 8. He had always been passionately fond of flowers, but during his residence at Jutigny that love had been lavished upon flowers of all sorts. He had never cultivated distinctions and discriminations in regard to them. Now his taste in this direction had grown refined and self-conscious. For a long time he had scorned the popular plants which grow in flat baskets, in watered pots, under green awnings, or under the red parasols of Parisian markets. Simultaneous with the refinement of his literary taste and his preoccupations with art, which permitted him to be content only in the presence of choice-creations, distilled by subtly troubled brains, and simultaneous with the weariness he began to feel in the presence of popular ideas, his love for flowers had grown purged of all impurities and lees, and had become clarified. He compared a florist shop to a microcosm wherein all the categories of society are represented. Here are poor common flowers, the kind found in hovels, which are truly at home only when resting on ledges of garret windows, their roots thrust into milk-bottles and old pans, like the ghillie-flower, for example, and one also finds stupid and pretentious flowers like the rose, which belongs in the porcelain flower-pots painted by young girls. Then there are the flowers of noble lineage, like the orchid, so delicate and charming, at once cold and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled in the heated-glass palaces of Paris, incesses of the vegetable kingdom, living in solitude, having absolutely nothing in common with the street-plants and other bourgeois flora. He permitted himself to feel a certain interest and pity only for the popular flowers enfeebled by their nearness to the odours of sinks and drains in the poor quarters. In revenge he detested the bouquets harmonising with the cream and gold-rums of pretentious houses. For the joy of his eyes he reserved those distinguished rare blooms which had been brought from distant lands, and whose lives were sustained by artful devices under artificial equators. But this very choice, this predilection for the conservatory plants, had itself changed under the influence of his mode of thought. Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had led him to abandon real flowers, and to use in their place replicas, faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India rubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and silk. He was the possessor of a marvellous collection of tropical plants, the result of the labours of skillful artists, who knew how to follow nature, and recreate her, step by step, taking the flower as a bud, leading it to its full development, even imitating its decline, reaching such a point of perfection as to convey every nuance, the most fugitive expressions of the flower when it opens at dawn, and closes at evening, observing the appearance of the petals curled by the wind, or rumpled by the rain, applying dew-drops of gum on its metutinal corollas, shaping it in full bloom, when the branches bend under the burden of their sap, or showing the dried stem and shriveled cupules when calyxes are thrown off and leaves fall to the ground. This wonderful art had held him entranced for a long while, but now he was dreaming of another experiment. He wished to go one step beyond, instead of artificial flowers imitating real flowers, natural flowers should mimic the artificial ones. He directed his ideas to this end, and had not to seek long or go far, since his house lay in the very heart of a famous horticultural region. He visited the conservatories of the Avenue de Châtillon, and of the One Valley, and returned exhausted, his purse empty, astonished at the strange forms of vegetation he had seen, thinking of nothing but the species he had acquired, and continually haunted by memories of magnificent and fantastic plants. The flowers came several days later. This is Saint holding a list in his hands, verified each one of his purchases. The gardeners from their wagons brought a collection of caladiums, which sustained enormous heart-shaped leaves on turgid hairy stalks. While preserving an air of relationship with its neighbour, no one leaf repeated the same pattern. Others were equally extraordinary. The roses, like the virginale, seemed cut out of varnished cloth or oil silks. The white ones, like the albano, appeared to have been cut out of an ox's transparent pleura, or the diaphanous bladder of a pig. Some, particularly the madame, imitated zinc and parodied pieces of stamped metal, having a hue of emperor green, stained by drops of oil paint, and by spots of white and red lead. Others, like the Bosphorus, gave the illusion of a starched calico in crimson and myrtle-green. Still others, like the Aurora Borealis, displayed leaves having the colour of raw meat, streaked with purple sides, violet fibrils, two miffed leaves from which oozed blue wine and blood. The albano and the aurora sounded the two extreme notes of temperament, the apoplexy and chlorosis of this plant. The gardeners brought still other varieties which had the appearance of artificial skin ridged with false veins, and most of them looked as though consumed by syphilis and leprosy, or the exhibited livid surfaces of flesh veined with scarlet rash and damasked with eruptions. Some had the deep red hue of scars that have just closed, or the dark tint of incipient scabs. Others remarked with matter raised by scaldings. There were forms which exhibited shaggy skins hollowed by ulcers and relieved by cankers, and a few appeared embossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog-glard, with green unguents of belladonna smeared with grains of dust and the yellow micas of iodiform. Embossed in his home, these flowers seemed to desessant more monstrous than when he had beheld them, confused with others among the glass rooms of the conservatory. Sapristi! he exclaimed enthusiastically. A new plant, modelled like the Caladiums, the Alokasia Metallica, excited him even more. It was coated with a layer of bronze-green, on which glanced silver reflections. It was the masterpiece of artificiality. It could be called a piece of stovepipe cut by a chimney-maker into the form of a pike-head. The men next brought clusters of leaves, lozinch-like in shape and bottle-green in colour. In the centre rose a rod at whose end a varnished ace of hearts swayed. As though meaning to defy all conceivable forms of plants, a fleshy stalk climbed through the heart of this intense familian ace. A stalk that in some specimens was straight, in others showed ringlets like a pig's tail. It was the Antheurium, an aroid recently imported into France from Columbia, a variety of that family to which also belonged an amorphophallus, a coach in China plant with leaves shaped like fish knives, with long dark stems seemed with gashes, like lambs flecked with black. Desis-sant exalted. They brought a new batch of monstrosities from the wagon, Echinopsis, issuing from padded compresses with rose-coloured flowers that looked like the pitiful stumps. Gaping Nidularia revealing skinless foundations in steel plates. Tilancia lindeni, the colour of wine-must with jagged scrapers. Cypripedia with complicated contours, a crazy piece of work seemingly designed by a crazy inventor. They looked like sabbos or like a lady's work table on which lies a human tongue with taut filaments, such as one sees designed on the illustrated pages of works treating of the diseases of the throat and mouth. Two little side pieces of a red jujupe colour which appeared to have been borrowed from a child's toy mill, completed this singular collection of a tongue's underside with the colour of slate and wine-leaves and of a glossy pocket from whose lining oozed a viscous glue. He could not remove his eyes from this unnatural orchid which had been brought from India. Then the gardeners, impatient at his procrastinations, themselves began to read the labels fastened to the pots they were carrying in. Bewildered, Desi Saint looked on and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the names. The Encephalatus Horidus, a gigantic iron rust-coloured artichoke, like those put on portals of Chateau to foil wall climbers. The Cocos Micania, a sort of notched and slender palm, surrounded by tall leaves resembling paddles and oars. The Zamiya Lamanai, an immense pineapple, a wondrous chester leaf, planted in sweet heather soil, its top bristling with barbed javelins and jagged arrows. The Sibotium Spectabile, surpassing the others by the craziness of its structure, hurling a defiance to reverie, as it darted through the palmated foliage an enormous orangutan tail, a hairy dark tail whose end was twisted into the shape of a bishop's cross. But he gave little heed, for he was impatiently awaiting the series of plants which most bewitched him. The vegetable ghouls, the carnivorous plants, the Antilles flytrap, with its shaggy border secreting a digestive liquid, armed with crooked prickles coiling around each other, forming a grating about the imprisoned insect. The drossera of the peat-bogs provided with glandular hair, the saracena and the cephalothus, opening greedy horns capable of digesting and absorbing real meat. Lastly the Nepenthes, whose capricious appearance transcends all limits of eccentric forms. He never worried of turning in his hands the pot in which this floral extravagance stirred. It imitated the gum-tree whose long leaf of dark metallic green it possessed, but it differed in that a green string hung from the end of its leaf, an umbilic cord supporting a greenish urn, streaked with jasper, a sort of German porcelain pipe, a strange bird's nest which tranquilly swung about, revealing an interior covered with hair. This is really something worthwhile, is a saint murmured. He was forced to tear himself away, for the gardeners anxious to leave were emptying their wagons of their contents, and depositing, without any semblance of order, the tuberous begonias and black croton stained like sheet-iron with satin red. Then he perceived that one name still remained on his list. It was the catalya of Nugrenada. On it was designed a little winged bell of a faded lilac, an almost dead mauve. He approached, placed his nose above the plant, and quickly recoiled. It exhaled an odour of toy-boxes of painted pine. It recalled the horrors of a new year's day. He felt that he would do well to mistrust it, and he almost regretted having admitted among the scentless plants this orchid which evoked the most disagreeable memories. As soon as he was alone his gaze took in this vegetable tide which foamed in the vestibule. Intermingled with each other they crossed their swords, their chrisses and stanchions, taking on a resemblance to a green pile of arms, above which, like barbaric penins, floated flowers with hard dazzling colours. The air of the room grew rarified. Then in the shadowy dimness of a corner, near the floor, a white, soft light crept. He approached, and perceived that the phenomenon came from the rhizomorphies which threw out these night-lamp gleams while respiring. These plants are amazing, he reflected. Then he drew back to let his eye encompass the whole collection at a glance. His purpose was achieved. Not one single specimen seemed real. The cloth, paper, porcelain and metal seemed to have been loaned by man to nature to enable her to create her monstrosities. When unable to imitate man's handiwork, nature had been reduced to copying the inner membranes of animals, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, their magnificent corruptions. All is syphilis, thought Desis Sainte. His eye riveted upon the horrible streaked staining of the colladium plants, caressed by a ray of light. And he beheld a sudden vision of humanity consumed through the centuries by the virus of this disease. Since the world's beginnings, every single creature had, from sire to son, transmitted the imperishable heritage, the eternal malady which has ravaged man's ancestors, and whose effects are visible even in the bones of old fossils that have been exhumed. The disease had swept on through the centuries, gaining momentum. It even raged today, concealed in obscure sufferings, dissimulated under symptoms of headaches and bronchitis, hysterics and gout. It crept to the surface from time to time, preferably attacking the ill-nourished and the poverty-stricken, spotting faces with gold pieces, ironically decorating the faces of poor wretches, stamping the mark of money on their skins to aggravate their unhappiness. And here, on the coloured leaves of the plants, it was resurgent in its original splendour. It is true, pursued Isis Saint, returning to the course of reasoning he had momentarily abandoned. It is true that most often nature, left alone, is incapable of begetting such perverse and sickly specimens. She furnishes the original substance, the germ and the earth, the nourishing womb, and the elements of the plant which man then sets up, models, paints and sculpts, as he wills. Limited, stubborn and formless though she be, nature has at last been subjected, and her master has succeeded in changing through chemical reaction the earth's substances. In using combinations which had been long matured, cross-fertilization processes long prepared, in making use of slips and graftings, and man now forces differently coloured flowers in the same species, invests new tones for her, modifies to his will the long-standing form of her plants, polishes the rough clods, puts an end to the period of botch work, places his stamp on them, imposes on them the mark of his own unique art. It cannot be gained said, he thought, resuming his reflections, that man in several years is able to effect a selection which slothful nature can produce only after centuries. Decidedly the haughty culturalists are the real artists nowadays. He was a little tired, and he felt stifled in this atmosphere of crowded plants. The promenades he had taken during the last few days had exhausted him. The transition had been too sudden from the tepid atmosphere of his room to the out-of-doors, from the placid tranquility of a reclusive life to an active one. He left the vestibule, and stretched out on his bed to rest, but absorbed by this new fancy of his, his mind, even in his sleep, could not lessen its tension, and he was soon wandering among the gloomy insanities of a nightmare. He found himself in the centre of a walk in the heart of the wood, twilight had fallen. He was strolling by the side of a woman, whom he had never seen before. She was emaciated, and had flaxen hair, a bulldog face, freckles on her cheeks, crooked teeth projecting under a flat nose. She wore a nurse's white apron, a long neckerchief torn in strips on her bosom, half shoes like those worn by Prussian soldiers, and a black bonnet adorned with frillings and trimmed with a rosette. There was a foreign look about her, like that of a mountain-bank at a fair. He asked himself who the woman could be. He felt that she had long been an intimate part of his life. Vainly he sought her origin, her name, her profession, her reason for being. No recollection of this liaison, which was inexplicable and yet positive, rewarded him. He was searching his past for a clue, when a strange figure suddenly appeared on horseback before them, trotting about for a moment, and then turning around in its saddle. Dizzy Sant's heart almost stopped beating, and he stood riveted to the spot with horror. He nearly fainted. This enigmatic, sexless figure was green. Through her violet eyelids the eyes were terrible in their cold blue. Pimples surrounded her mouth, horribly emaciated skeleton arms, bared to the elbows, issued from ragged, tattered sleeves, and trembled feverishly, and the skinny legs shivered in shoes that were several sizes too large. The ghastly eyes were fixed on Dizzy Sant, penetrating him, freezing his very marrow. Wilder than ever the bulldog woman threw herself at him, and commenced to howl like a dog at the killing, her head hanging on her rigid neck. Suddenly he understood the meaning of the frightful vision. Before him was the image of syphilis. Pursued by fear, and quite beside himself, he sped down a pathway at top speed, and gained a pavilion standing among the labyrinems to the left, where he fell into a chair in the passageway. After a few moments, when he was beginning to recover his breath, the sound of sobbing made him lift his head. The bulldog woman was in front of him, and grotesque and woeful. While warm tears fell from her eyes, she told him that she had lost her teeth in her flight. As she spoke, she drew clay pipes from the pocket of her nurse's apron, breaking them and shoving pieces of the stems into the hollows of her gums. But she is really absurd, Dizzy Sant told himself. These stems will never stick, and as a matter of fact they dropped out one after another. At this moment were heard the galloping sounds of an approaching horse. A fearful terror pierced Dizzy Sant. His limbs gave way. The galloping grew louder. Despair brought him sharply to his senses. He threw himself upon the woman who was stamping on the pipe bowls and treating her to be silent, not to give notice of their presence by the sound of her shoes. She writhed and struggled in his grip. He led her to the end of the corridor, strangling her to prevent her crying out. Suddenly he noticed the door of a coffee-house with green Venetian shutters. It was unlocked. He pushed it, rushed in headlong, and then paused. Before him, in the centre of a vast glade, huge white pieros were leaping, rabbit-like, under the rays of the moon. Tears of discouragement welled to his eyes. Never, no, never would he succeed in crossing the threshold. I shall be crushed, he thought. And as though to justify his fears, the ranks of tall pieros swarmed and multiplied, their somersaults now covered the entire horizon, the whole sky on which they landed, now on their heads, now on their feet. Then the hoofbeats paused. He was in the passage behind a round skylight. More dead than alive, Dizis Saint turned about, and through the round window beheld projecting erect ears, yellow teeth, nostrils from which breathed two jets of vapour smelling of phenol. He sank to the ground, renouncing all ideas of flight or resistance. He closed his eyes, so as not to behold the horrible gaze of syphilis, which penetrated through the wall, which even pierced his closed lids, which he felt gliding over his moist spine, over his body, whose hair bristled in pools of cold sweat. He waited for the worst, and even hoped for the coup de crasse to end everything. A moment which seemed to last a century past. Shuddering, he opened his eyes, everything had vanished, without any transition, as though by some stage device a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance. A one, dead, waste, gullied landscape, a light illumined this desolate sight, a peaceful white light that recalled gleams of phosphorus dissolved in oil. Something that stirred on the ground became a deathly pale, nude woman, whose feet were covered with green silk stockings. He contemplated her with curiosity, as though frizzed by overheated irons, her hair curled, becoming straight again at the end. A distended nostrils were the colour of roast veal. Her eyes were desirous, and she called to him in low tones. He had no time to answer, for already the woman was changing. Flamboyant colours passed and repast in her eyes. Her lips were stained with a furious ansurium red. The nipples of her breasts flashed, painted like two pods of red pepper. A sudden intuition came to him. It is the flower, he said, and his reasoning mania persisted in his nightmare. Then he observed the frightful irritation of the breasts and mouth, discovered spots of bister and copper on the skin of her body, and recoiled bewildered. But the woman's eyes fascinated him, and he advanced slowly, attempting to thrust his heels into the earth, so as not to move, letting himself fall, and yet lifting himself to reach her. Just as he touched her, the dark amorphophallae leaped up from all sides and thrust their leaves into his abdomen, which rose and fell like a sea. He had broken all the plants, experiencing limitless disgust in seeing these warm, firm stems stirring in his hands. Suddenly the detested plants had disappeared, and two arms sought to enlace him. A terrible anguish made his heart beat furiously, for the eyes, the horrible eyes of the woman, had become a clear, cold and terrible blue. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but she held him with an irresistible movement. He beheld the wild nidularium, which yawned, bleeding in steel plates. With his body he touched the hideous wound of this plant. He felt himself dying. Awoke with a start, suffocating, frozen, mad with fear, and sighing, ah, thank God it was but a dream. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Deeson. Against the Grain by Jochise Karl Wiesmans. Translated by John Howard. Chapter 9. These nightmares attacked him repeatedly. He was afraid to fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams, in which he tumbled down flights of stairs, and felt himself sinking powerless into abysmal depths. His nervous attacks, which had abated for several days, became acute, more violent and obstinate than ever unearthing new tortures. The bed covers tormented him. He stifled under the sheets. His body smarted and tingled as though stung by swarms of insects. These symptoms were augmented by a dull pain in his jaws, and a throbbing in his temples, which seemed to be gripped in a vice. His alarm increased, but unfortunately the means of subduing the inexorable malady were not at hand. He had unsuccessfully sought to install a hydropathic apparatus in his dressing room, but the impossibility of forcing water to the height on which his house was perched, and the difficulty of procuring water even in the village where the fountains functioned sparingly and only at certain hours of the day caused him to renounce the project. Since he could not have floods of water playing on him from the nozzle of a hose, the only efficacious means of overcoming his insomnia and calming his nerves through its action on his spinal column, he was reduced to brief sprays or to mere cold baths, followed by energetic massages applied by his servant with the aid of a horsehair glove. But these measures failed to stem the march of his nervous disorder. At best they afforded him a few hours relief, dearly paid for by the return of the attacks in an even more virulent form. His ennui passed all bounds. His pleasure in the possession of his wonderful flowers was exhausted. Their textures and nuances pawled on him. Besides, despite the care he lavished on them, most of his plants drooped. He had them removed from his rooms, but in his state of extreme excitability their very absence exasperated him, for his eyes were pained by the void. To while away the interminable hours, he had recourse to his portfolios of prints and arranged his goya's. The first impressions of certain plates of the Caprice, recognisable as proofs by their reddish hues, which he had bought at auction at a high price, comforted him, and he lost himself in them, following the painter's fantasies, distracted by his vertiginous scenes, his witches astride on cats, his women striving to pluck out the teeth of a hanged man, his bandits, his succubi, his demons and dwarfs. Then he examined his other series of etchings and aquitints, his proverbs with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wild rage, finally his plate of the garot, of which he cherished a marvellous trial proof printed on heavy watermarked paper, unmounted. Goya's savage verve and keenly fanciful talent delighted him, but the universal admiration his works had won nevertheless estranged him slightly, and for years he had refused to frame them for fear that the first blundering fool who caught sight of them might deem it necessary to fly into banal and facile raptures before them. The same applied to his Rembrandts, which he examined from time to time half-secretly, and if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdy's make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate. This promiscuity in admiration furthermore was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted. He closed his portfolios, and completely disconcerted, again plunged into melancholy. To divert the current of his thoughts and cool his brain, he sought books that would sooth him, and turned to the romances of Dickens, those charming novels which are so satisfying to invalids and convalescents, who might grow fatigued by works of a more profound and vigorous nature. But they produced an effect contrary to his expectations. These chaste lovers, these protesting heroines garbed to the neck, loved among the stars, confined themselves to lowered eyes and blushes, wet tears of joy and clasped hands, an exaggeration of purity which threw him into an opposite excess. By the law of contrast he leaped from one extreme to the other, let his imagination dwell on vibrant scenes between human lovers, and mused on their sensual kisses and passionate embraces. His mind wandered off from his book to worlds far removed from the English prude, to wanton peccadillos and salacious practices condemned by the church. He grew excited. The impotence of his mind and body which he had supposed final, vanished. Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves. He was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past, and he wallowed in memories of his old sin. He rose and pensively opened a little box of verme, with a lid of aventurine. It was filled with violet bonbons. He took one up and pressed it between his fingers, thinking of the strange properties of this sugary, frosted sweet-meat. When his virility had been impaired, when the thought of woman had roused in him no sharp regret or desire, he had only to put one in his mouth, let it melt, and almost at once it induced misty, languishing memories, infinitely tender. These bonbons, invented by Sirodin, and bearing the ridiculous name of Perle de Pirénée, were each a drop of sarcanthus perfume, a drop of feminine essence, crystallized in a morsel of sugar. They penetrated the papillai of the tongue, recalling the very savour of voluptuous kisses. Usually he smiled as he inhaled this love aroma, this shadow of a caress which for a moment restored the delights of women he had once adored. Today they were not merely suggestive. They no longer served as a delicate hint of his distant riotous past. They were become powerful, thrusting aside the veils, exposing before his eyes the importunate, corporeal, and brutal reality. At the head of the procession of mistresses, whom the fragrance of the bonbons helped to place in bold relief, one paused, displaying long white teeth, a satiny rose skin, a snub nose, mouse-coloured eyes, and close-cropped blonde hair. This was Miss Urania, an American with a vigorous body, sinewy limbs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron. She had been one of the most celebrated acrobats of the circus. Desis Sante had watched her attentively through many long evenings. At first she had seemed to him what she really was, a strong and beautiful woman. But the desire to know her never troubled him. She possessed nothing to recommend her in the eyes of a blasé man, and yet he returned to the circus allured by he knew not what, importuned by a sentiment difficult to define. Gradually, as he watched her, a fantastic idea seized him. A graceful antics and arch-feminine ways receded to the background of his mind, replaced by her power and strength, which had for him all the charm of masculinity. Compared with her, Desis Sante seemed to himself a frail, effeminate creature, and he began to desire her, as ardently as an anemic young girl might desire some lautish Hercules whose arms could crush her in a strong embrace. One evening he finally decided to communicate with her and dispatched one of the attendants on this errand. Miss Urania deemed it necessary not to yield before a preliminary courtship, but she showed herself amenable, as it was common gossip that Desis Sante was rich, and that his name was instrumental in establishing women. But as soon as his wishes were granted, his disappointments surpassed any he had yet experienced. He had persuaded himself that the American woman would be as bestial and stupid as a wrestler at a county fair, and instead her stupidity was of an altogether feminine nature. Certainly she lacked education and tact, had neither good sense nor wit, and displayed an animal veracity at table, but she possessed all the childish trays of a woman. Her manner and speech were cocketish and affected, those of a silly, scandal-loving young girl. There was absolutely nothing masculine about her. Furthermore she was withdrawn and puritanical in her embraces, displaying none of the brute force he had dreaded yet longed for, and she was subject to none of the perturbations of his sex. Desis Sante inevitably returned to the masculine role he had momentarily abandoned. His impression of femininity, weakness, need of protection, of fear even, disappeared. The illusion was no longer possible. Miss Urania was an ordinary mistress in no wise justifying the cerebral curiosity she had at first awakened in him. Although the charm of her firm skin and magnificent beauty had at first astonished and captivated Desis Sante, he lost no time in terminating this liaison, for his impotence was prematurely hastened by the frozen and prudish caresses of this woman. And yet she was the first of all the women he had loved, now flitting through his reverie to stand out. But if she was more strongly imprinted on his memory than a host of others whose allurements had been less spurious and more seductive, the reason must be ascribed to her healthy animalism, to her exuberance which contrasted so strikingly with the perfumed anemia of the others, a faint suggestion of which he found in the delicate Syrodin Bonbon. Miss Urania haunted him by reason of her very difference, but almost instantly, offended by the intrusion of this natural crude aroma, the antithesis of the scented confection, Desis Sante returned to more civilized exhalations, and his thoughts reverted to his other mistresses. They pressed upon him in a throng, but above them all rose a woman whose startling talents had satisfied him for months. She was a little slender brunette, with black eyes and burnished hair parted on one side, and sleeked down over her head. He had known her in a café where she gave ventriloquial performances. Before the amazed patrons she caused her tiny cardboard figures placed near each other on chairs to talk. She conversed with the animated mannequins while flies buzzed around the chandeliers. Then one heard the rustling of the tense audience, surprised to find itself seated and instinctively recoiling when they heard the rumbling of imaginary carriages. Desis Sante had been fascinated. He lost no time in winning over the ventriloquist, tempting her with large sums of money. She delighted him by the very contrast she exhibited to the American woman. This brunette used strong perfumes and burned like a crater. Despite all her blandishments, Desis Sante wearied off her in a few short hours. But this did not prevent him from letting himself be fleeced, for the phenomenon of the ventriloquist attracted him more than did the charms of the mistress. Certain plans he had long pondered upon ripened and he decided to bring them to fruition. One evening he ordered a tiny sphinx brought in, a sphinx carved from black marble and resting in the classic pose without stretched paws and erect head. He also purchased a chimera of polychrome clay. It brandished its mane of hair and its sides resembled a pair of bellows. These two images he placed in a corner of the room. Then he extinguished the lamps, permitting the glowing embers to throw a dim light around the room and to magnify the objects which were almost immersed in gloom. Then he stretched out on a couch beside the woman whose motionless figure was touched by the ember gleams and waited. With strange intonations that he had long and patiently taught her, she animated the two monsters. She did not even move her lips. She did not even glance in their direction, and in the silence followed the marvellous dialogue of the chimera and the sphinx. It was recited in deep guttural tones, which were at first raucous, then turned shrill and unearthly. Here, chimera, pause. Never! lulled by the admirable prose of Flaubert, he listened. He panted and shivering sensations raced through his frame, when the chimera uttered the magical and solemn phrase, New perfumes I seek, Stranger flowers I seek, Pleasures not yet discovered. Ah, it was to him that this voice, mysterious as an incantation, spoke. It was to him that this voice recounted her feverish agitation for the unknown, her insatiable ideals, her imperative needs to escape from the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines of thought, to grope towards the mists of elusive, unattainable art. The poignant tragedy of his past failures rent his heart. Gently he clasped the silent woman at his side. He sought refuge in her nearness, like a child who is inconsolable. He was blind to the sulkiness of the comidienne, obliged to perform off-scene, in her leisure moments, far from the spotlight. Their liaison continued, but his spells of exhaustion soon became acute. His brain no longer sufficed to stimulate his benumbed body. No longer did his nerves obey his will, and now the crazy whims of dotards dominated him. Terrified by the approach of a disastrous weakness in the presence of his mistress, he resorted to fear, that oldest, most efficacious of excitants. A hoarse voice from behind the door would exclaim while he held the woman in his arms. Open the door, woman! I know you're in there, and with whom. Just wait, wait! Instantly, like a libertine stirred by fear of discovery in the open, he recovered his strength and hurled himself madly upon the ventriloquist, whose voice continued to bluster outside the room. In this wise he experienced the pleasures of a panic-stricken person. But this state, unfortunately, did not last long, and despite the sums he paid her, the ventriloquist parted to offer herself to someone less exigent and less complex. He had regretted her defection, and now, recalling her, the other women seemed insipid, their childish graces and monotonous cocketry disgusting him. In the ferment of his disordered brain, he delighted in mingling with these recollections of his past other more gloomy pleasures, as theology qualifies the evocation of past disgraceful acts. With the physical visions he mingled spiritual ardours brought into play and motivated by his old readings of the casuists, of the bosom-balms, and the dianas, of the Liguaris and the Sancheses, treating of transgressions against the sixth and ninth commandments of the decalogue. In awakening an almost divine ideal in this soul steeped in her precepts, a soul possibly predisposed to the teachings of the church through hereditary influences dating back from the reign of Henri Trois. Religion had also stirred the illegitimate, forbidden enjoyment of the senses. Licentious and mystical obsessions haunted his brain. They mingled confusedly, and he would often be troubled by an unappeasable desire to shun the vulgarities of the world, and to plunge far from the customs and modes held in such reverence into convulsions and raptures which were wholly or infernal, and which in either case proved too exhausting and innovating. 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. End of chapter 9. Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey. Chapter 10 of Against the Grain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Giesen. Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huismas. Translated by John Howard. Chapter 10. During the course of this malady which attacks impoverished races, sudden calms succeed an attack. Strangely enough, Dizisant 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 colour to a liquid iridescence magical with tender rainbow tints. This lasted several days, then hallucinations of odour suddenly appeared. His rum 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 thenced to the kitchen. Still the odour persisted. Dizisant 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, and 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 odour. He betook himself to his dressing room. There, near an old baptistery which he used as a wash basin and 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, where 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 odours than that another art should be evoked by detaching sound waves or by striking the eye with diversely coloured rays. But if no person could discern without intuition developed by study a painting by a master from a doorb, a melody of Beethoven from one by Clappissant, no more could anyone at first without preliminary initiation help confusing a bouquet invented by a sincere artist with a potpourri made by some manufacturer to be sold in groceries and bazaars. In this art the branch devoted to achieving certain effects by artificial methods particularly delighted him. Perfumes in fact rarely come from the flowers whose names they bear. The artist who dared to borrow nature's elements would only produce a bastard work which would have neither authenticity nor style, in as much as the essence obtained by the distillation of flowers would bear but a distant and vulgar relation to the odour of the living flower wafting its fragrance into the air. Thus with the exception of the inimitable jasmine which it is impossible to counterfeit, all flowers are perfectly represented by the blend of aromatic spirits, stealing the very personality of the model and to it adding that nuance the more, that heady scent, that rare touch which entitled a thing to be called a work of art. To resume, in the science of perfumery the artist develops the natural odour of the flowers working over his subject like a jeweller refining the luster of a gem and making it precious. Little by little the arcana of this art, most neglected of all, was revealed to Desesante who could now read this language as diversified and insinuating as that of literature. This style with its unexpected concision under its vague flowing appearance. To achieve this end he had first been compelled to master the grammar and understand the syntax of odours, learning the secret of the rules that regulate them, and once familiarised with the dialect he compared the works of the masters of the Atkinson's and Lubin's, the Chardin's and Violet's, the Le Grand's and Piess's. Then he separated the construction of their phrases, weighed the value of their words and the arrangement of their periods. Later on in this idiom of fluids experience was able to support theories too often incomplete and banal. Classic perfumery in fact was scarcely diversified, almost colourless and uniformly issuing from the mould cast by the ancient chemists. It was in its dotage confined to its old olympics when the Romantic period was born, and had modified the old style, rejuvenating it, making it more supple and malleable. Step by step its history followed that of our language. The perfumed Louis Tray's style, composed of elements highly prized at that time of iris powder, musk, chive and myrtle water, already designated under the name of Water of the Angels, was hardly sufficient to express the cavalier graces, the rather crude tones of the period which certain sonnets of Saint-Amont have preserved for us. Later, with myrrh and Olybunum, the mystic odours or steer and powerful, the pompous gesture of the great period, the redundant artifices of oratorial art, the full sustained harmonious style of bossue and the masters of the pulpit were almost possible. Still later the sophisticated rather bored graces of French society under Louis Kang's more easily found their interpretation in the almond, which in a manner summed up this epoch. Then after the ennui and jadedness of the first empire, which misused Oda Cologne and Rosemary, perfumery rushed in the wake of Victor Hugo and Gautier towards the Levant. It created oriental combinations, vivid eastern nosegays, discovered new internations, antithesis which until then had been unattempted, selected and made use of antique nuances which it complicated, refined and assorted. It resolutely rejected that voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by the Malazerpe, the Boileaux, the Andrieuses and the Baur-l'Ormiens, the wretched distillers of their own poems. But this language had not remained stationary since the period of 1830. It had continued to evolve, and patterning itself on the progress of the century had advanced parallel with the other arts. It too had yielded to the desires of amateurs and artists, receiving its inspiration from the Chinese and Japanese, conceiving fragrant albums, imitating the Takeoka bouquets of flowers, obtaining the odour of rondellitia from the blend of lavender and clove, the peculiar aroma of Chinese ink from the marriage of patchouli and camphor, the emanation of Japanese hoevenia by compounds of citron, clove and neroli. Desis Sainte studied and analysed the essences of these fluids, experimenting to corroborate their texts. He took pleasure in playing the role of a psychologist for his personal satisfaction in taking apart and reassembling the machinery of a work, in separating the pieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his sense of smell had thereby attained a sureness that was all but perfect. Just as a wine merchant has only to smell a drop of wine to recognise the grape, as a hop dealer determines the exact value of hops by sniffing a bag, as a Chinese trader can immediately tell the origin of the teas he smells, knowing in what farms, of what mountains, in what buddhist convents it was cultivated, the very time when its leaves were gathered, the state and the degree of torrefaction, the effect upon it of its proximity to the plum tree and other flowers, to all those perfumes which change its essence, adding to it an unexpected touch, and introducing into its dryish flavour a hint of distant fresh flowers, just so could Deses Sainte, by inhaling a dash of perfume, instantly explain its mixture and the psychology of its blend, and could almost give the name of the artist who had composed and given it the personal mark of his individual style. Naturally he had a collection of all the products used by perfumers. He even had the real Mecca balm, that rare balm cultivated only in certain parts of Arrabia Petraea and under the monopoly of the ruler. Now seated in his dressing-room in front of his table, he thought of creating a new bouquet, and he was overcome by that moment of wavering confidence, familiar to writers when after months of inaction they prepare for a new work. Like Balzac, who was wont to scribble on many sheets of paper so as to put himself in a mood for work, Deses Sainte felt the necessity of steadying his hand by several initial and unimportant experiments. Desiring to create heliotrope, he took down bottles of vanilla and almond, and then changed his idea and decided to experiment with sweet peas. He groped for a long time, unable to effect the proper combinations, for orange is dominant in the fragrance of this flower. He attempted several combinations, and ended in achieving the exact blend by joining tubros and rose to orange, the whole united by a drop of vanilla. His hesitation disappeared. He felt alert and ready for work. Now he made some tea by blending cassi with iris. Then, sure of his technique, he decided to proceed with a fulminating phrase whose thunderous roar would annihilate the insidious odor of almond still hovering over his room. He worked with amber and with tonkin musk marvellously powerful, with patchouli, the most poignant of vegetable perfumes whose flower in its habitat wafts an odour of mildew. Try what he would. The eighteenth century obsessed him. The pannier robes and furbillows appeared before his eyes. Memories of Boucher's venus haunted him. Recollections of Timidar's romance of the exquisite rosette pursued him. Furious, he rose and to rid himself of the obsession. With all his strength he inhaled that pure essence of spikenard, so dear to orientals and so repulsive to Europeans because of its pronounced odour of valerian. He was stunned by the violence of the shock. As though pounded by hammer-strokes, the filigraines of the delicate odour disappeared. He profited by the period of respite to escape the dead centuries, the antiquated fumes, and to enter, as he formerly had done, less limited or more recent works. He had of old loved to lull himself with perfumes. He used effects analogous to those of the poets, and employed the admirable odour of certain pieces of Baudelaire, such as Irréparable and Le Balcon, where the last of the five lines composing the Strophe is the echo of the first verse, and returns like a refrain to steep the soul in infinite depths of melancholy and languor. He strayed into reveries evoked by those aromatic stanzas, suddenly brought to his point of departure to the motive of his meditation by the return of the initial theme, reappearing at stated intervals in the fragrant orchestration of the poem. He actually wished to saunter through an astonishing diversified landscape, and he began with a sonorous ample phrase that suddenly opened a long vista of fields for him. With his vaporisers he injected an essence formed of ambrosia, lavender and sweet peas into this room. This formed an essence which, when distilled by an artist, deserves the name by which it is known, extract of wild grass. Into this he introduced an exact blend of tube-rows, orange flower and almond, and forthwith artificial lilacs sprang into being, while the linden trees rustled, their thin emanations imitated by extract of London tillia, drooping earthward. Into this decor, arranged with a few broad lines receding as far as the eye could reach, under his closed lids, he introduced a light rain of human and half feline essences, possessing the aroma of petticoats, breathing of the powdered painted woman, the Stephanotis, Ayapanna or Poponax, Champaca, Sarcanthus and Cypress wine, to which he added a dash of syringa, in order to give to the artificial life of paints which they exhaled, a suggestion of natural, dewy laughter and pleasures enjoyed in the open air. Then, through a ventilator, he permitted these fragrant waves to escape, only preserving the field, which he renewed, compelling it to return in his strophes like a ritornello. The women had gradually disappeared, now the plain had grown solitary. Suddenly, on the enchanted horizon, factories appeared, whose tall chimneys flared like bowls of punch. The odour of factories and of chemical products now passed with the breeze, which was simulated by means of fans. Nature exhaled its sweet effluvia amid this putrescence. Desessant warmed a pellet of Storax, and a singular odour, at once repugnant and exquisite, pervaded the room. It partook of the delicious fragrance of Johnquill, and of the stench of gutter percha and coal oil. He disinfected his hands, inserted his resin in a hermetically sealed box, and the factories disappeared. Then, among the revived vapours of the Linden's and Medogras, he threw several drops of new-mone hay, and amid this magic sight, for the moment despoiled of its lilacs, sheaves of hay were piled up, introducing a new season, and scattering their fine effluence into these summer odours. At last, when he had sufficiently enjoyed this sight, he suddenly scattered the exotic perfumes, emptied his vaporisers, threw in his concentrated spirits, poured his balms, and in the exasperated and stifling heat of the room there rose a crazy sublimated nature, a paradoxical nature which was neither genuine nor charming. Reuniting the tropical spices and the peppery breath of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaica hediosmia with the French odours of Jasmine, Hawthorne and Verbena, regardless of seasons and climates, he forced trees of diverse essences into life, and flowers with conflicting fragrances and colours. By the clash of these tones, he created a general, nondescript, unexpected, strange perfume in which reappeared like an obstinate refrain, the decorative phrase of the beginning, the odour of the meadows fanned by the lilacs and Linden's. Suddenly a poignant pain seized him. He felt as though wimbles were drilling into his temples. Opening his eyes, he found himself in his dressing-room, seated in front of his table. Stupified, he painfully walked across the room to the window which he half opened. A puff of wind dispelled the stifling atmosphere which was enveloping him. To exercise his limbs, he walked up and down, gazing at the ceiling, where crabs and sea-racks stood out in relief against a background as light in colour as the sands of the seashore. A similar décor covered the plinths and bordered the partitions which were covered with Japanese sea-green crepe, slightly wrinkled, imitating a river rippled by the wind. In this light current swam a rose-petal, around which circled a school of tiny fish, painted with two strokes of the brush. But his eyelids remained heavy. He ceased to pace about the short space between the baptistery and the bath. He leaned against the window. His dizziness ended. He carefully stopped up the vials and used the occasion to arrange his cosmetics. Since his arrival at Fontenay he had not touched them, and now was quite astonished to behold once more this collection formally visited by so many women. The flasks and jars were lying heaped up against each other. Here a porcelain box contained a marvellous white cream, which, when applied on the cheeks, turns to a tender rose-colour under the action of the air, to such a true flesh-colour that it procures the very illusion of a skin touched with blood. There lacquer objects encrusted with mother of pearl enclosed Japanese gold and Athenian green, the colour of the cancerous wing, gold and green, which changed to deep purple when wetted. There were jars filled with filbert paste, the circus of the harem, emulsions of lilies, lotions of strawberry water and elders for the complexion, and tiny bottles filled with solutions of Chinese ink and rose water for the eyes. There were tweezers, scissors, rouge and powder puffs, files and beauty patches. He handled this collection formally bought to please a mistress who swooned under the influence of certain aromatics and balms, a nervous, unbalanced woman who loved to steep the nipples of her breasts in perfumes, but who never really experienced a delicious and overwhelming ecstasy save when her head was scraped with a comb, or when she could inhale amid caresses the odour of perspiration, or the plaster of unfinished houses on rainy days, or of dust splashed by huge drops of rain during summer storms. He mused over these memories, and one afternoon spent at Pontain, through idleness and curiosity, in company with this woman at the home of one of her sisters, returned to him, stirring in him a forgotten world of old ideas and perfumes. While the two women plattled and displayed their gowns, he had drawn near the window and had seen through the dusty panes the muddy street sprawling before him, and had heard the repeated sounds of galoshes over the puddles of the pavement. This scene, already far removed, came to him suddenly, strangely and vividly. Pontain was there before him, animated and throbbing in this greenish and dull mirror into which his unseeing eyes plunged. A hallucination transported him far from fontainé. Besides reflecting the street, the mirror brought back thoughts it had once been instrumental in evoking, and plunged in reverie. He repeated to himself this ingenious, sad and comforting composition he had formally written upon returning to Paris. Yes, the season of downpours has come. Now behold water spouts, vomiting as they rush over the pavements, and rubbish marinates in puddles that fill the holes scooped out of the macadam. Under a larring sky in the damp air the walls of houses have black perspiration, and their airholes are fetid. The loathesomeness of existence increases, and melancholy overwhelms one. The seeds of vileness which each person harbours in his soul sprout. The craving for vile debaucheries seizes austere people, and base desires grow rampant in the brains of respectable men. And yet I warm myself here before a cheerful fire, from a basket of blossoming flowers comes the aroma of balsamic benzoin, geranium, and the hall-flowered bent-grass which permeates the room. In the very month of November at Pontain, in the rue de Paris, springtime persists. Here in my solitude I laugh at the fears of families which, to shun the approaching cold weather, escape on every steamer to Cannes and to other winter resorts. In clement nature does nothing to contribute to this extraordinary phenomenon. It must be said that his artificial season at Pontain is the result of man's ingenuity. In fact, these flowers are made of taffeta and are mounted on wire. The springtime odour filters through the window-joints, exhaled from the neighbouring factories, from the perfumeries of Pinot and St. James. For the workmen exhausted by the hard neighbours of the plants, for the young employees who too often are fathers, the illusion of a little healthy air is possible thanks to these manufacturers. So, from this fabulous subterfuge of a country, can an intelligent cure arise? The consumptive men about town who are sent to the south die, their end due to the change in their habits, and to the nostalgia for the Parisian excesses which destroyed them. Here, under an artificial climate, Libertine memories will reappear, the languishing feminine emanations evaporated by the factories. Instead of the deadly ennui of provincial life, the doctor can thus platonically substitute for his patient the atmosphere of the Parisian women and of boudoirs. Most often, all that is necessary to effect the cure is for the subject to have a somewhat fertile imagination. Since nowadays nothing genuine exists. Since the wine one drinks and the Libertine one boldly proclaims are laughable and a sham. Since it really needs a healthy dose of good will to believe that the governing classes are respectable and that the lower classes are worthy of being assisted or pitted, it seems to me, concluded Deses Sainte, to be neither ridiculous nor senseless to ask of my fellow men a quantity of illusion, barely equivalent to what they spend daily in idiotic ends, so as to be able to convince themselves that the town of Pentein is an artificial niece or remontum. But all this does not prevent me from seeing, he said, forced by weakness from his meditations, that I must be careful to mistrust these delicious and abominable practices, which may ruin my constitution, he sighed. Well, well, more pleasures to moderate, more precautions to be taken. And he passed into his study, hoping the more easily to escape the spell of these perfumes. He opened the window wide, glad to be able to breathe the air. But it suddenly seemed to him that the breeze brought in a vague tide of bergamot, with which jasmine and rose water were blend. Agitated, he asked himself whether he was not really under the yoke of one of those possessions exercised in the Middle Ages. The odour changed, and was transformed, but it persisted. A faint sense of tincture of tolu, of balm of Peru, and of saffron, united by several drams of amber and musk, now issued from the sleeping village, and suddenly the metamorphosis was affected. These scattered elements were blend, and once more the frangipane spread from the valley of fontané, as far as the fort, assailing his exhausted nostrils, once more shattering his helpless nerves, and throwing him into such a prostration that he fell unconscious on the windowsill. End of chapter 10. Recording by Martin Geeson in Hazelmere Surrey.