Against Nature

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

Book: Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans Read Free Book Online
Authors: Joris-Karl Huysmans
University Press, 1951).
    Spackman, Barbara,
Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio
, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
    Symons, Arthur,
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(London: Constable, 1911).
    West, Shearer,
Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty
(London: Bloomsbury, 1993).

Note on this Translation
    I have used Volume VII of Huysmans’
Œuvres complètes
(Paris: Crès, 1929), in which certain errors contained in the first edition and in the standard Fasquelle edition have been corrected.
    Huysmans’ style, which Bloy described as ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax’, is one of the strangest literary idioms in existence, packed with purple passages, intricate sentences, weird metaphors, unexpected tense changes and a vocabulary rich in slang and technical terms. I have tried to achieve the same effect, using the same constituents, in this English translation; and it is only fair to warn the reader that he may find that the resultant mixture, like the French original, is best taken in small doses.
    I should like to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for permission to reproduce passages I had already translated in my
Life of J.-K. Huysmans
(Oxford, 1955); my long-suffering friends and colleagues for help with the terminology of a wide range of subjects
    Robert Baldick
May 1957
    I would like to thank Margaret Bartley, Robert Mighall and Jonathan Patrick for their help and advice at various stages of this edition.
    Patrick McGuinness
2003

AGAINST NATURE
    I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time… though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.
    Jan Van Ruysbroeck 1

PROLOGUE
    Judging by the few portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps 1 the Floressas Des Esseintes family had been composed in olden times of sturdy campaigners with forbidding faces. Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders, they were an alarming sight with their piercing eyes, their sweeping mustachios and their bulging chests filling the enormous cuirasses which they wore.
    These were the founders of the family; the portraits of their descendants were missing. There was, in fact, a gap in the pictorial pedigree, with only one canvas to bridge it, only one face to join past and present. It was a strange, sly face, with pale, drawn features; the cheekbones were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge, the hair was plastered down and bound with a string of pearls and the thin, painted neck emerged from the starched pleats of a ruff.
    In this picture of one of the closest friends of the Duc d’Epernon and the Marquis d’O, 2 the defects of an impoverished stock and the excess of lymph in the blood were already apparent.
    Since then, the degeneration 3 of this ancient house had clearly followed a regular course, with the men becoming progressively less manly; and over the last two hundred years, as if to complete the ruinous process, the Des Esseintes had taken to intermarrying among themselves, thus using up what little vigour they had left.
    Now, of this family which had once been so large that it occupied nearly every domain in the Ile de France and La Brie, only one descendant was still living: the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung,with hollow cheeks, cold eyes of steely blue, a nose which was turned up but straight and thin, papery hands.
    By some freak of heredity, this last scion of the family bore a striking resemblance to his distant ancestor the court favourite, for he had the same exceptionally fair pointed beard, and the same ambiguous expression, at once weary and wily.
    His childhood had been overshadowed by sickness. However, despite the threat of scrofula and recurrent bouts of fever, he had succeeded in clearing

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