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

the hurdle of adolescence with the aid of good nursing and fresh air; and after this his nerves had rallied, had overcome the languor and lethargy of chlorosis and had brought his body to its full physical development.
    His mother, a tall, pale, silent woman, died of nervous exhaustion. Then it was his father’s turn to succumb to some obscure illness when Des Esseintes was nearly seventeen.
    There was no gratitude or affection associated with the memories he retained of his parents: only fear. His father, who normally resided in Paris, was almost a complete stranger; and he remembered his mother chiefly as a still, supine figure in a darkened bedroom in the Château de Lourps. It was only rarely that husband and wife met, and all that he could recall of these occasions was a drab impression of his parents sitting facing each other over a table that was lighted only by a deeply shaded lamp, for the Duchess had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise. In the semi-darkness they would exchange one or two words at the most, and then the Duke would unconcernedly slip away to catch the first available train.
    At the Jesuit school to which Jean was sent to be educated, life was easier and pleasanter. The good Fathers made a point of cosseting the boy, whose intelligence amazed them; but in spite of all their efforts, they could not get him to pursue a regular course of study. He took readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in the Latin tongue; but on the other hand he was absolutely incapable of construing the simplest sentence in Greek, revealed no aptitude whatever for modern languages and displayed blank incomprehension when anyone tried to teach him the first principles of science.
    His family showed little interest in his doings. Occasionallyhis father would come to see him at school, but all he had to say was: ‘Good day, goodbye, be good and work hard.’ The summer holidays he spent at Lourps, but his presence in the Château failed to awaken his mother from her reveries; she scarcely noticed him, or if she did, gazed at him for a few moments with a sad smile and then sank back again into the artificial night which the heavy curtains drawn across the windows created in her bedroom.
    The servants were old and tired, and the boy was left to his own devices. On rainy days he used to browse through the books in the library, and when it was fine he would spend the afternoon exploring the local countryside.
    His chief delight was to go down into the valley to Jutigny, a village lying at the foot of the hills, a little cluster of cottages wearing thatch bonnets decorated with sprigs of stonecrop and patches of moss. He used to lie down in the meadows, in the shadow of the tall hayricks, listening to the dull rumble of the water-mills and breathing in the fresh breezes coming from the Voulzie. Sometimes he would go as far as the peateries and the hamlet of Longueville with its green and black houses, or else he would scramble up the windswept hillsides from which he could survey an immense prospect. On the one hand he could look down on the Seine valley, winding away into the distance where it merged into the blue sky, and on the other he could see, far away on the horizon, the churches and the great tower of Provins, which seemed to tremble under the sun’s rays in a dusty golden haze.
    He would spend hours reading or daydreaming, enjoying his fill of solitude until night fell; and by dint of pondering the same thoughts his intelligence grew sharper and his ideas gained in maturity and precision. At the end of every vacation he went back to his masters a more serious and a more stubborn boy. These changes did not escape their notice: shrewd and clearsighted men, accustomed by their profession to probing the inmost recesses of the human soul, they treated this lively but intractable mind with caution and reserve. They realized that this particular pupil of theirs