Read Online Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans - Free Book Online

warm bath of rosy light and breathing in the aromatic odours given off by the camphor-wood. But quite apart from the beneficial effect which this tinted atmosphere had in bringing a ruddy flush to complexions worn and discoloured by the habitual use of cosmetics and the habitual abuse of the night hours, he himself enjoyed, in this voluptuous setting, peculiar satisfactions – pleasures which were in a way heightened and intensified by the recollection of past afflictions and bygone troubles.
    Thus, in hateful and contemptuous memory of his childhood, he had suspended from the ceiling of this room a little silvercage containing a cricket which chirped as other crickets had once chirped among the embers in the fireplaces at the Château de Lourps. Whenever he heard this familiar sound, all the silent evenings of constraint he had spent in his mother’s company and all the misery he had endured in the course of a lonely, unhappy childhood came back to haunt him. And when the movements of the woman he was mechanically caressing suddenly dispelled these memories and her words or laughter brought him back to the present reality of the boudoir, then his soul was swept by tumultuous emotions: a longing to take vengeance for the boredom inflicted on him in the past, a craving to sully what memories he retained of his family with acts of sensual depravity, a furious desire to expend his lustful frenzy on cushions of soft flesh and to drain the cup of sensuality to its last and bitterest dregs.
    At other times, when he was weighed down by splenetic boredom, and the rainy autumn weather brought on an aversion for the streets, for his house, for the dirty yellow sky and the tar-macadam clouds, then he took refuge in this room, set the cage swinging gently to and fro and watched its movements reflected
ad infinitum
in the mirrors on the walls, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage itself was not moving but that the boudoir was tossing and turning, waltzing round the house in a dizzy whirl of pink.
    Then, in the days when he had thought it necessary to advertise his individuality, he had decorated and furnished the public rooms of his house with ostentatious oddity. The drawing-room, for example, had been partitioned off into a series of niches, which were styled to harmonize vaguely, by means of subtly analogous colours that were gay or sombre, delicate or barbarous, with the character of his favourite works in Latin and French. He would then settle down to read in whichever of these niches seemed to correspond most exactly to the peculiar essence of the book which had taken his fancy. 1
    His final caprice had been to fit up a lofty hall in which to receive his tradesmen. They used to troop in and take their places side by side in a row of church stalls; then he would ascend an imposing pulpit and preach them a sermon on dandyism, 2 adjuring his bootmakers and tailors to conform strictly to his encyclicals on matters of cut, and threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they did not follow to the letter the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.
    By these means he won a considerable reputation as an eccentric – a reputation which he crowned by wearing suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats, by sticking a bunch of Parma violets in his shirt-front in lieu of a cravat and by entertaining men of letters to dinners which were greatly talked about. One of these meals, modelled on an eighteenth-century original, had been a funeral feast to mark the most ludicrous of personal misfortunes. The dining-room, draped in black, opened out on to a garden metamorphosed for the occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pines. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth adorned with baskets of violets and scabious; candelabra shed an eerie green light over the table and tapers