For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk
the inside of which could contain an urn and the outside
a prayer book. Against the wall, opposite it,
he placed a church pew surmounted by a tall dais with
little benches carved out of solid wood. His church
tapers were made of real wax, procured from a special
house which catered exclusively to houses of worship,
for Des Esseintes professed a sincere repugnance to
gas, oil and ordinary candles, to all modern forms
of illumination, so gaudy and brutal.
Before going to sleep in the morning, he would gaze,
with his head on the pillows, at his El Greco whose
barbaric color rebuked the smiling, yellow material
and recalled it to a more serious tone. Then he
could easily imagine himself living a hundred leagues
removed from Paris, far from society, in cloistral
security.
And, all in all, the illusion was not difficult, since
he led an existence that approached the life of a
monk. Thus he had the advantages of monasticism
without the inconveniences of its vigorous discipline,
its lack of service, its dirt, its promiscuity and
its monotonous idleness. Just as he had transformed
his cell into a comfortable chamber, so had he made
his life normal, pleasant, surrounded by comforts,
occupied and free.
Like a hermit he was ripe for isolation, since life
harassed him and he no longer desired anything of
it. Again like a monk, he was depressed and in
the grip of an obsessing lassitude, seized with the
need of self-communion and with a desire to have nothing
in common with the profane who were, for him, the
utilitarian and the imbecile.
Although he experienced no inclination for the state
of grace, he felt a genuine sympathy for those souls
immured in monasteries, persecuted by a vengeful society
which can forgive neither the merited scorn with which
it inspires them, nor the desire to expiate, to atone
by long silences, for the ever growing shamelessness
of its ridiculous or trifling gossipings.
Ever since the night when he had evoked, for no apparent
reason, a whole train of melancholy memories, pictures
of his past life returned to Des Esseintes and gave
him no peace.
He found himself unable to understand a single word
of the books he read. He could not even receive
impressions through his eyes. It seemed to him
that his mind, saturated with literature and art,
refused to absorb any more.
He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance,
like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves.
Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic.
After having strained and enervated it, his mind had
fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his
plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortege
of vague reveries to which he passively submitted.
The confused medley of meditations on art and literature
in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a
dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely
swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed
into the present and future, submerging everything
beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with
an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated,
like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes
of his life.
