Laudator Temporis Acti

J.-K. Huysmans (1848-1907), À Rebours, chapter 3 (tr. Brendan King):

The author he really loved, and who caused him to leave aside forever his reading of Lucan's resounding addresses, was Petronius.

This latter was a shrewd observer, a discerning analyst, a marvellous painter; calmly, without prejudice, without hate, he described the daily life of Rome, recounted in the short, lively chapters of the Satyricon the manners and morals of his age.

Noting down the facts one after another, establishing them in a definitive form, he unfolded the petty existences of the common people, their chance meetings, their bestialities, their couplings.

Here, it's the inspector of rented accommodation who has come to ask the names of some recently arrived travellers; there, it's a brothel where the men prowl around naked women standing next to placards with scales of charges, while through the half-closed doors of the bedrooms, you catch a glimpse of cavorting couples; there again, in successive scenes in the book, whether in insolently luxurious villas, insanely rich and ostentatious, or whether in miserable inns, with their unmade camp-beds full of fleas, we see the society of the time going about its business: filthy pickpockets such as Ascyltus and Eumolpus, on the look out for some rich pickings; old hags with hitched-up skirts and cheeks plastered with white lead and red acacia; catamites of sixteen, plump and curly-haired; women subject to attacks of hysteria; legacy-hunters offering their sons and daughters to the debauches of rich testators; all run through his pages, arguing in the streets, touching each other up in the public baths, beating each other black and blue as if in a pantomime.

And all this recounted in a style of peculiar vitality, of a very particular tone, in a style drawing on every dialect, borrowing expressions from all the languages imported into Rome, pushing back every limit, all the trammels of that so-called Golden Age, letting everyone speak in his own idiom: uneducated freedmen in vulgar Latin, the argot of the streets; foreigners in their barbarous patois, a bastard offspring of African, Syrian and Greek; idiotic pedants, like the character Agamemnon in the book, in a rhetoric of overblown words. These people are sketched in a single stroke, sprawled round a table, exchanging insipid drunken gossip, spouting senile maxims and stupid sayings, their snouts turned towards Trimalchio who picks his teeth and offers chamberpots to the assembled company, telling them about the state of his bowels and his flatulence, inviting his guests to put themselves at their ease.

This realist novel, this slice cut from the heart of Roman life, completely unconcerned, whatever anyone might say, with social reform or satire, with no need of a carefully worked-out ending or a moral; this story without intrigue or action, putting on stage the amorous intrigues of those game birds of Sodom; analysing with a calm finesse the joys and sorrows of their love-affairs and their couplings, depicting life in a splendidly wrought language without the author revealing himself once, without him making a single comment, without him approving or condemning the acts and thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decrepit civilisation, of an Empire coming apart at the seams, gripped des Esseintes and he glimpsed in the refinement of its style, the acuity of its observations, and in the firmness of its method, peculiar correspondences and curious analogies with the few modern French novels he could bear.

Certainly, he bitterly regretted the Eustion and the Albutiae, those two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciades Fulgentius and which are lost forever; but the bibliophile in him consoled the man of letters, as with worshipful hands he leafed through the superb edition he possessed of the Satyricon, an octavo bearing the date 1585 and the name of J. Dousa of Leyden.