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 legs,
without even apologizing.
A portion of the shelves which lined the walls of
his orange and blue study was devoted exclusively
to those Latin works assigned to the generic period
of “The Decadence” by those whose minds
have absorbed the deplorable teachings of the Sorbonne.
The Latin written in that era which professors still
persist in calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated
Des Esseintes. With its carefully premeditated
style, its sameness, its stripping of supple syntax,
its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned
of all the rugged and often rich expressions of the
preceding ages, was confined to the enunciation of
the majestic banalities, the empty commonplaces tiresomely
reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets; but it betrayed
such a lack of curiosity and such a humdrum tediousness,
such a drabness, feebleness and jaded solemnity that
to find its equal, it was necessary, in linguistic
studies, to go to the French style of the period of
Louis XIV.
The gentle Vergil, whom instructors call the Mantuan
swan, perhaps because he was not born in that city,
he considered one of the most terrible pedants ever
produced by antiquity. Des Esseintes was exasperated
by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheus
whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus
who simpers about bees, his Aeneas, that weak-willed,
irresolute person who walks with wooden gestures through
the length of the poem. Des Esseintes would gladly
have accepted the tedious nonsense which those marionettes
exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet’s
impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius
and Lucretius; the plain theft, revealed to us by
Macrobius, of the second song of the Aeneid,
copied almost word for word from one of Pisander’s
