The Cathedral by Joris Karl Huysmans

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J.K. Huysmans

THE CATHEDRAL

Translated by Clara Bell

_Publishing History_
First published in France in 1898
First English edition in 1898

THE CATHEDRAL.

CHAPTER I.

At Chartres, as you turn out of the little market-place, which is swept
in all weathers by the surly wind from the flats, a mild air as of a
cellar, made heavy by a soft, almost smothered scent of oil, puffs in
your face on entering the solemn gloom of the sheltering forest.

Durtal knew it well, and the delightful moment when he could take
breath, still half-stunned by the sudden change from a stinging north
wind to a velvety airy caress. At five every morning he left his rooms,
and to reach the covert of that strange forest he had to cross the
square; the same figures were always to be seen at the turnings from the
same streets; nuns with bowed heads, leaning forward, the borders of
their caps blown back and flapping like wings, the wind whirling in
their skirts, which they could hardly hold down; and shrunken women, in
garments they hugged round them, struggling forward with bent shoulders
lashed by the gusts.

Never at that hour had he seen anybody walking boldly upright, without
straining her neck and bowing her head; and these scattered women
gathered by degrees into two long lines, one of them turning to the
left, to vanish under a lighted porch opening to a lower level than the
square; the other going straight on, to be swallowed up in the darkness
by an invisible wall.

Closing the procession came a few belated priests, hurrying on, with one
hand gathering up the gown that ballooned behind them, and with the
other clutching their hats, or snatching at the breviary that was
slipping from under one arm, their faces hidden on their breast, to
plough through the wind with the back of their neck; with red ears, eyes
blinded with tears, clinging desperately, when it rained, to umbrellas
that swayed above them, threatening to lift them from the ground and
dragging them in every direction.

The passage had been more than usually stormy this morning; the squalls
that tear across the district of La Beauce, where nothing can check
them, had been bellowing for hours; there had been rain, and the puddles
splashed under foot. It was difficult to see, and Durtal had begun to
think that he should never succeed in getting past the dim mass of the
wall that shut in the square, by pushing open the door behind which lay
that weird forest, redolent of the night-lamp and the tomb, and
protected from the gale.

He sighed with satisfaction, and followed the wide path that led through
the gloom. Though he knew his way, he walked cautiously in this alley,
bordered by enormous trunks, their crowns lost in shadow. He could have
fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were
flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir
overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our
firmament; they quivered almost on the ground, and were, in fact,
earth-born.

In this obscurity nothing was to be heard but the fall of quiet feet,
nothing to be seen but silent shades visible against the twilight like
shapes of deeper darkness.

Durtal presently turned into another wide walk crossing that he had
left. There he found a bench backed by the trunk of a tree, and on this
he leaned, waiting till the Mother should awake, and the sweet interview
interrupted yesterday by the close of the day should begin again.

He thought of the Virgin, whose watchful care had so often preserved him
from unexpected risk, easy slips, or greater falls. Was not She the
bottomless Well of goodness, the Bestower of the gifts of good Patience,
the Opener of dry and obdurate hearts? Was She not, above all, the
living and thrice Blessed Mother?

Bending for ever over the squalid bed of the soul, she washed the sores,
dressed the wounds, strengthened the fainting weakness of converts.
Through all the ages She was the eternal supplicant, eternally
entreated; at once merciful and thankful; merciful to the woes She
alleviated, and thankful to them too. She was indeed our debtor for our
sins, since, but for the wickedness of man, Jesus would never have been
born under the corrupt semblance of our image, and She would not have
been the immaculate Mother of God. Thus our woe was the first cause of
Her joy; and this supremest good resulting from the very excess of Evil,
this touching though superfluous bond, linking us to Her, was indeed the
most bewildering of mysteries; for Her gratitude would seem unneeded,
since Her inexhaustible mercy was enough to attach Her to us for ever.

Thenceforth, in Her immense humility, She had at various times
condescended to the masses; She had appeared in the most remote spots,
sometimes seeming to rise from the earth, sometimes floating over the
abyss, descending on solitary mountain peaks, bringing multitudes to Her
feet, and working cures; then, as if weary of wandering to be adored,
She wished--so it had seemed--to fix the worship in one place, and had
deserted Her ancient haunts in favour of Lourdes.

That town was the second stage of Her progress through France in the
nineteenth century. Her first visit was to La Salette.

This was years ago. On the 19th of September, 1846, the Virgin had
appeared to two children on a hill; it was a Saturday, the day dedicated
to Her, which, that year, was a fast day by reason of the Ember week. By
another coincidence, this Saturday was the eve of the Festival of Our
Lady of Seven Dolours, and the first vespers were being chanted when
Mary appeared as from a shell of glory just above the ground.

And she appeared as Our Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of
stubborn rocks and dismal hills. Weeping bitterly, She had uttered
reproofs and threats; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had
flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never since been dried
up.

The fame of this event spread far and wide; frantic thousands scrambled
up fearful paths to a spot so high that trees could not grow there.
Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across
ravines to drink the water; and maimed limbs recovered, and tumours
melted away to the chanting of canticles.

Then, by degrees, after the sordid debates of a contemptible lawsuit,
the reputation of La Salette dwindled to nothing; pilgrims were few,
miracles were less often proclaimed. The Virgin, it would seem, was
gone; She had ceased to care for this spring of piety and these
mountains.

At the present day few persons climb to La Salette but the natives of
Dauphine, tourists wandering through the Alps, or invalids following the
cure at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe. Conversions and
spiritual graces still abound there, but bodily healing there is next to
none.

"In fact," said Durtal to himself, "the vision at La Salette became
famous without its ever being known exactly why. It may be supposed to
have grown up as follows: the report, confined at first to the village
of Corps at the foot of the mountain, spread first throughout the
department, was taken up by the adjacent provinces, filtered over all
France, overflowed the frontier, trickled through Europe, and at last
crossed the seas to land in the New World which, in its turn, felt the
throb, and also came to this wilderness to hail the Virgin.

"And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might
have daunted the determination of the most persevering. To reach the
little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow
trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations; days
must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas
at country inns; and after flaying your back on the carding-combs of
impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on
foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridle-paths above precipices; and at
last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no
pastures, no torrents; nothing--nothing but total solitude, and silence
unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be
found.

"What a scene!" thought Durtal, calling up the memories of a journey he
had made with the Abbe Gevresin and his housekeeper, since leaving La
Trappe. He remembered the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint
Georges de Commiers and La Mure, and his alarm in the carriage as the
train slowly travelled across the abyss. Beneath was darkness increasing
in spirals down to the vasty deeps; above, as far as the eye could
reach, piles of mountains invaded the sky.

The train toiled up, snorting and turning round and round like a top;
then, going into a tunnel, was swallowed by the earth; it seemed to be
pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a
clearing full of sunshine; presently, as if it were retracing its road,
it rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a
steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding
ribbon of road cut in the living rock.

Suddenly the peaks parted, a wide opening brought the train out into
broad daylight; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.

"Le Drac!" exclaimed the Abbe Gevresin, pointing to a sort of liquid
serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between
rocks in the very jaws of the pit.

For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that
rent it as it passed; the waters changed as though poisoned by these
fangs; they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran
bath; then the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the
shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun;
presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way,
scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far
away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind
them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry
sand.

Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down
into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train
on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was
the void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! "What a hash!"
thought he.

And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss
was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the
peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and
sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being
covered for its whole width by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable
balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped
avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a
tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows
of an axe--huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn
through shaley layers of slate.

And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the
heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling
clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of
oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of
coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very
edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white
crosses--the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs,
red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling
headlong, clinging on--how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here
and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides;
while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks,
with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing
smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of
their summits.

The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting;
perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within
us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless
rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the
all-important fact; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting
the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.

The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which
had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the
mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it; they cut it up,
sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere
tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud.

The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam at
the sight of those, vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong
place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.

The Abbe had said that the Drac was one of the most formidable torrents
in France; at the moment it was dormant, almost dry; but when the
season of snows and storms comes it wakes up and flashes like a tide of
silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, and can in an instant
swallow up villages and dams.

"It is hideous," thought Durtal. "That bilious flood must carry fevers
with it; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its
metallic hues, its scrap of rainbow-colour stranded in the mud."

Durtal now thought over all these details; as he closed his eyes he
could see the Drac and La Salette.

"Ah!" thought he, "they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture to
those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for
when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no
bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church
of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard,
and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of
dry scoriae, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above them, the
glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of
grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was
nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.

"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade,
close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three
bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most
preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican's
bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then
the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her
sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking; Maximin,
with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his
hand; Melanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog
like a paper-weight--all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more
alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a
melodramatic expression.

"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the
Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if
the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this
degrading work--perpetrated by one Barreme of Angers and cast in the
steam foundries of Le Creusot--the body too had something to endure on
this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.

"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had
themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun
burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church,
you are frozen.

"The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of
bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for
everything combines to forbid it.

"But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of
them; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette
has fallen into disrepute.

"Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself
again, not in Dauphine this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After
the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of
Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in
Glory, who appeared; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she
revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.

"And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as
the exact opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the hills
in the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit
access to their heights; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine
trees, living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and
accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every
requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached without
adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in country
inns, or days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without creeping along
the face of a precipice; and the traveller is at his destination when he
gets out of the train.

"This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that
it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such
strong measures to attract them.

"But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself of
the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics; with
Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene.

"This it is that confounds the mind: Jesus condescending to make use of
the wretched arts of human commerce; adopting the repulsive tricks which
we employ to float a manufacture or a business.

"And we wonder whether this may not be the sternest lesson in humility
ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproof hurled at the
American abominations of our day--God reduced to lowering Himself once
more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices
that He may make Himself heard and obeyed; God no longer even trying to
make us understand His purpose through Himself, or to uplift us to that
height.

"In point of fact, the way in which the Lord set to work to promulgate
the mercies peculiar to Lourdes is astounding. To make them known He is
no longer content to spread the report of its miracles by word of mouth;
no, and it might be supposed that in His eyes Lourdes is harder to
magnify than La Salette--He adopted strong measures from the first. He
raised up a man whose book, translated into every language, carried the
news of the vision to the most distant lands, and certified the truth of
the cures effected at Lourdes.

"To the end that this work should stir up the masses, it was necessary
that the writer destined to the task should be a clever organizer, and
at the same time a man devoid of individuality of style and of any novel
ideas. In a word, what was needed was a man devoid of talent; and that
is quite intelligible, since from the point of view of appreciating art
the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public.
And our Lord did the thing well; he selected Henri Lasserre.

"Consequently the mine exploded as required, rending souls and bringing
crowds out on to the road to Lourdes.

"Years went by. The fame of the sanctuary is an established fact.
Indisputable cures are effected by supernatural means and certified by
clinical authorities, whose good faith and scientific skill are above
suspicion. Lourdes has its fill; and yet, little by little, in the long
run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about
the Grotto is diminishing. It is dying out, if not in the religious
world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting,
who must be convinced. And our Lord thinks it desirable to revive
attention to the benefits dispensed by His Mother.

"Lasserre was not such an instrument as could renew the half-exhausted
vogue enjoyed by Lourdes. The public was soaked in his book; it had
swallowed it in every vehicle and in every form; the end was achieved;
this budding-knife of miracles was a tool that might now be laid aside.

"What was now wanted was a book entirely unlike his; a book that would
influence the vaster public, whom his homely prosiness would never
reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable
strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please. It was
requisite, therefore, that this new book should be written by a man of
talent, whose style nevertheless should not be so transcendental as to
scare folks. And it was an advantage that the writer should be very well
known, so that his enormous editions might counterpoise those of
Lasserre.

"Now in all the realm of literature there was but one man who could
fulfil these imperative conditions: Emile Zola. In vain should we seek
another. He alone with his battering push, his enormous sale, his
blatant advertisement, could launch Lourdes once more.

"It mattered little that he would deny supernatural agency and endeavour
to explain inexplicable cures by the meanest hypotheses; it mattered
little that he mixed mortar of the medical muck of a Charcot to make his
wretched theory hold together; the great thing was that noisy debates
should arise about the book of which more than a hundred and fifty
thousand copies proclaimed the name of Lourdes throughout the world.

"And then the very disorder of his arguments, the poor resort to a
'breath that heals the people,' invented in contradiction to all the
data of positive science on which he prided himself, with the purpose of
making these extraordinary cures intelligible--cures which he had seen,
and of which he dared not deny the reality or the frequency--were
admirable means of persuading unprejudiced and candid inquirers of the
authenticity of the recoveries effected year after year at Lourdes.

"This avowed testimony to such amazing facts was enough to give a fresh
impetus to the masses. It must be remarked, too, that the book betrays
no hostility to the Virgin, of whom it speaks only in respectful terms
on the whole; so is it not very credible that the scandal to which this
work gave rise was profitable?

"To sum up: it may be asserted that Lasserre and Zola were both useful
instruments; one devoid of talent, and for that very reason penetrating
to the very lowest strata of the Catholic methodists; the other, on the
contrary, making himself welcome to a more intelligent and cultivated
public, by those splendid passages where the flaming multitude of
processions moves on, and amid a cyclone of anguish, the triumphant
faith of the white ranks is exultant.

"Oh, yes! She is fond of Her Lourdes, is Our Lady, and pets it. She
seems to have centred all Her powers there, all Her favours; Her other
sanctuaries are perishing that this one may live!

"Why?

"Why, above all, have created La Salette and then sacrificed it, as it
were?

"That She should have appeared there is quite intelligible," thought
Durtal, answering himself. "The Virgin is more highly venerated in
Dauphine than in any other province; chapels dedicated to Her worship
swarm in those parts, and She meant perhaps to reward their zeal by Her
gracious presence.

"On the other hand, She appeared there with a special and very definite
end in view: to preach repentance to mankind, and especially to priests.
She ratified by certain miracles the evidence of this mission which She
confided to Melanie, and then, that being accomplished, She could desert
the spot where She had, no doubt, never intended to remain.

"And after all," he went on, after a moment's reflection, "may we not
admit an even simpler solution, namely, this:--

"Mary vouchsafes to appear under various aspects to satisfy the tastes
and cravings of each soul. At La Salette, where She descended in a
distressful spot, all in tears, She revealed Herself no doubt to certain
persons, more especially to the souls in love with sorrow, the mystical
souls that delight in reviving the anguish of the Passion and following
the Mother in Her heart-breaking way to the Cross. She would thus seem
less attractive to the vulgar who do not love woe or weeping; it may be
added that they still less love reproof and threats. The Virgin of La
Salette could not become popular, by reason of Her aspect and address,
while She of Lourdes, who appeared smiling, and prophesied no
catastrophes, was easy of access to the hopes and gladness of the crowd.

"She was, in short, in that sanctuary, the Virgin of the world at large,
not the Virgin of mystics and artists, the Virgin of the few, as at La
Salette.

"What a mystery is this direct intervention of the Christ's Mother on
earth!" thought Durtal.

And he went on: "It is clear, on reflection, that the churches founded
by Her may be classed in two very distinct groups.

"One group where She has revealed Herself to certain persons, where
waters spring and bodily ills are healed: La Salette and Lourdes.

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