s Esseintes finds himself at thirty _sur le chemin,
degrise, seul, abominablement lasse_. He has already realised that 'the
world is divided, in great part, into swaggerers and simpletons.' His
one desire is to 'hide himself away, far from the world, in some
retreat, where he might deaden the sound of the loud rumbling of
inflexible life, as one covers the street with straw, for sick people.'
This retreat he discovers, just far enough from Paris to be safe from
disturbance, just near enough to be saved from the nostalgia of the
unattainable. He succeeds in making his house a paradise of the
artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go best with candle-light,
for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes has effected a simple
transposition of night and day. His disappearance from the world has
been complete; it seems to him that the 'comfortable desert' of his
exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious solitude; it seems to
him that he has attained his desire, that he has attained to happiness.

Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets, his
fantastic amours: the _repas de deuil_, Miss Urania the acrobat, the
episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the Sphinx
and the Chimaera of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_ Madame
Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his childhood
with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood, the fantasies
of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_ joining so
strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer. At times his brain
is haunted by social theories--his dull hatred of the ordinary in life
taking form in the region of ideas. But in the main he feeds himself,
with something of the satisfaction of success, on the strange food for
the sensations with which he has so laboriously furnished himself. There
are his books, and among these a special library of the Latin writers of
the Decadence. Exasperated by Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace,
he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he
might), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of
Apuleius. His curiosity extends to