Émile Huysmans

“ He pondered these recollections, recalling particularly an afternoon spent, partly for want of anything better to do, partly out of curiosity, in this woman's company at her sister's house at Pantin, the memory of which stirred in his breast a whole forgotten world of long-ago thoughts and oldtime scents. While the two women were chattering and showing each other their frocks, he had gone to the window and, through the dusty panes, had looked out on the long, muddy street and heard its pavements echo under the incessant beat of heavy boots trampling through the puddles. ”

“ Without any transition, as though by some stage device, a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance, a wan, dead, waste, gullied landscape. A light illumined this desolate site, a peaceful white light that recalled gleams of phosphorus dissolved in oil.
Something that stirred on the ground became a deathly pale, nude woman whose feet were covered with green silk stockings.
He contemplated her with curiosity. As though frizzed by overheated irons, her hair curled, becoming straight again at the end; her distended nostrils were the color of roast veal. ”

“ No doubt she lacked education and refinement, possessed neither good sense nor good wit, while at table she gave tokens of a brutish greediness but all the childish weaknesses of a woman were there in full force; she had all the love of chatter and finery that marks the sex specially given up to trivialities; any such thing as a transmutation of masculine ideas into her feminine person was a pure figment of the imagination.
Besides, she was quite a little Puritan and was altogether innocent of those rude, athletic caresses Des Esseintes at once desired and dreaded ”

“ Laure's establishment the indispensable rôle of the handsome Jewess.
Quite at his ease, and very much at home, Des Esseintes was talking familiarly in a low voice with the mistress of the house. "Don't be afraid, stupid," he turned to the child to say; "come now, make your choice, it's my treat,"—and he pushed the lad gently towards a divan, onto which he fell between two women. They drew a little closer together, on a sign from Madame Laure, enveloping Auguste's knees in their peignoirs and bringing under his nose their powdered shoulders that emitted a warm, heady perfume. ”

“ All these pictures came crowding into his head at once. The shopman, surprised to see a customer sitting at a table lost in a brown study and quite oblivious of his surroundings, asked him which of the Guides he had chosen. Des Esseintes looked up in a dazed way, then, with a word of excuse for his absence of mind, purchased a Baedeker and left the shop. The cold wind froze him to the bone; it was blowing crosswise, lashing the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli with a pelting rain. ”

“ To open the campaign, he made all haste to reduce the fortress by the battery of bank notes, the ventriloquist catching his fancy by the very fact of the utter contrast she presented to the fair American. This brown beauty reeked of artfully prepared perfumes, heady and unhealthy scents, and she burned like the crater of a volcano. In spite of all his subterfuges, Des Esseintes' vigour was exhausted in a few hours; none the less he persisted in allowing himself to be drained dry by her, for more than the woman as a woman, her phenomenal endowments attracted him. ”

“ At bottom, human wisdom might be summed up in the precept,—drag things out indefinitely, say no, then after a long time, yes; for indeed there was no way of managing mankind half so good as procrastination.
"Ah! if only the same held good of the stomach," sighed Des Esseintes, seized with a sudden spasm of pain which instantly brought his thoughts back to Fontenay, recalling them from the far-away regions they had been roaming. ”

“ Today churches have more or fewer bells as they are more or less rich.... Oh, well, why worry? Where are the little glasses?"
His wife brought them, shook hands with the guests, and retired.
Then while Carhaix was pouring the cognac, Des Hermies said in a low voice, "I did not want to speak before her, because these matters distress and frighten her, but I received a singular visit this morning from Gévingey, who is running over to Lyons to see Dr. Johannès. He claims to have been bewitched by Canon Docre, who, it seems, is making a flying visit to Paris. What have been their relations? ”

“ Chapter 5 The afternoon was drawing to its close when a carriage halted in front of the Fontenay house. Since Des Esseintes received no visitors, and since the postman never even ventured into these uninhabited parts, having no occasion to deliver any papers, magazines or letters, the servants hesitated before opening the door. Then, as the bell was rung furiously again, they peered through the peep-hole cut into the wall, and perceived a man, concealed, from neck to waist, behind an immense gold buckler. ”

“ True, it has been out of my power to play a sure game; that I have foreseen, yet been unable to prevent certain contingencies,—old mother Laure's little tricks, for instance, pocketing the money and not delivering the goods; the chance of one of the women getting infatuated with Auguste, and, when the three months was up, letting him have his whack on tick; or even the possibility of the handsome Jewess's highly-spiced vices having scared the lad, too young and impatient to brook the slow and elaborate preliminaries, or stand the exhausting consummations of her caprices. ”

“ Shame had won the day over fear; he was shown into a dining-room; then another door opened noisily, admitting a formidable grenadier of a man, dressed in a frock coat and black trousers that seemed carved in wood. Des Esseintes followed him into an inner sanctum. From that moment his sensations had been vague. Confusedly he remembered dropping into an armchair before a window, and stammering out, as he put a finger to his tooth: "It has been stopped already; I am afraid there's nothing can be done." ”

“ The "Athenæum" calls the story "a masterpiece of concentrated observation and description." It was first published, with stories by Zola, De Maupassant, and two others, in a collection called "Soirées de Médan." Huysmans, with his minute painting of detail, reminds us of his Dutch ancestry of artists. His art criticisms have marked him the most vigorous and intelligent champion of the impressionists, Moreau, Pissaro, Monet, and Whistler.
He was born at Paris in 1848. After 1892, when he retired to the Trappe de Notre Dame d'Igny, Huysmans showed an altogether new side to his genius. ”

“ Fleming-like, he is less melodist than harmonist—and such acrid harmonies, polyphonic variations, and fuguelike flights to the other side of good and evil.
George Moore was the first English critic to recognise Huysmans. He wrote that "a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of exquisite and powerful liquor." Frankly, it was his conversion that focussed upon Huysmans so much attention. No one may remain isolated in his century. He has never been a favourite with the larger Parisian public; rather, a curiosity, a spiritual ogre turned saint. ”

“ Unquestionably, there is not one among the frail blondes and majestic brunettes of the flesh that can vie with their delicate grace and terrific strength.
Such were Des Esseintes' reflections when the breeze brought him the faint whistle of the toy railroad winding playfully, like a spinning top, between Paris and Sceaux. His house was situated at a twenty minutes' walk from the Fontenay station, but the height on which it was perched, its isolation, made it immune to the clatter of the noisy rabble which the vicinity of a railway station invariably attracts on a Sunday. ”

“ He left the vestibule and stretched out on his bed to rest, but, absorbed by this new fancy of his, his mind, even in his sleep, could not lessen its tension and he was soon wandering among the gloomy insanities of a nightmare.
He found himself in the center of a walk, in the heart of the wood; twilight had fallen. He was strolling by the side of a woman whom he had never seen before. She was emaciated and had flaxen hair, a bulldog face, freckles on her cheeks, crooked teeth projecting under a flat nose. She wore a nurse's white apron, a long neckerchief, torn in strips on her bosom ”

“ Des Esseintes could not stir a limb; a soothing, enervating lassitude, was creeping through every member, rendering him incapable of so much as lifting his hand to light a cigar. He kept telling himself: "Come, come now, get up, we must be off"; but instantly objections occurred to him in contravention of these orders. What was the good of moving, when a man can travel so gloriously sitting in a chair? ”

“ Unfortunately, there as everywhere, an innumerable army of pedants had invaded the sanctuary and degraded by their ignorance and want of talent its stern and uncompromising dignity. Then, to crown the calamity, pious ladies had taken up the pen, and ill-advised sacristies and rash drawing-rooms had extolled as veritable works of genius the wretched prattlings of these females.
Among other works of this sort that stirred his curiosity, Des Esseintes had read those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian General Officer's wife whose house at Paris was the rendezvous of the most fervent Catholics. ”

“ Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” ”

“ A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principal étape in his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. ”

“ He concluded with the ultimatum that, before trying any course of cure, before beginning any sort of hydropathic treatment,—impracticable in any case at Fontenay,—he was bound to abandon this solitary existence, to return to Paris and take part again in the common life of men; in a word, endeavour to find diversions the same as other people.
"But they don't divert me, the pleasures other people enjoy," protested Des Esseintes, indignantly. ”

“ In this, she was altogether feminine, obedient to her temperament of a passionate, cruel woman; she was active and alive, more refined and yet more savage, more hateful and yet more exquisite; she was shown awakening more powerfully the sleeping passions of man; bewitching, subjugating more surely his will, with her unholy charm as of a great flower of concupiscence, born of a sacrilegious birth, reared in a hothouse of impiety.
As Des Esseintes used to maintain: never before at any epoch had the art of water-colour succeeded in reaching such a brilliancy of tint ”

“ I know you have a lover with you. Just wait a minute, and I'll let you know, you trollop."—Instantly, like the libertines whose passions are stimulated by terror of being caught in flagrante delicto in the open air, on the river banks, in the Tuileries Gardens, in a summer-house or on a bench, he would temporarily recover his powers, throw himself at the ventriloquist, whose voice went storming on outside the room, and he found an abnormal satisfaction in this rush and scurry, this alarm of a man running a risk, interrupted, hurried in his fornication. ”

“ The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters—one of whom, Cornelius Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great period—Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. His first book, Le Drageoir à Epices, published at the age of twenty-six, is a pasticcio of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of little sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies of Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful, laboured work of a really artistic temperament ”

“ His fascinating corruption bore a fatal correspondence with Des Esseintes' predilections, and, in days of fog and rain, the latter would shut himself up in the retreat imagined by this poet, intoxicating his eyes with the glitter of his rich stuffs, with the flash of his jewels, with his sumptuosities, exclusively material, which all helped to excite the brain to frenzy and rose like a cantharides powder in a cloud of hot incense towards a Brussels Idol with painted face and belly tanned with perfumes. ”

“ Yes, his object was attained; not one of them looked real; cloth, paper, porcelain, metal seemed to have been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. When she had found herself incapable of copying human workmanship, she had been reduced to mimick the membranes of animals' insides, to borrow the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the superb horrors of their gangrened skin.
"It is all a matter of syphilis," reflected Des Esseintes, his eyes attracted, riveted on the hideous marking of the Caladiums, lit up at that moment by a shaft of daylight. ”