During the days following his return, Des Esseintes contemplated his
books and experienced, at the thought that he might have been
separated from them for a long period, a satisfaction as complete as
that which comes after a protracted absence. Under the touch of this
sentiment, these objects possessed a renewed novelty to his mind, and
he perceived in them beauties forgotten since the time he had
purchased them.
Everything there, books, bric-a-brac and furniture, had an individual
charm for him. His bed seemed the softer by comparison with the hard
bed he would have occupied in London. The silent, discreet
ministrations of his servants charmed him, exhausted as he was at the
thought of the loud loquacity of hotel attendants. The methodical
organization of his life made him feel that it was especially to be
envied since the possibility of traveling had become imminent.
He steeped himself in this bath of habitude, to which artificial
regrets insinuated a tonic quality.
But his books chiefly preoccupied him. He examined them, re-arranged
them on the shelves, anxious to learn if the hot weather and the rains
had damaged the bindings and injured the rare paper.
He began by moving all his Latin books; then he arranged in a new
order the special works of Archelaus, Albert le Grand, Lully and
Arnaud de Villanova treating of cabbala and the occult sciences;
finally he examined his modern books, one by one, and was happy to
perceive that all had remained intact.
This collection had cost him a considerable sum of money. He would not
suffer, in his library, the books he loved to resemble other similar
volumes, printed on cotton paper with the watermarks of _Auvergne_.
Formerly in Paris he had ordered made, for himself alone, certain
volumes which specially engaged mechanics printed from hand presses.
Sometimes, he applied to Perrin of Lyons, whose graceful, clear type
was suitable for archaic reprints of old books. At other times he
dispatched orders to England or to America for the execution of modern
literature and the works of the present century. Still again, he
applied to a house in Lille, which for centuries had possessed a
complete set of Gothic characters; he also would send requisitions to
the old Enschede printing house of Haarlem whose foundry still has the
stamps and dies of certain antique letters.
He had followed the same method in selecting his papers. Finally
growing weary of the snowy Chinese and the nacreous and gilded
Japanese papers, the white Whatmans, the brown Hollands, the
buff-colored Turkeys and Seychal Mills, and equally disgusted with all
mechanically manufactured sheets, he had ordered special laid paper in
the mould, from the old plants of Vire which still employ the pestles
once in use to grind hemp. To introduce a certain variety into his
collection, he had repeatedly brought from London prepared stuffs,
paper interwoven with hairs, and as a mark of his disdain for
bibliophiles, he had a Lubeck merchant prepare for him an improved
candle paper of bottle-blue tint, clear and somewhat brittle, in the
pulp of which the straw was replaced by golden spangles resembling
those which dot Danzig brandy.
Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books,
adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by Lortic, by
Trautz-Bauzonnet or Chambolle, by the successors of Cape, in
irreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cow hide, Cape goat skin,
in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs, protected by
tabby or moire watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with clasps
and corners, and sometimes even enamelled by Gruel Engelmann with
silver oxide and clear enamels.
Thus, with the marvelous episcopal lettering used in the old house of
Le Clere, he had Baudelaire's works printed in a large format
recalling that of ancient missals, on a very light and spongy Japan
paper, soft as elder pith and imperceptibly tinted with a light rose
hue through its milky white. This edition, limited to one copy,
printed with a velvety black Chinese ink, had been covered outside and
then recovered within with a wonderful genuine sow skin, chosen among
a thousand, the color of flesh, its surface spotted where the hairs
had been and adorned with black silk stamped in cold iron in
miraculous designs by a great artist.
That day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable book from his shelves
and handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces which
seemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more than
ordinarily penetrating.
His admiration for this writer was unqualified. According to him,
until Baudelaire's advent in literature, writers had limited
themselves to exploring the surfaces of the soul or to penetrating
into the accessible and illuminated caverns, restoring here and there
the layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, and
noting, like Balzac for example, the layers of strata in the soul
possessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, by
paternal stupidity, or by senile love.
What had been treated heretofore was the abundant health of virtues
and of vices, the tranquil functioning of commonplace brains, and the
practical reality of contemporary ideas, without any ideal of sickly
depravation or of any beyond. In short, the discoveries of those
analysts had stopped at the speculations of good or evil classified by
the Church. It was the simple investigation, the conventional
examination of a botanist minutely observing the anticipated
development of normal efflorescence abounding in the natural earth.
Baudelaire had gone farther. He had descended to the very bowels of
the inexhaustible mine, had involved his mind in abandoned and
unfamiliar levels, and come to those districts of the soul where
monstrous vegetations of thought extend their branches.
There, near those confines, the haunt of aberrations and of sickness,
of the mystic lockjaw, the warm fever of lust, and the typhoids and
vomits of crime, he had found, brooding under the gloomy clock of
Ennui, the terrifying spectre of the age of sentiments and ideas.
He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attained
the October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of souls
summoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasing
decay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are
enfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseries
borne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligences
oppressed by a ridiculous destiny.
He had pursued all the phases of that lamentable autumn, studying the
human creature, quick to exasperation, ingenious in deceiving himself,
compelling his thoughts to cheat each other so as to suffer the more
keenly, and frustrating in advance all possible joy by his faculty of
analysis and observation.
Then, in this vexed sensibility of the soul, in this ferocity of
reflection that repels the restless ardor of devotions and the
well-meaning outrages of charity, he gradually saw arising the horror
of those senile passions, those ripe loves, where one person yields
while the other is still suspicious, where lassitude denies such
couples the filial caresses whose apparent youthfulness seems new, and
the maternal candors whose gentleness and comfort impart, in a sense,
the engaging remorse of a vague incest.
In magnificent pages he exposed his hybrid loves who were exasperated
by the impotence in which they were overwhelmed, the hazardous deceits
of narcotics and poisons invoked to aid in calming suffering and
conquering ennui. At an epoch when literature attributed unhappiness
of life almost exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love or to
the jealousies that attend adulterous love, he disregarded such
puerile maladies and probed into those wounds which are more fatal,
more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn in
ruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathing
and the future frightens and menaces with despair.
And the more Des Esseintes read Baudelaire, the more he felt the
ineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served only
to portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeeded
in expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language;
who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to define
with a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive and
tentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls.
After Baudelaire's works, the number of French books given place in
his shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent to
those works which it is fashionable to praise. "The broad laugh of
Rabelais," and "the deep comedy of Moliere," did not succeed in
diverting him, and the antipathy he felt against these farces was so
great that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, to
the capers of circus clowns.
As for old poetry, he read hardly anything except Villon, whose
melancholy ballads touched him, and, here and there, certain fragments
from d'Aubigne, which stimulated his blood with the incredible
vehemence of their apostrophes and curses.
In prose, he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved
even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised _Salons_ he found strangely
saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward
all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the
reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet
whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more,
he relished suggestive ideas condensed into severe and strong phrases,
such as those created by Nicole in his reflections, and especially
Pascal, whose austere pessimism and attrition deeply touched him.
Apart from such books as these, French literature began in his library
with the nineteenth century.
This section was divided into two groups, one of which included the
ordinary, secular literature, and the other the Catholic literature, a
special but little known literature published by large publishing
houses and circulated to the four corners of the earth.
He had had the hardihood to explore such crypts as these, just as in
the secular art he had discovered, under an enormous mass of insipid
writings, a few books written by true masters.
The distinctive character of this literature was the constant
immutability of its ideas and language. Just as the Church perpetuated
the primitive form of holy objects, so she has preserved the relics of
her dogmas, piously retaining, as the frame that encloses them, the
oratorical language of the celebrated century. As one of the Church's
own writers, Ozanam, has put it, the Christian style needed only to
make use of the dialect employed by Bourdaloue and by Bossuet to the
exclusion of all else.
In spite of this statement, the Church, more indulgent, closed its
eyes to certain expressions, certain turns of style borrowed from the
secular language of the same century, and the Catholic idiom had
slightly purified itself of its heavy and massive phrases, especially
cleaning itself, in Bossuet, of its prolixity and the painful rallying
of its pronouns; but here ended the concessions, and others would
doubtless have been purposeless for the prose sufficed without this
ballast for the limited range of subjects to which the Church confined
itself.
Incapable of grappling with contemporary life, of rendering the most
simple aspects of things and persons visible and palpable, unqualified
to explain the complicated wiles of intellects indifferent to the
benefits of salvation, this language was nevertheless excellent when
it treated of abstract subjects. It proved valuable in the argument of
controversy, in the demonstration of a theory, in the obscurity of a
commentary and, more than any other style, had the necessary authority
to affirm, without any discussion, the intent of a doctrine.
Unfortunately, here as everywhere, the sanctuary had been invaded by a
numerous army of pedants who smirched by their ignorance and lack of
talent the Church's noble and austere attire. Further to profane it,
devout women had interfered, and stupid sacristans and foolish
_salons_ had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of such
women.
Among such works, Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those of
Madame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous
of the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him with
insufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched:
they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny
chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news
of one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeply
mysterious air the common gossip of politics, weather forecasts and
the state of the weather.
But there was even worse: a female laureate licensed by the Institute,
Madame Augustus Craven, author of _Recit d'une soeur_, of _Eliane_ and
_Fleaurange_, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press.
Never, no, never, had Des Esseintes imagined that any person could
write such ridiculous nonsense. In the point of conception, these
books were so absurd, and were written in such a disgusting style,
that by these tokens they became almost remarkable and rare.
It was not at all among the works of women that Des Esseintes, whose
soul was completely jaded and whose nature was not inclined to
sentimentality, could come upon a literary retreat suited to his
taste.
Yet he strove, with a diligence that no impatience could overcome, to
enjoy the works of a certain girl of genius, the blue-stocking pucelle
of the group, but his efforts miscarried. He did not take to the
_Journal_ and the _Lettres_ in which Eugenie de Guerin celebrates,
without discretion, the amazing talent of a brother who rhymed, with
such cleverness and grace that one must go to the works of de Jouy and
Ecouchard Lebrun to find anything so novel and daring.
He had also unavailingly attempted to comprehend the delights of those
works in which one may find such things as these:
This morning I hung on papa's bed a cross which a little
girl had given him yesterday.
Or:
Mimi and I are invited by Monsieur Roquiers to attend the
consecration of a bell tomorrow. This does not displease
me at all.
Or wherein we find such important events as these:
On my neck I have hung a medal of the Holy Virgin which
Louise had brought me, as an amulet against cholera.
Or poetry of this sort:
O the lovely moonbeam which fell on the Bible I was reading!
And, finally, such fine and penetrating observations as these:
When I see a man pass before a crucifix, lift his hat and
make the sign of the Cross, I say to myself, 'There goes a
Christian.'
And she continued in this fashion, without pause, until after Maurice
de Guerin had died, after which his sister bewailed him in other
pages, written in a watery prose strewn here and there with bits of
poems whose humiliating poverty ended by moving Des Esseintes to pity.
Ah! it was hardly worth mentioning, but the Catholic party was not at
all particular in the choice of its proteges and not at all artistic.
Without exception, all these writers wrote in the pallid white prose
of pensioners of a monastery, in a flowing movement of phrase which no
astringent could counterbalance.
So Des Esseintes, horror-stricken at such insipidities, entirely
forsook this literature. But neither did he find atonement for his
disappointments among the modern masters of the clergy. These latter
were one-sided divines or impeccably correct controversialists, but
the Christian language in their orations and books had ended by
becoming impersonal and congealing into a rhetoric whose every
movement and pause was anticipated, in a sequence of periods
constructed after a single model. And, in fact, Des Esseintes
discovered that all the ecclesiastics wrote in the same manner, with a
little more or a little less abandon or emphasis, and there was seldom
any variations between the bodiless patterns traded by Dupanloup or
Landriot, La Bouillerie or Gaume, by Dom Gueranger or Ratisbonne, by
Freppel or Perraud, by Ravignan or Gratry, by Olivain or Dosithee, by
Didon or Chocarne.
Des Esseintes had often pondered upon this matter. A really authentic
talent, a supremely profound originality, a well-anchored conviction,
he thought, was needed to animate this formal style which was too
frail to support any thought that was unforseen or any thesis that was
audacious.
Yet, despite all this, there were several writers whose burning
eloquence fused and shaped this language, notably Lacordaire, who was
one of the few really great writers the Church had produced for many
years.
Immured, like his colleagues, in the narrow circle of orthodox
speculations, likewise obliged to dissipate his energies in the
exclusive consideration of those theories which had been expressed and
consecrated by the Fathers of the Church and developed by the masters
of the pulpit, he succeeded in inbuing them with novelty and in
rejuvenating, almost in modifying them, by clothing them in a more
personal and stimulating form. Here and there in his _Conferences de
Notre-Dame_, were treasures of expression, audacious usages of words,
accents of love, rapid movements, cries of joy and distracted
effusions. Then, to his position as a brilliant and gentle monk whose
ingenuity and labors had been exhausted in the impossible task of
conciliating the liberal doctrines of society with the authoritarian
dogmas of the Church, he added a temperament of fierce love and suave
diplomatic tenderness. In his letters to young men may be found the
caressing inflections of a father exhorting his sons with smiling
reprimands, the well-meaning advice and the indulgent forgiveness.
Some of these Des Esseintes found charming, confessing as they did the
monk's yearning for affection, while others were even imposing when
they sought to sustain courage and dissipate doubts by the inimitable
certainties of Faith. In fine, this sentiment of paternity, which gave
his pen a delicately feminine quality, lent to his prose a
characteristically individual accent discernible among all the
clerical literature.
After Lacordaire, ecclesiastics and monks possessing any individuality
were extremely rare. At the very most, a few pages of his pupil, the
Abbe Peyreyve, merited reading. He left sympathetic biographies of his
master, wrote a few loveable letters, composed treatises in the
sonorous language of formal discourse, and delivered panegyrics in
which the declamatory tone was too broadly stressed. Certainly the
Abbe Peyreyve had neither the emotion nor the ardor of Lacordaire. He
was too much a priest and too little a man. Yet, here and there in the
rhetoric of his sermons, flashed interesting effects of large and
solid phrasing or touches of nobility that were almost venerable.
But to find writers of prose whose works justify close study, one was
obliged to seek those who had not submitted to Ordination; to the
secular writers whom the interests of Catholicism engaged and devoted
to its cause.
With the Comte de Falloux, the episcopal style, so stupidly handled by
the prelates, recruited new strength and in a manner recovered its
masculine vigor. Under his guise of moderation, this academician
exuded gall. The discourse which he delivered to Parliament in 1848
was diffuse and abject, but his articles, first printed in the
_Correspondant_ and since collected into books, were mordant and
discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceived
as harangues, they contained a certain strong muscular energy and were
astonishing in the intolerance of their convictions.
A dangerous polemist because of his ambuscades, a shrewd logician,
executing flanking movements and attacking unexpectedly, the Comte de
Falloux had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death of
Madame Swetchine, whose tracts he had collected and whom he revered as
a saint.
But the true temperament of the writer was betrayed in the two
brochures which appeared in 1848 and 1880, the latter entitled
_l'Unite nationale_.
Moved by a cold rage, the implacable legitimist this time fought
openly, contrary to his custom, and hurled against the infidels, in
the form of a peroration, such fulminating invectives as these:
"And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of human
nature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds,
emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the
simian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied:
you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the
high-priests of an abominable future!"
The other brochure bore the title _le Parti catholique_ and was
directed against the despotism of the _Univers_ and against Veuillot
whose name he refused to mention. Here the sinuous attacks were
resumed, venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman, clad in
blue answered the sharp physical blows of the fighter with scornful
sarcasms.
These contestants represented the two parties of the Church, the two
factions whose differences were resolved into virulent hatreds. De
Falloux, the more haughty and cunning, belonged to the liberal camp
which already claimed Montalembert and Cochin, Lacordaire and De
Broglie. He subscribed to the principles of the _Correspondant_, a
review which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the Church
with a varnish of tolerance. Veuillot, franker and more open, scorned
such masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultramontaine
doctrines and confessed, with a certain compunction, the pitiless yoke
of the Church's dogma.
For the conduct of this verbal warfare, Veuillot had made himself
master of a special style, partly borrowed from La Bruyere and Du
Gros-Caillou. This half-solemn, half-slang style, had the force of a
tomahawk in the hands of this vehement personality. Strangely
headstrong and brave, he had overwhelmed both free thinkers and
bishops with this terrible weapon, charging at his enemies like a
bull, regardless of the party to which they belonged. Distrusted by
the Church, which would tolerate neither his contraband style nor his
fortified theories, he had nevertheless overawed everybody by his
powerful talent, incurring the attack of the entire press which he
effectively thrashed in his _Odeurs de Paris_, coping with every
assault, freeing himself with a kick of the foot of all the wretched
hack-writers who had presumed to attack him.
Unfortunately, this undisputed talent only existed in pugilism. At
peace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry and
novels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engaged
in a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banal
litanies and mumbling childish hymns.
More formal, more constrained and more serious was the beloved
apologist of the Church, Ozanam, the inquisitor of the Christian
language. Although he was very difficult to understand, Des Esseintes
never failed to be astonished by the insouciance of this writer, who
spoke confidently of God's impenetrable designs, although he felt
obliged to establish proof of the improbable assertions he advanced.
With the utmost self-confidence, he deformed events, contradicted,
with greater impudence even than the panegyrists of other parties, the
known facts of history, averred that the Church had never concealed
the esteem it had for science, called heresies impure miasmas, and
treated Buddhism and other religions with such contempt that he
apologized for even soiling his Catholic prose by onslaught on their
doctrines.
At times, religious passion breathed a certain ardor into his
oratorical language, under the ice of which seethed a violent current;
in his numerous writings on Dante, on Saint Francis, on the author of
_Stabat Mater_, on the Franciscan poets, on socialism, on commercial
law and every imaginable subject, this man pleaded for the defense of
the Vatican which he held indefectible, and judged causes and opinions
according to their harmony or discord with those that he advanced.
This manner of viewing questions from a single viewpoint was also the
method of that literary scamp, Nettement, whom some people would have
made the other's rival. The latter was less bigoted than the master,
affected less arrogance and admitted more worldly pretentions. He
repeatedly left the literary cloister in which Ozanam had imprisoned
himself, and had read secular works so as to be able to judge of them.
This province he entered gropingly, like a child in a vault, seeing
nothing but shadow around him, perceiving in this gloom only the gleam
of the candle which illumed the place a few paces before him.
In this gloom, uncertain of his bearings, he stumbled at every turn,
speaking of Murger who had "the care of a chiselled and carefully
finished style"; of Hugo who sought the noisome and unclean and to
whom he dared compare De Laprade; of Paul Delacroix who scorned the
rules; of Paul Delaroche and of the poet Reboul, whom he praised
because of their apparent faith.
Des Esseintes could not restrain a shrug of the shoulders before these
stupid opinions, covered by a borrowed prose whose already worn
texture clung or became torn at each phrase.
In a different way, the works of Poujoulat and Genoude, Montalembert,
Nicolas and Carne failed to inspire him with any definite interest.
His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with the
scholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duc de Broglie, nor was
his penchant for the social and religious questions, even when
broached by Henry Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter where
he gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at the
Sacre-Coeur. He had not touched these books for a long time, and the
period was already remote when he had thrown with his waste paper the
puerile lucubrations of the gloomy Pontmartin and the pitiful Feval;
and long since he had given to his servants, for a certain vulgar
usage, the short stories of Aubineau and Lasserre, in which are
recorded wretched hagiographies of miracles effected by Dupont of
Tours and by the Virgin.
In no way did Des Esseintes derive even a fugitive distraction from
his boredom from this literature. The mass of books which he had once
studied he had thrown into dim corners of his library shelves when he
left the Fathers' school. "I should have left them in Paris," he told
himself, as he turned out some books which were particularly
insufferable: those of the Abbe Lamennais and that impervious
sectarian so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the Comte
Joseph de Maistre.
A single volume remained on a shelf, within reach of his hand. It was
the _Homme_ of Ernest Hello. This writer was the absolute opposite of
his religious confederates. Almost isolated among the pious group
terrified by his conduct, Ernest Hello had ended by abandoning the
open road that led from earth to heaven. Probably disgusted by the
dullness of the journey and the noisy mob of those pilgrims of letters
who for centuries followed one after the other upon the same highway,
marching in each other's steps, stopping at the same places to
exchange the same commonplace remarks on religion, on the Church
Fathers, on their similar beliefs, on their common masters, he had
departed through the byways to wander in the gloomy glade of Pascal,
where he tarried long to recover his breath before continuing on his
way and going even farther in the regions of human thought than the
Jansenist, whom he derided.
Tortuous and precious, doctoral and complex, Hello, by the piercing
cunning of his analysis, recalled to Des Esseintes the sharp, probing
investigations of some of the infidel psychologists of the preceding
and present century. In him was a sort of Catholic Duranty, but more
dogmatic and penetrating, an experienced manipulation of the
magnifying glass, a sophisticated engineer of the soul, a skillful
watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a
passion and elucidate it by details of the wheel work.
In this oddly formed mind existed unsurmised relationships of
thoughts, harmonies and oppositions; furthermore, he affected a wholly
novel manner of action which used the etymology of words as a
spring-board for ideas whose associations sometimes became tenuous,
but which almost constantly remained ingenious and sparkling.
Thus, despite the awkwardness of his structure, he dissected with a
singular perspicacity, the _Avare_, "the ordinary man," and "the
passion of unhappiness," revealing meanwhile interesting comparisons
which could be constructed between the operations of photography and
of memory.
But such skill in handling this perfected instrument of analysis,
stolen from the enemies of the Church, represented only one of the
temperamental phases of this man.
Still another existed. This mind divided itself in two parts and
revealed, besides the writer, the religious fanatic and Biblical
prophet.
Like Hugo, whom he now and again recalled in distortions of phrases
and words, Ernest Hello had delighted in imitating Saint John of
Patmos. He pontificated and vaticinated from his retreat in the rue
Saint-Sulpice, haranguing the reader with an apocalyptic language
partaking in spots of the bitterness of an Isaiah.
He affected inordinate pretentions of profundity. There were some
fawning and complacent people who pretended to consider him a great
man, the reservoir of learning, the encyclopedic giant of the age.
Perhaps he was a well, but one at whose bottom one often could not
find a drop of water.
In his volume _Paroles de Dieu_, he paraphrased the Holy Scriptures,
endeavoring to complicate their ordinarily obvious sense. In his other
book _Homme_, and in his brochure _le Jour du Seigneur_, written in a
biblical style, rugged and obscure, he sought to appear like a
vengeful apostle, prideful and tormented with spleen, but showed
himself a deacon touched with a mystic epilepsy, or like a talented
Maistre, a surly and bitter sectarian.
But, thought Des Esseintes, this sickly shamelessness often obstructed
the inventive sallies of the casuist. With more intolerance than even
Ozanam, he resolutely denied all that pertained to his clan,
proclaimed the most disconcerting axioms, maintained with a
disconcerting authority that "geology is returning toward Moses," and
that natural history, like chemistry and every contemporary science,
verifies the scientific truth of the Bible. The proposition on each
page was of the unique truth and the superhuman knowledge of the
Church, and everywhere were interspersed more than perilous aphorisms
and raging curses cast at the art of the last century.
To this strange mixture was added the love of sanctimonious delights,
such as a translation of the _Visions_ by Angele de Foligno, a book of
an unparalleled fluid stupidity, with selected works of Jean Rusbrock
l'Admirable, a mystic of the thirteenth century whose prose offered an
incomprehensible but alluring combination of dusky exaltations,
caressing effusions, and poignant transports.
The whole attitude of this presumptuous pontiff, Hello, had leaped
from a preface written for this book. He himself remarked that
"extraordinary things can only be stammered," and he stammered in good
truth, declaring that "the holy gloom where Rusbrock extends his eagle
wings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for such as him the far
horizons would be a too narrow garment."
However this might be, Des Esseintes felt himself intrigued toward
this ill-balanced but subtile mind. No fusion had been effected
between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very
jolts and incoherencies constituted the personality of the man.
With him was recruited the little group of writers who fought on the
front battle line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to the
regular army, but were more properly the scouts of a religion which
distrusted men of such talent as Veuillot and Hello, because they did
not seem sufficiently submissive and shallow. What the Church really
desires is soldiers who do not reason, files of such blind combatants
and such mediocrities as Hello describes with the rage of one who has
submitted to their yoke. Thus it was that Catholicism had lost no time
in driving away one of its partisans, an enraged pamphleteer who wrote
in a style at once rare and exasperated, the savage Leon Bloy; and
caused to be cast from the doors of its bookshops, as it would a
plague or a filthy vagrant, another writer who had made himself hoarse
with celebrating its praises, Barbey d'Aurevilly.
It is true that the latter was too prone to compromise and not
sufficiently docile. Others bent their heads under rebukes and
returned to the ranks; but he was the _enfant terrible_, and was
unrecognized by the party. In a literary way, he pursued women whom he
dragged into the sanctuary. Nay, even that vast disdain was invoked,
with which Catholicism enshrouds talent to prevent excommunication
from putting beyond the pale of the law a perplexing servant who,
under pretext of honoring his masters, broke the window panes of the
chapel, juggled with the holy pyxes and executed eccentric dances
around the tabernacle.
Two works of Barbey d'Aurevilly specially attracted Des Esseintes, the
_Pretre marie_ and the _Diaboliques_. Others, such as the _Ensorcele_,
the _Chevalier des touches_ and _Une Vieille Maitresse_, were
certainly more comprehensive and more finely balanced, but they left
Des Esseintes untouched, for he was really interested only in
unhealthy works which were consumed and irritated by fever.
In these all but healthy volumes, Barbey d'Aurevilly constantly
hesitated between those two pits which the Catholic religion succeeds
in reconciling: mysticism and sadism.
In these two books which Des Esseintes was thumbing, Barbey had lost
all prudence, given full rein to his steed, and galloped at full speed
over roads to their farthest limits.
All the mysterious horror of the Middle Ages hovered over that
improbable book, the _Pretre marie_; magic blended with religion,
black magic with prayer and, more pitiless and savage than the Devil
himself, the God of Original Sin incessantly tortured the innocent
Calixte, His reprobate, as once He had caused one of his angels to
mark the houses of unbelievers whom he wished to slay.
Conceived by a fasting monk in the grip of delirium, these scenes were
unfolded in the uneven style of a tortured soul. Unfortunately, among
those disordered creatures that were like galvanized Coppelias of
Hoffmann, some, like Neel de Nehou, seemed to have been imagined in
moments of exhaustion following convulsions, and were discordant notes
in this harmony of sombre madness, where they were as comical and
ridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece.
After these mystic divagations, the writer had experienced a period of
calm. Then a terrible relapse followed.
This belief that man is a Buridanesque donkey, a being balanced
between two forces of equal attraction which successively remain
victorious and vanquished, this conviction that human life is only an
uncertain combat waged between hell and heaven, this faith in two
opposite beings, Satan and Christ, was fatally certain to engender
such inner discords of the soul, exalted by incessant struggle,
excited at once by promises and menaces, and ending by abandoning
itself to whichever of the two forces persisted in the pursuit the
more relentlessly.
In the _Pretre marie_, Barbey d'Aurevilly sang the praises of Christ,
who had prevailed against temptations; in the _Diaboliques_, the
author succumbed to the Devil, whom he celebrated; then appeared
sadism, that bastard of Catholicism, which through the centuries
religion has relentlessly pursued with its exorcisms and stakes.
This condition, at once fascinating and ambiguous, can not arise in
the soul of an unbeliever. It does not merely consist in sinking
oneself in the excesses of the flesh, excited by outrageous
blasphemies, for in such a case it would be no more than a case of
satyriasis that had reached its climax. Before all, it consists in
sacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, in
a wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. It
also is founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the
satisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play with
forbidden things, for no reason other than that they had been
forbidden to do so.
In fact, if it did not admit of sacrilege, sadism would have no reason
for existence. Besides, the sacrilege proceeding from the very
existence of a religion, can only be intentionally and pertinently
performed by a believer, for no one would take pleasure in profaning a
faith that was indifferent or unknown to him.
The power of sadism and the attraction it presents, lies entirely then
in the prohibited enjoyment of transferring to Satan the praises and
prayers due to God; it lies in the non-observance of Catholic precepts
which one really follows unwillingly, by committing in deeper scorn of
Christ, those sins which the Church has especially cursed, such as
pollution of worship and carnal orgy.
In its elements, this phenomenon to which the Marquis de Sade has
bequeathed his name is as old as the Church. It had reared its head in
the eighteenth century, recalling, to go back no farther, by a simple
phenomenon of atavism the impious practices of the Sabbath, the
witches' revels of the Middle Ages.
By having consulted the _Malleus maleficorum_, that terrible code of
Jacob Sprenger which permits the Church wholesale burnings of
necromancers and sorcerers, Des Esseintes recognized in the witches'
Sabbath, all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism.
In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the nights
successively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies and
devoted to the bestialities of passion, he once more discovered the
parody of the processions, the insults and eternal threats levelled at
God and the devotion bestowed upon His rival, while amid cursing of
the wine and the bread, the black mass was being celebrated on the
back of a woman on all fours, whose stained bare thighs served as the
altar from which the congregation received the communion from a black
goblet stamped with an image of a goat.
This profusion of impure mockeries and foul shames were marked in the
career of the Marquis de Sade, who garnished his terrible pleasures
with outrageous sacrileges.
He cried out to the sky, invoked Lucifer, shouted his contempt of God,
calling Him rogue and imbecile, spat upon the communion, endeavored to
contaminate with vile ordures a Divinity who he prayed might damn him,
the while he declared, to defy Him the more, that He did not exist.
Barbey d'Aurevilly approached this psychic state. If he did not
presume as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious curses against the
Saviour; if, more prudent or more timid, he claimed ever to honor the
Church, he none the less addressed his suit to the Devil as was done
in medieval times and he, too, in order to brave God, fell into
demoniac nymphomania, inventing sensual monstrosities, even borrowing
from bedroom philosophy a certain episode which he seasoned with new
condiments when he wrote the story _le Diner d'un athee_.
This extravagant book pleased Des Esseintes. He had caused to be
printed, in violet ink and in a frame of cardinal purple, on a genuine
parchment which the judges of the Rota had blessed, a copy of the
_Diaboliques_, with characters whose quaint quavers and flourishes in
turned up tails and claws affected a satanic form.
After certain pieces of Baudelaire that, in imitation of the clamorous
songs of nocturnal revels, celebrated infernal litanies, this volume
alone of all the works of contemporary apostolic literature testified
to this state of mind, at once impious and devout, toward which
Catholicism often thrust Des Esseintes.
With Barbey d'Aurevilly ended the line of religious writers; and in
truth, that pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secular
literature than to the other with which he demanded a place that was
denied him. His language was the language of disheveled romanticism,
full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delighted
with extravagant comparisons and with whip strokes and phrases which
exploded, like the clangor of noisy bells, along the text. In short,
d'Aurevilly was like a stallion among the geldings of the
ultramontaine stables.
Des Esseintes reflected in this wise while re-reading, here and there,
several passages of the book and, comparing its nervous and changing
style with the fixed manner of other Church writers, he thought of the
evolution of language which Darwin has so truly revealed.
Compelled to live in a secular atmosphere, raised in the heart of the
romantic school, constantly being in the current of modern literature
and accustomed to reading contemporary publications, Barbey
d'Aurevilly had acquired a dialect which although it had sustained
numerous and profound changes since the Great Age, had nevertheless
renewed itself in his works.
The ecclesiastical writers, on the contrary, confined within specific
limitations, restricted to ancient Church literature, knowing nothing
of the literary progress of the centuries and determined if need be to
blind their eyes the more surely not to see, necessarily were
constrained to the use of an inflexible language, like that of the
eighteenth century which descendants of the French who settled in
Canada still speak and write today, without change of phrasing or
words, having succeeded in preserving their original idiom by
isolation in certain metropolitan centres, despite the fact that they
are enveloped upon every side by English-speaking peoples.
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.