Chapter 2


More than two months passed before Des Esseintes could bury himself in
the silent repose of his Fontenay abode. He was obliged to go to Paris
again, to comb the city in his search for the things he wanted to buy.

What care he took, what meditations he surrendered himself to, before
turning over his house to the upholsterers!

He had long been a connoisseur in the sincerities and evasions of
color-tones. In the days when he had entertained women at his home, he
had created a boudoir where, amid daintily carved furniture of pale,
Japanese camphor-wood, under a sort of pavillion of Indian rose-tinted
satin, the flesh would color delicately in the borrowed lights of the
silken hangings.

This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed each
other all along the walls, reflecting, as far as the eye could reach,
whole series of rose boudoirs, had been celebrated among the women who
loved to immerse their nudity in this bath of warm carnation, made
fragrant with the odor of mint emanating from the exotic wood of the
furniture.

Aside from the sensual delights for which he had designed this
chamber, this painted atmosphere which gave new color to faces grown
dull and withered by the use of ceruse and by nights of dissipation,
there were other, more personal and perverse pleasures which he
enjoyed in these languorous surroundings,--pleasures which in some way
stimulated memories of his past pains and dead ennuis.