Joris-Karl Huysmans

“ Saint Gregory, the first Benedictine to be elected Pope, was the creator of the Liturgy, the master of plain-song. He was alike devoted to justice and to charity, and a passionate patron of art; and this admirable Pope, with his broad and comprehensive spirit, regarded it as a temptation of the Devil that made the bigots, the Pharisees of his day, proclaim their determination not to read profane literature; for, said he, it helps us to understand that which is sacred. ”

“ On the other side of Saint Michael the scene is different; a chubby, smiling angel is playing with a child whom he has perched on one of his fellow-angels' shoulders, and the infant delightedly waves a bough; behind him slowly marches a representative group of saints—a woman, a king, a cenobite, conducted by Saint Peter towards a doorway leading to a sanctum where sits Abraham, an old man with a cloth spread over his knees full of little heads all rejoicing—the souls that are saved. ”

“ This statue, like that at Amiens, was famous; every guidebook sings the praises of the regular features, the calm expression of the face; in reality the countenance is particularly fatuous and cold, beautiful but lifeless. How inferior to that of the twelfth century, the expressive and living God seated between the symbols of the Tetramorph in the tympanum of the royal front.
The Apostles were perhaps rather more refined, rather less squat than the patriarchs and prophets supporting Saint Anne under the north porch, but their quality as works of art was less striking. ”

“ At Chartres, it is true, the devils with wolves' muzzles and asses' ears, trampling down bishops and kings, laymen and monks, and driving them into the maw of a dragon spouting flames—the demons with goats' beards and crescent-shaped jaws seizing hapless sinners who have wandered to the mouldings of the arch, are all very skilfully arranged, in well composed groups round the principal figure ”

“ The preying demons are not ferocious enough, they almost look as if they were monks and were doing it for fun, while the damned take it very calmly.
"How far more desperate is the devil's festival at Dijon!" Durtal recalled to mind the church of Notre Dame in that city, so strange a specimen of thirteenth-century gothic of the Burgundian stamp. ”

“ I fancy that my soul is convalescent, that it is young again, and breathes once more; but if I try to take advantage of this lucid moment to collect myself and to pray, it is all over—I flee from myself—nothing will work. ”

“ At once fierce and pitying, she threatens and entreats; and this image of one for ever excommunicate, cast out of the temple and left to all eternity on the threshold, is as haunting as the memory of suffering, as a nightmare of terror. ”

“ At Bourges, as in all works of this class in the Middle Ages, the dead are escaping from their sepulchres, and on the uppermost frieze, below a figure of Christ, with whom the Virgin and Saint John are interceding, Saint Michael is weighing souls; to the left devils are dragging away the wicked, and to the right angels are conducting the blessed. ”

“ Thus he is represented in the Dom at Erfurt, in a fresco of the fifteenth century, too much restored.
This colossal figure, five storeys high, extends from the pavement of the church to the roof. Christopher has a beard which flows in a stream, and legs as thick as the pillars of the nave. ”

“ A few months ago I longed for the monastic life, that is beyond doubt—and now I am wavering. I have abortive gushes of feeling, ineffectual projects, inclinations which fail, wishes which come short—I will and I will not. Still it is needful to understand oneself ”

“ A devil with a wild beast's muzzle and a drunkard's face in the middle of his fat stomach, is hammering the skull of a wretch who struggles, grinding his teeth, while the devil bites his legs with the end of his tail that bears a serpent's head. ”

“ Men and women push up the lid of the tomb, stride across the edge, leap up, roll over pell mell, one above another; some ecstatically clasping their hands in prayer, their eyes fixed on heaven; others anxiously looking about them on all sides; others praying with terror, throwing up their arms ”

“ And posting himself in front of the cathedral, he studied the south porch, which had most of zoological mysticism and devilries.
But he did not find the monstrosities of his fancy. At Chartres the Vices and Virtues were not symbolized by more or less chimerical creatures, but by human faces. After careful search he discovered on some of the pillars of the middle doorway the Vices embodied in small carved groups: Lust, as a woman fondling a young man ”

“ If the interceding Saints should, in certain cases, refuse to cure us, at any rate they will make us no worse by a mistaken diagnosis and the exhibition of dangerous remedies. Though after all, even if our modern practitioners were not ignoramuses, of what use would that be, since the medicines they prescribe are adulterated? ”

“ It stood thus, formerly, at the door of Notre-Dame de Paris, and is still to be seen in one corner of the principal front at Amiens; but in most places the iconoclasts overthrew it, and the churches where the statue of Christopher is now to be seen may be easily counted. ”

“ The resurrection of the dead, as it is represented by the image-maker of Le Berry, is enough to set the noisy prudery of the Catholics neighing, for the figures are nude, and certain reticences, usually observed at any rate in the female form, are here omitted. ”