Then his thoughts began to obsess him less; his suffering disappeared and to the exhaustion he had felt throughout his members was grafted a certain indescribable languor.  He was astonished and satisfied not to be weighted with drugs and vials, and a faint smile played on his lips when the servant brought a nourishing injection of peptone and told him he was to take it three times every twenty-four hours.

The operation succeeded and Des Esseintes could not forbear to congratulate himself on this event which in a manner crowned the existence he had created.  His penchant towards the artificial had now, though involuntarily, reached the supreme goal.

Farther one could not go.  The nourishment thus absorbed was the ultimate deviation one could possibly commit.

“How delicious it would be” he reflected, “to continue this simple regime in complete health!  What economy of time, what a pronounced deliverance from the aversion which food gives those who lack appetite!  What a complete riddance from the disgust induced by food forcibly eaten!  What an energetic protestation against the vile sin of gluttony, what a positive insult hurled at old nature whose monotonous demands would thus be avoided.”

And he continued, talking to himself half-aloud.  One could easily stimulate desire for food by swallowing a strong aperitif.  After the question, “what time is it getting to be?  I am famished,” one would move to the table and place the instrument on the cloth, and then, in the time it takes to say grace, one could have suppressed the tiresome and vulgar demands of the body.

Several days afterwards, the servant presented an injection whose color and odor differed from the other.

“But it is not the same at all!” Des Esseintes cried, gazing with deep feeling at the liquid poured into the apparatus.  As if in a restaurant, he asked for the card, and unfolding the physician’s prescription, read: 

Cod Liver Oil . . . . . . . .  20 grammes
Beef Tea  . . . . . . . . . . 200 grammes
Burgundy Wine . . . . . . . . 200 grammes
Yolk of one egg.

He remained meditative.  He who by reason of the weakened state of his stomach had never seriously preoccupied himself with the art of the cuisine, was surprised to find himself thinking of combinations to please an artificial epicure.  Then a strange idea crossed his brain.  Perhaps the physician had imagined that the strange palate of his patient was fatigued by the taste of the peptone; perhaps he had wished, like a clever chef, to vary the taste of foods and to prevent the monotony of dishes that might lead to want of appetite.  Once in the wake of these reflections, Des Esseintes sketched new recipes, preparing vegetable dinners for Fridays, using the dose of cod liver oil and wine, dismissing the beef tea as a meat food specially prohibited by the Church.  But he had no occasion longer to ruminate on these nourishing drinks, for the physician succeeded gradually in curing the vomiting attacks, and he was soon swallowing, in the normal manner, a syrup of punch containing a pulverized meat whose faint aroma of cacao pleased his palate.