by Abbo le Courbé; and with the
Hortulus
, the didactic poem by the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose canto devoted to the glorification of the pumpkin as a symbol of fecundity tickled his sense of humour. Another work he appreciated was the poem by Ermold le Noir celebrating the exploits of Louis le Débonnaire, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, even sombre style, an iron idiom chilled in monastic waters but with flaws in the hard metal where feeling showed through; and another, a poem by Macer Floridus,
De Viribus Herbarum
, which he particularly enjoyed for its poetic recipes and the remarkable virtues it attributed to certain plants and flowers â to the aristolochia, for instance, which mixed with beef and laid on a pregnant womanâs abdomen invariably results in the birth of a male child, or borage, which served as a cordial makes the gloomiest guest merry, or the peony, whose powdered root is a lasting cure for epilepsy, or fennel, which applied to a womanâs bosom clears her urine and stimulates her sluggish periods.
Except for a few special books which had not been classified; certain undated or modern texts; some cabbalistic, medical or botanical works; sundry odd volumes of Migneâs patrology, containing Christian poems to be found nowhere else, and of Wernsdorffâs anthology of the minor Latin poets; except for Meursius, Forbergâs manual of classical erotology, the moechialogy and the diaconals intended for the use of father-confessors, which he took down and dusted off at long intervals, his collection of Latin works stopped at the beginning of the tenth century.
By that time, after all, the peculiar originality and elaboratesimplicity of Christian Latinity had likewise come to an end. Henceforth the gibble-gabble of the philosophers and the scholiasts, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, would reign supreme. The sooty heaps of chronicles and history books, the leaden masses of cartularies, would steadily pile up, while the stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks, stirring the poetical left-overs of Antiquity into a pious stew, were already things of the past; the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery, had already closed down. The old editions so beloved of Des Esseintes tailed away to nothing â and making a prodigious jump of several centuries, he stacked the rest of his shelves with modern books which, without regard to the intermediate ages, brought him right down to the French language of the present day. 5
CHAPTER 4
A carriage drew up late one afternoon outside the house at Fontenay. As Des Esseintes never had any visitors and the postman did not so much as approach this uninhabited region, since there were no newspapers, reviews or letters to be delivered, the servants hesitated, wondering whether they should answer the door or not. But when the bell was sent jangling violently against the wall, they ventured so far as to uncover the spy-hole let into the door, and beheld a gentleman whose entire breast was covered, from neck to waist, by a huge buckler of gold.
They informed their master, who was at breakfast.
âYes indeed,â he said; âshow the gentleman inâ â for he remembered having once given his address to a lapidary so that the man might deliver an article he had ordered.
The gentleman bowed his way in, and on the pitch-pine floor of the dining-room he deposited his golden buckler, which rocked backwards and forwards, rising a little from the ground and stretching out at the end of a snake-like neck a tortoiseâs head which, in a sudden panic, it drew back under its carapace.
This tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours, and
Hortulus
, the didactic poem by the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose canto devoted to the glorification of the pumpkin as a symbol of fecundity tickled his sense of humour. Another work he appreciated was the poem by Ermold le Noir celebrating the exploits of Louis le Débonnaire, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, even sombre style, an iron idiom chilled in monastic waters but with flaws in the hard metal where feeling showed through; and another, a poem by Macer Floridus,
De Viribus Herbarum
, which he particularly enjoyed for its poetic recipes and the remarkable virtues it attributed to certain plants and flowers â to the aristolochia, for instance, which mixed with beef and laid on a pregnant womanâs abdomen invariably results in the birth of a male child, or borage, which served as a cordial makes the gloomiest guest merry, or the peony, whose powdered root is a lasting cure for epilepsy, or fennel, which applied to a womanâs bosom clears her urine and stimulates her sluggish periods.
Except for a few special books which had not been classified; certain undated or modern texts; some cabbalistic, medical or botanical works; sundry odd volumes of Migneâs patrology, containing Christian poems to be found nowhere else, and of Wernsdorffâs anthology of the minor Latin poets; except for Meursius, Forbergâs manual of classical erotology, the moechialogy and the diaconals intended for the use of father-confessors, which he took down and dusted off at long intervals, his collection of Latin works stopped at the beginning of the tenth century.
By that time, after all, the peculiar originality and elaboratesimplicity of Christian Latinity had likewise come to an end. Henceforth the gibble-gabble of the philosophers and the scholiasts, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, would reign supreme. The sooty heaps of chronicles and history books, the leaden masses of cartularies, would steadily pile up, while the stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks, stirring the poetical left-overs of Antiquity into a pious stew, were already things of the past; the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery, had already closed down. The old editions so beloved of Des Esseintes tailed away to nothing â and making a prodigious jump of several centuries, he stacked the rest of his shelves with modern books which, without regard to the intermediate ages, brought him right down to the French language of the present day. 5
CHAPTER 4
A carriage drew up late one afternoon outside the house at Fontenay. As Des Esseintes never had any visitors and the postman did not so much as approach this uninhabited region, since there were no newspapers, reviews or letters to be delivered, the servants hesitated, wondering whether they should answer the door or not. But when the bell was sent jangling violently against the wall, they ventured so far as to uncover the spy-hole let into the door, and beheld a gentleman whose entire breast was covered, from neck to waist, by a huge buckler of gold.
They informed their master, who was at breakfast.
âYes indeed,â he said; âshow the gentleman inâ â for he remembered having once given his address to a lapidary so that the man might deliver an article he had ordered.
The gentleman bowed his way in, and on the pitch-pine floor of the dining-room he deposited his golden buckler, which rocked backwards and forwards, rising a little from the ground and stretching out at the end of a snake-like neck a tortoiseâs head which, in a sudden panic, it drew back under its carapace.
This tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours, and
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