stening to the sound he had so often heard before, he lived over
again the silent evenings spent near his mother, the wretchedness of
his suffering, repressed youth. And then, while he yielded to the
voluptuousness of the woman he mechanically caressed, whose words or
laughter tore him from his revery and rudely recalled him to the
moment, to the boudoir, to reality, a tumult arose in his soul, a need
of avenging the sad years he had endured, a mad wish to sully the
recollections of his family by shameful action, a furious desire to
pant on cushions of flesh, to drain to their last dregs the most
violent of carnal vices.

On rainy autumnal days when melancholy oppressed him, when a hatred of
his home, the muddy yellow skies, the macadam clouds assailed him, he
took refuge in this retreat, set the cage lightly in motion and
watched it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until it
seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage no longer stirred, but that the
boudoir reeled and turned, filling the house with a rose-colored
waltz.

In the days when he had deemed it necessary to affect singularity, Des
Esseintes had designed marvelously strange furnishings, dividing his
salon into a series of alcoves hung with varied tapestries to relate
by a subtle analogy, by a vague harmony of joyous or sombre, delicate
or barbaric colors to the character of the Latin or French books he
loved. And he would seclude himself in turn in the particular recess
whose _decor_ seemed best to correspond with the very essence of the
work his caprice of the moment induced him to read.

He had constructed, too, a lofty high room intended for the reception
of his tradesmen. Here they were ushered in and seated alongside each
other in church pews, while from a pulpit he preached to them a sermon
on dandyism, adjuring his bootmakers and tailors implicitly to obey
his briefs in the matter of style, threatening them with pecuniary
excommunication if they failed to follow to the letter the
instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.

He acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced by
wearing costumes of white velvet, and gold-embroidered waistcoats, by
inserting, in place of a cravat, a Parma bouquet in the opening of his
shirt, by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, a
revival of the eighteenth century, celebrating the most futile of his
misadventures, was a funeral repast.

In the dining room, hung in black