QUO VADIS

The only book I managed to finish on honeymoon was Huysmans' A Rebours, in which the "anaemic and highly strung" Duc Jean des Esseintes flees the vulgar commerce of the bourgeoisie by designing his own hermetic world in the country: a house where the air is suffused with assiduously chosen perfumes and bouquets, whose walls are filled with paintings by Moreau, and whose shelves are lines with Catholic theology and classical literature.

Chapter III provides an acid - and occasionally ardent - overview of Latin works. I realised, upon reading it, that everything I had been taught at school was wrong...

the gentle Virgil, he whom the schoolmastering fraternity call the Swan of Mantua, presumably because that was not his native city, impressed him as being one of the most appalling pedants and one of the most deadly bores that Antiquity ever produced; his well-washed, beribboned shepherds taking it in turns to empty over each other's heads jugs of icy-cold sententious verse, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who blubbers about bees, and his Aeneas, that irresolute, garrulous individual who strides up and down like a puppet in a shadow-theatre, making wooden gestures behind the ill-fitting, badly oiled screen of the poem...

...It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid's limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace's vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown, was absolutely limitless...

The only Latin author Des Esseintes has any time whatever for - and who, indeed, he loves - is Petronius...

In villas full of insolent luxury where wealth and ostentation run riot, as also in the mean inns described throughout the book, with their unmade trestle beds swarming with fleas, the society of the day has its fling - despraced ruffians like Ascyltus and Eumolpus, out for what they can get; unnatural old men with their gowns tucked up and their cheeks plastered with white lead and acacia rouge; catamites of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women having hysterics; legacy-hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lusts of rich testators, all these and more scurry across the pages of the Satyricon, squabbling in the streets, fingering one another in the baths, beating one another up like characters in a pantomime.

It is such fine literary criticism that I notice Wikipedia's entry on Petronius quotes verbatim from Robert Baldick's translation of A Rebours. Meanwhile, I'm going to skip over Virgil and Horace and find myself a copy of the Satyricon.