent to Europeans on account of its excessive valerian content. He was stunned by the violence of the shock this gave him. The filigree of the delicate scent which had been troubling him vanished as if it had been pounded with a hammer; and he took advantage of this respite to escape from past epochs and antiquated odours in order to engage, as he had been used to do in other days, in less restricted and more up-to-date operations.
At one time he had enjoyed soothing his spirit with scented harmonies. He would use effects similar to those employed by the poets, following as closely as possible the admirable arrangement of certain poems by Baudelaire such as L’Irréparable and Le Balcon, in which the last of the five lines in each verse echoes the first, returning like a refrain to drown the soul in infinite depths of melancholy and languor. He used to roam haphazardly through the dreams conjured up for him by these aromatic stanzas, until he was suddenly brought back to his starting point, to the motif of his meditation, by the recurrence of the initial theme, reappearing at fixed intervals in the fragrant orchestration of the poem.
At present his ambition was to wander at will across a landscape full of changes and surprises, and he began with a simple phrase that was ample and sonorous, suddenly opening up an immense vista of countryside.
With his vaporizers he injected into the room an essence composed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea and other flowers – an extract which, when it is distilled by a true artist, well merits the name it has been given of ‘extract of meadow blossoms’. Then into this meadow he introduced a carefully measured amalgam of tuberose, orange and almond blossom; and immediately artificial lilacs came into being, while linden-trees swayed in the wind, shedding on the ground about them their pale emanations, counterfeited by the London extract of tilia.
Once he had roughed out this background in its main outlines, so that it stretched away into the distance behind his closed eyelids, he sprayed the room with a light rain of essences that were half-human, half-feline, smacking of the petticoat, indicating the presence of woman in her paint and powder – stephanotis, ayapana, opopanax, chypre, champaka and schoenanthus – on which he superimposed a dash of syringa, to give the factitious, cosmetic, indoor life they evoked the natural appearance of laughing, sweating, rollicking pleasures out in the sun.
Next he let these fragrant odours escape through a ventilator, keeping only the country scent, which he renewed, increasing the dose so as to force it to return like a ritornel at the end of each stanza.
The women he had conjured up had gradually disappeared, and the countryside was once more uninhabited. Then, as if by magic, the horizon was filled with factories, whose fearsome chimneys belched fire and flame like so many bowls of punch.
A breath of industry, a whiff of chemical products now floated on the breeze he raised by fanning the air, though Nature still poured her sweet effluvia into this foul-smelling atmosphere.
Des Esseintes was rubbing a pellet of styrax between his fingers, warming it so that it filled the room with a most peculiar smell, an odour at once repugnant and delightful, blending the delicious scent of the jonquil with the filthy stench of guttapercha and coal tar. He disinfected his hands, shut away his resin in a hermetically sealed box, and the factories disappeared in their turn.
Now, in the midst of the revivified effluvia of linden-trees and meadow flowers, he sprinkled a few drops of the perfume ‘New-mown Hay’, and on the magic spot momentarily stripped of its lilacs there rose piles of hay, bringing a new season with them, spreading summer about them in these delicate emanations.
Finally, when he had sufficiently savoured this spectacle, he frantically scattered exotic perfumes around him, emptied his vaporizers, quickened all his concentrated essences and gave free rein to all his balms, with the result that the suffocating room was suddenly filled with an insanely sublimated vegetation, emitting powerful exhalations, impregnating an artificial breeze with raging alcoholates – an unnatural yet charming vegetation, paradoxically uniting tropical spices such as the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthorn and vervain; defying climate and season to put forth trees of different smells and flowers of the most divergent colours and fragrances; creating out of the union or collision of all these tones one common perfume, unnamed, unexpected, unusual, in which there reappeared, like a persistent refrain, the decorative phrase he had started with, the smell of the great meadow and the swaying lilacs and linden-trees.
All of a sudden he felt a sharp stab of pain, as if a drill were boring into his temples. He opened his eyes, to find himself back in the middle of his dressing-room, sitting at his table; he got up and, still in a daze, stumbled across to the window, which he pushed ajar. A gust of air blew in and freshened up the stifling atmosphere that enveloped him. He walked up and down to steady his legs, and as he went to and fro he looked up at the ceiling, on which crabs and salt-encrusted seaweed stood out in relief against a grained background as yellow as the sand on a beach. A similar design adorned the plinths bordering the wall panels, which in their turn were covered with Japanese crape, a watery green in colour and slightly crumpled to imitate the surface of a river rippling in the wind, while down the gentle current floated a rose petal round which there twisted and turned a swarm of little fishes sketched in with a couple of strokes of the pen.
But his eyes were still heavy, and so he stopped pacing the short distance between font and bath and leaned his elbows on the window-sill. Soon his head cleared, and after carefully putting the stoppers back in all his scent-bottles, he took the opportunity to tidy up his cosmetic preparations. He had not touched these things since his arrival at Fontenay, and he was almost surprised to see once again this collection to which so many women had had recourse. Phials and jars were piled on top of each other in utter confusion. Here was a box of green porcelain containing schnouda, that marvellous white cream which, once it is spread on the cheeks, changes under the influence of the air to a delicate pink, then to a flesh colour so natural that it produces an entirely convincing illusion of a flushed complexion; there, lacquered jars inlaid with mother-of-pearl held Japanese gold and Athens green the colour of a blisterfly’s wing, golds and greens that turn dark crimson as soon as they are moistened. And beside pots of filbert paste, of harem serkis, of Kashmir-lily emulsions, of strawberry and elderberry lotions for the skin, next to little bottles full of China-ink and rose-water solutions for the eyes, lay an assortment of instruments fashioned out of ivory and mother-of-pearl, silver and steel, mixed up with lucern brushes for the gums – pincers, scissors, strigils, stumps, hair-pads, powder-puffs, back-scratchers, beauty-spots and files.
He poked around among all this apparatus, bought long ago to please a mistress of his who used to go into raptures over certain aromatics and certain balms – an unbalanced, neurotic woman who loved to have her nipples macerated in scent, but who only really experienced complete and
utter ecstasy when her scalp was scraped with a comb or when a lover’s caresses were mingled with the smell of soot, of wet plaster from houses being built in rainy weather, or of dust thrown up by heavy rain-drops in a summer thunderstorm.
As he mused over these recollections, one memory in particular haunted him, stirring up a forgotten world of old thoughts and ancient perfumes – the memory of an afternoon he had spent with this woman at Pantin, partly for want of anything better to do and partly out of curiosity, at the house of one of her sisters. While the two women were chattering away and showing each other their frocks, he had gone to the window and, through the dusty panes, had seen the muddy street stretching into the distance and heard it echo with the incessant beat of galoshes tramping through the puddles.
This scene, though it belonged to a remote past, suddenly presented itself to him in astonishing detail. Pantin was there before him, bustling and alive in the dead green water of the moon-rimmed mirror into which his unthinking gaze was directed.5 An hallucination carried him away far from Fontenay; the looking-glass conjured up for him not only the Pantin street but also the thoughts that street had once evoked; and lost in a dream, he said over to himself the ingenious, melancholy, yet consoling anthem he had composed that day on getting back to Paris:
‘Yes, the season of the great rains is upon us; hearken to the song of the gutter-pipes retching under the pavements; behold the horse-dung floating in the bowls of coffee hollowed out of the macadam; everywhere the foot-baths of the poor are overflowing.
‘Under the lowering sky, in the humid atmosphere, the houses ooze black sweat and their ventilators breathe foul odours; the horror of life becomes more apparent and the grip of spleen more oppressive; the seeds of iniquity that lie in every man’s heart begin to germinate; a craving for filthy pleasures takes hold of the puritanical, and the minds of respected citizens are visited by criminal desires.
‘And yet here I am, warming myself in front of a blazing fire, while a basket of full-blown flowers on the table fills the room with the scent of benzoin, geranium and vetiver. In mid-November it is still springtime at Pantin in the Rue de Paris, and I can enjoy a quiet laugh at the expense of those timorous families who, in order to avoid the approach of winter, scuttle away at full speed to Antibes or to Cannes.
‘Inclement Nature has nothing to do with this extraordinary phenomenon; let it be said at once that it is to industry, and industry alone, that Pantin owes this factitious spring.
‘The truth is that these flowers are made of taffeta and mounted on binding wire, while this vernal fragrance has come filtering in through cracks in the window-frame from the neighbouring factories where the Pinaud and St James perfumes are made.
‘For the artisan worn out by the hard labour of the workshops, for the little clerk blessed with too many offspring, the illusion of enjoying a little fresh air is a practical possibility – thanks to these manufacturers.
‘Indeed, out of this fabulous counterfeit of the countryside a sensible form of medical treatment could be developed. At present, gay dogs suffering from consumption who are carted away to the south generally die down there, finished off by the change in their habits, by their nostalgic longing for the Parisian pleasures that have laid them low. Here, in an artificial climate maintained by open stoves, their lecherous memories would come back to them in a mild and harmless form, as they breathed in the languid feminine emanations given off by the scent factories. By means of this innocent deception, the physician could supply his patient platonically with the atmosphere of the boudoirs and brothels of Paris, in place of the deadly boredom of provincial life. More often than not, all that would be needed to complete the cure would be for the sick man to show a little imagination.
‘Seeing that nowadays there is nothing wholesome left in this world of ours; seeing that the wine we drink and the freedom we enjoy are equally adulterate and derisory; and finally, seeing that it takes a considerable degree of goodwill to believe that the governing classes are worthy of respect and that the lower classes are worthy of help or pity, it seems to me,’ concluded Des Esseintes, ‘no more absurd or insane to ask of my fellow men a sum total of illusion barely equivalent to that which they expend every day on idiotic objects, to persuade themselves that the town of Pantin is an artificial Nice, a factitious Menton.’
‘All that,’ he muttered, interrupted in his reflections by a sudden feeling of faintness, ‘doesn’t alter the fact that I shall have to beware of these delicious, atrocious experiments, which are just wearing me out.’
He heaved a sigh.
‘Ah, well, that means more pleasures to cut down on, more precautions to take!’ – and he shut himself up in his study, hoping that there he would find it easier to escape from the obsessive influence of all these perfumes.
He threw the window wide open, delighted to take a bath of fresh air; but suddenly it struck him that the breeze was bringing with it a whiff of bergamot oil, mingled with a smell of jasmine, cassia and rose-water. He gave a gasp of horror, and began to wonder whether he might not be in the grip of one of those evil spirits they used to exorcize in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile the odour, though just as persistent, underwent a change. A vague scent of tincture of Tolu, Peruvian balsam and saffron, blended with a few drops of musk and amber, now floated up from the sleeping village at the foot of the hill; then all at once the metamorphosis took place, these scattered whiffs of perfume came together, and the familiar scent of frangipane, the elements of which his sense of smell had detected and recognized, spread from the valley of Fontenay all the way to the Fort, assailing his jaded nostrils, shaking anew his shattered nerves and throwing him into such a state of prostration that he fell fainting, almost dying, across the window-sill.
CHAPTER 11
The frightened servants immediately sent for the Fontenay doctor, who was completely baffled by Des Esseintes’s condition. He muttered a few medical terms, felt the patient’s pulse, examined his tongue, tried in vain to get him to talk, ordered sedatives and rest and promised to come back the next day. But at this Des Esseintes summoned up enough strength to reprove his servants for their excessive zeal and to dismiss the intruder, who went off to tell the whole village about the house, the eccentric furnishings of which had left him dumbfounded and flabbergasted.
To the amazement of the two domestics, who now no longer dared to budge from the pantry, their master recovered in a day or two; and they came upon him drumming on the windowpanes and casting anxious glances at the sky. And then, one afternoon, he rang for them and gave orders that his bags were to be packed for a long journey.
While the old man and his wife hunted out the things he said he would need, he paced feverishly up and down the cabin-style dining-room, consulted the timetables of the Channel steamers and scrutinized the clouds from his study window with an impatient yet satisfied air.
For the past week, the weather had been atrocious. Sooty rivers flowing across the grey plains of the sky carried along an endless succession of clouds, like so many boulders torn out of the earth. Every now and then there would be a sudden downpour, and the valley would disappear under torrents of rain.
But that particular day, the sky had changed in appearance: the floods of ink had dried up, the clouds had lost their rugged outlines and the heavens were now covered with a flat, opaque film. This film seemed to be falling ever lower, and at the same time the countryside was enveloped in a watery mist; the rain no longer cascaded down as it had done the day before, but fell in a fine, cold, unrelenting spray, swamping the lanes, submerging the roads, joining heaven and earth with its countless threads. Daylight in the village dimmed to a ghastly twilight, while the village itself looked like a lake of mud, speckled by the quicksilver needles of rain pricking the surface of the slimy puddles. From this desolate scene all colour had faded away, leaving only the roofs to glisten brightly above the supporting walls.
‘What terrible weather!’ sighed the old man-servant, as he laid on a chair th
e clothes his master had asked for, a suit ordered some time before from London.
Des Esseintes made no reply except to rub his hands and sit down before a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks was displayed in the form of a fan. For a few moments he hesitated between the various shades; then, taking into account the cheerless day, his cheerless clothes and his cheerless destination, he picked out a pair in a drab silk and quickly pulled them on. They were followed by the suit, a mottled check in mouse grey and lava grey, a pair of laced ankle-boots, a little bowler hat and a flax-blue Inverness cape. In this attire, and accompanied by his man-servant, who was bent under the burden of a trunk, an expanding valise, a carpet-bag, a hat-box, and a bundle of sticks and umbrellas rolled up in a travelling-rug, he made his way to the station. There, he told his man that he could not say definitely when he would be back – in a year perhaps, or a month, or a week, or even sooner; gave instructions that during his absence nothing in the house should be moved or changed; handed over enough money to cover household expenses; and got into the train, leaving the bewildered old man standing awkward and agape behind the barrier.
He was alone in his compartment. Through the rain-swept windows the countryside flashing past looked blurred and dingy, as if he were seeing it through an aquarium full of murky water. Closing his eyes, Des Esseintes gave himself up to his thoughts.
Once again, he told himself, the solitude he had longed for so ardently and finally obtained had resulted in appalling unhappiness, while the silence which he had once regarded as well-merited compensation for the nonsense he had listened to for years now weighed unbearably upon him. One morning, he had woken up feeling as desperate as a man who finds himself locked in a prison cell; his lips trembled when he tried to speak, his eyes filled with tears and he choked and spluttered like someone who has been weeping for hours. Possessed by a sudden desire to move about, to look upon a human face, to talk to some other living creature, and to share a little in the life of ordinary folk, he actually summoned his servants on some pretext or other and asked them to stay with him. But conversation was impossible, for apart from the fact that years of silence and sick-room routine had practically deprived the two old people of the power of speech, their master’s habit of keeping them at a distance was scarcely calculated to loosen their tongues. In any event, they were a dull-witted pair, and quite incapable of answering a question in anything but monosyllables.