Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Author:Joris-Karl Huysmans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2001-02-27T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The frightened servants immediately sent for the Fontenay doctor, who was completely baffled by Des Esseintes’s condition. He muttered a few medical terms, felt the patient’s pulse, examined his tongue, tried in vain to get him to talk, ordered sedatives and rest and promised to come back the next day. But at this Des Esseintes summoned up enough strength to reprove his servants for their excessive zeal and to dismiss the intruder, who went off to tell the whole village about the house, the eccentric furnishings of which had left him dumbfounded and flabbergasted.

To the amazement of the two domestics, who now no longer dared to budge from the pantry, their master recovered in a day or two; and they came upon him drumming on the windowpanes and casting anxious glances at the sky. And then, one afternoon, he rang for them and gave orders that his bags were to be packed for a long journey.

While the old man and his wife hunted out the things he said he would need, he paced feverishly up and down the cabin-style dining-room, consulted the timetables of the Channel steamers and scrutinized the clouds from his study window with an impatient yet satisfied air.

For the past week, the weather had been atrocious. Sooty rivers flowing across the grey plains of the sky carried along an endless succession of clouds, like so many boulders torn out of the earth. Every now and then there would be a sudden downpour, and the valley would disappear under torrents of rain.

But that particular day, the sky had changed in appearance: the floods of ink had dried up, the clouds had lost their rugged outlines and the heavens were now covered with a flat, opaque film. This film seemed to be falling ever lower, and at the same time the countryside was enveloped in a watery mist; the rain no longer cascaded down as it had done the day before, but fell in a fine, cold, unrelenting spray, swamping the lanes, submerging the roads, joining heaven and earth with its countless threads. Daylight in the village dimmed to a ghastly twilight, while the village itself looked like a lake of mud, speckled by the quicksilver needles of rain pricking the surface of the slimy puddles. From this desolate scene all colour had faded away, leaving only the roofs to glisten brightly above the supporting walls.

‘What terrible weather!’ sighed the old man-servant, as he laid on a chair the clothes his master had asked for, a suit ordered some time before from London.

Des Esseintes made no reply except to rub his hands and sit down before a glass-fronted bookcase in which a collection of silk socks was displayed in the form of a fan. For a few moments he hesitated between the various shades; then, taking into account the cheerless day, his cheerless clothes and his cheerless destination, he picked out a pair in a drab silk and quickly pulled them on. They were followed by the suit,

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