A REBOURS (Annotated and Illustrated)

Ă€ REBOURS

an Annotated Guide to the Novel by J-K Huysmans edited by theresa zeitz-lindamood

À REBOURS

AN ANNOTATED GUIDE TO THE NOVEL BY J.K. HUYSMANS EDITED BY THERESA ZEITZ-LINDAMOOD

INTRODUCTION At left is a luxury edition of the 1884 novel À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, its pages filled with over two hundred color illustrations and its covers adorned with

botanical designs in orange, navy, turquoise and mauve leather, with a little gilding

to finish it off. This sort of splendor would be too much for any regular book to bear, but not Huysmans’s À Rebours. This novel—if it can even be called a novel, since it has only one character and no plot to speak of—celebrates refinement and excess,

and marvelling at objects like this finely bound book is the chief occupation of the Duc Jean Des Esseintes, the decadent hero of À Rebours.

Des Esseintes is a sickly aristocrat who is so exhausted with the nineteenth

century that he decides to withdraw from society and cultivate his (already refined) tastes in solitude. He would have been pleased by the ornate treatment of the

book at left, since he has a mania for filling his library with finely bound books, A deluxe edition of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours from 1903

matched only by his passion for collecting exotic plants, Latin and French Decadent

< James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Count Robert de Montesquiou, No. 2 (1894, lithograph), a portrait of one of the historical models for the decadent hero of À Rebours

and furniture taken from Medieval churches. Each of these interests, and more,

literature, perfumes, liqueurs, paintings and drawings from all centuries, and chalices comprises a chapter in À Rebours, making the book less of a narrative than a forum for discussion of aesthetic tastes across varied fields.

When Huysmans writes about Des Esseintes’s various collections, he does

not gloss over specifics but rather relishes offering an overabundance of detail; when Des Esseintes decides to have his pet tortoise’s shell gilded and encrusted with gems, he doesn’t choose just any jewels but lists dozens of semiprecious stones:

uvarovite, cymophane, peridot, sapphirine... This exactitude is at once a barrier to the reader’s complete understanding and enjoyment of the text and an invitation

into the rich and strange world that is the mind of Des Esseintes—or of Huysmans, since the authorial voice and the thoughts of the protagonist can be difficult to

distinguish. Practically nothings happens in the book; it is simply a record of Des

Esseintes’s ideas, opinions, and memories as he lives in solitude, surrounded by his collections of beautiful things.

The Paris of Huysmans and Des Esseintes: Stereograph of Pont-Neuf (c. 1870–80)

Although Des Esseintes’s collections seem to promise pleasure by engaging

all the senses, À Rebours is not a happy book. It is permeated with Des Esseintes’s

desperate desire to escape: not simply to run away from Paris into a fantastical house of his own design, but also to escape from the reality of the natural world by putting into practice the poet Charles Baudelaire’s ideas about the supremacy of Artifice

over Nature, and to escape from his own time period, immersing himself in the art and literature of past ages. Even as he imagines himself living in Ancient Rome or in a Medieval monastery, Des Esseintes is a strikingly modern figure. He is deeply critical of the Church, an atheist who believes only in Schopenhauer; his politics

are anti-democratic, yet he supports a woman’s right to abortion. He is frank about his diverse sexual escapades with male and female partners from various walks of life; he may be the first openly bisexual character in Western literature.

The title of the book is difficult to translate into English. It has been rendered

as Against the Grain and Against Nature, but neither one captures the sense of

deliberate perversity suggested by the French title. A French dictionary translates the phrase à rebours as ‘the wrong way,’ but perhaps the best expression of the title was

offered by a French friend: “it is like the sensation of petting a cat’s fur backwards.” À Rebours is unlike any book written before or since; it both created

a genre and exhausted it in just two hundred pages. It was hailed as a revolutionary and masterful work when it was first published, but many criticized its dubious

morals. Young artists and writers were inspired by the daring, plotless amorality of 6 | À REBOURS

À Rebours, and perhaps the best assessment of the work comes from Oscar Wilde. In Wilde’snThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) the title character is

corrupted by a book that, while unnamed in the text, is undoubtedly À Rebours: It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own... The style in which it was written was that curious jeweled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms... There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in color. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy.

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, Chapter 10)

As much as Wilde and other fin de siècle writers were inspired by À Rebours,

Huysmans was equally indebted to several historical persons on whom he based the character of Des Esseintes. First among these models was Count Robert

de Montesquiou-Fezensac (pictured on the previous page), a dandy and aesthete whose audacious taste in furnishings was related to Huysmans by their mutual

acquaintance, Stephane Mallarmé. Count Montesquiou was also the prototype for another literary aristocrat, the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s À la

recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Huysmans was also inspired by the caprices of the mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria, who squandered his country’s wealth

building magnificent indoor lakes and fairy-tale castles, transforming his fantasy Page numbers in this guide refer to the 2004 Penguin Classics edition of À Rebours (Against Nature) with a revised translation by Robert Baldick

life into a reality.

The first time I read À Rebours I was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity

of information that Huysmans provides. I started by looking up the plants and

paintings that he mentions, and my research of finding these images broadened to become this volume, an obsessive investigation of Des Esseintes’s obsessive collecting. Whether À Rebours is a new or a familiar book for you, I hope this

guide will add to your enjoyment of the richest, strangest novel of the nineteenth century. THERESA ZEITZ-LINDAMOOD, DECEMBER 2012

4

À REBOURS

PROLOGUE

4

THE PROLOGUE, in just a dozen harried pages, tells all of Jean Duc Des Esseintes’s family history, his childhood, his love affairs and attempts to find friends in his twenties, culminating in a decision to withdraw from society and cultivate his tastes in solitude. In a sense, all of his interaction with the outside world ceases by the end of the Prologue, before the book begins in earnest. He is the only living descendent of his noble family. Centuries of aristocratic inbreeding and degeneration (in the French text: décadence) have contributed to his sickly but extraordinarily refined and sensitive character.

The Des Esseintes family had been composed in olden times of sturdy campaigners with forbidding faces... Now, of this family which had

once been so large that it occupied nearly every domain in the Ile de

France, only one descendant was still living: the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung... pp. 3–4

A lithograph illustration of the prologue by Auguste Leroux, from the 1920 edition of À Rebours

The Jan Van Ruysbroeck epigraph of À Rebours reads, “I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time... though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.” Indeed, Des Esseintes feels intense joy, even a sense of belonging, when he feels a connection with artists and writers who lived hundreds of years ago. A certain picture in the Des Esseintes family portrait gallery forms a similar striking link across the centuries:

It was a strange, sly face, with pale, drawn features; the cheekbones

were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge, the hair was plastered down and bound with a string of pearls and the thin, painted neck

emerged from the starched pleats of a ruff... By some freak of heredity, [Des Esseintes] bore a striking resemblance to his distant ancestor, for he had the same exceptionally fair pointed beard, and the same ambiguous expression, at once weary and wily. pp. 3–4

In Paris, Des Esseintes tried to find companionship with ancient aristocrats, “men of letters,” bohemian “free thinkers,” and noblemen of his own age. He found them all insufferable. While consorting with men of his age and position, he realized that his definition of true debauchery differed from theirs:

They squandered fortunes on horses, cards, and all the other pleasures

dear to empty minds. After a year’s trial, Des Esseintes was overcome by an immense distaste for the company of these men, whose debauchery

struck him as being base and facile, entered into without discrimination or desire, indeed without any real stirring of the blood or stimulation of the nerves. p. 7

Woodcut illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg from the 1931 edition of À Rebours

Des Esseintes’s illness is introduced in the Prologue, and the subsequent chapters of À Rebours describe his symptoms in exacting detail. Although the name of the disease is never mentioned in the text, Huysmans wrote in an 1884 letter to his friend and mentor Émile Zola that he was following “step by step” the progression of syphilis as described in contemporary medical texts. The Prologue offers a clue as to how he acquired the disease.

In his twenties, Des Esseintes was bored to the point of impotence with most women:

In desperation he had recourse to the perilous caresses of the

professional virtuosos, but the only effect was to impair his health

and exacerbate his nerves. Already he was getting pains at the back

of his neck and his hands were shaky... they trembled uncontrollably when holding something light such as a wineglass. p. 9

10 | À REBOURS

At the end of the Prologue, Des Esseintes sells his familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s château and moves to the suburb of Fontenay, marked by the lighter rectangle on the map above:

[Fontenay] would be too far out for the tidal wave of Parisian life to reach him, and yet near enough for the proximity of the capital to

strengthen him in his solitude. For, since a man has only to know he cannot get to a certain spot to be seized with a desire to go there, by not entirely barring the way back he was guarding against any hankering after human society, any nostalgic regrets. p. 10

PROLOGUE | 11

c À REBOURS

CHAPTER

1

IN CHAPTER 1, Des Esseintes designs his new library and begins his self-imposed exile in Fontenay. He remembers favorite extravagances from his life in Paris, contrasting his efforts to impress others with “ostentatious oddity” with his new desire to make a home where he will never have visitors and where everything exists for his enjoyment:

The new home he was now planning, this time for his own personal

pleasure and not to astonish other people, was going to be comfortably though curiously appointed: a peaceful and unique abode specially

designed to meet the needs of the solitary life he intended to lead. p. 14 Des Esseintes’s first order of business is choosing a wall color for his Fontenay library.

He doesn’t care if his choice looks “crude or insipid” in daylight, since he keeps an against-the-grain schedule of sleeping all day and staying up nights. Des Esseintes analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, and psychological impact of each of the hues in the chart below.

Slowly, one by one, he went through the various colors. Blue, he

remembered, takes on an artificial green tint by candlelight; if a dark blue like indigo or cobalt, it becomes black; if pale, it turns to grey, and if soft and true like turquoise, it goes dull and pale... p. 14

COLOR OPTIONS METHODICALLY REJECTED BY DES ESSEINTES

Indigo

Cobalt

Pearl grey

All browns

Cinnabar green

Salmon pink

Grey-blue

Emperor green

Maize

Turquoise

Iron grey

Myrtle green

Peacock green

Rose

Plum

WALL COLOR OPTIONS CONSIDERED ACCEPTABLE BY DES ESSEINTES

Red

Orange

Yellow

Back in Paris, Des Esseintes would pour his time and energy into planning elaborate parties. Only one is described in the text:

The dining-room, draped in black, opened out on to a garden

metamorphosed for the occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pines…

While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were

waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears.

Dining off black-bordered plates, the company had enjoyed turtle

soup, ripe olives from Turkey, caviare, game served in sauces the color

of licorice and boot-polish… From dark-tinted glasses they had drunk the wines of Limagne and Soussillon… And after coffee and walnut

cordial, they had rounded off the evening with kvass, porter and stout.

On the invitations, the dinner was described as a funeral banquet in

memory of the host’s virility, lately but only temporarily deceased. p. 13

14 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes has a mania for fine bookbinding; naturally, he decides to “bind the walls of his library like books” with Morocco leather of a red-orange color. He chooses this color because:

As for those gaunt, febrile creatures of feeble constitution and nervous disposition whose sensual appetite craves dishes that are smoked and

seasoned, whose eyes almost always prefer that most morbid and irritating of colors, with its acid glow and unnatural splendor—orange...

When the lining of the walls had been completed, he had the

moldings and the tall plinths lacquered a deep indigo, similar to the color coachbuilders use for the panels of carriage bodies. p. 16

À Rebours contains very little discussion of fashion, but it is clear that Des Esseintes fits the role of the typical nineteenth-century dandy:

His final caprice had been to fit up a lofty hall in which to receive his tradesmen. They used to troop in and take their places side by side in a row of church stalls; then he would ascend an imposing pulpit and Nicola Pisano, Pulpit of Siena Cathedral (granite, porphyry, green marble, 1265–1268 CE)

preach them a sermon on dandyism, adjuring his bookmakers and

tailors to conform strictly to his encyclicals on matters of cut… pp. 12–13

CHAPTER ONE | 15

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Pelt Merchant of Cairo (1869, oil on canvas, Private Collection)

Back in Paris, Des Esseintes filled his house with delicate carved camphor-wood furniture and pink Indian satin, but chooses less feminine decorations for Fontenay:

As to furniture, Des Esseintes did not have to undertake any laborious treasure-hunts… he confined himself to fitting up ebony bookshelves round the greater part of the room, strewing tiger skins and blue fox

furs about the floor, and installing beside a massive money-changer’s

table of the fifteenth century an old church lectern of wrought iron. p. 17 Des Esseintes darkens the atmosphere of his library with heavy curtains and makes it even more isolated from the outside world by installing light-obscuring windowpanes:

The windows, with panes of bluish crackle-glass or gilded bottle-punts which shut out the view and admitted only a very dim light, were

dressed with curtains cut out of old ecclesiastical stoles, whose faded gold threads were almost invisible against the dull red material. p. 17

16 | À REBOURS

CHAPTER ONE | 17

18 | À REBOURS 18 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes keeps three poems by Charles Baudelaire in his library displayed as if they were holy scriptures or precious relics:

Flanked by two Byzantine monstrances of gilded copper… there Illuminated missal (French, egg tempera and gold leaf on parchment, c. 1200 CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

stood a magnificent triptych whose separate panels had been fashioned to resemble lace-work. This now contained, framed under glass, copied

on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and marvelously illuminated, three pieces by Baudelaire: on the right and left, the sonnets La Mort des amants and L’Ennemi, and in the middle, the prose poem bearing the English title Anywhere out of the World. p. 17

The poems are copied out in the style of an illuminated missal (a book containing the text of the Catholic Mass, above left) and displayed between two monstrances (far left), used for displaying the consecrated Host for veneration during the Eucharist. Below, and on the following pages, are the poems that Des Esseintes has in his triptych.

La Mort des Amants

The Death of Lovers

Nous aurons des lits pleins d’odeurs légères, Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux, Et d’étranges fleurs sur des étagères, Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux.

Usant à l’envi leurs chaleurs dernières, Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux, Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux.

Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique, Nous échangerons un éclair unique, Comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d’adieux; Et plus tard un Ange, entr’ouvrant les portes, Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux, Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes.

We shall have beds full of subtle perfumes, Divans as deep as graves, and on the shelves Will be strange flowers that blossomed for us Under more beautiful heavens.

Using their dying flames emulously, Our two hearts will be two immense torches Which will reflect their double light In our two souls, those twin mirrors.

Some evening made of rose and of mystical blue A single flash will pass between us Like a long sob, charged with farewells; And later an Angel, setting the doors ajar, Faithful and joyous, will come to revive The tarnished mirrors, the extinguished flames.

Charles Baudelaire, 1861 (trans. William Aggeler)

CHAPTER ONE | 19

Anywhere Out of the World Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed. This one would prefer to suffer in front of the stove, and that one believes he would get well if he were placed by the window.

It seems to me that I should always be happier elsewhere than where I happen to be, and this question of moving is one that I am continually talking over with my soul.

“Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you say to living in Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and you would bask merrily, like a lizard. It is by the sea; they say that it is built of marble, and that the people have such a horror of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There is a landscape that would suit you­­—made out of light and minerals, with water to reflect them.”

My soul does not answer.

“Since you love tranquillity, and the sight of moving things, will you come and live in Holland, that heavenly land? Perhaps you could be happy in that country, for you have often admired pictures of Dutch life. What do you say to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships anchored at the doors of houses?”

My soul remains silent.

Perhaps Batavia seems more attractive to you? There we would find the intellect of Europe married to the beauty of the tropics.

Not a word. Can my soul be dead?

“Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that only your own torment gives you pleasure? If that be so, let us flee to those lands constituted in the likeness of Death. I know just the place for us, poor soul! We will leave for Torneo. Or let us go even farther, to the last limits of the Baltic; and if possible, still farther from life. Let us go to the Pole. There the sun obliquely grazes the earth, and the slow alternations of light and obscurity make variety impossible, and increase that monotony which is almost death. There we shall be able to take baths of darkness, and for our diversion, from time to time the Aurora Borealis shall scatter its rosy sheaves before us, like reflections of the fireworks of Hell!”

At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely cries to me: “Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!”

Charles Baudelaire (trans. Arthur Symons)

20 | À REBOURS

L’Ennemi

The Enemy

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées, Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées, Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

—Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

My youth has been nothing but a tenebrous storm, Pierced now and then by rays of brilliant sunshine; Thunder and rain have wrought so much havoc That very few ripe fruits remain in my garden.

I have already reached the autumn of the mind, And I must set to work with the spade and the rake To gather back the inundated soil In which the rain digs holes as big as graves.

And who knows whether the new flowers I dream of Will find in this earth washed bare like the strand, The mystic aliment that would give them vigor?

Alas! Alas! Time eats away our lives, And the hidden Enemy who gnaws at our hearts Grows by drawing strength from the blood we lose!

Charles Baudelaire, 1861 (trans. William Aggeler)

CHAPTER TWO | 21

D À REBOURS

CHAPTER

2

CHAPTER 2 contains a description of Des Esseintes’s dining room, which is designed to imitate a ship’s cabin set inside a regular room. It is littered with anchors, nets, and sextants, and is periodically filled with the scent of ship’s tar. As with his library, natural light is obscured in the dining room by a porthole and an even more inventive window treatment:

[The window] had been rendered useless by a large aquarium occupying the entire space between the porthole and this real window in the real

house-wall. On autumn evenings, when the samovar stood steaming on the table and the sun had almost set, the water in the aquarium, which had been dull and turbid all morning, would turn red like glowing

embers and shed a fiery, glimmering light upon the pale walls. pp. 19–20

Des Esseintes enjoys having control of his miniature-ocean aquarium in the dining room:

He would set in action the system of pipes and conduits which emptied the aquarium and refilled it with fresh water, and then pour in a few

drops of colored essences, thus producing at will the various tints, green or grey, opaline or silvery, which real rivers take on according to the color of the sky. p. 20

Chapter 2 contains a discussion of ideas inherited from Baudelaire about the superiority of artifice over nature. These ideas practically constitute a personal philosophy for Des Esseintes who decides to fill his aquarium with:

... some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forewords behind the port-hole window and got entangled in artificial seaweed. p. 20

| 23

Des Esseintes never leaves the ground floor of his home, but keeps two servants on the floor above to prepare his meals and fetch supplies. He makes special arrangements to minimize their presence:

He made them wear thick felt slippers, had the doors fitted

with tambours and their hinges well oiled, and covered the floors with

long-pile carpeting, to make sure that he never heard the sound of their footsteps overhead… since the woman would have to pass alongside

the house occasionally to get to the woodshed, and he had no desire to

see her commonplace silhouette through the window, he had a costume Illustration by Auguste Lepère from Chapter 2 of the 1903 deluxe edition of À Rebours

CRAMPTON

Above: Des Esseintes’s two favorite steam locomotives < Utagawa Hiroshige II, Dutch Ship at Anchor Off the Coast of Tsushima (1859, polychrome woodblock print, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

made for her of Flemish faille... such as the beguines still wear to this day at Ghent. pp. 18–19

ENGERTH

Des Esseintes often wishes he was born into an earlier age, but he also readily embraces modern inventions. He praises two newly built steam locomotives (left) which he considers “animate yet artificial” and ultimately more beautiful than any woman he has known.

One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass

corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose

extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant

wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.

The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given

to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thick-set figure encased in

armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled

mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down...

It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all

the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found. pp. 23–24

CHAPTER TWO | 25

J

À REBOURS

CHAPTER

3

Thomas Couture, The Romans of the Decadence (1847, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

CHAPTER 3 covers Des Esseintes’s preferences in the field of Latin literature. He disdains the classical writers like Cicero and only praises Latin works of the Decadence, written as the Roman Empire and its language began to disintegrate and acquire:

...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. p. 33

Although this chapter intends to be a discussion of Des Esseintes’s preferences in writing, his bibliophilia crops up whenever books are mentioned. À Rebours often specifies exactly which printing-house produced each of the volumes in his library.

Naturally enough he bitterly regretted the loss of the Eustion and the Petronius’s Satyricon, the exact version Des Esseintes owns: an “octavo edition of 1585 printed by J. Dousa at Leyden”

Albutia, those two works by Petronius which have vanished forever; 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. p. 31

Des Esseintes’s favorite Latin authors are Lucan, Petronius, and Apuleis. The things that Des Esseintes admires about their writing often mirror the style of À Rebours itself.

LUCAN (39 CE–65 CE)

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. p. 29 PETRONIUS (27–66 CE)

[Petronius’s Satyricon was written] 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... p. 30 APULEIS (125–180 CE)

The Latin language reached the top of the tide in [Apuleis’s]

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. p. 31

28 | À REBOURS

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888, oil on canvas, Private Collection)

Des Esseintes enjoys the early Christian writings of Tertullian because these ascetic works were written in the shadow of the most depraved emperor that Rome ever knew, Elagabalus (also known as Heliogabalus) who ruled 218â&#x20AC;&#x201C;222 CE:

Living in times of appalling storm and stress... [Tertullian] had gone on calmly writing his sermons... 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 womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tasks in the

midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picking for choice among his barbers, scullions, and charioteers. p. 32

Portrait bust of Emperor Elagabalus (222 CE, marble, National Gallery in Oslo)

Elagabalus is primarily remembered for having curious sexual appetites and for attempting to replace the Roman pantheon with a sort of sun-worship religion. Historians also mention his astonishing cruelty; Elagabalus would lock anyone who had displeased him in a cage with hundreds of starving rats and apparently enjoyed watching them being eaten alive. The painting by Alma-Tadema (above) is a vivid nineteenth-century re-imagining of a slightly less sinister occasion, a party where Elagabalus attempted to smother his guests in rose-petals dropped from false ceiling panels. Elagabalus married and divorced five women and two men, but the Roman citizens were truly shocked when Elagabalus raped and wed a Vestal Virgin, a priestess sworn to celibacy. The normal punishment for such a Vestal Virgin who broke her vows was to be buried alive, but Elagabalus believed he was an incarnation of the sun god and would be able to produce divine children with the Vestal Virgin. Elagabalus began to demand mass human sacrifices of children whose entrails were placed in golden bowls as offerings to the sun god. He became Emperor at age fourteen, and by the time he was eighteen the Roman people had had enough. He was stabbed to death in a toilet, beheaded, and dragged through the streets.

CHAPTER THREE | 29

u À REBOURS

CHAPTER

4

CHAPTER 4 contains perhaps the most memorable episode in À Rebours, the story of the bejeweled tortoise created by Des Esseintes’s ever-shifting whims:

Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colors, and following with his eyes the silvery glints running across the weft of the

wool, which was a combination of yellow and plum, he had thought what a good idea it would be to places on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints. p. 40

Des Esseintes acquires a tortoise, but the effect is not what he hoped. The carpet is still too garish, so he decides to drown it out with an even more brilliant object:

Stated in these terms, the problem was easier to solve; and he

accordingly decided to have his tortoise’s buckler glazed with gold. p. 41

The tortoise is sent away to the gilder’s workshop. When it first returns Des Esseintes is elated with the effect, but his happiness doesn’t last long. Soon a new urge possesses him:

It struck him that this gigantic jewel was only half-finished... From

a collection of Japanese art he selected a drawing representing a huge bunch of flowers springing from a single slender stalk, took it to a

jeweler’s… and informed the astonished lapidary that the leaves and

petals of each and every flower were to be executed in precious stones and mounted on the actual shell of the tortoise. pp. 41–42

Balas ruby is a “vinegar-pink” stone according to the text and its “feeble lustre” (43) makes it well suited to border the design, where it won’t distract from the flashier gemstones that Des Esseintes chooses for the center. It is not a true ruby, but rather an archaic name for a rose-tinted specimen of mineral called spinel.

Several of the British crown jewels were long presumed to be rubies but are actually spinels; the two are very difficult to distinguish without a microscope.

Sapphirine is a rare mineral which “kindles bluish, phosphorescent fires against a dull, chocolatebrown background” (42) according to Huysmans. It is rarely cut into gemstones because it is opaque and has so many imperfections. Des Esseintes uses sapphirines for the central flowers.

African turquoise is superior to Oriental turquoise in Des Esseintes’s view and is described in the text as “a fossil ivory impregnated with coppery substances and whose celadon blue looks thick, opaque, and sulphurous, as if jaundiced with bile” (43). African turquoise is actually not related to true turquoise at all, but is jasper, a form of chalcedony like minerals such as agate and onyx.

32 | À REBOURS

Peridot is a type of olivine described in the text as “leek-green” (42) that Des Esseintes chooses for the leaves of the design on the tortoise’s shell.

Peridots have often been passed off as costly emeralds, and strangely enough, peridot crystals have recently been found in the composition of certain Pallasite (stony-iron) meteorites.

Aquamarine is a blue variety of beryl; green beryls are emeralds. The best quality are quite flawless and clear, but most aquamarine stones are dull, opaque, and greyish. Des Esseintes uses them in the design’s border with other subtle gems.

Opals make Des Esseintes’s short list for the border gems but he eschews them because the opal has “a positively rheumatic sensitivity, the play of its rays changing in accordance with changes in moisture or temperature” (43)

Ceylon cat’s eye or cymophane is described by Huysmans as “streaked with concentric veins which seem to shift and change position according to the way the light falls.” This three-dimensional quality is called chatoyancy, which derives from its French name, œil de chat.

Hydrophane is a very porous type of opal that is able to absorb water; in fact, “the hydrophane will burn only in water and refuses to light up its grey fires unless it is wetted” (43). This “unstable and unreliable” character makes Des Esseintes decide not to use this stone even though he admires its exciting “varying color and vacillating fire” (43).

Uvarovite is listed as a stone “of purplish red” in the text; despite the ‘uva’ in its name recalling the Spanish word for grape, it is in fact a green chromium-bearing garnet.

| 33 CHAPTER FOUR | 33

Des Esseintes has a deep reverence for the ancient aristocracy of France, and a simple change in weather reminds Des Esseintes of their heraldic traditions:

Like a great canopy of counter-ermine, the sky hung before him, a black curtain spattered with white.

Suddenly an icy wind blew up which drove the dancing snowflakes

before it and reversed this arrangement of colors. The sky’s heraldic trappings were turned round to reveal a true ermine, white dotted

with black where pinpricks of darkness showed through the curtain of falling snow. pp. 44–45

Ermine refers to the fur of the winter-phase stoat, usually with the black-tufted tail attached as a sign of its distinction (see left) but the term also refers to an abstracted pattern of these black tufts painted on a white crest. The inverse of this pattern, white designs on a black field, was also used in heraldry, and (as Des Esseintes suggests) is called counter-ermine.

Huysmans based the character of Des Esseintes largely on stories he heard from Mallarmé about France’s most stylish aristocrat, the dandy and poet Count Robert de Montesquiou.

Usually the jewelled tortoise story from À Rebours is cited as one of Count Montesquiou’s real-life caprices, but Phillipe Jullian clarifies in his 1965 biography Prince of Aesthetes that the reptile was decorated by the Count’s friend Judith Gautier and he only wrote a poem about it. Jullian claims that Montesquiou could never have retreated from society like Des Esseintes, and was too kind and sensitive to have dreamed up the sadistic follies of Chapters 6 and 13. However, Jullian affirms a connection between their darker natures:

Huysmans is nearer the truth when he suggests that Des Esseintes had two temptations: paederasty and diabolism; these were also Montesquiou’s two temptations. ( Jullian’s Prince of Aesthetes, 52)

James Abbott Mcneill Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert De Montesquiou-Fezensac (1891-1892, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection, New York)

34 | À REBOURS

Count de Montesquiou became known throughout France for his eccentric taste, and he was able to dream up decorating schemes to surpass those of Des Esseintes. Montesquiou describes the entryway of his first apartment in Paris:

“I decided to procure a quantity of old tapestries of so-called forest

foliage and to decorate the climbing and twisting passage with them.

The addition of a fairly spotted, moss-colored carpet then succeeded in making it look like a leafy lane. Some earthenware and bronze animals were added to complete the illusion of being out of doors... Some old musical instruments remained suspended from the branches of my

greenery, like the harps hung by the waters of Babylon.“ (Montesquiou

Illustration by Auguste Leroux from 1920 edition of À Rebours

quoted in Jullian’s Prince of Aesthetes, 43)

Count Montesquiou’s childhood home was decorated with the series of Unicorn Tapestries (above) currently displayed at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s Medieval branch.

CHAPTER FOUR | 35

x À REBOURS

CHAPTER

5

CHAPTER 5 describes Des Esseintesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art collection. His taste in paintings is as unusual and refined as his set of literary preferences, and he enjoys the work of artists from the seventeenth century as much as contemporaries like Odilon Redon (Eye-Balloon, charcoal on paper, 1878, MoMA, pictured above). When it comes time to decorate the walls of his Fontenay house, Des Esseintes keeps several criteria in mind:

He had set his heart on finding a few pictures of subtle, exquisite

refinement, steeped in an atmosphere of ancient fantasy, wrapped in

an aura of antique corruption, divorced from modern times and modern society. For the delectation of his mind and the delight of his eyes, he had decided to seek out evocative works which would transport him to some unfamiliar world, point the way to new possibilities, and

shake up his nervous system by means of erudite fancies, complicated nightmares, suave and sinister visions.

Of all the artists he considered, there was one who sent him into

raptures of delight, and that was Gustave Moreau... p. 50

38 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes’s favorite painter is Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), a Frenchman who stands alone in art history, “with no real ancestors and no possible descendants” (56) and whose paintings remind Des Esseintes of several other crafts:

This art crossed the frontiers of painting to borrow from the writer’s art its most subtly evocative suggestions, from the enameller’s art its most

wonderfully brilliant effects, from the lapidary’s and the etcher’s art its most exquisitely delicate touches. p. 57

The Moreau oil painting that Des Esseintes owns, Salomé Dancing Before Herod (left) is the subject of a three-page description which begins:

This painting showed a throne like the high altar of a cathedral standing beneath a vaulted ceiling—a ceiling crossed by countless arches

springing from the thick-set, almost Romanesque columns, encased in polychromic brickwork, encrusted with mosaics, set with lapis lazuli

and sardonyx—in a palace which resembled a basilica built in both the Moslem and the Byzantine styles.

In the center of the tabernacle set on the altar, which was approached

by a flight of recessed steps in the shape of a semi-circle, the Tetrarch

Herod was seated, with a tiara on his head, his legs close together and his hands on his knees.

His face was yellow and parchment-like, furrowed with wrinkles,

lined with years; his long beard floated like a white cloud over the

jewelled stars that studded the gold-laced robe moulding his breast.

Round this immobile, statuesque figure, frozen like some Hindu god

in a hieratic pose, incense was burning, sending up clouds of vapor

through which the fiery gems set in the sides of the throne gleamed

like the phosphorescent eyes of wild animals. The clouds rose higher

and higher, swirling under the arches of the roof, where the blue smoke mingled with the gold dust of the great beams of sunlight slanting down from the domes.

Amid the heady odor of these perfumes, in the overheated

atmosphere of the basilica, Salome slowly glides forward on the points of her toes, her left arm stretched out in a commanding gesture, her

right bent back and holding a great lotus-blossom beside her face, while < Gustave Moreau, Salomé Dancing Before Herod (1876, oil on canvas, Armand Hammer Collection at UCLA)

a woman squatting on the floor strums the strings of a guitar.

With a withdrawn, solemn, almost august expression on her face, she

begins the lascivious dance which is to rouse the aged Herod’s dormant senses; her breasts rise and fall, the nipples hardening at the touch of her whirling necklaces... pp. 50–51

CHAPTER FIVE | 39

Moreau’s watercolor The Apparition (right) shows the scene following the beheading of John the Baptist. An excerpt from the long description of the painting in À Rebours:

The Saint’s decapitated head had left the charger where it lay on the

flagstones and risen into the air, the eyes staring out from the livid face, the colorless lips parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood. A

mosaic encircled the face, and also a halo of light whose rays darted out under the porticoes, emphasized the awful elevation of the head, and Gustave Moreau’s studio in Paris, now open to the public as the Musée Gustave Moreau

kindled a fire in the glassy eyeballs, which were fixed in what happened

At right: Gustave Moreau, The Apparition (1876, watercolor on paper, Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

the art of water-colour produced such brilliant hues; never before had

to be agonized concentration on the dancer...

It was Des Esseintes’s opinion that never before, in any period, had

an aquarellist’s wretched chemical pigments been able to make paper sparkle so brightly with precious stones, glitter so splendidly with

sumptuous garments, glow so warmly with exquisite fleshtints. p. 56

Des Esseintes owns an oil painting and a watercolor by Moreau, both depicting the biblical tale of Salomé, a popular decadent theme treated most memorably in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé (left). Des Esseintes believes that only Moreau truly understands Salome:

... [Salome] had always repelled the artistic advances of fleshly painters,

such as Reubens who travestied her as a Flemish butcher’s wife; she had always passed the comprehension of the writing fraternity... In Gustave Moreau’s work, which in conception went far beyond the data supplied

by the New Testament, Des Esseintes saw realized at long last the weird Oscar Wilde’s French play Salomé (1891), this edition illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley

and superhuman Salome of his dreams. p. 52

Jan Luyken, The Battle of Turnhout in 1597 (engraving, 1681)

In his red-tapestry covered boudoir (a room separate from but adjacent to his bedroom) Des Esseintes has hung his collection of prints by Jan Luyken (1649-1712), a Dutch engraver, poet, and religious fanatic with a taste for the gruesome.

Luyken’s Religious Persecutions, a collection of appalling plates

displaying all the tortures which religious fanaticism has invented...

Full of abominable fancies, reeking of burnt flesh, dripping with blood,

echoing with screams and curses, they 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...

Jan Luyken, Antipas Roasted Alive in a Copper Steer (engraving, 1680)

remarkable reconstructions of other places and periods: buildings,

< Jan Luyken, Melchizedek

the persecutions of the Christians... The prints were mines of interesting

Blessing Abraham (detail of ink drawing, undated, Met Museum)

costumes, and manners in the days of the Maccabees, in Rome during

information and could be studied for hours on end without a moment’s boredom. pp. 57–58

CHAPTER FIVE | 43

44 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes’s penchant for minutely detailed prints brought him to Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885), a French lithographer and engraver whose art Huysmans describes as:

Rather like the work of a primitive or an Albert Dürer of sorts,

composed under the influence of opium... Des Esseintes admired

the delicacy of detail and the impressive power of this plate... p. 59 Bresdin’s work is minutely detailed, as the detail of The Good Samaritan (above) shows:

[In The Good Samaritan] 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, hawks, 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 with cloudy waves. p. 59 Rodolphe Bresdin, The Good Samaritan (1861, lithograph).

The highlighted section of the print is enlarged above.

CHAPTER FIVE | 45

Odilon Redon, Portrait of Rodolphe Bresdin (1865, Louvre) < Odilon Redon, Orpheus (c. 1903–1910, mixed media, Cleveland Museum of Art)

In the same cedar-paneled vestibule with the Bresdins, Des Esseintes displays his drawings by the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) who was Bresdin’s pupil, establishing a kind of artistic continuity or evolution that is absent in the case of Gustave Moreau. At left is Redon’s quite naturalistic portrait of his teacher. The drawings that Des Esseintes owns are more surreal and typical of Redon (see p. 37 in frame):

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 horrible spider with a human face lodged in the middle of

its body... 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. pp. 59–60

Redon’s disturbing charcoal drawings have a counterpart (almost an antidote for Des Esseintes) in the same artist’s paintings:

[A] radiant figure, in the midst of all these frenzied pictures, stood

out calm and serene: the figure of Melancholy, seated on some rocks Odilon Redon, Melancholy (1876, mixed media on cardboard, Art Institute of Chicago)

before a disk-like sun... His gloom would then be dissipated, as if by

magic; a sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take

possession 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. pp. 60–61

CHAPTER FIVE | 47

48 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes also owns a painting by Doménikos Theotokópoulos, called “El Greco” (1541– 1614) because of his Greek origins. The painting in Des Esseintes’s bedroom is described as:

... a study of Christ in which the drawing was exaggerated, the coloring 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... p. 61 El Greco, Christ on the Cross (1610?, oil on canvas, National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo)

Des Esseintes idealizes the monastic lifestyle but still loves luxury, so he decorates his bedroom using refined materials to imitate the appearance of an austere monk’s cell:

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… the ceiling was similarly covered in 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 wool dyed white in places where sandals and boots could be supposed to have left their mark. p. 62

Des Esseintes acquires quite a few antique church items to furnish his bedroom, including a priedieu, a sort of cushioned praying station (far left) and several misericords (left) which were often carved with whimsical figures.

By way of a bedside table, he installed an antique priedieu, the inside of which could hold a chamber-pot while the top supported an

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... for he professed a genuine antipathy to all modern forms of lighting. pp. 62–63 Above: a pew with misericords.

Detail: a figurative misericord from Tréguier Cathedral, France

CHAPTER FIVE | 49

B À REBOURS

CHAPTER

6

CHAPTER 6 contains a tale that was expurgated from many twentieth century editions of À Rebours, a story about the night Des Esseintes met a boy named Auguste Langlois:

Des Esseintes remembered how he had been walking along the Rue Rivoli when he had come across a young scamp of sixteen or so,

a peaky-faced, sharp-eyed child, as attractive in his way as any girl.

He was sucking hard at a cigarette…

‘Look here,’ said Des Esseintes suddenly; ‘how would you like

a bit of fun tonight? I’ll foot the bill, of course.’ And he had taken the

youngster off to an establishment where a certain Madame Laure kept Woodcut illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg from Chapter 6 in the 1931 edition of À Rebours

an assortment of pretty girls in a series of crimson cubicles furnished with circular mirrors, couches and wash-basins.

There a wonderstruck Auguste, twisting his cap in his hands, had

stood gaping at a battalion of women whose painted mouths opened all together to exclaim: ‘What a duck! Isn’t he sweet!’ pp. 65–66

Des Esseintes sends the boy off with the brothel’s “handsome Jewess” and explains his motives to the inquiring and understandably curious Madame:

‘The truth is that I’m simply trying to make a murderer of the boy.

See if you can follow my line of argument. The lad’s a virgin and he’s

reached the age where the blood starts coming to a boil. He could, of course, just run after the little girls of his neighborhood, stay decent and still have his bit of fun, enjoy his little share of the tedious

happiness open to the poor. But by bringing him here, by plunging

him into luxury such as he’s never known and will never forget, and by giving him the same treat every fortnight, I hope to get him into the habit of these pleasures which he can’t afford. Assuming that it will take three months for them to become absolutely indispensable to

him—and by spacing them out as I do, I avoid the risk of jading his appetite—well, at the end of those three months, I stop the little

allowance I’m going to pay you in advance for being nice to the boy.

And to get the money to pay for his visits here, he’ll turn burglar, Lithograph illustration by Auguste Leroux from Chapter 9 in the 1920 edition of À Rebours

he’ll do anything if it helps him on to one of your divans in one of your gas-lit rooms.

Looking on the bright side of things, I hope that, one fine day,

he’ll kill the gentleman who turns up unexpectedly just as he’s breaking open his desk. On that day my object will be achieved: I shall have contributed to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white.’ pp. 67–68

c À REBOURS

CHAPTER

7

Above: a silver pyx (Spanish, midsixte a lidded box for carrying communion wafers to those unable to attend mass < Spanish gilt-silver chalice, (late fifteenth century), made for holding the wine of the Eucharist

BY CHAPTER 7, Des Esseintes is so restless that he cannot even read his books, even though he had dreamed of a life of solitary reading at Fontenay:

His very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged

with literature and art, refused to absorb any more... He had to live on

himself, to feed on his own substance, like those animals that lie torpid in a hole all winter. p. 70

Des Esseintes’s thoughts turn to his Jesuit upbringing and he feels a resurgent interest in Christianity. He begins to consider the medieval liturgical objects he owns (see above and left) as physical manifestations of the Church’s power to preserve traditions:

Hunting for more acceptable explanations of his ecclesiastical

predilections, he told himself he had been obliged to turn to the

Church, in that the Church was the only body to have preserved the art of past centuries, the lost beauty of the ages. She had kept

unchanged, even in shoddy modern reproductions, the goldsmiths’ traditional forms; preserved the charm of chalices as slender as petunias, of pyres simply and exquisitely styled... pp. 73–74

Des Esseintes feels pangs of genuine religious devotion, but he is equally fascinated by the perversions of Catholic ritual. This was a theme that Huysmans explored further in his 1891 novel about Satanism, Là Bas (The Damned) at left. While contemplating his chalices and altar-cards, Des Esseintes begins to think about:

The mad rites of magical ceremonies, black masses and witches’ sabbaths, together with the horrors of demonic possession and

exorcism, were enacted before his mind’s eye; and he began to wonder if he were not guilty of sacrilege in possessing articles which had once

been solemnly consecrated… This idea, that he was possibly living in a

state of sin, filled him with a certain pride and satisfaction, not unmixed with delight in these sacrilegious acts. p. 77

Just as the Eucharist is the most important Catholic ritual, the Black Mass was understood as the ultimate expression of Satanism in fin de siècle France. Huysmans describes it as:

… the Black Mass celebrated over a woman on all fours whose naked

rump, repeatedly soiled, served as the altar, with the priest cursing the

bread and wine, and the congregation derisively taking communion in the shape of a black host stamped with a picture of a he-goat. p. 148

Martin Maële, illustratration of a Black Mass (1911, lithograph)

54 | À REBOURS

Elisabet Ney, Bust of Arthur Schopenhauer (1859, marble, Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin, Texas)

Des Esseintes compares the promises of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy (which was very much in vogue in Paris at the time) with the teachings of the Church, ultimately finding more comfort in the philosopher than in Catholic doctrine:

What were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with

[Schopenhauer’s] treatises on spiritual hygiene? He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls… pp. 78–79

In his 1903 preface to À Rebours, written after he himself had returned to the Catholic faith, Huysmans reverses the viewpoint expressed in this novel and claims that Schopenhauerism is a poor substitute for Christianity, using the same metaphor of disease:

Schopenhauer’s observations lead nowhere; he leaves you, so to speak, in the lurch; in the end, his aphorisms are only a herbarium of dry plaints; whereas the Church explains the origins and the causes, indicates the conclusions, offers remedies. She does not limit herself to giving you

a spiritual consultation, but treats and cures you, whereas the German quack, once he has proved the incurability of your condition, simply sneers and turns his back on you. (Preface to 1903 edition of À Rebours)

CHAPTER SEVEN | 55

o À REBOURS

CHAPTER

8

IN CHAPTER 8, Des Esseintes decides that, rather than collecting fake flowers as he did in Paris, plants crafted by man to imitate nature, he will assemble a botanical collection that puts the ultimate twist on Baudelarian ideas of artifice:

Now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes. p. 83

The hothouse was one of the most important themes of Decadent literature, featured in Maeterlinckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Serres chaudes (1889) and Charles Baudelaireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Les Fleurs du mal (1861), representing a world separated from the everyday and populated with exotic, rare beings. pictured at left. Baudelaireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poems explore moral corruption, but Des Esseintes is more fixated on physical decay, preferring plants such as the Caladiums (above) that, even in perfect health, seem to display the symptoms of human diseases:

Most of [the Caladiums], as if ravaged by syphilis or leprosy, displayed

livid patches of flesh mottled with roseola, damasked with darter; others had the bright pink color of a scar that his healing or the brown tint of a scab that is forming. p. 84

Des Esseintes also admires plants that seem to be designed by nature to imitate man-made objects, such as the Alocasia at far left:

The Alocasia metallica roused him to still greater admiration.

Covered with a coat of greenish bronze shot with glints of silver, it

was the supreme masterpiece of artifice; anyone would have taken it for a bit of stove-pipe cut into a pike-head pattern by the makers. p. 85

All of these specimens were newly discovered when À Rebours was written, but by now some of them have become rather ordinary houseplants, such as the Anthurium:

[A] stiff stem on top of which trembled a great ace of hearts, as glossy

as a pepper; and then, as if in defiance of all the familiar aspects of plant

life, there sprang from the middle of this bright vermilion heart a fleshy, downy tail. p. 85

Cypripedium is a genus of forty-seven varieties of orchid, sometimes known as slipper orchids. Huysmans describes the plant as:

...the Cypripedium, with its complex, incoherent contours devised by some demented draftsman. It looked rather like a clog or a tidy,

and on top was a human tongue bent back with the string stretched tight, just as you may see it depicted in the plates of medical works dealing with diseases of the throat and mouth; two little wings, of

a jujube red, which might almost have been borrowed from a child’s toy windmill, completed this baroque combination of the underside

of a tongue, the color of wine lees and slate, and a glossy pocket-case with a lining that oozed drops of viscous paste. p. 85

58 | À REBOURS

| 59 CHAPTER EIGHT | 59

The Amorphophallus titanum (from the Greek, ‘giant shapeless phallus’) pictured at right can grow up to 2.5 meters (8 feet) in height and, though it is not carnivorous, reeks of rotting flesh to attract insects for pollination. There are over two hundred species in the Amorphophallus genus, some fleshy and shell-pink, others with a large, squat, deflated-looking spadix. Des Esseintes is “overcome with joy” when he catches sight of it:

A certain Amorphophallus, a plant from Cochin-China with leaves

the shape of fish-slices and long black stalks crisscrossed with scars like the limbs of a negro slave. p. 85

Below is a flowering cactus from the South American genus Echinopsis, which comprises 128 species. Some of these varieties contain the hallucinogen mescaline, but the text doesn’t specify exactly which variety Des Esseintes owns. Huysmans describes the plant as:

The Echinopsis, thrusting its ghastly blossoms out of cotton-wool compresses, like the stumps of amputated limbs… p. 85

The plants on the following pages are all members of a botanical group that is the ultimate feature of an against-the-grain greenhouse:

Des Esseintes was waiting impatiently for the series which particularly fascinated him, those vegetable ghouls, the carnivorous plants. p. 85

CHAPTER EIGHT || 61 61

The Drosera: a plant that traps and digests insects with its “set of glandulous hairs” p. 86

62 | À REBOURS

The Cephalotus: “opening voracious gullets” p. 86

The Sarracenia: “capable of consuming and digesting whole chunks of meat” p. 86

| 63

The Venus Flytrap: “with its curved spikes that interlock to form a grille over any insect it imprisons” p. 86

64 | À REBOURS

The Encephalartos: “A huge pineapple, a monumental Cheshire cheese stuck in heath-mould and bristling on top with barbed javelins and native arrows.” p. 86

| 65

The Nidularium: “Opening its sword-shaped petals to reveal gaping flesh-wounds...” p. 85

The Hawaiian Tree Fern (known as Cibotium glaucum but classified as C. spectabile in Huysmans’s day) has curled-up fern fronds, giant fiddleheads, that grow up to 3 m (9 feet) in length. Its appearance imitates not only a man-made object but an ecclesiastical accessory:

The Cibotium spectabile, challenging comparison with the weirdest

nightmare and out-doing even its congeners in the craziness of its formation, with an enormous orang-outang’s tail poking out of a

cluster of palm-leaves—a brown, hairy tail twisted at the tip into the shape of a bishop’s crozier. p. 86

The last carnivorous plant that the text mentions is the pitcher-plant, also known as the Nepenthes genus (see previous full-page illustration, left). Huysmans describes it as:

The Nepenthes which in shape and form passes all the bounds of

eccentricity. With unwearying delight Des Esseintes turned in his hands the pot in which this floral extravaganza was quivering. It

resembled the gum-tree in its long leaves of a dark, metallic green; but from the end of each leaf there hung a green string, an umbilical cord carrying a greenish-coloured pitcher dappled with purple markings,

a sort of German pipe in porcelain, a peculiar kind of bird’s nest that

swayed gently to and fro, displaying an interior carpeted with hairs. p. 86

The bromeliad at left is an aerophyte, an air plant, which does not grow in soil but on logs or rocks and absorbs nutrients and water through its leaves:

The Tillandsia lindenii, trailing its jagged plough-shares the color of wine-must... p. 85

66 | À REBOURS

Martin Johnson Heade, Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds (1871, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art)

Along with the Cypripedium orchid, Des Esseintes owns an orchid from the Cattleya genus (comprising 113 species total). It is the only plant in his greenhouse with a noticeable scent:

Then he noticed that there was still one name left on his list, the

Cattleya of New Granada. They pointed out to him a little winged

bell-flower of a pale lilac, an almost imperceptible mauve; he went up,

put his nose to it and started backâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for it gave out a smell of varnished

deal, a toy-box smell that brought back horrid memories of New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Day when he was a child. He decided he had better be wary of it, and almost regretted having admitted among all the scentless plants he possessed this orchid with its unpleasantly reminiscent odor. p. 87

CHAPTER EIGHT | 67

n À REBOURS

CHAPTER

9

Woodcut illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg from Chapter 9 in the 1931 edition of À Rebours

IN CHAPTER 9, Des Esseintes eats purple bonbons filled with a “drop of female essence” which cause him to recall past debauches and love affairs in vivid detail. The first woman he remembers is described in rather masculine terms:

Miss Urania, an American girl with a supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron. She had been one of the most famous acrobats and the Circus, where Des Esseintes had followed

her performance night after night. She had struck him as being a strapping, handsome woman... p. 97

It is possible that Huysmans intended the reader to understand this relationship as a coded homosexual affair. In the nineteenth century, “Uranian” was a common term for a homosexual; the term derived from the concept of homosexual love being more ethereal (and thus associated with the heavenly body Uranus) than heterosexual affairs motivated by base, earthly urges for reproduction.

The next mistress, who is also described with manly features like “greasy hair parted on one side near the temples like a boy’s” (p. 99), earns a special place in Des Esseintes’s memory because of her talent as a ventriloquist. When they make love, Des Esseintes has her project the voice of an angry, jealous husband on the other side of the door, exciting him enough to help stave off his impotence. In a more literary use of her talents, he has her perform a dialogue from Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

One night he had a miniature sphinx brought in, carved in black marble and couched in the classic pose, its paws stretched out and its head

held rigidly upright, together with a chimera in coloured terra-cotta,

flaunting a bristling mane, darting ferocious glances from its eyes and lashing flanks as swollen as a blacksmith’s bellows with its tail. He

placed one of these mythical beasts at either end of the bedroom and

put out the lamps, leaving only the red embers glowing in the hearth, to shed a dim light that would exaggerate the size of objects almost

submerged in the semi-darkness. This done, he lay down on the bed beside the ventriloquist, whose set face was lit up by the glow of a half-burned log, and waited.

With strange intonations that he had made her rehearse beforehand

for hours, she gave life and voice to the monsters, without so much as moving her lips, without even looking in their direction.

There and then, in the silence of the night, began the marvelous

dialogue of the Chimera and the Sphinx, spoken in deep, guttural

voices, now raucous, now piercingly clear, like voices from another world.

‘I seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untasted.’ p. 100

70 | À REBOURS

Previous page: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Garroted Man (1868, etching) < Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Plate from Los Caprichos: Bien tirada está (1820s, etching)

Des Esseintes’s insomnia, anxiety and depression have increased dramatically by Chapter 9, and the “joy“ brought to him by the hothouse plants has evaporated. Looking at his collection of prints by Goya (including plates from the series known as Caprices and Proverbs and a plate titled Garroting, see previous page) puts him in good humor for a moment:

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes.

On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather

put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear

that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might feel obliged to dishonor them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies

over them... Unaccountable vogues had utterly spoilt certain books and pictures for [Des Esseintes] that he had once held dear; confronted

with the approbation of the mob, he always ended up by discovering

some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and promptly rejected them, at

the same time wondering whether his flair was not deserting him, his taste getting blunted. pp. 94-95 72 | À REBOURS

The third liaison that Des Esseintes recalls in Chapter 9 is an explicitly homosexual relationship, and the passage was expurgated from certain earlier editions of À Rebours:

He was accosted near the Invalides by a youth who asked him which Woodcut illustration from Chapter 9 by Arthur Zaidenberg, 1930 edition of À Rebours

was the quickest way to get to the Rue de Babylone… Des Esseintes

ran his eyes over him. He looked as though he had just left school, and was poorly clad in a little cheviot jacket too tight round the hips and

barely reaching below the small of the back, a pair of close-fitting black breeches, a turn-down collar and a flowing cravat, dark-blue with thin white stripes, tied in a loose bow.

The face was somewhat disconcerting; pale and drawn, with fairly

regular features topped by long black hair, it was lit up by two great

liquid eyes, ringed with blue and set close to the nose, which was dotted

with a few golden freckles; the mouth was small, but spoilt by fleshy lips with a line dividing them in the middle like a cherry.

From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Boy With a Basket of Fruit (1593, oil on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome)

friendship that somehow lasted several months. Des Esseintes could

not think of it now without a shudder; never had he submitted to more delightful or more stringent exploitation, never had he run such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress. p. 102

CHAPTER NINE | 73

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CHAPTER

10

+

VANILLA

+

TUBEROSE

ROSE

+

CITRON

=

+

ORANGE BLOSSOM

+

CLOVES

=

NEROLI

+

CAMPHOR

SWEET PEA

JAPANESE HOVENIA

=

PATCHOULI

CHINA INK

CHAPTER 10 opens with Des Esseintesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s newest symptom: olfactory hallucinations, which are particularly nuanced because he has spent years studying the art of perfumery. This perhaps under-appreciated art suits him well, since it involves using the ultra-distilled essence of each ingredient as well as a high degree of artifice in imitating and even surpassing the fragrances that nature invents:

Hardly ever, in fact, are perfumes produced from the flowers whose names they bear... the artist in perfumery completes the original

natural odor, which, so to speak, he cuts and mounts as a jeweler improves and brings out the water of a precious stone. p. 106

The chapter also includes several perfume recipes, such as instructions for blending the scent of Sweet Pea, Hovenia, and China Ink perfumes (above).

Vervain (also known as verbena) produces an herbal, lemony perfume that was very popular with the Ancient Egyptians and the Romans. Liqueur de verveine from Le Puy-en-Velay is flavored with the plant. It has several uses as an herbal remedy, including as an abortifacient.

Musk comes from the glandular secretions of the Asian musk deer.

The substance comes from the musk pod (pictured above) located near the deerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tail and is diluted when it is used in perfumery, where it serves as a fixative and offers its own sweet, earthy, inimitable scent. Today synthetic musk is preferred since the deer must be killed in order to harvest the musk pod.

Frankincense is an aromatic resin from the Bosnellia tree. It has been traded for over five thousand years in North Africa and has been used to scent cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues for centuries. Good quality frankincense has a woody scent with notes of pine and lemon.

76 | Ă&#x20AC; REBOURS

Iris rhizomes, sometimes called orris-root, are harvested and aged for at least five years before being steam distilled into a thick, oily compound called ‘iris butter’ by perfumiers. It has a scent somewhat like violets. Orris-root provides flavoring for certain brands of gin, such as Bombay Sapphire (look for the drawing on the bottle’s side).

Ambergris is a gray, waxy secretion from the digestive tracts of sperm whales that has been found floating on the ocean. It was long used as a fixative in perfumery, though it was also valued for its own pungent sweetness, likened to tobacco, pine, or mulch. Though it has largely been replaced by synthetic fixatives, pieces of ambergris still turn up and fetch very high prices. Scientists believe that ambergris is produced in the whale’s digestive tract from indigestible squid beaks.

Spikenard (also called nard or muskroot) is a flowering plant of the Valerian family whose rhizomes can be crushed and distilled into an essential oil with an earthy, musty scent. It was a popular cooking ingredient in Ancient Rome (in small quantities) and during the Middle Ages in larger quantities and particularly as a flavoring in alcoholic drinks, such as Hippocras, a spiced, sweetened wine concoction.

Civet is another kind of animal musk from the African civet cat’s perineal gland. Civetone can be harvested without killing the animal and it is still used today in many perfumes (notably Calvin Klein’s ’Obsession for Men’ which attracts jaguars according to wildlife photographers). Civetone is overpowering in its natural state but when it is very diluted it offers pleasant musky, sweet, sweaty and smoky notes.

Jasmine is the only scent that Des Esseintes believes is better in its natural state (rather than imitated by a combination of other essences). The flowers must be harvested at night and many bushels are needed to make a small amount of essence.

Opoponax is an herb with yellow flowers, sometimes called sweet myrrh, whose cut stalks produce a juice that is dried into resinous chunks (see above). It has a woody, balsamic scent similar to lavender and is most famous for being Molly Bloom’s favorite perfume in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Saffron is more popular as a cooking ingredient than as a perfume, but offers aromas of “metallic honey, grass, and hay“ according to one perfumier. Since each saffron crocus produces only three stigmas (the strands above), saffron has always been a luxury item.

CHAPTER TEN | 77

François Boucher, Venus at Her Toilette (1751, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Des Esseintes knows so much about the history of perfumery that when the room fills with frangipane, amber, musk and patchouli, he feels overwhelmed by historical hallucinations conjured by these smells:

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… p. 109 78 | À REBOURS

Des Esseintes has an extensive collection of cosmetics and beauty implements which delighted his past mistresses:

Besides 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 Illustration of clouds of perfume from Ch. 10, by Auguste Lepère in the 1903 edition of À Rebours

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. p. 112

The strigil is an unexpected item to find in Des Esseintes’s vanity. Strigils were used in ancient times as a kind of body scraper to remove oil and grit from the body after exercise in the arena (at right, a bronze Etruscan strigil from 300 BCE).

CHAPTER TEN | 79

y À REBOURS

CHAPTER

11

IN CHAPTER 11, after he recovers from his perfume-induced fainting spell, Des Esseintes is overcome with loneliness and boredom as he realizes that his life of monk-like isolation is more stifling than he had expected. He begins to consider travel as a means of escape:

The works of Dickens, which he had recently read in the hope of

soothing his nerves, but which had produced the opposite effect, slowly

began to act upon him in an unexpected way, evoking visions of English life which he contemplated for hours on end. Then, little by little, an idea insinuated itself into his mindâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions; and this idea was allied with

a longing to experience new sensations and thus afford some relief to a mind dizzy with hunger and drunk with fantasy. p. 118

With his steamer, carpetbag, hat-box and valise packed, Des Esseintes dons the only outfit described in the novel:

[A] 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. p. 117

The Inverness cape (far left) was designed c. 1850 as a new conception of a travel garment that would be less formal than a cloak and more refined than the businesslike overcoat.

Lithograph illustration by Auguste Leroux, Chapter 10 of the 1920 edition of Ă&#x20AC; Rebours

The first travel guides were published by the German Karl Baedeker in the 1830s, and Des Esseintes consults one of these guidebooks (above) in a Paris bookstore:

... he sat down to examine these volumes, whose flexible covers bent

between his fingers. Glancing through them, he was suddenly struck

by a page of Baedeker describing the London art-galleries. The precise, laconic details given by the guide aroused his interest. p. 121

John Everett Millais, The Eve of St Agnes (1863, oil on canvas, Tate)

The artworks that appeal to Des Esseintes are those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters in England who were drawn to mystical and medieval subjects. Des Esseintes has seen some of these works at an exhibition in Paris, including:

... pictures by Millais such as The Eve of St Agnes, with its moonlight effect of silvery-green tones; and weirdly colored pictures by Watts, speckled with gamboge and indigo, and looking as if they had been sketched by an ailing Gustave Moreau, painted in by an anaemic

Michael Angelo and retouched by a romantic Raphael… the strange and mysterious amalgam of these three masters was informed

by the personality, at once coarse and refined, of a dreamy, scholarly Englishman affliction with a predilection for hideous hues. p. 122

< George Frederic Watts, Eve Repentant (c. 1865–1897, oil on canvas, Tate Collection)

82 | À REBOURS

John A. Grimshaw, Liverpool from Wapping (1875, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Des Esseintes begins to have doubts about his travel plans as he remembers a failure of a trip to Holland based on a vision of the country he had constructed in French museums:

He had pictured to himself a Holland such as Teniers and Jan Steen,

Rembrandt and Ostade had painted… but there was no sign of the wild

revelry or domestic drunkenness, and he had to admit that the paintings of the Dutch School exhibited in the Louvre had led him astray...

Holland was just a country like any other. p. 127

Finally, Des Esseintes decides to simply turn around and return to his house at Fontenay:

‘When you come to think of it,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ve seen and felt all

that I wanted to see and feel. I’ve been steeped in English life ever since

I left home, and it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality.’ p. 129

CHAPTER ELEVEN | 83

t

À REBOURS

CHAPTER

12

IN CHAPTER 12, perhaps the most tedious chapter of À Rebours, Des Esseintes organizes his collection of Catholic literature. The chapter does include an interesting overview of his taste in bookbinding; Huysmans’s mother and stepfather ran a bookbindery from the time the author was ten years old, so he probably learned about papers, leathers, and typefaces at an early age. The materials that Des Esseintes chooses for his books harmonize with his understanding of the text and his admiration of the authors:

This collection had cost him considerable sums of money, for the

truth was that he could not bear to have his favorite authors printed on rag-paper, as they were in other people’s libraries, with characters like hobnails in a peasant’s boots.

In Paris in former days, he had had certain volumes set up just for

himself and printed on hand-presses by specially hired workmen.

Sometimes he would commission Perrin of Lyons, whose slim, clear

types were well adapted for archaic reimpressions of old texts… p. 131

Blackletter (or Textura) is a heavy, angular script used by monks during the Middle Ages to copy manuscripts.

The first printed books (such as the Gutenberg Bible, above) imitated its dense calligraphic appearance.

Perrin of Lyons was a punchcutter and typefounder working in Lyons the mid 19th century who was interested in reviving the crisp, clean typography of Ancient Roman inscriptions on monuments.

Civilité is a type designed by Robert Granjon in the 1550s as a French version of italic fonts. It was based on Gothic calligraphy and soon became the default choice for French children’s primers and textbooks.

Watered silk has an optical moiré pattern produced by pressing a doubled length of silk between highpressure metal rollers, resulting in a wavy pattern in the warp of the silk.

Onager hide is one of the more exotic leathers that Des Esseintes uses, from the notoriously un-tameable onager (also called an Asiatic wild ass, pictured above).

Lampas is a woven fabric with a background weft of taffeta topped by additional “brocading wefts” containing the design. Lyons was a major center of lampas production.

Édouard Manet, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire (1862–67, etching on blue laid paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Though Huysmans does not invoke the title of Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du mal (1861), a botanical metaphor serves to distinguish this poet above all other writers:

The efforts [of writers before Baudelaire] amounted to no more than

the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.

Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the

inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the

monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish... and sounded instead

those deeper, deadlier, long-lasting wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt upon souls tortured by the present, disgusted by the past, terrified and dismayed by the future. p. 134

86 | À REBOURS

Correspondances

Correspondences

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Nature is a temple where living pillars Let escape sometimes confused words; Man traverses it through forests of symbols That observe him with familiar glances.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme une nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Like long echoes that intermingle from afar In a dark and profound unity, Vast like the night and like the light, The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond.

Il est des parfums frais comme de chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants Sweet like oboes, green like prairies, —And others corrupted, rich and triumphant

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

That have the expanse of infinite things, Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense, Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (trans. William Aggeler)

CHAPTER TWELVE | 87 CHAPTER TWELVE | 87

l À REBOURS

CHAPTER

13

CHAPTER 13 starts in the midst of a heat wave. Des Esseintes is crippled by stomach pains and nauseated by the mere sight of food. Laudanum, hashish, and opium offer him no relief, and he lacks energy for the humorous remedies he used to employ in Paris:

Alas, the time was long past when Des Esseintes, then enjoying comparatively good health, would get into a sledge he kept

at home—this in the hottest period of the year—and sit there wrapped in furs that he pulled tightly round him, shivering to the best of his

ability and saying through deliberately chattering teeth: ‘What an icy

wind! Why, it’s freezing here, it’s freezing!’—until he almost convinced himself that it was really cold. p. 158

Des Esseintes wanders around and enters the Fontenay garden for the first time since moving there. He is able to observe some young boys fighting beyond the hedge:

Kicks and blows fell thick and fast, and the weaker boys were knocked

to the ground, where they lay thrashing about and crying as the broken Woodcut illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg, Chapter 13 of the 1931 edition of À Rebours

stones dug into their bottoms. The sight put new life into Des Esseintes; the interest this fight aroused in him took his mind off his own sickly

condition. Faced with the savage fury of these vicious brats, he reflected on the cruel and abominable law of the struggle for life... p. 155

Des Esseintes finds momentary distraction from his pain by contemplating a bottle of Benedictine and the way the sweet, feminine liqueur contrasts with the form of its bottle:

He staggered over to the cupboard and... reached up to the shelf above for a bottle of Benedictine—a bottle he kept in the house on account

of its shape, which he considered suggestive of ideas at once pleasantly wanton and vaguely mystical... the squat, dark-green bottle normally conjured up visions of medieval priories for him, with its antique monkish paunch...

It gave off a subtle aroma of angelica and hyssop mixed with seaweed

whose iodine and bromine content was masked with sugar; it stimulated the palate with a spirituous fire hidden under an altogether virginal

sweetness; and it flattered the nostrils with a hint of corruption wrapped up in a caress that was at once childlike and devout. p. 152–53

Des Esseintes later finds distraction and relief by looking at his astrolabe (at right), a navigational instrument that prompts him to have an almost Proustian stream of memories of wandering about the Latin Quarter of Paris after visiting the Cluny Museum.

He had bought this instrument, which was made of engraved

and gilded copper, of German workmanship and dating from the

seventeenth century, in a second-hand dealer’s in Paris, after a visit he had paid to the Cluny Museum, where he had stood for hours

enraptured by a wonderful astrolabe of carved ivory, whose cabalistic appearance had captivated him. The paper-weight stirred up in him a whole swarm of memories… p. 159 The Cluny Museum (Musée national du Moyen Âge), Paris

90 | À REBOURS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN | 91

2 À REBOURS

CHAPTER

14

Édouard Manet, Once Upon a Midnight Dreary: llustration to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (1875, lithograph) < Alphonse Mucha, Illustration for Flaubert’s Salammbô (1896, lithograph)

CHAPTER 14 covers Des Esseintes’s taste in modern French literature and poetry.

Des Esseintes favors works that reveal the author’s true personality, but he also admits that a reader “naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality” (p. 165). In a subtle demonstration of this philosophy, Des Esseintes’s preferences are mirrored in the aspects he chooses to highlight in his praise of Gustave Flaubert:

When the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by

a nostalgic yearning for another age… there comes a time when he

bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord...

The personality of the great writer [Flaubert] was revealed in all

its splendor in those incomparable pages of La Tentation de Saint

Antoine and Salammbô in which, leaving our petty modern civilization far behind, he conjured up the Asiatic glories of distant epochs, their

mystic arduous and doldrums, that oppressive boredom which emanates from opulence... p. 166–67

Radna and Krishna in the Boat of Love (unknown artist, National Museum in Delhi) 94 | Ă&#x20AC; REBOURS

Des Esseintes is able to find something to appreciate even among the works of Émile Zola, who was Huysmans’s friend and mentor when he was interested in Naturalism. Des Esseintes prefers the most mystical and exotic of Zola’s tales, La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875), about a young priest and his lover, set in an Edenic garden called Paradou:

[Zola] had fled to an idyllic region where the sap boiled in the

sunshine; he had dreamt of fantastic heavenly copulations, of long earthly ecstasies, of fertilizing showers of pollen falling into the

palpitating genitals of flowers… he had created, perhaps unconsciously, a prodigious Hindu poem, extolling, in a style whose board patches of

crude color had something of the weird brilliance of Indian paintings, living animate matter, which by its own frenzied procreation revealed

to man and woman the forbidden fruit of love, its suffocating spasms, its instinctive caresses, its natural postures. p. 169

Des Esseintes loves Verlaine’s poetry for its whispery, intimate vagueness, and correlates the poems with his memories of Parisian women. As with other authors in this chapter, Des Esseintes claims that Verlaine’s works correspond to the art of another age:

Often Des Esseintes would reread this book, Sagesse, allowing the

poems it contained to inspire in him secret reveries, impossible dreams of an occult passion for a Byzantine Madonna... she was so mysterious and so alluring that it was impossible to tell whether she was longing to indulge in depravities so monstrous that, once accomplished, they would become irresistible. p. 172

CHAPTER FOURTEEN | 95

s

À REBOURS

CHAPTER

15

IN CHAPTER 15, as the symptoms of Des Esseintes’s syphilis grow more acute, he begins to have aural hallucinations. As he waits for the arrival of the local doctor, he reviews his tastes in music. His favorite music is plainsong (also called Gregorian chant):

This type of music, at present considered an effete and barbarous form of the Christian liturgy, as an archaeological curiosity, as a relic of the distant past, was the very soul of the Middle Ages… This traditional

melody was the only one which, with its powerful unison, its harmonies as massive and imposing as blocks of freestone, could tone in with the

old basilicas and fill their Romanesque vaults, of which it seemed to be the emanation, the very voice. p. 187

Des Esseintes admits that his musical preferences are not as refined as his taste in literature or art, since he lacks a way to study music in a solitary fashion and wouldn’t dare mingle with hordes of common people just to hear a concert.

Secular music is a promiscuous art in that you cannot enjoy it at home, by yourself, as you do a book; to savour it he would have had to join

the mob of inveterate theatre-goers that fills the Cirque d’Hiver, where Vera Bock, cover for a 1937 Bonibooks edition of À Rebours

under a broiling sun and in a stifling atmosphere you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his arms about and massacring disconnected

snatches of Wagner to the huge delight of an ignorant crowd. p. 189

In order to clear up Des Esseintes’s stomach troubles the doctor prescribes a nutritive enema of peptone or beef tea, cod liver oil and Burgundy to be administered three times a day:

Des Esseintes could not help secretly congratulating himself on this

experience which was, so to speak, the crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfillment.

No one, he thought, would ever go any further; taking nourishment this was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the norm. p. 193

Des Esseintes’s stomach improves quickly; he delights in making up menus for his enemas (even avoiding meat on Fridays) and soon he feels well enough to wake up during the day and makes plans to redecorate his library. However, Des Esseintes’s newfound joy and energy do not indicate a full recovery, and his doctor tells him that although the digestive troubles have been cleared up, he must still treat the neurological problems. The following sentence is the most overt clue in the text indicating that Des Esseintes suffers from syphilis:

The doctor examined him, sounded him and carefully scrutinized his urine, in which certain white streaks told him what one of the chief determining causes of his nervous trouble was. p. 193

98 | À REBOURS

Although Des Esseintes is quite excited about his new idea for wall hangings made from old liturgical vestments, his doctor is uninterested and comes up with a new prescription that is entirely less delightful than the nutritive enemas:

Des Esseintes told him of his unrealizable ideals and was beginning to

outline new experiments in color... when the doctor threw cold water on his enthusiasm by declaring in peremptory fashion that wherever he put his ideas into effect it would certainly not be in that house. pp. 195â&#x20AC;&#x201C;96

CHAPTER FIFTEEN | 99

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CHAPTER

16

IN CHAPTER 16, the final chapter of À Rebours, there is almost no concrete imagery, no reference to art or literature or any of the rare, beautiful objects that Des Esseintes loves so dearly. As he tries to imagine what sort of life he will live in a “newly constructed” flat in Paris, he considers and rejects the company of aristocratic society and the comfort of the Church because both have become too impure for his tastes. They have been utterly corrupted by money, “the vast bagnio of America transported to the continent of Europe,” (p. 203) just as Roman civilization was destroyed by barbarian forces. Every doctor that Des Esseintes consults agrees with the first doctor’s opinion that his solitary life at Fontenay must be abandoned for “amusement and relaxation” in Paris: Buried deep in his armchair, he was now brooding over this

unambiguous prescription which upset all his plans, broke all the ties binding him to his present life and buried all his future projects in oblivion. So his beatific happiness was over!

The doctors spoke of amusement and relaxation, but with whom, with

what, did they expect him to have fun and enjoy himself ?

Had he not outlawed himself from society? Had he heard of anybody

else who was trying to organize a life like this, a life of dreamy

contemplation? Did he know a single individual who was capable

of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting,

the quintessence of an idea, or whose soul was sensitive enough to understand Mallarmé and love Verlaine? p. 198

Des Esseintes watches as movers pack up all his treasures and collapses into a chair:

‘In two days’ time I shall be in Paris,’ he told himself.

‘Well, it is all over now... Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts,

the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of ancient hope! p. 204

THE END | 101

ILLUSTRATED EDITIONS OF À REBOURS AUGUSTE LEPÈRE, 1903 EDITION: PP. 23, 31, 65, 79, 104 AUGUSTE LEROUX, 1920 EDITION: PP. 7, 35, 51, 81 ARTHUR ZAIDENBERG, 1931 EDITION: PP. 8, 51, 69, 73, 89, 99, 101, 103 COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSUEM OF ART PP. 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 29, 30, 34, 35, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 68, 71, 72, 78, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88, 93, 95, 99, 104 COURTESY OF ARTSTOR.ORG PP. 40, 46

MANY THANKS TO ALL AT THE COOPER UNION, ESPECIALLY DAVID WEIR, MIKE ESSL, AND SASHA TOCHILOVSKY

BY THERESA A. ZEITZ-LINDAMOOD WWW.TAZL.COM NEW YORK, NY 2011–2012

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À REBOURS (1884) is the definitive text of French Decadent literature, a work that celebrates

excess and artifice, a novel without a plot. It has just one character: the Duc Jean des Esseintes, the last scion of a once-glorious aristocratic family. He is syphilitic, neurasthenic, and appalled by nineteenth-century life. He

flees Paris and begins building the eccentric villa of his dreams, where he can live in solitude, refining his tastes in literature, paintings, perfumes, gemstones, exotic plants and much more. The novel consists of nothing more

than the Duc des Esseintes’s memories, his æsthetic musings, and the development of his personal philosophy,

which blends the writings of Baudelaire and Schopenhauer with Sadism and Catholicism. Written in an ornate, sensuous style, this wildly original novel by J-K Huymans remains without parallel in Western literature.

There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour.

The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy... It was a poisonous book.

OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) In France and across Europe À Rebours was read as the most flamboyant

expression of what came to be known as ‘the Decadence’. It was held up by

some as a cautionary tale and by others as a manual of modern living. It was held up by some as a cautionary tale and by others as a manual of modern

living; it was read as a moral fable and as a chillding case study of crisis and

debauchery. Many felt that it marked the end of the novel, while a few saw it as the beginning of a new way of writing.

PATRICK MCGUINNESS, Introduction to À Rebours (2008 edition) Monsieur Huysmans, with a remarkable talent and stupefying erudition, has

put together in his book À Rebours all the elements of human despair. He has

solidly spat on every pleasure, and kept for himself the terrible joy of abolishing human joy. An unhealthy book, but artistically very beautiful, perfectly crafted and skillfully wrought.

EMILE GOUDEAU, L’Echo de Paris (1884)