How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point?
Durtal answered himself: "I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having
been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe.
"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to consider if,
however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense
in it.
"After all, my surprise depends on preconceived ideas of conversions. I
have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt,
or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined.
It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of these
two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also a
third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has
used in my case. And I know not in what this consists; it is something
analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel
it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a
crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without
knowing how or why, the thing is done.
"Yes, but in fact this manoeuvre is very like that of the mine which
only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that case
the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved; I
might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread,
but in this case, no! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without
even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap
of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can, be occult and
silent, strange and gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden
disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an
act of which we are aware.
"No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that there has
been divine impulse, grace.
"But," said he, "in that case the psychology of conversion is
worthless," and he made answer to himself,--
"That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages through
which I have passed; no doubt I can distinguish here and there some
landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity, weariness
of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of
childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to
the churches; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and
group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent
explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to
myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on
one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has
vanished, and left no trace.
"It is certain," he continued, after silent thought, "that in these
cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in the
hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so caressing,
that the soul they have handled has felt nothing.
"On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my conversion,
I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference,
have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round
about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me
in."
And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three causes:--
"First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered among the
monasteries;" and the memories of childhood returned to him, of cousins,
of aunts, seen in convent parlours; gentle women and grave, white as
wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their
looks, and asked if he were a good boy.
He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother's skirts,
trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those
colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss.
Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews which had
wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put
into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours
with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the
convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the bitter
salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with
trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose
mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water; and a thousand details
came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran
in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These
gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he
retained a somewhat confused memory of them, amid which was the vague
recollection of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the
north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone.
It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had
left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind
embellished them; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty
years, and now began to work.
But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still more
active.
These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art; and the
disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness.
After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having taken the
impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at
last chosen after much useless vagabondage; he had become the intimate
friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much
attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton,
named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice.
These friendships were not like those he had formerly made, entirely
superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity
of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been
roughly broken; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix
died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that
prostrated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus.
These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without an anchor,
drifted; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this
desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends
are not made.
So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude which he bore
bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became
intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an arm-chair in
the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams: then, especially,
fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing pantomimes of
which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes.
Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke from
these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to
throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned
himself to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to
him.
"Let me chase away these phantoms by work," he cried. But at what should
he work? He had just published the "Life of Gilles de Rais," which might
interest a few artists, and he now remained without a subject, on the
hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went
from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism
of the Middle Ages, in his account of "Marshal de Rais," he saw nothing
so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which
he had discovered in Görres' and Ribet's "Studies in Mysticism" had put
him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new
documents.
But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could he write
the life of a saint? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which
he based his opinion seemed plausible.
Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood
carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only
treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who
seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast
trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody, a
translation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the
coloured images of Bouasse.
The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to plan it
out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language
of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead.
Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of
the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in
one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in
their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the
barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of
the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?
Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious imitations,
nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains,
whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting
up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint; and this is at least
doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of
style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would
probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be
no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less
adroitly; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would seem
mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then ... then ... one must
have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one's heroine, if
one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book.
This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert's admirable pages
on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like a
dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose apparent
simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate skill.
All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a
true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course
through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the
love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul.
On the other hand, Hello's "Physionomies de Saints" are worth reading.
Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each
chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between
the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the
fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them; the meanness of his
style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is
lacking which would rescue the book from the category of pale and dead
publications.
The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever writers
were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St.
Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor and
narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and
yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a
task, it were better to be silent; and he threw himself back in his
chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew
upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have
in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were
no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters
gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home
again, and assured them a resting-place.
No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose plan of
labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had
wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by
boasting the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble.
In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate, and mourns
over the enforced task of living. Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the book
of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their every
line, and the Middle Ages too in the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" cursed
existence, and cried out loudly for death.
More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there is nothing
to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere catalogues
of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of
the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations.
"Then," he said to himself, "if it be well considered, the vaunted
argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and
injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God
made it, but as man has refashioned it."
Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting to examine
through what phases of consent, through what voluntary falls the
creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores.
We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which
beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer; we may well
loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly
souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot down
by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time of
peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money
market.
But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror,
the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a
mystery no philosophy can explain.
"Ah!" he went on, "when I think of that horror, that disgust of
existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand
how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find
shelter.
"Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the
great winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my
history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy,
its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that
Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of
comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and
rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age
advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is
crumbling.
"I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they
take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their
backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your
disease."
Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than
his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew
him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had
entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard
the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal
chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelful of
verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he had
listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of
All Souls, he had felt himself caught once for all; but that which had
put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more completely into
bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week.
He had visited the churches during that week; and they had opened to him
like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were
forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped
lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd
flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross
formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of
which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the
blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly
kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.
And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church,
became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.
At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy
of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had
followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all
their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the
Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebræ by the slow
chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it
over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the
Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at nightfall.
The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate before the
Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.
By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to
console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own,
sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that
sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ
Himself.
Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his
temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to
him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the
liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been
appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church
where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.
Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great
and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller
sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.
Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed
for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont
to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner
of the poorer part of Paris.
He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the
Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were
thoroughly at home.
Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the
clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice
flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.
There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague
uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more
than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of
joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his
senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.
He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten
o'clock.
He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy
and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat
fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very
old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared
or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base,
hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like
celery.
No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their
naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their
junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic
roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four
hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The
shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars
was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered,
the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only
stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags
like handfuls of russet lace.
And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one,
strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue
smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had
grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which
was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof
the broken stems fell from above the arches.
The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed
stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute
panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more
obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their
surface.
This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton trees, a
conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up
the memory of an impossible phoenix and unlikely palms; but it also
recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a
ship's prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars,
to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested
by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which
sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.
On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public
filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat
further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost
alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid
nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were
beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers,
street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe,
who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the
piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their
eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.
Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the
mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of
St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than
it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule
solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir,
and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion,
above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its
slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once
monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed
itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their
last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ.
At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all
the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the
others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order,
more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in
the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and
more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.
At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself: "It is
impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this
musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as
to be superhuman, and far from profane music, which has never attained
to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."
The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The "Kyrie
eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the
grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding
and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus,"
concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the
choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung
low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become
loud.
Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced there as in
other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical
liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned
voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds
from the deep.
It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful surroundings of the
Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose
behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he could
not see.
He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and
all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears,
of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the
ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.
When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and was
delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and
sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those
wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of
the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the
superhuman effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still visible.
The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose
capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with
large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a crosier.
The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on
the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the
arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary,
some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been restored
by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and
a really touching simplicity.
They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal foundries,
and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who
pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and
pensive, dressed in robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue,
gooseberry-red, pumpkin-purple and wine lees, and these are made still
deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or destroyed,
which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass. In
one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light,
between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by
the wings of the two angels whose faces also seem cut in crystal and
full of light.
These windows differ from those of other churches, in that they absorb
the rays of the sun, without refracting them. No doubt they have been
deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent
joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this church
which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and
thieves.
Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the modern churches are
useless, they remain deaf to the prayers which break against the icy
indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves
where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps
given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves,
rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the
neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed
that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His
promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would
retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not
been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they
might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him,
in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift
of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in
the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development
of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has
carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to
those of His Saints.
Ah, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those chapels damp and
smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of
extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense!
In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of other
years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith; among
these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most
certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever
pray in earnest he could do it in that church; and he said to himself
that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is impossible but that the
burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for ever
impregnated the pillars and stained the walls; it is impossible but that
the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of
tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which
sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of
tears.
As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this church remained
intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from
the Château Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the
modern rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with
prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and
spirits.
In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises, delicate and
little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen
far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle,
its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through
which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it
appears, at least, from the Place Saint André des Arts. Symbolically it
might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and
hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and
that very real bell.
"They say," thought Durtal, "they say that ignorant architects and
unskilled archæologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and
surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived in
its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance
with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was a
monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas
which are put up as a show in open spaces.
"Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and not
standing; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it
from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal twilight,
out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a
servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels.
"Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of
Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful
choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas,
here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists!"
Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church which
satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much
overrun by tourists; there were few ceremonies there, just the necessary
amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels
remained closed; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted
mending; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them
hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still; the shell of the
church was charming, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of
Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack of
sick beasts were growling; as for the other sanctuaries on the right
bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as
possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere
ornamented with promiscuous tunes.
Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches, for
religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as
you pass the bridges.
In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent,
and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies
and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in
its turn had directed him to God.
Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left
architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the other
arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the
breviaries, into the books of Ruysbröck, Angela da Foligno, Saint
Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had confirmed
him in his belief.
But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was too recent
for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it
seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to set
it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt the reality
of his conversion, and said: "After all I am united to the church only
on the side of art. I only go there to see or hear and not to pray; I do
not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as in
a warm bath I do not feel the cold if I am motionless, but if I move I
freeze, so in the church my impulses are upset when I move, I am almost
on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy
outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves,
skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except
Faith."
But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to feeling,
was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious
ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church,
they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to
return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if
he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts,
seeking to revive themselves, without his consciousness, by the cordial
of a false piety.
In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean miracle, when
he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without connection
of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the
explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let
them burn themselves out, to resist them.
He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came the
reverse movement; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be
clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went as
far as the door and dared not enter.
At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself, and cried
in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only
pleasure that remained to me--the flesh. Once I amused myself without
blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one
more weariness to existence--would that I could undo it."
He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by suggesting
doubts.
"Suppose all this were not true, if there were nothing in it, if I were
deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right?"
But he was obliged to be sorry for himself, for he felt distinctly to
the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true
Faith.
"These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for my
filthinesses are odious," he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm
sprang up within him.
How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church,
for she commands assent?
First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most
wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the
world began have had the flesh as their spring-board. Logically and
humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and
woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin
in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to God
by the foulest uncleanness.
All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has
remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the
soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to
her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to
her.
Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in
spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the
disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the
awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.
"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her
prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the
truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures,
scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly
dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals
them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that true
life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible,
before all things admirable, she is great--
"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments
she orders!"
And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer.