Meanwhile the silvery sound of a clock that tolled the angelus announced breakfast time to Des Esseintes.  He abandoned his books, pressed his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that, among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly were the only ones whose ideas and style offered the gaminess he so loved to savor in the Latin and decadent, monastic writers of past ages.

Chapter 13

As the season advanced, the weather, far from improving, grew worse.  Everything seemed to go wrong that year.  After the squalls and mists, the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheet iron.  In two days, without transition, a torrid heat, an atmosphere of frightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days and the streaming of the rains.  As though stirred by furious pokers, the sun showed like a kiln-hole, darting a light almost white-hot, burning one’s face.  A hot dust rose from the roads, scorching the dry trees, and the yellowed lawns became a deep brown.  A temperature like that of a foundry hung over the dwelling of Des Esseintes.

Half naked, he opened a window and received the air like a furnace blast in his face.  The dining room, to which he fled, was fiery, and the rarefied air simmered.  Utterly distressed, he sat down, for the stimulation that had seized him had ended since the close of his reveries.

Like all people tormented by nervousness, heat distracted him.  And his anaemia, checked by cold weather, again became pronounced, weakening his body which had been debilitated by copious perspiration.

The back of his shirt was saturated, his perinaeum was damp, his feet and arms moist, his brow overflowing with sweat that ran down his cheeks.  Des Esseintes reclined, annihilated, on a chair.

The sight of the meat placed on the table at that moment caused his stomach to rise.  He ordered the food removed, asked for boiled eggs, and tried to swallow some bread soaked in eggs, but his stomach would have none of it.  A fit of nausea overcame him.  He drank a few drops of wine that pricked his stomach like points of fire.  He wet his face; the perspiration, alternately warm and cold, coursed along his temples.  He began to suck some pieces of ice to overcome his troubled heart—­but in vain.

So weak was he that he leaned against the table.  He rose, feeling the need of air, but the bread had slowly risen in his gullet and remained there.  Never had he felt so distressed, so shattered, so ill at ease.  To add to his discomfort, his eyes distressed him and he saw objects in double.  Soon he lost his sense of distance, and his glass seemed to be a league away.  He told himself that he was the play-thing of sensorial illusions and that he was incapable of reacting.  He stretched out on a couch, but instantly he was cradled as by the tossing of a moving ship, and the affection of his heart increased.  He rose to his feet, determined to rid himself, by means of a digestive, of the food which was choking him.