Against Nature (20 page)

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 Duranty
⁸
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 Church'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.

To this strange mixture was added a love of sugary piety revealed in translations of the
Visions
of Angela da Foligno, a book of unparalleled stupidity and fluidity, and selections from Jan van Ruysbroeck, a thirteenth-century mystic whose prose presented an incomprehensible but attractive amalgam of gloomy ecstasies, tender raptures and violent rages.

All the affectation there was in Hello the bumptious pontiff had come out in a preface he wrote for this book. As he said himself, ‘extraordinary things can only be stammered out' – and stammer he did, declaring that ‘the sacred obscurity in which Ruysbroeck spreads his eagle's wings is his ocean, his prey, his glory, and for him the four horizons would be too close-fitting a garment'.

Be that as it may, Des Esseintes felt drawn to this unbalanced but subtle mind; the fusion of the skilled psychologist with the pious pedant had proved impossible, and these jolts, these incoherences even, constituted the personality of the man.

The recruits who joined his standard made up the little group of writers who operated on the colour-line of the clerical camp. They did not belong to the main body of the army; strictly speaking, they were rather the scouts of a religion that distrusted men of talent like Veuillot and Hello, for the simple reason that they were neither servile enough nor insipid enough. What it really wanted was soldiers who never reasoned why, regiments of those purblind mediocrities Hello used to attack with all the ferocity of one who had suffered their tyranny. Accordingly Catholicism had made haste to close the columns of its papers
to one of its partisans, Léon Bloy,
⁹
a savage pamphleteer who wrote in a style at once precious and furious, tender and terrifying, and to expel from its bookshops, as one plague-stricken and unclean, another author who had bawled himself hoarse singing its praises: Barbey d'Aurevilly.
¹⁰

Admittedly this latter writer was far too compromising, far too independent a son of the Church. In the long run, the others would always eat humble pie and fall back into line, but he was the
enfant terrible
the party refused to own, who went whoring through literature and brought his women half-naked into the sanctuary. It was only because of the boundless contempt Catholicism has for all creative talent that an excommunication in due and proper form had not outlawed this strange servant who, under the pretext of doing honour to his masters, broke the chapel windows, juggled with the sacred vessels and performed step-dances round the tabernacle.

Two of Barbey d'Aurevilly's works Des Esseintes found particularly enthralling:
Un Prêtre marié
and
Les Diaboliques
. Others, such as
L'Ensorcelée
,
Le Chevalier des Touches
and
Une Vieille Maîtresse
, were doubtless better balanced and more complete works, but they did not appeal so strongly to Des Esseintes who was really interested only in sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever.

In these comparatively healthy volumes Barbey d'Aurevilly was constantly tacking to and fro between those two channels of Catholic belief which eventually run into one: mysticism and sadism. But in the two books which Des Esseintes was now glancing through, Barbey had thrown caution to the winds, had given rein to his steed, and had ridden full tilt down one road after another, as far as he could go.

All the horrific mystery of the Middle Ages brooded over that improbable book
Un Prêtre marié
; magic was mixed up with religion, sorcery with prayer; while the God of original sin, more pitiless, more cruel than the Devil, submitted his innocent victim Calixte to uninterrupted torments, branding her with a red cross on the forehead, just as in olden times he had one of his angels mark the houses of the unbelievers he meant to kill.

These scenes, like the fantasies of a fasting monk affected
with delirium, were unfolded in the disjointed language of a fever patient. But unfortunately, among all the characters galvanized into an unbalanced life like so many Hoffmann Coppelias, there were some, the Néel de Néhou for instance, who seemed to have been imagined in one of those periods of prostration that always follow crises; and they were out of keeping in this atmosphere of melancholy madness, into which they introduced the same note of unintentional humour as is sounded by the little zinc lordling in hunting-boots who stands blowing his horn on the pedestal of so many mantelpiece clocks.

After these mystical divagations, Barbey had enjoyed a period of comparative calm, but then a frightening relapse had occurred.

The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ – all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been the more obstinate in its pursuit.

In
Un Prêtre marié
, it was Christ whose temptations had been successful and whose praises were sung by Barbey d'Aurevilly; but in
Les Diaboliques
, the author had surrendered to the Devil, and it was Satan he extolled. At this point there appeared on the scene that bastard child of Catholicism which for centuries the Church has pursued with its exorcisms and its
autos-da-fé
– sadism.

This strange and ill-defined condition cannot in fact arise in the mind of an unbeliever. It does not consist simply in riotous indulgence of the flesh, stimulated by bloody acts of cruelty, for in that case it would be nothing more than a deviation of the genetic instincts, a case of satyriasis developed to its fullest extent; it consists first and foremost in a sacrilegious manifestation, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in a wholly idealistic, wholly Christian aberration. There is also something
in it of joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the wicked delight of disobedient children playing with forbidden things for no other reason than that their parents have expressly forbidden them to go near them.

The truth of the matter is that if it did not involve sacrilege, sadism would have no
raison d'être
; on the other hand, since sacrilege depends on the existence of a religion, it cannot be deliberately and effectively committed except by a believer, for a man would derive no satisfaction whatever from profaning a faith that was unimportant or unknown to him.

The strength of sadism then, the attraction it offers, lies entirely in the forbidden pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and the prayers that should go to God; it lies in the flouting of the precepts of Catholicism, which the sadist actually observes in topsy-turvy fashion when, in order to offend Christ the more grievously, he commits the sins Christ most expressly proscribed – profanation of holy things and carnal debauch.

In point of fact, this vice to which the Marquis de Sade had given his name was as old as the Church itself; the eighteenth century, when it was particularly rife, had simply revived, by an ordinary atavistic process, the impious practices of the witches' sabbath of medieval times – to go no further back in history.

Des Esseintes had done no more than dip into the
Malleus Maleficorum
, that terrible code of procedure of Jacob Sprenger's which permitted the Church to send thousands of necromancers and sorcerers to the stake; but that was enough to enable him to recognize in the witches' sabbath all the obscenities and blasphemies of sadism. Besides the filthy orgies dear to the Evil One – nights devoted alternately to lawful and unnatural copulation, nights befouled by the bestialities of bloody debauch – he found the same parodies of religious processions, the same ritual threats and insults hurled at God, the same devotion to his Rival – as when the Black Mass was celebrated over a woman on all fours whose naked rump, repeatedly soiled, served as the altar, with the priest cursing the bread and wine, and the congregation derisively taking communion in the shape of a black host stamped with a picture of a he-goat.

This same outpouring of foul-mouthed jests and degrading
insults was to be seen in the works of the Marquis de Sade, who spiced his frightful sensualities with sacrilegious profanities. He would rail at Heaven, invoke Lucifer, call God an abject scoundrel, a crazy idiot, spit on the sacrament of communion, do his best in fact to besmirch with vile obscenities a Divinity he hoped would damn him, at the same time declaring, as a further act of defiance, that that Divinity did not exist.

This psychic condition Barbey d'Aurevilly came close to sharing. If he did not go as far as Sade in shouting atrocious curses at the Saviour; if, out of greater caution or greater fear, he always professed to honour the Church, he nonetheless addressed his prayers to the Devil in true medieval fashion, and in his desire to defy the Deity, likewise slipped into demonic erotomania, coining new sensual monstrosities, or even borrowing from
La Philosophie dans le boudoir
a certain episode which he seasoned with fresh condiments to make the story
Le Dîner d'un athée
.

The extraordinary book that contained this tale was Des Esseintes's delight; he had therefore had printed for him in bishop's-purple ink, within a border of cardinal red, on a genuine parchment blessed by the Auditors of the Rota, a copy of
Les Diaboliques
set up in those
lettres de civilité
whose peculiar hooks and flourishes, curling up or down, assume a satanic appearance.

Not counting certain poems of Baudelaire's which, in imitation of the prayers chanted on the nights of the witches' sabbath, took the form of infernal litanies, this book, among all the works of contemporary apostolic literature, was the only one to reveal that state of mind, at once devout and impious, towards which nostalgic memories of Catholicism, stimulated by fits of neurosis, had often impelled Des Esseintes.

With Barbey d'Aurevilly, the series of religious writers came to an end. To tell the truth, this pariah belonged more, from every point of view, to secular literature than to that other literature in which he claimed a place that was denied him. His wild romantic style, for instance, full of twisted expressions, outlandish turns of phrase and far-fetched similes, whipped up his sentences as they galloped across the page, farting and
jangling their bells. In short, Barbey looked like a stallion among the geldings that filled the ultramontane stables.