Free Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

not have to undertake any laborious treasure-hunts, in so far as the only luxuries he intended to have in this room were rare books and flowers. Leaving himself free to adorn any bare walls later on with a few drawings and paintings, he confined himself for the present to fitting up ebony bookshelves and bookcases round the greater part of the room, strewing tiger skins and blue fox furs about the floor, and installing beside a massive money-changer’s table of the fifteenth century, several deep-seated wing-armchairs and an old church lectern of wrought iron, one of those antique singing-desks on which deacons of old used to place the antiphonary and which now supported one of the weighty folios of Du Cange’s
Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinatis
. 5
    The windows, with panes of bluish crackle-glass or gilded bottle-punts which shut out the view and admitted only a very dim light, were dressed with curtains cut out of old ecclesiastical stoles, whose faded gold threads were almost invisible against the dull red material.
    As a finishing touch, in the centre of the chimney-piece, which was likewise dressed in sumptuous silk from a Florentine dalmatic, and flanked by two Byzantine monstrances of gilded copper which had originally come from the Abbaye-au-Bois at Bièvre, there stood a magnificent triptych whose separate panels had been fashioned to resemble lace-work. This now contained, framed under glass, copied on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and marvellously illuminated, three pieces by Baudelaire: on the right and left, the sonnets
La Mort des amants
and
L’Ennemi
, and in the middle, the prose poem bearing the English title
Anywhere out of the World
. 6

CHAPTER 2
    After the sale of his goods, Des Esseintes kept on the two old servants who had looked after his mother and who between them had acted as steward and concierge at the Château de Lourps while it waited, empty and untenanted, for a buyer.
    He took with him to Fontenay this faithful pair who had been accustomed to a methodical sickroom routine, trained to administer spoonfuls of physic and medicinal brews at regular intervals and inured to the absolute silence of cloistered monks, barred from all communication with the outside world and confined to rooms where the doors and windows were always shut.
    The husband’s duty was to clean the rooms and go marketing; the wife’s to do all the cooking. Des Esseintes gave up the first floor of the house to them; but he made them wear thick felt slippers, had the doors fitted with tambours and their hinges well oiled, and covered the floors with long-pile carpeting, to make sure that he never heard the sound of their footsteps overhead.
    He also arranged a code of signals with them so that they should know what he needed by the number of long or short peals he rang on his bell; and he appointed a particular spot on his desk where the household account-book was to be left once a month while he was asleep. In short, he did everything he could to avoid seeing them or speaking to them more often than was absolutely necessary.
    However, since the woman would have to pass alongside the house occasionally to get to the woodshed, and he had no desire to see her commonplace silhouette through the window, he hada costume made for her of Flemish faille, with a white cap and a great black hood let down on the shoulders, such as the beguines still wear to this day at Ghent. 1 The shadow of this coif gliding past in the twilight produced an impression of convent life, and reminded him of those peaceful, pious communities, those sleepy villages shut away in some hidden corner of the busy, wide-awake city.
    He went on to fix his mealtimes according to an unvarying schedule; the meals themselves were necessarily plain and simple, for the feebleness of his stomach no longer allowed him to enjoy heavy or elaborate dishes.
    At five o’clock in winter, after dusk had fallen, he ate a light breakfast of