It was the great American hulks transported to our continent. It was
the immense, the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of the
financier and the parvenu, beaming, like a pitiful sun, upon the
idolatrous town which wallowed on the ground the while it uttered
impure psalms before the impious tabernacle of banks.

"Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!" cried Des
Esseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked.
This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "To think that all this is not a dream, to think
that I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of this
century!" To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims of
Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: "The
soul is pained by all things it thinks upon." But the words resounded
in his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui disintegrated,
lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, all
effective and gentle vigor.

He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availed
little in comforting him, that impossible faith in a future life alone
would pacify him.

An access of rage swept aside, like a hurricane, his attempts at
resignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideous
truth--nothing was left, all was in ruins. The bourgeoisie were
gormandizing on the solemn ruins of the Church which had become a
place of rendez-vous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns and
scandalous jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis and the Pale Christ
of Golgotha not going to prove their existence by commanding the
cataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed the
sinful cities? Was this degradation to continue to flow and cover with
its pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities and
shames?

The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaved men appeared, bringing
chests and carrying the furniture; then the door closed once more on
the servant who was removing packages of books.

Des Esseintes sank into a chair.

"I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of
human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose
dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the
Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of
life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by
the consoling beacons of ancient