J.-K. Huysmans

“ He said to himself, "If I had a place like this, above the roofs of Paris, I would fix it up and make of it a real haven of refuge. Here, in the clouds, alone and aloof, I would work away on my book and take my time about it, years perhaps. What inconceivable happiness it would be to escape from the age, and, while the waves of human folly were breaking against the foot of the tower, to sit up here, out of it all, and pore over antique tomes by the shaded light of the lamp."
He smiled at the naïveté of his daydream. ”

“ Des Esseintes thought that never before had a water color attained such magnificent coloring; never before had the poverty of colors been able to force jeweled corruscations from paper, gleams like stained glass windows touched by rays of sunlight, splendors of tissue and flesh so fabulous and dazzling. Lost in contemplation, he sought to discover the origins of this great artist and mystic pagan, this visionary who succeeded in removing himself from the world sufficiently to behold, here in Paris, the splendor of these cruel visions and the enchanting sublimation of past ages. ”

“ He took in all the windows of the nave with a rapid glance, and it struck him that their effect was a combination of the prison and the grave, with their coals of fire burning behind iron bars, some crossed like the windows of a gaol, and others twisting like black twigs and branches. Is not glass painting of all arts that in which God does most to help the artist, the art which man, unaided, can never make perfect, since the sky alone can give life to the colours by a beam of sunshine, and lend movement to the lines? ”

“ Durtal looked on in transport. He desired to cry aloud his enthusiasm and his Faith to the landscape; he felt a joy in living. The horror of existence counted for nothing when there were such moments, as no earthly happiness can give. God alone had the power of thus filling a soul, of making it overflow, and rush in floods of joy; and He alone could also fill the basin of sorrows, as no event in this world could do. Durtal had just tried it; his spiritual sufferings and joys attained under the divine imprint an acuteness, which people most humanly happy or unhappy cannot even suspect. ”

“ Without any transition, as though by some stage device, a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance, a wan, dead, waste, gullied landscape. A light illumined this desolate site, a peaceful white light that recalled gleams of phosphorus dissolved in oil.
Something that stirred on the ground became a deathly pale, nude woman whose feet were covered with green silk stockings.
He contemplated her with curiosity. As though frizzed by overheated irons, her hair curled, becoming straight again at the end; her distended nostrils were the color of roast veal. ”

“ From behind the pendent lace smiled the composite features of the unknown and of Mme. Chantelouve. Delighted, he gazed at the apparition without ever perceiving whom he had evoked, when his cat, jumping into his lap, distracted his thoughts and brought him back to his room.
"Well, well, she won't let me alone," and in spite of himself he began to laugh at the thought of the unknown following him even to the château de Tiffauges. "It's foolish to let my thoughts wander this way," he said, drawing himself up, "but daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty. ”

“ Blessed Virgin, I do not seek to excuse myself and my sins. And still I dare confess to Thee that it is discouraging, heart-breaking, to understand nothing and see nothing! Is this Chartres where I am vegetating a waiting-place, a halting-place between two monasteries, a bridge leading from Notre Dame de l'Atre to Solesmes or some other Abbey? Or is it, on the contrary, the final stage where it is Thy will that I should remain fixed? But then my life has no further meaning! It is purposeless, built and overthrown with the shifting of sands. ”

“ Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelful of verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. ”

“ Not one of us knows where we are. I descend again from the carriage, and sitting on an embankment, I nibble at a bit of bread and drink a drop or two, when the whirl of a hurricane whistles in the distance, approaches, roaring and vomiting fire, and an interminable train of artillery passed at full speed, carrying along horses, men, and cannon whose bronze necks sparkle in a confusion of light. ”

“ Opening his eyes he found himself in his dressing room, seated in front of his table. Stupefied, he painfully walked across the room to the window which he half opened. A puff of wind dispelled the stifling atmosphere which was enveloping him. To exercise his limbs, he walked up and down gazing at the ceiling where crabs and sea-wrack stood out in relief against a background as light in color as the sands of the seashore. A similar décor covered the plinths and bordered the partitions which were covered with Japanese sea-green crêpe, slightly wrinkled, imitating a river rippled by the wind. ”

“ A magnificent blue for the sky and another vile blue, white, brilliant red, melancholy pinks, a light green, dark greens, and gold. No bright yellow like everlastings, no luminous straw-colour; at most a heavy opaque yellow for the hair of his female saints; no truly bold orange, no violet, either tender or strong, unless in the half-hidden lining of a cloak or in the scarcely visible robe of a saint, cut off by the frame; no brown that does not lurk in the background. His palette, as may be seen, is very limited. ”

“ Guardian of strident Neuroses, Leaden Tower of Hysteria, bloody Vase of Rape!
"Master, thy faithful servants, on their knees, implore thee and supplicate thee to satisfy them when they wish the torture of all those who love them and aid them; they supplicate thee to assure them the joy of delectable misdeeds unknown to justice, spells whose unknown origin baffles the reason of man; they ask, finally, glory, riches, power, of thee, King of the Disinherited, Son who art to overthrow the inexorable Father!" ”

“ At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne away on the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror, wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering "Dona eis requiem," they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ.
What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such disasters? And Durtal made answer to himself: "No man." ”

“ How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Hérodiade who, in the work of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dim white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones.
The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerelle whites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity. ”

“ And slowly, while unrolling its coil of smoke, the censer spread, as it were, a blue gauze before the altar, while the Blessed Sacrament was lifted like a golden moon, amid the stars of the tapers, sparkling in the growing darkness of that fog, the bells of the abbey sounded with musical and sweet strokes. And all the monks bowed low with their eyes closed, then recovered themselves and entoned the "Laudate" to the old melody which is also sung at Notre Dame des Victoires at the Benediction in the evening. ”

“ To the men of that time the north meant the gloom of winter, the dejection of darkness, the misery of cold; the ice-bound chant of the winds was to them the very blast of evil; to the north was the home of the devil, the hell of nature, as the south was its Eden."
"But that is absurd!" cried Durtal, "the greatest blunder ever introduced into the symbolism of the elements. The medieval sages were mistaken, for snow is pure and cold is chastity. It is the sun, on the contrary, that is the active agent in developing the germs of rottenness, the ferment of vice! ”

“ Chapter 7 Ever since the night when he had evoked, for no apparent reason, a whole train of melancholy memories, pictures of his past life returned to Des Esseintes and gave him no peace.
He found himself unable to understand a single word of the books he read. He could not even receive impressions through his eyes. It seemed to him that his mind, saturated with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.
He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. ”

“ Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if, fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God. ”

“ It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. ”

“ A lamentable perfume went up like incense to Our Lady from a very sheaf of woes.
Few men came to this hidden meeting-place of trouble; still fewer young people, for these have not yet suffered enough; there were only a few old men, and a few sick who dragged themselves along by the backs of the chairs, and a little hunchback, whom Durtal saw coming there every evening, an outcast who could only be loved by Her who does not even see the body. ”

“ On rainy autumnal days when melancholy oppressed him, when a hatred of his home, the muddy yellow skies, the macadam clouds assailed him, he took refuge in this retreat, set the cage lightly in motion and watched it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage no longer stirred, but that the boudoir reeled and turned, filling the house with a rose-colored waltz. ”

“ On the other hand, consider this blue which Angelico uses so sumptuously in his celestial tones; when he makes it darker it loses its fulness, and looks almost dull; we see this in St. Clara's hood.
But what is yet more amazing is that this painter, so eloquent in blue, is but a stammerer when he makes use of the other angelic hue—rose-pink. In his hands it is neither subtle nor ingenuous; it is opaque, of the colour of blood thinned with water, or of pink sticking-plaister, excepting when it trends on the hue of wine-lees, like that of the Saviour's sleeves. ”

“ Now the Sundays grew heavy, the violet Sundays when the "Gloria in Excelsis" is no more heard, when the "Audi Benigne" of Saint Ambrose is chanted, and the "Miserere," that cinder-coloured psalm, which is perhaps the most perfect masterpiece which the Church has ever drawn from her store-houses of plain chants.
It was Lent, when the amethysts fade in the moist grey of onyxes, in the embrowned white of quartz, and the magnificent invocation, "Attende Domine," rose beneath the arches. ”

“ Die, aged world!" cried Des Esseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked. This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, "To think that all this is not a dream, to think that I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of this century!" To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims of Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: "The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon." ”

“ The crypt was closed in the afternoon, but he found his way in by a small door in the sacristy inside the cathedral, and descended into utter darkness.
Having reached the crypt in front of the altar, he round once more the doubtful but soothing odour of that vault, smoked by burning tapers, and went forward in the soft, warm atmosphere of frankincense and a cellar. It was even darker than in the early morning, for the lamps were out; floating wicks only, shining through what looked like very thin orange-peel, threw gleams of tarnished gold on the sooty walls. ”

“ Des Esseintes reflected, "is not conducive to the steadying of my already weakened faith. And how admit that omnipotence which stops at such a trifle as a pinch of fecula or a soupcon of alcohol?"
These reflections all the more threw a gloom over the view of his future life and rendered his horizon more menacing and dark.
He was lost, utterly lost. What would become of him in this Paris where he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to the Saint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. ”

“ It is not disputed that the journey of the soul towards God includes, first, perpendicular and breakneck roads—these are the roads of the life of Purification—next, narrower paths still, but well marked out and accessible—these are the paths of the life of Illumination—at length, a wide road almost smooth, the road of the life of unity, at the end of which the soul throws itself into the furnace of Love, and falls into the abyss of the most adorable Infinity! ”

“ At last, in the apse, forming the top of the cross, it poured in, symbolical of the light that flooded the world from the top of the Tree; and the pictures were diaphanous, just lightly covered with flowing lines and aerial tints, to frame in a sheaf of coloured sparks the image of a Madonna, less hieratic and barbaric than the others, and a fairer Infant, blessing the earth with uplifted hand. ”

“ Visible for Salomé alone, it does not, with its fixed gaze, attract Herodias, musing on her finally consummated revenge, nor the Tetrarch who, bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, still pants, maddened by the nudity of the woman saturated with animal odors, steeped in balms, exuding incense and myrrh.
Like the old king, Des Esseintes remained dumbfounded, overwhelmed and seized with giddiness, in the presence of this dancer who was less majestic, less haughty but more disquieting than the Salomé of the oil painting. ”

“ In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung fascinated over the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances; in a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons that approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders; the place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but besides the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded. ”

“ Never was there a more unearthly and yet more living Virgin. Neither Van Eyck, with his rather vulgar and never beautiful heads, nor Memling—more tender and refined, no doubt, but limited to his ideal of a woman with a round forehead and a face shaped like a kite, wide above and pointed below—ever achieved the elegance of form or the purity of a woman made divine by love, a being who, even apart from her surroundings and bereft of the attributes by which she is recognizable, could be none other than the Mother of God. ”

“ Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the depths of some village cloister; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the psalms by the return of the doxology, the "Gloria Patri et Filio," which separated them from each other.
He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable, penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the united tenderness of these bright spirits. ”

“ Those of Notre Dame de Paris are thick-set and gloomy, almost elephantine; cleft almost from top to bottom by deep bays, they seem to mount slowly and with difficulty, and stop short, crushed as it were by the burden of sins, dragged down to earth by the wickedness of the city; we feel the effort with which they rise, and we are saddened as we contemplate those captive masses, all the more depressing by reason of the dismal hue of the louvre-boards. ”

“ In the immediate shipwreck of human reason, wishing to explain the terrible enigma of the meaning of life, one only idea comes to the surface, in the midst of the wreckage of thoughts which sink, the idea of an expiation felt rather than understood, the idea that the sole end assigned to life is sorrow.
"Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows. ”

“ Painted as a triptych, on the right wing was an old man in front of some wondering bystanders, burning incense to the Virgin, who is visible through an open window above a landscape in distant perspective with avenues undulating to the horizon; while a woman, her head dressed in a muffler that is almost a turban, touches the old man's shoulder with one hand and raises the other with an indescribable gesture of surprise and joy, her face expressive of ecstasy. ”

“ When the organ sounded out the first chords, and that plain chant melody began, the choir had only to cross their arms and hold their tongues. As tapers which are lighted by threads of fulminate attached one to the other, the faithful caught fire, and, accompanied by the organs, struck up for themselves the humble and glorious strains. ”

“ They seated themselves in the gloom of the side aisle of the choir, where the dark-toned windows were still further obscured by a poorly executed wooden niche, in which the Virgin, as dark as her namesake in the crypt, Notre Dame de Sous-Terre, stood on a pillar, hung round with bunches of metal hearts and little lamps on coronas, from the roof. Frames of tapers on each side shot up little tongues of flame, and prostrate women were praying, their faces hidden in their hands or upturned to the dark countenance, on which the light did not fall. ”

“ There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty confidence of their faith. ”

“ The Soul, distraught by the joy of union, heart-broken at having still to live, only aspires now to escape for ever from the Gehenna of the flesh; thus it beseeches the Bridegroom with the uplifted arms of its towers, to take pity on it, to come to fetch it, to take it by the clasped hands of its spires and snatch it from earth, to carry it up with Him into Heaven. ”

“ Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the chapel, seemed also changed, his frame remained robust, and his complexion bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common expression of his features, and took away from him that look of a vine-dresser which he had at a distance.
"It is clear," thought Durtal, "that the soul is everything in these people, and their faces are modelled by it. ”

“ Well, I, who am no visionary, and who must appeal to my imagination to picture Her at all, I fancy I discern Her under the forms and expressions of the cathedral itself; the features are a little confused in the pale splendour of the great rose window that blazes behind Her head like a nimbus. She smiles, and Her eyes, all light, have the incomparable effulgence of those pure sapphires which light up the entrance to the nave. Her slight form is diffused in a clear robe of flame, striped and ribbed like the drapery of the so-called Berthe. ”