Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  But there was worse to come: there was Mrs Augustus Craven, 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 Ecouchard 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 goodwill 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 polemists 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-Maximin, the Reverend Father Chocarne.6

  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 none the less 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 dull 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 none the less 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 – Netternent. 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 this 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-Cœur, 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.7

  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 Duranty8 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 but 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 Chu
rch’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.