He would arise prostrate from such reveries, fatigued
and all but lifeless. He would light the lamps
and candles so as to flood the room with light, for
he hoped that by so doing he might possibly diminish
the intolerably persistent and dull throbbing of his
arteries which beat under his neck with redoubled
strokes.
During the course of this malady which attacks impoverished
races, sudden calms succeed an attack. Strangely
enough, Des Esseintes awoke one morning recovered;
no longer was he tormented by the throbbing of his
neck or by his racking cough. Instead, he had
an ineffable sensation of contentment, a lightness
of mind in which thought was sparklingly clear, turning
from a turbid, opaque, green color to a liquid iridescence
magical with tender rainbow tints.
This lasted several days. Then hallucinations
of odor suddenly appeared.
His room was aromatic with the fragrance of frangipane;
he tried to ascertain if a bottle were not uncorked—no!
not a bottle was to be found in the room, and he passed
into his study and thence to the kitchen. Still
the odor persisted.
Des Esseintes rang for his servant and asked if he
smelled anything. The domestic sniffed the air
and declared he could not detect any perfume.
There was no doubt about it: his nervous attacks
had returned again, under the appearance of a new
illusion of the senses.
Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary aroma,
he resolved to steep himself in real perfumes, hoping
that this homeopathic treatment would cure him or
would at least drown the persistent odor.
He betook himself to his dressing room. There,
near an old baptistery which he used as a wash basin,
under a long mirror of forged iron, which, like the
edge of a well silvered by the moon, confined the
green dull surface of the mirror, were bottles of every
conceivable size and form, placed on ivory shelves.
He set them on the table and divided them into two
series: one of the simple perfumes, pure extracts
or spirits, the other of compound perfumes, designated
under the generic term of bouquets.
He sank into an easy chair and meditated.
He had long been skilled in the science of smell.
He believed that this sense could give one delights
equal to those of hearing and sight; each sense being
susceptible, if naturally keen and if properly cultivated,
to new impressions, which it could intensify, coordinate
and compose into that unity which constitutes a creative
work. And it was not more abnormal and unnatural
that an art should be called into existence by disengaging
odors than that another art should be evoked by detaching
sound waves or by striking the eye with diversely colored
rays. But if no person could discern, without
intuition developed by study, a painting by a master
from a daub, a melody of Beethoven from one by Clapisson,
no more could any one at first, without preliminary
initiation, help confusing a bouquet invented by a
sincere artist with a pot pourri made by some manufacturer
to be sold in groceries and bazaars.
