Paris Spleen: little poems in prose

V: Double Bedroom

9 v Double Bedroom A room resembling a reverie, a room truly spiritual, stagnant atmosphere in soft pink and blue tints. There the soul bathes idly, scented with regret and desire.—Something crepuscular, bluish and rose pink; voluptuous dream during an eclipse. The furnishings are elongated, prostrate, languid. The furniture seems to dream; suggesting somnambulistic life, vegetable or mineral . The upholstery speaks a mute language, like flowers, like skies, like setting suns. On the wall, no artistic abomination. Compared to pure dream, unanalyzed impression, an art made definite—positive art—is blasphemy . Here, everything has just enough clarity, and the delicious obscurity of harmony. Hints of a choice and exquisite scent mingled with air lightly humid swim in this atmosphere, where slumbering spirit is rocked by hothouse sensations. Muslin rains down abundantly over the windows and around the bed in snowy cascade. Within this bed is ensconced the Idol, queen of dreams. But how did she come there? Who brought her? what magic potency set her upon this throne of voluptuous reverie? Well never mind: there she is! I recognize her. There indeed, those eyes whose flame travels the twilight; subtle and terrible organs of sight familiar to me from their fearsome malice. They call to, they beat down, they devour foolhardy focus fixed on them. I have made long study of those dark stars which excite curiosity and admiration. To what benevolent demon do I owe being thus set about with mystery, silence, peace and perfumes? What beatitude! what we or- 10 dinarily call life, even when it expands most happily, has nothing in common with this supreme life that I now know and that I savor, minute by minute, second by second. But no! there are no longer minutes, no longer seconds. Time has disappeared; it is Eternity that reigns, an eternity of delight! But then there’s a terrible loud knock at the door and, as in hellish dreams, I feel a pickax in my gut. Then enter a Specter: a bailiff come to torture me with legal matters ; a notorious trollop bitching about money and loading her life’s trivialities on top of my own troubles; or maybe even an editorial guttersnipe demanding another installment of some manuscript. The paradisal room, the idol, the queen of dreams, the Sylphide, as the great René calls her,3 all this magic has vanished with the Specter’s brutal blow. Horrors! I remember. I remember! Yes! this hole-in-the-wall, this abode of eternal ennui, is mine. Pieces of furniture, stupid, musty, broken down; the fire unlit, emberless, fouled with spit; sad windows where rain has cut furrows in the dirt; manuscripts crossed out or unfinished ; an almanac with a penciled check on dates to be careful of. The other-worldly scent, in which I tippled with a practiced sensibility , is, alas! replaced by the fetid odor of tobacco mixed with a species of evil-smelling mildew. One breathes in rancid desolation. In this shrunken world, so full of disgust, a single object attracts me: the vial of laudanum; old and terrible lover; like all lovers, alas, fertile in caresses and betrayal. Oh! yes! Time has reappeared; Time reigns absolute now; and with that hideous old character has come his devilish retinue of Memories, Regrets, Convulsions, Fears, Anguish, Nightmare, Rage, Neurosis. I swear that now the seconds are strongly, solemnly accentuated and each, flying off the clock, cries, “I am Life insupportable. I am implacable Life.” There is only one single Second in human life with the mission of 3. The elemental called a sylphide is a spirit of air. The reference here is to a loved adolescent girl imagined by Chateaubriand (the ‘great René’). 11 announcing good news, the good news that causes for each of us an inexplicable fear. Yes! Time reigns, recovering his brutal dictatorship. And he drives me as if I were an ox, with his double goad.—“Gee up! ass! sweat, you slave! damn you! Live!” ...