In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably
affected in its organism, enfeebled by old ideas,
exhausted by excesses of syntax, sensitive only to
the curiosities which make sick persons feverish,
and yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline,
eager to repair all the omissions of enjoyment, to
bequeath the most subtle memories of grief in its
death bed, was incarnate in Mallarme, in the most
perfect exquisite manner imaginable.
Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Poe;
here were their fine and powerful substances distilled
and disengaging new flavors and intoxications.
It was the agony of the old language which, after
having become moldy from age to age, ended by dissolving,
by reaching that deliquescence of the Latin language
which expired in the mysterious concepts and the enigmatical
expressions of Saint Boniface and Saint Adhelme.
The decomposition of the French language had been
effected suddenly. In the Latin language, a long
transition, a distance of four hundred years existed
between the spotted and superb epithet of Claudian
and Rutilius and the gamy epithet of the eighth century.
In the French language, no lapse of time, no succession
of ages had taken place; the stained and superb style
of the de Goncourts and the gamy style of Verlaine
and Mallarme jostled in Paris, living in the same period,
epoch and century.
And Des Esseintes, gazing at one of the folios opened
on his chapel desk, smiled at the thought that the
moment would soon come when an erudite scholar would
prepare for the decadence of the French language a
glossary similar to that in which the savant, Du Cange,
has noted the last murmurings, the last spasms, the
last flashes of the Latin language dying of old age
in the cloisters and sounding its death rattle.
Burning at first like a rick on fire, his enthusiasm
for the digester as quickly died out. Torpid
at first, his nervous dyspepsia reappeared, and then
this hot essence induced such an irritation in his
stomach that Des Esseintes was quickly compelled to
stop using it.
The malady increased in strength; peculiar symptoms
attended it. After the nightmares, hallucinations
of smell, pains in the eye and deep coughing which
recurred with clock-like regularity, after the pounding
of his heart and arteries and the cold perspiration,
arose illusions of hearing, those alterations which
only reveal themselves in the last period of sickness.
Attacked by a strong fever, Des Esseintes suddenly
heard murmurings of water; then those sounds united
into one and resembled a roaring which increased and
then slowly resolved itself into a silvery bell sound.
He felt his delirious brain whirling in musical waves,
engulfed in the mystic whirlwinds of his infancy.
The songs learned at the Jesuits reappeared, bringing
with them pictures of the school and the chapel where
they had resounded, driving their hallucinations to
the olfactory and visual organs, veiling them with
clouds of incense and the pallid light irradiating
through the stained-glass windows, under the lofty
arches.
