Another time, in the Rue de Rivoli, he comes upon a boy of about sixteen years old, a ‘pale, cunning-looking’ child, smoking a bad cigarette, and who asks him for a light. Des Esseintes offers him Turkish aromatic cigarettes, enters into conversation with him, learns that his mother is dead, that his father beats him, and that he works for a cardboard-box maker. ‘Des Esseintes listened thoughtfully. “Come and drink,” said he, and led him into a café, where he made him drink some very strong punch. The child drank in silence. “Come,” said Des Esseintes suddenly, “do you feel inclined for some amusement this evening? I will treat you.”’ And he leads the unfortunate boy into a disorderly house, where his youth and nervousness astonish the girls. While one of these women draws the boy away, the landlady asks Des Esseintes what was his idea in bringing them such an imp. The decadent answers (p. 95): ‘I am simply trying to train an assassin. This boy is innocent, and has reached the age when the blood grows hot; he might run after the girls in his quarter, remain honest while amusing himself.... Bringing him here, on the contrary, into the midst of a luxury of which he had no conception, and which will engrave itself forcibly on his memory, in offering him every fortnight such an unexpected treat, he will get accustomed to these pleasures from which his means debar him. Let us admit that it will require three months for them to become absolutely necessary to him.... Well, at the end of three months I discontinue the little rente which I am going to pay you in advance for this good action, and then he will steal in order to live here.... He will kill, I hope, the good gentleman who will appear inopportunely while he is attempting to break open his writing-table. Then my aim will be attained; I shall have contributed, to the extent of my resources, in creating a villain, one more enemy of that hideous society which fleeces us.’ And he leaves the poor defiled boy on this first evening with these words: ‘Return as quickly as possible to your father.... Do unto others what you would not wish them to do to you; with this rule you will go a long way. Good-evening. Above all, don’t be ungrateful. Let me hear of you as soon as possible through the police news.’
He sees the village children fighting for a piece of black bread covered with curd cheese; he immediately orders for himself a similar slice of bread, and says to his servant: ‘Throw this bread and cheese to those children who are doing for each other in the road. Let the feeblest be crippled, not manage to get a single piece, and, besides, be well whipped by their parents when they return home with torn breeches and black eyes; that will give them an idea of the life that awaits them’ (p. 226).
When he thinks of society, this cry bursts from his breast: ‘Oh, perish, society! Die, old world!’ (p. 293).
Lest the reader should feel curious as to the course of Des Esseintes’ history, let us add that a serious nervous illness attacks him in his solitude, and that his doctor imperiously orders him to return to Paris and the common life. Huysmans, in a second novel, ‘Là-bas,’ shows us what Des Esseintes eventually does in Paris. He writes a history of Gilles de Rais, the wholesale murderer of the fifteenth century, to whom Moreau de Tours’ book (treating of sexual aberrations) has unmistakably called the attention of the Diabolist band, who are in general profoundly ignorant, but erudite on this special subject of erotomania. This furnishes M. Huysmans with the opportunity of burrowing and sniffing with swinish satisfaction into the most horrible filth. Besides this, he exhibits in this book the mystic side of decadentism; he shows us Des Esseintes become devout, but going at the same time to the ‘black mass’ with a hysterical woman, etc. I have no occasion to trouble myself with this book, as repulsive as it is silly. All I wished was to show the ideal man of decadentism.
We have him now, then, the ‘super-man’ (surhomme) of whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and whom they wish to resemble: physically, ill and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his whole time in choosing the colours of stuffs which are to drape his room artistically, in observing the movements of mechanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping liqueurs. His raciest notion is to keep awake all night and to sleep all day, and to dip his meat into his tea. Love and friendship are unknown to him. His artistic sense consists in watching the attitude of people before some work, in order immediately to assume the opposite position. His complete inadaptability reveals itself in that every contact with the world and men causes him pain. He naturally throws the blame of his discomfort on his fellow-creatures, and rails at them like a fish-wife. He classes them all together as villains and blockheads, and he hurls at them horrible anarchical maledictions. The dunderhead considers himself infinitely superior to other people, and his inconceivable stupidity only equals his inflated adoration of himself. He possesses an income of 50,000 francs, and must also have it, for such a pitiable creature would not be in a position to draw one sou from society, or one grain of wheat from nature. A parasite of the lowest grade of atavism, a sort of human sacculus,[293] he would be condemned, if he were poor, to die miserably of hunger in so far as society, in misdirected charity, did not assure to him the necessaries of life in an idiot asylum.
If M. Huysmans in his Des Esseintes has shown us the Decadent with all his instincts perverted, i.e., the complete Baudelairian with his anti-naturalism, his æsthetic folly and his anti-social Diabolism, another representative of decadent literature, M. Maurice Barrès, is the incarnation of the pure ego-mania of the incapacity of adaptation in the degenerate. He has dedicated up to the present a series of four novels to the culte du moi, and has annotated, besides, an edition of the three first in a brochure much more valuable for our inquiry than the novels themselves, inasmuch as all the sophisms by which consciousness forces itself to explain a posteriori the impulsions of morbid unconscious life appear here conveniently summed up in a sort of philosophical system.
A few words on M. Maurice Barrès. He first made himself talked of by defending, in the Parisian press, his friend Chambige, the Algerian homicide, a logical cultivator of the ‘Ego.’ Then he became a Boulangist deputy, and later he canonized Marie Bashkirtseff, a degenerate girl who died of phthisis, a victim to moral madness, with a touch of the megalomania and the mania of persecution, as well as of morbid erotic exaltation. He invoked her as ‘Our Lady of the wagon-lit’ (Notre Dame du Sleeping).[294]
His novels, Sous l’[Œil des Barbares, Un Homme libre, Le Jardin de Bérénice, and L’Ennemi des Lois, are constructed after the artistic formula established by M. Huysmans. The description of a human being, with his intellectual life, and his monotonous, scarcely modulated external destinies, gives the author a pretext for expressing his own ideas on all possible subjects; on Leonardo da Vinci and Venice;[295] on a French provincial museum and the industrial art of the Middle Ages;[296] on Nero,[297] Saint Simon, Fourier, Marx, and Lassalle.[298] Formerly it was the custom to utilize these excursions into all possible fields of discussion as articles for newspapers or monthly periodicals, and afterwards to collect them in book form. But experience has taught that the public does not exhibit much interest in these collections of essays, and the Decadents have adopted the clever ruse of connecting them by means of a scarcely perceptible thread of narrative, and presenting them to their readers as a novel. The English novelists of the preceding century, then Stendhal, Jean Paul and Goethe himself, have also made use of these insertions of the author’s personal reflections in the course of the story; but with them (with the exception, perhaps, of Jean Paul) these interpellations were at least subordinated to the work of art as a whole. It was reserved for M. Huysmans and his school to give them the chief place, and to transform the novel from an epic poem in prose into a hybrid mixture of Essais of Montaigne, of Parerga et Paralipomena of Schopenhauer, and the effusions in the diary of a girl at a boarding-school.
M. Barrès makes it no secret that he has described his own life in his novels, and that he considers himself a typical representative of a species. ‘These monographs ... are,’ he says,[299] ‘a communication of a type of young man already frequently met with, and which, I feel sure, will become still more numerous among the pupils who are now at the Lycée.... These books ... will eventually be consulted as documents.’