Classic Audiobook Collection - Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Against the Grain by Joris Carl Weismance, translated by John Howard. Chapter 1 The Floressa de Césinthe, to judge by the various portraits preserved in the Chateau de Lourg, had originally been a family of stalwart troopers and stern cavalrymen. closely arrayed side by side in the old frames which their broad shoulders filled, they startled one with the fixed gaze of their eyes, their fierce mustaches, and the chests whose deep curves filled the enormous shells of their cuirasses. These were the ancestors. There were no portraits of their descendants, and a wide breach existed in the series of the faces of this race.

Starting point is 00:01:03 Only one painting served as a link to connect the past and present, a crafty, mysterious head with haggard and gaunt features, cheekbones punctuated with a comma of painting. The hair overspread with pearls, a painted neck rising stiffly from the fluted ruff. In this representation of one of the most intimate friends of the Duke de Pernand and the Marquis d'O, the ravages of a sluggish and impoverished constitution were already noticeable. It was obvious that the decadence of this family had followed an unvarying course. The effemination of the males had continued with quickened tempo.

Starting point is 00:01:58 As if to conclude the work of long years, the Desicent had intermarried for two centuries, using up in such consanguineous unions such strength as remained. There was only one living scion of this family, which had once been so numerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Eil de France and La Brie. The Duke Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and delicate hands. By a singular atavistic reversion, the last descendant resembled the old Grand Sire, from whom he had inherited the pointed remarkably fair beard, and an ambiguous expression, at once weary and cunning. His childhood had been an unhappy one, menaced with scrofula and afflicted with relentless fevers,

Starting point is 00:03:10 he yet succeeded in crossing the breakers of adolescence thanks to fresh air and careful attention he grew stronger overcame the languors of chlorosis and reached his full development his mother a tall pale taciturn woman died of anemia and his father of some uncertain malady de cainte was then 17 years of age. He retained but a vague memory of his parents, and felt neither affection nor gratitude for them. He hardly knew his father, who usually resided in Paris. He recalled his mother, as she lay motionless in a dim room of the Chateau de Lourg. The husband and wife would meet on rare occasions, and he remembered those lifeless interviews, when his parents sat face to face in front of a round table, faintly lit by a lamp with a

Starting point is 00:04:18 wide, low-hanging shade, for the Duchess could not endure light or sound, without being seized with a fit of nervousness. A few halting words would be exchanged between them in the gloom, and then the indifferent duke would depart to meet the first train back to Paris. Jean's life at the Jesuit school where he was sent to study was more pleasant. At first the fathers pampered the lad, whose intelligence astonished them. But despite their efforts, they could not induce him to concentrate on studies requiring discipline. He nibbled at various books, and was precociously brilliant in Latin. On the contrary, he was absolutely incapable of construing two Greek words, showed no aptitude for living languages,

Starting point is 00:05:24 and promptly proved himself a dunce when obliged to master the elements of the sciences. His family gave him little heed. Sometimes his father visited him at school. How are you? Be good. Study hard. And he was gone. The lad passed the summer vacations at the Chateau de Lour.

Starting point is 00:05:52 But his presence could not seduce his mother from her reveries. She scarcely noticed him. When she did, her gaze would rest on him for a moment with a sad smile, and that was all. The moment after she would again become absorbed in the artificial night, with which the heavily curtained windows enshrouded the room. The servants were old and dull. Left to himself, the boy delved into books on rainy days, and roamed about the room. the countryside on pleasant afternoons.

Starting point is 00:06:33 It was his supreme delight to wander down the little valley to Jitigny, a village planted at the foot of the hills, a tiny heap of cottages, capped with thatch, strewn with tufts of sen-green and clumps of moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he would lie listening to the hollow splashing of the mills, and inhaling the fresh breeze from Vuzzi. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs, to the green and black hamlet of Longueville, or climbed wind-swept hillsides affording magnificent views. There, below to one side, as far as the eye could reach, lay the Sen Valley, blending in the distance with the blue sky.

Starting point is 00:07:30 High up, near the horizon, on the other side, rose the churches and tower of Provence, which seemed to tremble in the golden dust of the air. Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague undeveloped ideas took on form. After each vacation, Jean returned to his master's

Starting point is 00:08:04 more reflective and headstrong. These changes did not escape them, subtle and observant, accustomed by their profession to plumb souls to their depths. They were fully aware of his unresponsiveness to their teachings. They knew that this student would never contributed to the glory of their order. And as his family was rich and apparently careless of his future, they soon renounced the idea of having him take up any of the professions their school offered. Although he willingly discussed with them those theological doctrines which intrigued his fancy by their subtleties and hair-splittings, they did not even think of training him for the religious orders, since, in spite of their efforts, his faith remained languid.

Starting point is 00:09:04 As a last resort, through prudence and fear of the harm he might effect, they permitted him to pursue whatever studies pleased him, and to neglect the others, being loath to antagonise this bold and independent spirit by the quibblings of the lay-school assistant. Thus he lived in perfect contentment, scarcely feeling the parental yoke of the priests. He continued his Latin and French studies when the whim seized him, and although theology did not figure in his schedule, he finished his apprenticeship in this science, begun at the Chateau de Lour, in the library bequeathed by his grand uncle, Dom Prospect. the old prior of the regular canons of Saint-Rouf. But soon the time came when he must quit the Jesuit institution. He attained his majority and became master of his fortune.

Starting point is 00:10:11 The Comte de Mont-Chevrell, his cousin and guardian, placed in his hands the title to his wealth. There was no intimacy between them, for there was no possible point of contact between these two men, the one young, the other old. Impelled by curiosity, idleness, or politeness, Liz Isaint, sometimes visited the Montchrelle family, and spent some dull evenings in their Rue de la Ches mansion, where the ladies, old as antiquity itself, would gossip of quarterings of the noble arms,

Starting point is 00:10:52 heraldic moons and anachronistic ceremonies. The men, gathered around whist-tables, proved even more shallow and insignificant than the dowagers. These descendants of ancient, courageous knights, these last branches of feudal races, appeared to Desicant as catarral, crazy old men, repeating inanities and timidies and time-worn phrases. A fleur-de-lie seemed the sole imprint on the soft pap of their brains. The youth felt an unutterable pity for these mummies, buried in their elaborate hypogeums of wainscoting and grotto work, for these tedious triflers, whose eyes were forever turned towards a hazy Canaan, an imaginary Palestine.

Starting point is 00:11:54 After a few visits with such relatives, he resolved never again to set foot in their homes, regardless of invitations or reproaches. Then he began to seek out the young men of his own age and set. One group, educated like himself in religious institutions, institutions, preserved the special marks of this training. They attended religious services, received the sacrament on Easter, frequented the Catholic circles, and concealed as criminal, their amorous escapades. For the most part they were unintelligent, acquiescent, fops, stupid boars who had tried the patience of their professors. Yet these professors were pleased to have bestowed such docile, pious creatures upon society. The other group, educated in the

Starting point is 00:13:01 state colleges or in the lyce, were less hypocritical and much more courageous, but they They were neither more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas and races, they played Lanskinet and Baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Isand felt an overpowering weariness of this company, whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate, without any ardent reactions or excitement of nerves and blood. He gradually forsook them to make the acquaintance of literary men, in whom he thought

Starting point is 00:14:00 he might find more interest and feel more at ease. This too proved disappointing. He was revolted by their rancorous and petty judgments, their conversation as obvious as a church door, their dreary discussions in which they judged the value of a book by the number of editions it had passed, and by the prophets acquired. At the same time, he noticed that the freethinkers, the doctriners of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others were greedy and shameless Puritans, whom in education he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker. His contempt for humanity deepened.

Starting point is 00:14:56 He reached the conclusion that the world, for the most part, was composed of scoundrels and imbeciles. Certainly he could not hope to discover in others aspirations and aversions similar to his own, could not expect companionship with an intelligence exulting in a studious decrepitude, nor anticipate meeting a mind as keen as his among the writers and scholars. Irritated, ill at ease, and offended by the poverty of ideas given, and received, he became like those people described by Nicol, those who are always melancholy. He would fly into a rage when he read the patriotic and social balderdash retailed daily in the newspapers, and would exaggerate the significance of the plaudits which a sovereign public always reserved for works

Starting point is 00:16:03 deficient in ideas and style. Already he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless arc, in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity. A single passion, woman, might have curbed his contempt, but that too her. had pulled on him. He had taken to carnal repasts, with the eagerness of a crotchety man, affected with a depraved appetite, and given to sudden hungers, whose taste is quickly dulled and surfeited. Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavish suppers, where at dessert tipsy women would unfasten their clothing and strike their heads against the tables.

Starting point is 00:17:06 He had haunted the green rooms, loved actresses and singers, endured in addition to the natural stupidity he had come to expect of women, the maddening vanity of female strolling players. Finally, satiated and weary of this man. monotonous extravagance and the sameness of their caresses. He had plunged into the foul depths, hoping by the contrast of squalid misery to revive his desires and stimulate his deadened senses. Whatever he attempted proved vain. An unconquerable ennui oppressed him. Yet he persisted in his excesses and returned to the perilous embraces of accomplished mistresses. But his health failed.

Starting point is 00:18:06 His nervous system collapsed. The back of his neck grew sensitive. His hand, still firm when it seized a heavy object, trembled when it held a tiny glass. The physicians whom he consulted, frightened him. It was high time to check his excesses and renounce those pursuits which were dissipating his reserve of strength. For a while he was at peace, but his brain soon became over-excited, like those young girls who, in the grip of puberty, crave coarse and vile

Starting point is 00:18:47 foods. He dreamed of and practiced perverse loves and pleasures. This was the end. As though satisfied with having exhausted everything, as though completely surrendering to fatigue, his senses fell into a lethargy, and impotence threatened him. He recovered, but he was lonely. tired, sobered, imploring an end to his life which the cowardice of his flesh prevented him from consummating. Once more he was toying with the idea of becoming a recluse, of living in some hushed retreat, where the turmoil of life would be muffled, as in those streets covered with straw, to prevent any sound from reaching invalids. It was time to make up his mind.

Starting point is 00:19:53 The condition of his finances terrified him. He had spent in acts of folly and in drinking bouts the greater part of his patrimony, and the remainder, invested in land, produced a ridiculously small income. He decided to sell the Chateau de Lourg, which he no longer visited, and where he left no memory or regret behind. He liquidated his other holdings, bought government bonds, and in this way drew an annual interest

Starting point is 00:20:28 of fifty thousand francs. In addition, he reserved a sum of money which he meant to use in buying and furnishing the house, where he proposed to enjoy a perfect repose. Exploring the suburbs of the capital, he found a place for sale at the top of the Fontenéot in a secluded section near the fort, far from any neighbours. His dream was realised. In this country place, so little violated by Parisians, he could be certain of seclusion. The difficulty of reaching the place, due to an unreliable railroad passage. by at the end of the town, and to the little street-cars, which came and went at irregular

Starting point is 00:21:21 intervals, reassured him. He could picture himself alone on the bluff, sufficiently far away to prevent the Parisian throngs from reaching him, and yet near enough to the capital to confirm him in his solitude. And he felt that in not entirely closing the way, there was a chance that he would not be assailed by a wish to return to society, seeing that it is only the impossible, the unachievable that arouses desire. He put masons to work on the house he had acquired. Then one day, informing no one of his plans, he quickly disposed of his old furniture, dismissed his servants, and left, without giving the concierge any address. End of Chapter 1

Starting point is 00:22:23 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weissmance, translated by John Howard. Chapter 2 More than two months passed before DesEcent could bury himself in the the silent repose of his Fontenay abode. He was obliged to go to Paris again, to comb the city in his search for the things he wanted to buy. What care he took, what meditations he surrendered himself to, before turning over his house to the upholsterers. He had long been a connoisseur in the sincerity and evasions of colour tones. In the days when he had entertained women at his home, he had created a boudoir where, amid daintily carved furniture of pale Japanese

Starting point is 00:23:25 camphor wood, under a sort of pavilion of Indian rose-tinted satin, the flesh would colour delicately in the borrowed lights of the silken hangings. This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed each other all along the walls, reflecting as far as the eye could reach, whole series of rose boudoirs had been celebrated among the women who loved to immerse their nudity in this bath of warm carnation, made fragrant with the odour of mint emanating from the exotic wood of the furniture. Aside from the sensual delights for which he had designed this chamber, this painted atmosphere which gave new colour to faces grown dull and withered by the use of seruse and by nights of

Starting point is 00:24:28 dissipation, there were other more personal and perverse pleasures which he enjoyed in these languorous surroundings, pleasures which in some way stimulated memories of his past pains, and dead ennuis. As a souvenir of the hated days of his childhood, he had suspended from the ceiling, a small silver-wired cage, where a captive cricket sang as if in the ashes of the chimneys of the Chateau de Lour. Listening to the sound he had so often heard before, he lived over again the silent evening spent near his mother, the wretchedness of his suffering repressed youth. And then, while he yielded to the voluptuousness of the voluptuousness of the woman he mechanically caressed, whose words or laughter tore him from his reverie, and rudely

Starting point is 00:25:32 recalled him to the moment, to the boudoir, to reality. A tumult arose in his soul, a need of avenging the sad years he had endured, a mad wish to sully the recollections of his family by shameful action. A furious desire to. to pant on cushions of flesh, to drain to their last dregs the most violent of carnal vices. On rainy autumnal days when melancholy oppressed him, when a hatred of his home, the muddy yellow skies, the macadam clouds assailed him, he took refuge in this retreat, set the cage lightly in motion, and watched it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage no longer stirred, but that the boudoir reeled and turned,

Starting point is 00:26:40 filling the house with a rose-coloured waltz. In the days when he had deemed it necessary to affect singularity, Des Iscent had designed mind. marvellously strange furnishings, dividing his salon into a series of alcoves hung with varied tapestries to relate by a subtle analogy, by a vague harmony of joyous or sombre, delicate or barbaric colours to the character of the Latin or French books he loved. And he would seclude himself in turn, in the particular recess whose decor seemed best to correspond with the very essence of the work his caprice of the moment induced him to read. He had constructed, too, a lofty, high room intended for the reception of his tradesmen. Here they were ushered in, and seated

Starting point is 00:27:44 alongside each other in church pews, while from a pulpit he preached. He prospersed, he preached to them a sermon on dandyism, adjuring his boot-makers and tailors implicitly to obey his briefs, in the matters of style, threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they failed to follow to the letter the instructions contained in his monetaries and bulls. He acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced. by wearing costumes of white velvet and gold-embroidered waistcoats, by inserting in place of a cravat a palmer bouquet in the opening of his shirt, by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, a revival of the 18th century, celebrating the most futile of his misadventures, was a funeral repast. In the dining-room,

Starting point is 00:28:50 hung in black and opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool, now bordered with basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines. The dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets and scabuses, lit by candelabra, from which green flames blaze. and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared. To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude negresses wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with patterns of tears served the guests. Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, and ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfurt black pudding, game with sauces that were the colour of licorice and blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries. They had sipped out of dark glasses, wines from

Starting point is 00:30:17 L'Imani, Rousillon, Tenedos, Val de Penoos, and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of Kvass and porter and stout. The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility. This was what he had written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices. But he was done with those extravagances in which he had once gloried. Today he was filled with a contempt for those juvenile displays, the singular apparel, the appointments of his bizarre chambers. He contented himself with planning for his own pleasure,

Starting point is 00:31:07 and no longer for the astonishment of others, an interior that should be comfortable, although embellished in a rare style, with building a curious, calm retreat to serve the needs of his future solitude. When the Fontenay house was in readiness, fitted up by an architect according to his plans, when all that remained was to determine the colour scheme, he again devoted himself to long speculations. He desired colours whose expressiveness would be displayed in the artificial light of lamps. To him it mattered not at all if they were lifeless or crude in daylight,

Starting point is 00:31:55 for it was at night that he lived, feeling more completely alone then, feeling that only under the protective covering of darkness did the mind grow really animated and active. He also experienced a peculiar pleasure in being in a richly illuminated room, the only patch of light amid the shadow-haunted sleeping houses. This was a form of enjoyment, in which perhaps entered an element of vanity. That peculiar pleasure known to late workers, when drawing aside the window-curtains, they perceive that everything about them is extinguished, silent, dead. Slowly, one by one he selected the colours. Blue inclines to a false green by candlelight. If it is dark, like cobalt or indigo, it turns black. If it is bright, it turns grey. If it is soft like turquoise, it grows feeble and faded. There could be no question of making it the dominant note of a room unless it were blended

Starting point is 00:33:18 with some other colour. Iron grey always frowns and is heavy. Pearl grey loses its blue, and changes to a muddy white. Brown is lifeless and cold. As for deep green, such as as Emperor or Myrtle, it has the same property. as blue and merges into black. There remained then the paler greens, such as peacock, Cinebar or lacquer. But the light banishes their blues, and brings out their yellows, in tones that have a false and undecided quality. No need to waste thought on the salmon, the maize and rose colours, whose feminine associations oppose all ideas of isolation. No need to consider the violet, which is completely neutralised at night.

Starting point is 00:34:21 Only the red in it holds its ground, and what a red! A viscous red like the leaves of wine. Besides, it seemed useless to employ this colour, for by using it, Using a certain amount of santanin, he could get an effect of violet on his hangings. These colours disposed of, only three remained. Red, orange, yellow. Of these he preferred orange, thus by his own example, confirming the truth of a theory which he declared had almost mathematical correctness.

Starting point is 00:35:03 the theory that a harmony exists between the sensual nature of a truly artistic individual, and the colour which most vividly impresses him. Disregarding entirely the generality of men whose gross retinas are capable of perceiving, neither the cadence peculiar to each colour, nor the mysterious charm of their nuances of light and shade, ignoring the bourgeoisie whose eyes are insensible to the pomp and splendour of strong, vibrant tones, and devoting himself only to people with sensitive pupils, refined by literature and art, he was convinced that the eyes of those among them who dream of the ideal and demand illusions are generally caressed by blue and its derivatives,

Starting point is 00:36:03 Move, lilac, and pearl grey, provided always that these colours remain soft, and do not overstep the bounds, where they lose their personalities by being transformed into pure violets and frank greyes. Those persons, on the contrary, who are energetic and incisive, the plethoric red-blooded strong males, who fling themselves unthinkingly into the affair of the moment,

Starting point is 00:36:36 generally delight in the bold gleams of yellows and reds, the clashing symbols of vermilions and cromes that blind and intoxicate them. But the eyes of enfeebled and nervous persons whose sensual appetites crave highly seasoned foods, the eyes of hectic and over-excited creatures have a predilection towards that irritating and morbid colour, with its fictitious splendours, its acid fevers, orange. Thus there could be no question about Daisy Sand's choice, but unquestionable difficulties still arose. If red and yellow are heightened by light, the same does not always hold true of their compound orange, which often seems to ignite, and turns to nasturtium, to a flaming

Starting point is 00:37:39 red. He studied all their nuances by candlelight, discovering a shade which, which it seemed to him would not lose its dominant tone, but would stand every test required of it. These preliminaries completed, he sought to refrain from using, for his study at least, oriental stuffs and rugs which have become cheapened and ordinary, now that rich merchants can easily pick them up at auctions and shops. He finally decided to bind him. his walls, like books, with coarse-grained Morocco, with cape skin, polished by strong steel plates under a powerful press. When the wainscoting was finished, he had the moulding and high plinths painted in indigo, a lacquered indigo, like that which coach-makers

Starting point is 00:38:41 employ for carriage panels. The ceiling, slightly rounded, was also lanked. lined with Morocco. In the centre was a wide opening, resembling an immense bull's eye encased in orange skin. A circle of the firmament worked out on a background of king blue silk, on which were woven silver seraphim with outstretched wings. This material had long before been embroidered by the Cologne Guild of Weavers for an old cope. The setting was complete. At night the room subsided into a restful, soothing harmony. The wainscoting preserved its blue, which seemed sustained and warmed by the orange, and the orange remained pure, strengthened and fanned as it was,

Starting point is 00:39:43 by the insistent breath of the blues. Des esaint was not deeply concerned about the furniture itself. The only luxuries in the room were books and rare flowers. He limited himself to these things, intending later on to hang a few drawings or paintings on the panels which remained bare, to place shelves and book racks of ebony around the walls, to spread the pelts of wild beasts and the skins of blue fox on the floor,

Starting point is 00:40:21 to install near a massive 15th century counting table, deep-arm chairs, and an old chapel chapel reading-desk of forged iron, one of those old lecterns, on which the deacon formerly placed the antiphonary, and which now supported one of the heavy folios of Ducanges, glossarium media et infimai Latinitatis. The windows, whose blue-fishered panes, stippled with fragments of gold-edged bottles, intercepted the view of the country, and only permitted a faint light to enter, were draped with curtains cut from old stoles of dark and reddish gold, neutralised by an almost dead russet woven in the pattern. The mantle shelf was sumptuously draped with the remnant of a Florentine Dalmatica, between two gilded copper monstrencies of Byzantine style,

Starting point is 00:41:30 originally brought from the old Abbe au Bois de Bévre, stood a marvellous church canon, divided into three separate compartments, delicately wrought like lacework. It contained, under its glass frame, three works of Baudelaire, copied on real vellum, with wonderful missile letters and splendid colouring. To the right and left, the sonnets bearing the titles of La Mour des Amens and L'Enemis. In the centre, the prose poem entitled Anywhere Out of the World. N'Ampartu O'U Ord Dumonde. End of Chapter 2

Starting point is 00:42:22 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weissmance. translated by John Howard Chapter 3 After selling his effects Desecesein't retained the two old domestics who had tended his mother and filled the offices of steward and house porter at the Chateau de Lourre,

Starting point is 00:42:50 which had remained deserted and uninhabited until its disposal. These servants he brought to Fontaine They were accustomed to the regular life of hospital attendants, hourly serving the patients their stipulated food and drink, to the rigid silence of cloistral monks who live behind barred doors and windows, having no communication with the outside world. The man was assigned the task of keeping the house in order, and of procuring provisions. the woman that of preparing the food. He surrendered the second story to them, forced them to wear heavy felt coverings over their shoes,

Starting point is 00:43:40 put sound mufflers along the well-oiled doors, and covered their floor with heavy rugs, so that he would never hear their footsteps overhead. He devised an elaborate signal-code of bells, whereby his wants were made known. He pointed out the exact spot on his bureau where they were to place the account book each month while he slept.

Starting point is 00:44:06 In short, matters were arranged, in such wise that he would not be obliged to see or to converse with them very often. Nevertheless, since the woman had occasion to walk past the house so as to reach the woodshed, He wished to make sure that her shadow, as she passed his windows, would not offend him. He had designed for her a costume of Flemish silk, with a white bonnet and large black lowered hood, such as is still worn by the nuns of Ghent.

Starting point is 00:44:46 The shadow of this headdress in the twilight gave him the sensation of being in a cloister, back memories of silent, holy villages, dead quarters enclosed and buried in some quiet corner of a bustling town. The hours of eating were also regulated. His instructions in this regard were short and explicit, for the weakened state of his stomach no longer permitted him to absorb heavy or varied foods. In winter, at five o'clock in the afternoon, when the day was drawing to a close, he breakfasted on two boiled eggs, toast and tea.

Starting point is 00:45:33 At eleven o'clock he dined. During the night he drank coffee, and sometimes tea and wine, and at five o'clock in the morning, before retiring, he supped again lightly. His meals, which were planned and ordered once for all at the beginning of each season, was served him on a table in the middle of a small rum, separated from his study by a padded corridor, hermetically sealed, so as to permit neither sound nor odour to filter into either of the two rooms it joined. With its vaulted ceiling fitted with beams in a half-circle, its bulk-hirted

Starting point is 00:46:19 heads and floors of pine, and the little window in the wainscotting that looked like a porthole, the dining-room resembled the cabin of a ship. Like those Japanese boxes which fit into each other, this room was inserted into a larger apartment, the real dining-room constructed by the architect. It was pierced by two windows. One of them was invisible, hidden by a partition, which could, however, be lowered by a spring so as to permit fresh air to circulate around this pine-wood box, and to penetrate into it. The other was visible, placed directly opposite the porthole built in the wainscoting, but it was blocked up, for a long aquarium occupied the entire space between the porthole and the genuine window placed in the outer wall.

Starting point is 00:47:19 Thus the light, in order to brighten the room, traversed the window, whose panes had been replaced by a plate-glass, the water, and lastly the window of the porthole. In autumn at sunset, when the steam rose from the samovar on the table, the water of the aquarium, one and glassy all during the morning, reddened like blazing gleams of embers, and lapped restlessly against the light-coloured wood. Sometimes, when it chanced that Desicante was awake in the afternoon, he operated the stops of the pipes and conduits which emptied the aquarium, replacing it with pure water.

Starting point is 00:48:09 Into this he poured drops of coloured liquids that made it green or brackish, opaline or silvery, tones similar to it. those of rivers which reflect the colour of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the menace of rain, which reflect, in a word, the state of the season and atmosphere. When he did this, he imagined himself on a brig, between decks, and curiously he contemplated the marvellous mechanical fish, wound like clocks, which passed before the porthole, or clung to the artificial seaweed. While he inhaled the odour of tar

Starting point is 00:48:55 introduced into the room shortly before his arrival, he examined coloured engravings, hung on the walls, which represented, just as at Lloyd's office and the steamship agencies, steamers bound for Valparaiso and La Platt, and looked at framed pictures

Starting point is 00:49:15 on which were inscribed the itineraries of the room. royal mail steam packet, the Lopeth and the Valerie companies, the freight and port calls of the Atlantic mailboats. If he tired of consulting these guides, he could rest his eyes by gazing at the chronometers and sea compasses, the sextants, field-glasses, and cards strewn on a table, on which stood a single volume bound in sealskin. The book was, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pim, specially printed for him on laid paper, each sheet carefully selected with a seagull watermark. Or he could look at fishing rods, tan-coloured nets, rolls

Starting point is 00:50:07 of russet sail, a tiny black-painted cork anchor, all thrown in a heap near the door communicating with the kitchen, by a passage furnished with Capadine silk, which reabsorbed, just as in the corridor which connected the dining room with his study, every odour and sound. Thus, without stirring, he enjoyed the rapid motions of a long sea voyage, the pleasure of travel, which only exists, as a matter of fact, in retrospect and seldom in the present. at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin whose studied disorder, whose transitory appearance, and whose seemingly temporary furnishings corresponded so well with the briefness of the time he spent there on his meals, and contrasted so perfectly with his study. a well-arranged, well-furnished room where everything betokened a retired, orderly existence. Movement, after all, seemed futile to him.

Starting point is 00:51:29 He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes. Every epicure nowadays enjoys, in restaurants celebrated for the excellence of their cellars, wines of capital taste, manufactured from inferior brands treated by Pasteur's method. For they have the same aroma, the same colour, the same bouquet, as the rare wines of which they are an imitation. and consequently the pleasure experienced in sipping them is identical. The originals, moreover, are usually unprocurable for love or money.

Starting point is 00:52:27 Transposing this insidious deviation, this adroit deceit into the realm of the intellect, there was not the shadow of a doubt that fanciful delights resembling the true in every detail could be enjoyed. One could revel, for instance, in long explorations while near one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, if need be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distant lands. One could enjoy the beneficent results of a sea-bath, too, even in Paris. All that is necessary is to visit the Vichy Bath

Starting point is 00:53:14 situated in a boat on the seine, far from the shore. There the illusion of the sea is undeniable, imperious, positive. It is achieved by salting the water of the bath, by mixing, according to the codex formula, sulphate of soda, hydrochlorate of magnesia and lime. By extracting from a box, carefully closed by means of a screw, a ball of thread, or a very small piece of cable, which had been specially procured from one of those

Starting point is 00:53:50 great rope-making establishments, whose vast warehouses and basements are heavy with odours of the sea and the port. By inhaling these perfumes held by the ball or the cable end, by consulting an exact photograph of the casino, by eagerly reading the Joanne guide, describing the beauties of the seashore where one would wish to be, by being rocked on the waves, made by the eddy of flyboats lapping against the pontoon of baths, by listening to the plaint of the wind under the arches, or to the hollow murmur of the omnibuses passing above on the Purg Royale, two steps away. The secret lies in knowing how to present. seed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination, and succeed in substituting

Starting point is 00:54:51 the dream reality for the reality itself. Artifice, besides, seemed to desicente the final distinctive mark of man's genius. Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of estates. Really, what dullness! The dullness of the specialist confined to his narrow work! What manners?

Starting point is 00:55:31 The manners of the tradesmen offering one particular wear to the exclusion of all others! What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas! There is not one of her inventions, no matter how subtle or imposing it may be, which human genius cannot create. No Fontainebleau forest, no moonlight which a scenic setting flooded with electricity cannot produce. No waterfall which hydraulics cannot imitate to perfection. No rock which pasteboard cannot be made to resemble.

Starting point is 00:56:17 No flower which taffiters and delicately painted papers cannot simulate. There can be no doubt about it. This eternal, driveling old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace. place her by artifice. Closely observe that work of hers which is considered the most exquisite, that creation of hers whose beauty is everywhere conceded the most perfect and original. Woman! Has not man made for his own use, an animated and artificial being which easily equals

Starting point is 00:57:05 woman, from the point of view of plastic beauty. Is there a woman whose form is more dazzling, more splendid, than the two locomotives that pass over the northern railroad lines? One, the Crampton, is an adorable, shrill-voiced blonde, a trim, gilded blonde, with a large, fragile body imprisoned in a glittering corset of copper, and having the long sinewy lines of a cat. Her extraordinary grace is frightening, as with the sweat of her hot sides rising upwards and her steel muscles stiffening, she puts in motion the immense rose window of her fine wheels and darts forward, metalsome among rapids and floods.

Starting point is 00:58:05 The other, the Engert, is a nobly proportioned dusky brunette, emitting raucous muffled cries. Her heavy loins are strangled in a cast-iron breastplate. A monstrous beast with a dishevelled mane of black smoke and with six low coupled wheels. What irresistible power she has when causing the earth to tremble, she slowly and heavily drags the unwieldy cue of her merchandise. Unquestionably, there is not one among the frail blondes and majestic brunettes of the flesh

Starting point is 00:58:54 that can vie with their delicate grace and terrific strength. Such were Desecese Sainte's reflections when the breeze brought him the faint whistle of the toy railroad, winding playfully like a spinning top between Paris and so. His house was situated at a twenty minutes walk from the Fontenay station, But the height on which it was perched, its isolation, made it immune to the clatter of the noisy rabble, which the vicinity of a railway station invariably attracts on a Sunday. As for the village itself, he hardly knew it.

Starting point is 00:59:41 One night he had gazed through his window at the silent landscape, which slowly unfolded, as it dipped to the foot of a slope, on whose summit the batteries of the Verrier Woods were trained. In the darkness, to left and right, these masses, dim and confused, rose tear-on-tier, dominated far off by other batteries and forts, whose high embankments seemed in the moonlight bathed in silver against the sombre sky. Where the plain did not fall under the shadow of the hills, it seemed powdered with starch and smeared with white cold cream. In the warm air that fanned the faded grasses

Starting point is 01:00:33 and exhaled a spicy perfume, the trees, chalky white under the moon, shook their pale leaves and seemed to divide their trunks, whose shadows formed bars of black on the plaster-like ground, where pebbles scintillated like glittering plates. Because of its enameled look and its artificial air, the landscape did not displeased desicente. But since that afternoon spent at Fontaineux, in search of a house,

Starting point is 01:01:11 he had never ventured along its roads in daylight. The verdure of this region inspired him with no interest whatever, for it did not have the delicate and doleful charm of the sickly and pathetic vegetation, which forces its way painfully through the rubbish heaps of the mounds, which had once served as the ramparts of Paris. That day, in the village, He had perceived corpulent, bewiskered bourgeois citizens, and mustached, uniformed men,

Starting point is 01:01:49 with heads of magistrates and soldiers, which they held as stiffly as monstresses in churches. And ever since that encounter, his detestation of the human face had been augmented. During the last month of his stay in Paris, when he was weary of everything, afflicted with hypochondria, the prey of melancholia, when his nerves had become so sensitive that the sight of an unpleasant object or person impressed itself deeply on his brain, so deeply that several days were required before the impression could be effaced. The touch of a human body brushing against him in the street had been an excruciating agony. The very sight of certain faces made him suffer. He considered the crabbed expressions of some insulting. He felt a desire to slap the fellow who

Starting point is 01:03:01 walked, eyes closed, with such a learned air, the one who minced along, smiling at his image in the window panes, and the one who seemed stimulated by a whole world of thought, while devouring with contracted brow the tedious contents of a newspaper. Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics, that base distraction of mediocrities, that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books. He hated the new generation with all the energy in him.

Starting point is 01:04:10 They were frightful clodhoppers, who seemed to find it necessary to talk and laugh boisterously in restaurants and cafes. They jostled you on sidewalks without begging paupers. Pardon. They pushed the wheels of their perambulators against your legs, without even apologising. End of Chapter 3 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Wismans. Translated by John Howard. Chapter 4 A portion of the shelves which lined the walls of his orange and blue study was devoted to

Starting point is 01:04:59 exclusively to those Latin works, assigned to the generic period of the decadence, by those whose minds have absorbed the deplorable teachings of the Sorbonne. The Latin written in that era which professors still persist in calling the great age, hardly stimulated desicente, with its carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax, its poverty of colour and nuance. This language, pruned of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces, tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets.

Starting point is 01:05:56 But it betrayed such a lack of curiosity. and such a hum-drum-tidiousness, such a drabness, feebleness, and jaded solemnity, that to find its equal it was necessary in linguistic studies to go to the French style of the period of Louis-Catar's. The gentle Virgil, whom instructors call the Mantuan Swan, perhaps because he was not born in that city, He considered one of the most terrible pedants ever produced by antiquity. Dysicant was exasperated by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheus, whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristheus who simpers about bees,

Starting point is 01:06:51 his Ineas, that weak-willed, irresolute person, who walks with wooden gestures through the length of the poem. Dezis Saint would gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which those marionettes exchange with each other off stage, or even the poet's impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius, and Lucretius. The plain theft revealed to us by Macrobius of the second song of the Inead copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems. In fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses.

Starting point is 01:07:35 The thing he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans, and extending their syllabic quantities, measured according to the unchanging rule of a pedantic, dantic and dull prosody. He disliked the texture of those stiff verses in their official garb, their abject reverence

Starting point is 01:08:05 for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbable caesura's, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of a dactyl against a spondy. Borrowed from the perfected forge of Catullus, this unvarying versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assenances, this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet, which designates nothing whatever, and permits nothing to be seen, All this impoverished vocabulary of muffled lifeless tones bored him beyond measure. It is no more than just to add that if his admiration for Virgil was quite restrained, and his attraction for Ovid's lucid outpourings even more circumspect,

Starting point is 01:09:12 there was no limit to his disgust at the elephantine graces of fervous. Horace, at the prattle of this hopeless lout, who smirkingly utters the broad, crude jests of an old clown. Neither was he pleased in prose with the verbosities, the redundant metaphors, the ludicrous digressions of Cicero. There was nothing to beguile him in the boasting of his apostrophies, in the flow of his patriotic nonsense, in the emphasis of his harangues, in the ponderousness of his style, fleshy but ropy, and lacking in marrow and bone, in the insupportable dross of his long adverbs,

Starting point is 01:10:05 with which he introduces phrases, in the unalterable formula of his adipose periods, badly sewed together with the thread of conjunctions, and finally in his wearisome habits of tortology. Nor was his enthusiasm awakened for Caesar, celebrated for his laconic style. Here, on the contrary, was disclosed a surprising aridity, a sterility of recollection, an incredibly undue constipation. He found pasture neither among them, nor among those writers who are peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate. Salus, who is less colourless than the others, sentimental and pompous Titus Livius, turgid and lurid Seneca, watery and larval swetonius, Tacitus, who in his studied conciseness is the keenest, most

Starting point is 01:11:12 wiery and muscular of them all. In poetry he was untouched by juvenile, despite some rough-shod verses, and by Perseus, despite his mysterious insinuations. In neglecting Tibulus and propersius, Quintilian and the Plinneys, Statius, martial, even Terence and Plautus, whose jargon full of neologisms, compound words and diminutives, could please him, but whose low comedy and gross humour he loathed. Desis Saint only began to be interested in the Latin language with Lucan. Here it was liberated, already more expressive and less dull. This careful armour, these verses plaited.

Starting point is 01:12:09 with enamel and studied with jewels captivated him. But the exclusive preoccupation with form, the sonorities of tone, the clangor of metals, did not entirely conceal from him the emptiness of the thought, the turgidity of those blisters which embossed the skin of the farsalia. Petronius was the author whom he truly loved, and who caused him forever to abandon the sonorous ingenuities of Lucan, for he was a keen observer, a delicate analyst, a marvellous painter. Tranqually, without prejudice or hate, he described Rome's daily life, recounting the customs of his epoch in the sprightly little chapters of the satiricon. Observing the facts of life, stating them in clear, definite form, he revealed the petty existence of the people,

Starting point is 01:13:18 their happenings, their bestialities, their passions. One glimpses the inspector of furnished lodgings, who has inquired after the newly arrived travellers. Bordy houses, where, where men prowl around nude women, while through the half-open doors of the rooms, couples can be seen in dalliance. The society of the time, in villas of an insolent luxury, a revel of richness and magnificence, or in the poor quarters with their rumpled, bug-written folding-beds. impure sharpers, like Asculte and Eumolpe in search of a rich windfall. Old incubi with tucked up dresses and plastered cheeks of white lead and red acacia.

Starting point is 01:14:15 Plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen. Women who are the prey of hysterical attacks. Hunters of heritages offering their sons. and daughters to debauched testators. All pass across the pages. They debate in the streets, rub elbows in the baths, beat each other unmercifully as in a pantomime. And all this recounted in a style of strange freshness and precise colour, drawing from all dialects, borrowing expressions from all the languages that were drifting into Rome, extending all the limits, removing all the handicaps of the so-called great age. He made each person speak his own idiom, the uneducated

Starting point is 01:15:11 freedmen, the vulgar Latin Argo of the streets, the strangers their barbarous patwa, the corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek. imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims and inept proverbs. This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without any preoccupation, whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire, without the need of any studied end or of morality. This story without intrigue or action, portraying the adventures of evil persons, analysing with a

Starting point is 01:16:12 calm finesse the joys and sorrows of these lovers and couples, depicting life in a splendidly wrought language, without surrendering himself to any commentary, without approving or cursing the acts and thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decrepit civilisation, of an empire that cracks, struck des esant. In the keenness of the observation, in the firmness of the method, he found singular comparisons, curious analogies with the few modern French novels he could endure. Certainly, he bitterly regretted the Eustion and the Albuttiai, those two works by Petronius mentioned by Plankiades Fulgentius, which are forever lost. But the bibliophile in him

Starting point is 01:17:10 consoled the student, when he touched with worshipful hands, the superiors. perdition of the satiricon which he possessed, the Octavo bearing the date 1585, and the name of J. Dauza of Leiden. Leaving Petronius, his Latin collection entered into the second century of the Christian era, passed over Fronto, the declaimer, with his antiquated terms, skipped the attic knights of Aulus Gellius, his disciple and friend. A clever, ferreting mind, but a writer entangled in a glutinous vase, and halted at Apuleus, of whose works he owned the first edition printed at Rome in 1469. This African delighted him.

Starting point is 01:18:08 The Latin language was at its richest in the metamorphosis. It contained ooze and rubbish-strewn water rushing from all the provinces, and the refuse mingled and was confused in a bizarre, exotic, almost new colour. Mannerisms, new details of Latin society, found themselves shaped into neologisms, specially created for the needs of conversation, in a Roman corner of Africa. He was amused by the southern exuberance and joviality of a doubtlessly corpulent man. He seemed a salacious gay crony compared with the Christian apologists who lived in the same century, the soporific minucius felix, a pseudo-classicist, pouring forth the still-thick emulsions of Cicero into his Octavius.

Starting point is 01:19:12 Nay, even Tertullian, whom he perhaps preserved for his Aldian edition more than for the work itself. Although he was sufficiently versed in theology, the disputes of the Montanists against the Catholic Church, the polemics against the Gnostics left him cold. Despite Tertullian's curious, concise style full of ambiguous terms, resting on participle, clashing with oppositions, bristling with puns and witticisms, dappled with vocables culled from the juridical science and the language of the fathers of the Greek church. He now hardly ever opened the Apologetica and the treatise on Patience. At the most he read several pages of the De Culta Feminarum,

Starting point is 01:20:07 where Tertullian counsels women not to bedek themselves with jewels. and precious stuffs, forbidding them the use of cosmetics, because these attempt to correct and improve nature. These ideas, diametrically opposed to his own, made him smile. Then the role played by Tertullian in his Carthage bishopric seemed to him suggestive in pleasant reveries. More even than his works did the man attract him. He had, in fact, lived in stormy times, agitated by frightful disorders, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing high priest of Emesa, Ella Gabulus, and he tranquilly prepared his sermons, his dogmatic writings, his pleadings, his homilies, while the Roman Empire shook on its foundations, while the follies of Asia, while the

Starting point is 01:21:11 ordias of paganism were full to the brim. With the utmost Saint-Fois, he recommended carnal abstinence, frugality in food, sobriety and dress, while walking in silver, powder, and golden sand, a tiara on his head, his garb figured with precious stones, Ella Gabalos worked amid his eunuchs at womanish labour, calling himself the empress, and changing every night his emperor, whom he preferably chose among barbers, scullions and circus drivers. This antithesis delighted him. Then the Latin language arrived at its supreme maturity under Petronius, commenced to decay. The Christian literature replaced it, bringing new words with new ideas, unemployed constructions, strange verbs, adjectives with subtle meanings, abstract words until then rare in the Roman language,

Starting point is 01:22:25 and whose usage Tertullian had been one of the first to adopt. But there was no attraction in this dissolution, continued after Tertullian's death by his pupil, St. Cyprian, by Arnobius and by Lactantius. There was something lacking. It made clumsy returns to Ciceronian magniloquence, but had not yet acquired that special flavour, which in the fourth century, and particularly during the centuries following, the odour of Christianity

Starting point is 01:23:00 would give the pagan tongue, decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that old world civilisation collapsed, and the empires, putrified by the sanniers of the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of the barbarians. Only one Christian poet, Commodianus, represented the third century in his library. The Carmen Apologeticum, written in 259, is a collection of instructions, twisted into acrostics in popular hexameters, with caesura's introduced according to the heroic verse style, composed without regard to quantity or hiatus, and often accompanied by such rhymes as the church Latin would later supply in such abundance. These sombre, tortuous, gamey verses, crammed with terms of ordinary speech,

Starting point is 01:24:08 with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed and interested him even more than the soft and already green style of the historians, Amianus Marcellinus. and Aurelius Victorus, Simachus, the letter-writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler. Them he even preferred to the genuinely scanned lines, the spotted and superb language of Claudian, Rutilius and Alsonius. They were then the masters of art. They filled the dying empire with their cries.

Starting point is 01:24:51 the Christian aosoneus with his kento nuptialis and his exuberant embellished Mosella. Rutilius with his hymns to the glory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks, his journey from Italy into Gaul and the impressions recorded along the way, the intervals of landscape reflected in the water, the mirage of vapours, and the movement of mists that enveloped the mountains. Claudian, a sort of avatar of Lucan, dominates the fourth century with the terrible clarion of his verses,

Starting point is 01:25:33 a poet forging a loud and sonorous hexameter, striking the epithet with a sharp blow amid sheaves of sparks, achieving a certain grandeur which fills his work with a powerful breath. In the Occidental Empire, tottering more and more in the perpetual menace of the barbarians, now pressing in hordes at the Empire's yielding gates, He revives antiquity, sings of the abduction of proserpine, lays on his vibrant colours,

Starting point is 01:26:12 and passes with all his torches alight into the obscurity that was then engulfing, his world. Paganism again lives in his verse, sounding its last fanfare, lifting its last great poet above the Christianity, which was soon entirely to submerge the language, and which would forever be sole master of art. The new Christian spirit arose with Paulinus, disciple of Fausonianus, Euvencus, who paraphrases the Gospels in verse, Victorinus, author of the Maccabees, Sanctus Borgigalensis, who in an eclog, imitated from Virgil, makes his shepherds, Egon and Buculus, lament the maladies of their flock,

Starting point is 01:27:09 and all the saints, Iler of Poitier, defender of the Nicene faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has been called. Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homilies, the wearisome Christian Cicero. Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams, Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary, Wigilantius, who attacks the cult of saints, and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already preaches with arguments which future ages were to repeat against the monastic vows and celibacy of the priests. Finally, in the fifth century came Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Dizisand knew him only too well, for he was the church's most reputed writer, founder of Christian orthodoxy,

Starting point is 01:28:11 considered an oracle and sovereign master by Catholics. He no longer opened the pages of this holy man's works, although he had sung his disgust of the earth in the confessions, and although his lamenting piety had essayed in the city of God to mitigate the frightful distress of the times by sedative promises of a rosier future. When Desis Saint had studied theology, he was already sick and weary of the old monk's preachings and Jeremiahads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combats against the schisms. He preferred to sum the Psychomachia of Prudentius, that first type of allegorical poem, which was later in the Middle Ages,

Starting point is 01:29:09 to be used continually, and the works of Sidonios Apollinaris, whose correspondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungences, archaisms, and enigmas allured him. He willingly re-read the panegyrix in which this bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of his vanglorious eulogies, and in spite of everything he confessed a weakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were, by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheels, and invents intricate and useless parts. After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the Panegyrist, Sedulius, author of the rhymed poems and Abyscederian hymns, certain passages of which the Church has appropriated for its services.

Starting point is 01:30:12 Marius Victorious, whose gloomy treatise on the perversity of the times, is illumined here and there with verses that gleam with phosphorescence. Paulinus of Pella, poet of the shivering Eucharisticon, and Orientius Bishop of Osh, who in the of his monasteries invades against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people. The interest which Desecese-Saint felt for the Latin language did not pause at this period, which found it drooping, thoroughly putrid, losing its members and dropping its pus, and barely preserving through all the corruption of its body, those still firm elements which the Christians detached to marinate in the brine of their new language.

Starting point is 01:31:14 The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the horrible epoch, when frightful motions convulsed the earth. The barbarians sacked Gaul, paralyzed Rome, pillaged by the Visigoths, felt its life grow feeble, perceived its extremities the Occident and the Orient writhe in blood, and grow more exhausted from day to day. In this general dissolution, in the successive assassination of the Caesars, in the turmoil of carnage from one end of Europe to another, there resounded a terrible shout of triumph, stifling all clamors, silencing all voices. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men astride on small horses, clad in rat-skin coats, monstrous tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, chins gullied with scars and gashes, and jaundiced faces

Starting point is 01:32:23 bare of hair, rushed at full speed to envelop the territories of the lower empire, like a whirlwind. Everything disappeared in the dust of their gallopings, in the smoke of the conflagrations. Darkness fell, and the amazed people trembled as they heard the fearful tornado which passed with thunder crashes. The hordes of Huns raised Europe. rushed towards Gaul, overran the plains of Chalon, where Aiteus pillaged it in an awful charge. The plains gorged with blood, foamed like a purple sea. Two hundred thousand corpses barred the way, broke the movement of this avalanche, which, swerving, fell with mighty thunder-claps against Italy, whose extent,

Starting point is 01:33:23 exterminated towns flamed like burning bricks. The Occidental Empire crumbled beneath the shock. The moribund life which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness was extinguished. For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near. Such cities as had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague. The Latin language in its turn seemed to sink under the world's ruins. Years hastened on. The barbarian idioms began to be modulated, to leave their vein stones and form real languages.

Starting point is 01:34:13 Latin, saved in the debacle by the cloisters, was confined in its usage to the convents and monasteries. Here and there some poets gleamed dullly and coldly, the African Dracontius with his Hexamaron, Claudius Memertius with his liturgical poetry, avitus of Vienne, then the biographers like Enodius, who narrates the prodigies of that perspicacious and venerated diplomat, Saint Epiphanius, the upright and vigilant pastor. Or like Eugippus, who tells of the life of Saint Severin, that mysterious hermit and humble ascetic, who appeared like an angel of grace to the distressed people,

Starting point is 01:35:04 mad with suffering and fear. Writers like Ferranius of Jevodon, who prepared a little treatise on continents, like Oralianus and Pereolus, who compiled the ecclesiastical canons, historians like Rosarius, famous for a lost history of the Huns. Dezésant's library did not contain many works

Starting point is 01:35:32 of the centuries immediately succeeding. Notwithstanding this deficiency, the sixth century was represented by Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitier, whose hymns and Wexil la Regis carved out of the old carrion of the Latin language, and spiced with the aromatics of the church, haunted him on certain days, by Boethius, Gregory of Tours, and Hernandez. In the 7th and 8th centuries, since, in addition to the low Latin of the chroniclers, the Fredegers and Paul Diaxe, and the poems contained in the Bangor Antiphonary, which he sometimes read for the alphabetical and monor rhymed hymn sung in honour of St. Comgill,

Starting point is 01:36:24 the literature limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints, to the legend of St. Columban, written by the monk Jonas, and to that of the Blessed Cuspert, written by the venerable bead from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarne. He contented himself with glancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of these hagiographers, and in again reading several extracts from the lives of St. Rusticula and St. Radigondi, related one by Defensorius, the other by the modest and ingenious Baudonia, a nun of Poitiers. But the singular works of Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature allured him still further. They included the whole series of riddles by Adhelm, Tatween and Eusebius, who were descendants of Symphosius.

Starting point is 01:37:30 and especially the enigmas composed by st boniface in acrostic strophes whose solution could be found in the initial letters of the verses his interest diminished with the end of those two centuries hardly pleased with the cumbersome mass of carlovingian latinists the alquins and the agin hearts he contented himself as a specimen of the language of the 9th century, with the chronicles of St. Gall, Freculfius and Regino, with the poem of the siege of Paris written by Abel Le Corp, with the didactic orthulus of the Benedictine Valafrit Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd as a symbol of fruitfulness enlivened him, with the poem in which Hermolt the dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Devonair, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding style, and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of sentiment

Starting point is 01:38:46 here and there in the unpliant metal. With the De Wiribus Erbarum, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him because of his poetic recipes, and the very strange virtues which he ascribes to certain plants and flowers. To the Aristolochia, for example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow, and placed on the lower part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, ensures the birth of a male child. Or to the borage, which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining-room, diverts guests. or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy or to the fennel which if placed on a woman's breasts clears her water and stimulates the indolence of her periods apart from several special unclassified volumes modern or dateless certain works on the cabala medicine and botany certain odd tomes contain

Starting point is 01:39:57 undiscoverable Christian poetry and the anthology of the minor Latin poets of Wernsdorf, apart from Meusius, the manual of classical erotology of Forberg, and the diaconals used by confessors, which he dusted at rare intervals, his Latin library ended at the beginning of the 10th century. And in fact, the curiosity the complicated naivete of the Christian language had also founded. The balderdash of philosophers and scholars, the logomarchy of the Middle Ages, thenceforth held absolute sway.

Starting point is 01:40:45 The sutty mass of chronicles and historical books and cartilaries accumulated, and the stammering grace, the often exonerous, exquisite awkwardness of the monks, placing the poetic remains of antiquity in a ragoul, were dead. The fabrications of verbs and purified essences, of substantives breathing of incense, of bizarre adjectives, coarsely carved from gold, with the barbarous and charming taste of Gothic jewels, were destroyed. The old editions, beloved by Des Ecese Sainte, here ended. And with a formidable leap of centuries,

Starting point is 01:41:37 the books on his shelves went straight to the French language of the present century. End of Chapter 4. Against the Grain by Joris Karl Leismontz, translated by John Howard. Chapter 5 The afternoon was drawing to its close when a carriage halted in front of the Fontaineau-house. Since Dese-Ecesant received no visitors, and since the postman never even ventured into these uninhabited parts, having no occasion to deliver any papers, magazines, or letters, the servants hesitated before opening

Starting point is 01:42:27 the door. Then, as the bell was rung furiously again, they peered through the peep-hole cut into the wall, and perceived a man concealed from neck to waist behind an immense gold buckler. They informed their master who was breakfasting. Ask him in, he said, for he recalled having given his address to a lapidary for the delivery of a purchase. The man bowed and deposited the buckler on the pine-wood floor of the dining-room. It oscillated and wavered, revealing the serpentine head of a tortoise, which suddenly terrified retreated into its shell. This tortoise was a fancy which had seized Des Saint, sometime before his departure from Paris,

Starting point is 01:43:30 examining an oriental rug one day in reflected light, and following the silver gleams which fell on its web of plum violet and Aladdin yellow, it suddenly occurred to him how much it would be improved if he could place on it some object whose deep colour might enhance the vividness of its tints. Possessed by this idea he had been strolling aimlessly along the streets, when suddenly he found himself gazing at the very object of his wishes. There, in a shop window on the Palais Royal, lay a huge tortoise in a large basin. He had purchased it. Then he had sat a long time, with eyes half shut, studying the effect. Decidedly, the Ethiopic black, the harsh Sienna tone of this shell, dulled the rug's reflections without adding to it. The dominant silver gleams in it barely sparkled,

Starting point is 01:44:42 crawling with lackluster tones of dead zinc against the edge of the edge of the edge of the edge of the of the hard, tarnished shell. He bit his nails while he studied a method of removing these discords and reconciling the determined opposition of the tones.

Starting point is 01:45:03 He finally discovered that his first inspiration, which was to animate the fire of the weave by setting it off against some dark object was erroneous. In fact,

Starting point is 01:45:18 This rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. The colours were not sufficiently subdued. He must reverse the process, dull the tones, and extinguish them by the contrast of a striking object, which would eclipse all else, and cast a golden light on the pale silver. Thus stated, the problem was easier to solve. He therefore decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold.

Starting point is 01:45:55 The tortoise, just returned by the lapidary, shone brilliantly, softening the tones of the rug, and casting on it a gorgeous reflection, which resembled the irradiations from the scales of a barbaric visigoth shield. At first, Desicant was entombed. chanted with this effect. Then he reflected that this gigantic jewel was only in outline, but it would not really be complete until it had been encrusted with rare stones. From a Japanese collection he chose a design representing a cluster of flowers,

Starting point is 01:46:41 emanating spindle-like from a slender stalk, taking it to a jeweller, he skisle-like, he skisdialer, he sketched a border to enclose this bouquet in an oval frame, and informed the amazed lapidary that every petal and every leaf was to be designed with jewels and mounted on the scales of the tortoise. The choice of stones made him pause. The diamond has become notoriously common, since every tradesman has taken to wearing it on his little things. The oriental emeralds and rubies are less vulgarised, and cast brilliant, rutulent flames. But they remind one of the green and red antennae of certain omnibuses which carry signal lights of these colours. As for topazes, whether sparkling or dim, they are cheap stones, precious only to women of the middle class, who like to have jewel cases on their dressing-tables.

Starting point is 01:47:52 And then, although the church has preserved for the amethyst, a sacerdotal character which is at once unctuous and solemn, this stone too is abused on the blood-red ears and veined hands of butcher's wives, who love to adorn themselves inexpensively with real and heavy jewels. Only the sapphire, among all these stones, has kept its fires undefiled by any taint of commercialism. Its sparks, crackling in its limpid, cold depths, have in some way protected its shy and proud nobility from pollution. Unfortunately, its fresh fire does not sparkle in artificial light. The blue retreats, and seems to fall asleep, only awakening to shine at daybreak. None of these satisfied Des Iscent at all. They were too civilized and familiar. He let trickle

Starting point is 01:49:03 through his fingers still more astonishing and bizarre stones, and finally selected a number of real and artificial ones, which, used together, should produce a fascinating and disconcerting harmony. This is how he composed his bouquet of flowers. The leaves were set with jewels of a pronounced distinct green. The chryso-berils of asparagus green. The chrysolites of leek-green. The olivines of olive-green.

Starting point is 01:49:41 They hung from branches of Almandine and Uvarovit of a violet red, darting spangles of a hard brilliance, like tartar micas gleaming through forest depths. For the flowers, separated from the stalk and removed from the bottom of the sheaf, he used blue cinder. But he formerly waved that oriental turquoise, used for broaches and rings, which, like the banal pearl and the odious coral, serves to delight people of no importance. He chose Occidental Turquoise exclusively, stones which, properly speaking, are only a fossil ivory, impregnated with coppery substances whose sea-blue is choked, opaque, sulfurous, and,

Starting point is 01:50:41 as though yellowed by bile. This done, he could now set the petals of his flowers with transparent stones which had morbid and vitreous sparks, feverish and sharp lights. He composed them entirely with Ceylon's snapdragons, cymophanes and blue chalcedony. These three stones darted mysterious and perverse scintillations, painfully torn from the frozen depths of their troubled waters. The snap-dragon of a greenish-grey streaked with concentric veins which seemed to stir and change constantly according to the dispositions of light.

Starting point is 01:51:32 The simophane, whose azure waves float over the milky tint, swimming in its depths. The blue chalcedony, which kindles with bluish-phosphorescent fires against a dead brown, chocolate background. The lapidary made a note of the places where the stones were to be inlaid. And the border of the shell, he asked Desisant. At first he had thought of some opals and hydrofanes. But, But these stones, interesting for their hesitating colours, for the evasions of their flames, are too refractory and faithless. The opal has a quite rheumatic sensitiveness.

Starting point is 01:52:23 The play of its rays alters according to the humidity, the warmth or cold. As for the hydrophane, it only burns in water, and only consents to kindle its embers, when then moistened. He finally decided on minerals whose reflections vary, for the Compostel hyacinth, mahogany red. The berylacus green, the ballas ruby, vinegar rose, the pseudomanian ruby, pale slate. Their feeble sparklings sufficed to light the darkness of the shell. and preserved the values of the flowering stones, which they encircled with a slender garland of vague fires. Des Saint now watched the tortoise squatting in a corner of the dining-room, shining in the shadow.

Starting point is 01:53:26 He was perfectly happy. His eyes gleamed with pleasure at the resplendencies of the flaming corolli against the gold-bats. background. Then he grew hungry, a thing that rarely, if ever, happened to him, and dipped his toast, spread with a special butter in a cup of tea, a flawless blend of Shafayun, Moyutan and Hansky, yellow teas which had come from China to Russia by special caravans. This liquid perfume he drank in those Chinese porcelains called eggshell, so light and diaphanous they are. And as an accompaniment to these adorable cups, he used a service of solid silver, slightly gilded. The silver showed faintly under the fatigued layer of gold, which gave it an aged, quite exhausted and moribund. tint. After he had finished his tea, he returned to his study, and had the servant carry in the

Starting point is 01:54:42 tortoise, which stubbornly refused to budge. The snow was falling. By the lamplight he saw the icy patterns on the bluish windows, and the hoar frost, like melted sugar, scintillating in the stumps of bottles spotted with gold. A deep silence enveloped the cottage drooping in shadow. Desicent fell into reverie. The fireplace piled with logs, gave forth a smell of burning wood. He opened the window slightly. Like a high tapestry of black ermine, the sky rose before him, black flecked with white. An icy wind swept past, accelerated the crazy flight of the snow,

Starting point is 01:55:38 and reversed the colour order. The heraldic tapestry of heaven returned, became a true ermine, a white flecked with black in its turn, by the specks of darkness dispersed among the flakes. He closed the window, This abrupt transition from torrid warmth to cold winter affected him. He crouched near the fire, and it occurred to him that he needed a cordial to revive his flagging spirits.

Starting point is 01:56:13 He went to the dining-room, where built into one of the panels was a closet containing a number of tiny casks, ranged side by side, and resting on small stands of sandalwood. This collection of barrels he called his mouth organ. A stem could connect all the spigots and control them by a single movement, so that once attached he had only to press a button concealed in the woodwork to turn on all the taps at the same time and fill the mugs placed underneath. The organ was now open. The stops labelled flute.

Starting point is 01:56:57 Horn, celestial voice, were pulled out, ready to be placed. Desi Sand sipped here and there, enjoying the inner symphonies, succeeded in procuring sensations in his throat, analogous to those which music gives to the ear. Moreover, each liquor corresponded, according to his thinking, to the sound of some instrument. Dry kurathau, for example, to the clarinet, whose tone is sourish and velvety. Kumul, to the oboe, whose sonorous notes snuffle. Mint and Anisette to the flute, at once sugary and peppery, peuling and sweet. While to complete the orchestra, Kyrschvasser has the furious ring of the trumpet.

Starting point is 01:57:58 Gin and whiskey burn the palate with their strident crashings of trombones and cornets. Brandy storms with the deafening hubbub of tubas, while the thunder-claps of the symbols and the furiously beaten drum roll in the mouth by means of the rakhi of kios. He also thought that the comparison could be continued, that quartets of string instruments could play under the palette, with the violin simulated by old brandy, fumous and fine, piercing and frail,

Starting point is 01:58:42 the tenor violin by rum, louder and more sonorous. the cello by the lacerating and lingering ratafia, melancholy and caressing, with the double bass, full-bodied, solid and dark as the old bitters. If one wished to form a quintet, one could even add a fifth instrument with the vibrant taste, the silvery detached and shrill note of dry cumin, imitating the harp. The comparison was further prolonged. Tone relationships existed in the music of liquors. To cite but one note, Benedictine represents, so to speak,

Starting point is 01:59:33 the minor key of that major key of alcohols, which are designated in commercial scores under the name of Green Chartreuse. These principles once admitted, he succeeded after numerous experiments in enjoying silent melodies on his tongue, mute funeral marches, in hearing in his mouth solos of mint, duos of ratafia and rum. He was even able to transfer to his palate real pieces of music, following the composer step by step, rendering his thought, his effects, his nuances, by combinations or contrasts of liquors, by approximative and skilled mixtures.

Starting point is 02:00:28 At other times he himself composed melodies, executed pastoral's with mild black current, which evoked in his throat the trillings of nightingales, with the tender chouva, Coco, which sang Saccharine songs like the Romance of Estelle, and the, Ah, shall I tell you, Mama, of past days. But on this evening, Des Isat was not inclined to listen to this music. He confined confined himself to sounding one note on the keyboard of his organ, by swallowing a little glass of genuine Irish whiskey. He sank into his easy chair and slowly inhaled this fermented juice of oats and barley. A pronounced taste of creosote was in his mouth.

Starting point is 02:01:28 Gradually as he drank, his thought followed the now revived sensitiveness of his palate, fitted its progress to the flavour of the whiskey, reawakened by a face of a face of the fatal exactitude of odors, memories effaced for years. This carbolic tartness forcibly recalled to him the same taste he had had on his tongue in the days when dentists worked on his gums. Once abandoned on this track, his reverie at first dispersed among all the dentists he had known, concentrated and converged on one of them, who was more firmly engraved in his memory. It had happened three years ago, seized in the middle of the night with an abominable toothache. He put his hand to his cheek, stumbled against the furniture, pacing up and down the room like a demented person.

Starting point is 02:02:34 It was a molar, which had already been filled. no remedy was possible. Only a dentist could alleviate the pain. He feverishly waited for the day, resolved to bear the most atrocious operation, provided it would only ease his sufferings. Holding a hand to his jaw, he asked himself what should be done. The dentists who treated him were rich merchants, whom one could not see at any time. time, one had to make an appointment. He told himself that this would never do, that he could not endure it. He decided to patronise the first one he could find, to hasten to a popular tooth extractor, one of those iron-fisted men, who, if they are ignorant of the useless art

Starting point is 02:03:31 of dressing, decaying teeth, and of filling holes, know how to pull the staunched, stubbornest stump, with an unequalled rapidity. There the office opened early in the morning, and one is not required to wait. Seven o'clock struck at last. He hurried out, and recollecting the name of a mechanic who called himself a dentist, and dwelt in the corner of a key, he rushed through the streets, holding his cheek, with his hands repressing the tears. Arrived in front of the house, recognisable by an immense wooden signboard, where the name of Gatonaks sprawled in enormous pumpkin-coloured letters, and by two little glass cases where

Starting point is 02:04:27 false teeth were carefully set in rose-coloured wax. He gasped for the breath. He perspired profusely. A horrible fear shook him, a trembling crept under his skin. Suddenly, a calm ensued. The suffering ceased. The tooth stopped paining. He remained stupefied on the sidewalk. Finally, he stiffened against the anguish, mounted the dim stairway, running up four steps at a time to the fourth story. He found himself in front of a door where an enamel plate repeated, inscribed in sky-blue lettering,

Starting point is 02:05:16 the name on the signboard. He rang the bell, and then, terrified by the great red spittles which he noticed on the steps, he faced about, resolved to endure his toothache all his life. At that moment, moment, an excruciating cry pierced the partitions, filled the cage of the doorway, and glued

Starting point is 02:05:42 him to the spot with horror, at the same time that a door was opened and an old woman invited him to enter. His feeling of shame quickly changed to fear. He was ushered into a dining-room. Another door creaked, and in entered a terrible grenadier, dressed in a frock coat and black trousers. De Saint followed him to another room. From this instant his sensations were confused. He vaguely remembered, having sunk into a chair opposite a window, having murmured as he put a finger to his tooth. It has already been filled, and I am afraid nothing more can be done with it. The man immediately suppressed these explanations by introducing an enormous index finger into his mouth.

Starting point is 02:06:45 Muttering beneath his waxed, fang-like moustaches, he took an instrument from the table. Then the play began, clinging to the arms of his seat. seat, Dese Césant felt a cold sensation in his cheek and began to suffer unheard agonies. Then he beheld stars. He stamped his feet frantically and bleated like a sheep about to be slaughtered. A snapping sound was heard. The molar had broken while being extracted. It seemed that his head was being shattered, that his skull was being smashed. He lost his senses, howled as loudly as he could, furiously defending himself from the man who rushed at him anew as if he wished to implant his whole arm in the depths of his bowels. Brusquely recoiled a step, and lifting the tooth attached to the jaw,

Starting point is 02:07:53 brutally let him fall back into the chair. Breathing heavily, his form filling the window, he brandished at one end of his foreseps, a blue tooth with blood at one end. Faint and prostrate, Desisant spat blood into a basin, refused with a gesture, the tooth which the old woman was about to wrap in a piece of paper, and fled after paying two francs. Expectorating blood in his turn down the steps, he at length found himself in the street, joyous, feeling ten years younger, interested in every little occurrence.

Starting point is 02:08:46 "'Phew!' he exclaimed, saddened by the assault of these memories. He rose to dissipate the horrible spell of this vision, and, returning to reality, began to be concerned with the tortoise. It did not budge at all, and he tapped it. The animal was dead, Doubtless accustomed to a sedentary existence, to a humble life spent underneath its poor shell, It had been unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it,

Starting point is 02:09:28 The rutulent cope with which it had been covered, The jewels with which its back had been paved, like a Picks. End of Chapter 5 Against the Grain by Joris Carl Wismans, translated by John Howard. Chapter 6 With the sharpening of his desire to withdraw from a hated age, he felt a despotic urge to shun pictures representing humanity, striving in little holes, or running to and fro in quest of money. With his growing indifference to contemporary life, he had resolved not to

Starting point is 02:10:21 introduce into his cell any of the ghosts of distastees or regrets, but had desired to procure subtle and exquisite paintings, steeped in ancient dreams or antique corruptions, far removed from the manner of our present day. For the delight of his spirit and the joy of his eyes, he had desired a few suggestive creations that cast him into an unknown world, revealing to him the contours of new conjectures, agitating the nervous system by the violent deliriums,

Starting point is 02:11:03 complicated nightmares, nonchalant or atrocious chimerae, induced. Among these were some executed by an artist whose genius allured and entranced him, Gustave Moro. Dezésant had acquired his two masterpieces, and at night used to sink into reverie before one of them, a representation of Salome, conceived in this fashion. A throne, resembling the high altar of a cathedral, reared itself behind innumerable vaults, leaping from heavy Romanesque pillars, studied with polychromatic bricks, set with mosaics, encrusted with lapis lazuli and sardinics, in a palace that like a basilica was at once Mohammedan and Byzantine in design. In the centre of the tabernacle, surmounting an altar approached by semi-circular steps, sat Herod the tetrarch, a tiara upon his head, his legs pressed closely together,

Starting point is 02:12:20 his hands resting upon his knees. His face was the colour of yellow parchment. It was furrowed with wrinkles, ravaged with age. His long beard floated like a white cloud upon the star-like clusters of jewels, Constellating the Orfrey robe, fitting tightly over his breast. Around this form, frozen into the immobile, sacerdotal hieratic pose of a Hindu god, burned perfumes, wafting aloft clouds of incense which were perforated like foothed. phosphorescent eyes of beasts by the fiery rays of the stones set in the throne. Then the vapour rolled up,

Starting point is 02:13:12 diffusing itself beneath arcades, where the blue smoke mingled with the gold powder of the long sunbeams falling from the domes. In the perverse odour of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the temple, Salome, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command, her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with her face, slowly advances on her toes to the rhythm of a stringed instrument played by a woman seated on the ground. Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamond scintillate against her glistening skin, her bracelets, her girdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls, flowered with silver, and laminated with gold,

Starting point is 02:14:26 the breastplate of jewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents of fire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea rose. Its jewels like splendid insects with dazzling elitra, feigned with carmine, dotted with yellow gold, dippered with blue steel, speckled with peacock green. With a tense concentration, with the fixed gaze of a somnambulist, she beholds neither the trembling tetrarch, nor her mother, the fierce Herodias who watches her, nor the hermaphrodite, nor the eunuch who sits sword in hand at the foot of the throne, A terrible figure veiled to his eyes, whose breasts droop like gourds under his orange-chequered tunic.

Starting point is 02:15:32 This conception of Salome, so haunting to artists and poets, had obsessed Desecente for years. How often had he read in the old Bible of Pierre Baricay, translated by the theological doctors of the University of Louvain, the gospel of st matthew who in brief and ingenuous phrases recounts the beheading of the baptist how often had he fallen into reverie as he read these lines but when herod's birthday was kept the daughter of herodias danced before them and pleased herod whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask and she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger. And the king was sorry. Nevertheless, for the oath's sake,

Starting point is 02:16:36 and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her. And he sent and beheaded John in the prison. And his head was brought in a charger and given to the damsel, and she brought it to her mother. But neither St. Matthew, nor St. Mark, nor St. Luke, nor the other evangelist, had emphasised the maddening charms and depravities of the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooning in the far-off mist of the centuries,

Starting point is 02:17:16 not to be grasped by vulgar and materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic intellects, made visionaries by their neuroticism, rebellious to painters of the flesh, to Rubens, who disguised her as a butcher's wife of Flanders, a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded in portraying the disquieting exaltation of this dancer, the refined grandeur of this murderer. In Gustav Moro's work, conceived independently of the Testament themes, Desecesaint at last saw realised the superhuman and exotic Salome of his dreams. She was no longer the mere performer, who rests a cry of desire and of passion,

Starting point is 02:18:14 from an old man by a perverted twisting of her loins, who destroys the end. energy and breaks the will of a king by trembling breasts and quivering belly. She became, in a sense, the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal hysteria, of a cursed beauty, distinguished from all others by the catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles. The monstrous beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, like the Helen of antiquity, fatal to all who approach her, all who behold her, all whom she touches. Thus understood, she was associated with the theogonies of the Far East. She no longer sprang from biblical traditions, could no longer even be assimilated with the living image of Babylon, the royal prostitute of the apocalypse, garbed like her in jewels and purple, and painted like her, for she was not hurled by a fatidical power, by a supreme force into the alluring vileness of debauchery.

Starting point is 02:19:43 The painter, moreover, seems to have wished to affirm this desire of remaining outside the centuries, scorning to designate the origin, nation and epoch, by placing his Salome in this extraordinary palace with its confused and imposing style, in clothing her with sumptuous and chimerical robes, in crowning her with a fantastic mitre, shaped like a Phoenician tower, such as Salambo, or placing in her hand the sceptre of Isis, the tall lotus, sacred flower of Egypt and India. Dizest sought the sense of this emblem, had it that phallic significance which the primitive cults of India gave it? Did it enunciate an oblation of virginity to the senile herod, an exchange of blood, an impure and voluntary wound, offered under the express stipulation of a monstrous sin?

Starting point is 02:20:55 Or did it represent the allegory of fecundity, the Hindu myth of life, an existence held between the hands of woman, distorted and trampled by the palpitant hands of man, whom a fit of madness seizes, seduced by a convulsion of the flesh. Perhaps, too, in arming his enigmatic goddess with the venerated lotus, the painter had dreamed of the dancer, the mortal woman with the polluted vase, from whom spring all sins and crimes. Perhaps he had recalled the rites of ancient Egypt, the sepulchral ceremonies of the embalming, when, after stretching the corpse on a bench of jasper, extracting the brain with curved needles to the chambers of the nose, the chemists and the priests, before gilding the nails and teeth,

Starting point is 02:21:57 and coating the body with bitumenes and essences, inserted the chaste petals of the divine flower in the sexual parts to purify them. However this may be, an irresistible fascination emanated from this painting. But the watercolour entitled the apparition was perhaps even more disturbing. There, the Palace of Herod arose like an alhambra on slender, iridescent columns with moorish tile, joined with silver beton and gold cement. Arabesques proceeded from lozenges of lapis lazuli, wove their patterns on the cupolas, where on necrious marketry crept rainbow gleams and prismatic flames. The murder was accomplished.

Starting point is 02:22:59 The executioner stood impassive, his hands on the hilt of his long blood-stained sword. The severed head of the saint stared lividly on the charger, resting on the slabs. The mouth was discoloured and open. The neck crimson, and tears fell from the, eyes. The face was encircled by an aureole, worked in mosaic, which shot rays of light under

Starting point is 02:23:31 the porticoes, and illuminated the horrible ascension of the head, brightening the glassy orbs of the contracted eyes, which were fixed with a ghastly stare upon the dancer. With a gesture of terror, Salome thrusts from her the horrible vision which transfixes her motionless to the ground. Her eyes dilate, her hands clasp her neck in a convulsive clutch. She is almost nude. In the ardour of the dance, her veils had become loosened. She is garbed only in gold-wrought stuffs and limpid stones. A neckpiece clasps her as a corslet does the body. and like a superb buckle, a marvellous jewel sparkles on the hollow between her breasts. A girdle encircles her hips, concealing the upper part of her thighs,

Starting point is 02:24:38 against which beats a gigantic pendant, streaming with carbuncles and emeralds. All the facets of the jewels kindle under the ardent shafts of light escaping from the head of the Baptist. The stones grow warm, outlining the woman's body with incandescent rays, striking her neck, feet and arms, with tongues of fire. The millions like coals, violets like jets of gas, blues like flames of alcohol, and whites like starlight. The horrible head blazes, Leading constantly, clots of sombre purple on the ends of the beard and hair. Visible for Salome alone, it does not, with its fixed gaze, attract Herodias, musing on her finally consummated revenge.

Starting point is 02:25:42 Nor the tetrarch, who bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, still pants, maddened by the nudity of the woman saturated with animal odours, steeped in balms, exuding incense and myre. Like the old king, Desicant remained dumbfounded, overwhelmed and seized with giddiness in the presence of this dancer, who was less majestic, less haughty, but more disquieting than the Salome of the oil painting. In this insensate and pitiless image, in this innocent and dangerous idol, the eroticism and terror of mankind were depicted. The tall lotus had disappeared, the goddess had vanished. A frightful nightmare now stifled the woman, dizzied by the whirlwind of the dance, hypnotised and petrified by terror.

Starting point is 02:26:52 It was here that she was indeed woman, for here she gave rein to her ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the dull senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, cultivated in sacrilegious beds in impious hot-houses.

Starting point is 02:27:29 Dyssinant thought that never before had a watercolour attained such magnificent colouring. Never before had the poverty of colours been able to force jewelled coruscations from paper. gleams like stained-glass windows touched by rays of sunlight, splendors of tissue and flesh so fabulous and dazzling. Lost in contemplation, he sought to discover the origins of this great artist and mystic pagan, this visionary who succeeded in removing himself from the world sufficiently to behold, here in Paris, the splendour of these cruel visions and the enchanting sublimation of past ages. Desicent could not trace the genesis of this artist.

Starting point is 02:28:28 Here and there were vague suggestions of Mantegna and of Jacobo de Barbari. Here and there were confused hints of Vinci and of the feverish colours of Dulaquois. But the influences of such masters remained negligible. The fact was that Gustave Moro derived from no one else. He remained unique in contemporary art, without ancestors, and without possible descendants. He went to ethnographic sources, to the origins of myths, and he compared and elucidated their intricate enigmas. He reunited the legends of the Far East into a whole, the myths which had been altered by the superstitions of other peoples, thus justifying his architectonic fusions,

Starting point is 02:29:25 his luxurious and outlandish fabrics, his hieratic and sinister allegories, sharpened by the restless perceptions of a pruriently modern neurosis. And he remained saddened, haunted by the symbols of perversities and superhuman loves, of divine stuprations, brought to end without abandonment and without hope. His depressing and erudite productions possessed a strange enchantment, an incantation that stirred one to the depths, just as do certain poems of Baudelaire, caused one to pause disconcerted, amazed, brooding on the spell of an art which leaped beyond the confines of painting, borrowing its most subtle effects from the art of writing, its most marvellous strokes from the art of limousin, its most exquisite refinements,

Starting point is 02:30:35 from the art of the lapidary and the engraver. These two pictures of Salome, for which Deseciance's admiration was boundless, he had hung on the walls of his study on special panels between the bookshelves, so that they might live under his eyes. But these were not the only pictures he had acquired to divert his solitude.

Starting point is 02:31:03 Although he had surrendered to his self-suit, surrendered to his servants the second story of his house, which he himself never used at all, the ground floor had required a number of pictures to fit the walls. It was thus arranged. A dressing-room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one of the corners of the house. One passed from the bedroom to the library, and from the library into the dining-room, which formed the other corner. These rooms, whose windows looked out on the Oney Valley, composed one of the sides of the dwelling. The other side of the house had four rooms arranged in the same order. Thus, the kitchen formed an angle, and corresponded with the dining-room, a long corridor which served as the

Starting point is 02:31:57 entrance with the library, a small dressing-room with the bedroom, and the toilet forming a second angle with the dressing-room. These rooms received the light from the side opposite the Oney Valley, and faced the towers of Croix and Chattillon. As for the staircase, it was built outside, against one of the sides of the house, and the footsteps of his servants in ascending or descending, thus reached Descente less distinctly. The dressing-room was tapestried in deep red, on the walls in ebony frames, hung the prints of Jan Laocan, an old Dutch engraver, almost unknown in France. He possessed of the work of this artist, who was fantastic and melancholy, vehement and wild, the series of his religious persecutions.

Starting point is 02:32:59 Horrible prints, depicting all the agonies invented by the madness of religions. Prince pregnant with human sufferings, showing bodies roasting on fires, skulls slit open with swords, chippanned with nails and gashed with sores. Intestines separated from the abdomen and twisted on spools, fingernails slowly extracted with pincers, eyes gouged, limbs dislocated and deliberately broken, and bones bared of flesh and agonizingly scraped by sheets of metal. These works filled with abominable imaginings, offensive with their odours of burning, oozing with blood, and clamorous with cries of horror and maledictions, gave Desecent, who was held fascinated in this red room, the creeping sensations of goose-flesh. But in addition to the tremblings they occasioned, beyond the terrible skill of this man, the extraordinary life which animates his characters, one discovered, among his astonishing, swarming throngs, among his mobs of people, delineated with a dexterity which recalled

Starting point is 02:34:31 Kalu, but which had a strength never possessed by that amusing daubber, curious reconstructions of bygone ages. The architecture, costumes and customs during the time of the Maccabeans, of Rome under the Christian persecutions, of Spain under the Inquisition, of France during the Middle Ages, at the time of St. Bartholomew and the Dragonad, were studied with a meticulous care and noted with scientific acts. These prints were veritable treasures of learning. One could gaze at them for hours without experiencing any sense of weariness.

Starting point is 02:35:20 Profoundly suggestive in reflections, they assisted DesEcent in passing many a day when his books failed to charm him. Lauchan's life too fascinated him, by explaining the hallucination of his. his work. A fervent Calvinist, a stubborn sectarian, unbalanced by prayers and hymns, he wrote religious poetry, which he illustrated, paraphrased the Psalms in verse, lost himself in the reading of the Bible, from which he emerged haggard and frenzied, his brain haunted by monstrous subjects, his mouth twisted by the maledictions. of the Reformation, and by its songs of terror and hate. And he scorned the world, surrendering his

Starting point is 02:36:17 wealth to the poor, and subsisting on a slice of bread. He ended his life in travelling with an equally fanatical servant, going where chance led his boat, preaching the gospel far and wide, endeavouring to forego nourishment, and eventually becoming almost demented and violent. Other bizarre sketches were hung in the larger adjoining room, as well as in the corridor, both of which had woodwork of red cedar. There was Bredin's Comedy of Death, in which, in the fantastic landscape bristling with trees, brushwood and tufts of grass, resembling phantom demon forms, teeming with rat-headed, pod-tailed birds, on earth covered with ribs, skulls and bones, gnarled and cracked willows rear their trunks, surmounted by agitated skeletons, whose arms beat the air while they

Starting point is 02:37:26 in tone a song of victory. A Christ speeds across a clouded sky. A hermit in the depths of a cave, meditates, holding his head in his hands. One wretch dies, exhausted by long privation and enfeebled by hunger, lying on his back, his legs outstretched in front of a pond. The good Samaritan, by the same artist, is a large engraving on stone. An incongruous medley of palms, sobs and oaks, grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake. Then a magical forest, cut in the centre, near a glade through which a stream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group. Then an elf in town, appearing on the horizon of an exotic sky, dotted with birds and covered with masses of fleecy clouds.

Starting point is 02:38:42 It could be called the design of an uncertain, primitive durach, with an opium-steeped brain, But although he liked the finesse of the detail and the imposing appearance of this print, Desicant had a special weakness for the other frames adorning the room. They were signed Odilin Redon. They enclosed inconceivable apparitions in their rough gold-striped pear-tree wood, ahead of a Merivindian style, resting against a brooky. bowl, a bearded man, at once resembling a Buddhist priest and an orator at a public reunion, touching the ball of a gigantic cannon with his fingers.

Starting point is 02:39:33 A frightful spider, revealing a human face in its body. The charcoal drawings went even farther into the dream terrors. Here, an enormous dye in which a sad eye winked. There, dry and arid landscapes, dusty plains, shifting ground, volcanic upheavals catching rebellious clouds, stagnant and livid skies. Sometimes the subjects even seem to have borrowed from the caco demons of science, reverting to prehistoric times. A monstrous plant on the rocks, queer blocks everywhere. Glacial mud, figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads, and flat skulls, recalled the ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate

Starting point is 02:40:39 man still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs were beyond anything imaginable. They leaped, for the most part, beyond the limits of painting, and introduced a fantasy that was unique, the fantasy of a diseased and delirious mind. And indeed, certain of these faces with their monstrous insane eyes, certain of these swollen, deformed bodies resembling carafs, induced in desescent recollections of typhoid,

Starting point is 02:41:26 memories of feverish nights, and of the shocking visions of his infancy which persisted and would not be suppressed. Seized with an indefinable uneasiness in the presence of these sketches, the same sensation caused by certain proverbs of Goya which they recalled, or by the reading of Edgar Allan-Torpearl. opposed tales, whose mirages of hallucination and effects of fear Odiland Redon seemed to have transposed to a different art. He rubbed his eyes, and turned to contemplate a radiant figure,

Starting point is 02:42:08 which, amid these tormenting sketches, arose serene and calm, a figure of melancholy, seated near the disc of a sun on the rocks in a dejected and gloomy posture. The shadows were dispersed as though by an enchantment. A charming sadness, a languid and desolate feeling flowed through him. He meditated long before this work, which, with its dashes of paint flecking the thick crayon spread a brilliance of sea-green and of pale gold among the protracted darkness of the charcoal prints. In addition to this series of the works of Redon, which adorned nearly every panel of the passage, he had hung a disturbing sketch by El Greco in his bedroom. It was a Christ done in strange tints, in a strange tints, in a

Starting point is 02:43:13 strained design, possessing a wild colour and a disordered energy. A picture executed in the painter's second manner, when he had been tormented by the necessity of avoiding imitation of Titian. This sinister painting, with its wax and sickly green tones, bore an affinity to certain ideas, Desi Saint had, with regard to furnishing a room. According to him, there were but two ways of fitting a bedroom. One could either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnal delights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, a sort of oratory. For the first instance, the Louis-Cain's style was inevitable for the fastidious, for the cerebrus,

Starting point is 02:44:12 for the cerebrally morbid. Only the 18th century had succeeded in enveloping woman with a vicious atmosphere, imitating her contours in the undulations and twistings of wood and copper, accentuating the sugary languor of the blonde with its clear and lively decor,

Starting point is 02:44:36 attenuating the pungency of the brunette with its tapestries of aqueous, sweet, almost insipid tones. He had once had such a rum in Paris, with a lofty white, lacquered bed, which is one stimulant the more, a source of depravity to old Ruiz, leering at the false chastity and hypocritical modesty of Gros's tender virgins, at the deceptive candour of a bed evocative of babes and chaste maidens. For the second instance, and now that he wished to put behind him the irritating memories of his past life, this was the only possible expedient.

Starting point is 02:45:25 He was compelled to design a room that would be like a monastic cell. But difficulties faced him here, for he refused. to accept in its entirety the austere ugliness of those asylums of penitence and prayer. By dint of studying the problem in all its phases, he concluded that the end to be attained could thus be stated, to devise a sombre effect by means of cheerful objects, or rather to give a tone of elegance and distinction to the room thus trussed. meanwhile preserving its character of ugliness. To reverse the practice of the theatre, whose vile tinsel imitate sumptuous and costly textures.

Starting point is 02:46:20 To obtain the contrary effect by use of splendid fabrics. In a word, to have the cell of a Carthusian monk which should possess the appearance of reality without in fact being so. Thus he proceeded. To imitate the stone colour of ochre and clerical yellow, he had his walls covered with saffron silk. To simulate the chocolate hue of the dado's common to this type of room, he used pieces of violet wood, deepened with amourines. The effect was bewitching. While recalling to Desicant, the repellent rigidity of the model he had followed and yet transformed. The ceiling, in turn, was hung with white unbleached cloth in imitation of plaster, but without its discordant brightness. As for the cold

Starting point is 02:47:23 pavement of the cell, he was able to copy it by means of a bit of rug designed in red squares, with whitish spots in the weave to imitate the wear of sandals and the friction of boots. Into this chamber he introduced a small iron bed, the kind used by monks, fashioned of antique, forged and polished iron. The head and foot adorned with thick filigries of blossoming tulips enlaced with vine branches and leaves. Once this had been part of a balustrade of an old hostel's superb staircase. For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk, the inside of which could contain an urn and the outside a prayer-book.

Starting point is 02:48:18 Against the wall opposite it, he placed a church pew, surmounted by a tall dais with little benches, carved out of solid wood. His church tapers were made of real wax, procured from a special house which catered exclusively to houses of worship, for Desicent professed a sincere repugnance to gas, oil, and ordinary candles, to all modern forms of illumination, so gaudy and brutal. Before going to sleep in the morning, he would gaze with his head on the pillows at his elbreco, whose barbaric colour rebuked the smiling yellow material, and recalled it to a more serious tone. Then he could easily imagine himself living a hundred leagues removed from Paris, far from society, in cloistral security.

Starting point is 02:49:22 And all in all, the illusion was not difficult, since he led an existence that approached the life of a monk. Thus he had the advantages of monasticism without the inconveniences of its vigorous discipline, its lack of service, its dirt, its promiscuity, and its monotonous idleness. Just as he had transformed his cell into a comfortable chamber, so had he made his life normal, pleasant, surrounded by comforts, occupied and free. Like a hermit, he was ripe for isolation, since life harassed him, and he no longer desired anything of it. Again like a monk, he was depressed and in the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with the need of self-communion, and with a desire to have nothing in common with the profane, who were, for him, the utilitarian and the imbecile.

Starting point is 02:50:34 Although he experienced no inclination for the state of grace, he felt a genuine sympathy for those souls immured in monasteries, persecuted by a vengeful society, which can forgive neither the merited scorn with which it inspires them, nor the desire to expiate, to atone by long silences, for the ever-growing shamelessness of its ridiculous or trifling gossipings. End of Chapter 6 Against the Grain by Jorice Carl Weismance, translated by John Howard. Chapter 7 Ever since the night when he had evoked, for no apparent reason, a whole train of melancholy memories, pictures of his past life returned to Desecent, and gave him no peace.

Starting point is 02:51:43 He found himself unable to understand a single word of the books he read. He could not even receive impressions through his eyes. It seemed to him that his mind, saturated with literature and art, refused to absorb any more. He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Soltitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness,

Starting point is 02:52:27 which annihilated his plans, broke his willpower, and invoked a cortege of vague reveries to which he passively submitted. The confused medley of meditations on art and literature. in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life. The book he held in his hands fell to his knees. He abandoned himself to the mood

Starting point is 02:53:27 which dominated him, watching the dead years of his life, filled with so many disgusts and fears move past. What a life he had lived! He thought of the evenings spent in society, the horse races, card parties, love affairs ordered in advance and served at the stroke of midnight in his rose-coloured boudoir. He recalled faces, expressions, vain words which obsessed him with the stubbornness of popular melodies which one cannot help humming, but which suddenly and inexplicably end by boring one. This phase had not lasted long. His memory gave him respite, and he plunged again into his Latin studies, so as to efface the impressions of such recollections. But almost instantly, the rushing force of his memories swept him into a second phase, that of his childhood,

Starting point is 02:54:39 especially of the years spent at the school of the fathers. Although more remote, they were more positive and more indelibly stamped on his brain. The leafy park, the long walks, the flower-beds, the benches, All the actual details of the monastery rose before him here in his room. The gardens filled, and he heard the ringing cries of the students, mingling with the laughter of the professors as they played tennis, with their cassocks tucked up between their knees, or perhaps chatted under the trees with the youngsters,

Starting point is 02:55:23 without any posturing oruteur, as though they were compared. of the same age. He recalled the easy yoke of the monks, who declined to administer punishment by inflicting the commitment of five hundred or a thousand lines while the others were at play, being satisfied with making those delinquents prepare the lesson that had not been mastered, and most often simply having recourse to a gentle admonition. surrounded the children with an active but gentle watch, seeking to please them, consenting to whatever expeditions they wished to take on Tuesdays, taking the occasion of every minor holiday not formally observed by the church to add cakes and wine to the ordinary fair, and to entertain

Starting point is 02:56:20 them with picnics. It was a paternal discipline whose success lay in the fact that the did not seek to domineer over the pupils, that they gossiped with them, treating them as men, while showering them with the attentions paid a spoiled child. In this manner the monks succeeded in assuming a real influence over the youngsters, in moulding to some extent the minds which they were cultivating, in directing them in a sense, in instilling special ideas, in assuring the growth of their thoughts by insinuating, wheedling methods, with which they continued to flatter them throughout their careers, taking pains not to lose sight of them in their later life, and by sending them affectionate letters, like those which

Starting point is 02:57:18 the Dominican La Cordeaux-D'Ere so skillfully wrote to his former pupils of Sores. Desicant took note of this system which had been so fruitlessly expended on him. His stubborn, captious and inquisitive character disposed to controversies had prevented him from being modelled by their discipline or subdued by their lessons. His scepticism had increased after he left the precincts of the college. His association with a legitimist intolerant and shallow society, his conversations with unintelligent churchwardens and abbots, whose blunders tore away the veil so subtly woven by the Jesuits, had still more fortified his spirit of independence, and increased his scorn

Starting point is 02:58:18 for any faith whatever. He had deemed himself free of all bonds and constraints. Unlike most graduates of lice or private schools, he had preserved a vivid memory of his college and of his masters. And now, as he considered these matters, he asked himself if the seeds sown until now on barren soil were not beginning to take root. For several days, in fact, his soul had been strangely perturbed. At moments he felt himself veering towards religion.

Starting point is 02:59:00 Then at the slightest approach of reason, his faith would dissolve, yet he remained deeply troubled. himself, he was well aware that he would never possess a truly Christian spirit of humility and penitence. He knew without a doubt that he would never experience that moment of grace mentioned by La Cardeur, when the last shaft of light penetrates the soul and unites the truths there lying dispersed. He never felt the need of mortification. and of prayer, without which no conversion is possible, if one is to believe the majority of priests. He had no desire to implore a God whose forgiveness seemed most improbable. Yet the sympathy he felt for his old teachers lent him an interest in their works and doctrines.

Starting point is 03:00:05 Those inimitable accents of conviction, those ardent voices of men of indubitably superior intelligence, returned to him and led him to doubt his own mind and strength. Amid the solitude in which he lived, without new nourishment, without any fresh experiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchange of sensations common to society. In this unnatural confinement in which he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay in Paris were revived as active irritants. The reading of his beloved Latin works, almost all of them written by bishops and monks, had doubtless,

Starting point is 03:01:00 contributed to this crisis. Invelled in a convent-like atmosphere, in a heady perfume of incense, his nervous brain had grown excitable. And by an association of ideas, these books had driven back the memories of his life as a young man, revealing in full light the years spent with the fathers. There is no doubt about it, Desis Saint mused, as he reasoned the matter and followed the progress of this introduction of the Jesuitic spirit into Fontaine. Since my childhood, although unaware of it, I have had this leaven which has never fermented. The weakness I have always borne for religious subjects is perhaps a positive proof. of it. But he sought to persuade himself to the contrary, disturbed at no longer being his own master.

Starting point is 03:02:07 He searched for motives. It had required a struggle for him to abandon things sacerdotal, since the church alone had treasured objects of art, the lost forms of past ages. in its wretched modern reproductions, she had preserved the contours of the gold and silver ornaments, the charm of chalises curving like petunias, and the charm of pixes with their chaste sides. Even in aluminium and imitation enamels and coloured glasses, she had preserved the grace of vanished modes. In short, most of the precious objects, now to be found in the Cluny Museum, which have miraculously escaped the crude barbarism of the Philistines,

Starting point is 03:03:02 come from the ancient French abbeys. And just as the church had preserved philosophy and history and letters from barbarism in the Middle Ages, so had she saved the plastic arts, bringing to our own days those marvellous fabrics and jewelleries, which the makers of sacred objects spoiled to the best of their ability, without being able to destroy the originally exquisite form. It followed, then, that there was nothing surprising in his having bought these old trinkets, in his having, together with a number of other collectors, purchased such relics from the antique shops of Paris, and the second-hand dealers of the provinces. But these reasons he evoked in vain. He did not wholly succeed in convincing himself. He persisted in considering

Starting point is 03:04:02 religion as a superb legend, a magnificent imposture. Yet despite his convictions, his skepticism began to be shattered. This was the singular fact he was obliged to face. He was less confident now than in childhood, when he had been directly under the influence of the Jesuits, when their instruction could not be shunned, when he was in their hands and belonged to them body and soul without family ties, with no outside influence, powerful enough to counteract their precepts. Moreover, they had inculcated in him a certain tendency towards the marvellous, which, in turned and exercised in the close quarters of his fixed ideas, had slowly and obscurely developed in his soul, until today it was blossoming in his solitude, affecting his spirit, regardless of arguments.

Starting point is 03:05:12 By examining the process of his reasoning, by seeking to unite its threads and to discover its sources and causes, he concluded that his previous mode of living was derived from the education he had received. Thus, his tendencies towards artificiality and his craving for eccentricity were no more than the results of specious studies, spiritual refinements, and quasi-theological speculations. They were, in the last analysis, ecstasies, aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, as desirable as that promised us by the Holy Scriptures. He curbed his thoughts sharply, and broke the thread of his reflections. Well, he thought vexed, I am even more affected than I had imagined.

Starting point is 03:06:15 Here I am arguing with myself, like a very casuist. He was left pensive, agitated by a vague fear. Certainly if La Cordeaux's theory was sound, he had nothing to be afraid of, since the magic touch of conversion is not to be consummated in a moment. To bring about the explosion, the ground must be constantly and assiduously mind. But just as the Romances speak of the thunderclap of love, so do theologians also speak of the thunder-clap of conversion.

Starting point is 03:07:00 No one was safe, should one admit the truth of this doctrine. There was no longer any need of self-analysis, of paying heed to presentiments, of taking preventive measures. The psychology of mysticism was void. Things were so because they were so, and that was all. I am really becoming stupid, thought de Césant. The very fear of this malady will end by bringing it on if this continues. He partially succeeded in shaking off this influence. The memories of his life with the Jesuits waned, only to be replaced by other thoughts. He was entirely dominated by morbid abstractions. Despite himself, he thought of the contradictory interpretations of the dogmas,

Starting point is 03:08:02 of the lost apostuses of Father Labé, recorded in the works on the decrees. Fragments of these schisms, scraps of these heresies which for centuries had divided the churches of the Orient and the Occident returned to him. Here Nestorius denied the title of Mother of God to the Virgin, because in the mystery of the incarnation it was not God, but rather a human being she had nourished in her womb. There, Utahiches declared that Christ's image could not resemble that of other men, since divinity had chosen to dwell in his body, and had consequently entirely altered the form of everything. Other quibblers maintained that the Redeemer had had no body at all, and that this expression of the holy books must be taken figuratively.

Starting point is 03:09:05 while Tertullian put forth his famous semi-materialistic axiom. Only that which is not has no body. Everything which is has a body fitting it. Finally, this ancient question, debated for years, demanded an answer. Was Christ hanged on the cross? Or was it the Trinity which had suffered as one? in its triple hypothesis, on the cross at Calvary. And mechanically, like a lesson long ago learned, he proposed the questions to himself, and answered them. For several days his brain was a swarm of paradoxes, subtleties, and hair-splittings,

Starting point is 03:09:58 a skein of rules as complicated as the articles of the codes, that involved the sense of everything, indulged in puns, and ended in a most tenuous and singular celestial jurisprudence. The abstract side vanished in its turn, and under the influence of the Gustav Moreau paintings of the wall, yielded to a concrete succession of pictures. Before him, he saw marching a procession of prelates. The Archimandrites and patriarchs, their white beards waving during the reading of the prayers, lifted golden arms to bless kneeling throngs. He saw silent files of penitence marching into dim crypts. Before him rose vast cathedrals, where white monks intoned from pulpit. Just as de Quince, having taken a dose of opium and uttered the word consul Romanus,

Starting point is 03:11:10 evoked entire pages of Livius, and beheld the solemn advance of the consuls and the magnificent pompous march of the Roman armies, so he, at a theological expression, paused breathless, as he viewed the onrush of penitence and the churchly apparitions which detached themselves from the glowing depths of the basilica. These scenes held him enchanted. They moved from age to age, culminating in the modern religious ceremonies, bathing his soul in a tender, mournful infinity of music. On this plane, no reasonings were necessary. There were no further contests to be endured. He had an indescribable impression of respect and fear.

Starting point is 03:12:10 His artistic sense was conquered by the skillfully calculated Catholic rituals. His nerves quivered at these memories. Then, in sudden rebellion, in a sudden reversion, monstrous ideas were born in him, fancies concerning those sacrilegies warned against by the manual of the father confessors, of the scandalous, impure desecration of holy water and sacred oil. The demon, a powerful rival, now stood against an omnipotent god. A frightful grande seemed to Desicent to emanate from a crime committed in church by a believer, bent with blasphemously horrible glee and sadistic joy over such revered objects,

Starting point is 03:13:09 covering them with outrages and saturating them in opprobrium. Before him were conjured up the madnesses of magic. of the black mass, of the witches revels, of terrors of possessions and of exorcisms. He reached the point where he wondered if he were not committing a sacrilege in possessing objects which had once been consecrated, the church canons, chasubles and picks covers, and this idea of a state of sin imparted to him a mixed sensation of pride and relief. The pleasures of sacrilege were unravelled from the skein of this idea. But these were debatable sacrilegies in any case, and hardly serious, since he really loved these objects,

Starting point is 03:14:08 and did not pollute them by misuse. In this wise he lulled himself with prudent and cowardly thoughts, the caution of his soul, forbidding obvious crimes, and depriving him of the courage necessary to the consummation of frightful and deliberate sins. Little by little, this tendency to ineffectual quibbling disappeared. In his mind's eye, he saw the panorama of the church, with its hereditary influence on humanity through the centuries. He imagined it as imposing and suffering, emphasising to man the horror of life, the infallicity of man's destiny, preaching patience, penitence, and the spirit of sacrifice, seeking to heal wounds while it displayed the bleeding wounds of Christ, bespeaking divine privileges,

Starting point is 03:15:14 promising the richest part of paradise to the afflicted, exhorting humanity to suffer and to render to God like a holocaust, its trials and offences, its vicissitudes and pains. Thus the church grew truly eloquent, the beneficent mother of the oppressed, the eternal menace of oppressors and despots. Here, D'Eze Saint was on firm ground. He was thoroughly satisfied with this admission of social ordeal, but he revolted against the vague hope

Starting point is 03:15:58 of remedy in the beyond. Schopenhauer was more true. His doctrine and that of the church started from common premises. He too based his system on the vileness of the world. He, too, like the author of the imitation of Christ, uttered that grievous outcry, Truly life on earth is wretched. He also preached the nothingness of life, the advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that no matter what it does, in whatever direction it may turn, it must remain wretched.

Starting point is 03:16:42 the poor by reason of the sufferings entailed by want, the rich by reason of the unconquerable weariness engendered by abundance. But this philosophy promised no universal remedies, did not entice one with false hopes so as to minimise the inevitable evils of life. He did not affirm the revolting conception of original sin, nor did he feel inclined to argue that it is a beneficent God who protects the worthless and wicked, reigns misfortunes on children, stultifies the aged, and afflicts the innocent. He did not exalt the virtues of a providence which has invented that useless, incomprehensible, unjust and senseless abomination, physical suffering. Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried in his outraged pity.

Starting point is 03:17:57 If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart. heart. Ah, Schopenhauer alone was right. Compared with these treatises of spiritual hygiene, of what avail were the evangelical pharmac appears? He did not claim to cure anything, and he offered no alleviation to the sick. But his theory of pessimism was, in the end, the great consoler of choice intellects and lofty souls. He revealed society as it is, asserted woman's inherent stupidity, indicated the safest course, preserved you from disillusionment by warning you to restrain hopes as much as possible, to refuse to yield to their allurement,

Starting point is 03:18:58 to deem yourself fortunate, finally, if they did not come toppling about your ears at some unexpected moment. Traversing the same path as the imitation, this theory, too, ended in similar highways of resignation and indifference, but without going astray in mysterious labyrinths and remote roads. But if this resignation, which was obviously the only outcome of the deplorable condition of things and their irremediability, was open to the spiritually rich, it was all the more difficult of approach to the poor, whose passions and cravings were more easily satisfied by the benefits of religion. These reflections relieved de Saint of a heavy burden. The aphorisms of the great German calmed his excited thoughts, and the points of contact in these two doctrines helped him

Starting point is 03:20:07 to correlate them. And he could never forget that poignant and poetic caesolicism in which he had bathed, and whose essence he had long ago absorbed. These reversions to religion, these intimations of faith, tormented him particularly since the changes that had lately taken place in his health. Their progress coincided with that of his recent nervous disorders. He had been tortured since his youth by inexplicable aversions, by shudderings which chilled his spine and made him grit his teeth, as, for example, when he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactions had long persisted.

Starting point is 03:20:59 Even now he suffered poignantly when he heard the tearing of cloth, the rubbing of a finger against a piece of chalk, or a hand touching a bit of moire. The excesses of his youthful life, the exaggerated tension of his mind had strangely aggravated his earliest nervous disorder, and had thinned the already impoverished blood of his race. In Paris, he had been compelled to submit to hydrotherapy treatments for his trembling fingers, frightful pains, neuralgic strokes which cut his face in two, drummed maddeningly against his temples, pricked his eyelids agonisingly, and induced a nausea, which could be dispelled only by lying flat on his back in the dark. These afflictions had gradually disappeared, thanks to a more regulated and sane mode of living. They now returned in another form, attacking his whole body.

Starting point is 03:22:14 The pains left his head, but affected his inflated stomach. His entrails seemed pierced by hot bars of iron. A nervous cough racked him at regular intervals, awakening and almost strangling him in his bed. Then his appetite forsook him, Gassius hot acids and dry heats coursed through his stomach. He grew swollen, was choked for breath, and could not endure his clothes after each attempt at eating.

Starting point is 03:22:53 He shunned alcoholic beverages, coffee and tea, and drank only milk. And he took recourse to baths of cold water and dosed himself with asafetida, Valerian and Quinine. He even felt a desire to go out and strolled about the country when the rainy days came to make it desolate and still. He obliged himself to take exercise. As a last resort, he temporarily abandoned his books and corroded with ennui, determined to make his listless life tolerable by realising a project he had long deferred through laziness and a dislike of change since his instalment at Fontaine. Being no longer able to intoxicate himself with the felicities of style, with the delicious witchery of the rare epithet, which, while remaining precise,

Starting point is 03:24:00 yet opened to the imagination of the initiate, infinite and distant vistas, he determined to give the finishing touches to the decorations of his home. He would procure precious hot-house flowers, and thus permit himself a material occupation which might distract him, calm his nerves, and rest his brain. He also hoped that the the sight of their strange and splendid nuances would in some degree atone for the fanciful and genuine colours of style, which he was for the time to lose from his literary diet. End of Chapter 7 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weismanse

Starting point is 03:24:57 Translated by John Howard. He had always been passionately fond of flowers, but during his residence at Jutigny, that love had been lavished upon flowers of all sorts. He had never cultivated distinctions and discriminations in regard to them. Now his taste in this direction had grown refined and self-conscious. For a long time he had scorned the popular plant. which grow in flat baskets, in watered pots, under green awnings, or under the red parasols of Parisian markets. Simultaneous with the refinement of his literary taste and his preoccupations with art, which permitted him to be content only in the presence of choice creations,

Starting point is 03:25:58 distilled by subtly troubled brains, and simultaneous with the weary and wearying he began to feel in the presence of popular ideas. His love for flowers had grown, purged of all impurities and lees, and had become clarified. He compared a florist shop to a microcosm, wherein all the categories of society are represented. Here are poor common flowers, the kind found in hovels, which are truly at home only where resting on ledges of garret windows, their roots thrust into milk bottles and old pans, like the gilly flower, for example. And one also finds stupid and pretentious flowers like the rose, which belongs in the porcelain flower-pots painted by young girls. Then there are the flowers of noble lineage, like the orchid, so delicate and charming, at once cold, and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled in the heated glass palaces of Paris, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living in solitude, having absolutely nothing in common with the street

Starting point is 03:27:21 plants and other bourgeois flora. He permitted himself to feel a certain interest and pity only for the popular flowers enfeebled by their nearness to the odours of sinks and drains in the poor quarters. In revenge he detested the bouquets harmonising with the cream and gold rums of pretentious houses. For the joy of his eyes, he reserved those distinguished rare blooms which had been brought from distant lands, and whose lives were sustained by artful devices under artificial equators. But this very choice, this predilection for the conservatory plants, had itself changed under the influence of his mode of thought. Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality

Starting point is 03:28:23 had led him to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicas. faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India rubber and wire, calico and taffita, paper and silk. He was the possessor of a marvellous collection of tropical plants, the result of the labours of skillful artists, who knew how to follow nature, and recreate her, step by step, taking the flower as a bud, leading it to its full divest. development, even imitating its decline, reaching such a point of perfection as to convey every nuance, the most fugitive expressions of the flower when it opens at dawn and closes at evening, observing the appearance of the petals curled by the wind or rumpled by the rain, applying dew-drops of gum on its matutinal corollars, shaping it in full,

Starting point is 03:29:28 bloom, when the branches bend under the burden of their sap, or showing the dried stem and shrivelled cupules, when calyxes are thrown off and leaves fall to the ground. This wonderful art had held him entranced for a long while, but now he was dreaming of another experiment. He wished to go one step beyond. Instead of artificial flowers imitating real flowers, natural flowers should mimic the artificial ones. He directed his ideas to this end, and had not to seek long or go far, since his house

Starting point is 03:30:17 lay in the very heart of a famous horticultural region. He visited the conservatories of the Avenue de Chateau. and of the Oney Valley, and returned exhausted, his purse empty, astonished at the strange forms of vegetation he had seen, thinking of nothing but the species he had acquired, and continually haunted by memories of magnificent and fantastic plants. The flowers came several days later. This is Saint, holding a list in his hands, verified each one of his purchases. The gardeners from their wagons brought a collection of calediums, which sustained enormous, heart-shaped leaves on turgid, hairy stalks.

Starting point is 03:31:12 While preserving an air of relationship with its neighbour, no one leaf repeated the same pattern. Others were equally extraordinary. The roses, like the Virginale, seemed cut out of varnished cloth or oil silks. The white ones, like the Albano, appeared to have been cut out of an ox's transparent plura, or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Some, particularly the Madame Mame, imitated zinc and parodied pieces of steel. damped metal, having a hue of Emperor green, stained by drops of oil paint and by spots of white

Starting point is 03:31:58 and red lead. Others, like the Bosphorus, gave the illusion of a starched calico in crimson and myrtle green. Still others, like the Aurora Borealis, displayed leaves having the color of raw meat, streaked with purple sides, violet fibrored. brills, tumified leaves from which oozed blue wine and blood. The Albano and the Aurora sounded the two extreme notes of temperament, the apoplexy and chlorosis of this plant. The gardeners brought still other varieties which had the appearance of artificial skin ridged with false veins, and most of them looked as though consumed by syphilis and leprosy, for the exhibited livid surfaces of flesh, veined with scarlet rash, and damasked with eruptions. Some had the deep red hue of scars that have just closed, or the dark tint of incipient scabs. Others were marked with matter raised by scaldings.

Starting point is 03:33:17 There were forms which exhibited shaggy skins, hollowed by ulcers and relieved by cankers, and a few appeared embossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog-lard, with green unguents of belladonna, smeared with grains of dust and the yellow mica of ioda form. Collected in his home, these flowers, seemed to desiccent, more monstrous than when he had beheld them, confused with others among the glass-rooms of the conservatory. "'Sapristi!' he exclaimed enthusiastically. A new plant, modelled like the calediums, the Alocasia Metallica, excited him even more.

Starting point is 03:34:11 It was coated with a layer of bronze-green, on which glanced silver. reflections. It was the masterpiece of artificiality. It could be called a piece of stovepipe, cut by a chimney-maker into the form of a pike-head. The men next brought clusters of leaves, lozinch-like in shape and bottle-green in colour. In the centre rose a rod, at whose end a varnished ace of hearts swayed. though meaning to defy all conceivable forms of plants, a fleshy stalk climbed through the heart of this intense vermilion ace. A stalk that in some specimens was straight, in others, showed ringlets like a pig's tail. It was the antheurium, an aroid recently imported into

Starting point is 03:35:12 France from Colombia, a variety of that family to which also belonged an amorphofalus, a coach in China plant with leaves shaped like fish-knives, with long dark stems seamed with gashes, like lambs flecked with black. Dez-saint exalted! They brought a new batch of monstrosities from the wagon, echin-es-saint. Nopsies, issuing from padded compresses with rose-coloured flowers that looked like the pitiful stumps. Gaping Nidularia, revealing skinless foundations in steel plates. Tilanzia Lindenai, the colour of wine must with jagged scrapers.

Starting point is 03:36:06 Cypropedia, with complicated contours, a crazy piece of wood. work, seemingly designed by a crazy inventor. They looked like sabos, or like a lady's work-table, on which lies a human tongue with taut filaments, such as one sees designed on the illustrated pages of works treating of the diseases of the throat and mouth. Two little side-pieces of a red ju-jube colour, which appeared to have been borrowed from a child's toy mill, completed this singular collection of a tongue's underside, with the colour of slate and wine-leys, and of a glossy pocket from whose lining oozed a viscous glue. He could not remove his eyes from this unnatural orchid, which had been brought from India. Then the gardeners, impatient at his procrastinations,

Starting point is 03:37:15 themselves began to read the labels fastened to the pots they were carrying in. Bewildered, Dizzy Scent looked on and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the names. The encephalatus horidus, a gigantic iron-rust-coloured artiture. oak, like those put on portals of chateau to foil wall climbers. The Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm, surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars. The Zamia lehmanai, an immense pineapple, a wondrous chester leaf, planted in sweet heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jagged arrows, the sibotium spectabile, surpassing the others by the craziness of its structure,

Starting point is 03:38:15 hurling a defiance to reverie, as it darted through the palmated foliage an enormous orangutang tang tail, a hairy, dark tail whose end was twisted into the shape of a bishop's cross. But he gave little he, for he was impatiently awaiting the series of plants which most bewitched him. The vegetable ghouls, the carnivorous plants. The Antilles fly-trap, with its shaggy border, secreting a digestive liquid, armed with crooked prickles coiling around each other, forming a grating about the imprisoned insect. The drossira of the people,

Starting point is 03:39:06 bogs provided with glandular hair, the Saracena and the cephalothus, opening greedy horns, capable of digesting and absorbing real meat. Lastly, the Nepenthes, whose capricious appearance transcends all limits of eccentric forms. He never wearied of turning in his hands the pot in which this floral extravagance stirred. It imitated the gum-tree, whose long leaf of dark metallic green it possessed, but it differed in that a green string hung from the end of its leaf, an umbilic cord supporting a greenish urn, streaked with jasper, a sort of German porcelain pipe, a strange bird's nest which tranquilly swung about, revealing an interior

Starting point is 03:40:06 covered with hair. This is really something worthwhile, Des Isaint murmured. He was forced to tear himself away, for the gardeners, anxious to leave, were emptying their wagons of their contents, and depositing, without any semblance of order, the tuberous begonias and black croton

Starting point is 03:40:31 stained like sheet-iron with Saturn red. Then he perceived that one name still remained on his list. It was the Catlea of New Granada. On it was designed a little winged bell of a faded lilac, an almost dead mauve. He approached, placed his nose above the plant, and quickly recoiled. It exhaled an odour of toy boxes of painted pine. It recalled the horrors of a New Year's day. He felt that he would do well to mistrust it,

Starting point is 03:41:14 and he almost regretted having admitted among the scentless plants, this orchid which evoked the most disagreeable memories. As soon as he was alone, his gaze took in this vegetable tide which foamed in the vestibule. intermingled with each other they crossed their swords their chrises and stanchions taking on a resemblance to a green pile of arms above which like barbaric pennons floated flowers with hard dazzling colours The air of the room grew rarefied. Then in the shadowy dimness of a corner, near the floor, a white, soft light crept. He approached, and perceived that the phenomenon came from the rhizomorphies,

Starting point is 03:42:12 which throughout these night-lamp gleams while respiring. These plants are amazing, he reflected. Then he drew back to let his eye encompass the whole collection at a glance. His purpose was achieved. Not one single specimen seemed real. The cloth, paper, porcelain and metal seemed to have been loaned by man to nature to enable her to create her monstrosities. When unable to imitate man's handiwork, nature had been reduced to copying the inner membranes of animals, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, their magnificent corruptions. All is syphilis, thought de des Saint, his eye riveted upon the horrible, streaked stainings of the caledium plants,

Starting point is 03:43:17 caressed by a ray of light. And he beheld a sudden vision of humanity consumed through the centuries by the virus of this disease. Since the world's beginnings, every single creature had, from sire to sun, transmitted the imperishable heritage, the eternal malady which has ravaged man's ancestors, and whose effects are visible even in the bones of old fossils that have been exhumed. The disease had swept on through the centuries, gaining momentum. It even raged today, concealed in obscure sufferings, dissimulated under symptoms of headaches and bronchitis, hysterics and gout.

Starting point is 03:44:10 It crept to the surface from time to time, preferably attacking the ill-nourished and the poverty-stricken, spotting faces with gold pieces, ironically decorating the faces of poor wretches, stamping the mark of money on their skins to aggravate their unhappiness. And here, on the coloured leaves of the plants, it was resurgent in its original splendour. It is true. pursued de Césaint, returning to the course of reasoning he had momentarily abandoned. It is true that most often nature, left alone, is incapable of begetting such perverse and sickly specimens. She furnishes the original substance, the germ and the earth, the nourishing

Starting point is 03:45:07 womb, and the elements of the plant, which man then sets up, models, paints and sculpts as he wills. Limited, stubborn, and formless though she be, nature has at last been subjected, and her master has succeeded in changing, through chemical reaction, the earth's substances, in using combinations which had been long matured, cross-fertilisation processes long prepared,

Starting point is 03:45:41 in making use of slips and grafting, and man now forces differently coloured flowers in the same species, invests new tones for her, modifies to his will the long-standing form of her plants, polishes the rough clods, puts an end to the period of botch-work, places his stamp on them, imposes on them the mark of his own unique art. It cannot be gainsaid, he thought, resuming his reflections, that man in several years is able to effect a selection which slothful nature can produce only after centuries. Decidedly, the horticulturalists are the real artists nowadays. and he felt stifled in this atmosphere of crowded plants. The promenades he had taken during the last few days had exhausted him. The transition had been too sudden from the tepid atmosphere of his room to the out-of-doors, from the placid tranquility of a reclusive life to an active one.

Starting point is 03:47:06 He left the vestibule and stretched out on his bed to rest. But, absorbed by this new fancy of his, his mind, even in his sleep, could not lessen its tension, and he was soon wandering among the gloomy insanities of a nightmare. He found himself in the centre of a walk, in the heart of the wood. Twilight had fallen. He was strolling by the side of a woman, whom he had never seen before. She was emaciated and had flaxen hair, a bulldog face, freckles on her cheeks, crooked teeth projecting under a flat nose. She wore a nurse's white apron, a long neckerchief torn in strips on her bosom, half-shoes like those worn by Prussian soldiers, and a black bonnet adorned with frillings and trimmed with a rosette.

Starting point is 03:48:14 There was a foreign look about her, like that of a mountebank at a fair. He asked himself who the woman could be. He felt that she had long been an intimate part of his life. vainly he sought her origin, her name, her profession, her reason for being. No recollection of this liaison, which was inexplicable and yet positive, rewarded him. He was searching his past for a clue, when a strange figure suddenly appeared on horseback before them, trotting about for a moment, and then turning around in its saddle. Desa Saint's heart almost stopped beating, and he stood riveted to the spot with horror.

Starting point is 03:49:08 He nearly fainted. This enigmatic, sexless figure was green. Through her violet eyelids, the eyes were terrible in their cold blue. Pimples surrounded her mouth, horribly emaciated skeleton arms, bared to the elbows, issued from ragged, tattered sleeves, and trembled feverishly, and the skinny legs shivered in shoes that were several sizes too large. The ghastly eyes were fixed on Desecent, penetrating him, freezing his very marrow. Wilder than ever, the bulldog woman threw herself at him, and commenced to howl like a dog at the killing, her head hanging on her rigid neck.

Starting point is 03:50:05 Suddenly he understood the meaning of the frightful vision. Before him was the image of syphilis. Pursued by fear, and quite beside himself, he sped down a part of syphilis. He sped down a pufferice. pathway at top speed, and gained a pavilion standing among the laburnums to the left, where he fell into a chair in the passageway. After a few moments, when he was beginning to recover his breath, the sound of sobbing made him lift his head. The bulldog woman was in front of him, and grotesque and woeful, while warm tears fell from her eyes, she told him. him that she had lost her teeth in her flight. As she spoke, she drew clay pipes from the pocket of her nurse's apron, breaking them and shoving pieces of the stems into the hollows of

Starting point is 03:51:07 her gums. But she is really absurd, Dizisat told himself. These stems will never stick, and as a matter of fact they dropped out one after another. At this moment were heard the galloping sounds of an approaching horse. A fearful terror pierced Desecent. His limbs gave way. The galloping grew louder. Despair brought him sharply to his senses. He threw himself upon the woman who was stamping on the pipe-bowls, entreating her to be silent, not to give notice of their presence by the sound of her shoes. She writhed and struggled in his grip. He led her to the end of the corridor, strangling her to prevent her crying out.

Starting point is 03:52:02 Suddenly he noticed the door of a coffee house with green Venetian shutters. It was unlocked. He pushed it, rushed in headlong, and then paused. Before him, in the centre of a vast glade. huge white pierrot were leaping rabbit-like under the rays of the moon tears of discouragement welled to his eyes never no never would he succeed in crossing the threshold I shall be crushed, he thought. And as though to justify his fears, the ranks of tall pierrot's swarmed and multiplied. Their somersaults now covered the entire horizon, the whole sky on which they landed now on their heads, now on their feet. Then the hoofbeats paused.

Starting point is 03:53:06 He was in the passage behind a round skylight. More dead. than alive, D'Ezesant turned about, and through the round window beheld projecting erect ears, yellow teeth, nostrils from which breathed two jets of vapour, smelling of phenol. He sank to the ground, renouncing all ideas of flight or resistance, he closed his eyes so as not to behold the horrible gaze of sin. which penetrated through the wall, which even pierced his closed lids, which he felt gliding over his moist spine, over his body whose hair bristled in pools of cold sweat. He waited for the worst, and even hoped for the coup de grasse to end everything. A moment which seemed to last a century passed.

Starting point is 03:54:13 Shuddering he opened his eyes. Everything had vanished. Without any transition, as though by some stage device, a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance, a one, dead, waste, gullied landscape, A light illumined this desolate sight, A peaceful white light That recalled gleams of phosphorus dissolved in oil.

Starting point is 03:54:47 Something that stirred on the ground Became a deathly pale, nude woman Whose feet were covered with green silk stockings. He contemplated her with curiosity, As though frizzed by overheated. iron, her hair curled, becoming straight again at the end. A distended nostrils were the colour of roast veal. Her eyes were desirous, and she called to him in low tones. He had no time to answer, for already the woman was changing. Flamboyant colours passed

Starting point is 03:55:30 and repassed in her eyes. Her lips were stained with a furious ancillium red. The nipples of her breasts flashed, painted like two pods of red pepper. A sudden intuition came to him. It is the flower, he said, and his reasoning mania persisted in his nightmare. Then he observed the frightful irritation of the breasts and mouse. discovered spots of bister and copper on the skin of her body, and recoiled, bewildered. But the woman's eyes fascinated him, and he advanced slowly, attempting to thrust his heels into the earth, so as not to move, letting himself fall,

Starting point is 03:56:26 and yet lifting himself to reach her. Just as he touched her, the dark amorpho-pho-phorfer. Fulai, leaped up from all sides, and thrust their leaves into his abdomen, which rose and fell like a sea. He had broken all the plants, experiencing a limitless disgust in seeing these warm, firm stems stirring in his hands. Suddenly, the detested plants had disappeared, and two arms sought to enlace him. A terrible anguish made his heart beat furiously, for the eyes, the horrible eyes of the woman had become a clear, cold and terrible blue. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but she held him with an irresistible movement. He beheld the wild Nidularium

Starting point is 03:57:34 which yawned, bleeding in steel plates. With his body he touched the hideous wound of this plant. He felt himself dying. Awoke with a start, suffocating, frozen, mad with fear, and sighing. Oh, thank God, it was but a dream. End of Chapter 8. Against the Grain by Joris Carl Weismans, translated by John Howard. Chapter 9

Starting point is 03:58:17 These nightmares attacked him repeatedly. He was afraid to fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams, in which he tumbled down flights of stairs, and felt himself sinking, powerless, into abysmal depths. His nervous attacks, which had abated for several days, became acute, more violent and obstinate than ever, unearthing new tortures. The bed-covers tormented him. He stifled under the sheets, his body smarted and tingled as though stung by swarms of insects. These symptoms were augmented by a dull pain in his jaws, and a throbbing in his temples, which seemed to be gripped in a vice.

Starting point is 03:59:26 His alarm increased, but unfortunately the means of subduing the inexorable malady were not at hand. He had unsuccessfully sought to install a hydropathic apparatus in his dressing-room, but the impossibility of forcing water to the height on which his house was perched, and the difficulty of procuring water, even in the village where the fountains functioned sparingly, and only at certain hours of the day, caused him to renounce the project. Since he could not have floods of water playing on him from the nozzle of a hose, the only efficacious means of overcoming his insomnia and calming his nerves through its action on his spinal column, he was reduced to brief sprays or to mere cold baths, followed by energetic massages applied by his servant with the aid of a horsehair glove. but these measures failed to stem the march of his nervous disorder at best they afforded him a few hours relief dearly paid for by the return of the attacks in an even more virulent form his ennui passed all bounds his pleasure in the possession of his wonderful flowers was exhausted their textures and nuances palled on him

Starting point is 04:01:03 besides despite the care he lavished on them most of his plants drooped he had them removed from his rooms but in his state of extreme excitability their very absence exasperated him for his eyes were pained by the void. To while away the interminable hours, he had recourse to his portfolios of prints, and arranged his goyas. The first impressions of certain plates of the caprice, recognisable as proofs by their reddish hues, which he had bought at auction at a high price,

Starting point is 04:01:46 comforted him, and he lost himself in them. following the painter's fantasies, distracted by his vertiginous scenes, his witches astride on cats, his women striving to pluck out the teeth of a hanged man, his bandits, his succubi, his demons and dwarfs. Then he examined his other series of etchings and acquitants,

Starting point is 04:02:14 his proverbs with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wild rage. Finally, his plate of the garot, of which he cherished a marvellous trial-proof, printed on heavy water-marked paper, unmounted. Goya's savage verve and keenly fanciful talent delighted him. But the universal admiration his works had won, nevertheless estranged him slightly, and for years he had refused to frame them, for fear that the first

Starting point is 04:02:54 blundering fool who caught sight of them might deem it necessary to fly into banal and facile raptures before them. The same applied to his Rembrandts, which he examined from time to time half secretly. And if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable, as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate. This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life.

Starting point is 04:03:58 Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering, meanwhile, if his perceptions were not growing blunted. He closed his portfolios, and completely disconcerted, again plunged into melancholy. To divert the current of his thoughts and cool his brain, he sought books that, that would soothe him, and turned to the romances of Dickens, those charming novels, which are so satisfying to invalids and convalescence, who might grow fatigued by works of a more profound and vigorous nature. But they produced an effect contrary to his expectations.

Starting point is 04:04:59 These chaste lovers, these protesting heroines garbed to the neck, loved among the stars, confined themselves to lowered eyes and blushes, wept tears of joy and clasped hands, an exaggeration of purity, which threw him into an opposite excess. By the law of contrast, he leaped from one extreme to the other, let his imagination dwell on vibrant scenes between human lovers, and mused on. their sensual kisses and passionate embraces. His mind wandered off from his book to worlds far removed from the English prude, to wanton peccadilloes and salacious practices condemned by the church. He grew excited, the impotence of his mind and body which he had supposed final vanished.

Starting point is 04:06:02 Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves. He was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsequrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past, and he wallowed in memories of his old sin. He rose, and pensively opened a little box of Vermeigh, with a lid of Aventureen. It was filled with violet bonbons. He took one up, and, pressed it between his fingers, thinking of the strange properties of this sugary, frosted sweetmeat. When his virility had been impaired, when the thought of woman had roused in him

Starting point is 04:07:13 no sharp regret or desire, he had only to put one in his mouth, let it melt, and almost at once it induced misty, languishing memories, infinitely tender. These bonbons, invented by Cirodin, and bearing the ridiculous name of Perle de Pirene, where each a drop of sarcantus perfume, a drop of feminine essence, crystallized in a morsel of sugar. They penetrated the papillai of the tongue, recalling the very savour of voluptuous kisses. Usually he smiled as he inhaled this love aroma, this shadow of a caress which for a moment restored the delights of women he had once adored.

Starting point is 04:08:08 Today they were not merely suggestive. They no longer served as a delicate hint of his distant riotous past. They were become powerful, thrusting aside the veils, exposing before his eyes the important unfortunate, corporeal and brutal reality. At the head of the procession of mistresses, whom the fragrance of the bonbons helped to place in bold relief, one paused, displaying long white teeth, a satiny rose skin, a snub nose, mouse, mouse-coloured eyes, and close-cropped blonde hair. This was Miss Urania, an American with a vigorous body, sinewy limbs, muscles of steel and arms of iron.

Starting point is 04:09:07 She had been one of the most celebrated acrobats of the circus. De Césaint had watched her attentively through many long evenings. At first she had seemed to him what she really was, a strong, and beautiful woman. But the desire to know her never troubled him. She possessed nothing to recommend her in the eyes of a blasé man, and yet he returned to the circus, allured by he knew not what, importuned by a sentiment difficult to define. Gradually, as he watched her, a fantastic idea seized him. Her graceful and and arch-feminine ways receded to the background of his mind, replaced by her power and strength,

Starting point is 04:10:02 which had for him all the charm of masculinity. Compared with her, Desisant seemed to himself a frail, effeminate creature, and he began to desire her, as ardently as an anemic young girl might desire some loutish Hercules, whose arms could crush her in a strong embrace. One evening he finally decided to communicate with her and dispatched one of the attendants on this errand. Miss Eurania deemed it necessary not to yield before a preliminary courtship, but she showed herself amenable, as it was common gossip that Desicant was rich

Starting point is 04:10:51 and that his name was instrumental in establishing women. But as soon as his wishes were granted, his disappointment surpassed any he had yet experienced. He had persuaded himself that the American woman would be as bestial and stupid as a wrestler at a county fair, and instead her stupidity was of an altogether feminine nature. Certainly she lacked education and tact, had neither good sense nor wit, and displayed an animal veracity at table, but she possessed all the childish trays of a woman.

Starting point is 04:11:37 Her manner and speech were coquettish and affected, those of a silly scandal-loving young girl. There was absolutely nothing masculine about her. Furthermore, she was withdrawn and puritanical in her embraces, displaying none of the brute force he had dreaded, yet longed for, and she was subject to none of the perturbations of his sex. D'Ezesant inevitably returned to the masculine role he had momentarily abandoned. His impression of femininity, weakness, needy. of protection, of fear even, disappeared. The illusion was no longer possible. Miss Urania was an ordinary mistress in no wise justifying the cerebral curiosity she had at first awakened in him. Although the charm of her firm skin and magnificent beauty had at first astonished and captivated

Starting point is 04:12:48 desiccent. He lost no time in terminating this liaison, for his impotence was prematurely hastened by the frozen and prudish caresses of this woman. And yet, she was the first of all the women he had loved, now flitting through his reverie to stand out. But if she was more strongly imprinted on his memory than a host of others whose allurements had been less spurious and more seductive, the reason must be ascribed to her healthy animalism, to her exuberance, which contrasted so strikingly with the perfumed anemia of the others, a faint suggestion of which he found in the delicate Sijodin bonbon. Miss Eurania haunted him by reason of her very different, but almost instantly, offended by the intrusion of this natural, crude aroma, the antithesis of the scented confection,

Starting point is 04:13:56 Desicant returned to more civilized exhalations, and his thoughts reverted to his other mistresses. They pressed upon him in a throng, but above them all rose a woman whose startling talents had satisfied him for months. She was a little, slender brunette, with black eyes and burnished hair parted on one side, and sleek down over her head. He had known her in a cafe where she gave ventriloquial performances. Before the amazed patrons, she caused her tiny cardboard figures, placed near each other on chairs to talk. She conversed with the animated mannequins, while flies buzzed around the chandeliers.

Starting point is 04:14:51 Then one heard the rustling of the tense audience, surprised to find itself seated and instinctively recoiling when they heard the rumbling of imaginary carriages. Dizzy Scent had been fascinated. He lost no time in winning over, the ventriloquist, tempting her with large sums of money. She delighted him by the very contrast she exhibited to the American woman. This brunette used strong perfumes, and burned like

Starting point is 04:15:25 a crater. Despite all her blandishments, Desicant wearied of her in a few short hours. But this did not prevent him from letting himself be fleeced. For the first of his own The phenomenon of the ventriloquist attracted him more than did the charms of the mistress. Certain plans he had long pondered upon ripened, and he decided to bring them to fruition. One evening he ordered a tiny sphinx brought in, a sphinx carved from black marble, and resting in the classic pose with outstretched paws and erect head. He also purchased a chimera of polychrome clay. It brandished its mane of hair, and its sides resembled a pair of bellows.

Starting point is 04:16:21 These two images he placed in a corner of the room. Then he extinguished the lamps, permitting the glowing embers to throw a dim light around the room, and to magnify the objects which were almost immersed in gloom. Then he stretched out on a couch beside the woman whose motionless figure was touched by the ember gleams and waited. With strange intonations that he had long and patiently taught her, she animated the two monsters. She did not even move her lips. She did not even glance in their direction. and in the silence followed the marvellous dialogue of the chimera and the sphinx.

Starting point is 04:17:13 It was recited in deep, guttural tones, which were at first rourcus, then turned shrill and unearthly. Here, chimera, pause. Never! Lulled by the admirable prose of Flaubert, he listened, He panted and shivering sensations raced through his frame, when the chimera uttered the magical and solemn phrase. New perfumes I seek, stranger flowers I seek, pleasures not yet discovered. Ah, it was to him that this voice, mysterious as an incantation, spoke. It was to him that this voice, mysterious as an incantation, spoke. It was to him that this voice recounted her feverish agitation for the unknown, her insatiable ideals,

Starting point is 04:18:12 her imperative need to escape from the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines of thought, to grope towards the mists of elusive, unattainable art. The poignant tragedy of his past failures rent his heart. Gently, he clasped the silent woman at his side. He sought refuge in her nearness, like a child who is inconsolable. He was blind to the sulkiness of the Comedienne, obliged to perform off-scene, in her leisure moments, far from the spotlight. Their liaison continued, but his spells of exhaustion soon became acute.

Starting point is 04:19:05 His brain no longer sufficed to stimulate his benumbed body. No longer did his nerves obey his will, and now the crazy whims of dotards dominated him. Terrified by the approach of a disastrous weakness in the presence of his mistress, he resorted to fear, that oldest, most efficacious of excitants. A hoarse voice from behind the door would exclaim while he held the woman in his arms. "'Open the door, woman, I know you're in there, and with whom? Just wait, wait!' Instantly, like a libertine stirred by fear of discovery in the open, he recovered his strength and hurled himself madly upon the ventriloquist, whose voice continued to bluster outside the room.

Starting point is 04:20:06 In this wise, he experienced the pleasures of a panic-stricken person. But this state unfortunately did not last long, and despite the sums he paid her, the ventriloquist parted to offer herself to someone less exigent and less complex. He had regretted her defection, and now, recalling her, the other women seemed insipid, their childish graces and monotonous coquetry, disgusting him. In the ferment of his disordered brain, he delighted in minglingling. with these recollections of his past, other more gloomy pleasures, as theology qualifies the evocation of past disgraceful acts. With the physical visions, he mingled spiritual ardors,

Starting point is 04:21:07 brought into play and motivated by his old readings of the casuists, of the bosom-baums, and the Dianas, of the Liguaries and the Sanchez's, treating of transgressions against the sixth and ninth commandments of the Decahologue. In awakening an almost divine ideal in this soul steeped in her precepts, a soul possibly predisposed to the teachings of the church through hereditary influences dating back from the reign of Henri Trois, religion had also stirred the illegitimate, forbidden enjoyment of the senses. Licentious and mystical obsessions haunted his brain. They mingled confusedly, and he would often be troubled by an unappeasable desire to shun the vulgarities of the world, and to plunge, far from the

Starting point is 04:22:09 customs and modes held in such reverence, into convulsions and raptures, which were holy or infernal. and which in either case proved too exhausting and enervating. He would arise prostrate from such reveries, fatigued and all but lifeless. He would light the lamps and candles so as to flood the room with light, for he hoped that by so doing he might possibly diminish the intolerably persistent and dull throbbing of his arcing. which beat under his neck with redoubled strokes. End of Chapter 9 Against the Grain by Jorice Carl Weismanz, translated by John Howard.

Starting point is 04:23:10 Chapter 10 During the course of this malady which attacks impoverished races, sudden calms succeed an attack. strangely enough, Dezésaint, awoke one morning, recovered. No longer was he tormented by the throbbing of his neck or by his racking cough. Instead, he had an ineffable sensation of contentment, a lightness of mind, in which thought was sparklingly clear, turning from a turbid, opaque green colour, to a liquid iridescent. and a distance, magical with tender rainbow tints.

Starting point is 04:23:57 This lasted several days. Then hallucinations of odour suddenly appeared. His rum was aromatic with the fragrance of frangipane. He tried to ascertain if a bottle were not uncorked. No, not a bottle was to be found in the room, and he passed into his study and thence to the curts. kitchen, still the odour persisted. Liz Isand rang for his servant and asked if he smelled anything.

Starting point is 04:24:33 The domestic sniffed the air, and declared he could not detect any perfume. There was no doubt about it. His nervous attacks had returned again, and the appearance of a new illusion of the senses. Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary aroma, he resolved to steep himself in real perfumes, hoping that this homeopathic treatment would cure him or would at least drown the persistent odour. He betook himself to his dressing-room. There, near an old baptistery, which he used as a wash-basin, under a long mirror of the dressing-room, forged iron, which, like the edge of a well, silvered by the moon, confined the green dull surface

Starting point is 04:25:29 of the mirror, where bottles of every conceivable size and form placed on ivory shelves. He set them on the table, and divided them into two series, one of the simple perfumes, pure extracts or spirits, the other of compounds. perfumes designated under the generic term of bouquets. He sank into an easy chair and meditated. He had long been skilled in the science of smell. He believed that this sense could give one delights equal to those of hearing and sight. Each sense being susceptible, if naturally keen and if properly cultivated, to new impressions.

Starting point is 04:26:20 which it could intensify, coordinate, and compose into that unity which constitutes a creative work. And it was not more abnormal and unnatural that an art should be called into existence by disengaging odours, than that another art should be evoked by detaching sound waves, or by striking the eye with diversely coloured rays. But if no person could discern, without intuition developed by study, a painting by a master, from a daub, a melody of Beethoven, from one by Clapisson. No more could anyone at first, without preliminary initiation, help confusing a bouquet invented by a sincere artist, with a pot-pourri made by some manufacturer to be sold in groceries and bazaars. In this art, the branch devoted to achieving certain effects by

Starting point is 04:27:29 artificial methods particularly delighted him. Perfumes, in fact, rarely come from the flowers whose names they bear. The artist who dared to borrow nature's elements would only produce a bastard work which would have neither authenticity nor style. inasmuch as the essence obtained by the distillation of flowers would bear but a distant and vulgar relation to the odour of the living flower wafting its fragrance into the air. Thus, with the exception of the inimitable jasmine, which it is impossible to counterfeit, all flowers are perfectly represented by the blend of aromatic spirits, stealing the very personality of the model, and to it adding that nuance the more, that heady scent, that rare touch, which entitled a thing to be called a work of art.

Starting point is 04:28:35 resume, in the science of perfumery the artist develops the natural odour of the flowers, working over his subject, like a jeweller, refining the luster of a gem, and making it precious. Little by little, the arcana of this art, most neglected of all, was revealed to Desecent, who could now read this language, as diversified and insinuating as that of literature, this style with its unexpected concision under its vague, flowing appearance. To achieve this end, he had first been compelled to master the grammar and understand the syntax of odours, learning the secret of the rules that regulate them, and once familiarised with the dialect, he compared the works of the masters, of the Atkins'

Starting point is 04:29:35 and Lubins, the Chardins and Violet, the Legrandes and Pierses. Then he separated the construction of their phrases, weighed the value of their words, and the arrangement of their periods. Later on, in this idiom of fluids, experience was able to support theories too often incomplete and banal. Classic perfumery, in fact, was scarcely diversified, almost colourless and uniformly issuing from the mould cast by the ancient chemists. It was in its dotage, confined to its old elumbics when the romantic period was born, and had modified the old style, rejuvenating

Starting point is 04:30:27 it, making it more supple and malleable. Step by step, it's history followed that of our language. The perfumed Louis-Tres style, composed of elements highly prized at that time, of iris powder, musk, chive, and myrtle water, already designated under the name of Water of the Angels, was hardly sufficient to express the cavalier graces, the rather the crude tones of the period, which certain sonnets of Saint-Ament have preserved for us. Later, with myrrh and olibbonum, the mystic odours, austere and powerful, the pompous gesture of the great period, the redundant artifices of oratorial art, the full, sustained, harmonious style of Bossiue, and the masters of the

Starting point is 04:31:28 the pulpit were almost possible. Still later, the sophisticated, rather bored graces of French society under Louis Cain's, more easily found their interpretation in the almond, which in a manner summed up this epoch. Then, after the ennui and jadedness of the First Empire, which misused Ode-Cologne and Rosemary, The perfumery rushed, in the wake of Victor Hugo and Gautier, towards the Levant. It created oriental combinations, vivid eastern nosegays, discovered new intonations, antitheses which until then had been unattempted, selected and made use of antique nuances,

Starting point is 04:32:23 which it complicated, refined and assorted. It resolutely rejected that voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by the Malazerp, the Boalos, the Andrieus, and the Baur-Lormions, wretched distillers of their own poems. But this language had not remained stationary since the period of 1830. It had continued to evolve, and patterning itself on the progress of the same. century had advanced parallel with the other arts. It too had yielded to the desires of amateurs and artists, receiving its inspiration from the Chinese and Japanese, conceiving fragrant albums, imitating the Takeooka bouquets of flowers, obtaining the odour of rondelegia from the blend of lavender and clove, the peculiar aroma of Chinese ink from the marriage

Starting point is 04:33:29 of patuli and camphor, the emanation of Japanese hovenia by compounds of citron, clove, and neroly. Desicant studied and analysed the essences of these fluids, experimenting to corroborate their texts. He took pleasure in playing the role of a psychologist for his personal satisfaction, in taking apart and reassembling the machinery of a work, in separating the pieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his sense of smell had thereby attained a sureness that was all but perfect. Just as a wine merchant has only to smell a drop of wine to recognise the grape, as a hop-dealer determines the exact value of hops by sniffing a bag, as a Chinese trader can immediately tell the origin of the teas he smells, knowing in what farms of what

Starting point is 04:34:37 mountains, in what buddistic convents it was cultivated. the very time when its leaves were gathered, the state and the degree of torrefaction, the effect upon it of its proximity to the plum-tree and other flowers, to all those perfumes which change its essence, adding to it an unexpected touch, and introducing into its dryish flavour, a hint of distant, fresh flowers. Just so could desiccent, by inhaling a d'escent, by inhaling a d'Arts, by inhaling a d'Arisle, dash of perfume instantly explain its mixture and the psychology of its blend, and could almost give the name of the artist who had composed and given it the personal mark of his

Starting point is 04:35:26 individual style. Naturally he had a collection of all the products used by perfumers. He even had the real mecca balm. That rare balm cultivated only in certain parts of Arabia Petraea, and under the monopoly of the ruler. Now, seated in his dressing-room in front of his table, he thought of creating a new bouquet, and he was overcome by that moment of wavering confidence, familiar to write us when, after months of inaction, they prepare for a new work. Like Balzac, who was wont to scribble on many sheets of paper so as to put himself

Starting point is 04:36:14 in a mood for work, Desis Saint felt the necessity of steadying his hand by several initial and unimportant experiments. Desiring to create heliotrope, he took down bottles of vanilla and almond, and then changed his idea and decided to experiment with sweet peas. He groped for a long time, unable to effect the proper combinations, for orange is dominant in the fragrance of this flower. He attempted several combinations, and ended in achieving the exact blend, by joining tube-rose and rose to orange, the whole united by a drop of vanilla. He felt alert and ready for work. Now he made some tea by blending Cassi with Iris.

Starting point is 04:37:15 Then, sure of his technique, he decided to proceed with a fulminating phrase, whose thunderous roar would annihilate the insidious odour of almond, still hovering over his room. He worked with amber and with Tonkin must. mask, marvellously powerful, with patchuli, the most poignant of vegetable perfumes, whose flower, in its habitat, wafts an odour of mildew. Try what he would. The eighteenth century obsessed him. The pannier robes and furbelows appeared before his eyes. Memories of Bouches, Venus, haunted him.

Starting point is 04:38:05 of Temidard's romance, of the exquisite Rosette pursued him. Furious, he rose, and to rid himself of the obsession, with all his strength he inhaled that pure essence of spikenard, so dear to Orientals, and so repulsive to Europeans, because of its pronounced odour of Valerian. He was stunned by the violence of the shock. As though pounded by hammerstrokes, the filigrains of the delicate odour disappeared. He profited by the period of respite to escape the dead centuries, the antiquated fumes, and to enter, as he formerly had done, less limited or more recent works. He had of old loved to lull himself with perfumes.

Starting point is 04:39:05 He used effects analogous to those of the poets, and employed the admirable order of certain pieces of baudelaire, such as Irreparable and Le Balcon, where the last of the five lines composing the strophy is the echo of the first verse, and returns like a refrain to steep the source. soul in infinite depths of melancholy and languor. He strayed into reveries evoked by those aromatic stanzas,

Starting point is 04:39:40 suddenly brought to his point of departure, to the motive of his meditation, by the return of the initial theme, reappearing at stated intervals in the fragrant orchestration of the poem. He actually wished to saunter through an astonishing, diversified landscape, and he began with a sonorous, ample phrase that suddenly opened a long vista of fields for him. With his vaporizers, he injected an essence formed of ambrosia, lavender, and sweet peas

Starting point is 04:40:19 into this rum. This formed an essence, which, when distilled by an artist, deserves the name by which it is known, extract of wild grass. Into this he introduced an exact blend of tube rose, orange flower and almond, and forthwith artificial lilacs sprang into being, while the linden trees rustled, their thin emanations imitated by extract of London tillia, drooping earthward. Into this décre, arranged with a few broad lines, receding as far as the eye could reach under his closed lids, he introduced a light reign of human and half-feline essences, possessing the aroma of petticoats, breathing of the powdered, painted woman, the Stephanotis, Ayapana, opoponax, Champa,

Starting point is 04:41:25 Sarkandthus and Cypress wine, to which he added a dash of syringa, in order to give to the artificial life of paints which they exhaled a suggestion of natural dewy laughter and pleasures enjoyed in the open air. Then, through a ventilator, he permitted these fragrant waves to escape, only preserving the field, which he renewed, compelling it to return in his strophies like a retornello. The women had gradually disappeared, now the plain had grown solitary. Suddenly, on the enchanted horizon, factories appeared, whose tall chimneys flared like bowls of punch.

Starting point is 04:42:19 The odour of factories and of chemical products, now passed with the breeze which was simulated by means of fans nature exhaled its sweet effluvia amid this putrescence daise saint warmed a pellet of storax and a singular odour at once repugnant and exquisite pervaded the room it partook of the delicious fragrance of junquil and of the stench of gutter and coal oil. He disinfected his hands, inserted his resin in a hermetically sealed box, and the factories disappeared. Then, among the revived vapours of the lindens and meadow-grass, he threw several drops of new-mown hay. And amid this magic sight, for the moment despoiled of its lilacs, XIVs of hay were piled up, introducing a new season, and scattering their fine effluence into these summer odours.

Starting point is 04:43:32 At last, when he had sufficiently enjoyed this sight, he suddenly scattered the exotic perfumes, emptied his vaporizers, threw in his concentrated spirits, poured his barms, and in the exasperated and stifling heat of the room, there rose a crazy, sublimated nature, a paradoxical nature, which was neither genuine nor charming, reuniting the tropical spices and the peppery breath of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaica Hediosmia, with the French odours of Jasmine, Hawthorne, and Verbena. Regardless of seasons and climates, he forced trees of diverse essences into life, and flowers with conflicting fragrances and colours. By the clash of these tones, he created a general, nondescript, unexpected, strange perfume, in which reappeared like an obstinate refrain,

Starting point is 04:44:42 the decorative phrase of the beginning, the odour of the meadows, fanned by the lilacs and lindens. Suddenly a poignant pain seized him. He felt as though wimbles were drilling into his temples. Opening his eyes, he found himself in his dressing-room, seated in front of his table. Stupified, he painfully walked across the room. to the window which he half opened. A puff of wind dispelled the stifling atmosphere which was enveloping him. To exercise his limbs he walked up and down, gazing at the ceiling, where crabs and sea-racks stood out in relief, against a background as light in colour as the sands of the seashore. A similar décre covered the plinths and bordered the partitions which were covered with

Starting point is 04:45:45 Japanese sea-green crape, slightly wrinkled, imitating a river rippled by the wind. In this light current swam a rose petal, around which circled a school of tiny fish, painted with two strokes of the brush. but his eyelids remained heavy. He ceased to pace about the short space between the baptistry and the bath. He leaned against the window. His dizziness ended. He carefully stopped up the vials and used the occasion to arrange his cosmetics. Since his arrival at Fontenet, he had not touched them,

Starting point is 04:46:34 And now was quite astonished to behold once more this collection formerly visited by so many women. The flasks and jars were lying heaped up against each other. Here a porcelain box contained a marvellous white cream, which, when applied on the cheeks, turns to a tender rose colour under the action of the air. to such a true flesh colour that it procures the very illusion of a skin touched with blood. There lacquer objects, encrusted with mother of pearl, enclosed Japanese gold and Athenian green, the colour of the cancerous wing, gold and green, which changed to deep purple when wetted. There were jars filled with filbert paste.

Starting point is 04:47:31 the circus of the harem, emulsions of lilies, lotions of strawberry water and elders for the complexion, and tiny bottles filled with solutions of Chinese ink and rose water for the eyes. There were tweezers, scissors,

Starting point is 04:47:51 rouge and powder puffs, files and beauty patches. He handled this collection, formerly bought to pleases, a mistress who swooned under the influence of certain aromatics and balms, a nervous, unbalanced woman who loved to steep the nipples of her breasts in perfumes, but who never really experienced a delicious and overwhelming ecstasy, save when her head was scraped with a comb, or when she could inhale amid caresses the odour of perspiration.

Starting point is 04:48:31 or the plaster of unfinished houses on rainy days or of dust splashed by huge drops of rain during summer storms he mused over these memories and one afternoon spent at pontin through idleness and curiosity in company with this woman at the home of one of her sisters returned to him stirring in him a forgotten world of old ideas and perfumes. While the two women prattled and displayed their gowns, he had drawn near the window and had seen through the dusty panes, the muddy street sprawling before him, and had heard the repeated sounds of goloshes over the puddles of the pavement. This scene, already far removed, came to him.

Starting point is 04:49:29 him suddenly, strangely and vividly. Pontein was there before him, animated and throbbing in this greenish and dull mirror into which his unseeing eyes plunged. A hallucination transported him far from Fontaine. Besides reflecting the street, the mirror brought back thoughts it had once been instrumental in evoking, and plunged in reverie, he repeated to himself this ingenious, sad, and comforting composition he had formerly written upon returning to Paris. Yes, the season of downpours is come. Now behold water-spouts, vomiting as they rush over the pavements, and rubbish marinate in puddles that fill the holes scooped out of the Macadam. Under a larring sky in the damp air, the walls of houses have black perspiration,

Starting point is 04:50:35 and their air-holes are fetid. The loathsomeness of existence increases and melancholy overwhelms one. The seeds of vileness which each person harbours in his soul sprout. The craving for vile, bortures, seizes austere people, and base desires grow rampant in the brains of respectable men. And yet I warm myself here before a cheerful fire. From a basket of blossoming flowers comes the aroma of balsamic benzoin, geranium, and the hall-flowered bent grass which permeates the room. In the very month of November, at Pontin, in the Rue de Paris, springtime persists. Here in my solitude I laugh at the fears of families, which, to shun the approaching cold weather, escape on every steamer to Cannes and to other winter resorts.

Starting point is 04:51:49 In clement nature does nothing to contribute to this extraordinary phenomenon. It must be said that his artificial season at Pontin is the result of man's ingenuity. In fact, these flowers are made of taffita and are mounted on wire. The springtime odour filters through the window joints, exhaled from the neighbouring factories, from the perfumaries of Pinot and St James. For the workmen exhausted by the hard labours of the plants, for the young employees who too often are fathers, the illusion of a little healthy air is possible, thanks to these manufacturers. So, from this fabulous subterfuge of a country, can an intelligent cure arise? The consumptive men about town who are

Starting point is 04:52:50 sent to the south, die, their end due to the change in their habits, and to the nostalgia for the Parisian excesses which destroyed them. Here, under an artificial climate, libertine memories will reappear, the languishing feminine emanations evaporated by the factories. Instead of the deadly ennui of provincial life, the doctor can thus platonically substitute for his patient the atmosphere of the Parisian women and of boudoirs. Most often, all that is necessary to effect the cure is for the subject to have a somewhat fertile imagination. Since nowadays nothing genuine exists, since the wine one drinks and the liberty one boldly proclaims a laughable and a sham, since it really needs a healthy dose of good will to believe that the governing classes are respectable and that the lower classes are worthy of being assisted or pitied, it seems to me, concluding,

Starting point is 04:54:08 did desicente, to be neither ridiculous nor senseless, to ask of my fellow-men a quantity of illusion, barely equivalent to what they spend daily in idiotic ends, so as to be able to convince themselves that the town of Pontin is an artificial niece, or a manton. But all this does not prevent me from seeing, he said, forced by weakness from his meditations, that I must be careful to mistrust these delicious and abominable practices which may ruin my constitution. He sighed. Well, well, more pleasures to moderate, more precautions to be taken. And he passed into his study, hoping the more easily to escape the spell of the

Starting point is 04:55:08 perfumes. He opened the window wide, glad to be able to breathe the air. But it suddenly seemed to him that the breeze brought in a vague tide of Bergamot, with which Jasmine and rosewater were blent. Agitated, he asked himself whether he was not really under the yoke of one of those possessions, exercised in the Middle Ages. The odour changed and was transformed, but it persisted. A faint sense of tincture of tolu, of balm of Peru and of saffron, united by several drams of amber and musk, now issued from the sleeping village, and suddenly the metamorphosis was effected.

Starting point is 04:56:04 These scattered elements were blent, and once more the fiends, the ferocious. Frangipane spread from the valley of Fontenay as far as the fort, assailing his exhausted nostrils, once more shattering his helpless nerves, and throwing him into such a prostration that he fell, unconscious, on the window-sill. End of Chapter 10 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weisman. translated by John Howard. Chapter 11

Starting point is 04:56:47 The servants were seized with alarm, and lost no time in calling the Fontené physician, who was completely at sea about Desaisein's condition. He mumbled a few medical terms, felt his pulse, examined the invalid's tongue, unsuccessfully sought to make him speak, prescribed sedatives and rest, promised to return on the morrow, and at the negative sign made by Desicent, who recovered enough strength to chide the zeal of his servants, and to bid farewell to this intruder. He departed, and was soon retailing through the village the eccentricities of this house, whose decorations had positively amazed him, and held him rooted to the spot. To the great astonishment of the domestics, who no longer dared stir from

Starting point is 04:57:53 the servants' quarters, their master recovered in a few days, and they surprised him drumming against the window-panes, gazing at the sky with a troubled look. One afternoon the bells were peremptorily rung, and Dez-Issin commanded his trunks to be packed for a long voyage. While the man and the woman were choosing, under his guidance, the necessary equipment, he feverishly paced up and down the cabin of the dining-room, consulted the timetables of the steamers, walked through his study where he continued to gaze at the clouds, with an air at once impatient and satisfied. For a whole week the weather had been atrocious.

Starting point is 04:58:47 Streams of soot raced unceasing across the grey fields of the sky masses of clouds, like rocks torn from the earth. At intervals, showers swept down, engulfing the valley with torrents of rain. Today the appearance of the heavens had changed. The rivers of ink had evaporated and vanished, and the harsh contours of the clouds had softened. The sky was uniformly flat and covered with a brackish film.

Starting point is 04:59:23 Little by little this film seemed to drop, and a watery haze covered the countryside. the countryside. The rain no longer fell in cataracts as on the preceding evening. Instead, it fell incessantly, fine, sharp and penetrating. It inundated the walks, covered the roads with its innumerable threads which joined heaven and earth. The livid sky threw a one leaden light on the village, which was now transformed into a lake of mud, pricked by needles of water that dotted the puddles with drops of bright silver. In this desolation of nature, everything was grey,

Starting point is 05:00:16 and only the housetops gleamed against the dead tones of the walls. What weather! sighed the aged domestic, placing on a chair the clothes which his master had requested of him, an outfit formerly ordered from London. Desise Saint's sole response was to rub his hands and to sit down in front of a bookcase with glass doors. He examined the socks which had been placed nearby for his inspection. For a moment he hesitated on the colour. Then he quickly studied the melancholy day, and earnestly bethought himself of the effect he desired.

Starting point is 05:01:03 He chose a pair the colour of Feij-Mourg, quickly slipped them on, put on a pair of buttoned shoes, donned the mouse-grey suit, which was chequered with a lava-grey, and dotted with black, placed a small hunting-cap on his head, and threw a blue rain-coat, over him. He reached the railway station, followed by the servant, who almost bent under the weight of a trunk, of a lease, a carpet bag, a hat-box, and a travelling rug containing umbrellas and canes. He informed his servant that the date of his return was problematical, that he might return in a year, in a month, in a week, or even sooner, and enjoined him to change nothing in the house. He gave a sum of money, which he thought would be necessary for the upkeep of the house during his absence, and climbed into the coach, leaving the old man astounded, arms waving and mouth gaping behind the rail while the train got underway.

Starting point is 05:02:20 He was alone in his compartment. A vague and dirty countryside, such as one seized through an aquarium of troubled water, receded rapidly behind the train, which was lashed by the rain. Plunged in his meditations, Dizant closed his eyes. Once more, this so ardently desired

Starting point is 05:02:46 and finally attained solitude had ended in a fearful distress. This silence, which formerly would have appeared as a compensation for the stupidities heard for years, now weighed on him with an unendurable burden. One morning he had awakened as uneasy as a prisoner in his cell. His lips had sought to articulate sounds. Tears had welled to his eyes, and he had found it impossible to breathe, suffocating, like a person who had sobbed for hours.

Starting point is 05:03:29 Seized with a desire to walk, to behold a human figure, to speak to someone, to mingle with life, he had proceeded to call his domestics, employing a specious pretext. But conversation with them. was impossible. Besides the fact that these old people bowed down by years of silence and the customs of attendance were almost dumb, the distance at which Desecesant had always kept them was hardly conducive to inducing them to open their mouths now. Two, they possessed dull brains, and were incapable of answering his questions. other than by monosyllables.

Starting point is 05:04:21 It was impossible, therefore, to find any solace in their society. But a new phenomenon now occurred. The reading of the novels of Dickens, which he had lately undertaken to soothe his nerves, and which had only produced effect the opposite of those hoped for, began slowly to act in an unexpected manner.

Starting point is 05:04:47 bringing on visions of English existence, on which he mused for hours. Little by little, in these fictive contemplations, ideas insinuated themselves, ideas of the voyage brought to an end of verified dreams, on which was imposed the desire to experience new impressions, and thus escape the exhausting sense. terrible debauches, intent upon beating in the void. With its mist and rain, this abominable weather aided his thoughts still more, by reinforcing the memories of his readings, by placing under his eyes the unfading image of a land of fog and mud, and by refusing to let his ideas wander idly.

Starting point is 05:05:46 One day, able to endure it no longer, he had instantly decided. Such was his haste, that he even took flight before the designated time, for he wished to shun the present moment, wished to find himself jostled and shouldered in the hubbup of crowded streets and railway stations. I breathe, he exclaimed, when the tree. train moderated its waltz, and stopped in the So-station rotunda, panting while its wheels performed its last pirouettes. Once in the Boulevard d'Enferre, he hailed a coachman. In some strange manner he extracted a pleasure from the fact that he was so hampered with

Starting point is 05:06:38 trunks and rugs. By promising a substantial tip, he reached an understanding with the man of the man of the brown trousers and red waistcoat. At once, he commanded, and when you reach the Rue de Rivoli, stop in front of Galignani's messenger. Before departing, he desired to buy a Baidecker or Murray guide of London. The carriage got under way heavily, raising rings of mud around its wheels and moving through marsh-like ground.

Starting point is 05:07:15 Beneath the grey sky, which seemed suspended over the housetops, water gushed down the thick sides of the high walls, spouts overflowed, and the streets were coated with a slimy dirt

Starting point is 05:07:30 in which passers-by slipped. Thick-set men paused on sidewalks be spattered by passing omnibuses, and women, their skirts, tucked up to the knees, bent under umbrellas, flattened themselves against the shops to avoid being splashed. The rain entered diagonally through the carriage doors. Dese Césaint was obliged to lift the carriage windows down which the water ran,

Starting point is 05:08:03 while drops of mud furrowed their way like fireworks on each side of the fiacre. To the monotonous sound of sacks of peas shaking against his head, through the action of the showers pattering against the trunks and on the carriage rug, Dizant dreamed of his voyage. This already was a partial realisation of his England, enjoyed in Paris through the means of this frightful weather. A rainy, colossal London, smelling of molten metal and of soot, ceaselessly steaming and smoking in the fog, now spread out before his eyes. Then rows of docks sprawled ahead as far as the eye could reach, docks full of cranes, handwins, handwins and bales, swarming with men perched on masts, or astride-yard sail. while myriads of other men on the keys pushed hogsheads into cellars. All this was transpiring in vast warehouses along the river banks, which were bathed by the muddy and dull water of an imaginary Thames,

Starting point is 05:09:24 in a forest of masts and girders piercing the wan clouds of the firmament, while trains rushed past at full speed or rumpled underground, uttering horrible cries and vomiting waves of smoke, and while through every street, monstrous and gaudy and infamous advertisements flared through the eternal twilight, and strings of carriages passed between rows of preoccupied and taciturn people, whose eyes stared ahead and whose elbows pressed closely against their bodies. Gyssinne shivered deliciously to feel himself mingling in this terrible world of merchants,

Starting point is 05:10:15 in this insulating mist, in this incessant activity, in this pitilessing gearing, which ground millions of the disinherited, urged by the comfort. at distilling philanthropists to recite biblical verses and to sing psalms. Then the vision faded suddenly with a jolt of the fiacre, which made him rebound in his seat. He gazed through the carriage windows. Night had fallen. Gas burners blinked through the fog amid a yellowish halo. Ribbons of fire swam in puddhers. Swam in puddhers. of water, and seemed to revolve around wheels of carriages, moving through liquid and dirty flame. He endeavoured to get his bearings, perceived the carousel, and suddenly, unreasoningly,

Starting point is 05:11:15 perhaps through the simple effect of the high fall from fanciful spaces, his thought reverted to a very trivial incident. He remembered that his domestic, had neglected to put a toothbrush in his belongings. Then he passed in review the list of objects packed up. Everything had been placed in his release. But the annoyance of having omitted this brush persisted, until the driver, pulling up, broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets. He was in the Rue de Rivoli, in front of Gallignani's messenger.

Starting point is 05:11:59 Separated by a door whose unpolished glass was covered with inscriptions, and with strips of passepartout, framing newspaper clippings and telegrams, where two vast shop windows crammed with albums and books. He drew near, attracted by the sight of these books bound in parrot blue and cabbage green paper, embossed with silver and golden letterings. All this had an anti-Parizian touch, a mercantile appearance, more brutal, and yet less wretched than those worthless bindings of French books. Here and there, in the midst of the opened albums, reproducing humorous scenes from Dumorier and John Leach, or the delirious cavalcades of Caldicot, some French novels appeared. blending placid and satisfied vulgarities to these rich virduce hues. He tore himself away from his contemplation, opened the door, and entered a large library which was full of people.

Starting point is 05:13:16 Seated strangers unfolded maps and jabbered in strange languages. A clerk brought him a complete collection of guides. He, in turns, sat down to examine the books with their flexible covers. He glanced through them and paused at a page of the Beidaka describing the London museums. He became interested in the laconic and exact details of the guidebooks, but his attention wandered away from the old English paintings to the moderns, which attracted him much more. He recalled certain works he had seen.

Starting point is 05:13:58 seen at international expositions, and imagined that he might possibly behold them once more at London. Pictures by Mille, the eve of St Agnes with its lunar, clear green. Pictures by Watts, strange in colour, chequered with gambouge and indigo. Pictures sketched by a sick Gustave Moro, painted by an anemic Michelangelo, and retouched by a Raphael, submerged in blue. Among other canvases, he recalled a denunciation of Cain, an Ida, some Eves, where in the strange and mysterious mixture of these three masters

Starting point is 05:14:46 rose the personality at once refined and crude of a learned and dreamy Englishman, tormented by the bewitchment of cruel. tones. These canvases thronged through his memory. The clerk, astonished by this client who was so lost to the world, asked him which of the guides he would take. Desisant remained dumbfounded, then excused himself, bought a baed-decker, and departed. The dampness froze him to the spot. The wind blew from the side, lashing the arcades with whips of rain. Proceed to that place, he said to the driver, pointing with his finger to the end of a passage,

Starting point is 05:15:40 where a store formed the angle of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castellon, and with its whitish panels of glass illumined from within, resembled a vast night-lamp, burning through the wretchedness of this mist. in the misery of this crazy weather. It was the bodega. Dezis Sand strayed into a large room sustained by iron pillars, and lined on each side of its walls

Starting point is 05:16:11 with tall barrels, placed on their ends upon gantries, hooped with iron, their paunches with wooden loopholes, imitating a rack of pipes, and from whose notches hung tulip-shaped glasses upside down. The lower sides were bored and hafted with stone cocks.

Starting point is 05:16:34 These hogsheads, painted with a royal coat of arms, displayed the names of their drinks, the contents, and the prices on coloured labels, and stated that they were to be purchased by the cask, by the bottle, or by the glass. In the passage between these rows of casks, under the gas-jets which flared at one end of an ugly iron-grey chandelier, tables, covered with baskets of Palmer's biscuits, hard and salty cakes, plates piled with mince pies, and sandwiches concealing strong, mustardy concoctions under their unsavory covers,

Starting point is 05:17:18 succeeded each other between a row of seats, and as far as the end of this cellar which was lined with still more hogsheads, carrying tiny barrels on their tops, resting on their sides, and bearing their names stamped with hot metal into the oak. An odour of alcohol assailed Desicant upon taking a seat in this room, heavy with strong wines. He looked about him. Here the tons were placed in a straight line, exhibiting the whole series of ports, the sweet or sour wines, the colour of mahogany or amaranth, and distinguished by such laudatory epithets as old port, light delicate, coburn's very fine, magnificent old regina. There, protruding formidable abdomens pressed closely against each other, huge casks contained the martial Spanish wines, sherry and its derivatives, the San Lucar, Pasto, Pale Dry, Oloroso, and Amontilla. The cellar was filled with people, leaning on his elbows on a corner of the table,

Starting point is 05:18:44 D'Ezes Saint sat waiting for his glass of port, ordered of a gentleman who was opening explosive sodas contained in oval bottles, which recalled, while exaggerating, the capsules of gelatin and gluten, used by pharmacists to conceal the taste of certain medicines. Englishmen were everywhere. Awkward pale clergymen,

Starting point is 05:19:13 garbed in black from head to the, foot with soft hats, laced shoes, very long coats dotted in the front with tiny buttons, clean-shaved chins, round spectacles, greasy, flat hair, faces of tripe dealers, and mastiff snouts with apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, finest cheeks, bloodshot crazy eyes, whiskers that looked like those of some big monkeys. Farther away, at the end of the wine store, a long row of tow-headed individuals, their chins covered with white hair, like the end of an artichoke, reading through a microscope the tiny Roman type of an English newspaper. Opposite him, a sort of American Commodore, dumpy and thick set, with smoked skin and bulwere, and bulwere.

Starting point is 05:20:14 nose was sleeping, a cigar planted in the hairy aperture of his mouth. Opposite were frames hanging on the wall, enclosing advertisements of champagne, the trademarks of Perrier and Röderer, Hyde-Sique and Mum, and a hooded head of a monk with the name of Don Perignon Rince, written in Gothic characters. A certain end of a monk. Renovation enveloped Dese des Saint in this guard-house atmosphere. Stunned by the prattle of the Englishman conversing among themselves, he fell into a reverie, evoking before the purple port which filled the glasses, the creatures of Dickens that love this drink so very much, imaginatively peopling the cellar with new personages, seeing here

Starting point is 05:21:14 the white head of hair and the ruddy complexion of Mr. Wickfield. There, the phlegmatic, crafty face and the vengeful eye of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the melancholy solicitor in bleak house. Positively, all of them broke away from his memory and installed themselves in the bodega, with their peculiar characteristics and their betraying gestures. His memories, brought to life by his recent readings, attained a startling precision. The city of the Romancer, the house illumined and warmed, so perfectly tended and isolated. The bottles poured slowly by Little Dorrit and Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister,

Starting point is 05:22:06 appeared to him sailing like an ark in a deluge of mire and scyre. sort. Idly he wandered through this imaginary London, happy to be sheltered, as he listened to the sinister shrieks of tugs, plying up and down the Thames. His glass was empty. Despite the heavy fumes in this cellar caused by the cigars and pipes, he experienced a cold shiver when he returned to the reality of the damp and fetid weather. He called for a glass of Amontillado, and suddenly, beside this pale, dry wine, the lenative, sweetish stories of the English author were routed, to be replaced by the pitiless revolsives and the grievous irritants of Edgar Allan Poe, The cold nightmares of the cask of a montilado, of the man immured in a vault assailed him.

Starting point is 05:23:13 The ordinary placid faces of American and English drinkers who occupied the rum appeared to him to reflect involuntary, frightful thoughts, to be harboring instinctive, odious plots. Then he perceived that he was left alone here, and that the the dinner hour was near. He paid his bill, tore himself from his seat, and dizzily gained the door. He received a wet slap in the face upon leaving the place. The street-lamps moved their tiny fans of flame, which failed to illuminate. The sky had dropped to the very houses. This is Saint viewed the arcades of the Rue de Riboli, drowned in the gloomé.

Starting point is 05:24:03 and submerged by water, and it seemed to him that he was in the gloomy tunnel under the Thames. Tewitchings of his stomach recalled him to reality. He regained his carriage, gave the driver the address of the tavern in the Rue d'Amsterdam near the station, and looked at his watch. Seven o'clock. He had just time to eat dinner. The train would not leave until ten minutes of nine, and he counted on his fingers, reckoning the hours of travel from Dieppe to New Haven, saying to himself, If the figures of the timetable are correct, I shall be at London tomorrow at twelve-thirty. The fiacre stopped in front of the tavern. Once more, Dyssaint alighted, and entered a long, plain, dark room, divided in the

Starting point is 05:25:03 partitions as high as a man's waist, a series of compartments resembling stalls. In this room, wider towards the door, many beer-pumps stood on a counter, near hams having the colour of old violins, red lobsters, marinated mackerel with onions and carrots, of lemon, bunches of laurel and thyme, juniper berries, and long peppers swimming in thick sauce. One of these boxes was unoccupied. He took it, and called a young black-suited man, who bent forward, muttering something in a jargon he could not understand. While the cloth was being laid, Desicant viewed his neighbours. They were unlawed. They were, Islanders, just as at the bodega, with cold faiance eyes, crimson complexions, thoughtful or haughty airs.

Starting point is 05:26:09 They were reading foreign newspapers. The only ones eating were unescorted women in pairs, robust English women with boyish faces, large teeth, ruddy apple cheeks, long hands and legs. attacked with genuine ardour a rumpstake pie, a warm meat dish cooked in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a pie. After having lacked appetite for such a long time, he remained amazed in the presence of these hearty eaters, whose veracity whetted his hunger. He ordered ox-tailed soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock, and seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef, and drank two pints of ale,

Starting point is 05:27:13 stimulated by the flavour of a cow-shed which this fine pale beer exhaled. His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue stilton cheese, made quickly. work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice, but which does not have its sugary taste. He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food, had awakened. awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and prepared

Starting point is 05:28:05 to sip his coffee into which gin had been poured. The rain continued to fall. He heard it patter on the panes which formed a ceiling at the end of the room. It fell in cascades down the spouts. No one was stirring in the room. Everybody utterly weirrily. was indulging himself in front of his wine-glass. Tongues were now wagging freely, as almost all the English men and women raised their eyes as they spoke, this isand concluded that they were talking of the bad weather.

Starting point is 05:28:45 Not one of them laughed. He threw a delighted glance on their suits, whose colour and cut did not perceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense of contentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being in some way, though superficially, a naturalised London citizen. Then he suddenly started. And what about the train? he asked himself. He glanced at his watch, ten minutes to eight.

Starting point is 05:29:22 I still have nearly a half hour to remain here. Once more he began to muse upon the plan he had conceived. In his sedentary life, only two countries had ever attracted him, Holland and England. He had satisfied the first of his desires. Unable to keep away, one fine day he had left Paris and visited the towns of the lowlands, one by one. In short, nothing but cruel disillusions had resulted from this trip. He had fancied a Holland after the works of teniers and stain, of Rembrandt and Ostada,

Starting point is 05:30:10 in his usual way imagining rich, unique and incomparable ghettos, at thought of amazing Kermesses, continual debauches in the countryside, intent for a view of that patriarchal simplicity, that jovial, lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters. Certainly Harlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him. The unwashed people, seen in their country farms, really resembled those types painted by fun Astada, with the unwashed. their uncouth children and their old fat women, embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies. But of the unrestrained joys, the drunken family carousals, not a wit! He had to admit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him.

Starting point is 05:31:10 They had simply served as a springing board for his dreams. He had rushed forward on a false stoop. track, and had wandered into capricious visions, unable to discover in the land itself anything of that real and magical country which he had hoped to behold. Seeing nothing at all on the plots of ground strewn with barrels of the dances of petticoated and stocking to peasants, crying for very joy, stamping their feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly. decidedly nothing of all this was visible holland was a country just like any other country and what was more a country in no wise primitive not at all simple For the Protestant religion, with its formal hypocrisies and solemn rigidness, held sway here.

Starting point is 05:32:12 The memory of that disenchantment returned to him. Once more he glanced at his watch. Ten minutes still separated him from the train's departure. It is about time to ask for the bill and leave, he told himself. He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach, through his body. Come, he addressed himself. Let us drink and screw up our courage.

Starting point is 05:32:41 He filled a glass of brandy while asking for the reckoning. An individual in a black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort of major domo with a bald and sharp head, a greying beard without moustaches, came forward. A pencil rested behind his ear, and he assumed an attitude like a singer, one foot in front of the other. He drew a notebook from his pocket, and without glancing at his paper, his eyes fixed on the ceiling near a chandelier, wrote while counting.

Starting point is 05:33:19 "'There you are,' he said, tearing the sheet from his notebook, and giving it to Desis Saint, who looked at him with curiosity, as though he were a rare animal. What a surprising John Bull, he thought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of his shaved mouse, the appearance of a wheelsman on an American ship. At this moment the tavern door opened. Several persons entered, bringing with them an odour of wet dog, to which was blent the smell of coal, wafted by the wind through the opened door. Lizis Saint was incapable of moving a limb. A soft, warm languor prevented him from even stretching out his hand to light a cigar. He told himself, "'Come now, let us get up. We must take ourselves off.' Immediate objections thwarted his orders. "'What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromas and atmosphere and

Starting point is 05:34:38 inhabitants, whose food and utensils surrounded him? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened to him in Holland? He had but sufficient time to race to the station, An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more and more obvious and sudden strength. Pensively, he let the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said to himself, Now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd into the baggage-room.

Starting point is 05:35:25 What an annoy, what a bore that would be. Then he repeated to himself once more. In fine, I have experienced and seen all I wished to experience and see. I have been filled with English life since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go, and by an awkward trip lose those imperishable sensations. How stupid of me to have sought to do! disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy of the docile phantasmagorias of my brain,

Starting point is 05:36:04 like a very fool to have thought of the necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of an excursion. Well, he exclaimed, consulting his watch, it is now time to return home. This time he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back to the Soule Station, and returned with his trunks, packages, Belize's, runks, umbrellas, to Fonet, feeling the physical stimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home after a long and dangerous voyage. End of Chapter 11 Against the Grain by Joris Carl Weismanz,

Starting point is 05:37:04 translated by John Howard. Chapter 12, Part 1 During the days following his return, DesEcent contemplated his books and experienced at the thought that he might have been separated from them for a long period, a satisfaction as complete as that which comes after a protracted absence. Under the touch of this sentiment, these objects possessed a renewed novelty to his mind, and he perceived in them beauties forgotten since the time he had purchased them.

Starting point is 05:37:46 Everything there, books, bric-a-brac, and furniture, had an individual charge. for him. His bed seemed the softer by comparison with the hard bed he would have occupied in London. The silent, discreet ministrations of his servants charmed him, exhausted as he was at the thought of the loud loquacity of hotel attendants. The methodical organisation of his life made him feel that it was especially to be envied since the possibility of travelling. had become imminent. He steeped himself in this bath of habitude, to which artificial regrets insinuated a tonic quality. But his books chiefly preoccupied him. He examined them, rearranged them on the shelves, anxious to learn if the hot weather and the rains had

Starting point is 05:38:46 damaged the bindings and injured the rare paper. He began by moving. all his Latin books. Then he arranged in a new order the special works of Archelaus, Albert Le Grand, Lully and Arnaud de Villanova, treating of the cabala and the occult sciences. Finally, he examined his modern books, one by one, and was happy to perceive that all had remained intact. This collection had cost him a considerable sum of money. He would not suffer in his library the books he loved to resemble other similar volumes, printed on cotton paper with the watermarks of Auvergne. Formerly in Paris, he had ordered made for himself alone certain volumes

Starting point is 05:39:41 which specially engaged mechanics printed from hand presses. Sometimes he applied to Perrin of Lyon, whose graceful clear time. was suitable for archaic reprints of old books. At other times he dispatched orders to England or to America for the execution of modern literature and the works of the present century. Still again he applied to a house in Lille, which for centuries had possessed a complete set of Gothic characters. He also would send requisitions to the old Ensheida printing house of Harlem, whose foundry still has the stamps and dyes of certain antique letters. He had followed the same method in selecting his papers, finally growing weary of the snowy Chinese

Starting point is 05:40:38 and the necrious and gilded Japanese papers, the white Watmans, the brown hollands, the buff-coloured turkeys and Seychal Mills, and equally disgusted with all mechanically manufactured sheets. He had ordered special laid paper in the mould, from the old plants of Vire, which still employ the pebbles once in use to grind hemp. To introduce a certain variety into his collection, he had repeatedly brought from London prepared stuffs, paper into woven. with hairs, and as a mark of his disdain for bibliophiles, he had a Lubbock merchant, prepare for him an improved candle-paper of bottle-blue tint, clear and somewhat brittle, in the pulp of which the straw was replaced by golden spangles, resembling those which dot dantsig brandy.

Starting point is 05:41:42 Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books. adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by l'Ochtique by trots bosonet or chambol by the successors of capi in irreproachable covers of old silk stamped cowhide cape goat-skin in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs protected by tabby or moiree watered silk ecclesiastically ornamented with clasps and corners and sometimes even enamelled by gruel engelmann with silver oxide and clear enameles thus with the marvellous episcopal lettering used in the old house of leclerc he had baudelaire's works printed in a large format recalling that of ancient missiles on a very light and spongy gibberts. pan paper, soft as elder pith, and imperceptibly tinted with a light rose hue through its milky white. This edition, limited to one copy, printed with a velvety black Chinese ink, had been covered outside, and then recovered within with a wonderful, genuine sow skin, chosen among a thousand,

Starting point is 05:43:13 the colour of flesh, its surface spotted where the hairs had been, and adorned with black silk, stamped in cold iron, in miraculous designs by a great artist. That day, Desi Saint took this incomparable book from his shelves, and handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces which seemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more than ordinarily penetrating. His admiration for this writer was unqualified. According to him, until Baudelaire's advent in literature, writers had limited themselves to exploring the surfaces of the soul, or to penetrating into the accessible and illuminated caverns,

Starting point is 05:44:08 restoring here and there the layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, and noting, like Balzac, for example, the layers of strata in the soul, possessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, by paternal stupidity, or by senile love.

Starting point is 05:44:33 What had been treated heretofore was the abundant health of virtues and of vices, the tranquil functioning of commonplace brains, and the practical reality of contemporary ideas, without any ideal of sickly deprivation or of any beyond. In short, the discoveries of those analysts had stopped at the speculations of good or evil classified by the church. It was the simple investigation, the conventional examination of a botanist, minutely observing the anticipated development of normal efflorescence abounding in the natural earth. Bodilère had gone farther. He had descended to the very bowels of the inexhaustible mine, had he had he involved his mind in abandoned and unfamiliar levels, and come to those districts of the soul

Starting point is 05:45:38 where monstrous vegetations of thought extend their branches. There, near those confines, the haunt of aberrations and of sickness, of the mystic lockjaw, the warm fever of lust, and the typhoids and vomits of crime, he had found, brooding under the gloomy clock of Ennui, the terrifying specter of the age of sentiments and ideas. He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attained the October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of souls summoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasing decay of impressions, while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are enfeebled, and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseries born,

Starting point is 05:46:41 intolerances endured, and affronts suffered by intelligences oppressed by a ridiculous destiny. He had pursued all the phases of that lamentable autumn, studying the human creature, quick to exasperation, ingenious in deceiving himself, compelling his thoughts to cheat each other so as to suffer the more keenly, and frustrating in advance all possible joy by his faculty of analysis and observation. Then, in this vexed sensibility of the soul, in this ferocity of reflection that repels the restless ardour of devotions, and the well-meaning outrages of charity, he gradually saw arising the horror of those senile passions, those ripe loves, where one person yields while the other is still suspicious, where lassitude, denies such couples the filial caresses whose apparent usefulness seems new, and the maternal candors, whose gentleness and comfort impart, in a sense, the engaging remorse of a vague incest.

Starting point is 05:48:08 In magnificent pages he exposed his hybrid loves, who were exasperated by the impotence in which they were overwhelmed, the hazardous deceits of narcotics and poisons invoked to aid in calming suffering and conquering ennui. At an epoch when literature attributed unhappiness of life almost exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love, or to the jealousies that attend adulterous love. He disregarded such puerile maladies, and probed, into those wounds which are more fatal, more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn in ruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathing, and the future frightens and menaces with despair. And the more desiccent red baudelaire,

Starting point is 05:49:14 the more he felt the ineffable charm of this writer, who in an age when verse served only to portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language, who more than any other writer possessed a marvellous power to define with a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive and tentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls. After Baudelaire's works, the number of French books given place in his shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent to those works which it is fashionable to praise. The broad laugh of Rabe, and the deep comedy of Moliere did not succeed in diverting him. And the antipathy he felt against these farces was so great that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, to the capers of circus clowns. As for old poetry, he read hardly anything except Villan, whose melancholy ballads touched him, and here and there

Starting point is 05:50:39 certain fragments from Dobinier, which stimulated his blood. with the incredible vehemence of their apostrophes and curses. In prose, he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised Salon, he found strangely saturated with moralising twaddle and futility. In his hatred towards all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusive,

Starting point is 05:51:14 to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bordaloo and Bosseuxue, whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing. But still more, he relished suggestive ideas condensed into severe and strong phrases, such as those created by Nicol in his reflections, and especially Pascal, whose austere pessimism and attrition, deeply touched him. Apart from such books as these, French literature began in his library with the 19th century. This section was divided into two groups, one of which included the ordinary secular literature, and the other the Catholic literature, a special but little-known literature published by large publishing houses and circulated to the four corners of the earth.

Starting point is 05:52:16 He had had the hardihood to explore such crypts as these. Just as in the secular art, he had discovered under an enormous mass of insipid writings, a few books written by true masters. The distinctive character of this literature was the constant immutable, of its ideas and language. Just as the church perpetuated the primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics of her dogmas, piously retaining as the frame that encloses them

Starting point is 05:52:56 the oratorical language of the celebrated century. As one of the church's own writers, Ozanam has put it, The Christian style needed only to make use of the dialect employed by Bordalou and by Bosseux to the exclusion of all else. In spite of this statement, the Church, more indulgent, closed its eyes to certain expressions, certain turns of style, borrowed from the secular language of the same century, and the Catholic idiom had slightly purified itself of its heavy and massive phrases, especially cleaning itself in Bosseuxi of its prolixity, and the painful rallying of

Starting point is 05:53:47 its pronouns. But here ended the concessions, and others would doubtless have been purposeless, for the prose sufficed without this ballast, for the limited race. of subjects to which the Church can find itself. Incapable of grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the most simple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualified to explain the complicated wiles of intellects, indifferent to the benefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent when it treated of abstract.

Starting point is 05:54:30 subjects. It proved valuable in the argument of controversy, in the demonstration of a theory, in the obscurity of a commentary, and, more than any other style, had the necessary authority to affirm, without any discussion, the intent of a doctrine. Unfortunately, here, as everywhere, the sanctuary had been invaded by a numerous army of pedants, who smirched by their ignorance and lack of talent the church's noble and austere attire. Further to profane it, devout women had interfered, and stupid sacristan's and foolish salons had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of such women. Among such works, Desis Saint had had the curiosity to read those of man.

Starting point is 05:55:30 Madame Svecine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous of the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him with insufferably horrible boredom. They were more than merely wretched. They were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news of one another in low voice. voices, while they repeat with a deeply mysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts and the state of the weather. But there was even worse. A female laureate, licensed by the Institute, Madame Augustus Craven, author of Residuncer

Starting point is 05:56:24 of Elianne and Fleur Orange, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press. Never, no, never had DesEssesant imagined that any person could write such ridiculous nonsense. In the point of conception, these books were so absurd, and were written in such a disgusting style, that by these tokens they became almost remarkable and rare. It was not at all among the works of women that Desicant, whose soul was completely jaded, and whose nature was not inclined to sentimentality, could come upon a literary retreat suited to his taste. Yet he strove, with a diligence that no impatience could overcome, to enjoy the works of a certain girl of genius, the blue-stocking Pucel of the group, but his efforts miscarried.

Starting point is 05:57:34 He did not take to the journal and the letter, in which a genie de Guerin celebrates without discretion the amazing talent of a brother who rhymed, with such cleverness and grace, that one must go to the works of de Jouille and Euchar Le Brin, to find anything so novel and daring. he had also unavailingly attempted to comprehend the delights of those works in which one may find such things as these this morning i hung upon papa's bed a cross which a little girl had given him yesterday or mimi and i are invited by m rocquire to attend the consecration of a bell to-morrow this does not displease me at all or wherein we find such important events as these on my neck i have hung a medal of the holy virgin which louise had brought me as an amulet against cholera or poetry of this sort oh the lovely moonbeam which fell on the bible i was reading and finally such fine and penetrating observations as these when i see a man

Starting point is 05:58:58 pass before a crucifix, lift his hat, and make the sign of the cross, I say to myself, There goes a Christian. And she continued in this fashion, without pause, until after Maurice de Guerin had died, after which his sister bewailed him in other pages, written in a watery prose, strewn here and there with bits of poems, whose humiliating poverty ended by moving Dissusant to pity. It was hardly worth mentioning, but the Catholic Party was not at all particular in the choice of its protégés, and not at all artistic. Without exception, all these writers wrote in the pallid white prose of pensioners of a monastery,

Starting point is 05:59:59 in a flowing movement of phrase which no astringent could counterbalance. So, Desis Saint, horror-stricken at such insipidities, entirely forsook this literature. But neither did he find atonement for his disappointments among the modern masters of the clergy. These latter were one-sided divines, or impeccably correct, controversialists, but the Christian language in their orations and books had ended by becoming impersonal, and congealing into a rhetoric whose every movement and pause was anticipated, in a sequence of periods constructed after a single model. And in fact, Dezisant discovered that all the ecclesiastics wrote in the same manner,

Starting point is 06:00:57 with a little more or a little less abandon or emphasis, and there was seldom many variations between the bodiless patterns traded by DuPan-Loo or Landrieu, La Bouillet or Gome, by Don Guerranger or Ratispone, by Freppel or Perot, by ravignon or gratis, by olivin or d'ocit, by didon or chocarn. These iscent had often pondered upon this matter. A really authentic talent, a supremely profound originality, a well-anchored conviction he thought

Starting point is 06:01:42 was needed to animate this formal style, which was too frail to support any thought that was unforeseen, or any thesis that was audacious. Yet, despite all this, there were several writers whose burning eloquence fused and shaped this language, notably La Corteur, who was one of the few really great writers the Church had produced for many years, immured, like his colleagues, in the narrow circle of orthodox speculations, likewise obliged to dissipate his energies in the exclusive consideration of those theories which had been expressed and consecrated by the fathers of the church, and developed by the masters of the pulpit. He succeeded in imbuing them with novelty, and in rejuvenating, almost in modifying them, by clothing them in a more personal and stimulating form. Here and there in his Conference de Notre Dame were treasures of expression,

Starting point is 06:02:55 audacious usages of words, accents of love, rapid movements, cries of joy, and distracted effusions. Then, to his position as a brilliant and gentle monk whose ingenuity and labours had been exhausted in the impossible task of conciliating the liberal doctrines of society with the authoritarian dogmas of the church, he added a temperament of fierce love

Starting point is 06:03:27 and suave diplomatic tenderness. In his letters to young men may be found the caressing inflections of a father exorting his sons with smiling reprimands, the well-meaning advice and the indulgent forgiveness. Some of these Deziscent found charming, confessing as they did,

Starting point is 06:03:53 the monks yearning for affection, while others were even imposing when they sought to sustain courage and dissipate doubts by the inimitable certainties of faith. In fine, this sentiment of paternity, which gave his pen a delicately feminine quality, lent to his prose a characteristically individual accent, discernible among all the clerical literature. After La Caudère, ecclesiastics and monks possessing any,

Starting point is 06:04:31 individuality were extremely rare. At the very most a few pages of his pupil, the Abbe Perrave, merited reading. He left sympathetic biographies of his master, wrote a few lovable letters, composed treatises in the sonorous language of formal discourse, and delivered panegyrix in which the declamatory tone was too broadly stressed. Certainly the Abbe Pireve had neither the emotion nor the ardour of La Corteur. He was too much of a priest and too little a man. Yet, here and there in the rhetoric of his sermons, flashed interesting effects of large and solid phrasing,

Starting point is 06:05:23 or touches of nobility that were almost venerable. But to find writers of prose, whose works justify close study, one was obliged to seek those who had not submitted to ordination, to the secular writers whom the interests of Catholicism engaged and devoted to its cause. End of Chapter 12, Part 1 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weismance, translated by John Howard. chapter twelve part two with the comte de fallou the episcopal style so stupidly handled by the prelates recruited new strength and in a manner recovered its masculine vigour Under his guise of moderation, this academician exuded Gaul.

Starting point is 06:06:30 The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848 was diffuse and abject, but his articles first printed in the correspondents, and since collected into books, where mordant and discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form, Conceived as harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and were astonishing in the intolerance of their convictions. A dangerous polemist because of his ambuscades, a shrewd logician executing flanking movements and attacking unexpectedly. the Count de Falu had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death of Madame Svetin, whose tracts he had collected, and whom he revered as a saint. But the true temperament of the writer was betrayed in the two brochures which appeared in 1848 and 1880,

Starting point is 06:07:37 the latter entitled L'unit Nacional, moved by a cold, rain. the implacable legitimist this time fought openly contrary to his custom and hurled against the infidels in the form of a peroration such fulminating invectives as these and you systematic utopians who make an abstraction of human nature fomenters of atheism fed on chimera and hatreds emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the Simeon race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied. You shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the high priests of an abominable future. The other brochure bore the title Le Partie Catholic, and was directed against the despotism of the universe, and against Vuyu, whose name he refused to mention.

Starting point is 06:08:52 Here the sinuous attacks were resumed. Venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman, clad in blue, answered the sharp physical blows of the fighter with scornful sarcasm. These contestants represented the two parties of the church. the two factions whose differences were resolved into virulent hatreds. De Fallou, the more haughty and cunning, belonged to the liberal camp, which already claimed Montalember and Cochin, La Corderre and de Broli. He subscribed to the principles of their correspondents, a review which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the church

Starting point is 06:09:41 with a varnish of tolerance. Veryu, franca and more open, scorned such masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultramontane doctrines, and confessed with a certain compunction the pitiless yoke of the church's dogma.

Starting point is 06:10:05 For the conduct of this verbal warfare, Veriu had made himself master of a special style, partly borrowed from La Brouillère and du Grot-Ca-Ure. This half-solum, half-slang style had the force of a tomahawk in the hands of this vehement personality. Strangely headstrong and brave, he had overwhelmed both free thinkers and bishops with this terrible weapon, charging at his enemies like a bull, regardless of the party to which they belonged. distrusted by the church, which would tolerate neither his contraband style nor his fortified theories, he had nevertheless overawed everybody by his powerful talent, incurring the attack of the entire press, which he effectively thrashed in his Odour de Paris, coping with every assault, freeing himself with a kick of the foot of all the wretched hack writers who had presumed to attack him.

Starting point is 06:11:17 Unfortunately, this undisputed talent only existed in pugilism. At peace, Vieu was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry and novels were pitiful. His language was vapid when it was not engaged in a striking. controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banal litanies and mumbling childish hymns. More formal, more constrained and more serious was the beloved apologist of the church, Hosanam, the inquisitor of the Christian language. Although he was very difficult to understand, Des Isaint never failed to be astonished by the Insusian.

Starting point is 06:12:08 of this writer, who spoke confidently of God's impenetrable designs, although he felt obliged to establish proof of the improbable assertions he advanced. With the utmost self-confidence, he deformed events, contradicted with greater impudence even than the panegyrists of other parties, the known facts of history, averred that the church had never concealed the esteem it had for science, called Harris' impure miasmas, and treated Buddhism and other religions with such contempt that he apologised for even soiling his Catholic prose by onslaught on their doctrines. At times, religious passion breathed a certain ardour into his oratorical language,

Starting point is 06:13:08 under the ice of which seethed a violent current. In his numerous writings on Dante, on St. Francis, on the author of the Starbat Mater, on the Franciscan poets, on socialism, on commercial law, and every imaginable subject, this man pleaded for the defence of the Vatican, which he held indefectible, and judged causes and opinions according to their harmony or discord with those that he advanced. This manner of viewing questions from a single viewpoint was also the method of that literary scamp, netman, whom some people would have made the other's rival. The latter was less bigoted than the master, affected less arrogance, and admitted more worldly pretensions.

Starting point is 06:14:08 He repeatedly left the literary cloister in which Ozanam had imprisoned himself, and had read secular works, so as to be able to judge of them. This province he entered gropingly, like a child in a vault, seeing nothing but shadow around him, perceiving in this gloom

Starting point is 06:14:30 only the gleam of the candle which illumined the place a few paces before him. In this gloom, uncertain of his bearings, he stumbled at every turn, speaking of Murchy, who had the care of a chiselled and carefully finished style, of Hugo, who sought the noisome and unclean, and to whom he dared compare,

Starting point is 06:14:57 de la Prade, of Paul de la Croix, who scorned the rules, of Paul de la Roche and of the poet Rabou, whom he praised because of their apparent faith. Des Isaint could not restrain a shrug of the shoulders before these stupid opinions, covered by a borrowed prose whose already worn texture

Starting point is 06:15:23 clung or became torn at each phrase. In a different way, the works of Pujula and Genoud Montalembert, Nicola and Carnet, failed to inspire him with any definite interest. His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with the scholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duke de Brolié.

Starting point is 06:15:51 Nor was his penchant for the social and religious questions, even when broached by Henri Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter where he gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at the Sacre Cure. He had not touched these books for a long time, and the period was already remote, when he had thrown with his waste paper the puerile lucubrations of the gloomy Pont-Martin

Starting point is 06:16:22 and the pitiful fival. And long since he had given to his servants, for a certain vulgar usage, the short stories of Obino and Lasserre, in which are recorded wretched hagiographies of miracles, effected by DuPont of Tours and by the Virgin. In no way did Desecese de Saint derive even a fugitive distraction from his boredom, from this literature. The mass of books which he had once studied, he had thrown into dim corners of his library, when he left the father's school.

Starting point is 06:17:05 I should have left them in Paris, he told himself, as he turned out some books which were particularly insufferable. Those of the Abbe Laminet, and that impervious sectarian, so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the Count Joseph de Mestre. A single volume remained on a shelf, within reach of his hand.

Starting point is 06:17:34 It was the um of Ernest Ello. This writer was the absolute opposite of his religious confederates. Almost isolated among the pious group, terrified by his conduct, Ernest Ello had ended by abandoning the open road that led from earth to heaven, probably disgusted by the dullness of the journey. and the noisy mob of those pilgrims of letters, who for centuries followed one after the other upon the same highway, marching in each other's steps,

Starting point is 06:18:13 stopping at the same places to exchange the same commonplace remarks on religion, on the church fathers, on their similar beliefs, on their common masters. He had departed through the byways to wander in the gloomy glade, of Pascal, where he tarried long enough to recover his breath before continuing on his way, and going even farther in the regions of human thought than the Jansenist, whom he derided. Talk to us and precious, doctoral and complex, Elou, by the piercing cunning of his analysis, recalled to Desecent the sharp probing investigations. of some of the infidel psychologists of the preceding and present century.

Starting point is 06:19:09 In him was a sort of Catholic Durante, but more dogmatic and penetrating, an experienced manipulator of the magnifying glass, a sophisticated engineer of the soul, a skillful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a passion and elucidated by details of the wheelwork. In this oddly formed mind, existed unsurmised relationships of thoughts, harmonies and oppositions. Furthermore, he affected a wholly novel manner of action,

Starting point is 06:19:48 which used the etymology of words as a springboard for ideas, whose associations sometimes became tenuous, but which almost constant. remained ingenious and sparkling. Thus, despite the awkwardness of his structure, he dissected with a singular perspicacity the avarre, the ordinary man, and the passion of unhappiness, revealing meanwhile interesting comparisons which could be constructed between the operations of photography and of memory. But such skill in handling

Starting point is 06:20:29 this perfected instrument of analysis, stolen from the enemies of the church, represented only one of the temperamental phases of this man. Still another existed. This mind divided itself in two parts, and revealed, besides the writer, the religious fanatic and biblical prophet. it. Like Hugo, whom he now and again recalled in distortions of phrases and words, Ernest Ello had delighted in imitating St. John of Patmos. He pontificated and vaticinated from his retreat in the Rue Saint-Sulpice, haranguing the reader with an apocalyptic language, partaking in spots of the bitterness of an Isaiah. He affected inordinate pretensions of profundity.

Starting point is 06:21:29 There were some fawning and complacent people who pretended to consider him a great man, the reservoir of learning, the encyclopedic giant of the age. Perhaps he was a well, but one at whose bottom one often could not find a drop of water. In his volume

Starting point is 06:21:53 Parole de Dieu He paraphrased the Holy Scriptures Endeavouring to complicate their ordinarily Obvious sense In his other book Um And in his brochure Le Jour du Seigneur

Starting point is 06:22:09 Written in a biblical style Rugged and obscure He sought to appear like a vengeful Apostle Prideful and tormented with spleen but showed himself a deacon touched with a mystic epilepsy, or like a talented maestre, a surly and bitter sectarian. But, thought des Saint, this sickly shamelessness often obstructed the inventive sallies of the casuist.

Starting point is 06:22:44 With more intolerance than even Ozanam, irresolutely denied all that pertained to his clan, proclaimed the most disconcerting axioms, maintained with a disconcerting authority that geology is returning towards Moses, and that natural history, like chemistry and every contemporary science, verifies the scientific truth of the Bible. The proposition on each page was of the unique truth and the superhuman knowledge of the church, and everywhere were interspersed more than perilous aphorisms

Starting point is 06:23:27 and raging curses cast at the art of the last century. To this strange mixture was added the love of sanctimonious delights, such as a translation of the Vision by Angel de Foligno, a book of an unparalleled fluid stupidity, with selected works of Jean-Russbrock L'Admirable, a mystic of the 13th century, whose prose offered an incomprehensible but alluring combination of dusky exaltations,

Starting point is 06:24:05 caressing effusions, and poignant transports. The whole attitude of this presumptuous pontiff, Elo, had leaped from a preface written for this book. He himself remarked that extraordinary things can only be stammered, and he stammered in good truth, declaring that the holy gloom where Rusbrock extends his eagle wings is his ocean, His prey, his glory, and for such as him the far horizons would be a too narrow garment. However this might be, Dez Isand felt himself intrigued towards this ill-balanced, but subtle mind. No fusion had been effected between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very jolts and incoherences constituted the personality of the man.

Starting point is 06:25:10 With him was recruited the little group of writers who fought on the front battle-line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to the regular army, but were more properly the scouts of a religion which distrusted men of such talent as Véyo and Ello, because they did not seem sufficient, submissive and shallow. What the Church really desires is soldiers who do not reason. Files of such blind combatants and such mediocrities as Elo describes with the rage of one who has submitted to their yoke. Thus it was that Catholicism had lost no time in driving away one of its partisans, an enraged pamphleteer who wrote in a style at once rare and exasperated, the savage León Blois, and caused to be cast from the doors of its bookshops, as it would a plague or a filthy vagrant,

Starting point is 06:26:17 another writer who had made himself hoarse with celebrating its praises, Barbe de Réviye. It is true that the latter was too prone to compromise and not sufficiently docile. Others bent their heads under rebukes and returned to the ranks. But he was the Enfant Terrible, and was unrecognised by the party. In a literary way, he pursued women, whom he dragged into the sanctuary. Nay, even that vast disdain was invoked, with which Catholicism enshrouds talent, to prevent excommunication from putting beyond the pale of the law

Starting point is 06:27:04 a perplexing servant, who, under pretext of honouring his masters, broke the window-panes of the chapel, juggled with the holy pixes, and executed eccentric dances around the tabernacle. Two works of Barbé de Réviéééééé, specially attracted to esce, the Pretre Marrier and the Diabolique. Others, such as the Ensoorsela, the Chevalier de Tuch and

Starting point is 06:27:36 Unviery Maitres, were certainly more comprehensive and more finely balanced, but they left Desicant untouched, for he was really interested only in unhealthy works, which were consumed and irritated by fever. In these all but healthy volumes, Barbé d'Orivilly constantly hesitated between those two pits, which the Catholic religion succeeds in reconciling, mysticism and sadism. In these two books which Desicent was summing, Barbé had lost all prudence, given full reign to his steed, and galloped at full speed over roads to their farthest limits. All the mysterious horror of the Middle Ages hovered over that improbable book,

Starting point is 06:28:33 the Préter Marier. Magic blended with religion, black magic with prayer, and more pitiless and savage than the devil himself, the god of original sin, incessantly tortured the innocent caliques. his reprobate, as once he had caused one of his angels to mark the houses of unbelievers whom he wished to slay. Conceived by a fasting monk in the grip of delirium, these scenes were unfolded in the uneven style of a tortured soul. Unfortunately, among those disordered creatures that were like galvanized coppelius of Offman, Some, like Neel de Neu, seemed to have been imagined in moments of exhaustion following convulsions,

Starting point is 06:29:28 and were discordant notes in this harmony of sombre madness, where they were as comical and ridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece. After these mystic divagations, the writer had experienced a period of calm. Then a terrible relapse followed. This belief that man is a Buridanesque donkey, a being balanced between two forces of equal attraction, which successively remain victorious and vanquished, this conviction that human life is only an uncertain combat

Starting point is 06:30:12 waged between hell and heaven. This faith in two opposite beings, Satan and Christ, was fatally certain to engender such inner discords of the soul, exalted by incessant struggle, excited at once by promises and menaces, and ending by abandoning itself to whichever of the two forces persisted in the pursuit the more relentlessly. In the Pretre Marier, Barbé d'Oré-Révié sang the praises of Christ, who had prevailed against temptation. In the Diabolique, the author succumbed to the devil whom he celebrated. Then appeared sadism, that bastard of Catholicism, which through the centuries

Starting point is 06:31:07 religion has relentlessly pursued with its exorcisms and stakes. this condition at once fascinating and ambiguous cannot arise in the soul of an unbeliever it does not merely consist in sinking oneself in the excesses of the flesh excited by outrageous blasphemies for in such a case it would be no more than a case of satiriasis that had reached its climax before all it consists in sacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, in a wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. It also is founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the satisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play with forbidden things, for no reason other than that they had been forbidden to do so. In fact, if it did not admit of sacrilege, sadism would have no reason for existence.

Starting point is 06:32:23 Besides, the sacrilege proceeding from the very existence of a religion can only be intentionally and pertinently performed by a believer, for no one would take pleasure in profaning a faith that was indifferent or unknown to him. The power of sadism and the attraction it presents lies entirely then in the prohibited enjoyment of transferring to Satan the praises and prayers due to God. It lies in the non-observance of Catholic precepts, which one really follows unwillingly, by committing in deeper scorn of Christ those sins which the Church has especially cursed, such as pollution of worship and carnal orgy. In its elements, this phenomenon to which the Marquis de Sade has bequeathed his name is as old as the church. It had reared its head in the 18th century, recalling to go back no farther by a simple phenomenon of atavism the impious practices of the Sabbath,

Starting point is 06:33:38 the witch's revels of the Middle Ages. By having consulted the Maleus Malificarum, that terrible code of Jacob Sprengar, which permits the church wholesale burnings of necromancers and sorcerers, Dez esant recognised in the Witches' Sabbath all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism. In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, The knights, successively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies, and devoted to the bestialities of passion, he once more discovered the parody of the processions, the insults, and eternal threats levelled at God, and the devotion bestowed upon his rival.

Starting point is 06:34:34 While amid cursing of the wine and the bread, the black mass was being celebrated on the of a woman on all fours, whose stained bare thighs served as the altar, from which the congregation received the communion from a black goblet stamped with an image of a goat. This profusion of impure mockeries and foul shames were marked in the career of the Marquis de Sade, who garnished his terrible pleasures with outrageous sacrilegies. he cried out to the sky invoked lucifer shouted his contempt of god calling him rogue and imbecile spat upon the communion endeavoured to contaminate with vile ordias a divinity who he prayed might damn him the while he declared to defy him the more that he did not exist barbe d'orrivill approached this psychic state if he did not presume as far as de sade in uttering atrocious curses against the saviour

Starting point is 06:35:51 if more prudent or more timid he claimed ever to honour the church he none the less addressed his suit to the devil as was done in mediaeval times and he too in order to brave god fell into demoniacal nymphomania, inventing sensual monstrosities, even borrowing from bedroom philosophy a certain episode which he seasoned with new condiments when he wrote the story, Lédene d'en-a-te. This extravagant book pleased Desecent. He had caused to be printed in violet ink and in a frame of Cardinal Purple, on a genuine parchment which the judges of the Rota had blessed, a copy of the Diabolique, with characters whose quaint quavers and flourishes, in turned-up tails and claws, affected a satanic form. After certain pieces of Baudelaire, that in imitation of the clamorous songs of nocturnal revels celebrated infernal litanies. This volume alone of all the works

Starting point is 06:37:10 of contemporary apostolic literature testified to this state of mind, at once impious and devout, towards which Catholicism often thrusts des Saint. With Barbé d'Oré d'Orvilli ended the line of religious writers, And in truth, that pariah belonged more from every point of view to secular literature than to the other with which he demanded a place that was denied him. His language was the language of dishevelled romanticism, full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delighted with extravagant comparisons, and with whipstrokes and phrases which explode. it like the clangor of noisy bells along the text. In short, D'Revillie was like a stallion among the geldings of the ultramontane stables. Les Eissaint reflected in this wise, while re-reading, here and there, several passages of the book, and comparing its nervous and changing style with the fixed manner of other church writers, he thought of the evolution of language,

Starting point is 06:38:33 which Darwin has so truly revealed. Compelled to live in a secular atmosphere, raised in the heart of the Romantic School, constantly being in the current of modern literature and accustomed to reading contemporary publications, Barbé d'Orévillie had acquired a dialect, which, although it had sustained numerous and profound changes since the great age, had nevertheless renewed itself in his works. The ecclesiastical writers, on the contrary, confined within specific limitations, restricted to ancient church literature, knowing nothing of the literary progress of the century. centuries, and determined, if need be, to blind their eyes the more surely not to see, necessarily were constrained to the use of an inflexible language, like that of the 18th century, which descendants of the French who settled in Canada still speak and write today, without

Starting point is 06:39:44 change of phrasing or words, having succeeded in preserving their original idiom by Iceland in certain metropolitan centres, despite the fact that they are enveloped upon every side by English-speaking peoples. Meanwhile, the silvery sound of a clock that told the Angelus announced breakfast-time to Desicente. He abandoned his books, pressed his brow, and went to the dining-room, saying to himself that, among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbé d'Oréviye, where the only ones whose ideas and style offered the gaminess he so loved to savour in the Latin

Starting point is 06:40:35 and decadent monastic writers of past ages. End of Chapter 12 Against the Grain By Joris Karl Wismance translated by John Howard Chapter 13 As the season advanced, the weather far from improving grew worse. Everything seemed to go wrong that year.

Starting point is 06:41:10 After the squalls and mists, the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheet iron. In two days without transition, a torrent. The horrid heat, an atmosphere of frightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days, and the streaming of the rains. As though stirred by furious pokers, the sun showed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burning one's face. A hot dust rose from the roads, scorching the dry trees, and the yellowed lawns.

Starting point is 06:41:52 the yellowed lawns became a deep brown. A temperature like that of a foundry hung over the dwelling of Desercente. Half naked he opened a window and received the air like a furnace blast in his face. The dining room to which he fled was fiery, and the rarefied air simmered. Utterly distressed, he sat down, for the stimulation that had seized him had ended since the close of his reveries. Like all people tormented by nervousness, heat distracted him, and his anemia, checked by cold weather, again became pronounced, weakening his body, which had been debilitated by copious perspiration. The back of his shirt was saturated. his perineum was damp his feet and arms moist his brow overflowing with sweat that ran down his cheeks desicant reclined annihilated on a chair

Starting point is 06:43:05 the sight of the meat placed on the table at that moment caused his stomach to rise he ordered the food removed asked for boiled eggs and tried to swallow some bread soaked in eggs, but his stomach would have none of it. A fit of nausea overcame him. He drank a few drops of wine that pricked his stomach like points of fire. He wet his face. The perspiration, alternately warm and cold, coursed along his temples. He began to suck some pieces of ice to overcome his troubled heart, but in vain. So weak was he, that he leaned against the table. He rose, feeling the need of air, but the bread had slowly risen in his gullet and remained there. Never had he felt so distressed, so shattered, so ill at ease.

Starting point is 06:44:11 To add to his discomfort, his eyes distressed him, and he saw objects in double. Soon he lost his sense of distance, and his glass seemed to be a league away. He told himself that he was the plaything of sensorial illusions, and that he was incapable of reacting. He stretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by the tossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased. He rose to his heart increased. He rose to his feet, determined to rid himself, by means of a digestive, of the food which was choking him. He again reached the dining-room, and sadly compared himself in this cabin to passengers seized with seasickness. Stumbling, he made his way to the closet, examined the mouth-organ,

Starting point is 06:45:09 without opening any of the stops, but instead took from a high shelf a bottle of the of Benedictine, which he kept because of its form, which to him seemed suggestive of thoughts that were at once gently wanton and vaguely mystic. But at this moment he remained indifferent, gazing with lackluster staring eyes at this squat dark green bottle, which at other times had brought before him images of the medieval priories by its old-fashioned monkish paunch, its head and neck covered with a parchment hood. Its red wax stamp quartered with three silver mitres against a field of azure, and fastened at the neck like a papal bull with bands of lead.

Starting point is 06:46:05 Its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paper that seemed to have yellowed, with age, Liquor Monachorum Benedictinorum abatiae Fiscanensis. Under this thoroughly abatial robe, signed with a cross and the ecclesiastic initials D-O-M, pressed in between its parchments and ligatures, slept an exquisitely fine saffron-coloured liquid. It breathed an aroma that seemed the quintessence of

Starting point is 06:46:40 Angelica and Hyssop, blended with seaweed and of iodines and brooms, hidden in sweet essences, and it stimulated the palate with a spirituous ardour concealed under a virginal daintiness, and charmed the sense of smell by a pungency enveloped in a caress, innocent and devout. This deceit, which resulted from the extraordinary disharmony between contents and container, between the liturgic form of the flask and its so feminine and modern soul, had formerly stimulated DesEcent to reverie, and facing the bottle he was inclined to think at great length of the monks who sold it, the benedictines of the Abbey of Fécon.

Starting point is 06:47:35 who, belonging to the Brotherhood of Saint-Morre, which had been celebrated for its controversial works under the rule of Saint-Bunois, followed neither the observances of the white monks of Cittaut nor of the black monks of Cluny. He could not but think of them as being like their brethren of the Middle Ages, cultivating simples, heating retorts, and distilling faultless panaceas and prescripts, and prescriptions. He tasted a drop of this liquor, and for a few moments had relief. But soon the fire, which the dash of wine had lit in his bowels, revived. He threw down his napkin, returned to his study, and paced the floor. He felt as if he were under a pneumatic

Starting point is 06:48:30 clock, and a numbing weakness stole from his brain through his limbs. Unable to endure it longer, he betook himself to the garden. It was the first time he had done this since his arrival at Fontenet. There he found shelter beneath a tree which radiated a circle of shadow. Seated on the lawn, he looked around with a besotted air at the square. beds of vegetables planted by the servants. He gazed, but it was only at the end of an hour that he really saw them, for a greenish film floated before his eyes, permitting him only to see, as in the depths of water, flickering images of shifting tones. But when he recovered his balance, he clearly distinguished the onions and cabbages, a garden-bed. A garden-bed

Starting point is 06:49:30 of lettuce further off, and in the distance along the hedge, a row of white lilies recumbent in the heavy air. A smile played on his lips, for he suddenly recalled the strange comparison of old Nicanque, who likened in the point of form the pistols of lilies to the genital organs of a donkey. And he recalled also a passage from Albert Lé, in which that thormaturgist describes a strange way of discovering whether a girl is still a virgin, by means of a lettuce. These remembrances distracted him somewhat. He examined the garden,

Starting point is 06:50:17 interesting himself in the plants withered by the heat, and in the hot ground whose vapours rose into the dusty air. Then, above the hedge which separated the garden, below, low, from the embankment leading to the fort. He watched the urchins struggling and tumbling on the ground. He was concentrating his attention upon them, when another younger, sorry little specimen appeared. He had hair like seaweed covered with sand, two green bubbles beneath his nose, and disgusting lips, surrounded by a dirty white frame, formed. by a slice of bread, smeared with cheese, and filled with pieces of scullions. Dese Sins inhaled the air.

Starting point is 06:51:10 A perverse appetite seized him. This dirty slice made his mouth water. It seemed to him that his stomach, refusing all other nourishment, could digest this shocking food, and that his palate would enjoy it as though it were a feast. He leaped up, ran to the kitchen, and ordered a loaf, white cheese and green onions to be brought from the village, emphasising his desire for a slice exactly like the one being eaten by the child. Then he returned to sit beneath the tree. The little chaps were fighting with one another.

Starting point is 06:51:54 They struggled for bits of bread which they shoved into their cheeks, meanwhile sucking their fingers. Kicks and blows reigned freely, and the weakest trampled upon, cried out. At this sight, Dese Sésant recovered his animation. The interest he took in this fight distracted his thoughts from his illness. Contemplating the blind fury of these urchins,

Starting point is 06:52:24 he thought of the cruel and abominable law of the struggle of existence. And although these children were mean, he could not help being interested in their futures, yet could not but believe that it had been better for them had their mothers never given them birth. In fact, all they could expect of life was rash, colic, fever and measles in their earliest years, slaps in the face and degrading drudgeries up to thirteen years, deceptions by women, sicknesses and infidelity during manhood, and towards the last, infirmities and agonies in a poor house or asylum.

Starting point is 06:53:13 And the future was the same for everyone, and none in his good senses could envy his neighbour. The rich had the same passions, the same anxieties, the same pains and the same illnesses, but in a different environment, the same mediocre enjoyments, whether alcoholic, literary or carnal. There was even a vague compensation in evils, a sort of justice which re-established the balance of misfortune between the classes, permitting the poor. to bear physical suffering more easily, and making it difficult for the unresisting, weaker bodies of the rich to withstand it.

Starting point is 06:54:02 How vain, silly, and mad it is to beget brats! And Desicant thought of those ecclesiastics who had taken vows of sterility, yet was so inconsistent as to canonise St. Vincent de Paul, because he brought vain tortures to innocent creatures. By means of his hateful precautions, Vincent de Paul had deferred for years the death of unintelligent and insensate beings, in such a way that when they later became almost intelligent and sentient to grief, they were able to anticipate the future, to await and fear that death of whose very name they had of late been ignorant. Some of them going as far to invoke it in hatred of that sentence of life,

Starting point is 06:54:59 which the monk inflicted upon them by an absurd theological code. And since this old man's death his ideas had prevailed. Abandoned children were sheltered instead of being. killed, and yet their lives daily became increasingly rigorous and barren. Then, under pretext of liberty and progress, society had discovered another means of increasing man's miseries by tearing him from his home, forcing him to don a ridiculous uniform and carry weapons, by brutalising him in a slavery in every respect like that from which he had compelled, passionately freed the Negro, and all to enable him to slaughter his neighbour without risking

Starting point is 06:55:53 the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operate single-handed, without uniforms, and with weapons that are less swift and deafening. Dyssant wondered if there had ever been such a time as ours. Our age invokes the causes of humanity, endeavours to perfect anaesthesia to suppress physical suffering. Yet at the same time, it prepares these very stimulants to increase moral wretchedness. Ah, if ever this useless procreation should be abolished, it were now. But here again, the laws enacted by people like Portalis and Ome, appeared strange and cruel, In the matter of generation, justice finds the agencies for deception to be quite natural.

Starting point is 06:56:52 It is a recognised and acknowledged fact. There is scarcely a home of any station that does not confide its children to the drain pipes, or that does not employ contrivances that are freely sold, and which it would enter no person's mind to prohibit. And yet, if these subterfuges proved insufficient, if the attempt miscarried, and if to remedy matters one had recourse to more efficacious measures, ah, then there were not prisons enough, not municipal jails enough to confine those who, in good faith, were condemned by other individuals who had that very evening on the conjugal bed done their utmost to avoid giving birth

Starting point is 06:57:42 to children. The deceit itself was not a crime, it seemed. The crime lay in the justification of the deceit. What society considered a crime was the act of killing a being endowed with life, and yet, in expelling a fetus, one deseckels, one deseckels. destroyed an animal that was less formed and living, and certainly less intelligent and more ugly than a dog or a cat, although it is permissible to strangle these creatures as soon as they are born. It is only right to add, for the sake of fairness, thought Descent, that it is not the awkward man, who generally loses no time in disappearing, but rather the woman, the victim of his stupidity, who expiates the crime of having saved an innocent life.

Starting point is 06:58:40 Yet was it right that the world should be filled with such prejudice as to wish to repress manoeuvres so natural that primitive man, the Polynesian savage, for instance, instinctively practices them? The servant interrupted the charitable reflections of Desecente, who received the slice of bread on a plate of vermais. Pains shot through his heart. He did not have the courage to eat this bread, for the unhealthy excitement of his stomach had ceased. A sensation of frightful decay swept upon him. He was compelled to rise. The sun turned and slowly fell upon the place that he had lately occupied. The heat became more heavy and fierce.

Starting point is 06:59:38 Throw this slice of bread to those children who are murdering each other on the road, he ordered his servant. Let the weakest be crippled, be denied share in the prize, and be soundly thrashed into the bargain, as they will be when they return to their homes with, torn trousers and bruised eyes. This will give them an idea of the life that awaits them. And he entered the house and sank into his armchair. But I must try to eat something, he said. And he attempted to soak a biscuit in old

Starting point is 07:00:18 Constantia wine, several bottles of which remained in his cellar. That wine, the colour of slightly burned onions, partaking of Malaga and port, but with a specially luscious flavour, and an after-taste of grapes dried by fiery suns had often comforted him, given a new energy to his stomach weakened by the fasts which he was forced to undergo. But this cordial, usually so efficacious, now failed. Then he thought that an emoliant might perhaps counteract the fiery pains which were consuming him, and he took out the Nalifka, a Russian liqueur contained in a bottle frosted with unpolished glass. This unctuous raspberry-flavoured syrup also failed. Alas! The time was far off,

Starting point is 07:01:21 When enjoying good health, Desecese Sant had ridden to his house in the hot summer days in a sleigh, and there, covered with furs wrapped about his chest, forced himself to shiver, saying, as he listened attentively to the chattering of his teeth, "'Ah, how biting this wind is! It is freezing!' Thus he had almost succeeded in convincing himself that it was cold. Unfortunately, such remedies as these had failed of their purpose ever since his sickness became vital. With all this he was unable to make use of Lodnum. Instead of allaying the pain, this sedative irritated him even to the degree of depriving him

Starting point is 07:02:12 of rest. At one time he had endeavoured to procure visions through opium and hashish. these two substances had led to vomiting and intense nervous disturbances. He had instantly been forced to give up the idea of taking them. And without the aid of these coarse stimulants, demand of his brain alone to transport him into the land of dreams, far, far from life. What a day! He said to himself, sponging his nose, neck, feeling every ounce of his strength dissolve in perspiration. A feverish agitation still prevented him from remaining in one spot. Once more he walked up and down, trying every chair in the room in turn.

Starting point is 07:03:09 Wearyed of the struggle, at last he fell against his bureau, and leaning mechanically against the table, Without thinking of anything, he touched an astrolabe, which rested on a mass of books and notes, and served as a paperweight. He had purchased this engraved and gilded copper instrument. It had come from Germany, and dated from the 17th century, of a second-hand Paris dealer, after a visit to the Cluny Museum, where he had stood for a long while in ecstatic admiration, before a marvellous astrolabe made of chiselled ivory, whose cabalistic appearance enchanted him. This paperweight evoked many reminiscences within him. Aroused and actuated by the appearance of this trinket,

Starting point is 07:04:04 his thoughts rushed from Fontenay to Paris, to the curio-shop where he had purchased it, then returned to the museum, and he mentally beheld the ivory astrolabe, while his unseeing eyes continued to gaze upon the copper astrolabe on the table. Then he left the museum, and without quitting the town, strolled down the streets, wandered through the Rue du Saint-Méret and the Boulevard-S-Michel, branched off into the neighbouring streets, and paused before st. certain shops, whose quite extraordinary appearance and profusion had often attracted him. Beginning with an astrolabe, this spiritual jaunt ended in the cafes of the Latin quarter.

Starting point is 07:04:59 He remembered how these places were crowded in the rue Monsieur le Prince, and at the end of the Rue de Vosierre, touching the Odeon. Sometimes they followed one another like, the old Ridex of the Canal O'Aran at Antwerp, each of which revealed a front, the counterpart of its neighbour. Through the half-opened doors, and the windows dimmed with coloured panes or curtains, he had often seen women, who walked about like geese. Others, on benches, rested their elbows on the marble tables, humming, their temples resting between their hands. Still others strutted and posed in front of mirrors, playing with their false hair, pomarded by hairdressers. Others again took money from their purses, and methodically

Starting point is 07:05:56 sorted the different denominations in little heaps. Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, flabby necks and painted eyes, and all of them, like automaton's, moved simultaneously upon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with the same tone, and uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections, and the same smile. Certain ideas associated themselves in the mind of Desecent, whose reveries came to an end, now that he recalled this collection of coffee-houses and streets. He understood the significance of those cafes which reflected the state of soul of an entire generation, and from it he discovered the synthesis of the period.

Starting point is 07:06:56 And in fact the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses of prostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafe began to operate. This restriction of prostitution, which proved profitable to clandestine loves, evidently arose from the incomprehensible illusions of men in the matter of carnal life. Monstrous as it may appear, these haunts satisfied an ideal. Although the utilitarian tendencies transmitted by heredity, and developed by the precocious rudeness and constant, constant brutalities of the colleges had made the youth of the day strangely crude, and as strangely positive and cold. It had nonetheless preserved, in the back of their heads, an old blue flower, an old ideal

Starting point is 07:07:58 of a vague, sour affection. Today, when the blood clamoured, youths could not bring themselves to go through the formality of entering, ending, paying and leaving. In their eyes this was bestiality, the action of a dog attacking a bitch without much ado. Then too vanity fled unsatisfied from these houses where there was no semblance of resistance, there was no victory, no hoped for preference, nor even largesse obtained from the tradeswoman who measured her caresses according to the price. On the contrary, the courting of a girl of the cafes stimulated all the susceptibilities of love, all the refinements of sentiment. One disputed

Starting point is 07:08:54 with the others for such a girl, and those to whom she granted a rendezvous, in consideration of much money, were sincere in imagining that they had won her from a rival, and in so thinking they were the objects of honorary distinction and favour. Yet this domesticity was as stupid, as selfish, as vile as that of houses of ill fame. Its creatures drank without being thirsty, laughed without reason, were charmed by the caresses of a slut, quarrelled and fought for no reason whatever, despite to everything. The Parisian youth had not been able to see that these girls were, from the point of plastic beauty, graceful attitudes and necessary attire, quite inferior to the women in the bawdy houses. "'My God,' Desicant exclaimed, "'what ninnies are these fellows who flutter around

Starting point is 07:10:00 the cafes? For over and above their silly illusions, They forget the danger of degraded, suspicious allurements, and they are unaware of the sums of money given for affairs priced in advance by the mistress. Of the time lost in waiting for an assignation deferred so as to increase its value and cost, delays which are repeated to provide more tips for the waiters. This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practical sense, represented the dominant motive of the age. These very persons who would have gouged their neighbour's eyes to gain ten sous, lost all presence of mind and discrimination, before suspicious-looking girls in restaurants who pitilessly harassed and relentlessly fleeced them. Fathers devoted their lives to their businesses and labours. Families devoured one another

Starting point is 07:11:09 on the pretext of trade, only to be robbed by their sons, who in turn allowed themselves to be fleeced by women who posed as sweethearts to obtain their money. In all Paris, from east to west and from north to south, there existed an unbroken chain of female tricksters, a system of organized theft, and all because, instead of satisfying men at once, these women were skilled in the subterfuges of delay. At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in saying no before saying yes, for one could manage people only by trifling with them. Ah, if the same were but true of the stomach, sighed Desecesaint,

Starting point is 07:12:10 racked by a cramp which instantly and sharply brought back his mind that had roved far off to Fontenay. End of Chapter 13 Against the Grain by Joris Carl Weismance Translated by John Howard Chapter 14 Part 1 Several days slowly passed, thanks to certain measures which succeeded in tricking the stomach. But one morning, this is saint could endure food no longer,

Starting point is 07:12:54 and he asked himself anxiously whether his already serious weakness would not grow worse, and force him to take to bed. A sudden gleam of light relieved his distress. He remembered that one of his friends, quite ill at one time, had made use of a Papin's digester to overcome his anemia and preserve what little strength he had. He dispatched his servant to Paris for this precious utensil,

Starting point is 07:13:29 and following the directions, contained in the prospectus which the manufacturer had enclosed. He himself instructed the cook how to cut the roast beef into bits, put it into the pewter pot, with a slice of leek and carrot, and screw on the cover to let it boil for four hours. At the end of this time, the meat fibres were strained. He drank a spoonful of the thick, salty juice deposited at the bottom of the pot. Then he felt a warmth, like a smooth caress, descend upon him. This nourishment relieved

Starting point is 07:14:12 his pain and nausea, and even strengthened his stomach, which did not refuse to accept these few drops of soup. Thanks to this digester, his neurosis was arrested, and Desicant said to himself, Well, it is so much gained. Perhaps the temperature will change. The sky will throw some ashes upon this abominable sun, which exhausts me, and I shall hold out without accident till the first fogs and frosts of winter. In the torpor and listless ennui in which he was sunk, the disorder of his library, whose arrangement had never been completed, irritated him. Helpless in his armchair, he had constantly in sight the books set awry on the shelves, propped up against each other, or lying flat on their sides, like a tumbled pack of cards. This disorder offended him the more when he contrasted it with the perfect order of his religious works, carefully placed on parade along the walls.

Starting point is 07:15:30 He tried to clear up the confusion, but after ten minutes of work, perspiration covered him. The effort weakened him. He stretched himself on a couch and rang for his servant. Following his directions, the old man continued the task, bringing each book in turn to Desicant, who examined it and directed where it was to be placed. This task did not last long, for Desicent's library contained but a very limited number of contemporary, secular works. They were drawn through his brain, as bands of metal are drawn through a steel plate from which they issue thin, light, and reduced to almost imperceptible wires. and he had ended by possessing only those books which could submit to such treatment,

Starting point is 07:16:32 and which were so solidly tempered as to withstand the rolling-mill of each new reading. In his desire to refine, he had restrained and almost sterilized his enjoyment, ever accentuating the irremediable conflict existing between his ideas and those of the world in which he had happened to be born. He had now reached such a pass that he could no longer discover any writings to content his secret longings, and his admiration even weaned itself from those volumes which had certainly contributed to sharpen his mind, making it so suspicious and subtle. In art, his ideas had sprung from a simple point of view. For him schools did not exist, and only the temperament of the

Starting point is 07:17:32 writer mattered, only the working of his brain interested him, regardless of the subject. Unfortunately, this verity of appreciation, worthy of Pallis, was scarcely applicable, for the simple reason that even while desiring to be free of prejudices and passion, each person naturally goes to the works which most intimately correspond with his own temperament, and ends by relegating all others to the rear. This work of selection had slowly acted within him. Not long ago he had adored the great Balzac, but as his body weakened and his nerves became troublesome,

Starting point is 07:18:22 his tastes modified, and his admirer, generations changed. Very soon, and despite the fact that he was aware of his injustice to the amazing author of the Comédieu Men, Desisant had reached a point where he no longer opened Balzac's books. Their healthy spirit jarred on him. Other aspirations now stirred in him, somehow becoming undefinable. Yet when he probed himself, he understood that to attract a work must have that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allan Poe. But he ventured even further on this path, and called for Byzantine flora of brain, and complicated deliquescences of language. He desired a troubled indecision, on which he might brood

Starting point is 07:19:21 until he could shape it at will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary state of his soul. In short, he desired a work of art, both for what it was in itself, and for what it permitted him to endow it. He wished to pass by means of it into a sphere of sublimated sensation, which would arouse in him new commotions, whose cause he might long and vainly seek to analyse. In short, since leaving Paris, Desaise Saint was removing himself further and further from reality, especially from the contemporary world which he held in an ever-growing detestation. This hatred had inevitably reacted on his literary and artistic tastes, and he would have as little as possible to do with paintings and books whose limited subjects

Starting point is 07:20:24 dealt with modern life. Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately, under whatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's time. to Saint Antoine, to his education sentimental, Goncourt's Faustin, to his Germini la Certeux, Zola's foot to Labe Mouré to his assamoire. This point of view seemed logical to him. These works, less immediate, but just as vibrant and human, enabled him to penetrate farther into the depths of the temperaments of these

Starting point is 07:21:08 masters, who revealed in them the most mysterious transports of their being with a more sincere abandon, and they lifted him far above this trivial life which wearied him so. In them he entered into a perfect communion of ideas with their authors, who had written them when their state of soul was analogous to his own. In fact, when the period in which a period in which a man of talent is obliged to live, is dull and stupid. The artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a nostalgia of some past century. Finding himself unable to harmonise, save at rare intervals, with the environment in which he lives, and not discovering sufficient distraction in the pleasures of observation and analysis, in the examination of the environment.

Starting point is 07:22:08 and its people. He feels in himself the dawning of strange ideas. Confused desires for other lands awake and are clarified by reflection and study. Instincts, sensations and thoughts, bequeathed by heredity, awake, grow fixed, assert themselves with an imperious assurance. He recalls memories of beings and things he has never really known, and a time comes when he escapes from the penitentiary of his age, and roves in full liberty into another epoch, with which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony. With some it is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilizations, to dead epochs. With others it is an urge towards a fantastic future, to a more or less intense vision of a period about to dawn, whose image, by an effect of atavism of which he is unaware, is a reproduction of some past age.

Starting point is 07:23:23 In Flaubert, this nostalgia is expressed in solemn and majestic pictures of magnificent splendours, in whose gorgeous barbaric frames move palpitating and delicate creatures, mysterious and haughty. Women gifted in the perfection of their beauty, with souls capable of suffering, and in whose depths he discerned frightful derangements, mad aspirations, grieved as they were by the haunting premonition of the disillusionments their follies held in store. The temperament of this great artist is fully revealed in the incomparable pages of the Tantacion de Saint-Antoine and Salambeau, where far from our sorry life he evokes the splendours of old Asia, the age of fervent prayer and mystic depression, of languorous passions and excesses induced by the unbearable ennui, resulting from opulence and prayer. In de Goncourt, it was the nostalgia of the preceding century, a return to the elegances of a society forever lost. The stupendous setting of seas beating against jetties, of deserts stretching under torrid skies to distant horizons,

Starting point is 07:25:00 did not exist in his nostalgic work, which confined itself to a boudoir near an orlic part. scented with the voluptuous fragrance of a woman with a tired smile, a perverse little pout, and unresigned pensive eyes. The soul with which he animated his characters was not that breathed by Flaubert into his creatures, no longer the soul, early thrown in revolt by the inexorable certainty that no new happiness is possible. It was a soul that a soul that had too late revolted, after the experience, against all the useless attempts to invent new spiritual liaisons, and to heighten the enjoyment of lovers, which from immemorial times has always ended in satiety. Although she lived in and partook of the life of our time,

Starting point is 07:26:02 Fustin, by her ancestral influences, was a creature of the past century, whose cerebral lassitude and sensual excesses she possessed. This book of Edmond de Goncourt was one of the volumes which Desais Saint loved best, and the suggestion of reverie which he demanded lived in this work, where under each written line another line was etched, visible. to the spirit alone, indicated by a hint which revealed passion, by a reticence, permitting one to divine subtle states of soul which no idiom could express. And it was no longer Flaubert's language in its inimitable magnificence, but a morbid, perspicacious style, nervous and twisted, keen to note the impalpable impression that strike

Starting point is 07:27:02 the senses, a style expert in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch, which in itself was singularly complex. In short, it was the epithet, indispensable to decrepit civilizations, no matter how old they be, which must have words with new meanings and forms. invasions in phrases and words for their complex needs. At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody, and transmuted its language with Aosoneus, with Claudian and Rutilius, whose attentive, scrupulous, sonorous, and powerful style,

Starting point is 07:27:52 presented in its descriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances, bearing an affinity with the style of de Goncourt. At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. That Moribund Society of the 18th century, which possessed painters, musicians and architects, imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had not been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It had been necessary to await the arrival of de Goncourt, whose temperament was formed of memories and regrets, made more poignant by the sad spectacle of the intellectual

Starting point is 07:28:47 poverty and the pitiful aspirations of his own time, to resuscitate, not only in his historical works, but even more in Fustin, the very soul of that period, incarnating its nervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and her senses, so as to savour to exhaustion the grievous revolsives of love and of art. With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different. In him was no longing for vanished ages, no aspiring towards worlds lost in the night of time. His strong and solid temperament dazzled with the luxuriance of life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from the artificial graces and painted chloroses of the past

Starting point is 07:29:48 century, as well as from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity, and misty, effeminate dreams of the Old Orient. When he, too, had become obsessed by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetry itself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, He had rushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantastic passions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of feckoned rains of pollen, falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in a gigantic pantheism, had created, unwittingly perhaps, with this Eden-esque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvellous Hindu poem. Singing, in a style whose broad, crude strokes had something of the bizarre brilliance of an

Starting point is 07:30:55 Indian painting, the song of the flesh, of animated living matter, revealing to the human creature by its passion for reproduction, the forbidden fruits of love, its suffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes. With Baudelaire, these three masters had most affected des escent in modern French secular literature. But he had read them so often, had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorb them, he had been compelled to lay them aside, and let them remain unread on his shelves. Even though, Now, when the servant was arranging them for him, he did not care to open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the place they were to occupy, and seeing that they were properly

Starting point is 07:31:56 classified and put away. The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed him more. They were books towards which his taste had gradually veered, books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection of more vigorous writers. Here too, Descésainte had reached the point where he sought, among these troubled pages, only phrases which discharged a sort of electricity that made him tremble. They transmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemed refractory.

Starting point is 07:32:39 Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasitic nor servile. And perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory that the inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, though unfinished, distills a more irritating, apparent and acid balm, than the artist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it was in their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exesive the exaltations of the most excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbid psychological states, the most extravagant depravities of language, charged in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task of containing the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas.

Starting point is 07:33:37 Thus, after the masters, he betook himself to a few writers who were attracted to the him all the more because of the disdain in which they were held by the public incapable of understanding them. One of them was Paul Verlaine, who had begun with a volume of verse, the Poemes Sartournian, a rather ineffectual book where imitations of Le Cont de Lille jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but through which already filtered the real personality of the poet in such poems as the sonnet Rave Familier. In searching for his antecedents, Desicent discovered, under the hesitant strokes of the sketches, a talent already deeply affected by Baudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on, acquiesced in by the peerless master, but,

Starting point is 07:34:39 the imitation was never flagrant. And in some of his books, Bon Chanson, Fette Gallante, Romance Sans Parole, and in his last volume Sagesse, where poems where he himself was revealed as an original and outstanding figure. With rhymes obtained from verb tenses, sometimes even from long adverbs preceded by a monosyllable, from which they fell as from a rock into a heavy cascade of water, his verses, divided by improbable caesura's, often became strangely obscure, with their audacious ellipses and strange inaccuracies, which nonetheless did not lack grace. With his unrivaled ability to handle metre, he had sought to rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome

Starting point is 07:35:43 clay which rest on stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes he corrupted it by using only masculine rhymes, to which he seemed partial. He had often employed a bizarre form, a stanza of three lines whose middle verse was unrhymed, and a terset with but one rhyme, followed by a single line, an echoing refrain, like D'Anse-on-la-jig in streets. He had employed other rhymes whose dim echoes are repeated in remote stanzas, like faint reverberations of a bell. But his personality expressed itself most of all, in vague and delicious confidences, breathed in hushed accents in the twilight. He alone had been able to reveal the troubled ultimathules of the soul, low whisperings of

Starting point is 07:36:46 thoughts, a vowel so haltingly and murmuringly confessed, that the ear which hears them remains hesitant, passing on to the soul, languors quickened by the mystery of this suggestion, which is divined rather than felt. Everything characteristic of Verlaine was expressed in these adorable verses of the fete gallant. "'The night tombé, "'an sware equivoc of autumn,

Starting point is 07:37:19 "'le, the bell, supand, reveuses, to our bras, Dere then the moe so speciue to bea, that our am,

Starting point is 07:37:30 from this time, tremble and it was no longer the immense horizon opened by

Starting point is 07:37:38 the unforgettable portals of Baudelaire. It was a crevice in the moonlight, opening on a field which

Starting point is 07:37:46 was more intimate and more restrained, peculiar to Berlin, who had formulated his poetic system in those lines of which Dese Saint was so fond.

Starting point is 07:38:00 "'Card, we voulland la nuance, "'in'er, by the colour, "'rien than nuance, "'and all the rest of literature.' "'Dezescent had followed him with delight "'in his most diversified works. "'After his romance sans-parole, "'which had appeared in a journal,

Starting point is 07:38:22 "'verlen had preserved, a long silence, reappearing later in those charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and cold accents of Villan, singing of the Virgin, removed from our days of carnal thought and weary flesh. Dizésaint often re-read Sagesse, whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for a Byzantine Madonna, who at a certain moment changed into a distracted modern sidelis so mysterious and troubling that one could not know whether she aspired towards depravities so monstrous that they had become irresistible or whether she moved in an immaculate dream, where the adoration of the soul floated around her ever unavowed and ever pure.

Starting point is 07:39:21 There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself to them, Christen Corbiere, who in 1873, in the midst of the general apathy, had issued a most eccentric volume entitled, called Les Amour-Jone. Desecent, who, in his hatred of the banal and commonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly and the most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with this work, where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and where disconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as the litanies of Somay, that they qualified their author

Starting point is 07:40:12 for the name of obscenes confessor des Votes Marnes. The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the Negro dialect, was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasing phraseology, revelled in the in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman. Then out of this jumble, laughable conceits and sly affectations emerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out like the snapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hard, rugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpected neologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression,

Starting point is 07:41:08 and superbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his poem Parisian, where Desaisant had discovered this profound definition of woman. Eternel Feminine de L'Eternel Giacriss. Christen Corbiere had celebrated in a powerfully concise style, the Sea of Brittany, mermaids and the pardon of Saint Anne. And he had even risen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled, apropos of the Conli camp, at the individuals whom he designated under the name of

Starting point is 07:41:51 foreigners of the Fourth of September. The raciness of which he was so fond, which Carbier offered him in his sharp epithets, his beauties which ever remained a trifle suspect, Dyssinne found again in another poet, Theodor Anon, a disciple of Baudelaire and Gautier, moved by a very unusual sense of the exquisite and the artificial. Unlike Verlaine, whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire, especially on the psychological side in his insidious nuances of thought and skillful quintessence of sentiment, Teodor Anon,

Starting point is 07:42:39 especially descended from the master on the plastic side, by the external vision of persons and things. His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of Des Saint, who, on misty or rainy days, enclosed himself in the retreat fancied by the poet, and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of his fabrics, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusively material sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, and rose like a cantharides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense towards a Brussels idol, with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes. With the exception of the works of these poets, and of Stefan Malarmé, which his servant was told to place to one side, so that he might classify them separate. this is saint was but slightly attracted towards the poets end of chapter fourteen part one against the grain by jorice carl oismans translated by john howard chapter fourteen part two notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of his verse which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters of Hugo seemed pale in comparison,

Starting point is 07:44:26 Le Cont de Lille could no longer satisfy him. The antiquity so marvellously restored by Flaubert remained cold and immobile in his hands. Nothing palpitated in his verses which lacked depth, and which most often contained no idea. Nothing moved in those gloomy waste poems whose impassive mythologies ended by finally leaving him cold. Two, after having long delighted in Gautier, Des Ese Saint reached the point where he no longer cared for him.

Starting point is 07:45:09 The admiration he felt for this man's incomparable painting had gradually dissolved. Now he was more astonished than ravished by his descriptions. Objects impressed themselves upon Gautier's perceptive eyes, but they went no further. They never penetrated deeper into his brain and flesh. Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limited himself to reflecting surrounding objects,

Starting point is 07:45:44 with impersonal clearness. Certainly Descint still loved the works of these two poets, as he loved rare stones and precious objects. But none of the variations of these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither being evocative of reverie, neither opening, for him at least, broad roads of escape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours. These two books left him unsatisfied, and it was the same with Hugo. The oriental and patriarchal side was too conventional and barren to detain him, and his manners at once childish, and that of a grandfather, exasperated him. He had to go to the shrew.

Starting point is 07:46:39 chancers de rue and de bois, to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics. But how gladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this tour de force, for a new work by Baudelaire, which might equal the others, for he decidedly was almost the only one whose verses, under their splendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance. In passing from one extreme to the other, from form deprived of ideas to ideas deprived of form, Descinct remained no less circumspect and cold. The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal, the analytical detours of Duranty, seduced him, but their administrative, colourless and arid language, their static prose,

Starting point is 07:47:39 prose, fit at best for the wretched industry of the theatre, repelled him. Then their interesting works and their astute analyses applied to brains agitated by passions in which he was no longer interested. He was not at all concerned with general affections or points of view, with associations of common ideas. that the reserve of his mind was more keenly developed, and that he no longer admitted ought but superfine sensations, and Catholic or sensual torments. To enjoy a work which should combine, according to his wishes, incisive style with penetrating

Starting point is 07:48:29 and feline analysis, he had to go to the master of induction, the profound and strange Edgar Allan Poe, for whom, since the time when he re-read him, his preference had never wavered. More than any other, perhaps, he approached by his intimate affinity, de Césin's meditative of mind. If Baudelaire, in the hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbidity, psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul. Under the emblematic title, the demon of perversity, he had been the first in literature to pry into the irresistible, unconscious impulses of the will, which mental pathology now explains more scientifically. He had

Starting point is 07:49:33 also been the first to divulge, if not to signal, the impressive influence of fear, which acts on the will like an anaesthetic, paralysing sensibility, and like the curare, stupefying the nerves. It was on the problem of the lethargy of the will, that Poe had centred his studies, analysing the effects of this moral poison, indicating the symptoms of its progress, the troubles commencing with anxiety, continuing through anguish, ending finally in the terror which deadens the will, without intelligence succumbing, though sorely disturbed. Death, which the dramatists had so much abused, he had in some manner. changed and made more poignant by introducing an algebraic and superhuman element.

Starting point is 07:50:38 But in truth, it was less the real agony of the dying person which he described, and more the moral agony of the survivor, haunted at the deathbed by monstrous hallucinations engendered by grief and fatigue. with a frightful fascination, he dwelt on acts of terror, on the snapping of the will, coldly reasoning about them, little by little, making the reader gasp, suffocated and panting before these feverish, mechanically contrived nightmares. Convulsed by hereditary neurosis, maddened by a moral St. Vitus's dance, pose creakish. lived only through their nerves. His women, the Morellas and Ligiers, possessed an immense

Starting point is 07:51:34 erudition. They were steeped in the mists of German philosophy and the cabalistic mysteries of the Old Orient, and all had the boyish and inert breasts of angels. All were sexless. Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who have had the boyish and inert breasts of angels, all were sexless. Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who had often been compared because of their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination of mental maladies, differed radically in the effective conceptions which held such a large place in their works. Baudelaire, with his iniquitous and debased loves, cruel loves which made one think of the reprisals of an inquisition. Poe, with his chaste, aerial loves, inmate. which the senses played no part, where only the mind functioned, without corresponding to organs,

Starting point is 07:52:34 which, if they existed, remained forever frozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic, where vivisecting in a stifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked like delicious means. somnambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to desic Saint a source of unwearying conjecture. But now that his nervous disorders were augmented, days came when his readings broke his spirit, and when hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate usher, he was haunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror. Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touched these fearful elixiers, in the same way that he could no longer with impunity visit his red

Starting point is 07:53:41 corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of the gloomy Odiland-redin prince and the Jan Lauken horrors. And yet, when he felt inclined to read, All literature seemed to him dull after these terrible American imported filters. Then he betook himself to Villiers de Lilladain, in whose scattered works he noted seditious observations and spasmodic vibrations, but which no longer gave one, with the exception of his Clare Le Noir, such troubling horror. This Clare Le Noir, which appeared in 1867 in the Revue de Létre Des Ar, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of Histoire Morose, where against a background of obscure speculations borrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred. Dr. Tribula Bonhomme, solemn and childish, a Claire Le Noir, farcical and sinister,

Starting point is 07:54:55 with blue spectacles, round and large as frank pieces, which covered her almost dead eyes. This story centred about a simple adultery, and ended with an inexpressible terror, when Bonhomme, opening Claire's eyelids as she lies in her deathbed, and penetrating them with monstrous plummets, distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing the lover's decapitated head, while shouting a war-song, like a Kanaka. Based on this more or less just observation that the eyes of certain animals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, like photographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyes behold at the moment they expire.

Starting point is 07:55:54 This story evidently derived from Poe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique. This also applied to the intersigne, which had later been joined to the Comte Ruel, a collection of indisputable talent, in which was found Vera, which Deset Sainte considered a little masterpiece. Here the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness. No longer was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid, warm, almost celestial vision. It was in an identical genre, the reverse of the beatrice's and liegeas, those gloomy and dark phantoms engendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium. This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it no longer treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects of fear.

Starting point is 07:57:00 On the contrary, it studied the exaltations of the will, under the impulse of a fixed, idea. It demonstrated its power, which often succeeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualities on surrounding objects. Another book by Villiers de Lillardin, Isis, seemed to him curious in other respects. The philosophic medley of Clare Le Noir was evident in this work, which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal and troubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and rope ladders, all the romanticism which Villiers de Lillardin could never rejuvenate in his Elene and Morgan, forgotten pieces, published by an obscure man,

Starting point is 07:57:58 sieur francisque Guillaume. The heroine of this book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to have assimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allan Poe, and the diplomatic sagacities of Stendal, had the enigmatic countenance of Bradamante, abused by an antique Searcy. These insoluble mixtures developed a fuliginous vapour, across which philosophic and literary influences jostled, without being able to. be regulated in the author's brain, when he wrote the prologominy of this work, which could not have embraced less than seven volumes. But there was another side to Ville's temperament. It was piercing and acute in an altogether different sense, a side of forbidding pleasantry

Starting point is 07:58:58 and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxical mystifications of Poe. but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious and savage comedy which swift possessed a series of sketches les demoiselle de bian filatres the afichage celeste la machinae and le plus baudiné du monde betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind the whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas. The whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported desicente. No other French book had been written in this serious and bitter style. At the most a tale by Charles Crowe, La Science de l'amour, printed long ago in the Revue du Monde Nouveau could astonish by reason of its chemical whims, by its affected humour, and by its

Starting point is 08:00:10 coldly facetious observations. But the pleasure to be extracted from the story was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure. The firm, coloured and often original style of Villiers had disappeared to give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of the first comer. Heavens, heavens! How few books are really worth re-reading! sighed Desecent,

Starting point is 08:00:44 gazing at the servant who left the stool on which he had been perched, to permit DesEcent to survey his books with a single glance. Dezestant nodded his head, But two small books remained on the table. With a sigh he dismissed the old man, and turned over the leaves of a volume bound in Onager skin, which had been glazed by a hydraulic press, and speckled with silver clouds.

Starting point is 08:01:18 It was held together by fly-leaves of old silk damask, whose faint patterns held that charm of faded things, celebrated by malarmé in an exquisite poem these pages numbering nine had been extracted from copies of the two first parnassian books it was printed on parchment paper and preceded by this title "'Ckelque Verre de Malarmé, "'designed in a surprising calligraphy in unseal letters, "'ill illuminated and relieved with gold, as in old manuscripts. "'Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, "'several invited him.

Starting point is 08:02:07 "'Les fenetre, l'epilogue, and azure. "'But one among them all, a fragment of the erudial, held him at certain hours in a spell. How often beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber had he not felt himself haunted by this erudiad, who in the work of Gustav Moro was now plunged in gloom, revealing but a dim white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones? The darkness concealed the blue,

Starting point is 08:02:46 the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colours, and only sparing the aquarell whites revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity. At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines. And she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which Malarmé makes her utter. O'-mirre, O'-mire, O'-froid, to parlon-nui, in your cadre, jolet, that, "'that of foe, and pendant the hour, "'desoled, these songue,

Starting point is 08:03:38 "'and, searching my souvenirs, "'who are like the feyye "'sout a glass o' too profound, "'I'm appurue in to-o'-o'-pourn't, "'com an ombre-loin-tene. "'But, horror, "'de-soir, d'-swe're in your severe fontaine, "'I, of my rave,

Starting point is 08:04:00 "'and part, "'ourne! "'Cone, "'ourne! Nuis la nudity. These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet, who in an age of democracy devoted to Luca, lived his solitary and literary life, sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting far from society in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting byzantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions, lightly connected by an almost imperceptible thread.

Starting point is 08:04:46 These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes, perceiving the remorse. Perceiving the remotest analogies with a single term which by an effect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the colour and the quality. He described the object or being, to which otherwise he would have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets, so as to disengage all their facets and nuances. had he simply contented himself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded in dispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind by analogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was the attention of the reader,

Starting point is 08:05:46 diverted by the enumeration of the qualities which the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced. concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, the ensemble, a unique and complete aspect. It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimate of art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlier works, but Malarmé had boldly proclaimed it, in a verse on Theophil Gautier, and in the Apremidid de fone, an eclogue where the subtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressing verses, suddenly pierced by this wild, rending fawn cry. "'Alure, me vei'erre I la fervour premier, d'wae and sole, sous a floe antique de l'oe'oe'nique de liuire,

Starting point is 08:06:54 Lih, and la de you all for the ingenuity. That line with the monosyllable, Li, like a sprig, evoked the image of something rigid, slender and white. It rhymed with the substantive ingenuity, allegorically expressing by a single term, the passion, the effervescence,

Starting point is 08:07:20 the fugitive mood of a virgin fawn, amorously distracted by the sight of nymphs. In this extraordinary poem, surprising and unthought-of images leaped up at the end of each line, when the poet described the elations and regrets of the fawn, contemplating at the edge of a fen, the tufts of reeds still preserving in its transitory mould, the form made by the Nyatts who had occupied it. Then Dizizsad also experienced insidious delights in touching this diminutive book, whose cover of Japan vellum, as white as curdled milk, were held together by two silk bands, one of Chinese rose, the other of black. Hidden behind the cover, the black band rejoined

Starting point is 08:08:19 the rose, which rested like a touch of modern Japanese paint, or like a lascivious adjutant against the antique white, against the candid carnation tint of the book, and enlaced it, united its sombre colour with the light colour into a light rosette. It insinuated a faint warning of that regret, a vague menace of that sadness which succeeds the ended transports and the calmed excitements of the senses. Desecins placed L'Aprémede du Phonne on the table and examined another little book he had printed, an anthology of prose poems, a tiny chapel placed under the invocation of Baudelaire, and opening on the parvise of his poems. This anthology comprised a select

Starting point is 08:09:18 of Gaspar de la Nuis, of that fantastic Aloysius Bertrand, who had transferred the behaviour of Leonard in prose, and with his metallic oxides painted little pictures whose vivid colours sparkle like those of clear enameles. To this, Descinct had joined Le Voxe Populi of Villiers, A superb piece of work in a hammered golden style after the manner of Le Cont de Lille and of Flaubert, and some selections from that delicate Livre de Jadde, whose exotic perfume of ginseng and of tea blends with the odorous freshness of water

Starting point is 08:10:05 babbling along the book under moonlight. But in this collection had been gathered certain poems resurrected from defunct reviews. The demon of the analogie, the pip, the poor infant pal, the spectacle interompu, the phenomenon future, and especially plaint of autumn and frisson d'Ever, which were Malarmé's masterpieces, and were also celebrated among the masterpieces of prose poems. For they united such a magnificently delicate language that they cradled, like a melancholy incantation or a maddening melody, thoughts of an irresistible suggestiveness. Pulsations of the soul of a sensitive person whose excited nerves vibrate with a keenness, which penetrates ravishingly and induces a sadness.

Starting point is 08:11:10 Of all the forms of literature, that of the prose poem was the form Dizizant preferred. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it contained in its slender volume the strength of the novel, whose analytic developments and descriptive redundancies it suppressed. Quite often, Dizizant had meditated on that disquieting problem. To write a novel concentrated in a few phrases, which should contain the essence of hundreds of pages, always employed to establish the setting, to sketch the characters, and to pile up observations and minute details. Then the chosen words would be so unexchangeable that they would do duty for many others. The adjective, placed in such an ingenious and definite fashion, that it could not be displaced,

Starting point is 08:12:13 opening such perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on its sense, at once precise and complex, could record the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed by the gleams of this unique epithet. Thus conceived and condensed in a page or two, the novel could become a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader. A spiritual collaboration agreed to between ten superior persons scattered throughout the universe.

Starting point is 08:12:57 A delight offered to the refined, and accessible to them, alone. To Dese Saint, the prose poem represented the concrete juice of literature, the essential oil of art. That succulence, developed and concentrated into a drop, already existed in Baudelaire, and in those poems of Malarmé, which he read with such deep joy. When he had closed his anthology, Dese Saint told himself that his books which had ended on this last book would probably never have anything added to it.

Starting point is 08:13:40 In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its organism enfeebled by old ideas, exhausted by excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosities which make sick persons feverish, yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline, eager to repair all the omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath the most subtle memories of grief in its death-bed, was incarnate in Malarmé, in the most perfect exquisite manner imaginable. Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Poe, here where their fine and powerful substances distilled and disengaging new flavours and intoxications. It was the agony of the old language, which, after having become mouldy from age to age,

Starting point is 08:14:44 ended by dissolving, by reaching that deliquescence of the Latin language which expired in the mysterious concepts and the enigmatical expressions of St. Boniface and St. Boniface and St. Adeline. The decomposition of the French language had been effected suddenly. In the Latin language, a long transition, a distance of four hundred years existed between the spotted and superb epithet of Claudian and Rutilius, and the gamey epithet of the eighth century. In the French language, no lapse of time, no succession of ages had taken place. The stained and superb style of the de Goncourt, and the gamey style of Verlaine and Malarmé,

Starting point is 08:15:38 jostled in Paris, living in the same period, epoch and century. And Desis Saint, gazing at one of the folios opened on his chapel desk, smiled at the thought that the moment would soon come when an erudite scholar would prepare for the decadence of the French language, a glossary, similar to that in which the savants du conge, has noted the last murmurings, the last spasms, the last flashes of the Latin language, dying of old age in the cloisters, and sounding its death rattle. End of Chapter 14 Against the Grain by Joris Karl Weisman

Starting point is 08:16:32 Translated by John Howard Chapter 15 Burning at first like a rick on fire, his enthusiasm for the digester as quickly died out. Torpid at first, his nervous dyspepsia reappeared, and then this hot essence induced such an irritation in his stomach that Desicant was quickly composed. compelled to stop using it. The malady increased in strength. Peculiar symptoms attended it.

Starting point is 08:17:14 After the nightmares, hallucinations of smell, pains in the eye and deep coughing, which recurred with clock-like regularity, after the pounding of his heart and arteries and the cold perspiration, arose illusions of hearing, those alterations which only revealed themselves in the last period of sickness. Attacked by a strong fever, Dese Sainz suddenly heard murmurings of water. Then those sounds united into one, and resembled a roaring which increased, and then slowly resolved itself into a silvery bell sound. He felt his delirious brain whirling in musical waves, engulfed in the mystic whirlwinds of his infancy.

Starting point is 08:18:11 The songs learned that the Jesuits reappeared, bringing with them pictures of the school and the chapel where they had resounded, driving their hallucinations to the olfactory and visual organs, veiling them with clouds of incense. and the pallid light irradiating through the stained-glass windows under the lofty arches. At the Fathers, the religious ceremonies had been practised with great pomp. An excellent organist and remarkable singing director made an artistic delight of these spiritual exercises that were conducive to worship. The organist was in love with the old masters, and on holidays, celebrated masses by Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso, Psalms by Marcello, oratorios by Handel, motets by Bach. He preferred to render the sweet and facile compilations of Father Lambiotte, so much favoured

Starting point is 08:19:20 by priests, the laudy spirituali of the sixteenth century, whose sacerdotal beauty had often bewitched des Isanta. But he particularly extracted ineffable pleasures while listening to the plain chant which the organist had preserved, regardless of new ideas. That form which was now considered a decrepit and Gothic form of Christian liturgy, an archaeological curiosity, a relic of ancient time, had been the voice of the early church, the soul of the soul of the Middle Age. It was the eternal prayer that had been sung and modulated in harmony with the soul's transports, the enduring hymn uplifted for centuries to the Almighty. That traditional melody was the only one which, with its strong unison, its solemn and

Starting point is 08:20:20 massive harmonies, like Freestone, was not out of place with the old basilicas, making eloquent the Romanesque vaults, whose emanation and very spirit they seemed to be. How often had Desisant not thrilled under its spell, when the Christus Factus Est of the Gregorian chant rose from the nave, whose pillars seemed to tremble among the rolling clouds from censors, or when the de profundis was sung, sad and mournful as a suppressed sob, poignant as a despairing invocation of humanity, bewailing its mortal destiny, and imploring the tender forgiveness of its saviour. All religious music seemed profane to him, compared with that magnificent chant created by the genius of the church, anonymous as the organ

Starting point is 08:21:22 whose inventor is unknown. At bottom, in the works of Gommelli and Porpora, Carissimi and Durante, in the most wonderful compositions of Handel and Bach, there was never a hint of a renunciation of public success, or the sacrifice of an effect of art, or the abdication of human pride hearkening to its own prayer. At the most, the religious style, august and solemn, had crystallised in Les Suires'

Starting point is 08:21:58 imposing masses celebrated at Saint-Rosch, tending to approach the severe nudity and austere majesty of the old plain chant. Since then, absolutely revolted by these pretexts at Starbat Martyrs, devised by the pergoleses and the Rossinis, by this intrusion of profane art in liturgic art, Desic Saint had shunned those ambiguous works tolerated by the indulgent church. In addition, this weakness brought about by the desire for large congregations had quickly resulted in the adoption of songs borrowed from Italian operas, of law. Low cavatinas and indecent quadrilles, played in churches converted to boudoirs, and surrendered to stage actors whose voices resounded aloft, their impurity tainting the tones of the holy organ.

Starting point is 08:23:06 For years he had obstinately refused to take part in these pious entertainments, contenting himself with his memories of childhood. He even regretted having heard the te deum of the great masters, for he remembered that admirable plain chant, that hymn so simple and solemn composed by some unknown saint, a St. Ambrose or Hillary, who, lacking the complicated resources of an orchestra and the musical mechanics of modern science, revealed an ardent faith, a delirious jubilation. uttered from the soul of humanity in the piercing and almost celestial accents of conviction. De Césant's ideas on music were in flagrant contradiction with the theories he professed regarding the other arts.

Starting point is 08:24:05 In religious music, he approved only of the monastic music of the Middle Ages. That emaciated music which instinctively reacted on. his nerves like certain pages of the old Christian Latin. Then he freely confessed it, he was incapable of understanding the tricks that the contemporary masters had introduced into Catholic art, and he had not studied music with that passion which had led him towards painting and letters. He played indifferently on the piano, and after many painful attempts had succeeded, in reading a score, but he was ignorant of harmony, of the technique needed really to understand a nuance, to appreciate a finesse, to savour a refinement with full comprehension.

Starting point is 08:25:02 In other respects, when not read in solitude, profane music is a promiscuous art. To enjoy music, one must become part of that public which fills the theatre. where, in a vile atmosphere, one perceives a loutish-looking man butchering episodes from Wagner, to the huge delight of the ignorant mob. He had always lacked the courage to plunge into this mob bath, so as to listen to Berlio's compositions, several fragments of which had bewitched him by their passionate exultations and their vigorous fugues, and he was certain that there was not one single scene,

Starting point is 08:25:51 not even a phrase of one of the operas of the amazing Wagner, which could with impunity be detached from its whole. The fragments cut and served on the plate of a concert, lost all significance and remained senseless, since, like the chapters of a book completing each other, moving to an inevitable conclusion, Vagner's melodies were necessary to sketch the characters, to incarnate their thoughts, and to express their apparent or secret motives. He knew that their ingenious and persistent returns were understood only by the auditors,

Starting point is 08:26:35 who followed the subject from the beginning, and gradually beheld the characters in relief, in a setting from which they could not be removed without dying, like branches torn from a tree. That was why he felt that, among the vulgar herd of mellow maniacs, enthusing each Sunday on benches, scarcely any knew the score that was being massacred, when the ushers consented to be silent and permit the orchestra to be heard. Granted also that intelligent patriotism forbade a French theatre to give a Wagnerian opera, the only thing left to the curious who know nothing of musical arcana, and either cannot or will not betake themselves to Beyrhoyt is to remain at home,

Starting point is 08:27:31 and that was precisely the course of conduct he had pursued. The more public and facile music and the independent pieces of the old operas hardly interested him. The wretched trills of Ober and Boile Dieu, of Adam and Flotov, and the rhetorical commonplaces of Ambraz Tomas and the Bazins disgusted him, as did the superannuated affectations and vulgar graces of Italians. That was why he had resolutely broken with musical art, and during the years of his abstention he pleasurably recalled only certain programmes of chamber music when he had heard Beethoven, and especially Schumann and Schubert, who had affected his nerves in the same manner as had the more intimate and troubling poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

Starting point is 08:28:32 Some of Schubert's parts for violoncello had positively left him panting in the grip of hysteria. But it was particularly Schubert's leader that had immeasurably excited him, causing him to experience similar sensations as after a waste of nervous fluid, or a mystic dissipation of the soul. This music penetrated and drove back an eczewatered, and drove back an eczeworthy, infinity of forgotten sufferings and spleen in his heart. He was astonished at being able to contain so many dim miseries and vague griefs. This desolate music, crying from the inmost depths, terrified while charming him. Never could he repeat the young girls lament without a

Starting point is 08:29:29 welling of tears in his eyes, for in this plaint resided something beyond a mere broken-hearted state, something in it clutched him, something like a romance ending in a gloomy landscape. And always, when these exquisite sad plaints returned to his lips, there was evoked for him a suburban, flinty and gloomy sight where a succession of silent, bent persons harassed by life, filed past into the twilight. While steeped in bitterness and overflowing with disgust, he felt himself solitary in this dejected landscape, struck by an inexpressibly melancholy and stubborn distress, whose mysterious intensity excluded all consolation, pity and repose.

Starting point is 08:30:28 Like a funeral knell, this despairing chant haunted him, now that he was in bed, prostrated by fever, and agitated by an anxiety so much the more in-appeasable for the fact that he could not discover its cause. He ended by abandoning himself to the torrent of anguishes, suddenly damned by the chant of Psalms, slowly rising in his tortured head. One morning, nevertheless, he felt more tranquil, and requested the servant to bring a looking-glass. It fell from his hands. He hardly recognised himself. His face was a clay colour. The lips bloated and dry. the tongue parched the skin rough. His hair and beard, untended since his illness by the domestic,

Starting point is 08:31:31 added to the horror of the sunken face and staring eyes burning with feverish intensity in this skeleton head that bristled with hair. More than his weakness, more than his vomiting, which began with each attempt at taking nourishment, More than his emaciation, did his changed visage terrify him? He felt lost. Then, in the dejection which overcame him, a sudden energy forced him in a sitting posture. He had strength to write a letter to his Paris physician, and to order the servant to depart

Starting point is 08:32:14 instantly, seek, and bring him back that very day. He passed suddenly from complete depression into boundless hope. This physician was a celebrated specialist, a doctor renowned for his cures of nervous maladies. He must have cured many more dangerous cases than mine, Desicant reflected, I shall certainly be on my feet in a few days. Disenchantment succeeded his confidence. Learned and intuitive, though they be, physicians know absolutely nothing of neurotic diseases, being ignorant of their origins.

Starting point is 08:33:01 Like the others, this one would prescribe the eternal oxide of zinc and quinine, bromide of potassium and valerian. He had recourse to another thought. If these remedies have availed me little in the past, could it not be due to the fact that I have not taken the right quantities? In spite of everything, this expectation of being cured cheered him, but then a new fear entered. His servant might have failed to find the physician. Again he grew faint, passing instantly from the most unreasoning hopes to the most best baseless fears, exaggerating the chances of a sudden recovery and his apprehensions of danger.

Starting point is 08:33:53 The hours passed, and the moment came when, in utter despair, and convinced that the physician would not arrive, he angrily told himself that he certainly would have been saved had he acted sooner. Then his rage against the servant and the physician, who be accused of permitting him to die, vanished. And he ended by reproaching himself for having waited so long before seeking aid, persuading himself that he would now be wholly cured, had he that very last evening used the medicine. Little by little, these alternations of hope and alarms, jostling in his poor head, abated. The strong Ended by crushing him, and he relapsed into exhausted sleep, interrupted by incoherent dreams,

Starting point is 08:34:52 A sort of syncope, pierced by awakenings in which he was barely conscious of anything. He had reached such a state where he lost all idea of desires and fears, and he was stupefied, experiencing neither astonishment or joy, when the physician's suddenly arrived. The doctor had doubtless been apprised by the servant of Deseisant's mode of living, and of the various symptoms observed since the day when the master of the house had been found near the window, overwhelmed by the violence of perfumes. He put very few questions to the patient, whom he had known for many years. He felt his pulse and attentively studied the urine,

Starting point is 08:35:45 where certain white spots revealed one of the determining causes of nervousness. He wrote a prescription and left without saying more than that he would soon return. This visit comforted Dese Sésant, who nonetheless was frightened by the taciturnity, observed. He adjured his servant not to conceal the truth from him any longer, but the servant declared that the doctor had exhibited no uneasiness, and despite his suspicions, Desiart could seize upon no sign that might betray a shadow of a lie on the tranquil countenance of the old man. Then his thoughts began to obsess him less. His suffering disappeared, and to the exhaustion he had felt throughout his members was grafted

Starting point is 08:36:44 a certain indescribable languor. He was astonished and satisfied not to be waited with drugs and vials, and a faint smile played on his lips when the servant brought a nourishing injection of peptone, and told him he was to take it three times every 24 hours. The operation succeeded, and Desicant could not forbear to congratulate himself on this event, which in a manner crowned the existence he had created. His penchant towards the artificial had now, though involuntarily, reached the supreme goal. Farther one could not go! The nourishment thus absorbed was the ultimate deviations.

Starting point is 08:37:37 one could possibly commit. How delicious it would be, he reflected, to continue this simple regime in complete health. What economy of time, what a pronounced deliverance from the aversion which food gives those who lack appetite. What a complete riddance from the disgust induced by food forcibly eaten.

Starting point is 08:38:06 What an energetic, protestation against the vile sin of gluttony. What a positive insult held at old nature, whose monotonous demands would thus be avoided! And he continued talking to himself half aloud. One could easily stimulate desire for food by swallowing a strong aperitif. After the question, what time is it getting to be, I am famished. One would move to the table and place the instrument on the cloth, and then, in the time it takes to say grace, one could have suppressed the tiresome and vulgar demands of the body.

Starting point is 08:38:53 Several days afterwards, the servant presented an injection whose colour and odour differed from the other. But it is not the same at all. D'Eze Saint cried, gazing with deep feeling at the liquid poured into the apparatus. As if in a restaurant, he asked for the card, and unfolding the physician's prescription, read, Cod liver oil, 20 grams, beef tea, 200 grams, Burgundy wine, 200 grams, yoke of one egg. He remained meditative. He who, by reason of the weakened state of his stomach, had never

Starting point is 08:39:40 seriously preoccupied himself with the art of the cuisine, was surprised to find himself thinking of combinations to please an artificial epicure. Then a strange idea crossed his brain. Perhaps the physician had imagined that the strange palate of his patient, was fatigued by the taste of the peptone. Perhaps he had wished, like a clever chef, to vary the taste of foods, and to prevent the monotony of dishes that might lead to want of appetite. Once in the wake of these reflections,

Starting point is 08:40:21 Desicant sketched new recipes, preparing vegetable dinners for Fridays, using the dose of cod liver oil and wine, dismissing the beef tea as a meat food specially prohibited by the church. But he had no occasion longer to ruminate on these nourishing drinks, for the physician succeeded gradually in curing the vomiting attacks, and he was soon swallowing, in the normal manner, a syrup of punch containing a pulverized meat,

Starting point is 08:40:56 whose faint aroma of cacao pleased his palate. Weeks passed before his stomach decided to function. The nausea returned at certain moments, but these attacks were disposed of by ginger ale and Riviere's anti-emetic drink. Finally, the organs were restored. Meats were digested with the aid of pepsins. Recovering strength, he was able to stand up and attempt to walk, leaning on a cave, and supporting himself on the furniture.

Starting point is 08:41:34 Instead of being thankful over his success, he forgot his past pains, grew irritated at the length of time needed for convalescence, and reproached the doctor for not effecting a more rapid cure. At last the day came, when he could remain standing for whole afternoons. Then his study irritated. him, certain blemishes it possessed, and which habit had accustomed him to overlook, now

Starting point is 08:42:07 where apparent. The colours chosen to be seen by lamplight seemed discordant in full day. He thought of changing them, and for whole hours he combined rebellious harmonies of hues, hybrid pairings of cloth and leathers. I am certainly on the road to recovery, he reflected, taking note of his old hobbies. One morning, while contemplating his orange and blue walls, considering some ideal tapestries worked with stoles of the Greek church, dreaming of Russian orphry Dalmaticus, and brocaded copes flowered with Slavonic letters done in Ural stones and rose. rows of pearls, the physician entered, and, noticing the patient's eyes, questioned him.

Starting point is 08:43:05 Dysicant spoke of his unrealizable longings. He commenced to contrive new colour schemes, to talk of harmonies and discords of tones he meant to produce. When the doctor stunned him by peremptorily announcing that these projects would never be executed, here. And without giving him time to catch breath, he informed Desisant that he had done his utmost in re-establishing the digestive functions, and that now it was necessary to attack the neurosis, which was by no means cured, and which would necessitate years of diet and care. He added that before attempting a cure, before commencing any hydrotherapy treatment, impossible of execution at Fontaineais, Desis Saint must quit that solitude, return to Paris, and live an ordinary mode of existence, by amusing himself like others. But the pleasures of others will not amuse me, Desis Saint indignantly.

Starting point is 08:44:19 indignantly cried. Without debating the matter, the doctor merely asserted that this radical change was, in his eyes, a question of life or death, a question of health or insanity, possibly complicated in the near future by tuberculosis. So it is a choice between death and the Hulks, DesEcent exasperatedly exclaimed. The doctor, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world, smiled and reached the door without saying a word. End of Chapter 15 Against the Grain by Jorice Carl Weismanz, translated by John Howard. Chapter 16

Starting point is 08:45:16 Dezis Saint locked himself up in his bedroom. closing his ears to the sounds of hammers on packing cases. Each stroke rent his heart, drove a sorrow into his flesh. The physician's order was being fulfilled. The fear of once more submitting to the pains he had endured, the fear of a frightful agony, had acted more powerfully on Desecent than the hatred of the detersesion,

Starting point is 08:45:52 testable existence to which the medical order condemned him. Yet he told himself there were people who live without conversing with anyone, absorbed far from the world in their own affairs, like recluses and trappists, and there is nothing to prove that these wretches and sages become madmen or consumptives. He had unsuccessfully cited these examples. He had unsuccessfully cited these examples to the doctor. The latter had repeated coldly and firmly, in a tone that admitted of no reply, that his verdict, confirmed besides by consultation with all the experts on neurosis, was that distraction, amusement, pleasure alone, might make an impression on this malady, whose spiritual side eluded eluded all remedy, and made impatient by the recriminations of his patient, he, for the last

Starting point is 08:46:56 time declared that he would refuse to continue treating him if he did not consent to a change of air, and live under new hygienic conditions. De Césant had instantly betaken himself to Paris, had consulted other specialists, had impartially put the case before them. All, having unhesitatingly approved of the action of their colleague, he had rented an apartment in a new house, had returned to Fontaine and white with rage, had given orders to have his trunks packed. Sunk in his easy chair, he now ruminated upon that unyielding order which was wrecking his plans, breaking the strings of his present life and overturning his future plans. His beatitude was ended. He was compelled to abandon this sheltering haven and return at full speed

Starting point is 08:48:00 into the stupidity which had once attacked him. physician spoke of amusement and distraction. With whom? And with what did they wish him to distract and amuse himself? Had he not banished himself from society? Did he know a single person whose existence would approximate his in seclusion and contemplation? Did he know a man capable of appreciating the fineness of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintess of an idea, a man whose soul was delicate and exquisite enough to understand Malarmé and love Verlaine. Where and when must he search to discover a twin spirit, a soul detached from commonplaces, blessing silence as a benefit, ingratitude as a solace, contempt as a refuge and

Starting point is 08:49:03 port, in the world where he had dwelt before his departure for Fontaine. But most of the county squires he had associated with must since have stultified themselves near card-tables, or ended upon the lips of women. Most by this time must have married. After having enjoyed during their life the spoils of cads, their spouses now possessed the remains of trumpets. For master of first fruits, the people alone waste nothing. A pretty change, this custom adopted by a prudish society, Desecente reflected. The nobility had died. The aristocracy had marched to imbecility or orgia. It was extinguished in the corruption of its descendants, whose faculties grew weaker with each generation, and ended in the instincts

Starting point is 08:50:07 of gorillas, fermented in the brains of grooms and jockeys. Or rather, as with the choiseux-préline's, polyniacs and chevreuse, wallowed in the mud of lawsuits, which made it equal the other class's interpitude. The mansions themselves, the secular escrowes, the heraldic deportment of this antique caste had disappeared. The land, no longer yielding anything, was put up for sale, money being needed to procure the venereal witchcraft for the besotted descendants of the old races. The less scrupulous and stupid threw aside all sense of shame.

Starting point is 08:50:55 They weltered in the mire of fraud and deceit. behaved like cheap sharpers. This eagerness for gain, this lust for Luca, had even reacted on that other class which had constantly supported itself on the nobility, the clergy. Now one perceived in newspapers announcements of corn cures by priests. The monasteries had changed into apothecary or liqueur workrooms. They sold recipes or manufactured products. The Sito order chocolate, the trappists Semolina. The Marist brothers, bifosophate of medicinal lime and aquibuse water. The Jacobins and anti-apoplectic elixir. The disciples of Saint-Benois, Benedictine. The friars of Saint-Bruno, Chartreuse. Business had invaded the cloisters, where in place of antiphonaries,

Starting point is 08:52:02 heavy ledgers reposed on reading desks. Like leprosy, the avidity of the age was ravaging the church, weighing down the monks with inventories and invoices. And yet, in spite of everything, it was only among the ecclesiastics that de Saint could hope for pleasure. in the society of well-bred and learned canons, he would have been compelled to share their faith, to refrain from floating between sceptical ideas and transports of conviction, which rose from time to time on the water, sustained by recollections of childhood. He would have had to muster identical opinions, and never admit, he freely did in his ardent moments, a Catholicism charged with a soupsand of magic, as under Henry III, and with a

Starting point is 08:53:03 dash of sadism, as at the end of the last century. This special clericalism, this depraved and artistically perverse mysticism towards which he wended, could not even be discussed with a priest who would not have understood them, and who would have banished them with horror. For the twentieth time this irresolvable problem troubled him. He would have desired an end to this irresolute state in which he floundered. Now that he was pursuing a changed life, he would have liked to possess faith, to encrust it as soon as seized, to screw it into his soul, to shield it finally from all those reflections which uprooted and agitated it.

Starting point is 08:53:54 But the more he desired it, and the less his emptiness of spirit was evident, the more Christ's visitation receded. As his religious hunger augmented, and he gazed eagerly at this faith visible, but so far off that the distance terrified him, ideas pressed upon his active mind, driving back his will, rejecting by common sense. sense and mathematical proofs, the mysteries and dogmas. He sadly told himself that he would have to find a way to abstain from self-discussion. He would have to learn how to close his eyes and let himself be swept along by the current, forgetting those accursed discoveries which have destroyed the religious edifice from top to bottom since the last two centuries. He sighed. It is neither the physiologists nor the infidels that demolish Catholicism, but the priests, whose stupid works could extirpate convictions of the most steadfast.

Starting point is 08:55:10 A Dominican friar, Rouard de Carre, had proved in a brochure entitled, On the Adulteration of Sacramental Substances, that most massacres, were not valid, because the elements used for worship had been adulterated by the manufacturers. For years the holy oils had been adulterated with chicken fat, wax with burned bones, incense with cheap resin and benzoyn. But the thing that was worse was that the substances indispensable to the holy sacrifice, the two substances without which no oblation is possible had also been debased. The wine, by numerous dilutions and by illicit introductions of Pernambuco wood, Dainwurt berries, alcohol and alum. The bread of the

Starting point is 08:56:10 Eucharist, that must be needed with the fine flour of wheat, by kidney beans, potash and pipe clay. But they had gone even far. they had dared suppress the wheat, and shameless dealers were making almost all the host with the fecula of potatoes. Now God refused to descend into the fecula. It was an undeniable fact and a certain one. In the second volume of his treatise on moral theology, Cardinal Guse had dwelt at length on this question of the fraud practised from the divine point of view. And according to the

Starting point is 08:56:56 incontestable authority of this master, one could not consecrate bread made of flour of oats, buckwheat or barley. And if the matter of using rye be less doubtful, no argument was possible in regard to the fecula, which, according to the ecclesiastic expression, was in no way fit for sacramental purposes. By means of the rapid manipulation of the fecula, and the beautiful appearance presented by the unleavened breads created with this element, the shameless imposture had been so propagated that now the mystery of the transubstantiation hardly existed any longer, and the priests and faithful were holding communion, without being aware of it, with neutral elements.

Starting point is 08:57:52 Ah, far off was the time when Radigonda, queen of France, had with her own hands prepared the bread destined for the altars, or the time when, after the customs of Cluny, three priests or deacons, fasting and garbed in Alb and Amis, washed their faces and hands, and then picked out the wheat, grain by grain,

Starting point is 08:58:18 grinding it under millstone, kneading the paste in a cold and pure water, and themselves baking it under a clear fire while chanting psalms. All this matter of eternal dupory, Desicant reflected, is not conducive to the steadying of my already weakened faith. And how admit that omnipotence which stops at such a trifle? as a pinch of fecula or a soupsand of alcohol. These reflections, all the more, threw a gloom over the view of his future life, and rendered his horizon more menacing and dark. He was lost, utterly lost.

Starting point is 08:59:08 What would become of him in this Paris, where he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to the Saint-Germain, quarters, now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. And what contact could exist between him and that bourgeois class, which had gradually climbed up, profiting by all the disasters to grow rich, making use of all the catastrophes to impose respect on its crimes and thefts. After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money. Now one saw the reign of the caliphates of commerce, the despotism of

Starting point is 09:00:02 the rue du sentier, the tyranny of trade, bringing in its train venal, narrow ideas, knavish and vain instincts. Viler and more dishonest than the nobility despoiled, and the decayed clergy, the bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous ostentations, their braggadocio, degrading these qualities by its lack of savour-vivre. The bourgeoisie stole their faults and converted them into hypocritical vices. And authoritative and sly, low and cowardly, it pitilessly attacked its eternal and necessary dupe, the populace, unmuzzled and placed in ambush, so as to be in readiness to assault

Starting point is 09:00:58 the old castes. It was now an acknowledged fact. Its task once terminated, the proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humour, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, And, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose arms permitted them to live. In painting Or now beheld a deluge of silliness In literature, an intemperate mixture

Starting point is 09:01:58 Of dull style and cowardly ideas, For they had to credit the businessman with honesty, The buccaneer who purchased a dough For his son, and refused to pay that of his daughter, With virtue, chased love to the Volterian agnostic, who accused the clergy of rapes, and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff in the obscene chambers. It was the great American hulks transported to our continent. It was the immense,

Starting point is 09:02:36 the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of the financier and the parvenu, beaming like a pitiful sun upon the idolatrous town, which wallowed on the ground the while it uttered impure psalms before the impious tabernacle of banks. Well then, society crashed to ruin. Die-aged world, cried Desecent, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked. This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him. "'Ah!' he exclaimed, "'to think that all this is not a dream!

Starting point is 09:03:21 "'To think that I am going to return "'into the cowardly and servile crowd of this century. "'To console himself, "'he recalled the comforting maxims of Schopenhauer, "'and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal, "'the soul is pained by all things it thinks upon. But the words resounded in his mind like sounds deprived of sense. His ennui disintegrated, lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, all effective

Starting point is 09:04:02 and gentle vigour. He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availed little in comforting him. That impossible faith in a future life. alone would pacify him. An access of rage swept aside like a hurricane his attempts at resignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideous truth. Nothing was left. All was in ruins. The bourgeoisie were gormandising on the solemn ruins of the church, which had become a place of rendezvous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns and scandalous

Starting point is 09:04:51 jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis, and the pale Christ of Golgotha, not going to prove their existence by commanding the cataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed the sinful cities? Was this degradation to contain the to flow and cover with its pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities and shames. The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaven men appeared, bringing chests and carrying the furniture. Then the door closed once more on the servant who was removing packages of books. Desisant sank into a chair. I shall be in Paris in two days.

Starting point is 09:05:46 Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky, and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah, courage leaves me, my heart breaks. O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts. sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. End of Chapter 16.

Starting point is 09:06:35 Recording by Martin Gieson. End of Against the Grain by Joris Karl Wiesmence. Translated by by John Howard.

Classic Audiobook Collection - Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.