Down There (Là-Bas)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  "Then after a silence he resumes his discourse, and making no account of the murders, but dwelling only on the crimes of which the punishment, foreseen by canonic law, can be fixed by the Church, he demands that Gilles be smitten with double excommunication, first as an evoker of demons, a heretic, apostate and renegade, second as a sodomist and perpetrator of sacrilege.

  "Gilles, who has listened to this incisive and scathing indictment, completely loses control of himself. He insults the judges, calls them simonists and ribalds, and refuses to answer the questions put to him. The Prosecutor and advocates are unmoved; they invite him to present his defence.

  "Again he denounces them, insults them, but when called upon to refute them he remains silent.

  "The Bishop and Vice Inquisitor declare him in contempt and pronounce against him the sentence of excommunication, which is soon made public. They decide in addition that the hearing shall be continued next day-"

  A ring of the doorbell interrupted Durtal's perusal of his notes. Des Hermies entered.

  "I have just seen Carhaix. He is ill," he said.

  "That so? What seems to be the matter?"

  "Nothing very serious. A slight attack of bronchitis. He'll be up in a few days if he will consent to keep quiet."

  "I must go see him tomorrow," said Durtal.

  "And what are you doing?" enquired Des Hermies. "Working hard?"

  "Why, yes. I am digging into the trial of the noble baron de Rais. It will be as tedious to read as to write!"

  "And you don't know yet when you will finish your volume?"

  "No," answered Durtal, stretching. "As a matter of fact I wish it might never be finished. What will become of me when it is? I'll have to look around for another subject, and, when I find one, do all the drudgery of planning and then getting the introductory chapter written-the mean part of any literary work is getting started. I shall pass mortal hours doing nothing. Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life."

  "And, charitably, it lessens the distress of us few who still love art."

  "Few indeed!"

  "And the number keeps diminishing. The new generation no longer interests itself in anything except gambling and jockeys."

  "Yes, you're quite right. The men can't spare from gambling the time to read, so it is only the society women who buy books and pass judgment on them. It is to The Lady, as Schopenhauer called her, to the little goose, as I should characterize her, that we are indebted for these shoals of lukewarm and mucilaginous novels which nowadays get puffed."

  "You think, then, that we are in for a pretty literature. Naturally you can't please women by enunciating vigorous ideas in a crisp style."

  "But," Durtal went on, after a silence, "it is perhaps best that the case should be as it is. The rare artists who remain have no business to be thinking about the public. The artist lives and works far from the drawing-room, far from the clamour of the little fellows who fix up the custom-made literature. The only legitimate source of vexation to an author is to see his work, when printed, exposed to the contaminating curiosity of the crowd."

  "That is," said Des Hermies, "a veritable prostitution. To advertise a thing for sale is to accept the degrading familiarities of the first comer."

  "But our impenitent pride-and also our need of the miserable sous-make it impossible for us to keep our manuscripts sheltered from the asses. Art ought to be-like one's beloved-out of reach, out of the world. Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul. So when one of my books appears, I let go of it with horror. I get as far as possible from the environment in which it may be supposed to circulate. I care very little about a book of mine until years afterward, when it has disappeared from all the shop windows and is out of print. Briefly, I am in no hurry to finish the history of Gilles de Rais, which, unfortunately, is getting finished in spite of me. I don't give a damn how it is received."

  "Are you doing anything this evening?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Shall we dine together?"

  "Certainly."

  And while Durtal was putting on his shoes, Des Hermies remarked, "To me the striking thing about the so-called literary world of this epoch is its cheap hypocrisy. What a lot of laziness, for instance, that word dilettante has served to cover."

  "Yes, it's a great old alibi. But it is confounding to see that the critic who today decrees himself the title of dilettante accepts it as a term of praise and does not even suspect that he is slapping himself. The whole thing can be resolved into syllogism:

  "The dilettante has no personal temperament, since he objects to nothing and likes everything.

  "Whoever has no personal temperament has no talent."

  "Then," rejoined Des Hermies, putting on his hat, "an author who boasts of being a dilettante, confesses by that very thing that he is no author?"

  "Exactly."

  CHAPTER XVII

  Toward the end of the afternoon Durtal quit work and went up to the towers of Saint Sulpice.

  He found Carhaix in bed in a chamber connecting with the one in which they were in the habit of dining. These rooms were very similar, with their walls or unpapered stone, and with their vaulted ceilings, only, the bedroom was darker. The window opened its half-wheel not on the place Saint Sulpice but on the rear of the church, whose roof prevented any light from getting in. This cell was furnished with an iron bed, whose springs shrieked, with two cane chairs, and with a table that had a shabby covering of green baize. On the bare wall was a crucifix of no value, with a dry palm over it. That was all. Carhaix was sitting up in bed reading, with books and papers piled all around him. His eyes were more watery and his face paler than usual. His beard, which had not been shaved for several days, grew in grey clumps on his hollow cheeks, but his poor features were radiant with an affectionate, affable smile.

  To Durtal's questions he replied, "It is nothing. Des Hermies gives me permission to get up tomorrow. But what a frightful medicine!" and he showed Durtal a potion of which he had to take a teaspoonful every hour.

  "What is it he's making you take?"

  But the bell-ringer did not know. Doubtless to spare him the expense, Des Hermies himself always brought the bottle.

  "Isn't it tiresome lying in bed?"

  "I should say! I am obliged to entrust my bells to an assistant who is no good. Ah, if you heard him ring! It makes me shudder, it sets my teeth on edge."

  "Now you mustn't work yourself up," said his wife. "In two days you will be able to ring your bells yourself."

  But he went on complaining. "You two don't understand. My bells are used to being well treated. They're like domestic animals, those instruments, and they obey only their master. Now they won't harmonize, they jangle. I can hardly recognize their voices."

  "What are you reading?" asked Durtal, wishing to change a subject which he judged to be dangerous.

  "Books about bells! Ah, Monsieur Durtal, I have some inscriptions here of truly rare beauty. Listen," and he opened a worm-bored book, "listen to this motto printed in raised letters on the bronze robe of the great bell of Schaffhausen, 'I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunder.' And this other which figured on an old bell in the belfry of Ghent, 'My name is Roland. When I toll, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders.'"

  "Yes," Durtal agreed, "there is a certain vigour about that one."

  "Ah," said Carhaix, seeming not to have heard the other's remark, "it's ridiculous. Now the rich have their names and titles inscribed on the bells which they give to the churches, but they have so many qualities and titles that there is no room for a motto. Truly, humility is a forgotten virtue in our day."

  "If that were the only forgotten virtue!" sighed Durtal.

  "Ah!" replied Carhaix, not to be turned from his favourite subject, "and if this were the only abuse! But bells now rust from inactivity. The metal is no longer hammer-hardened and is not vibrant
. Formerly these magnificent auxiliaries of the ritual sang without cease. The canonical hours were sounded, Matins and Laudes before daybreak, Prime at dawn, Tierce at nine o'clock, Sexte at noon, Nones at three, and then Vespers and Compline. Now we announce the curate's mass, ring three angeluses, morning, noon, and evening, occasionally a Salute, and on certain days launch a few peals for prescribed ceremonies. And that's all. It's only in the convents where the bells do not sleep, for these, at least, the night offices are kept up."

  "You mustn't talk about that," said his wife, straightening the pillows at his back. "If you keep working yourself up, you will never get well."

  "Quite right," he said, resigned, "but what would you have? I shall still be a man with a grievance, whom nothing can pacify," and he smiled at his wife who was bringing him a spoonful of the potion to swallow.

  The doorbell rang. Mme. Carhaix went to answer it and a hilarious and red-faced priest entered, crying in a great voice, "It's Jacob's ladder, that stairway! I climbed and climbed and climbed, and I'm all out of breath," and he sank, puffing, into an armchair.

  "Well, my friend," he said at last, coming into the bedroom, "I learned from the beadle that you were ill, and I came to see how you were getting on."

  Durtal examined him. An irrepressible gaiety exuded from this sanguine, smooth-shaven face, blue from the razor. Carhaix introduced them. They exchanged a look, of distrust on the priest's side, of coldness on Durtal's.

  Durtal felt embarrassed and in the way, while the honest pair were effusively and with excessive humility thanking the abbé for coming up to see them. It was evident that for this pair, who were not ignorant of the sacrileges and scandalous self-indulgences of the clergy, an ecclesiastic was a man elect, a man so superior that as soon as he arrived nobody else counted.

  Durtal took his leave, and as he went downstairs he thought, "That jubilant priest sickens me. Indeed, a gay priest, physician, or man of letters must have an infamous soul, because they are the ones who see clearly into human misery and console it, or heal it, or depict it. If after that they can act the clown-they are unspeakable! Though I'll admit that thoughtless persons deplore the sadness of the novel of observation and its resemblance to the life it represents. These people would have it jovial, smart, highly coloured, aiding them, in their base selfishness, to forget the hag-ridden existences of their brothers.

  "Truly, Carhaix and his wife are peculiar. They bow under the paternal despotism of the priests-and there are moments when that same despotism must be no joke-and revere them and adore them. But then these two are simple believers, with humble, unsmirched souls. I don't know the priest who was there, but he is rotund and rubicund, he shakes in his fat and seems bursting with joy. Despite the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was gay-spoiling him for me-I have difficulty in persuading myself that this abbé is an elevated being. It's all right to say that the best thing for him is to be mediocre; to ask how, if he were otherwise, he would make his flock understand him; and add that if he really had superior gifts he would be hated by his colleagues and persecuted by his bishop."

  While conversing thus disjointedly with himself Durtal had reached the base of the tower. He stopped under the porch. "I intended to stay longer up there," thought he. "It's only half-past five. I must kill at least half an hour before dinner."

  The weather was almost mild. The clouds had been swept away. He lighted a cigarette and strolled about the square, musing. Looking up he hunted for the bell-ringer's window and recognized it. Of the windows which opened over the portico it alone had a curtain.

  "What an abominable construction," he thought, contemplating the church. "Think. That cube flanked by two towers presumes to invite comparison with the façade of Notre Dame. What a jumble," he continued, examining the details. "From the foundation to the first story are Ionic columns with volutes, then from the base of the tower to the summit are Corinthian columns with acanthus leaves. What significance can this salmagundi of pagan orders have on a Christian church? And as a rebuke to the over-ornamented bell tower there stands the other tower unfinished, looking like an abandoned grain elevator, but the less hideous of the two, at that.

  "And it took five or six architects to erect this indigent heap of stones. Yet Servandoni and Oppenord and their ilk were the real major prophets, the… zekiels of building. Their work is the work of seers looking beyond the eighteenth century to the day of transportation by steam. For Saint Sulpice is not a church, it's a railway station!

  "And the interior of the edifice is not more religious nor artistic than the exterior. The only thing in it that pleases me is good Carhaix's aërial cave." Then he looked about him. "This square is very ugly, but how provincial and homelike it is! Surely nothing could equal the hideousness of that seminary, which exhales the rancid, frozen odour of a hospital. The fountain with its polygonal basins, its saucepan urns, its lion-headed spouts, its niches with prelates in them, is no masterpiece. Neither is the city hall, whose administrative style is a cinder in the eye. But on this square, as in the neighbouring streets, Servandoni, Garancière, and Ferrou, one respires an atmosphere compounded of benign silence and mild humidity. You think of a clothes-press that hasn't been open for years, and, somehow, of incense. This square is in perfect harmony with the houses in the decayed streets around here, with the shops where religious paraphernalia are sold, the image and ciborium factories, the Catholic bookstores with books whose covers are the colour of apple seeds, macadam, nutmeg, bluing.

  "Yes, it's dilapidated and quiet."

  The square was then almost deserted. A few women were going up the church steps, met by mendicants who murmured paternosters as they rattled their tin cups. An ecclesiastic, carrying under his arm a book bound in black cloth, saluted white-eyed women. A few dogs were running about. Children were chasing each other or jumping rope. The enormous chocolate-coloured la Villette omnibus and the little honey-yellow bus of the Auteuil line went past, almost empty. Hackmen were standing beside their hacks on the sidewalk, or in a group around a comfort station, talking. There were no crowds, no noise, and the great trees gave the square the appearance of the silent mall of a little town.

  "Well," said Durtal, considering the church again, "I really must go up to the top of the tower some clear day." Then he shook his head. "What for? A bird's-eye view of Paris would have been interesting in the Middle Ages, but now! I should see, as from a hill top, other heights, a network of grey streets, the whiter arteries of the boulevards, the green plaques of gardens and squares, and, away in the distance, files of houses like lines of dominoes stood up on end, the black dots being windows.

  "And then the edifices emerging from this jumble of roofs, Notre Dame, la Sainte Chapelle, Saint Severin, Saint Etienne du Mont, the Tour Saint Jacques, are put out of countenance by the deplorable mass of newer edifices. And I am not at all eager to contemplate that specimen of the art of the maker of toilet articles which l'Opéra is, nor that bridge arch, l'arc de la Triomphe, nor that hollow chandelier, the Tour Eiffel! It's enough to see them separately, from the ground, as you turn a street corner. Well, I must go and dine, for I have an engagement with Hyacinthe and I must be back before eight."

  He went to a neighbouring wine shop where the dining-room, depopulated at six o'clock, permitted one to ruminate in tranquillity, while eating fairly sanitary food and drinking not too dangerously coloured wines. He was thinking of Mme. Chantelouve, but more of Docre. The mystery of this priest haunted him. What could be going on in the soul of a man who had had the figure of Christ tattooed on his heels the better to trample Him?

  What hate the act revealed! Did Docre hate God for not having given him the blessed ecstasies of a saint, or more humanly for not having raised him to the highest ecclesiastical dignities? Evidently the spite of this priest was inordinate and his pride unlimited. He seemed not displeased to be an object of terror and loathing, for thus he was somebody. Then, for a thorough-paced scoundrel, as this man seemed to be, what delight to m
ake his enemies languish in slow torment by casting spells on them with perfect impunity.

  "And sacrilege carries one out of oneself in furious transports, in voluptuous delirium, which nothing can equal. Since the Middle Ages it has been the coward's crime, for human justice does not prosecute it, and one can commit it with impunity, but it is the most extreme of excesses for a believer, and Docre believes in Christ, or he wouldn't hate Him so.

  "A monster! And what ignoble relations he must have had with Chantelouve's wife! Now, how shall I make her speak up? She gave me quite clearly to understand, the other day, that she refused to explain herself on this topic. Meanwhile, as I have not intention of submitting to her young girl follies tonight, I will tell her that I am not feeling well, and that absolute rest and quiet are necessary."

  He did so, an hour later when she came in.

  She proposed a cup of tea, and when he refused, she embraced him and nursed him like a baby. Then withdrawing a little, "You work too hard. You need some relaxation. Come now, to pass the time you might court me a little, because up to now I have done it all. No? That idea does not amuse him. Let us try something else. Shall we play hide-and-seek with the cat? He shrugs his shoulders. Well, since there is nothing to change your grouchy expression, let us talk. What has become of your friend Des Hermies?"

  "Nothing in particular."

  "And his experiments with Mattei medicine?"

  "I don't know whether he continues to prosecute them or not."

  "Well, I see that the conversational possibilities of that topic are exhausted. You know your replies are not very encouraging, dear."

  "But," he said, "everybody sometimes gets so he doesn't answer questions at great length. I even know a young woman who becomes excessively laconic when interrogated on a certain subject."