But these were not the only pictures he had acquired to divert his solitude.

Although he had surrendered to his servants the second story of his house, which he himself never used at all, the ground floor had required a number of pictures to fit the walls.

It was thus arranged: 

A dressing room, communicating with the bedroom, occupied one of the corners of the house.  One passed from the bedroom to the library, and from the library into the dining room, which formed the other corner.

These rooms, whose windows looked out on the Aunay Valley, composed one of the sides of the dwelling.

The other side of the house had four rooms arranged in the same order.  Thus, the kitchen formed an angle, and corresponded with the dining room; a long corridor, which served as the entrance, with the library; a small dressing room, with the bedroom; and the toilet, forming a second angle, with the dressing room.

These rooms received the light from the side opposite the Aunay Valley and faced the Towers of Croy and Chatillon.

As for the staircase, it was built outside, against one of the sides of the house, and the footsteps of his servants in ascending or descending thus reached Des Esseintes less distinctly.

The dressing room was tapestried in deep red.  On the walls, in ebony frames, hung the prints of Jan Luyken, an old Dutch engraver almost unknown in France.

He possessed of the work of this artist, who was fantastic and melancholy, vehement and wild, the series of his Religious Persecutions, horrible prints depicting all the agonies invented by the madness of religions:  prints pregnant with human sufferings, showing bodies roasting on fires, skulls slit open with swords, trepaned with nails and gashed with saws, intestines separated from the abdomen and twisted on spools, finger nails slowly extracted with pincers, eyes gouged, limbs dislocated and deliberately broken, and bones bared of flesh and agonizingly scraped by sheets of metal.

These works filled with abominable imaginings, offensive with their odors of burning, oozing with blood and clamorous with cries of horror and maledictions, gave Des Esseintes, who was held fascinated in this red room, the creeping sensations of goose-flesh.

But in addition to the tremblings they occasioned, beyond the terrible skill of this man, the extraordinary life which animates his characters, one discovered, among his astonishing, swarming throngs—­among his mobs of people delineated with a dexterity which recalled Callot, but which had a strength never possessed by that amusing dauber—­curious reconstructions of bygone ages.  The architecture, costumes and customs during the time of the Maccabeans, of Rome under the Christian persecutions, of Spain under the Inquisition, of France during the Middle Ages, at the time of Saint Bartholomew and the Dragonnades, were studied with a meticulous care and noted with scientific accuracy.