Against the Grain | Page 4

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of Fontenay-aux-Roses, in a secluded section near the fort, far from any
neighbors. His dream was realized! 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 passing by at the end of
the town, and to the little street cars which came and went at irregular
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.
Chapter 2
More than two months passed before Des Esseintes could bury himself
in 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 sincerities and evasions of
color-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 camphor-wood, under a sort of pavillion of Indian rose-tinted
satin, the flesh would color 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 odor 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 color to faces grown
dull and withered by the use of ceruse and by nights of 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 Lourps. Listening
to the sound he had so often heard before, he lived over again the silent
evenings spent near his mother, the wretchedness of his suffering,
repressed youth. And then, while he yielded to the voluptuousness of
the woman he mechanically caressed, whose words or laughter tore him
from his revery and rudely 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 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, filling the house with a rose-colored
waltz.

In the days when he had deemed it necessary to affect singularity, Des
Esseintes had designed marvelously 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 colors 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 alongside each
other in church pews, while from a pulpit he preached to them a sermon
on dandyism, adjuring his bootmakers and tailors implicitly to obey his
briefs in the matter of style, threatening them with pecuniary
excommunication if