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.
