Against the Grain | Page 9

use, an animated and artificial being which easily equals 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, mettlesome, along
rapids and floods.

The other, the Engerth, is a nobly proportioned dusky brunette emitting
raucous, muffled cries. Her heavy loins are strangled in a cast-iron
breast-plate. A monstrous beast with a disheveled 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 queue of her merchandise!
Unquestionably, there is not one among the frail blondes and majestic
brunettes of the flesh that can vie with their delicate grace and terrific
strength.
Such were Des Esseintes' reflections when the breeze brought him the
faint whistle of the toy railroad winding playfully, like a spinning top,
between Paris and Sceaux. His house was situated at a twenty minutes'
walk from the Fontenay station, but the height on which it was perched,
its isolation, made it immune to the clatter of the noisy rabble which the
vicinity of a railway station invariably attracts on a Sunday.
As for the village itself, he hardly knew it. 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
Verrieres woods were trained.
In the darkness, to left and right, these masses, dim and confused, rose
tier 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 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
displease Des Esseintes. But since that afternoon spent at Fontenay in
search of a house, 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, bewhiskered bourgeois
citizens and moustached uniformed men with heads of magistrates and
soldiers, which they held as stiffly as monstrances 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 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. 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 pardon. They pushed the wheels of their
perambulators against your