On account of its artificial, made-up appearance, Des Esseintes found this landscape not unattractive; but since that first afternoon he had spent house-hunting in the village of Fontenay, he had never once set foot in its streets by day. The greenery of this part of the country had no appeal whatever for him, lacking as it did even that languid, melancholy charm possessed by the pitiful, sickly vegetation clinging pathetically to life on the suburban rubbish-heaps near the ramparts. And then, on that same day, in the village itself, he had caught sight of bewhiskered bourgeois with protuberant paunches and mustachioed individuals in fancy dress, whom he took to be magistrates and army officers, carrying their heads as proudly as a priest would carry a monstrance; and after that experience his detestation of the human face had grown even fiercer than before.
During the last months of his residence in Paris, at a time when, sapped by disillusionment, depressed by hypochondria and weighed down by spleen, he had been reduced to such a state of nervous sensitivity that the sight of a disagreeable person or thing was deeply impressed upon his mind and it took several days even to begin removing the imprint, the human face as glimpsed in the street had been one of the keenest torments he had been forced to endure.
It was a fact that he suffered actual pain at the sight of certain physiognomies, that he almost regarded the benign or crabbed expressions on some faces as personal insults, and that he felt sorely tempted to box the ears of, say, one worthy he saw strolling along with his eyes shut in donnish affectation, another who smiled at his reflection as he minced past the shop-windows and yet another who appeared to be pondering a thousand-and-one weighty thoughts as he knit his brows over the rambling articles and sketchy news-items in his paper.
He could detect such inveterate stupidity, such hatred of his own ideas, such contempt for literature and art and everything he held dear, implanted and rooted in these mean mercenary minds, exclusively preoccupied with thoughts of swindling and money-grubbing and accessible only to that ignoble distraction of mediocre intellects, politics, that he would go home in a fury and shut himself up with his books.
Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafés, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs.
CHAPTER 3
One section of the bookshelves lining the walls of Des Esseintes’s blue and orange study was filled with nothing but Latin works – works which minds drilled into conformity by repetitious university lectures lump together under the generic name of ‘the Decadence’.1
The truth was that the Latin language, as it was written during the period which the academics still persist in calling the Golden Age, held scarcely any attraction for him. That restricted idiom with its limited stock of almost invariable constructions; without suppleness of syntax, without colour, without even light and shade; pressed flat along all its seams and stripped of the crude but often picturesque expressions of earlier epochs – that idiom could, at a pinch, enunciate the pompous platitudes and vague commonplaces endlessly repeated by the rhetoricians and poets of the time, but it was so tedious and unoriginal that in the study of linguistics you had to come down to the French style current in the age of Louis XIV to find another idiom so wilfully debilitated, so solemnly tiresome and dull.
Among other authors, the gentle Virgil, he whom the school-mastering fraternity call the Swan of Mantua, presumably because that was not his native city, impressed him as being one of the most appalling pedants and one of the most deadly bores that Antiquity ever produced; his well-washed, beribboned shepherds taking it in turns to empty over each other’s heads jugs of icy-cold sententious verse, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who blubbers about bees and his Aeneas, that irresolute, garrulous individual who strides up and down like a puppet in a shadow-theatre, making wooden gestures behind the ill-fitting, badly oiled screen of the poem, combined to irritate Des Esseintes. He might possibly have tolerated the dreary nonsense these marionettes spout into the wings; he might even have excused the impudent plagiarizing of Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius, as well as the outright theft Macrobius has revealed to us of the whole of the Second Book of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from a poem of Pisander’s; he might in fact have put up with all the indescribable fatuity of this rag-bag of vapid verses; but what utterly exasperated him was the shoddy workmanship of the tinny hexameters, with their statutory allotment of words weighed and measured according to the unalterable laws of a dry, pedantic prosody; it was the structure of the stiff and starchy lines in their formal attire and their abject subservience to the rule of grammar; it was the way in which each and every line was mechanically bisected by the inevitable caesura and finished off with the invariable shock of dactyl striking spondee.
Borrowed as it was from the system perfected by Catullus, that unchanging prosody, unimaginative, inexorable, stuffed full of useless words and phrases, dotted with pegs that fitted only too foreseeably into corresponding holes, that pitiful device of the Homeric epithet, used time and again without ever indicating or describing anything, and that poverty-stricken vocabulary with its dull, dreary colours, all caused him unspeakable torment.
It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid’s limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace’s vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown, was absolutely limitless.
In prose, he was no more enamoured of the long-winded style, the redundant metaphors and the rambling digressions of old Chick-Pea,2 the bombast of his apostrophes, the wordiness of his patriotic perorations, the pomposity of his harangues, the heaviness of his style, well fed and well covered, but weak-boned and running to fat, the intolerable insignificance of his long introductory adverbs, the monotonous uniformity of his adipose periods clumsily tied together with conjunctions, and finally his wearisome predilection for tautology, all signally failed to endear him to Des Esseintes. Nor was Caesar, with his reputation for laconism, any more to his taste than Cicero; for he went to the other extreme, and offended by his pop-gun pithiness, his jotting-pad brevity, his unforgivable, unbelievable constipation.
The fact of the matter was that he could find mental pabulum neither among these writers nor among those who for some reason are the delight of dilettante scholars: Sallust who is at least no more insipid than the rest, Livy who is pompous and sentimental, Seneca who is turgid and colourless, Suetonius who is larval and lymphatic and Tacitus, who with his studied concision is the most virile, the most biting, the most sinewy of them all. In poetry, Juvenal, despite a few vigorous lines, and Persius, for all his mysterious innuendoes, both left him cold. Leaving aside Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the two Plinys, Statius, Martial of Bilbilis, Terence even and Plautus, whose jargon with its plentiful neologisms, compounds, and diminutives attracted him, but whose low wit and salty humour repelled him, Des Esseintes only began to take an interest in the Latin language when he came to Lucan, in whose hands it took on new breadth, and became brighter and more expressive. The fine craftsmanship of Lucan’s enamelled and jewelled verse won his admiration; but the poet’s exclusive preoccupation with form, bell-like stridency and metallic brilliance did not entirely hide from his eyes the bombastic blisters disfiguring the Pharsalia, or the poverty of its intellectual content.
The author he really loved, and who made him abandon Lucan’s resounding tirades for good, was Petronius.
Petronius was a shrewd observer, a delicate analyst, a marvellous painter; dispassionately, with an entire lack of prejudice or animosity, he described the everyday life of Rome, recording the manners and morals of his time in the lively little chapters of the Satyricon
.3
Noting what he saw as he saw it, he set forth the day-to-day existence of the common people, with all its minor events, its bestial incidents, its obscene antics.
Here we have the Inspector of Lodgings coming to ask for the names of any travellers who have recently arrived; there, a brothel where men circle round naked women standing beside placards giving their price, while through half-open doors couples can be seen disporting themselves in the bedrooms. Elsewhere, in villas full of insolent luxury where wealth and ostentation run riot, as also in the mean inns described throughout the book, with their unmade trestle beds swarming with fleas, the society of the day has its fling – depraved ruffians like Ascyltus and Eumolpus, out for what they can get; unnatural old men with their gowns tucked up and their cheeks plastered with white lead and acacia rouge; catamites of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women having hysterics; legacy-hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lusts of rich testators, all these and more scurry across the pages of the Satyricon, squabbling in the streets, fingering one another in the baths, beating one another up like characters in a pantomime.
All this is told with extraordinary vigour and precise colouring, in a style that makes free of every dialect, that borrows expressions from all the languages imported into Rome, that extends the frontiers and breaks the fetters of the so-called Golden Age, that makes every man talk in his own idiom – uneducated freedmen in vulgar Latin, the language of the streets; foreigners in their barbaric lingo, shot with words and phrases from African, Syrian and Greek; and stupid pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, in a rhetorical jargon of invented words. There are lightning sketches of all these people, sprawled round a table, exchanging the vapid pleasantries of drunken revellers, trotting out mawkish maxims and stupid saws, their heads turned towards Trimalchio, who sits picking his teeth, offers the company chamber-pots, discourses on the state of his bowels, farts to prove his point and begs his guests to make themselves at home.
This realistic novel, this slice cut from Roman life in the raw, with no thought, whatever people may say, of reforming or satirizing society, and no need to fake a conclusion or point a moral; this story with no plot or action in it, simply relating the erotic adventures of certain sons of Sodom, analysing with smooth finesse the joys and sorrows of these loving couples, depicting in a splendidly wrought style, without affording a single glimpse of the author, without any comment whatever, without a word of approval or condemnation of his characters’ thoughts and actions, the vices of a decrepit civilization, a crumbling Empire – this story fascinated Des Esseintes; and in its subtle style, acute observation and solid construction he could see a curious similarity, a strange analogy with the few modern French novels he could stomach.
Naturally enough he bitterly regretted the loss of the Eustion and the Albutia, those two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciades Fulgentius which have vanished for ever; but the bibliophile in him consoled the scholar, as he reverently handled the superb copy he possessed of the Satyricon, in the octavo edition of 1585 printed by J. Dousa at Leyden.
After Petronius, his collection of Latin authors came to the second century of the Christian era, skipped tub-thumping Fronto with his old-fashioned expressions, clumsily restored and unsuccessfully renovated, passed over the Noctes Atticae of his friend and disciple Aulus Gellius, a sagacious and inquisitive mind, but a writer bogged down in a glutinous style, and stopped only for Apuleius, whose works he had in the editio princeps, in folio, printed at Rome in 1469.
This African author gave him enormous pleasure. The Latin language reached the top of the tide in his Metamorphoses, sweeping along in a dense flood fed by tributary waters from every province, and combining them all in a bizarre, exotic, almost incredible torrent of words; new mannerisms and new details of Latin society found expression in neologisms called into being to meet conversational requirements in an obscure corner of Roman Africa. What was more, Des Esseintes was amused by Apuleius’ exuberance and joviality – the exuberance of a southerner and the joviality of a man who was beyond all question fat. He had the air of a lecherous boon companion compared with the Christian apologists living in the same century – the soporific Minucius Felix for instance, a pseudo-classic in whose Octavius Cicero’s oily phrases have grown thicker and heavier, and even Tertullian, whom he kept more perhaps for the sake of the Aldine edition of his works than for the works themselves.
Although he was perfectly at home with theological problems,4 the Montanist wrangles with the Catholic Church and the polemics against Gnosticism left him cold; so, despite the interest of Tertullian’s style, a compact style full of amphibologies, built on participles, shaken by antitheses, strewn with puns and speckled with words borrowed from the language of jurisprudence or the Fathers of the Greek Church, he now scarcely ever opened the Apologeticus or the De Patientia; at the very most he sometimes read a page or two of the De Cultu Feminarum where Tertullian exhorts women not to adorn their persons with jewels and precious stuffs, and forbids them to use cosmetics because these attempt to correct and improve on Nature.
These ideas, diametrically opposed to his own, brought a smile to his lips, and he recalled the part played by Tertullian as Bishop of Carthage, a role which he considered pregnant with pleasant day-dreams. It was, in fact, the man more than his works that attracted him.
Living in times of appalling storm and stress, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing high-priest of Emesa, Elagabalus, he had gone on calmly writing his sermons, his dogmatic treatises, his apologies and homilies, while the Roman Empire tottered, and while the follies of Asia and the vices of paganism swept all before them. With perfect composure he had gone on preaching carnal abstinence, frugality of diet, sobriety of dress, at the same time as Elagabalus was treading in silver dust and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara and his clothes studded with jewels, working at women’s tasks in the midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picked for choice from among his barbers, scullions and charioteers.
This contrast delighted Des Esseintes. He knew that this was the point at which the Latin language, which had attained supreme maturity in Petronius, began to break up; the literature of Christianity was asserting itself, matching its novel ideas with new words, unfamiliar constructions, unknown verbs, adjectives of super-subtle meaning and finally abstract nouns, which had hitherto been rare in the Roman tongue and which Tertullian had been one of the first to use.
However, this deliquescence, which was carried on after Tertullian’s death by his pupil St Cyprian, by Arnobius, by the obscure Lactantius, was an unattractive process. It was a slow and partial decay, retarded by awkward attempts to return to the emphasis of Cicero’s periods; as yet it had not acquired that special gamey flavour which in the fourth century – and even more in the following centuries – the odour of Christianity was to give to the pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World, falling apart while the Empires succumbed to the barbarian onslaught and the accumulated pus of ages.
The art of the third century was represented in his library by a single Christian poet, Commodian of Gaza. His Carmen Apologeticum, written in the year 259, is a collection of moral maxims twisted into acrostics, composed in rude hexameters, divided by a caesura after the fashion of heroic verse, written without any respect for quantity or hiatus and often provided with the sort of rhymes of which church Latin could later offer numerous examples.
This strained, sombre verse, this mild, uncivilized poetry, full of everyday expressions and words robbed of their original meaning, appealed to him; it interested him even more than the already over-ripe, delightfully decadent style of the historians Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victor, the letter-writer Symmachus and the compilator and grammarian Macrobius, and he even preferred it to the properly scanned verse and the superbly variegated language of Claudian, Rutilius and Ausonius.
r /> These last were in their day the masters of their art; they filled the dying Empire with their cries – the Christian Ausonius with his Cento Nuptialis and his long, elaborate poem on the Moselle; Rutilius with his hymns to the glory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks and his account of a journey across the Alps into Gaul, in which he sometimes manages to convey certain visual impressions, the landscapes hazily reflected in water, the mirage effect of the vapours, the mists swirling round the mountain tops.
As for Claudian, he appears as a sort of avatar of Lucan, dominating the entire fourth century with the tremendous trumpeting of his verse; a poet hammering out a brilliant, sonorous hexameter on his anvil, beating out each epithet with a single blow amid showers of sparks, attaining a certain grandeur, filling his work with a powerful breath of life. With the Western Empire crumbling to its ruin all about him, amid the horror of the repeated massacres occurring on every side, and under the threat of invasion by the barbarians now pressing in their hordes against the creaking gates of the Empire, he calls Antiquity back to life, sings of the Rape of Proserpine, daubs his canvas with glowing colours and goes by with all his lights blazing through the darkness closing in upon the world.
Paganism lives again in him, sounding its last proud fanfare, lifting its last great poet high above the floodwaters of Christianity which are henceforth going to submerge the language completely and hold absolute and eternal sway over literature – with Paulinus, the pupil of Ausonius; with the Spanish priest Juvencus, who paraphrases the Gospels in verse; with Victorinus, author of the Machabaei; with Sanctus Burdigalensis, who in an eclogue imitated from Virgil makes the herdsmen Egon and Buculus bewail the maladies afflicting their flocks. Then there are the saints, a whole series of saints – Hilary of Poitiers, who championed the faith of Nicaea and was called the Athanasius of the West; Ambrosius, the author of indigestible homilies, the tiresome Christian Cicero; Damasus, the manufacturer of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate; and his adversary Vigilantius of Comminges, who attacks the cult of the saints, the abuse of miracles, the practice of fasting, and already preaches against monastic vows and the celibacy of the priesthood, using arguments that will be repeated down the ages.