“And yet I warm myself, here before a cheerful fire.  From a basket of blossoming flowers comes the aroma of balsamic benzoin, geranium and the whorl-flowered bent-grass which permeates the room.  In the very month of November, at Pantin, in the rue de Paris, springtime persists.  Here in my solitude I laugh at the fears of families which, to shun the approaching cold weather, escape on every steamer to Cannes and to other winter resorts.

“Inclement nature does nothing to contribute to this extraordinary phenomenon.  It must be said that his artificial season at Pantin is the result of man’s ingenuity.

“In fact, these flowers are made of taffeta and are mounted on wire.  The springtime odor filters through the window joints, exhaled from the neighboring factories, from the perfumeries of Pinaud and Saint James.

“For the workmen exhausted by the hard labors of the plants, for the young employes who too often are fathers, the illusion of a little healthy air is possible, thanks to these manufacturers.

“So, from this fabulous subterfuge of a country can an intelligent cure arise.  The consumptive men about town who are sent to the South die, their end due to the change in their habits and to the nostalgia for the Parisian excesses which destroyed them.  Here, under an artificial climate, libertine memories will reappear, the languishing feminine emanations evaporated by the factories.  Instead of the deadly ennui of provincial life, the doctor can thus platonically substitute for his patient the atmosphere of the Parisian women and of boudoirs.  Most often, all that is necessary to effect the cure is for the subject to have a somewhat fertile imagination.

“Since, nowadays, nothing genuine exists, since the wine one drinks and the liberty one boldly proclaims are laughable and a sham, since it really needs a healthy dose of good will to believe that the governing classes are respectable and that the lower classes are worthy of being assisted or pitied, it seems to me,” concluded Des Esseintes, “to be neither ridiculous nor senseless, to ask of my fellow men a quantity of illusion barely equivalent to what they spend daily in idiotic ends, so as to be able to convince themselves that the town of Pantin is an artificial Nice or a Menton.

“But all this does not prevent me from seeing,” he said, forced by weakness from his meditations, “that I must be careful to mistrust these delicious and abominable practices which may ruin my constitution.”  He sighed.  “Well, well, more pleasures to moderate, more precautions to be taken.”

And he passed into his study, hoping the more easily to escape the spell of these perfumes.