Against Nature (11 page)

But these were by no means the only pictures he had bought in order to adorn his retreat. True, none were needed for the first and only upper storey of his house, since he had given it over to his servants and did not use any of its rooms; but the ground floor by itself demanded a good many to cover its bare walls.

This ground floor was divided as follows: a dressing-room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one corner of the building; from the bedroom you went into the library, and from the library into the dining-room, which occupied another corner.

These rooms, making up one side of the house, were set in a straight line, with their windows overlooking the valley of Aunay.

The other side of the building consisted of four rooms corresponding exactly to the first four in their lay-out. Thus the corner kitchen matched the dining-room, a big entrance-hall the library, a sort of boudoir the bedroom and the closets the dressing-room.

All these latter rooms looked out on the opposite side to the valley of Aunay, towards the Tour du Croy and Châtillon.

As for the staircase, it was built against one end of the house, on the outside, so that the noise the servants made as they pounded up and down the steps was deadened and barely reached Des Esseintes' ears.

He had had the boudoir walls covered with bright red tapestry and all round the room he had hung ebony-framed prints by Jan Luyken,
³
an old Dutch engraver who was almost unknown in France.

He possessed a whole series of studies by this artist in lugubrious fantasy and ferocious cruelty: his
Religious Persecutions
, a collection of appalling plates displaying all the tortures which religious fanaticism has invented, revealing all the agonizing
varieties of human suffering – bodies roasted over braziers, heads scalped with swords, trepanned with nails, lacerated with saws, bowels taken out of the belly and wound on to bobbins, finger-nails slowly removed with pincers, eyes put out, eyelids pinned back, limbs dislocated and carefully broken, bones laid bare and scraped for hours with knives.

These pictures, full of abominable fancies, reeking of burnt flesh, dripping with blood, echoing with screams and curses, made Des Esseintes's flesh creep whenever he went into the red boudoir, and he remained rooted to the spot, choking with horror.

But over and above the shudders they provoked, over and above the frightening genius of the man and the extraordinary life he put into his figures, there were to be found in his astonishing crowd-scenes, in the hosts of people he sketched with a dexterity reminiscent of Callot but with a vigour that amusing scribbler never attained, remarkable reconstructions of other places and periods: buildings, costumes and manners in the days of the Maccabees, in Rome during the persecutions of the Christians, in Spain under the Inquisition, in France during the Middle Ages and at the time of the St Bartholomew massacres and the Dragonnades, were all observed with meticulous care and depicted with wonderful skill.

These prints were mines of interesting information and could be studied for hours on end without a moment's boredom; extremely thought-provoking as well, they often helped Des Esseintes to kill time on days when he did not feel in the mood for reading.

The story of Luyken's life also attracted him and incidentally explained the hallucinatory character of his work. A fervent Calvinist, a fanatical sectary, a zealot for hymns and prayers, he composed and illustrated religious poems, paraphrased the Psalms in verse, and immersed himself in Biblical study, from which he would emerge haggard and enraptured, his mind haunted by bloody visions, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of the Reformation, by its songs of terror and anger.

What is more, he despised the world, and this led him to give all he possessed to the poor, living on a crust of bread himself.
In the end he had put to sea with an old maid-servant who was fanatically devoted to him, landing wherever his boat came ashore, preaching the Gospel to all and sundry, trying to live without eating – a man with little or nothing to distinguish him from a lunatic or a savage.

In the larger adjoining room, the vestibule, which was panelled in cedar-wood the colour of a cigar-box, other prints, other weird drawings hung in rows along the walls.

One of these was Bresdin's
Comedy of Death
.
⁴
This depicts an improbable landscape which bristles with trees, coppices and thickets in the shape of demons or phantoms and full of birds with rats' heads and vegetable tails. From the ground, which is littered with vertebrae, ribs and skulls, there spring gnarled and shaky willow-trees, in which skeletons are perched, waving bouquets and chanting songs of victory, while a Christ flies away into a mackerel sky; a hermit meditates, with his head in his hands, at the back of a grotto; and a beggar dies of privation and hunger, stretched out on his back, his feet pointing to a stagnant pool.

Another was
The Good Samaritan
by the same artist, a lithograph of a huge pen-and-ink drawing. Here the scene is a fantastic tangle of palms, service-trees and oaks, growing all together in defiance of season and climate; a patch of virgin forest packed with monkeys, owls and screech-owls, and cumbered with old tree-stumps as unshapely as mandrake roots; a magic wood with a clearing in the centre affording a distant glimpse, first of the Samaritan and the wounded man, then of a river and finally of a fairytale city climbing up to the horizon to meet a strange sky dotted with birds, flecked with foaming billows, swelling, as it were, with cloudy waves.

It looked rather like the work of a primitive or an Albert Dürer of sorts, composed under the influence of opium; but much as Des Esseintes admired the delicacy of detail and the impressive power of this plate, he paused more often in front of the other pictures that decorated the room. These were all signed Odilon Redon.
⁵

In their narrow gold-rimmed frames of unpainted pear-wood, they contained the most fantastic of visions: a Merovingian
head balanced on a cup; a bearded man with something of the bonze about him and something of the typical speaker at public meetings, touching a colossal cannon-ball with one finger; a horrible spider with a human face lodged in the middle of its body. There were other drawings which plunged even deeper into the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions. Here there was an enormous dice blinking a mournful eye; there, studies of bleak and arid landscapes, of burnt-up plains, of earth heaving and erupting into fiery clouds, into livid and stagnant skies. Sometimes Redon's subjects actually seemed to be borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times: a monstrous flora spread over the rocks, and among the ubiquitous boulders and glacier mud-streams wandered bipeds whose apish features – the heavy jaws, the protruding brows, the receding forehead, the flattened top of the skull – recalled the head of our ancestors early in the Quaternary Period, when man was still fructivorous and speechless, a contemporary of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the cave-bear. These drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.

In fact, there were some of these faces, dominated by great wild eyes, and some of these bodies, magnified beyond measure or distorted as if seen through a carafe of water, that evoked in Des Esseintes's mind recollections of typhoid fever, memories which had somehow stayed with him of the feverish nights and frightful nightmares of his childhood.

Overcome by an indefinable malaise at the sight of these drawings – the same sort of malaise he experienced when he looked at certain rather similar
Proverbs
by Goya,
⁶
or read some of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, whose terrifying or hallucinating effects Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed into a different art – he would rub his eyes and turn to gaze at a radiant figure which, in the midst of all these frenzied pictures, stood out calm and serene: the figure of Melancholy, seated on some rocks before a disk-like sun, in a mournful and despondent attitude.

His gloom would then be dissipated, as if by magic; a sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take pos­
session of his thoughts, and he would meditate for hours in front of this work, which, with its splashes of gouache amid the heavy pencil-lines, introduced a refreshing note of liquid green and pale gold into the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings.

Besides this collection of Redon's works, covering nearly every panel in the vestibule, he had hung in his bedroom an extravagant sketch by Theotocopuli,
⁷
a study of Christ in which the drawing was exaggerated, the colouring crude and bizarre, the general effect one of frenzied energy, an example of the painter's second manner, when he was obsessed by the idea of avoiding any further resemblance to Titian.

This sinister picture, with its boot-polish blacks and cadaverous greens, fitted in with certain ideas Des Esseintes held on the subject of bedroom furniture and decoration.

There were, in his opinion, only two ways of arranging a bedroom: you could either make it a place for sensual pleasure, for nocturnal delectation, or else you could fit it out as a place for sleep and solitude, a setting for quiet meditation, a sort of oratory.

In the first case, the Louis-Quinze style was the obvious choice for people of delicate sensibility, exhausted by mental stimulation above all else. The eighteenth century is, in fact, the only age which has known how to develop woman in a wholly depraved atmosphere, shaping its furniture on the model of her charms, imitating her passionate contortions and spasmodic convulsions in the curves and convolutions of wood and copper, spicing the sugary languor of the blonde with its bright, light furnishings, and mitigating the salty savour of the brunette with tapestries of delicate, watery, almost insipid hues.

In his Paris house he had had a bedroom decorated in just this style, and furnished with the great white lacquered bed which provides that added titillation, that final touch of depravity so precious to the experienced voluptuary, excited by the spurious chastity and hypocritical modesty of the Greuze figures, by the pretended purity of a bed of vice apparently designed for innocent children and young virgins.

In the other case – and now that he meant to break with the
irritating memories of his past life, this was the only one for him – the bedroom had to be turned into a facsimile of a monastery cell. But here difficulties piled up before him, for as far as he was concerned, he categorically refused to put up with the austere ugliness that characterizes all penitential prayer-houses.

After turning the question over in his mind, he eventually came to the conclusion that what he should try to do was this: to employ cheerful means to attain a drab end, or rather, to impress on the room as a whole, treated in this way, a certain elegance and distinction, while yet preserving its essential ugliness. He decided, in fact, to reverse the optical illusion of the stage, where cheap finery plays the part of rich and costly fabrics; to achieve precisely the opposite effect, by using magnificent materials to give the impression of old rags; in short, to fit up a Trappist's cell that would look like the genuine article, but would of course be nothing of the sort.

He set about it in the following way: to imitate the yellow distemper beloved by church and state alike, he had the walls hung with saffron silk; and to represent the chocolate-brown dado normally found in this sort of room, he covered the lower part of the walls with strips of kingwood, a dark-brown wood with a purple sheen. The effect was delightful, recalling – though not too clearly – the unattractive crudity of the model he was copying and adapting. The ceiling was similarly covered with white holland, which had the appearance of plaster without its bright, shiny look; as for the cold tiles of the floor, he managed to hit them off quite well, thanks to a carpet patterned in red squares, with the wood dyed white in places where sandals and boots could be supposed to have left their mark.

He furnished this room with a little iron bedstead, a mock hermit's bed, made of old wrought iron, but highly polished and set off at head and foot with an intricate design of tulips and vine-branches intertwined, a design taken from the balustrade of the great staircase of an old mansion.

By way of a bedside table, he installed an antique priedieu, the inside of which could hold a chamber-pot while the top supported a euchologion; against the opposite wall he set a churchwardens' pew, with a great openwork canopy and
misericords carved in the solid wood; and to provide illumination, he had some altar candlesticks fitted with real wax tapers which he bought from a firm specializing in ecclesiastical requirements, for he professed a genuine antipathy to all modern forms of lighting, whether paraffin, shale-oil, stearin candles or gas, finding them all too crude and garish for his liking.

Before falling asleep in the morning, as he lay in bed with his head on the pillow, he would gaze at his Theotocopuli, whose harsh colouring did something to dampen the gaiety of the yellow silk hangings and put them in a graver mood; and at these times he found it easy to imagine that he was living hundreds of miles from Paris, far removed from the world of men, in the depths of some secluded monastery.

After all, it was easy enough to sustain this particular illusion, in that the life he was leading was very similar to the life of a monk. He thus enjoyed all the benefits of cloistered confinement while avoiding the disadvantages – the army-style discipline, the lack of comfort, the dirt, the promiscuity, the monotonous idleness. Just as he had made his cell into a warm, luxurious bedroom, so he had ensured that his everyday existence should be pleasant and comfortable, sufficiently occupied and in no way restricted.

Like an eremite, he was ripe for solitude, exhausted by life and expecting nothing more of it; like a monk again, he was overwhelmed by an immense weariness, by a longing for peace and quiet, by a desire to have no further contact with the heathen, who in his eyes comprised all utilitarians and fools.