62
" From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup and eaten Russian
rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet-roe, smoked
Frankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice
and boot-blacking truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum
puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries and heart-cherries;
from dark coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and
Rousillon, of Tenedoes, Val de Peñas and Oporto, and, after the coffee
and the walnut cordial they enjoyed kvass, porters and stouts. "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans , Against Nature (À Rebours)
63
" And whenever they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments conjured up, in his mind, a place on the outskirts of a city, a mean and voiceless place where silently, in the distance, lines of men and women, wearied and bowed down by life, were disappearing into the twilight, while he himself, surfeited with bitterness and replete with disgust, felt himself alone, utterly alone, in the midst of a tearful Nature, overwhelmed by an inexpressible melancholy, by a relentless anguish, the mysterious intensity of which precluded all consolation, all pity, all repose. "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans , Against Nature (À Rebours)
69
" Любить друг друга издали, безнадёжно, безответно, не рассчитывая на взаимность, никогда не принадлежать друг другу, целомудренно мечтать о недоступных прелестях, о невозможных поцелуях, о ласках, угасших на изгладившемся из памяти мёртвом челе, - ах. какое это, должно быть, чудное, ничем не омрачённое счастье! Всё остальное мерзость и тлен. "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans , Là-Bas (Down There)
70
" Those who visited that exhibition-room found an auto-de-fé of immense skies in ignition, globes blotted out by bleeding suns; hemorrhages of stars, flowing down in purple cataracts over tumbling tufts of clouds. Against this background of terrible din, silent women passed, nude or appareled in jeweled stuffs, like the bindings of the old Evangelists; women with hair of shaggy silk, with pale blue eyes, hard and fixed, and flesh of the frozen whiteness of milk; Salomes holding, motionless upon a platter, the head of the Baptist, which shone, soaked in phosphorus, under the quincunxes with shorn leaves, of a green that was almost black; goddesses galloping on hippogriffs and streaking, with the lapis lazuli of their wings, the agony of the clouds; feminine idols, in tiaras, upright on thrones, at the top of stairs submerged in extraordinary flowers, or seated, in rigid poses, upon the backs of elephants with green-mantled foreheads and breasts strung with pearl-ropes like cavalry bells, stamping about upon their own heavy image, reflected in a sheet of water and splashed by the columns of the ring-circled legs! "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans ,
73
" The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life. "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans , Against Nature (À Rebours)
74
" and, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated. "
― Joris-Karl Huysmans , Against Nature (À Rebours)