 CHAPTER XIII As the season advanced, the weather far from improving grew worse. Everything seemed to go wrong that year. After the squalls and mists, the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheet iron. In two days without transition, a torrid heat, an atmosphere of frightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days and the streaming of the rains. As though stirred by furious pokers, the sun showed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burning one's face. A hot dust rose from the roads, scorching the dry trees, and the yellowed lawns became a deep brown. A temperature like that of a foundry hung over the dwelling of Desis Sainte. Half-naked, he opened a window, and received the air like a furnace blast in his face. The dining-rump to which he fled was fiery, and the rarefied air simmered. Utterly distressed, he sat down, for the stimulation that had seized him had ended since the close of his reveries. Like all people tormented by nervousness, heat distracted him, and his anemia, checked by cold weather, again became pronounced, weakening his body, which had been debilitated by copious perspiration. The back of his shirt was saturated, his perineum was damp, his feet and arms moist, his brow overflowing with sweat that ran down his cheeks. Desis Sainte reclined annihilated on a chair. The sight of the meat placed on the table at that moment caused his stomach to rise. He ordered the food removed, asked for boiled eggs, and tried to swallow some bread soaked in eggs, but his stomach would have none of it. A fit of nausea overcame him. He drank a few drops of wine that pricked his stomach like points of fire. He wet his face. The perspiration, alternately warm and cold, coursed along his temples. He began to suck some pieces of ice to overcome his troubled heart, but in vain. So weak was he that he leaned against the table. He rose, feeling the need of air, but the bread had slowly risen in his gullet and remained there. Never had he felt so distressed, so shattered, so ill at ease. To add to his discomfort his eyes distressed him, and he saw objects in double. Soon he lost his sense of distance, and his glass seemed to be a leaguer way. He told himself that he was the plaything of sensorial illusions, and that he was incapable of reacting. He stretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by the tossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased. He rose to his feet, determined to rid himself by means of a digestive of the food which was choking him. He again reached the dining-room and sadly compared himself in this cabin to passengers seized with seasickness. Stumbling he made his way to the closet, examined the mouth-organ without opening any of the stops, but instead took from a high shelf a bottle of benedictine, which he kept because of its form, which to him seemed suggestive of thoughts that were at once gently wanton and vaguely mystic. But at this moment he remained indifferent, gazing with lacklustre staring eyes at this squat dark-green bottle, which at other times had brought before him images of the medieval priaries by its old-fashioned monkish porch, its head and neck covered with a parchment hood, its red wax stamp quartered with three silver mitres against a field of azure, and fastened at the neck like a papal bull with bands of lead, its label inscribed in sonorous Latin, on paper that seemed to have yellowed with age, liquor monacorum benedictinorum abatiae fiscanensis. Under this thoroughly abatial robe, signed with a cross and the ecclesiastic initials D.O.M. pressed in between its parchments and ligatures, slept an exquisitely fine, saffron-coloured liquid. It breathed an aroma that seemed the quintessence of angelica and hissep blended with seaweeds and of iodines and brooms hidden in sweet essences, and it stimulated the palate with a spirituous ardour concealed under a virginal daintiness, and charmed the sense of smell by a pungency enveloped in a caress innocent and devout. This deceit, which resulted from the extraordinary disharmony between contents and container, between the liturgic form of the flask and its so feminine and modern soul, had formally stimulated Dizisant to reverie, and facing the bottle he was inclined to think at great length of the monks who sold it, the benedictins of the Abbey of Fecan, who, belonging to the brotherhood of Saint-Mor, which had been celebrated for its controversial works under the rule of Saint-Benoît, followed neither the observances of the white monks of Sitot nor of the black monks of Cluny. He could not but think of them as being like their brethren of the Middle Ages cultivating simpals, heating retorts and distilling faultless panaceas and prescriptions. He tasted a drop of this liquor, and for a few moments had relief. But soon the fire which the dash of wine had lit in his bowels revived. He threw down his napkin, returned to his study, and paced the floor. He felt as if he were under a pneumatic clock, and a numbing weakness stole from his brain through his limbs. Unable to endure its longer, he betook himself to the garden. It was the first time he had done this since his arrival at Fontenay. There he found shelter beneath a tree which radiated a circle of shadow. Seated on the lawn, he looked around with a besotted air at the square beds of vegetables planted by the servants. He gazed, but it was only at the end of an hour that he really saw them, for a greenish film floated before his eyes, permitting him only to see, as in the depths of water, flickering images of shifting tones. But when he recovered his balance, he clearly distinguished the onions and cabbages, a garden bed of lettuce further off, and in the distance along the hedge a row of white lilies recumbent in the heavy air. A smile played on his lips, for he suddenly recalled the strange comparison of old Nikandr, who likened in the point of form the pistils of lilies to the genital organs of a donkey. And he recalled also a passage from Albert Legrand, in which that thormaturgist describes a strange way of discovering whether a girl is still a virgin by means of a lettuce. These remembrances distracted him somewhat. He examined the garden, interesting himself in the plants withered by the heat, and in the hot ground whose vapours rose into the dusty air. Then, above the hedge which separated the garden below from the embankment leading to the fort, he watched the urchins struggling and tumbling on the ground. He was concentrating his attention upon them, when another younger, sorry little specimen appeared. He had hair like seaweed covered with sand, two green bubbles beneath his nose, and disgusting lips surrounded by a dirty white frame, formed by a slice of bread smeared with cheese and filled with pieces of scallions. Dizisant inhaled the air. A perverse appetite seized him. This dirty slice made his mouth water. It seemed to him that his stomach, refusing all other nourishment, could digest this shocking food, and that his palate would enjoy it as though it were a feast. He leaped up, ran to the kitchen, and ordered a loaf, white cheese and green onions to be brought from the village, emphasising his desire for a slice exactly like the one being eaten by the child. Then he returned to sit beneath the tree. The little chaps were fighting with one another. They struggled for bits of bread which they shoved into their cheeks, meanwhile sucking their fingers. Kicks and blows reigned freely and the weakest trampled upon cried out. At this site Dizisant recovered his animation. The interest he took in this fight distracted his thoughts from his illness. Contemplating the blind fury of these urchins, he thought of the cruel and abominable law of the struggle of existence. And although these children were mean, he could not help being interested in their futures. Yet could not but believe that it had been better for them had their mothers never given them birth. In fact all they could expect of life was rash, colic, fever and measles in their earliest years, slaps in the face and degrading drudgeries up to thirteen years, deceptions by women, sicknesses and infidelity during manhood, and towards the last infirmities and agonies in a poor house or asylum. And the future was the same for everyone and none in his good senses could envy his neighbour. The rich had the same passions, the same anxieties, the same pains and the same illnesses, but in a different environment, the same mediocre enjoyments, whether alcoholic, literary or carnal. There was even a vague compensation in evils, a sort of justice which re-established the balance of misfortune between the classes, permitting the poor to bear physical suffering more easily, and making it difficult for the unresisting weaker bodies of the rich to withstand it. How vain, silly and mad it is to beget brats! And Desi-Saint thought of those ecclesiastics who had taken vows of sterility, yet were so inconsistent as to canonise Saint Vincent de Paul, because he brought vain tortures to innocent creatures. By means of his hateful precautions, Vincent de Paul had deferred for years the death of unintelligent and insensate beings. In such a way that when they later became almost intelligent and sentient to grief, they were able to anticipate the future, to await and fear that death of whose very name they had of late been ignorant, some of them going as far to invoke it in hatred of that sentence of life which the monk inflicted upon them by an absurd theological code. And since this old man's death his ideas had prevailed. Abandoned children were sheltered instead of being killed, and yet their lives daily became increasingly rigorous and barren. Then under pretext of liberty and progress society had discovered another means of increasing man's miseries by tearing him from his home, forcing him to don a ridiculous uniform and carry weapons, by brutalising him in a slavery in every respect like that from which he had compassionately freed the Negro, and all to enable him to slaughter his neighbour without risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operate single-handed without uniforms and with weapons that are less swift and deafening. Desis-Saint wondered if there had ever been such a time as ours. Our age invokes the causes of humanity, endeavours to perfect anesthesia to suppress physical suffering. Yet at the same time it prepares these very stimulants to increase moral wretchedness. Ah, if ever this useless procreation should be abolished it were now, but here again the laws enacted by people like Portalis and Ome appeared strange and cruel. In the matter of generation justice finds the agences for deception to be quite natural. It is a recognised and acknowledged fact. There is scarcely a home of any station that does not confide its children to the drain-pipes, or that does not employ contrivances that are freely sold and which it would enter no person's mind to prohibit. And yet if these subterfuges proved insufficient, if the attempt miscarried, and if to remedy matters one had recourse to more efficacious measures, ah, then there were not prisons enough, not municipal jails enough to confine those who in good faith were condemned by other individuals who had that very evening on the conjugal bed done their utmost to avoid giving birth to children. The deceit itself was not a crime, it seemed. The crime lay in the justification of the deceit. What society considered a crime was the act of killing a being endowed with life, and yet, in expelling a foetus, one destroyed an animal that was less formed and living and certainly less intelligent and more ugly than a dog or a cat, although it is permissible to strangle these creatures as soon as they are born. It is only right to add for the sake of fairness, thought Desis and, that it is not the awkward man who generally loses no time in disappearing, but rather the woman, the victim of his stupidity who expiates the crime of having saved an innocent life. Yet was it right that the world should be filled with such prejudice as to wish to repress manoeuvres so natural that primitive man, the Polynesian savage, for instance, instinctively practices them. The servant interrupted the charitable reflections of Desis Sainte, who received the slice of bread on a plate of vermets. Pains shot through his heart. He did not have the courage to eat this bread, for the unhealthy excitement of his stomach had ceased. A sensation of frightful decay swept upon him. He was compelled to rise. The sun turned and slowly fell upon the place that he had lately occupied. The heat became more heavy and fierce. Throw this slice of bread to those children who are murdering each other on the road. He ordered his servant, let the weakest be crippled, be denied share in the prize, and be soundly thrashed into the bargain, as they will be when they return to their homes with torn trousers and bruised eyes. This will give them an idea of the life that awaits them. And he entered the house and sank into his armchair. But I must try to eat something, he said, and he attempted to soak a biscuit in old Constantia wine, several bottles of which remained in his cellar. That wine, the colour of slightly burned onions, partaking of Malaga and port, but with a specially luscious flavour, and an aftertaste of grapes dried by fiery suns, had often comforted him, given a new energy to his stomach, weakened by the fasts which he was forced to undergo. But this cordial, usually so efficacious, now failed. Then he thought that an emollient might perhaps counteract the fiery pains which were consuming him, and he took out the Nalifka, a Russian liqueur contained in a bottle frosted with unpolished glass. This unctuous raspberry-flavoured syrup also failed. Alas! the time was far off when enjoying good health, Desis Sainte had ridden to his house in the hot summer days in a sleigh, and there, covered with furs wrapped about his chest, forced himself to shiver, saying as he listened attentively to the chattering of his teeth, ah! how biting this wind is! it is freezing! Thus he had almost succeeded in convincing himself that it was cold. Unfortunately such remedies as these had failed of their purpose ever since his sickness became vital. With all this he was unable to make use of lodnum. Instead of allaying the pain, this sedative irritated him even to the degree of depriving him of rest. At one time he had endeavored to procure visions through opium and hashish, but these two substances had led to vomiting and intense nervous disturbances. He had instantly been forced to give up the idea of taking them, and without the aid of these coarse stimulants, demand of his brain alone to transport him into the land of dreams, far, far from life. What a day! he said to himself, sponging his neck, feeling every ounce of his strength dissolve in perspiration. A feverish agitation still prevented him from remaining in one spot. Once more he walked up and down, trying every chair in the room in turn. Wearyed of the struggle, at last he fell against his bureau, and leaning mechanically against the table. Without thinking of anything he touched an astrolabe which rested on a mass of books and notes, and served as a paperweight. He had purchased this engraved and guilt copper instrument. It had come from Germany, and dated from the 17th century, of a second hand Paris dealer, after a visit to the Clooney Museum, where he had stood for a long while in ecstatic admiration before a marvellous astrolabe made of chiseled ivory, whose cabalistic appearance enchanted him. This paperweight evoked many reminiscences within him. Aroused and actuated by the appearance of this trinket, his thoughts rushed from Fontenay to Paris, to the curio shop where he had purchased it, then returned to the museum, and he mentally beheld the ivory astrolabe, while his unseeing eyes continued to gaze upon the copper astrolabe on the table. Then he left the museum, and without quitting the town, strolled down the streets, wandered through the Rue du Sommérat and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, branched off into the neighbouring streets, and paused before certain shops whose quite extraordinary appearance and profusion had often attracted him. Beginning with an astrolabe, this spiritual jaunt ended in the cafes of the Latin Quarter. He remembered how these places were crowded in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, and at the end of the Rue de Vaudgirard touching the Odéon. Sometimes they followed one another like the old Ridex of the Canal au Aran at Antwerp, each of which revealed a front the counterpart of its neighbour. Through the half-opened doors and the windows dimmed with coloured panes or curtains, he had often seen women who walked about like geese. Others, on benches, rested their elbows on the marble tables, humming, their temples resting between their hands. Still others strutted and posed in front of mirrors, playing with their false hair, permarded by hairdressers. Others again took money from their purses and methodically sorted the different denominations in little heaps. Most of them had heavy features, horse voices, flabby necks and painted eyes, and all of them, like automatons, moved simultaneously upon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with the same tone, and uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections, and the same smile. Certain ideas associated themselves in the mind of Desesante, whose reveries came to an end, now that he recalled this collection of coffee-houses and streets. He understood the significance of those cafes, which reflected the state of soul of an entire generation, and from it he discovered the synthesis of the period. And in fact the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses of prostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafe began to operate. This restriction of prostitution, which proved profitable to clandestine loves, evidently arose from the incomprehensible illusions of men in the matter of carnal life. Monstrous as it may appear, these haunts satisfied an ideal. Although the utilitarian tendencies transmitted by heredity and developed by the precocious rudeness and constant brutalities of the colleges had made the youths of the day strangely crude, and as strangely positive and cold, it had nonetheless preserved in the back of their heads an old blue flower, an old ideal of a vague sour affection. Today, when the blood clamoured, youths could not bring themselves to go through the formality of entering, ending, paying, and leaving. In their eyes this was bestiality, the action of a dog attacking a bitch without much ado. Then, too, vanity fled unsatisfied from these houses where there was no semblance of resistance, there was no victory, no hoped for preference, nor even largesse obtained from the tradeswoman who measured her caresses according to the price. On the contrary, the courting of a girl of the cafes stimulated all the susceptibilities of love, all the refinements of sentiment. One disputed with the others for such a girl, and those to whom she granted a rendezvous, in consideration of much money, were sincere in imagining that they had won her from a rival, and in so thinking they were the objects of honorary distinction and favour. Yet this domesticity was as stupid, as selfish, as vile, as that of houses of ill fame. Its creatures drank without being thirsty, laughed without reason, were charmed by the caresses of a slut, quarrelled and fought for no reason whatever, despite everything. The Parisian youth had not been able to see that these girls were, from the point of plastic beauty, graceful attitudes and necessary attire, quite inferior to the women in the bawdy houses. My God! Desisante exclaimed, what ninnies are these fellows who flutter around the cafes? Fall over and above their silly allusions, they forget the danger of degraded suspicious allurements, and they are unaware of the sums of money given for affairs priced in advance by the mistress, of the time lost in waiting for an assignation deferred so as to increase its value and cost, delays which are repeated to provide more tips for the waiters. This imbecile sentimentality, combined with a ferociously practical sense, represented the dominant motive of the age. These very persons, who would have gouged their neighbours' eyes to gain ten soothes, lost all presence of mind and discrimination before suspicious looking girls in restaurants, who pitilessly harassed and relentlessly fleeced them. Fathers devoted their lives to their businesses and labours. Families devoured one another on the pretext of trade, only to be robbed by their sons, who in turn allowed themselves to be fleeced by women who posed as sweethearts to obtain their money. In all Paris, from east to west and from north to south, there existed an unbroken chain of female tricksters, a system of organised theft, and all because instead of satisfying men at once, these women were skilled in the subterfuges of delay. At bottom, one might say that human wisdom consisted in the protraction of all things, in saying no before saying yes, for one could manage people only by trifling with them. Ah, if the same were but true of the stomach, sighed desissant, wracked by a cramp which instantly and sharply brought back his mind that had roved far off to fontany. Chapter 14. Part 1. Several days slowly passed, thanks to certain measures which succeeded in tricking the stomach, but one morning desissant could endure food no longer, and he asked himself anxiously whether his already serious weakness would not grow worse, and force him to take to bed. A sudden gleam of light relieved his distress. He remembered that one of his friends, quite ill at one time, had made use of a pappin's digester to overcome his anemia and preserve what little strength he had. He dispatched his servant to Paris for this precious utensil, and following the directions contained in the prospectus which the manufacturer had enclosed, he himself instructed the cork how to cut the roast beef into bits, put it into the pewter pot with a slice of leek and carrot, and screw on the cover to let it boil for four hours. At the end of this time the meat fibres were strained. He drank a spoonful of the thick, salty juice deposited at the bottom of the pot. Then he felt a warmth, like a smooth caress, descend upon him. This nourishment relieved his pain and nausea, and even strengthened his stomach which did not refuse to accept these few drops of soup. Thanks to this digester his neurosis was arrested, and Dizisat said to himself, Well, it is so much gained. Perhaps the temperature will change. The sky will throw some ashes upon this abominable sun which exhausts me, and I shall hold out without accident till the first fogs and frosts of winter. In the torpor and listless ennui in which he was sunk, the disorder of his library, whose arrangement had never been completed, irritated him. Helpless in his arm-chair he had constantly in sight the books set awry on the shelves, propped up against each other, or lying flat on their sides like a tumbled pack of cards. This disorder offended him the more when he contrasted it with the perfect order of his religious works, carefully placed on parade along the walls. He tried to clear up the confusion, but after ten minutes of work perspiration covered him. The effort weakened him. He stretched himself on a couch and rang for his servant. Following his directions the old man continued the task, bringing each book in turn to Dizisat who examined it and directed where it was to be placed. This task did not last long, for Dizisat's library contained but a very limited number of contemporary secular works. They were drawn through his brain as bands of metal are drawn through a steel plate from which they issue thin, light, and reduced to almost imperceptible wires, and he had ended by possessing only those books which could submit to such treatment, and which were so solidly tempered as to withstand the rolling mill of each new reading. In his desire to refine he had restrained and almost sterilized his enjoyment, ever accentuating the irremediable conflict existing between his ideas and those of the world in which he had happened to be born. He had now reached such a pass that he could no longer discover any writings to content his secret longings, and his admiration even weaned itself from those volumes which had certainly contributed to sharpen his mind, making it so suspicious and subtle. In art his ideas had sprung from a simple point of view. For him schools did not exist, and only the temperament of the writer mattered. Only the working of his brain interested him regardless of the subject. Unfortunately, this verity of appreciation worthy of palese was scarcely applicable, for the simple reason that even while desiring to be free of prejudices and passion, each person naturally goes to the works which most intimately correspond with his own temperament, and ends by relegating all others to the rear. This work of selection had slowly acted within him. Not long ago he had adored the great Balzac, but as his body weakened and his nerves became troublesome, his tastes modified, and his admirations changed. Very soon, and despite the fact that he was aware of his injustice to the amazing author of the comedy You Men, Desis Sante had reached a point where he no longer opened Balzac's books. Their healthy spirit jarred on him. Other aspirations now stirred in him, somehow becoming undefinable. Yet when he probed himself, he understood that to attract a work must have that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allan Poe. But he ventured even further on this path, and called for Byzantine flora of brain, and complicated delicousances of language. He desired a troubled indecision, on which he might brood until he could shape it at will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary state of his soul. In short, he desired a work of art, both for what it was in itself, and for what it permitted him to endow it. He wished to pass by means of it into a sphere of sublimated sensation, which would arouse in him new commotions, whose cause he might long and vainly seek to analyze. In short, since leaving Paris, Desis Sainte was removing himself further and further from reality, especially from the contemporary world which he held in an ever-growing detestation. This hatred had inevitably reacted on his literary and artistic tastes, and he would have as little as possible to do with paintings and books whose limited subjects dealt with modern life. Thus, losing the faculty of admiring beauty indiscriminately under whatever form it was presented, he preferred Flaubert's tentation de Saint-Antoine to his éducation sentimentale, concourse Faustin to his Germini l'Asserteux, Zola's faute de l'Abe-Mauré to his Assomboire. This point of view seemed logical to him. These works, less immediate but just as vibrant and human, enabled him to penetrate farther into the depths of the temperaments of these masters, who revealed in them the most mysterious transports of their being with a more sincere abandon, and they lifted him far above this trivial life which wearied him so. In them he entered into a perfect communion of ideas with their authors who had written them when their state of soul was analogous to his own. In fact, when the period in which a man of talent is obliged to live is dull and stupid, the artist, though unconsciously, is haunted by a nostalgia of some past century, finding himself unable to harmonise, save at rare intervals with the environment in which he lives, and not discovering sufficient distraction in the pleasures of observation and analysis, in the examination of the environment and its people, he feels in himself the dawning of strange ideas. Confused desires for other lands awake and are clarified by reflection and study. Instincts, sensations and thoughts bequeathed by heredity awake, grow fixed, assert themselves with an imperious assurance. He recalls memories of beings and things he has never really known, and a time comes when he escapes from the penitentiary of his age, and roves in full liberty into another epoch, with which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony. With some it is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilisations, to dead epochs. With others it is an urge towards a fantastic future, to a more or less intense vision of a period about to dawn, whose image by an effect of atavism of which he is unaware is a reproduction of some past age. In Flaubert this nostalgia is expressed in solemn and majestic pictures of magnificent splendours, in whose gorgeous barbaric frames move palpitating and delicate creatures, mysterious and haughty. Women gifted in the perfection of their beauty, with souls capable of suffering, and in whose depths he discerned frightful derangements, mad aspirations, grieved as they were by the haunting premonition of the disillusionments their follies held in store. The temperament of this great artist is fully revealed in the incomparable pages of the Tantesion de Saint-Antoine and Salambeau, where far from our sorry life he evokes the splendours of old Asia, the age of fervent prayer and mystic depression, of languorous passions and excesses induced by the unbearable ennui, resulting from opulence and prayer. In de Goncourt it was the nostalgia of the preceding century, a return to the elegances of a society forever lost. The stupendous setting of seas beating against jetties, of deserts stretching under torrid skies to distant horizons, did not exist in his nostalgic work which confined itself to a boudoir near an orlic park, scented with the voluptuous fragrance of a woman with a tired smile, a perverse little pout and unresigned pensive eyes. The soul with which he animated his characters was not that breathed by Flaubert into his creatures, no longer the soul early thrown in revolt by the inexorable certainty that no new happiness is possible, it was a soul that had too late revolted after the experience, against all the useless attempts to invent new spiritual liaisons, and to heighten the enjoyment of lovers which from immemorial times as always ended in satiety. Although she lived in and partook of the life of our time, fusta, by her ancestral influences, was a creature of the past century, whose cerebral lassitude and sensual excesses she possessed. This book of Edmond de Goncourt was one of the volumes which Deses Sainte loved best, and the suggestion of reverie which he demanded lived in this work where under each written line another line was etched, visible to the spirit alone, indicated by a hint which revealed passion, by a reticence permitting one to divine subtle states of soul which no idiom could express. And it was no longer Flaubert's language in its inimitable magnificence, but a morbid, perspicacious style, nervous and twisted, keen to note the impalpable impression that strikes the senses. A style expert in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch which in itself was singularly complex. In short, it was the epithet, indispensable to decrepit civilisations, no matter how old they be, which must have words with new meanings and forms, innovations in phrases and words for their complex needs. At Rome the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius, whose attentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented in its descriptive parts especially reflections, hints and nuances bearing an affinity with the style of Dugancourt. At Paris a fact unique in literary history had been consummated. That moribund society of the eighteenth century which possessed painters, musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines had not been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It had been necessary to await the arrival of Dugancourt, whose temperament was formed of memories and regrets made more poignant by the sad spectacle of the intellectual poverty and the pitiful aspirations of his own time, to resuscitate not only in his historical works, but even more in Fustin, the very soul of that period, incarnating its nervous refinements in this actress who tortured her mind and her senses so as to savor to exhaustion the grievous revulsives of love and of art. With Zola the nostalgia of the art of far away was different. In him was no longing for vanished ages, no aspiring towards worlds lost in the night of time. His strong and solid temperament dazzled with the luxuriance of life, its sanguine forces and moral health, diverted him from the artificial graces and painted chloroses of the past century, as well as from the hierarchic solemnity, the brutal ferocity, and misty, effeminate dreams of the old Orient. When he too had become obsessed by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing but a dream of the past century, obsessed by this nostalgia, by this need, which is nothing less than poetry itself, of shunning the contemporary world he was studying, he had rushed into an ideal and fruitful country, had dreamed of fantastic passions of skies, of long raptures of earth, and of feckoned rains of pollen falling into panting organs of flowers. He had ended in a gigantic pantheism, had created unwittingly perhaps, with this Edenesque environment in which he placed his Adam and Eve, a marvellous Hindu poem, singing in a style whose broad crude strokes had something of the bizarre brilliance of an Indian painting, the song of the flesh, of animated living matter, revealing to the human creature, by its passion for reproduction, the forbidden fruits of love, its suffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes. With Baudelaire these three masters had most affected Desessants in modern French secular literature, but he had read them so often, had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorb them he had been compelled to lay them aside and let them remain unread on his shelves. Even now when the servant was arranging them for him he did not care to open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the place they were to occupy and seeing that they were properly classified and put away. The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed him more. They were books towards which his taste had gradually veered, books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection of more vigorous writers. Here too Desessant had reached the point where he sought among these troubled pages only phrases which discharged a sort of electricity that made him tremble. They transmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemed refractory. Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasitic nor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory that the inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective though unfinished, distills a more irritating, apparent and acid balm than the artist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion it was in their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of the most excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbid psychological states, the most extravagant depravities of language charged in spite of its rebelliousness with the difficult task of containing the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas. Thus after the masters he betook himself to a few writers who attracted him all the more because of the disdain in which they were held by the public incapable of understanding them. One of them was Paul Verlaine, who had begun with a volume of verse, the Poème Saternien, a rather ineffectual book where imitations of Le Cont de Lille jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but through which already filtered the real personality of the poet in such poems as the sonnet Rèves Familiers. In searching for his antecedents, Desis Sainte discovered under the hesitant strokes of the sketches a talent already deeply affected by Baudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on, acquiesting by the peerless master, but the imitation was never flagrant. And in some of his books, Bonne Chanson, Fête Galante, Romance sans Parole, and in his last volume Sagesse, were poems where he himself was revealed as an original and outstanding figure. With rhymes obtained from verb tenses, sometimes even from long adverbs preceded by a monosyllable from which they fell as from a rock into a heavy cascade of water, his verses, divided by improbable caesuras, often became strangely obscure, with their audacious ellipses and strange inaccuracies, which nonetheless did not lack grace. With his unrivaled ability to handle meter, he had sought to rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which rest on stands. Their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes he corrupted it by using only masculine rhymes to which he seemed partial. He had often employed a bizarre form, a stanza of three lines, whose middle verse was unrhymed, and a tercet with but one rhyme, followed by a single line, an echoing refrain, like dans son l'agigue in streets. He had employed other rhymes whose dim echoes are repeated in remote stanzas, like faint reverberations of a bell. But his personality expressed itself most of all in vague and delicious confidences, breathed in hushed accents in the twilight. He alone had been able to reveal the troubled ultima thules of the soul, low whisperings of thoughts, a vowel so haltingly and murmuringly confessed, but the ear which hears them remains hesitant, passing on to the soul langurs quickened by the mystery of this suggestion, which is divine rather than felt. Everything characteristic of Verlaine was expressed in these adorable verses of the fête calante. Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d'automne, les belles se pendent rêveuses à nos bras, diret alors des mots si spécieux tout bas, que notre âme depuis ce temps tremblait s'étonne. It was no longer the immense horizon opened by the unforgettable portals of Baudelaire. It was a crevice in the moonlight, opening on a field which was more intimate and more restrained, peculiar to Verlaine, who had formulated his poetic system in those lines of which Déséssaint was so fond, car nous voulons la nuance encore, pas la couleur, rien que la nuance, et tout le reste est littérature. Déséssaint had followed him with delight in his most diversified works. After his roman sans parole, which had appeared in a journal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later in those charming verses hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and cold accents of vilain, singing of the virgin removed from our days of carnal thought and weary flesh. Déséssaint often reread Sagesse, whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for a Byzantine Madonna, who at a certain moment changed into a distracted modern s'il-à-lise, so mysterious and troubling that one could not know whether she aspired towards depraverties so monstrous that they had become irresistible, or whether she moved in an immaculate dream, where the adoration of the soul floated around her ever unevowed and ever pure. There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself to them. Tristan Corbière, who in 1873, in the midst of the general apathy, had issued a most eccentric volume entitled Les Amours jaunes. Déséssaint, who, in his hatred of the banal and commonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly and the most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with this work, where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and where disconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as the litanies of Sommeil, that they qualified their author for the name of Obsaine Confesseur de Des Votres Marnées. The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the negro dialect, was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasing phraseology, reveled in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman. Then out of this jumble laughable conceits and sly affectations emerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out like the snapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hard rugged style bristling with obsolescent words and unexpected neologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression, and superbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his poème parisien, where Déssaint had discovered this profound definition of woman, éternel féminin de l'éternel geocrice, Christen Corbière had celebrated in a powerfully concise style the sea of Brittany, mermaids and the pardons of Saint Anne. And he had even risen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled apropos of the Corly camp at the individuals whom he designated under the name of foreigners of the 4th of September. The raciness of which he was so fond, which Corbière offered him in his sharp epithets, his beauties which ever remained a trifle suspect, Déssaint found again in another poet, Théodore-Anon, a disciple of Baudelaire and Gauthier, moved by a very unusual sense of the exquisite and the artificial. Unlike Verlaine, whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire, especially on the psychological side in his insidious nuances of thought and skillful quintessence of sentiment, Théodore-Anon especially descended from the master on the plastic side by the external vision of persons and things. His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of Déssaint, who on misty or rainy days enclosed himself in the retreat fancied by the poet and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of his hands, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusively material sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, and rose like a canthanides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense towards a Brussels idol with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes. With the exception of the works of these poets, and of Stiff and Malarmé, which his servant was told to place to one side so that he might classify them separately, Déssaint was but slightly attracted towards the poets. End of chapter 14 part 1 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey Chapter 14 of Against the Grain This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Giesen Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Uismans Translated by John Howard Chapter 14 part 2 Notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of his verse, which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters of Hugo seemed pale in comparison, Lecourt de Lille could no longer satisfy him. The antiquity so marvelously restored by Flaubert remained cold and immobile in his hands. Nothing palpitated in his verses which lacked depth, and which most often contained no idea. Nothing moved in those gloomy waste-poems whose impassive mythologies ended by finally leaving him cold. Two, after having long delighted in Gaultier, Déssaint reached the point where he no longer cared for him. The admiration he felt for this man's incomparable painting had gradually dissolved. Now he was more astonished than ravished by his descriptions. Objects impressed themselves upon Gaultier's perceptive eyes, and no further they never penetrated deeper into his brain and flesh. Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limited himself to reflecting surrounding objects with impersonal clearness. Certainly Déssaint still loved the works of these two poets, as he loved rare stones and precious objects, but none of the variations of these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither being evocative of reverie, neither opening, for him at least, broad roads of escape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours. These two books left him unsatisfied, and it was the same with Hugo. The Oriental and Patriarchal side was too conventional and barren to detain him, and his manners at once childish and that of a grandfather exasperated him. He had to go to the chanson des rues et des bois to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics. But how gladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this tour de force for a new work by Baudelaire, which might equal the others, for he decidedly was almost the only one whose verses, under their splendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance. In passing from one extreme to the other, from form deprived of ideas to ideas deprived of form, Déssaint remained no less circumspect and cold. The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal, the analytical detours of Duranty seduced him, but their administrative colourless and arid language, their static prose, fit at best for the wretched industry of the theatre, repelled him. Then their interesting works and their astute analyses applied to brains agitated by passions in which he was no longer interested. He was not at all concerned with general affections or points of view, with associations of common ideas, now that the reserve of his mind was more keenly developed and that he no longer admitted ought but superfine sensations and catholic or sensual torments. To enjoy a work which should combine, according to his wishes, incisive style with penetrating and feline analysis, he had to go to the master of induction, the profound and strange Edgar Allan Poe, for whom since the time when he re-read him his preference had never wavered. More than any other, perhaps, he approached by his intimate affinity Déssaint's meditative cast of mind. If Baudelaire, in the hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology, had more especially investigated the domain of the soul. Under the emblematic title The Demon of Perversity, he had been the first in literature to pry into the irresistible unconscious impulses of the will, which mental pathology now explains more scientifically. He had also been the first to divulge, if not to signal, the impressive influence of fear, which acts on the will like an anesthetic, paralyzing sensibility, and like the curare, stupefying the nerves. It was on the problem of the lethargy of the will that Poe had centred his studies, analyzing the effects of this moral poison, indicating the symptoms of its progress, the troubles commencing with anxiety, continuing through anguish, ending finally in the terror which deadens the will, without intelligence succumbing, though sorely disturbed. Death, which the dramatists had so much abused, he had in some manner changed and made more poignant by introducing an algebraic and superhuman element. But in truth it was less the real agony of the dying person which he described, and more the moral agony of the survivor, haunted at the deathbed by monstrous hallucinations engendered by grief and fatigue. With a frightful fascination he dwelt on acts of terror, on the snapping of the will, coldly reasoning about them, little by little making the reader gasp, suffocated and panting before these feverish mechanically contrived nightmares. Convulsed by hereditary neurosis, maddened by a moral st. Vitus's dance, Poe's creatures lived only through their nerves. His women, the Morellas and Ligiers, possessed an immense erudition. They were steeped in the mists of German philosophy and the cabalistic mysteries of the old Orient, and all had the boyish and inert breasts of angels. All were sexless. Baudelaire and Poe, these two men who had often been compared because of their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination of mental maladies, differed radically in the effective conceptions which held such a large place in their works. Baudelaire with his iniquitous and debased loves, cruel loves which made one think of the reprisals of an inquisition, Poe with his chaste aerial loves in which the senses played no part where only the mind functioned without corresponding to organs which, if they existed, remained forever frozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic where, dissecting in a stifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked, like delicious miasmas, some nambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to disissant a source of unwearying conjecture. But now that his nervous disorders were augmented, days came when his readings broke his spirit and when hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate usher, he was haunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror. Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires and he rarely touched these fearful elixirs. In the same way that he could no longer with impunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of the gloomy Odiland-Redin prince and the Yan-Laokan horrors. And yet, when he felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull after these terrible American-imported filters. Then he betook himself to Viliers-de-Lis-Ladin in whose scattered works he noted seditious observations and spasmodic vibrations but which no longer gave one with the exception of his Clair-Le-Noir such troubling horror. This Clair-Le-Noir, which appeared in 1867 in the Revue des lettres des arts, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of Istoire morose, where against a background of obscure speculations borrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred. Dr. Tribula Bonhommet, solemn and childish, a Clair-Le-Noir, varsical and sinister, with blue spectacles round and large as frank pieces which covered her almost dead eyes. This story centered about a simple adultery and ended with an inexpressible terror when Bonhommet, opening Clair's eyelids as she lies in her deathbed and penetrating them with monstrous plummets, distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing the lover's decapitated head while shouting a war song like a kanaka. Based on this moral, less just observation that the eyes of certain animals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, like photographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyes behold at the moment they expire, this story evidently derived from Poe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique. This also applied to the Antersigne, which had later been joined to the Contre Cruelle, a collection of indisputable talent in which was found Vera, which Desessades considered a little masterpiece. Here the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness. No longer was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid, warm, almost celestial vision. It was in an identical genre, the reverse of the Beatrice's and Ligiere's, those gloomy and dark phantoms engendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium. This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it no longer treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects of fear. On the contrary, it studied the exultations of the will under the impulse of a fixed idea. It demonstrated its power, which often succeeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualities on surrounding objects. Another book by Vilier de Lille-Adin, Isis, seemed to him curious in other respects. The philosophic medley of Claire Le Noir was evident in this work, which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal and troubled observations. Souvenirs of old melodramas, polyards and rope ladders, all the romanticism which Vilier de Lille-Adin could never rejuvenate in his elene and morgane. Forgotten pieces published by an obscure man, Sir Francisque Guillaume. The heroine of this book, Marquis Tullia Fabriana, reputed to have assimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allan Poe and the diplomatic sagazities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenance of Bradamante abused by an antique Cersei. These insoluble mixtures developed a fuliginous vapour across which philosophic and literary influences jostled without being able to be regulated in the author's brain when he wrote the prolegomini of this work which could not have embraced less than seven volumes. But there was another side to Vilier's temperament. It was piercing and acute in an altogether different sense. A side of forbidding pleasantry and fierce railery. No longer was it the paradoxical mystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious and savage comedy which swift possessed. A series of sketches, Les Demoiselles de bien-filatres, La fichage céleste, La machine à gloire and Le plus beau dîner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialised baseness of the age, were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported des escentres. No other French book had been written in this serious and bitter style. At the most a tale by Charles Croix, La science de l'amour, printed long ago in the Revue du Monde Nouveau, could astonish by reason of its chemical whims, by its effected humour and by its coldly facetious observations. But the pleasure to be extracted from the story was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure. The firm, coloured and often original style of Villiers had disappeared to give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of the first comer. Heavens! Heavens! How few books are rarely worth rereading! sighed des escent, gazing at the servant who left the stool on which he had been perched, to permit des escent to survey his books with a single glance. Des escent nodded his head. But two small books remained on the table. With a sigh he dismissed the old man, and turned over the leaves of a volume bound in honourskin, which had been glazed by a hydraulic press and speckled with silver clouds. It was held together by fly-leaves of old silk damask, whose faint patterns held that charm of faded things, celebrated by Malarmé in an exquisite poem. These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the two first Parnassian books. It was printed on parchment paper, and preceded by this title. Quelque verre de Malarmé, designed in a surprising calligraphy in unsealed letters, illuminated and relieved with gold as in old manuscripts. Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers several invited him. Les fenêtres, les pilugues and azures. But one among them all, a fragment of the Erodiade, held him at certain hours in a spell. How often beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber had he not felt himself haunted by this Erodiade, who in the work of Gustave More was now plunged in gloom, revealing but a dim white statue in abrasia extinguished by stones. The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colours, and only sparing the aquarelle whites revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity. At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines, and she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which malarmée makes her utter. Au miroir, au froide par la nuit dans ton cadre je l'ai, que de foi et pendant les heures, désolé des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond, je m'apparu en toi comme une ombre lointaine. Mais horreur, des soirs dans ta sévère fontaine, j'ai de mon rêve et part connu la nudité. These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet, who in an age of democracy devoted to Luca, lived his solitary and literary life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting far from society in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting by zantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions likely connected by an almost imperceptible thread. These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes, perceiving the remotest analogies with a single term which by an effect of similitude at once gave the form, the perfume, the colour and the quality. He described the object or being to which otherwise he would have been compelled to place numerous and different epithets so as to disengage all their facets and nuances, had he simply contented himself with indicating the technical name. Thus he succeeded in dispensing with the comparison, which formed in the reader's mind by analogy as soon as the symbol was understood. Neither was the attention of the reader diverted by the enumeration of the qualities which the juxtaposition of adjectives would have induced. Concentrating upon a single word, he produced, as for a picture, the ensemble, a unique and complete aspect. It became a concentrated literature, an essential unity, a sublimate of art. This style was at first employed with restraint in his earlier works, but Malarmé had boldly proclaimed it in a verse on Théophile Gauthier and in La Prémédie du Faune, an eclogue where the subtleties of sensual joys are described in mysterious and caressing verses suddenly pierced by this wild, rending, fawn cry. Alors m'évérege à la ferveur première, droit et seul, sous un flot antique de lumière, l'île est l'un de vous tous pour l'ingénuité. That line with the monosyllable l'île, like a sprig, evoked the image of something rigid, slender and white. It rhymed with the substantive ingénuité, allegorically expressing by a single term the passion, the effervescence, the fugitive mood of a virgin fawn amorously distracted by the sight of nymphs. In this extraordinary poem, surprising and un-thought-of images leaped up at the end of each line, when the poet described the elations and regrets of the fawn contemplating at the edge of a fen, the tufts of reeds still preserving in its transitory mould the form made by the niats who had occupied it. Then Dizisat also experienced insidious delights in touching this diminutive book, whose cover of Japan vellum, as white as curdled milk, were held together by two silk bands, one of Chinese rose, the other of black. Hidden behind the cover, the black band rejoined the rose which rested like a touch of modern Japanese paint, or like a lascivious adjutant against the antique white, against the candid carnation tint of the book, and enlaced it, united its sombre colour with the light colour into a light rosette. It insinuated a faint warning of that regret, a vague menace of that sadness which succeeds the ended transports and the calmed excitements of the senses. Dizisat placed La Prémédie du Faune on the table, and examined another little book he had printed, an anthology of prose poems, a tiny chapel placed under the invocation of Baudelaire, and opening on the parvies of his poems. This anthology comprised a selection of Gaspar de la nuit of that fantastic Aloysius Bertrand, who had transferred the behaviour of Leonard in prose, and with his metallic oxides painted little pictures whose vivid colours sparkle like those of clear enamels. To this Dizisat had joined Le Vox Populis of Villiers, a superb piece of work in a hammered golden style after the manner of Le Cont de Lille and of Flaubert, and some selections from that delicate Livre de Jad, whose exotic perfume of ginseng and of tea blends with the odorous freshness of water babbling along the book under moonlight. But in this collection had been gathered certain poems resurrected from defunct reviews. Le démon de l'analogie, La pipe, Le pauvre enfant pâle, Le spectacle interrompu, Le phénomène futur, and especially Plainte de tonnes, and Rissons d'hiver, which were malarmés masterpieces and were also celebrated among the masterpieces of prose poems, for they united such a magnificently delicate language that they cradled like a melancholy incantation or a maddening melody, thoughts of an irresistible suggestiveness, pulsations of the soul of a sensitive person whose excited nerves vibrate with a keenness which penetrates ravishingly and induces a sadness. Of all the forms of literature, that of the prose poem was the form disissant preferred. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it contained in its slender volume the strength of the novel, whose analytic developments and descriptive redundancies it suppressed. Quite often disissant had meditated on that disquieting problem. To write a novel concentrated in a few phrases which should contain the essence of hundreds of pages always employed to establish the setting to sketch the characters and to pile up observations and minute details. Then the chosen words would be so un-exchangeable that they would do duty for many others. The adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite fashion that it could not be displaced, opening such perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on its sense at once precise and complex, could record the present reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed by the gleams of this unique epithet. Thus conceived and condensed in a page or two, the novel could become a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader. A spiritual collaboration agreed to between ten superior persons scattered throughout the universe, a delight offered to the refined and accessible to them alone. To disissant the prose poem represented the concrete juice of literature, the essential oil of art. That succulence developed and concentrated into a drop already existed in Baudelaire and in those poems of Malarmé which he read with such deep joy. When he had closed his anthology, disissant told himself that his books which had ended on this last book would probably never have anything added to it. 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 deathbed, was incarnate in Malarmé in the most perfect exquisite manner imaginable. Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Po, here were their fine and powerful substances distilled and disengaging new flavours and intoxications. It was the agony of the old language which, after having become mouldy from age to age, ended by dissolving, by reaching that deliquence of the Latin language which expired in the mysterious concept and the enigmatic expressions of Saint Boniface and Saint Adhelm. 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 gamey 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 Goncourt and the gamey style of Verlaine and Malarmé jostled in Paris, living in the same period, epoch and century. And disissant 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 Ducange has noted the last murmurings, the last spasms, the last flashes of the Latin language dying of old age in the cloisters and sounding like it's death rattle.