‘This writer,’ Huysmans said of himself, in a supposed interview published under the name of A. Meunier but in fact entirely written by him, ‘is an inexplicable mixture of refined Parisian and Dutch painter. From such a blend, to which we could add a pinch of black humour and another of dry British comedy, comes the hallmark of the works in question’ (which in this case are his earliest works, up to and including Against the Grain). Until the appearance of En route in 1892, the date at which we lose him, Huysmans seems to have made this kind of humour – recommended in the above sentence as if it were a spice – the very condition for maintaining one’s mental appetite. By the excess of dark colours in his palette, by his customary habit of reaching and surpassing a certain critical point in horrendous situations, by the meticulous, acute prefiguration of the heartbreaks that in his view were entailed by any kind of alternative, no matter how banal, he managed to obtain the paradoxical result of tapping the pleasure principle in his reader. External realities constantly presented in their most petty, aggressive, and hurtful aspects require of this reader a constant restoration of vital energy, undermined by an accumulation of daily trials of which he is suddenly made all too aware. The great originality of the author of En ménage [Home Life] derives from the fact that he seems to deny himself any of the benefits of humorous pleasure, making these benefits seem exclusively reserved for us, while Huysmans maintains an attitude of despair that constantly gives us the illusion of having an advantage over him. In fact, this is a deliberate plan, a well-considered therapeutic method, a ruse intended to make us overcome our own indigence. ‘And,’ we read in En ménage, ‘on those evenings when black moods descended upon him, he went to bed early, lingering before his bookshelves in search of a work that would suit the kinds of thoughts troubling him. He would have liked to find one that could console him and at the same time reinforce his bitterness, one that told of boredom that was greater than and yet similar to his own, one that could soothe him by comparison. Naturally, he did not find it.’
Huysmans’s style, marvellously cast to highlight the nervous communicability of sensations, is the product of a misappropriation of several different vocabularies, whose combination alone causes spasmodic laughter, even as the circumstances of the plot seem the least apt to justify it. Owing to the same kind of pathetic turn that he was able to make us enjoy, this man of imagination was forced to waste his life away among the cartons of a ministry office (the reports of his hierarchical superiors all portray him as a model functionary). It is in keeping with the writer’s whole exalting-appalling manner that there, in his idle moments, a few technical manuals and an always-open cookbook within reach, Huysmans, with unmatched clairvoyance, should have formulated from whole cloth most of the laws that would regulate modern affectivity, been the first to penetrate the histological constitution of the real, and been elevated with En rade [In Port] to the heights of inspiration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marthe, 1876. Sac au dos, 1878. Les Soeurs Vatard, 1879. En ménage, 1881. A vau-l’eau, 1882. A rebours, 1884. Un dilemme, 1887. En rade, 1887. Certains, 1889. Là-bas, 1891, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Marthe. The Vatard Sisters. Down Stream. Against the Grain. Down There.
He was hungry. Fatigue and his walk seemed to have taken the edge off his worries. He was almost joyful to notice a little pub, behind whose front window swelled a melon drenched in liquor.
Rows of bottles with lead capsules on their heads and flaming stars on their bellies formed a semicircle around two tiers of bruised Neufchâtel cheeses. There were parsley-covered vinaigrettes on cold beef, congealed stews with turnips, hasty puddings with black burn stains, their yellow mire puckering.
In an iron pail spilled a half-eaten rice pudding; eggs the colour of wine filled a flowered salad bowl; a rabbit laid open on a serving dish, its four paws in the air, oozed the viscous purple of its liver over its washed, pale-vermillion carcass. A wall of bowls nested one inside the other stretched upward, alongside a tower of saucers with blue borders. They stood before the display tiles and behind a former jar of brandied prunes, now filled with water, into which gladiolas dipped their drooping stems.
André sat at an empty table. While waiting for someone to bring him his soup, he looked the place over. It was a fairly large room, decorated with green gaslamps and window shades, a cast-iron potbellied stove, and a counter painted in false mahogany shot through with darker streaks, which was garnished with a blue glass vase full of flowers, pewter measuring jugs hanging like panpipes, a nickel collection box, a yawning cat, and a writing desk. Behind this item of furniture, shelves rose to the ceiling, supporting unlabelled litres, a porcelain teapot, white cups with three scarlet feet and a scarlet handle, and smudged gilt initials in the middle. A mirror embedded in the centre of the shelving reflected the tops of the flowers marinating in the blue vase, the zigzagging pipe of the stove, three unoccupied coat pegs stuck into the wall, the ripped lining of an overcoat, and the sheen of a greasy hat. On a little table, in a corner, a Burgundy cheese, its belly gashed, collapsed under the attack of a thousand flies; near the wine racks, where napkins in rings were piled, a hutch contained lank, soggy bread that almost touched a cage hanging from the ceiling. This cage was empty following a death and a cuttlefish occupied it alone, hanging at the end of a thread.
This establishment was part country inn, part restaurant for a poor neighbourhood. The owner, in shirtsleeves, pug nose and stomach jutting forward like a hump, took his sweet time; he kept a towel draped over his arm, and dragged his slippers decorated with dominoes and decks of cards through a muck of spittle and sand.
The sound of dishes and cauldrons, the song of things frying, and the whining of sauces escaped through the ever-banging door of the kitchen. The furious sputtering of meat sauteed in the pan, of dripping steaks on a grill, of sudden reddish vapours arrived from time to time, accompanied by fetid blue smoke. Muffled arguments and snatches of bosses astounding their lackeys could be heard at every moment.
A pale, reedy serving girl vacillated, with a pained and idiotic look on her face, eaten away by a persistent leukorrhea. Another lugged stacks of dishes from the kitchen to the pantry and from the pantry to the kitchen like a sleepwalker, not seeming to realize the importance of the task assigned her.
André began to get impatient; they still had not brought him his soup. He was tired of watching the people around him. They all knew each other; he had stumbled into a kind of family boarding house, a cattle trough in which a strange crowd was stuffing itself. There were discreet groups chatting in hushed tones, muffling their laughter behind napkins; there were braggarts, spewing up heavy-handed jokes in booming voices, grabbing attention with their hijinks.
Very familiar with his clientele, the owner chuckled, exclaiming, ‘Ha! that’s a good one!’ then suddenly and authoritatively shouting: ‘One braised veal, one steak in tomato sauce, one!’
André swallowed the noodle soup that they had finally gotten around to serving him. To his left, two gossips dug into a platter of tripe, dipped into a birchbark snuffbox, and emptied their glasses. Elbows on the table, they made salaams to each other for every spoonful of sauce, chattered like two old biddies, ran down a neighbour, pitied their concierge whose belly had swelled up from eating mussels.
André was beginning to cheer up, but then a group of cronies, installed near the stove, snuffed out the hubbub of the other groups with their racket.
A hairdresser was holding forth, emitting truths of this magnitude: ‘When you’ve got money, they all take their hats off; without that, when you’ve put all your do-re-mi into stocks that don’t earn squat, like I did, they won’t even spit at you. And anyway, every time I buy shares of something, it goes down the very next day. I can’t help it, though; I need the emotional thrill.’
His pals revelled in it. He kept filling their glasses, then, with his hooded eyes and glorious cretin’s face, he went on: ‘Personally, I like sex. For me to do without it, I’d have to be like the fig tree, standing stiff and still in the garden.’ And making a punning allusion to his trade, he added: ‘And besides, I still wouldn’t be a fig, I’d be a figaro.’
Shouts of joy burst out; incomprehensible hilarity greeted that salvo of idiocies.
André was more than ready to grab his hat and flee, but the service was in no hurry. He had reduced by half a very tough roast beef and abandoned the rest, and now he had asked for a sorrel salad that did not appear to be coming. He asked the owner, who stupidly exulted, whether he had a newspaper. Le Siècle was at hand; they brought him the Petites Affiches. He tried to engross himself in it, to cut himself off from the joy of those tables, to plug his ears against the strident jabberings of those imbeciles; he heard them all the same. He forced himself to read three pages of the rag, then stopped at an advertisement that offered, as the result of a family’s liquidation and as if it were some fabulous bargain, a dowry of eighteen thousand francs and an orphan girl. André remained lost in thought. In the words time running out placed between parentheses at the bottom of the advertisement, he saw parading before him an infinite perspective of filth. He imagined short-term pregnancies, bellies swollen after one month of marriage. He mused on the heartbreaks that the honest simpleton who let himself be taken in would suffer at the hands of that orphan. He had every chance of marrying a virgin who was thoroughly familiar with depravity since childhood! And André thought that it was already hard enough not to be made a fool of when one knows the family and has lived for several months with one’s fiancée. Who would have believed that his own wife could deceive him? Once more, he had returned to the starting-point of his thoughts, to the miseries of his home life. He wanted to shake off those memories, whatever it took. He forced himself to look at his neighbours again, to listen to them.
A shrill falsetto drilled into his ear. The hairdresser had left the restaurant without his even noticing, and now his place was occupied by a large fellow with a red beard and a nose crossed by gold spectacles, who was explaining to a very young man the mysteries of teeth. The latter widened his eyes and listened devoutly, no doubt hoping to establish his own practice in that field.
‘The biggest part of your profit picture,’ the older fellow was saying, ‘is putting in false teeth. They make them in England and sell them in Passage Choiseul. That’s where you can take in some serious money. Just think: you can charge ten francs a tooth and they only cost ten sous apiece without the rubber gums, and one franc with gums attached.’
‘They have pink ones and brown ones, don’t they?’ the young man timidly interrupted. ‘I think I’d like the pink ones better.’
‘Hey, you’re not as slow as you look! The brown ones are poor-man’s gums! They go for less, but you can sell more of them,’ the other resumed.
The young disciple gaped in astonishment.
‘And what about dentures that open wide?’ he ventured.
The man with the golden spectacles raised his arms heavenward. ‘Now those are real works of art! Just think, you have to cut the tooth from solid ivory, put it in gold settings – it costs a mint!’ And he continued explaining the tricks of his trade, admitted performing needless surgery on his patients’ stumps and profiting from their pained stupor to sell them toothpaste at inflated prices.
André decided that one more of these pathetic epiphanies was more than he could bear. His sorrel was eaten. He furiously demanded the cheque, refused to order dessert, paid the amount of one franc and forty centimes, and was opening the door when, from the back of the room where a few people were lingering before their tiny cordial glasses, a voice said simply and with conviction:
‘Women ain’t really much a’ nothin’!’
André closed the door behind him, reflecting with a certain sadness that, of all the insipid drivel he had heard that evening, this thought was perhaps the only one that had any depth or truth to it.
* * *
One article caught his eye and plunged him into an extended reverie. What a marvellous thing science is! he said to himself. Here you have Professor Selmi from Bologna discovering an alkalide in the putrefaction of corpses, a ptomaine in the form of a colourless oil that gives off a slow but persistent aroma of hawthorn, musk, syringa, orange blossom, or rose.
For the moment, these were the only scents they had obtained from those juices of an economy in decomposition, but others would surely follow. In the meantime, to satisfy the postulations of a practical century that buries the destitute by machine and that finds uses for everything (standing water, bottoms of sanitary tubs, the intestines of corpses, and old bones), they could convert cemeteries into factories that at the request of wealthy families would distil concentrated extracts of ancestors, essences of infants, or aromas of fathers.
This would be what in the business world they call the deluxe item. But for the needs of the working classes, who must not be neglected either, they could supplement these exclusive chemist’s shops with industrial laboratories that could mass-produce the perfumes. Indeed, they could distil them from the unwanted remains of common graves. The art of perfume-making could be established on entirely new bases, put within everyone’s reach: the deluxe item would give way to the ersatz item, discount perfumes that could be sold at very reduced prices, since the raw materials were plentiful and the only expense, so to speak, would be the labour costs of the gravediggers and the lab technicians.
Ah! I know many working-class women who would gladly spend a few pennies for whole tubs of ointments or blocks of soap made from essence of proletariat!
Besides, what an unending preservation of memory, what an eternal freshness of remembrance could be obtained from these sublimated emanations of the dead! As it is now, when one member of a loving couple dies, all the other has left is a photograph and, on All Saints’ Day, a graveside visit. With the invention of ptomaines, it will soon be possible to keep the woman one loves at home or in one’s own pocket, in an evanescent and spiritual state; to transmute the beloved into a flask of salts; to condense her into sap; to insert her like powder into a sachet embroidered with a sorrowful epitaph; to sniff her from a handkerchief on melancholy days, to breathe her in on happy ones.
Not to mention the fact that, when it comes to little sexual games, we could finally dispense with the inevitable ‘appeal to mother’ at just the wrong moment. The woman can swoon and call for help all she likes because she’ll know full well that Mother won’t be coming: the old lady will already be there, lying on her daughter’s very breast, in the form of a taffeta fly or pancake makeup.
After that, as progress takes its course, even those ptomaines that today are fearsome poisons will in the future be made safe to eat: and so, why not use their essence to enhance certain dishes? Why couldn’t that aromatic oil become a flavouring, like cinnamon and almond, vanilla and clove, adding an exquisite touch to cake batter? As with the perfume-maker, a new path, at once hearty and economic, would now be open to the pastry chef and the confectioner.
Finally, precious family ties, which our miserable age of disrespect is loosening and undoing, would be strengthened and secured by ptomaines. Thanks to them, there would be a shivery resurgence of affection, the solidarity of continued tenderness. They would forever inspire the appropriate moment for remembering the dear departed and holding them up as an example to the children, who in their greed would keep the memory perfectly vivid.
And so, on the evening of All Souls’ Day, the family is seated around the table in the little dining room with its pale wooden buffet veneered with black strips, under the glow of the lamp muted by a shade. Mother is a good woman; Father, a cashier in a business firm or bank; Junior, still small, has only recently passed the stage of whooping cough and impetigo. Subdued by the threat of going without dessert, the brat has finally agreed not to slap at his soup with his spoon, to eat his meat with a little bread.
Unmoving, he watches his silent, thoughtful parents. The maid enters, carrying some cream of ptomaine. That morning, Mother had gone to the mahogany Empire writing desk decorated with a clover-shaped lockplate, and reverently drawn from it the vial with its ground-glass stopper containing the precious liquid extracted from the decomposed viscera of her forebear. With an eye-dropper, she herself had added a few droplets of this flavouring, which now gives the cream its aroma.
The child’s eyes shine; but before being served, he must first listen to the praises sung about the old man, who along with a few facial traits has bequeathed him this posthumous taste of roses on which he will soon feast.
‘Ah, your Grandpa Jules was a man of sober mind, a wise and hard-working man! He came to Paris in wooden clogs and he always put something aside, even when he was only earning one hundred francs a month. You wouldn’t catch him lending money without interest or collateral! He was no fool: business first, everything even-Steven. And what respect he always showed to the rich! – And so he died revered by his children, to whom he left gilt-edged securities, like money in the bank!’
‘Do you remember Grandpa, darling?’
‘Yum, yum, Grandpa!’ the kid cries, smearing ancestral cream over his cheeks and nose.
‘And Grandma! Do you remember her, too, my little man?’
The child thinks about this. On the anniversary of the old woman’s death, they make a rice pudding flavoured with the bodily essence of the departed. Curiously, though she smelled like snuff when alive, in death she gives off an aroma of orange blossoms.
‘Yum, yum, Grandma too!’ the child cries.
‘And who do you love more, your grandma or your grandpa?’
Like all little nippers who prefer what they don’t have to what is in hand, the child remembers the far-off pudding and confesses that he likes his grandma better. Which does not keep him from holding out his empty dish toward the platter of grandpa.
Fearing that too much filial love might give him indigestion, the provident mother has the cream removed.
‘What a delightful and touching family scene!’ Jacques said to himself, rubbing his eyes. And in the mental state he was in, he wondered whether he had only been dreaming, dozing off with his nose on the magazine whose science column related the discovery of ptomaines.