 11 The servants were seized with alarm, and lost no time in calling the Fontaine physician, who was completely at sea about Désir Saint's condition. He mumbled a few medical terms, felt his pulse examined the invalid's tongue, unsuccessfully sought to make him speak, prescribed sedatives and rest, promised to return on the morrow, and at the negative sign made by Désir Saint, who recovered enough strength to chide the zeal of his servants, and to bid farewell to this intruder. He departed, and was soon retailing through the village the eccentricities of this house, whose decorations had positively amazed him, and held him rooted to the spot. To the great astonishment of the domestics, who no longer dared stir from the servants' quarters, their master recovered in a few days, and they surprised him drumming against the window-pains, gazing at the sky with a troubled look. One afternoon the bells were parenturally rung, and Désir Saint commanded his trunks to be packed for a long voyage. While the man and the woman were choosing, under his guidance, the necessary equipment, he feverishly paced up and down the cabin of the dining-room, consulted the timetables of the steamers, walked through his study where he continued to gaze at the clouds, with the nair at once impatient and satisfied. For a whole week the weather had been atrocious. Streams of soot raced unceasing across the grey fields of the sky masses of clouds, like rocks torn from the earth. At intervals, showers swept downward engulfing the valley with torrents of rain. Today the appearance of the heavens had changed, the rivers of ink had evaporated and vanished, and the harsh contours of the clouds had softened. The sky was uniformly flat and covered with a brackish film. Little by little this film seemed to drop, and a watery haze covered the countryside. The rain no longer fell in cataracts as on the preceding evening. Instead it fell incessantly fine, sharp and penetrating. It inundated the walks, covered the roads with its innumerable threads which joined heaven and earth. The livid sky threw a one ledden light on the village, which was now transformed into a lake of mud pricked by needles of water that dotted the puddles with drops of bright silver. In this desolation of nature everything was grey, and only the housetops gleamed against the dead tones of the walls. What rather, sighed the aged domestic, placing on a chair the clothes which his master had requested of him, an outfit formally ordered from London. This is Saint's sole response, was to rub his hands and to sit down in front of a bookcase with glass doors. He examined the socks which had been placed nearby for his inspection. For a moment he hesitated on the colour. Then he quickly studied the melancholy day, and earnestly bethought himself of the effect he desired. He chose a pair the colour of Feuillement. Quickly slipped them on, put on a pair of buttoned shoes, donned the mouse grey suit which was checkered with a lava grey and dotted with black, placed a small hunting cap on his head, and threw a blue raincoat over him. He reached the railway station, followed by the servant, who almost bent under the weight of a trunk, of a lease, a carpet bag, a hat box, and a travelling rug containing umbrellas and canes. He informed his servant that the date of his return was problematical, that he might return in a year, in a month, in a week, or even sooner, and enjoined him to change nothing in the house. He gave a sum of money which he thought would be necessary for the upkeep of the house during his absence, and climbed into the coach, leaving the old man astounded, arms waving and mouth gaping behind the rail while the train got under way. He was alone in his compartment. A vague and dirty countryside, such as one sees through an aquarium of troubled water, receded rapidly behind the train which was lashed by the rain. Plunged in his meditations, Dizzi Sant closed his eyes. Once more, this so ardently desired and finally attained solitude had ended in a fearful distress. This silence which formerly would have appeared as a compensation for the stupidities heard for years, now weighed on him with an unendurable burden. One morning he had awakened as uneasy as a prisoner in his cell. His lips had sought to articulate sounds. Tears had welled to his eyes, and he had found it impossible to breathe, suffocating like a person who had sobbed for hours. Seized with a desire to walk, to behold a human figure, to speak to someone, to mingle with life, he had proceeded to call his domestics employing a specious pretext. But conversation with them was impossible. Besides the fact that these old people bowed down by years of silence and the customs of attendance were almost dumb, the distance at which Dizzi Sant had always kept them was hardly conducive to inducing them to open their mouths now. Two, they possessed dull brains and were incapable of answering his questions other than by monosyllables. It was impossible, therefore, to find any solace in their society. But a new phenomenon now occurred. The reading of the novels of Dickens, which he had lately undertaken to soothe his nerves, and which had only produced effects the opposite of those hoped for, began slowly to act in an unexpected manner, bringing on visions of English existence on which he mused for hours. Little by little, in these fictive contemplations, ideas insinuated themselves, ideas of the voyage brought to an end of verified dreams, on which was imposed the desire to experience new impressions, and thus escape the exhausting cerebral debauches intent upon beating in the void. With its mist and rain, this abominable weather aided his thoughts still more, by reinforcing the memories of his readings, by placing under his eyes the unfading image of a land of fog and mud, and by refusing to let his ideas wander idly. One day, able to endure it no longer, he had instantly decided. Such was his haste that he even took flight before the designated time, for he wished to shun the present moment, wished to find himself jostled and shouldered in the hubbub of crowded streets and railway stations. I breathe, he exclaimed, when the train moderated its waltz, and stopped in the sew station rotunda, panting while its wheels performed its last pirouettes. Once in the boulevard d'enfer, he hailed a coachman. In some strange manner he extracted pleasure from the fact that he was so hampered with trunks and rugs. By promising a substantial tip, he reached an understanding with the man of the brown trousers and red waistcoat. At once, he commanded, and when you reach the rue de Rivoli, stop in front of Gallignani's messenger. Before departing, he desired to buy a beidecker or Murray guide of London. The carriage got under way heavily, raising rings of mud around its wheels and moving through marsh-like ground. Beneath the grey sky, which seemed suspended over the housetops, water gushed down the thick sides of the high walls, spouts overflowed, and the streets were coated with a slimy dirt in which passers-by slipped. Thick-set men, paused on sidewalks, bespattered by passing omnibuses, and women, their skirts tucked up to the knees, bent under umbrellas, flattened themselves against the shops to avoid being splashed. The rain entered diagonally through the carriage-doors. Desessant was obliged to lift the carriage-windows down which the water ran, while drops of mud furrowed their way like fireworks on each side of the fiac. To the monotonous sound of sacks of peas shaking against his head, through the action of the showers pattering against the trunks and on the carriage-rug, Desessant dreamed of his voyage. This already was a partial realisation of his England, enjoyed in Paris through the means of this frightful weather. A rainy, colossal London, smelling of molten metal and of soot, ceaselessly steaming and smoking in the fog, now spread out before his eyes. Then rows of docks sprawled ahead as far as the eye could reach, docks full of cranes, hand-winches and bales, swarming with men perched on masts, or astride yard-sales, while myriads of other men on the keys pushed hogsheads into cellars. All this was transpiring in vast warehouses along the river banks, which were bathed by the muddy and dull water of an imaginary Thames, in a forest of masts and girders piercing the one clouds of the firmament, while trains rushed past at full speed or rumpled underground, uttering horrible cries and vomiting waves of smoke, and while through every street monstrous and gaudy and infamous advertisements flared through the eternal twilight, and strings of carriages passed between rows of preoccupied and taciturn people, whose eyes stared ahead and whose elbows pressed closely against their bodies. This is St. Shivert deliciously to feel himself mingling in this terrible world of merchants, in this insulating mist, in this incessant activity, in this pitiless gearing which ground millions of the disinherited, urged by the comfort-distilling philanthropists to recite biblical verses and to sing psalms. Then the vision faded suddenly with a jolt of the fiacre, which made him rebound in his seat. He gazed through the carriage-windows. Night had fallen. Gas-burners blinked through the fog amid a yellowish halo. Ribbons of fire swam in puddles of water and seemed to revolve around wheels of carriages moving through liquid and dirty flame. He endeavoured to get his bearings, perceived the carousel, and suddenly, unreasoningly, perhaps through the simple effect of the high fall from fanciful spaces, his thought reverted to a very trivial incident. He remembered that his domestic had neglected to put a toothbrush in his belongings. Then he passed in review the list of objects packed up. Everything had been placed in his valise. But the annoyance of having omitted this brush persisted until the driver, pulling up, broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets. He was in the Rue de Rivoli, in front of Gallignani's messenger, separated by a door whose unpolished glass was covered with inscriptions and with strips of passe-partout framing newspaper clippings and telegrams, where two vast shop windows crammed with albums and books. He drew near, attracted by the sight of these books bound in parrot blue and cabbage green paper embossed with silver and golden letterings. All this had an anti-Parisian touch, a mercantile appearance, more brutal and yet less wretched than those worthless bindings of French books. Here and there, in the midst of the opened albums, reproducing humorous scenes from Du Maurier and John Leitch or the delirious cavalcade of Caldicot, some French novels appeared, blending placid and satisfied vulgarities to these rich, verjuice hues. He tore himself away from his contemplation, opened the door, and entered a large library which was full of people. Seated strangers unfolded maps and jabbered in strange languages. A clerk brought him a complete collection of guides. He, in turn, sat down to examine the books with their flexible covers. He glanced through them and paused at a page of the Baydeca describing the London museums. He became interested in the laconic and exact details of the guidebooks, but his attention wandered away from the old English paintings to the moderns, which attracted him much more. He recalled certain works he had seen at international expositions, and imagined that he might possibly behold them once more at London. Pictures by Mille, the eve of St Agnes with its lunar clear green. Pictures by Watts, strange in colour, checkered with gamboge and indigo. Pictures sketched by a sick Gustave Moreau, painted by an anemic Michelangelo, and retouched by a Raphael submerged in blue. Among other canvases he recalled a denunciation of Cain, an ida, some eaves, where in the strange and mysterious mixture of these three masters rose the personality at once refined and crude of a learned and dreamy Englishman tormented by the bewitchment of cruel tones. These canvases thronged through his memory. The clerk, astonished by this client who was so lost to the world, asked him which of the guides he would take. Lysissant remained dumbfounded, then excused himself, bought a Baydecker and departed. The dampness froze him to the spot. The wind blew from the side, lashing the arcades with quips of rain. Proceed to that place, he said to the driver, pointing with his finger to the end of a passage, where a store formed the angle of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castillon, and with its whitish panels of glass, illumined from within, resembled a vast night-lamp, burning through the wretchedness of this mist, in the misery of this crazy weather. It was the Bodega. Lysissant strayed into a large room sustained by iron pillars, and lined on each side of its walls with tall barrels placed on their ends upon gantries. Hooped with iron, their porches with wooden loopholes imitating a rack of pipes, and from whose notches hung tulip-shaped glasses upside down. The lower sides were bored and hafted with stone cocks. These hogsheads, painted with a royal coat of arms, displayed the names of their drinks, the contents, and the prices on coloured labels, and stated that they were to be purchased by the cask, by the bottle, or by the glass. In the passage between these rows of casks under the gas-jets which flared at one end of an ugly iron-gray chandelier, tables covered with baskets of Parma's biscuits, hard and salty cakes, plates piled with mince pies, and sandwiches concealing strong mustardy concoctions under their unsavory covers, succeeded each other between a row of seats, and as far as the end of this cellar, which was lined with still more hogsheads, carrying tiny barrels on their tops, resting on their sides, and bearing their names stamped with hot metal into the oak. An odour of alcohol assailed Desi-Saint upon taking a seat in this room, heavy with strong wines. He looked about him. Here the tons were placed in a straight line, exhibiting the whole series of ports, the sweet or sour wines, the colour of mahogany or amaranth, and distinguished by such laudatory epithets as old port, light delicate, coburns very fine, magnificent old Regina. There protruding formidable abdomens pressed closely against each other, huge casks contained the marshal Spanish wines, sherry and its derivatives, the San Lucar, pasto, pale dry, oloroso, and amontilla. The cellar was filled with people. Leaning on his elbows on a corner of the table, Desi-Saint sat waiting for his glass of port, ordered of a gentleman who was opening explosive sodas contained in oval bottles, which recalled, while exaggerating, the capsules of gelatin and gluten used by pharmacists to conceal the taste of certain medicines. Englishmen were everywhere. Awkward pale clergymen, garbed in black from head to foot with soft hats, laced shoes, very long coats dotted in the front with tiny buttons, clean shaved chins, round spectacles, greasy flat hair, faces of tripe dealers, and mastiff snouts with upper plectic necks, ears like tomatoes, finest cheeks, bloodshot crazy eyes, whiskers that looked like those of some big monkeys. Farther away, at the end of the wine-store, a long row of toe-headed individuals, their chins covered with white hair like the end of an artichoke, reading through a microscope the tiny Roman type of an English newspaper. Opposite him, a sort of American Commodore, dumpy and thick-set, with smoked skin and bulbous nose, was sleeping, a cigar planted in the hairy aperture of his mouth. Opposite were frames hanging on the wall, enclosing advertisements of champagne, the trademarks of Perrier and Röderer, hide-seek and mum, and a hooded head of a monk with the name of Don Perignon, Rens, written in Gothic characters. A certain enervation enveloped Deses Sainte in this guard-house atmosphere. Stunned by the prattle of the Englishmen conversing among themselves, he fell into a reverie, evoking, before the purple port which filled the glasses, the creatures of Dickens that love this drink so very much, imaginatively peopling the cellar with new personages, seeing here the white head of hair and the ruddy complexion of Mr. Wickfield. There the phlegmatic crafty face and the vengeful eye of Mr. Tolkienhorn, the melancholy solicitor in Bleak House. Positively all of them broke away from his memory and installed themselves in the bodega, with their peculiar characteristics and their betraying gestures. His memories, brought to life by his recent readings, attained a startling precision. The city of the Romancer, the house illumined and warmed, so perfectly tended and isolated. The bottles poured slowly by little Dorrit and Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister appeared to him sailing like an ark in a deluge of mire and soot. Idly he wandered through this imaginary London, happy to be sheltered as he listened to the sinister shrieks of tugs plying up and down the Thames. His glass was empty. Despite the heavy fumes in this cellar caused by the cigars and pipes, he experienced a cold shiver when he returned to the reality of the damp and fetid weather. He called for a glass of amontillado, and suddenly, beside this pale dry wine, the lennative Swedish stories of the English author were routed to be replaced by the pitiless revulsives and the grievous irritants of Edgar Allan Poe. The cold nightmares of the cask of amontillado, of the man immured in a vault, assailed him. The ordinary placid faces of American and English drinkers who occupied the room, appeared to him to reflect involuntary frightful thoughts, to be harbouring instinctive odious plots. Then he perceived that he was left alone here and that the dinner-hour was near. He paid his bill, tore himself from his seat, and dizzily gained the door. He received a wet slap in the face upon leaving the place. The streetlamps moved their tiny fans of flame which failed to illuminate. The sky had dropped the very houses. Desis Sainte viewed the arcades of the Rüderiboli, drowned in the gloom and submerged by water, and it seemed to him that he was in the gloomy tunnel under the Thames. Twitchings of his stomach recalled him to reality. He regained his courage, gave the driver the address of the tavern in the Rüdamsterdam near the station, and looked at his watch. Seven o'clock. He had just time to eat dinner. The train would not leave until ten minutes of nine, and he counted on his fingers, reckoning the hours of travel from Dieppe to Newhaven, saying to himself, If the figures of the timetable are correct, I shall be at London to-morrow at twelve thirty. The fiac stopped in front of the tavern. Once more Desis Sainte alighted, and entered a long, plain dark room, divided into partitions as high as a man's waist, a series of compartments resembling stalls. In this room, wider towards the door, many beer-pumps stood on a counter near Hams having the colour of old violins, red lobsters, marinated mackerel with onions and carrots, slices of lemon, bunches of laurel and thyme, tuna for berries, and long peppers swimming in thick sauce. One of these boxes was unoccupied. He took it, and called a young black-suited man, who bent forward, muttering something in a jargon he could not understand. While the cloth was being laid, Desis Sainte viewed his neighbours. They were islanders, just as at the bodega, with cold finance eyes, crimson complexions, thoughtful or haughty airs. They were reading foreign newspapers. The only ones eating were unescorted women in pairs, robust English women with boyish faces, large teeth, ruddy apple cheeks, long hands and legs. They attacked with genuine ardour a rump steak pie, a warm meat dish cooked in mushroom sauce, covered with a crust like a pie. After having lacked appetite for such a long time, he remained amazed in the presence of these hearty eaters whose veracity whetted his hunger. He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock, and seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated by the flavour of a cow shed which this fine pale beer exhaled. His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice, but which does not have its sugary taste. He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food, had awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had been poured. The rain continued to fall. He heard it patter on the panes which formed a ceiling at the end of the room. It fell in cascades down the spouts. No one was stirring in the room. Everybody utterly weary was indulging himself in front of his wine glass. Tongues were now wagging freely. As almost all the English men and women raised their eyes as they spoke, this is sound concluded that they were talking of the bad weather. Not one of them laughed. He threw a delighted glance on their suits whose colour and cut did not perceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense of contentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being in some way, though superficially, a naturalised London citizen. Then he suddenly started. And what about the train? he asked himself. He glanced at his watch, ten minutes to eight. I still have nearly a half hour to remain here. Once more he began to muse upon the plan he had conceived. In his sedentary life only two countries had ever attracted him, Holland and England. He had satisfied the first of his desires. Unable to keep away, one fine day he had left Paris and visited the towns of the lowlands one by one. In short nothing but cruel disillusions had resulted from this trip. He had fancied a Holland after the works of Teniers and Steen, of Rembrandt and Ostada, in his usual way imagining rich, unique and incomparable ghettos. At thought of amazing car-messes, continual debauches in the countryside's intent for a view of that patriarchal simplicity, that jovial lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters. Certainly Harlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him. The unwashed people seen in their country farms really resembled those types painted by fun Ostada, with their uncouth children and their old fat women embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies. But of the unrestrained joys, the drunken family carousels, not a wit, he had to admit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him. They had simply served as a springing-board for his dreams. He had rushed forward on a false track and had wandered into capricious visions, unable to discover in the land itself anything of that real and magical country which he had hoped to behold. Seeing nothing at all on the plots of ground strewn with barrels of the dances of petticoated and stockinged peasants crying for very joy, stamping their feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly. Decidedly, nothing of all this was visible. Holland was a country just like any other country, and what was more a country in no wise primitive, not at all simple, for the Protestant religion, with its formal hypocrisies and solemn rigidness, held sway here. The memory of that disenchantment returned to him. Once more he glanced at his watch. Ten minutes still separated him from the train's departure. It is about time to ask for the bill and leave, he told himself. He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through his body. Come, he addressed himself, let us drink and screw up our courage. He filled a glass of brandy while asking for the reckoning. An individual in a black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort of major domo with a bald and sharp head, a graying beard without moustaches, came forward. A pencil rested behind his ear and he assumed an attitude like a singer one foot in front of the other. He drew a notebook from his pocket and without glancing at his paper, his eyes fixed on the ceiling near a chandelier, wrote while counting. There you are, he said, tearing the sheet from his notebook and giving it to Desis Sainte, who looked at him with curiosity, as though he were a rare animal. What a surprising John Bull, he thought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of his shaved mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman on an American ship. At this moment the tavern door opened. Several persons entered, bringing with them an odour of wet dog, to which was blent the smell of coal wafted by the wind through the opened door. Desis Sainte was incapable of moving a limb. A soft warm langa prevented him from even stretching out his hand to light a cigar. He told himself, come now, let us get up, we must take ourselves off. Immediate objections thwarted his orders. What is the use of moving when one can travel on a chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromas and atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surrounded him? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened to him in Holland? He had but sufficient time to race to the station. An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more and more obvious and sudden strength. Pensively he let the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said to himself, now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd into the baggage room. What ennui, what a bore that would be! Then he repeated to himself once more, in fine I have experienced and seen all I wished to experience and see. I have been filled with English life since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go, and by an awkward trip lose those imperishable sensations. How stupid of me to have sought to disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy of the docile fantasmagorias of my brain! Like a very fool to have thought of the necessity of the curiosity of the interest of an excursion. Well, he exclaimed, consulting his watch, it is now time to return home. This time he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back to the SOE station, and returned with his chunks, packages, valises, runks, umbrellas, and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physical stimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home after a long and dangerous voyage. Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Wiesmans translated by John Howard. Chapter 12, Part 1 During the days following his return, Désir Saint contemplated his books and experienced at the thought that he might have been separated from them for a long period as 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 locustity of hotel attendants. The methodical organisation of his life made him feel that it was especially to be envied since the possibility of travelling 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, rearranged 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 Arceleus, Albert Legrand, Luley, and Arnaud de Villanova, treating of the cabala 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 Lyon, 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 Ensreda printing house of Harlem, whose foundry still has the stamps and dyes 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 Wattmans, the brown Hollands, the buff-coloured turkeys and seashell mills, and equally disgusted with all mechanically manufactured sheets. He had ordered special laid paper in the mould from the old plants of Vier, 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 dancing brandy. Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by l'hortique, by trots bosonet or chambol, by the successors of cappé, in irreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cowhide, cape goatskin, in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs protected by tabby or moiré watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with clasps and corners and sometimes even enameled by gruel engelman with silver oxide and clear enamels. Thus with the marvellous episcopal lettering used in the old house of Leclerc he had Baudelaire's works printed in a large format recalling that of ancient missiles on a very light and spongy Japan paper, soft as elderpith 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 sowskin, chosen among a thousand, the colour 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, Desis-Saint 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 here to fore was the abundant health of virtues and devices, the tranquil functioning of commonplace brains, and the practical reality of contemporary ideas without any ideal of sickly deprivation 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 locture, 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 enthousiasms and beliefs of youth are enfeebled, and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseries born, 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 ardour 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 candours whose gentleness and comfort in part, 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 pure-ile 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 desistant read Baudelaire, the more he felt the ineffable charm of this writer, who in an age when thus 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 marvellous 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 Rabelet, and the deep comedy of Molière, 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 Vilon, whose melancholy ballads touched him, and here and there certain fragments from Daubigny, 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 salon he found strangely saturated with moralising twaddle and futility. In his hatred towards all this bold adache he limited himself almost exclusively to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bordelou 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 19th 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 hardy-hood 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 Bordalou and by Bossue 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 Bossue 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 sacristons and foolish salons had acclaimed as works of genius the wretched prattle of such women. Among such works, Desis Sainte had had the curiosity to read those of Madame Svetchin, 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 Récidune of Eliane and Fleurange, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press. Never, no, never, had Desis Sainte 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 Desis Sainte, 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 picelle of the group, but his efforts miscarried. He did not take to the journal and the letter, in which Eugénie 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 Dejouis and Écouchard 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 upon Papa's bed, a cross which a little girl had given him yesterday. Or Mimi and I are invited by Monsieur Halkier 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. Oh, the lovely moon-beam 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 busy-sant to pity. It was hardly worth mentioning, but the Catholic party was not at all particular in the choice of its protégés, 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, Deyses Saint, 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, Deyses Saint discovered that all the ecclesiastics wrote in the same manner, with a little more or a little less abandon or emphasis. And there were seldom any variations between the bodiless patterns traded by Dupain-Loup, or L'Andréo, la Bouillerie, or Gôme, by Don Guéranger, or Ratispane, by Frepple, or Perrault, by Ravignan, or Gratri, by Olivier, or D'ocité, by Didon, or Chaucarne. Deyses Saint 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 unforeseen, or any thesis that was audacious. Yet, despite all this, there were several writers whose burning eloquence fused and shaped this language, notably La Quartière, 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 imbuing 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 conférence 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 labours 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, maybe found the caressing inflections of a father exhorting his sons with smiling reprimands, the well-meaning advice, and the indulgent forgiveness. Some of these desiscent 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 la Cordaire, ecclesiastics and monks possessing any individuality were extremely rare. At the very most, a few pages of his pupil, the Abbé Pérève, merited reading. He left sympathetic biographies of his master, wrote a few lovable letters, composed treatises in the sonorous language of formal discourse, and delivered panegyrics in which the declamatory tone was too broadly stressed. Certainly the Abbé Pérève had neither the emotion nor the ardour of la Cordaire. He was too much of 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. End of Chapter 12 Part 1 Recording by Martin Geithen in Hazelmere Surrey Chapter 12 of Against the Grain This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Geithen Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huismans Translated by John Howard Chapter 12 Part 2 With the Conte 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 in the books, were mordant and discerning under the exaggerated politeness of their form. Conceived as harangs, 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 Conte de Falloux had also written striking, penetrating pages on the death of Madame Svecin, 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 Lunité 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, fomenters of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds, emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the Simeon 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 Catolique, and was directed against the despotism of the univers, and against Veyu, whose name he refused to mention. Here the sinuous attacks were resumed, venom filtered beneath each line, when the gentleman Cladine Blu 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. Du Fallu, the Mohorti and Cunning, belonged to the liberal camp, which already claimed Montalemberg and Cochin, La Cordaire and de Broglie. He subscribed to the principles of their correspondents, a review which attempted to cover the imperious theories of the church with a varnish of tolerance. Veyu, franker and more open, scorned such masks, unhesitatingly admitted the tyranny of the ultra-montane doctrines, and confessed, with a certain compunction, the pitiless yoke of the church's dogma. With the conduct of this verbal warfare, Veyu had made himself master of a special style, partly borrowed from La Breuillière and du Cro-Cailloux. This half-solom, 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 overrode everybody by his powerful talent, incurring the attack of the entire press which he effectively thrashed in his odeur 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, Veyu 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 litonies 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, Desissant never failed to be astonished by the insusias 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. Avert that the church had never concealed the esteem it had for science, called heresy's impure miasmas, and treated Buddhism and other religions with such contempt that he apologised for even soiling his Catholic prose by onslaught on their doctrines. At times religious passion breathed a certain ardour into his oratorical language, under the ice of which seathed a violent current. In his numerous writings on Dante, on Saint Francis, on the author of the Starbat Mater, on the Franciscan poets, on socialism, on commercial law, and every imaginable subject, this man pleaded for the defence 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, Netman, 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 pretensions. 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 illumined the place a few paces before him. In this gloom, uncertain of his bearings, he stumbled at every turn, speaking of Murchet, who had the care of a chiseled and carefully finished style, of Hugo, who sought the noisome and unclean, and to whom he dared compare de la Prade, of Paul de la Croix, who scorned the rules, of Paul de la Roche, and of the poet Raboux, whom he praised because of their apparent faith. L'Essaint 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 Poujoula and Genoude, Montalambère, Nicola, and Carnet, 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 Duke de Broglie, nor was his penchant for the social and religious questions, even when broached by Henri Cocheun, who revealed his true self in a letter where he gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at the Sacré-Cœur. 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 purile lucubrations of the gloomy Pont-Martin and the pitiful Théval. And long since he had given to his servants for a certain vulgar usage the short stories of Obinot and Lacer, in which are recorded wretched hagiographies of miracles effected by Dupont of Tour and by the Virgin. In no way did Desessant 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 father's 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 la Menet, and that impervious sectarian, so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, the Conte Joseph de Maestre. A single volume remained on a shelf within reach of his hand. It was the um of Ernest Elo. This writer was the absolute opposite of his religious confederates. Almost isolated among the pious group terrified by his conduct, Ernest Elo 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 enough 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. Talk to us, and precious, doctoral and complex, Elo, by the piercing cunning of his analysis, recalled to disissant 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 manipulator 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 elucidated by details of the wheel-work. In this oddly formed mind existed unsamized relationships of thoughts, harmonies and oppositions. Furthermore, he affected a wholly novel manner of action which used the etymology of words as a springboard 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 avar, 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 Elo 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 Isiah. He affected inordinate pretensions of profundity. There were some forning 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, endeavouring to complicate their ordinarily obvious sense. In his other book, Am, 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 mestre, a surly and bitter sectarian. But, thought Desi Saint, 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 towards 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 Vision by Angel 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, Elo, 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, Dizisant felt himself intrigued towards this ill-balanced but subtle mind. No fusion had been effected between the skilful psychologist and the pious pedant, and the very jolts and incoherences 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 Veilleux and Elo 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 Elo 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 Léon Blois, 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, Barbe d'Orrévie. 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 pixies, and executed eccentric dances around the tabernacle. Two works of Barbe d'Orrévie, especially attracted des esats, the Praitres Mariers and the Diabolique. Others, such as the Ansar Slé, the Chevalier des Touche, and Une Vieille Maîtresse, were certainly more comprehensive and more finely balanced, but they left des esats untouched, for he was really interested only in unhealthy works, which were consumed and irritated by fever. In these all but healthy volumes, Barbe d'Orrévie constantly hesitated between those two pits which the Catholic religion succeeds in reconciling, mysticism and sadism. In these two books which des esats were summing, Barbe had lost all prudence, given full reign 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 Praitres Mariers. 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 copalias of Hoffman, some like Neel de Neu, seemed to have been imagined in moments of exhaustion following convulsions, and were discordant notes in this harmony of somber madness, where they were as comical and ridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece. After these mystic divergations 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 prêtres mariés, Barbé d'orevillies sang the praises of Christ, who had prevailed against temptation. In the diabolique 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 satiriasis 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 of 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 18th 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 maleus maleficarum, that terrible code of Jacob Sprenger, which permits the Church wholesale burnings of necromancers and sorcerers, Desisante recognised in the witches' Sabbath all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism. In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the knights 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 Machkidesad, who garnished his terrible pleasures without outrageous sacrilegies. He cried out to the sky, invoked Lucifer, shouted his contempt of God, calling him rogue and imbecile, spat upon the communion, endeavoured to contaminate with vile audios, a divinity who he prayed might damn him, the while he declared to defy him the more that he did not exist. Barbé d'Orrévie 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 honour the church. He nonetheless 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 Ludiné d'un até. This extravagant book pleased Désis Sainte. 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 diabolique, 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 clamourous 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, towards which Catholicism often thrust Désis Sainte. With Barbet d'Orrévie, 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 dishevelled romanticism, full of involved expressions, unfamiliar turns of speech, delighted with extravagant comparisons, and with whipstrokes and phrases which exploded like the clanger of noisy bells along the text. In short, D'Orrévie was like a stallion among the geldings of the ultra-montein stables. Désis Sainte reflected in this wise, while rereading, 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, Barbara D'Orrévie 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 told the Angelus announced breakfast time to Desis Saint. 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 Barbara D'Orrévie, where the only ones whose ideas and style offered the gaminess he so loved to savour in the Latin and decadent monastic writers of past ages, end of chapter 12, recording by Martin Geitham in Hazelmere Surrey.