He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through his body.  “Come!” he addressed himself, “let us drink and screw up our courage.”  He filled a glass of brandy, while asking for the reckoning.  An individual in black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort of majordomo with a bald and sharp head, a greying beard without moustaches, came forward.  A pencil rested behind his ear and he assumed an attitude like a singer, one foot in front of the other; he drew a note book from his pocket, and without glancing at his paper, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, near a chandelier, wrote while counting.  “There you are!” he said, tearing the sheet from his note book and giving it to Des Esseintes who looked at him with curiosity, as though he were a rare animal.  What a surprising John Bull, he thought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of his shaved mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman of an American ship.

At this moment, the tavern door opened.  Several persons entered bringing with them an odor of wet dog to which was blent the smell of coal wafted by the wind through the opened door.  Des Esseintes was incapable of moving a limb.  A soft warm languor prevented him from even stretching out his hand to light a cigar.  He told himself:  “Come now, let us get up, we must take ourselves off.”  Immediate objections thwarted his orders.  What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently?  Was he not even now in London, whose aromas and atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surrounded him?  For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened to him in Holland?

He had but sufficient time to race to the station.  An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more and more obvious and stubborn strength.  Pensively, he let the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said to himself, “Now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd into the baggage room!  What ennui!  What a bore that would be!” Then he repeated to himself once more, “In fine, I have experienced and seen all I wished to experience and see.  I have been filled with English life since my departure.  I would be mad indeed to go and, by an awkward trip, lose those imperishable sensations.  How stupid of me to have sought to disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy of the docile phantasmagories of my brain, like a very fool to have thought of the necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of an excursion!”

“Well!” he exclaimed, consulting his watch, “it is now time to return home.”

This time, he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back to the Sceaux station, and returned with his trunks, packages, valises, rugs, umbrellas and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physical stimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home after a long and dangerous voyage.

Chapter 12