Là-bas by J.K. Huysmans

Là-bas by J.K. Huysmans

Author:J.K. Huysmans [Huysmans, J.K.]
Language: fra
Format: azw3
Tags: Occult, Horror, Demons, French Literature, Classics, Decadence
ISBN: 9781907650307
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 1891-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


And Durtal captivated by this vision he has conjured up, closes his notebook and, with a shrug of his shoulders, considers how petty are his spiritual debates over a woman whose sin is – as indeed is his own – nothing but a bourgeois sin, a sin of the mediocre.

CHAPTER XII

“The pretext for this visit, which might seem strange to Chantelouve since I haven’t seen him for a few months, is simple enough,” Durtal said to himself, as he walked along the Rue de Bagneux. “Supposing he’s at home tonight – which isn’t very likely, for in that case, what would be the point of our rendezvous? – I could resort to telling him that I’d learned through des Hermies about his attack of gout and that I wanted to see how he was.”

He went up the stairs of the house in which the Chantelouves had their apartment. It was a very large old staircase with iron banisters, its steps paved with red tiles and bordered with wood. It was lit by antique reflector lamps, each of which was surmounted by a kind of iron casque, painted green.

This ancient house smelt of damp tombs, but it also exuded a clerical odour, giving off an aura of solemn intimacy lacking in the pasteboard buildings of today. It had none of that air of promiscuity common to new apartments, in which kept women lived indiscriminately among homely, conventional couples. The house pleased him and, against this sober backdrop, he judged Hyacinthe even more desirable.

He rang at the first floor. A maid showed him through a long corridor into the sitting room. He noted, at a glance, that nothing had changed since his last visit.

It was the same room, long and high-ceilinged, with windows that seemed to go on forever, and a fireplace adorned with a small bronze replica of Frémiet’s statue of Joan of Arc between two globe lamps of Japanese porcelain. He recognised the grand piano, the table heaped with sketch- books, the divan, the Louis XV-style armchairs with exotic needlework covers. In front of every window were blue, imitation-Chinese pots, mounted on fake-ebony stands, containing wilting palm leaves. On the walls were unremarkable religious pictures and a portrait of Chantelouve as a young man, in three-quarter profile, a hand resting on a pile of his works. Only an ancient Russian icon, inlaid with silver niello, and one of those Christs carved in wood in the seventeenth century by Bogard de Nancy, which was lying on a bed of velvet in an ancient gilded wooden frame, relieved the banality of these bourgeois furnishings, which looked as if they’d been fixed up for Lent to receive priests and charitable-minded ladies.

A huge fire was burning in the hearth, and a tall lamp with a rose-coloured lace shade illuminated the room.

“This stinks of the sacristy,” Durtal said to himself, just as the door opened.

Madame Chantelouve entered, swathed in a white swanskin wrap, smelling sweetly of frangipani. She shook Durtal by the hand, and, as



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