71 …sluttified. In the original Huymans uses his own neologism, ensalopé, which is derived from the verb saloper, which means to dirty or spoil and is often used in relation to prostitutes or general sexual debauchery.
71 …sauce ravigote. Ravigote sauces are highly seasoned with shallots or onion, capers and herbs: ravigoté connotes reinvigorated or freshened up. It is generally served with fish, fowl, eggs and, traditionally, with tête de veau, jellied hare, head cheese, paté or calves’ brains.
71 …perfumed beard. Huysmans uses a couple of slangy expressions that make the precise meaning a little unclear (barbe à la rose et qui aurait fait de la mousse avec les lèvres, en parlant). Although fait de la mousse does have a literal meaning and could be interpreted as ‘foaming at the mouth, or spitting, when he spoke’, this would not seem to make sense given the references to the gentleman’s silk hat and fancy beard. The allusion Huysmans is trying to make may be to do with the sense in which faire de la mousse, implies he is so clean he could blow soap-bubbles.
72 …A villain and a drunkard. This doesn’t do justice to the untranslatable phrase used by Huysmans, tendre comme un moineau et soulard comme une grive (literally, ‘tender as a sparrow and drunk as a thrush’). In French the word moineau is often coupled with vilain or sale and is used to describe an untrustworthy or disreputable man, while the grive has long been used in metaphors of drunkenness as it was believed that the bird had a fondness for eating grapes.
IV
77 …some of her piquette. A piquette was a kind of lightly alcoholic wine produced by adding water to grape pomace. Piquette can also refer to cheap wine in general, but given that it is a child drinking it seems more likely to refer to diluted wine.
80 …Boulevard de Montrouge. The name of this Boulevard, which is referred to several times, was changed in 1879, the year of the novel’s publication, to the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. It runs directly along the northern wall of Montparnasse cemetery, between the Boulevard Raspail and the Avenue de Maine.
81 …never got blind drunk at the bar. Huysmans uses the rare expression parler d’oeufs rouge au tourniquet in the original, meaning the equivalent of seeing pink elephants.
83 …Hey, any of you drunken bums. Huysmans uses a slang expression in the original, Jésus qui chiquent. The word Jésus has a number of slang connotations, being both thieves’ slang and a term used for homosexuals. Chiquer can literally mean to chew tobacco, but also has the meaning of ‘to eat or drink’, ‘to beat’, ‘to lie’ or ‘to cheat’, so the precise implication of the phrase is not easy to determine. Marcel Cressot in his La Phrase et le vocabulaire de J.-K. Huysmans (Droz, 1938), notes slightly unconvincingly that chiquer is a pun on the word Christ, which would make the phrase equivalent to Jesus H Christ, but this doesn’t really work in the context. In any case it is sufficiently coarse for Auguste to be shocked that a girl was saying it.
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85 …the one and only Marseille. During the 1850s and 1860s two brothers, known as the Frères Marseille, were famous for their prowess in Greco-Roman wrestling.
85 …Great Exhibition of 1867. The Great Exhibition or Exposition universelle of 1867 was the second World Fair to be held in Paris. It was located on the Champ de Mars in a series of pavilions and exhibitions, most notably Fréderic Le Play’s massive oval pavilion, the Palais Omnibus, and aimed to showcase French achievements in industry, agriculture, the arts and so on.
85 …the ring on the Rue Le Peletier. The sporting arena on the Rue Le Peletier no longer exists, but a famous painting by Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900) shows two men wrestling in the ring there.
85 …I’ll take you on, pass me some gloves. It was a common trick at wrestling booths for someone in the audience to challenge one of the fairground wrestlers. However, the challenger was invariably in on the act, the challenge simply being a ruse to attract paying customers.
88 …‘The Venus of Luchon’, ‘The Belle of Brabant’, ‘The Giantess of Auvergne’. Luchon is a spa town in the Haute-Garonne department, on the border between south-west France and Spain. Brabant is a historical region in the Low Countries, and Auvergne is a sparsely populated, agricultural region of France, geographically almost in the centre of the country.
88 …gigantic bellies. Huysmans uses the word berdouille, which means ‘belly’ in the Walloon dialect, and which Zola also used in L’Assommoir, 1877.
94 …the Avenger. The Vengeur (‘the Avenger’) was a 74-gun ship belonging to the French Navy, launched in 1762. In 1794, the ship fought in the Third Battle of Ushant where, after an epic four-hour duel with HMS Brunswick, she sank, having lost two masts and having been holed below the waterline.
94 …sirop de Calabre. A medicinal liqueur made by infusing white wine with gentian and iris. The exact method of preparation is given in Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire oeconomique (4th edition, 1740). It was believed to have medicinal properties as a purgative, as an aid to digestion, and to ease rheumatism, and so on.
94 …Curaçao. A liqueur made from the dried peel of the laraha citrus fruit on the island of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela.
95 …Theatre Legois. The Legois family were a theatre troupe known for their opéra-bouffes and their melodramatic tableaux. Their advertising poster described their performances as ‘the most brilliant spectacle you’ll ever see’.
95 …Theatre Delille. A popular theatre of the period named after the stage illusionist Adrien Delille (1799-1877), and located on Cours de Vincennes. Jules Chéret did a famous poster for the theatre advertising a trick called l’homme mutilé, or the decapitated corpse, an illusion in which a decapitated head seemed to speak.
95 …Corvi circus. The Cirque Corvi, which was established by Jacques Corvi in about 1845, was unusual in that it was a miniature circus involving the use of trained monkeys and dogs as performers. The running of the circus was taken over by Jacques’ son Ferdinand Corvi in 1869.
97 …near the old Capuchin monastery. Just off the Boulevard de Port Royal there was an old Capuchin monastery, on the corner of the Rue de la Santé and the Impasse de la Santé.
97 …On the way back from Montparnasse. Obviously a bawdy song from the period, though it’s not clear which.
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100 …kick your arse. Huysmans uses the phrase je vous détruirai le faubourg in the original, faubourg being popular slang for backside.
100 …the Gros-Caillou quarter. Named after large rock that used to stand near the present junction of the Rue Cler and the Rue Saint-Dominique in the seventh arrondissement, the quarter roughly comprises the area south of the Seine between the Champ de Mars to the west and the Hôtel des Invalides to the east.
101 …Petit Journal. The Petit Journal was a Parisian daily newspaper that had a huge circulation during the later part of the nineteenth century, partly because it was so cheap, and partly because it concentrated more on sensational stories and incidents than on serious political news.
101 …a darning egg. A wooden ‘egg’ was often used when darning or repairing socks to provide the round shape of the heel.
104 …it was ‘absinthe hour’. Charles Monselet, in De Montmartre à Séville (A. Faure, 1865), gives the following description: ‘Absinthe hour begins at about four o’clock in the afternoon. It is at this time that all the cafés, principally those on the boulevards, are at their most animated…Groups of four or five are arranged around a table, outside in the summer, inside in the winter. There’s a coming and going of plates, waiters with absinthe bottles in their hands, ask customers:
– Monsieur, straight or with sugar? […]
Because there are a hundred ways of taking absinthe, making it cloudy with water, mixing it, shaking it, diluting it. I’ve known professors of absinthe. The Green Muse! as despairing poets have called it.’
106 …Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. Now the Rue des Petits Champs, the street runs between the first and second arrondissements, not far from Op
éra.
107 …The Child’s Letter. Another sentimental song dating from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, written by Villemer and Delormel and with music by Ludovic Benza. It recounted a French soldier coming across a dead comrade and finding a letter from his young son in his bloodstained tunic. The soldier reads the letter out to the rest of the company, and the last verse runs, ‘The soldier stopped at the line where the mother/Along with her child, says: “We kiss you father!”/ Because the lead of the German bullet/Had torn away the rest of the child’s letter.’
107 …the Bobino. The Bobino, also known as the Théâtre du Luxembourg, was originally a music hall staging vaudevilles, pantomimes and so on, located near the Jardin du Luxembourg. In Huysmans’ first novel, Marthe, histoire d’une fille (1876), Marthe appears at the Bobino, and it was a performance at the Bobino that formed the subject of Huysmans’ first and only piece of theatre criticism, published in the Revue Mensuelle in 1867. The original Bobino was demolished in 1868, and in 1873 a new theatre, known as the Folies-Bobino, was built at 20 Rue de la Gaité.
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110 …her gentleman didn’t have long hair and didn’t wear a velvet jacket. Huysmans pokes fun here at the stereotypical view of the ‘uniform’ of Bohemian artists, but he is also signalling that Cyprien Tibaille doesn’t conform to this stereotype, and consequently his work is not a pose or a Romanticised affectation, but rather belongs to the Naturalist school in which the aim is to represent life as it really is.
111 …down the Rue Vandamme. Only a small part of the Rue Vandamme, running between the Rue de la Gaité, near Montparnasse cemetery, to the present Avenue du Maine, still exists. The part mentioned by Huysmans, running from the Avenue de Maine to the Rue du Château, was demolished when the site around Montparnasse station was redeveloped in the 1960s.
111 …the red railings and sheet-metal blue grapes of a wine-merchant’s. Although Huysmans doesn’t mention specifically the wine-merchant here, in a piece he wrote for Le Gaulois, on 11 June 1880, ‘Une Goguette’, he uses exactly the same words (barreaux rouges et ses raisins en tôle bleue) to describe popular wine-merchants in working-class districts such as Montparnasse.
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123 …Jamin’s café-concert hall. The soft-drinks manufacturer, François Jamin, constructed the café-concert at 26 Rue de la Gaité using building materials salvaged from the demolition of the Théâtre de l’Exposition in 1867. The Concert de la Gaîté-Montparnasse, as it was known, opened its doors in 1868.
123 …uniformed doorman trying to look tough. Huysmans uses the word municipal in the original, which often referred to old soldiers who were employed as bouncers or doormen of theatres and dance halls. He also employs a novel piece of slang, describing the doorman as se dressait sur ses ergots de cuir, which literally means ‘standing up on his leather spurs’, though dressant sur ses ergots is slang for getting on your high horse or acting tough.
123 …the Plaisance omnibus came along, cutting through this teeming crowd. Interestingly, André Gill, in his Correspondance et memoirs d’un caricaturiste (1840-1885), uses exactly the same image, recalling that the omnibus from Ménilmontant would cut the crowd in two on either side of the street.
125 …crammed you into ordered rows. In the original Huysmans uses the term en rangs d’oignons, literally ‘in rows (or ranks) of onions’. The expression derived from a system of public seating devised by a man named Artus de la Fontaine Solaro, a nobleman from Oignon in Picardy, who organised royal fêtes and ceremonies. At these events he assigned places according to the protocols of rank and nobility, exasperating those participating who ironically referred to it as being ‘seated in Oignon’s rows’. Over the course of time the expression lost its original meaning and its capital and was written as ‘onion’.
128 …When we sing in cherry blossom time. The first verse of the celebrated song written in 1866 by Jean-Baptiste Clément (1836-1903), and put to music by Antoine Renard two years later. Although written before the events of the Commune in 1871, the song became closely associated with it, partly due to a number of references, such as to wounds and blood, and partly because Clément was himself a Communard and later dedicated the song to a soldier who died during the Semaine sanglante (the week of bloodshed).
128 …Céladon. One of the central characters in L’Astrée, a pastoral novel by Honoré d’Urfé (1568-1625), only the first three parts of which were published during the author’s lifetime. L’Astrée runs to over 5,000 pages in its entirety and its complex plot revolves around the love of a shepherdess, Astrée, for a shepherd, Céladon, in fifth-century Forez. The book was immensely influential and Céladon subsequently became a synonym for amorousness.
131 …Boozed up drunks. In the original Huysmans uses two descriptive phrases, Ronds comme des balles and des repris de boisson. Ronds commes des balles is slang for having eaten or drunk too much (Zola uses it in this sense in L’Assommoir), while des repris de boisson (boisson meaning drink) is an expression that Huysmans himself seems to have invented, and which appears in his essay Zola et l’Assommoir (1876) when referring to the conventional perception that writers and poets were often disreputable or drunken individuals (des repris de boisson).
IX
138 …a little shiver. Huysmans uses the word risette here, which is commonly used to mean a gentle or polite smile, however the word also has a nautical meaning and refers to a light wind in open water which produces what are known as a ‘cat’s paw’ waves. Despite never having lived by the sea or having any sailing experience, it is curious how many nautical metaphors appear in Huysmans’ works, including titles such as En rade and A vau-l’eau, and the extended metaphor at the end of Against Nature in which des Esseintes compares living without the certainties of belief to a rudderless ship.
139 …suffering from a certain indisposition. The implication in the original text, though not stated as openly as it is here, is that Cyprien is recovering from a touch of ‘the pox’.
140 …emptied his barrel-organ. This slightly strange-sounding metaphor is in fact quite a literal description. Barrel-organs of the period worked by feeding through a continuous sheet of music, stored in a compartment below the mechanism, which would then come out and pile up at the other end.
140 …Cabanel and Gérôme. Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) was a French artist, one of the leading figures in Academic painting and an exponent of what would later and derisively be termed l’art pompier, originally because historical subjects such as those depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) wore helmets not dissimilar to those of firemen (pompiers). Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) was another leading Academic painter and sculptor. Huysmans was unsparing in his criticisms of l’art pompier, and in L’Art moderne (1883) he called for the over-polished work of Cabanel and Gérôme to be thrown in the bin, along with ‘all those cardboard cut-out goddesses and all that devotional rubbish of the past!’
141 …Venus de Medici. This lifesize sculpture of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, her left arm attempting to cover her breasts and her right hand trying to cover her genitals, was an iconic model of the kind of cold, classical beauty that Huysmans detested in art.
141 …so-called ‘paintings of the nude’. The kind of painting Huysmans is attacking here is admirably represented by the neoclassical work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whose nudes are characterised by flawless skin and not even a hint of bodily hair.
142 …glazed their vulgarity. In the original, Huysmans uses the word frottée, which ordinarily means ‘rubbed’. However, frottée is also a painting term, meaning to scumble or apply a thin glaze to the surface of a painting.
143 …boutiques of secondhand clothes. The marchandes à la toilette were a type that often figured in Balzac’s works, such as Splendeur et misères des courtisanes (1847). They not only provided secondhand clothes, jewelry and trinkets for courtesans or women who’d come down in the world, but also, by im
plication, filled the role of procuress.
143 …began to squeal. In the original Huysmans uses a rare metaphor, poussa des cris de merluche. Zola used the same expression in L’Assommoir. Although merluche can refer either to a fish, like a hake, or a Provençal fish dish, it also has a slang definition meaning a loose woman.
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146 …medlars. An apple-like fruit that needs to be left for several weeks until it begins to decay (a process known as bletting) before it is ready to eat. Medlars were more common in the past than they are today. Huysmans mentions them several times in his work, and in a piece written for La Cravache parisienne in December 1876, he describes them as being ‘as black as a dog’s arse’.
146 …Horsey, horsey. In the original Huysmans quotes part of a children’s nursery rhyme, A dada sur mon bidet, prout, prout, prout, cadet! which is an onomatopoeic rhyme much like ‘Horsey, horsey don’t you stop’, but in which the noises mimic the farting of a horse. The pun comes from the fact that in French, aside from its everyday definition, bidet can also refer to a small pony or horse.
148 …the only man who’d keep you is Private Punter. Huysmans uses a slang name Général Pavé, meaning any man walking the street (pavé) looking to pick up a prostitute. After the roads were macadamised, the term Général Macadam was also used to mean the same thing.
150 …knocking back a glass of Kir. Huysmans uses the slang expression étouffait son Pierrot de vin blanc. The term derived from a wine merchant who sold cassis and white wine for one sous a glass, and which was popularly known as un pierrot.
152 …perforated steel spoons. The traditional way to prepare absinthe is to put a sugar cube on a perforated spoon that rests over the glass. Water is then poured over the sugar which dissolves into the absinthe, the water turns the absinthe cloudy and the sugar helps sweeten its bitter taste.
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158 …La Belle Polonaise. Until recently La Belle Polonaise (‘The Beautiful Polish Girl’) was located at 21 Rue de la Gaité, Paris 75014. It has now been converted into a Japanese restaurant. Although the cypress and pine trees bordering Montparnasse cemetery that Huysmans mentions later are still there, the restaurant garden in which Auguste and Désirée have their meal no longer exists.