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Jean des Esseintes was the last surviving member of an old noble family that had grown weak over the years. He had spent much of his youth in Paris, living a wild and luxurious life filled with parties, mistresses, and expensive tastes. But over time, he became tired of the noisy, shallow world around him. The laughter and gossip of the city no longer brought him joy. He found people boring and predictable. What once seemed exciting now felt meaningless. Worn out by society and disgusted by the foolishness of human behavior, he decided to turn away from the world completely and live in solitude.
He bought a small house in the countryside, far from Paris, and designed it to match his unique tastes. Every detail was chosen with care. The walls were covered with soft, rich fabrics, and the rooms glowed with warm, unusual colors. He arranged rare books, perfumes, and precious stones around him, each chosen for the beauty and mystery they carried. He wanted to build a world that pleased only him, one that was pure art and free from the dull reality of ordinary life. He imagined that living this way, surrounded by beauty and silence, would bring him peace.
When he moved into his new home, he felt an almost childlike excitement. He filled his rooms with strange and beautiful things: paintings from forgotten artists, antique furniture, and even a live tortoise whose shell he had decorated with precious stones. He enjoyed creating strange and artistic combinations—placing perfumes beside paintings or matching wines with pieces of music. He loved the power of imagination, believing that one could find more joy in thinking and dreaming than in living real experiences. To him, art was greater than nature, because nature was flawed and full of chaos, while art could be controlled and perfected.
But even in his isolation, his mind refused to rest. He began to feel uneasy and restless. Memories of his past returned to him—his youth, his family, his time in Paris. He remembered his early education in a strict religious school, where the priests taught discipline and faith, but also where hypocrisy and cruelty lived beneath holy words. He remembered the strange loneliness he had felt even as a child, the feeling that he did not belong among others. These memories filled him with sadness but also shaped his belief that the world outside was not meant for him.
As he spent his days alone, des Esseintes developed an intense love for literature. He admired the works of writers who understood his feelings—those who wrote about sadness, art, and the beauty of the soul. He loved authors who explored dreams, pain, and spiritual longing. He would spend hours reading poetry that lifted him away from the world, sometimes laughing at how ordinary people wasted their lives chasing empty pleasures. To him, imagination was the only place where one could truly live. He believed that books could replace people, travel, and even love.
His sense of beauty became stranger as time went on. He loved rare flowers that looked almost artificial, like they were painted by an artist rather than grown by nature. He filled his greenhouse with orchids that twisted into shapes like human faces or insects. He admired the unnatural, the mysterious, the things that seemed alive yet lifeless. He wanted to escape everything that reminded him of ordinary life, even in his garden. He saw beauty in decay, in faded colors, and in silence. He felt that the uglier the world became, the more beautiful art had to be.
Sometimes he missed the sound of voices, but not real people—only the feeling of life. To fill the silence, he experimented with perfumes and music. He built a kind of perfume organ, arranging bottles of scents that he could mix like notes in a song. He would sit for hours, blending smells until they created a mood—sadness, joy, peace, or longing. He would also play different pieces of music and imagine that he could travel through time and emotion without leaving his chair. He felt as if his house had become his body, and every sense—sight, sound, smell—was part of his imagination.
Despite all his efforts to stay happy, a shadow began to fall over his mind. His body grew weak, and he suffered from strange illnesses. He felt faint, dizzy, and anxious. The quiet that he once loved now frightened him. The world he had built began to close in on him like a cage. The perfumes that once delighted him made him sick, and the silence of his house became unbearable. He realized that escaping from the world did not mean escaping from himself. The loneliness he had chosen became his greatest torment. His imagination, once his greatest joy, now fed his fear.
One day, he decided to visit Paris again, just to remind himself of the world he had left. But when he arrived, the noise and movement overwhelmed him. The people, the carriages, the shops—all of it made him dizzy. He felt like a ghost wandering through a place that was no longer his. He quickly returned to his house, realizing he could never live among people again. Yet, back in his solitude, he also could not find peace. He had cut himself off from life so completely that neither art nor imagination could comfort him anymore.
He tried to distract himself by studying religion, though not because of faith, but out of curiosity. He admired the beauty of church rituals, the smell of incense, the sound of chants, and the sadness of sacred art. The poetry of faith touched something deep inside him, even though he no longer believed. He thought of how religion, like art, offered a way to escape the ordinary. But he also saw how it could enslave minds with fear and guilt. Torn between attraction and rejection, he found himself lost in thought, unable to decide whether the divine was truth or illusion.
His health continued to worsen. He grew pale and weak, often spending days in bed. Doctors were called, but their medicine did little good. They told him that his lifestyle—his isolation, his lack of exercise, his strange diet—was destroying him. He was told to return to society, to eat properly, to walk, to speak with people, to live again among others. But he felt disgusted by the idea. The very thought of human contact, of meaningless talk and false laughter, filled him with dread. Yet, his fear of death and madness began to grow stronger than his disgust for the world.
He struggled to eat, forcing himself to swallow food that no longer tasted of anything. The flavors he once loved were gone. He tried to read but could not focus. His mind drifted endlessly between exhaustion and feverish imagination. He started hearing strange sounds in the silence of his house, the ticking of a clock echoing like a heartbeat, the wind whispering like voices. His body trembled at night, and he could no longer sleep peacefully. Dreams and reality began to blur, and he often woke up not knowing whether he was alive or trapped in a nightmare.
He became obsessed with his own decline, watching it as though it were another form of art. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw a ghostly figure, pale and fragile. He wondered if beauty could still exist in decay, if even suffering could be turned into something meaningful. He found strange comfort in thinking that pain was proof of life. But inside, he felt empty. The colors, scents, and sounds that once filled his world now seemed dead. His imagination had burned itself out, leaving only darkness.
At times, he would think back to his youth, when he had walked freely through Paris, full of confidence and desire. He remembered the people he had known, the women he had loved, the dreams he once chased. He realized that in running away from life, he had also run away from himself. The beauty he had tried to create could not replace the warmth of living. But he was too weak to return, too far gone in his solitude to rebuild what he had destroyed. He could only watch as his own mind turned against him.
Finally, his doctors insisted he leave his house and go back to Paris for treatment. With great sadness, he agreed. As he packed his belongings, he looked around at the treasures he had collected—the paintings, the books, the perfumes, the stones—and felt nothing but sorrow. These things had been his world, his companions, his escape. But now they were only reminders of failure. He realized that the beauty he had built was lifeless without the beating heart of the world. He had wanted to live through art alone, but art without life had become a prison.
Before leaving, he stood for a long time in his empty room, thinking about everything he had tried to do. He had turned away from people, believing he could live through imagination and beauty alone. But instead of freedom, he had found pain. The silence he had once loved had become unbearable, and the perfection he had sought had turned to dust. He whispered to himself that even art, no matter how beautiful, could not replace the human heart. As he closed the door behind him, he felt the weight of all his choices pressing down on him.
On the journey back to Paris, he looked out of the carriage window at the gray countryside passing by. The world seemed strange and distant, as if he had never belonged to it. He thought about life, death, and the mystery of existence. He wondered if perhaps there was still a chance to begin again, to find some peace among the living. But deep down, he knew that the world he had rejected would never welcome him, and the one he had created had already destroyed him. Alone between both worlds, he closed his eyes and let the silence of the road carry him away.