This is a scene in an Antique Dealer's
collection, taken from Honoré De Balzac's
philosophical novel "The Wild Ass's Skin", where he outlines the
uncanny and alluring effect of a multitude of collected objects -not yet
divested of historical allusion or meaning, nor icily institutionalised-
contained in a small, compressed private space, and set upon by an eager
imagination.
“At first sight the showrooms offered
him a chaotic medley of human and divine works. Crocodiles, apes and stuffed
boas grinned at stainless glass windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved
busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A
Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to
a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of creation and the events of
yesterday were paired off with grotesque good humour. A roasting-jack was posed
on a monstrance, a Republican sabre on a medieval arquebus. Madame du Barry,
painted in pastel by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in
cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk and trying
to divine some purpose in the spirals of smoke which were drifting towards her.
Instruments of death, poniards, quaint
pistols, weapons with secret springs were hobnobbing with instruments of life:
porcelain soup-tureens, Dresden china plate, translucent porcelain cups from
china, antique slat-cellars, comfit-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was
sailing under full canvas on the back of an immovable tortoise. A pneumatic
machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic
and unmoved. Several portraits of French aldermen and Dutch burgomasters,
insensible now as during their lifetime, rose above this chaos of antiques and
cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.
All the countries on earth seemed to
have brought here some remnants of their sciences and a sample of their arts.
It was a sort of philosophical midden in which nothing was lacking, neither the
Red Indian's calumet nor the green and gold slipper of the seraglio, nor the
yatogan of the Moor, nor the brazen image of the Tartar. There was even the
soldier's tobacco pouch, the ciborium of the priest and the plumes from a
throne. Furthermore, these monstrous tableaux were subjected to a thousand
accidents of lighting by the whimsical effects of a multitude of reflected
gleams due to the confusion of tints and the abrupt contrasts of light and shade.
The ear fancied it heard stifled cries, the mind imagined that it caught the
thread of unfinished dramas, and the eye that it perceived half-smothered
glimmers. Lastly, persistent dust had cast its thin coating over all these
objects, whose multiple angles and numerous sinuosities produced the most
picturesque of impressions.
To begin with the, the stranger compared these three showrooms, crammed
with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties,
masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason, to a
mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. After registering
this hazy impression, he tried to make a choice of specimens he enjoyed; but,
in the process of gazing, pondering, dreaming, he was overcome by a fever which
was perhaps due to the hunger which was gnawing at his vitals. His senses ended
by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences,
their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them.
The longing that had caused him to
visit the shop was satisfied: he left real life behind him, ascended by degrees
to an ideal world, and reached the enchanted palaces of ecstasy where the
universe appeared to him in transitory gleams and tongues of fire; just as,
long ago, the future of mankind had filed past in flaming visions before the
gaze of Saint John of Patmos.
A multitude of sorrowing faces, gracious or terrifying, dimly or clearly
described, remote or near at hand, rose up before him in masses, in myriads, in
generations. Egypt in its mysterious rigidity emerged from the sands,
represented by a mummy swathed in black bandages; then came the Pharaohs
burying entire peoples in order to build a tomb for themselves; then Moses and
the Hebrews and the wilderness: the whole of the ancient world, in all its
solemnity, drifted before his eyes. But here, cool and graceful, a marble
statue posed on a wreathed column, radiantly white, spoke to him of the
voluptuous myths of Greece and Ionia. Oh, who would not have smiled, as he did,
to see upon a red background, in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase, the brown
girl dancing before the god Priapus and joyously saluting him? Facing her was a
Latin queen lovingly fondling her chimaera! The capricious pleasures of imperial
Rome were there in every aspect: the bath, the couch, the dressing-table ritual
of some indolent, pensive Julia awaiting her Tibullus. Armed with the power of
Arabian talismans, the head of Cicero evoked memories of republican Rome and
unwound for him the scroll of Livy's histories. The young man gazed on the
Senatus pupulusque romanus: the consul, the lectors, the purple-edged togas,
the fights in the Forum, the plebs aroused to wrath. All this filed past him
like the insubstantial figures of a dream.
Then Christian Rome became the dominant
theme in these presentations. One painting showed the heavens opened and in it
he saw the Virgin Mary bathed in a cloud of gold in the midst of angels,
eclipsing the sun in glory, lending an ear to the lamentations of the sufferer
on whom this regenerate Eve smiled gently. As he fingered a mosaic made of
different lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, in imagination he emerged into
sun-drenched Italy: he was an onlooker at the Borgias' feasts, he rode through
the Abruzzi, sighed after Italian mistresses, worshipping their pale cheeks and
dark, elongated eyes.
Espying a medieval dagger with a hilt
as cunningly wrought as a piece of lace, with rust patches on it like
bloodstains, he thought with a shudder of mighty trysts interrupted by the cold
blade of a husband's sword. India and its religions lived again in an idol
dressed in gold and silk with conical cap and lozenge-shaped ear-flaps folded
upwards and adorned with bells. Near this grotesque figure a rush mat, as pretty
as the Indian dancer who had once rolled herself in it, still exhaled the
perfume of sandalwood. The mind was startled into perceptiveness by a monster
from China with a twisted gaze, contorted mouth and writhing limbs: the
creation of an inventive people weary of unvarying beauty and drawing ineffable
pleasure from the luxuriant diversity of ugliness.
A salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's
workshop brought him back to the bosom of the Renaissance at a period when art
and licence flourished together, when sovereign princes found diversion in
torture and prelates at Church Councils rested from their labours in the arms
of courtesans after decreeing chastity for mere priests. He saw the conquests
of Alexander carved on a cameo, the massacres of Pizarro etched on a match-lock
arquebus, the wars of religion -frenzied, seething, pitiless- engraved on the
base of a helmet. Then the charming pageantry of chivalry sprang up from a
Milanese suit of armour, brightly furnished, superbly damascened, beneath whose
visor the eyes of a paladin still gleamed.
For him this ocean of furnishings,
inventions, fashions, works of art and relics made up an endless poem. Forms,
colours, concepts of thought came to life again; but nothing complete presented
itself to his mind. The poet in him had to finish these sketches by the great
painter who had composed the vast palette on to which the innumerable accidents
of human life had been thrown in such disdainful profusion.”
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