XII

 

DURING the days that followed his return home, Des Esseintes browsed through the books in his library, and at the thought that he might have been parted from them for a long time he was filled with the same heart-felt satisfaction he would have enjoyed if he had come back to them after a genuine separation.  Under the impulse of this feeling, he saw them in a new light, discovering beauties in them he had forgotten ever since he had bought and read them for the first time.

      Everything indeed - books, bric-à-brac, and furniture - acquired a peculiar charm in his eyes.  His bed seemed softer in comparison with the pellet he would have occupied in London; the discreet and silent service he got at home delighted him, exhausted as he was by the very thought of the noisy garrulity of hotel waiters; the methodical organization of his daily life appeared more admirable than ever, now that the hazard of travelling was a possibility.

      He steeped himself once more in this refreshing bath of settled habits, to which artificial regrets added a more bracing and more tonic quality.

      But it was his books that chiefly engaged his attention.  He took them all down from their shelves and examined them before putting them back, to see whether, since his coming to Fontenay, the heat and damp had not damaged their bindings or spotted their precious papers.

      He began by going through the whole of his Latin library; then he rearranged the specialist works by Archelaus, Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully, and Arnaud de Villanova dealing with the cabbala and the occult sciences; and lastly he checked all his modern books one by one.  To his delight he discovered that they had one and all kept dry and were in good condition.

      This collection had cost him considerable sums of money, for the truth was that he could not bear to have his favourite authors printed on rag-paper, as they were in other people's libraries, with characters like hobnails in a peasant's boots.

      In Paris in former days, he had had certain volumes set up just for himself and printed on hand-presses by specially hired workmen.  Sometimes he would commission Perrin of Lyons, whose slim, clear types were well adapted for archaic reimpressions of old texts; sometimes he would send to England or America for new characters to print works of the present century; sometimes he would apply to a house a Lille which for hundreds of years had possessed a complete fount of Gothic letters; sometimes again he would commandeer the fine old Enschedé printing-works at Haarlem, whose foundry has preserved the stamps and matrices of the so-called lettres de civilité.

      He had done the same with the paper for his books.  Deciding one fine day that he was tired of the ordinary expensive papers - silver from China, pearly gold from Japan, white from Whatman's, greyish brown from Holland, buff from Turkey and the Seychal mills - and disgusted with the machine- made varieties, he had ordered special hand-made papers from the old mills at Vire where they still use pestles once employed to crush hempseed.  To introduce a little variety into his collection, he had at various times imported certain dressed fabrics from London - flock papers and rep papers - while to help mark his contempt for other bibliophiles, a Lubeck manufacturer supplied him with a glorified candle-paper, bluish in colour, noisy and brittle to the touch, in which the straw fibres were replaced by flakes of gold such as you find floating in Danzig brandy.

      In this way he had got together some unique volumes, always choosing unusual formats and having them clothed by Lortic, by Trautz-Bauzonnet, by Chambolle, by Capé's successors, in irreproachable bindings of old silk, of embossed ox-hide, of Cape goat-skin - all full bindings, patterned and inlaid, lined with tabby or watered silk, adorned in ecclesiastic fashion with metal clasps and corners, sometimes even decorated by Gruele-Engelmann in oxidized silver and shining enamel.

      Thus he had had Baudelaire's works printed with the admirable episcopal type of the old house of Le Clere, in a large format similar to that of a mass-book, on a very light Japanese felt, a bibulous paper as soft as elder-pith, its milky whiteness faintly tinged with pink.  This edition, limited to a single copy and printed in a velvety China-ink black, had been dressed outside and lined inside with a mirific and authentic flesh-coloured pigskin, one in a thousand, dotted all over where the bristles had been and blind-tooled in black with designs of marvellous aptness chosen by a great artist.

      On this particular day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable volume down from his shelves and fondled it reverently, re-reading certain pieces which in this simple but priceless setting seemed to him deeper and subtler than ever.

      His admiration for this author knew no bounds.  In his opinion, writers had hitherto confined themselves to exploring the surface of the soul, or such underground passages as were easily accessible and well lit, measuring here and there the deposits of the seven deadly sins, studying the lie of the lodes and their development, recording for instance, as Balzac did, the stratification of a soul possessed by some monomaniacal passion - ambition or avarice, paternal love or senile lust.

      Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brain of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and otherworldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these analysts of human nature stopped short at the speculations, good or bad, classified by the Church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.

      Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

      There, near the breeding-ground of intellectual aberrations and diseases of the mind - the mystical tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime - he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

      He had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, and had listed the symptoms of souls visited by sorrow, singled out by spleen; he had shown how blight affects the emotions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away, and nothing remains but the barren memory of hardships, tyrannies, and slights, suffered at the behest of a despotic and freakish fate.

      He had followed every phase of this lamentable autumn, watching the human creature, skilled in self-torment and adept in self-deception, forcing its thoughts to cheat one another in order to suffer more acutely, and ruining in advance, thanks to its powers of analysis and observation, any chance of happiness it might have.

      Then, out of this irritable sensitivity of soul, out of this bitterness of mind that savagely repulses the embarrassing attentions of friendship, the benevolent insults of charity, he witnessed the gradual and horrifying development of those middle-aged passions, those mature love-affairs where one partner goes on blowing hot when the other has already started blowing cold, where lassitude forces the amorous pair to indulge in filial caresses whose apparent juvenility seems something new, and in motherly embraces whose tenderness is not only restful but also gives rise, so to speak, to interesting feelings of remorse about a vague sort of incest.

      In a succession of magnificent pages he had exposed these hybrid passions, exacerbated by the impossibility of obtaining complete satisfaction, as well as the dangerous subterfuges of narcotic and toxic drugs, taken in the hope of deadening pain and conquering boredom.  In a period when literature attributed man's unhappiness almost exclusively to the misfortunes of unrequited love or the jealousies engendered by adulterous love, he had ignored these childish ailments and sounded instead those deeper, deadlier, longer-lasting wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion, and contempt upon souls tortured by the present, disgusted by the past, terrified and dismayed by the future.

      The more Des Esseintes re-read his Baudelaire, the more he appreciated the indescribable charm of this writer who, at a time when verse no longer served any purpose except to depict the external appearance of creatures and things, had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible - thanks to a solid, sinewy style which, more than any other, possessed that remarkable quality, the power to define in curiously healthy terms the most fugitive and ephemeral of the unhealthy conditions of weary spirits and melancholy souls.

      After Baudelaire, the number of French books that had found their way on to his shelves was very limited.  Without a doubt he was utterly insensible to the merits of those works it is good form to enthuse over.  The 'side-splitting mirth' of Rebelais and the 'commonsense humour' of Molière  had never brought so much as a smile to his lips; and the antipathy he felt to these buffooneries was so great that he did not hesitate to liken them, from the artistic point of view, to the knockabout turns given by the clowns at any country fair.

      As regards the poetry of past ages, he read very little apart from Villon, whose melancholy ballades he found rather touching, and a few odd bits of D'Aubigné that stirred his blood by the incredible virulence of their apostrophes and their anathemas.

      As for prose, he had little respect for Voltaire and Rousseau, or even Diderot, whose vaunted 'Salons' struck him as remarkable for the number of moralizing inanities and stupid aspirations they contained.  Out of hatred of all this twaddle, he confined his reading almost entirely to the exponents of Christian oratory, to Bourdaloue and Bossuet, whose sonorous and ornate periods greatly impressed him; but he was even fonder of tasting the pith and marrow of stern, strong phrases such as Nicole fashioned in his meditations, and still more Pascal, whose austere pessimism and agonized attrition went straight to his heart.

      Apart from these few books, French literature, so far as his library was concerned, started at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

      It fell into two distinct categories, one comprising ordinary profane literature, the other the works of Catholic writers - a very special literature, almost unknown to the general reader, and yet disseminated by enormous, long- established firms to the far corners of the earth.

      He had summoned up enough courage to explore these literary crypts, and as in the realm of secular literature, he had discovered, underneath a gigantic pile of insipidities, a few works written by true masters.

      The distinctive characteristic of this literature was the absolute immutability of its ideas and its idiom; just as the Church had perpetuated the primordial form of its sacred objects, so also it had kept intact the relics of its dogmas and piously preserved the reliquary that contained them - the oratorical style of the seventeenth century.  As one of its own writers - Ozanam - declared, the Christian idiom had nothing to learn from the language of Rousseau, and should employ exclusively the style used by Bourdaloue and Bossuet.

      In spite of this declaration, the Church, showing a more tolerant spirit, winked at certain expressions, certain turns of phrase borrowed from the lay language of the same century; and as a result the Catholic idiom had to some extent purged itself of its massive periods, weighed down, especially in Bossuet's case, by the inordinate length of its parentheses, the painful redundancy of its pronouns.  But there the concessions had stopped, and indeed any more would doubtless have been superfluous, for with its ballast gone, this prose was quite adequate for the narrow range of subjects to which the Church restricted itself.

      Incapable of dealing with contemporary life, of making visible and palpable the simplest aspect of creatures and things, and ill-fitted to explain the complicated ruses of a brain unconcerned about states of grace, this idiom was nonetheless excellent in the treatment of abstract subjects.  Useful in the discussion of a controversy, in the qualification of a commentary, it also possessed more than any other the necessary authority to state dogmatically the value of a doctrine.

      Unfortunately, here as everywhere else, an immense army of pedants had invaded the sanctuary and by their ignorance and lack of talent debased its noble and uncompromising dignity.  As a crowning disaster, several pious females had decided to try their hands at writing, and maladroit sacristies had joined with silly salons in extolling as works of genius the wretched rattlings of these women.

      Des Esseintes had been curious enough to read a number of these works, among them those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian general's wife whose house in Paris attracted the most fervent of Catholics.  Her writings had filled him with an infinite and overwhelming sense of boredom; they were worse than bad, they were banal; the abiding impression was of a lingering echo from a private chapel in which a clique of sanctimonious snobs could be heard muttering their prayers, asking in whispers for each other's news, and repeating with a portentous air a string of commonplaces on politics, the predictions of the barometer, and the present state of the weather.

      But there was worse to come: there was Mrs Augustus Cravan, an accredited laureate of the Institut, author of the Récit d'une Soeur as well as of an Éliane and a Fleurange, books which were all greeted with blaring trumpets and rolling organ by the entire apostolic press.  Never, no never, had Des Esseintes imagined that it was possible to write such trivial trash.  These books were based on such stupid concepts and were written in such a nauseating style that they almost acquired a rare and distinctive personality of their own.

      In any case, it was not among the female writers that Des Esseintes, who was neither pure in mind nor sentimental by nature, could expect to find a literary niche adapted to his particular tastes.  However, he persevered and, with a diligence unaffected by any feeling of impatience, tried his hardest to appreciate the work of the child of genius, the blue-stocking virgin of this group, Eugénie de Guérin.  His efforts were in vain: he found it impossible to take to the famous Journal and Letters in which she extols, without any sense of discretion or discrimination, the prodigious talent of a brother who rhymed with such marvellous ingenuity and grace that one must surely go back to the works of Monsieur de Jouy and Monsieur Écouchard Lebrun to find anything so bold or so original.

      Try as he might, he could not see what attraction lay in books distinguished by remarks such as these: "This morning I hung up by papa's bed a cross a little girl gave him yesterday"; and "We are invited tomorrow, Mimi and I, to attend the blessing of a bell at Monsieur Roquier's - a welcome diversion"; or by mention of such momentous events as this: "I have just hung about my neck a chain bearing a medal of Our Lady which Louise sent me as a safeguard against cholera"; or by poetry of this calibre: "Oh, what a lovely moonbeam has just fallen on the Gospel I was reading!" - or, finally, by observations as subtle and perspicacious as this: "Whenever I see a man cross himself or take his hat off on passing a crucifix, I say to myself: There goes a Christian."

      And so it went on for page after page, without pause, without respite, until Maurice de Guérin died and his sister could launch out into her lamentations, written in a wishy-washy prose dotted here and there with scraps of verse of such pathetic insipidity that Des Esseintes was finally moved to pity.

      No, in all fairness there was no denying the fact that the Catholic party was not very particular in its choice of protégées, and not very perceptive either.  These lymphs it had made so much of and for whom it had exhausted the good will of its press, all wrote like convent schoolgirls in a milk-and- water style, all suffered from a verbal diarrhoea no astringent could conceivably check.

      As a result, Des Esseintes turned his back in horror on these books.  Nor did he think it likely that the priestly writers of modern times could offer him sufficient compensation for all his disappointments.  These preachers and polemicists wrote impeccable French, but in their sermons and books the Christian idiom had ended up by becoming impersonal and stereotyped, a rhetoric in which every movement and pause was predetermined, a succession of periods copied from a single model.  All these ecclesiastics, in fact, wrote alike, with a little more or a little less energy or emphasis, so that there was virtually no difference between the grisailles they turned out, whether they were signed by their Lordships Dupanloup or Landriot, La Bouillerie or Gaume, by Dom Guéranger or Father Ratisbonne, by Bishop Freppel or Bishop Perraud, by Father Ravignan or Father Gratry, by the Jesuit Olivain, the Carmelite Dosithée, the Dominican Didon, or the sometime Prior of Saint- Maximim, the Reverend Father Chocarne.

      Time and again Des Esseintes had told himself that it would need a very genuine talent, a very profound originality, a very firm conviction to thaw this frozen idiom, to animate this communal style that stifled every unconventional idea, that suffocated every audacious opinion.

      Yet there were one or two authors whose burning eloquence somehow succeeded in melting and moulding this petrified language, and the foremost of these was Lacordaire, one of the few genuine writers the Church had produced in a great many years.

      Confined, like all his colleagues, within the narrow circle of orthodox speculation; obliged, as they were, to mark time and to consider only such ideas as had been conceived and consecrated by the Fathers of the Church and developed by the great preachers, he nonetheless managed to pull a bluff, to rejuvenate and almost modify these same ideas, simply by giving them a more personal and lively form.  Here and there in his Conférences de Notre-Dame, happy phrases, startling expressions, accents of love, bursts of passion, cries of joy and demonstrations of delight occurred that made the time-honoured style sizzle and smoke under his pen.  And then, over and above his oratorical gifts, this brilliant, gentle-hearted monk who had used up all his skill and all his energy in a hopeless attempt to reconcile the liberal doctrines of a modern society with the authoritarian dogmas of the Church, was also endowed with a capacity for fervent affection, for discreet tenderness.  Accordingly, the letters he wrote to young men used to contain fond paternal exhortations, smiling reprimands, kindly words of advice, indulgent words of forgiveness.  Some of these letters were charming, as when he admitted his greed for love, and others were quite impressive, as when he sustained his correspondents' courage and dissipated their doubts by stating the unshakeable certitude of his own beliefs.  In short, this feeling of fatherhood, which under his pen acquired a dainty feminine quality, lent his prose an accent unique in clerical literature.

      After him, few indeed were the ecclesiastics and monks who showed any signs of individuality.  At the very most, there were half-a-dozen pages by his pupil the Abbé Peyreyve that were readable.  This priest had left some touching biographical studies of his master, written one or two delightful letters, produced a few articles in a sonorous oratorical style, and pronounced a few panegyrics in which the declamatory note was sounded too often.  Obviously the Abbé Peyreyve had neither the sensibility nor the fire of Lacordaire; there was too much of the priest in him and too little of the man; and yet now and then his pulpit rhetoric was lit up by striking analogies, by ample, weighty phrases, by well-nigh sublime flights of oratory.

      But it was only among writers who had not been ordained, among secular authors who were devoted to the Catholic cause and had its interests at heart, that prosaists worthy of attention were to be found.

      The episcopal style, so feebly handled by the prelates, had acquired new strength and regained some of its old masculine vigour in the hands of the Comte de Falloux.  Despite his gentle appearance, this Academician positively oozed venom; the speeches he made in Parliament in 1848 were dully and diffuse, but the articles he contributed to the Correspondant and later published in book form were cruel and biting under their exaggerated surface politeness.  Conceived as polemic tirades, they displayed a certain caustic wit and expressed opinions of surprising intolerance.

      A dangerous controversialist by reason of the traps he laid for his adversaries, and a crafty logician forever outflanking the enemy and taking him by surprise, the Comte de Falloux had also written some penetrating pages on the death of Madame Swetchine, whose correspondence he had edited and whom he revered as a saint.  But where the man's temperament really showed itself was in two pamphlets which appeared in 1846 and 1880, the later work bearing the title L'Unité nationale.

      Here, filled with a cold fury, the implacable Legitimist delivered a frontal assault for once, contrary to his usual custom, and by way of peroration fired off this round of abuse at the sceptics.

      "As for you, you doctrinaire Utopians who shut your eyes to human nature, you ardent atheists who feed on hatred and delusion, you emancipators of woman, you destroyers of family life, you genealogists of the simian race, you whose name was once an insult in itself, be well content: you will have been the prophets and your disciples will be the pontiffs of an abominable future!"

      The other pamphlet was entitled Le Parti catholique and was directed against the despotism of the Univers and its editor Veuillot, whom it took care not to mention by name.  Here the flank attacks were resumed, with poison concealed in every line of this brochure in which the bruised and battered gentleman answered the kicks of the professional wrestler with scornful sneers.

      Between them they represented to perfection the two parties in the Church whose differences have always turned to uncompromising hatred.  Falloux, the more arrogant and cunning of the two, belonged to that liberal sect which already included both Montalembert and Cochin, both Lacordaire and Broglie; he subscribed wholeheartedly to the principles upheld by the Correspondant, a review which did its best to cover the imperious doctrines of the Church with a varnish of tolerance.  Veuillot, a more honest, outspoken man, spurned these subterfuges, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of ultramontane dictates, openly acknowledged and invoked the merciless discipline of ecclesiastical dogma.

      The latter writer had fashioned for the fight a special language which owed something to La Bruyère and something to the working-man living out in the Gros-Caillou.  This style, half solemn, half vulgar, and wielded by such a brutal character, had the crushing weight of a life-preserver.  An extraordinarily brave and stubborn fighter, Veuillot had used this dreadful weapon to fell free-thinkers and bishops alike, laying about him with all his might, lashing out savagely at his foes whether they belonged to one party or the other.  Held in suspicion by the Church, which disapproved of both his contraband idiom and his cut-throat conduct, this religious blackguard had nonetheless compelled recognition by sheer force of talent, goading the Press on till he had the whole pack at his heels, pummelling them till he drew blood in his Odeurs de Paris, standing up to every attack, kicking himself free of the vile pen-pushers that came snapping and snarling after him.

       Unfortunately, his undeniable brilliance showed only in a fight; in cold blood, he was just a run-of-the-mill writer.  His poems and novels were pitiful; his pungent language lost all its flavour in a peaceful atmosphere; between bouts, the Catholic wrestler was transformed into a dyspeptic old man, wheezing out banal litanies and stammering childish canticles.

      Stiffer, starchier, and statelier was the Church's favourite apologist, the Grand Inquisitor of the Christian idiom, Ozanam.  Though he was not easily surprised, Des Esseintes never failed to wonder at the aplomb with which this author spoke of the inscrutable purposes of the Almighty, when he should have been producing evidence for the impossible assertions he was making; with marvellous sangfroid the man would twist events about, contradict, with even greater impudence than the panegyrists of the other parties, the acknowledged facts of history, declare that the Church had never made any secret of the great regard it had for science, describe heresies as foul miasmas, and treat Buddhism and all other religions with such contempt that he apologized for sullying Catholic prose by so much as attacking their doctrines.

      From time to time religious enthusiasm breathed a certain ardour into his oratorical style, under whose icy surface there seethed a current of suppressed violence; in his copious writings on Dante, on St Francis, on the author of the Stabat, on the Franciscan poets, on Socialism, on commercial law, on everything under the  sun, he invariably undertook the defence of the Vatican, which he considered incapable of doing wrong, judging every case alike according to the greater or lesser distance separating it from his own.

      This practice of looking at every question from a single point of view was also followed by that paltry scribbler some people held up as his rival - Nettement.  The latter was not quite so strait-laced, and what pretensions he had were social rather than spiritual.  Now and again he had actually ventured outside the literary cloister in which Ozanam had shut himself up, and had dipped into various profane works with a view to passing judgement on them.  He had groped his way into the unfamiliar realm like a child in a cellar, seeing nothing around him but darkness, perceiving nothing in the gloom but the flame of the taper lighting his way ahead for a little distance.

      In this total ignorance of the locality, in this absolute obscurity, he had tripped up time and time again.  Thus he had spoken of Murger's style as "carefully chiselled and meticulously polished"; he had said that Hugo sought after what was foul and filthy, and had dared to make comparisons between him and Monsieur de Laprade; he had criticized Delacroix because he broke the rules, and praised Paul Delaroche and the poet Reboul because they seemed to him to have the faith.  Des Esseintes could not help shrugging his shoulders over these unfortunate opinions, wrapped up in a dowdy prose-style, the well-worn material of which caught and tore on the corner of every sentence.

      In another domain, the works of Poujoulat and Genoude, of Montalembert, Nicolas, and Carné failed to awaken any livelier feelings of interest in him; nor was he conscious of any pronounced predilection for the historical problems treated with painstaking scholarship and in a worthy style by the Duc de Broglie, or for the social and religious questions tackled by Henry Cochin - who had, however, given his measure in a letter describing a moving ceremony at the Sacré-Coeur, a taking of the veil.  It was years since he had opened any of these books, and even longer since he had thrown away the puerile lucubrations of the sepulchral Pontmartin and the pitiable Féval, and had handed over to the servants for some sordid purpose the little tales of such as Aubineau and Lasserre, those contemptible hagiographers of the miracles performed by Monsieur Dupont of Tours and the Blessed Virgin.

      In a word, Des Esseintes failed to find in this literature even a passing distraction from his boredom; and so he tucked away in the darkest corners of his library all these books that he had read long ago after leaving the Jesuit college.

      "I'd have done better to leave these behind in Paris," he muttered, as he pulled out from behind the rest two sets of books he found particularly insufferable: the works of the Abbé Lamennais and those of that fanatical bigot, that pompous bore, that conceited ass, Comte Joseph de Maistre.

      On one shelf, a solitary volume was left standing within his reach, and that was L'Homme, by Ernest Hello.

      This man was the absolute antithesis of his colleagues in religion.  Virtually isolated in the group of devotional writers, who were shocked by the attitudes he adopted, he had ended up by leaving the main road that leads from earth to heaven.  Sickened no doubt by the banality of this highway, and by the mob of literary pilgrims who for centuries had been filing along the same road, following in each other's footsteps, stopping in the same spots to exchange the same commonplaces about religion and the Fathers of the Church, about the same beliefs and the same masters, he had turned off into the by-paths, had come out in the bleak forest clearing of Pascal, where he had stopped for quite a time to get his second wind; then he had gone on his way, penetrating deeper than the Jansenist, whom he happened to despise, into the regions of human thought.

      Full of subtle complexity and pompous affectation, Hello with his brilliant, hair-splitting analyses reminded Des Esseintes of the exhaustive and meticulous studies of some of the atheistic psychologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  There was something of a Catholic Duranty in him, but more dogmatic and perceptive, a practised master of the magnifying-glass, an able engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker of the brain, who liked nothing better than to examine the mechanism of a passion and show just how the wheels went round.

      In this oddly constituted mind of his were to be found the most unexpected associations of thought, the most surprising analogies and contrasts; there was also a curious trick he had of using etymological definitions as a springboard from which to leap in pursuit of fresh ideas, joined together by links that were sometimes rather tenuous by almost invariably original and ingenious.

      In this way, and in spite of the faulty balance of his constructions, he had taken to pieces, so to speak, with remarkable perspicacity, the miser and the common man, had analysed the liking for company and the passion for suffering, and had revealed the interesting comparisons that can be established between the processes of photography and memory.

      But this skill in the use of the delicate analytical instrument he had stolen from the Church's enemies represented only one aspect of the man's temperament.  There was another person in him, another side to his dual nature - and this was the religious fanatic, the Biblical prophet.

      Like Hugo, whom he recalled at times by the twist he gave to an idea or a phrase, Ernest Hello had loved posing as a little St John on Patmos, only in his case he pontificated and vaticinated from the top of a rock manufactured in the ecclesiastical knick-knack shops of the Rue Saint-Sulpice, haranguing the reader in an apocalyptic style salted here and there with the bitter gall of an Isaiah.

      On these occasions he displayed exaggerated pretensions to profundity, and there were a few flatterers who hailed him as a genius, pretending to regard him as the great man of his day, the fount of knowledge of his time.  And a fount of knowledge he may have been - but one whose waters were often far from clear.

      In his volume Paroles de Dieu, in which he paraphrased the Scriptures and did his best to complicate their fairly simple message, in his other book L'Homme, and in his pamphlet Le Jour du Seigneur, which was written in an obscure, uneven Biblical style, he appeared in the guise of a vindictive apostle, full of pride and bitterness, a mad deacon suffering from mystical epilepsy, a Joseph de Maistre blessed with talent, a cantankerous and ferocious bigot.

      On the other hand, reflected Des Esseintes, these morbid excesses frequently obstructed ingenious flights of casuistry, for with even greater intolerance than Ozanam, Hello resolutely rejected everything that lay outside his little world, propounded the most astonishing axioms, maintained with disconcerting dogmatism that "geology had gone back to Moses", that natural history, chemistry, indeed all modern science furnished proof of the scientific accuracy of the Bible; every page spoke of the Church as the sole repository of truth and the source of superhuman wisdom, all this enlivened with startling aphorisms and with furious imprecations spewed out in torrents over the art and literature of the eighteenth century.

      To this strange mixture was added a love of sugary piety revealed in translations of the Visions of Angela da Foligno, a book of unparalleled stupidity and fluidity, and selections from Jan van Ruysbroeck, a thirteenth-century mystic whose prose presented an incomprehensible but attractive amalgam of gloomy ecstasies, tender raptures, and violent rages.

      All the affectation there was in Hello the bumptious pontiff had come out in a preface he wrote for this book.  As he said himself, "extraordinary things can only be stammered out" - and stammer he did, declaring that "the sacred obscurity in which Ruysbroeck spreads his eagle's wings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for him the four horizons would be too close-fitting a garment."

      Be that as it may, Des Esseintes felt drawn to this unbalanced but subtle mind; the fusion of the skilled psychologist with the pious pedant had proved impossible, and these jolts, these incoherences even, constituted the personality of the man.

      The recruits who joined his standard made up the little group of writers who operated on the colour-line of the clerical camp.  They did not belong to the main body of the army; strictly speaking, they were rather the scouts of a religion that distrusted men of talent like Veuillot and Hello, for the simple reason that they were neither servile enough nor insipid enough.  What it really wanted was soldiers who never reasoned why, regiments of those purblind mediocrities Hello used to attack with all the ferocity of one who had suffered their tyranny.  Accordingly Catholicism had made haste to close the columns of its papers to one of its partisans.  Léon Bloy, a savage pamphleteer who wrote in a style at once precious and furious, tender and terrifying, and to expel from its bookshops, as one plague-stricken and unclean, another author who had bawled himself hoarse singing its praises: Barbey d'Aurevilly.

      Admittedly this latter writer was far too compromising, far too independent a son of the Church.  In the long run, the others would always eat humble pie and fall back into line, but he was the enfant terrible the party refused to own, who went whoring through literature and brought his women half-naked into the sanctuary.  It was only because of the boundless contempt Catholicism has for all creative talent that an excommunication in due and proper form had not outlawed this strange servant who, under the pretext of doing honour to his masters, broke the chapel windows, juggled with the sacred vessels, and performed step-dances around the tabernacle.

      Two of Barbey d'Aurevilly's works Des Esseintes found particularly enthralling: Un Prêtre marié and Les Diaboliques.  Others, such as L'Ensorcelée, Le Chavalier des Touches and Une Vieille Maitresse, were doubtless better balanced and more complete works, but they did not appeal so strongly to Des Esseintes who was really interested only in sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever.

      In these comparatively healthy volumes Barbey d'Aurevilly was constantly tacking to and fro between those two channels of Catholic belief which eventually run into one: mysticism and sadism.  But in the two books which Des Esseintes was now glancing through, Barbey had thrown caution to the winds, had given rein to his steed, had had ridden full tilt down one road after another, as far as he could go.

      All the horrific mystery of the Middle Ages brooded over that improbable books Un Prêtre marié; magic was mixed up with religion, sorcery with prayer; while the God of original sin, more pitiless, more cruel than the Devil, submitted his innocent victim Calixte to uninterrupted torments, branding her with a red cross on the forehead, just as in olden times he had one of his angels mark the houses of the unbelievers he meant to kill.

      These scenes, like the fantasies of a fasting monk affected with delirium, were unfolded in the disjointed language of a fever patient.  But unfortunately, among all the characters galvanizes into an unbalanced life like so many Hoffmann Coppelias, there were some, the Néel de Néhou for instance, who seemed to have been imagined in one of those periods of prostration that always follow crises; and they were out of keeping in this atmosphere of melancholy madness, into which they introduced the same note of unintentional humour as is sounded by the little zinc lordling in hunting-boots who stands blowing his horn on the pedestal of so many mantelpiece clocks.

      After these mystical divagations, Barbey had enjoyed a period of comparative calm, but then a frightening relapse had occurred.

      The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been the more obstinate in its pursuit.

      In Un Prêtre marié, it was Christ whose temptations had been successful and whose praises were sung by Barbey d'Aurevilly; but in 'Les Diaboliques', the author had surrendered to the Devil, and it was Satan he extolled.  At this point there appeared on the scene that bastard child of Catholicism which for centuries the Church has pursued with its exorcisms and its autos-da-fé - sadism.

      This strange and ill-defined condition cannot in fact arise in the mind of an unbeliever.  It does not consist simply in riotous indulgence of the flesh, stimulated by bloody acts of cruelty, for in that case it would be nothing more than a deviation of the genetic instincts, a case of satyriasis developed to its fullest extent; it consists first and foremost in a sacrilegious manifestation, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in a wholly idealistic, wholly Christian aberration.  There is also something in it of joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the wicked delight of disobedient children playing with forbidden things for no other reason than that their parents have expressly forbidden them to go near them.

      The truth of the matter is that if it did not involve sacrilege, sadism would have no raison d'être; on the other hand, since sacrilege depends on the existence of a religion, it cannot be deliberately and effectively committed except by a believer, for a man would derive no satisfaction whatever from profaning a faith that was unimportant or unknown to him.

      The strength of sadism then, the attraction it offers, lies entirely in the forbidden pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and the prayers that should go to God; it lies in the flouting of the precepts of Catholicism, which the sadist actually observes in topsy-turvy fashion when, in order to offend Christ the more grievously, he commits the sins Christ most expressly proscribed - profanation of holy things and carnal debauch.

      In point of fact, this vice to which the Marquis de Sade had given his name was as old as the Church itself; the eighteenth century, when it was particularly rife, had simply revived, by an ordinary atavistic process, the impious practices of the witches' sabbath of medieval times - to go no further back in history.

      Des Esseintes had done no more than dip into the Malleus Maleficorum, that terrible code of procedure of Jacob Sprenger's which permitted the Church to send thousands of necromancers and sorcerers to the stake; but that was enough to enable him to recognize in the witches' sabbath all the obscenities and blasphemies of sadism.  Besides the filthy orgies dear to the Evil One - nights devoted alternatively to lawful and unnatural copulation - he found the same parodies of religious processions, the same ritual threats and insults hurled at God, the same devotion to his Rival - as when the Black Mass was celebrated over a woman on all fours whose naked rump, repeatedly soiled, served as the altar, with the priest cursing the bread and wine, and the congregation derisively taking communion in the shape of a black host stamped with a picture of a he-goat.

      This same outpouring of foul-mouthed jests and degrading insults was to be seen in the works of the Marquis de Sade, who spiced his frightful sensualities with sacrilegious profanities.  He would rail at Heaven, invoke Lucifer, call God an abject scoundrel, a crazy idiot, spit on the sacrament of communion, do his best in fact to besmirch with vile obscenities a Divinity he hoped would damn him, at the same time declaring, as a further act of defiance, that that Divinity did not exist.

      This psychic condition Barbey d'Aurevilly came close to sharing.  If he did not go as far as Sade in shouting atrocious curses at the Saviour; if, out of greater caution or greater fear, he always professed to honour the Church, he nonetheless addressed his prayers to the Devil in true medieval fashion, and in his desire to defy the Deity, likewise slipped into demonic erotomania, coining new sensual monstrosities, or even borrowing from La Philosophie dans le boudoir a certain episode which he seasoned with fresh condiments to make the story Le Dîner d'un athée.

      The extraordinary book that contained this tale was Des Esseintes' delight; he had therefore had printed for him in bishop's-purple ink, within a border of cardinal red, on a genuine parchment blessed by the Auditors of the Rota, a copy of Les Diaboliques set up in those lettres de civilité whose peculiar books and flourishes, curling up or down, assume a satanic appearance.

      Not counting certain poems of Baudelaire's which, in imitation of the prayers chanted on the nights of the witches' sabbath, took the form of infernal litanies, this book, among all the works of contemporary apostolic literature, was the only one to reveal that state of mind, at once devout and impious, towards which nostalgic memories of Catholicism, stimulated by fits of neurosis, had often impelled Des Esseintes.

      With Barbey d'Aurevilly, the series of religious writers came to an end.  To tell the truth, this pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secular literature than to that other literature in which he claimed a place that was denied him.  His wild romantic style, for instance, full of twisted expressions, outlandish turns of phrase, and farfetched similes, whipped up his sentences as they galloped across the page, farting and jangling their bells.  In short, Barbey looked like a stallion among the geldings that filled the ultramontane stables.

      Such was Des Esseintes' reflections as he dipped into the book, re-reading a passage here and there; and then, comparing the author's vigorous and varied style with the lymphatic, stereotyped style of his fellow writers, he was led to consider that evolution of language so accurately described by Darwin.

      Closely associated with the secular writers of his time, brought up in the Romantic school, familiar with the latest books and accustomed to reading modern publications, Barbey inevitably found himself in possession of an idiom which had undergone many profound modifications, and which had been largely renovated since the seventeenth century.

      The very opposite had been the case with the ecclesiastical writers; confined to their own territory, imprisoned within an identical, traditional range of reading, knowing nothing of the literary evolution of more recent times and absolutely determined, if need be, to pluck their eyes out rather than recognize it, they necessarily employed an unaltered and unalterable language, like the eighteenth-century language which the descendants of the French settlers in Canada normally speak and write to this day, no variation in vocabulary or phraseology having ever been possible in their idiom, cut off as it is from the old country and surrounded on all sides by the English tongue.

      Des Esseintes' musings had reached this point when the silvery sound of a bell tinkling a little angelus told him that breakfast was ready.  He left his books where they were, wiped his forehead and made for the dining-room, telling himself that of all the volumes he had been rearranging, the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly were still the only ones whose thought and style offered those gamy flavours and unhealthy spots, that bruised skin and sleepy taste which he so loved to savour in the decadent writers, both Latin and monastic, of olden times.