The Cathedral E-Book

Joris Karl Huysmans

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Ahymn to Gothic art and the glories of Chartres Cathedral. This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction

Note on the translation

The Cathedral

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

Selected bibliography in English

Chartres Cathedral in Pictures

Copyright

Introduction

Although J.-K. Huysmans is best known today for ushering in the Decadent movement with his iconoclastic novel of 1884, A Rebours (Against Nature), and for shocking the sensibilities of respectable Parisians with Là-bas (1891), his fictionalised account of Satanic practices in the heart of the French capital, for the last ten years of his life it was as the author of La Cathédrale (The Cathedral), that he was most famous.

Published in 1898, the success of the novel was as staggering as it was surprising, selling 20,000 copies in its first month alone. By the end of the decade it had practically outsold all of Huysmans’s pre-conversion novels put together. At first glance, the substance of the book — an extended disquisition on the symbolism of Chartres cathedral — gives little indication as to why it should have attracted such huge sales and become so central to the contemporary conception of Huysmans’s work. There were, admittedly, many fine things to admire in the book, as the contemporary critic Virginia Crawford pointed out at the time, in an article that analysed the impact of Catholicism on Huysmans’s fiction:

It is full of beautiful writing, of wonderful descriptive pages, of delicate appreciations, of spiritual insight into Christian symbolism. It opens up unsuspected vistas of thought, and invests even familiar objects with a new and profound significance. For lovers of religious and Catholic art, for students of architecture, for all those whose souls have been touched however lightly by the remote beauty of mysticism, almost every page will appear endowed with a gentle, deliberate charm.

(Studies in Foreign Literature, Duckworth, 1899.)

But despite her appreciation of the book’s finer literary qualities, Crawford found it difficult to believe that the book would have a mass appeal, especially among the English reading public, because it had few of the accepted attributes of the novel form: ‘Rightly or wrongly, the average novel-reader does expect a certain play of incident, a pretence at least of plot, and in La Cathédrale, he will find neither.’ These formal deficiencies didn’t deter contemporary readers from embracing the book in considerable numbers, and it is somewhat ironic that the more Huysmans saw himself as travelling down a spiritual path that the masses — whom he contemptuously dismissed as la foule (‘the horde’ or ‘the mob’) — were unable or unwilling to follow, the more his books began to sell in greater and greater numbers.

There are, of course, many reasons why a book becomes a bestseller, irrespective of what might be considered its literary merits. In Huysmans’s case, public interest had been piqued by the publication of his novel En Route three years previously, which had taken many people by surprise with its account of a conversion that was commonly assumed to be a straightforwardly autobiographical one. Although La Cathédrale had little of the spiritual intensity and pervasive carnal unease that so marked its predecessor, it too provided fertile ground for more speculation and myth-making in the press. The book was criticised in secular newspapers for what was seen as its author’s slavish adoption of Catholic dogma, and attacked in equal measure in some of the leading Catholic journals for its supposed heterodoxy, the Abbé Belleville even going so far as to try and get the novel placed on the Vatican’s Index of forbidden books. Fuel for the debate was provided by a controversial article in Le Figaro which appeared a few days before the novel’s publication, in which Julien de Narfon stated — inaccurately as it turned out — that Huysmans was about to leave Paris to become a monk in a monastery at Solesmes.

Although such media hype undoubtedly played its part in advertising the book and bringing it to the attention of a larger public, it still doesn’t explain why the book became so phenomenally successful, why it seemed to capture a particular mood of the time. One way to explain the apparent paradox of La Cathédrale’s popular commercial success is to look at the political and cultural context in which it was published. As Jennifer Birkett remarked in Sins of the Fathers (Quartet Books, 1986), ‘commercial success is linked with selling particular political attitudes,’ and in this sense Huysmans’s rising commercial status as a novelist shows that his work reflected a large — and growing — market for a set of reactionary views that found its cultural expression in the Catholic literary revival.

Central to any understanding of the political and cultural context in which La Cathédrale was published is the issue that ultimately played a defining role in France’s national consciousness: the Dreyfus Affair. During the latter half of the 1890s, and into the first decade of the new century, this increasingly divisive scandal effectively resolved the multifaceted complexity of French fin-de-siècle politics into a simple binary opposition. There seemed to be only two positions to take in this long-drawn-out, bitterly contested ‘Affair’, one was either ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ Dreyfus. While the pro-Dreyfus camp tended to include Republicans, socialists, anticlericals, secular liberals and radical feminists; the anti-Dreyfusards, initially in the majority, was comprised of the populist right, conservatives, the Church, monarchists, militarists, and a vocal band of anti-Semites.1

Like a number of writers, such as Jean Lorrain, Paul Valéry and Paul Léautaud, and artists such as Degas, Rodin, Forain and Caran d’Arche, Huysmans sided with the anti-Dreyfusards. Significantly, Émile Zola, Huysmans’s former friend and collaborator in the Naturalist movement, was instrumentally involved in the pro-Dreyfus campaign. Although the timing was purely coincidental, La Cathédrale appeared just two weeks after Zola’s famous open letter to the President, J’accuse. This rallying cry effectively blew the lid off the scandal, and as a result Zola was convicted of libel and given a prison sentence, which he escaped by fleeing to England. Huysmans rarely made overt political statements or took overtly political stands, but with the publication of his novel, he symbolically planted his flag on the side of Catholic tradition, a significant and dramatic step in the charged political atmosphere of France at the time.

In the face of vociferous attacks by supporters of Dreyfus on the establishment, on the Church and on the military — together with the threat to the social order posed by various progressive and revolutionary elements who confounded their own political struggle with that of Dreyfus’s — many Catholics saw in La Cathédrale the reflection of an older world order that they found comforting, a restatement of the ancient values of France, its traditional hierarchies and its supposed social stability. At a time characterised by what Elizabeth Emery calls ‘increased loneliness and a feeling of moral fragmentation’ in French society, Huysmans was not alone in being attracted to the symbolism of the medieval cathedral as a major social space in which those who found themselves marginalised by the democratic, secularising drift of the Republic could find a refuge, and reforge their sense of national and cultural identity:

Huysmans used an idealised image of the cathedral in his novels in order to bring moral equilibrium to a society he perceived as corrupted by materialism and individualism…[he] saw the cathedral as a way for the Church to teach the uninitiated about the Christian community; similarly, he saw the novel as a way of educating his contemporaries about the communal values an increasingly secular and materialistic society had neglected. The cathedral’s ability to link a seemingly infinite variety of art forms, theological messages, and social functions by subordinating them to a central value — Catholicism — also provided Huysmans with a model for his novels, in which description, dialogue, didactic messages and plot were subordinated to Durtal’s evolving consciousness.

(Romancing the Cathedral, University of New York Press, 2001.)

Huysmans’s emphasis on the Virgin Mary in the novel was equally significant in this reforging process, a reflection of the fact that the iconic figure of the Virgin served an important ideological purpose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In the first instance, the Virgin was a powerful, if paradoxical, icon of both motherhood and of desexualised femininity. This clearly served a vital function in relation to society’s pressing need to stem the spread of syphilis, the devastating impact of which was having an adverse effect on traditional social structures such as marriage, the family and — for the bourgeoisie — the inheritance of wealth and property. As an emblematic image of penitential, passive and continent womanhood, an ideal model of self-sacrifice, the Virgin acted as a potent counterweight to what were perceived as various forms of female delinquency, to prostitution, to the emerging figure of the femme nouvelle, and to the ‘strident’ claims of contemporary feminists — all of whom posed a threat to established patriarchal values held not just by traditional Catholics, but by moderate Republicans as well.

But if the Virgin — and the cathedrals and churches which were dedicated to her and with whom she was so closely associated — played a broader ideological role in fin-de-siècle social and political life, there were also deeper psychological reasons why Huysmans was drawn to her image. Containing within her the seemingly contradictory avatars of the Virgin and the Mother, she was able to fulfil her procreative role without invoking the guilt and shame that Huysmans associated with sex. He had long been searching for a way out of the impasse of sexual desire, a way to reconcile his spiritual yearnings with his physical urges, which in the early years of the 1890s were given fictional expression through the phantasmagorial sexual excesses of Madame Chantelouve in Là-bas, and the obsessive, nymphomanic visions of Florence in En Route.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the Virgin’s increasing fascination for Huysmans at this point in his life was mirrored by her growing theological significance as a redemptive mediatrix. Since becoming pope in 1878, Leo XIII had done much to promote Marianism — including advocating the use of the rosary and the scapular — and in an encyclical of 1891 he gave formal sanction to the notion that one can come to Christ through the Virgin. Consequently, Huysmans not only saw the Virgin as a powerful agent of redemption for sinful humanity, she also provided him with an image of female beauty devoid of the taint of sexual desire, offering an artistically imaginative and spiritually sanctioned means by which to sublimate the carnal obsessions that had been plaguing him for so many years.

The publication of La Cathédrale at the beginning of 1898 clearly had a huge impact on Huysmans’s standing as a public figure. The book’s rapid commercial success made him financially independent as a writer for the first time in his life and consolidated the media and public interest in him that his controversial conversion had generated at the time of En Route. With the success of La Cathédrale, Huysmans found he had become something of a literary celebrity, and in subsequent years newspapers frequently speculated about his activities or his whereabouts, and canvassed his opinions on various matters.

Ironically, the book’s sales also coincided with his retirement from the Ministry of the Interior. After 32 years of supplementing the meagre royalties from his books with a job which, if not exactly onerous, was by his own description tedious, the enormous sales of La Cathédrale gave him an income he could only have dreamed of at the time of A Rebours and Là-bas.

Significantly, Huysmans saw his retirement through the increasingly polarised lens of contemporary political events. His new-found notoriety as a controversial Catholic author after the publication of En Route hadn’t escaped the notice of the anticlerical ministry in which he worked, and in late 1897 Huysmans told several friends that he had been asked to retire after his superiors had learned that La Cathédrale was to be published early the following year. As he explained to Gustave Boucher on 28 October 1897:

They’ve told me that for a number of reasons, it would be better if I put in a request to retire.

(63 lettres inédites de J.-K. Huysmans à Gustave Boucher, Pierre Cogny, ed., Bulletin de la Société J.-K. Huysmans, 1977.)

Huysmans’s claim is not, however, entirely consistent with the facts. In a letter he wrote to Dom Du Bourg in December 1894, he had remarked:

Ah, Lord, what dreams I’ve had of withdrawing to a monastery when I retire in three years time…

(Huysmans intime, Librairie des Sainte-Pères, 1908.)

In other words, he had already planned to retire in 1898 and was using the furore raised over the publication of his work to make it appear as if he was another political victim of the secular Republic. Huysmans’s reinterpretation of events is significant because it reveals that, consciously or unconsciously, his feelings mirrored the growing negativity that other Catholics felt regarding relations between Church and State during the latter half of the 1890s and the early years of the new century. By 1898, Huysmans, along with many other Catholics, was beginning to see himself as a ‘victim’ of State persecution. This feeling was reflected in iconographic terms by the gradual shift from one avatar of the Virgin in his work to another. The benign image of Mary the Mediatrix in La Cathédrale gave way to a bleaker vision of the Virgin as Our Lady of Sorrows. This image of the Virgin as victim, underpinned by Huysmans’s adoption of the notion of mystical substitution, a belief that one could take on the pains and sufferings of others too weak to bear them, would increasingly figure in his later works such as Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901) and the final part of Durtal’s spiritual autobiography, L’Oblat of 1903.

Note

1 Anti-Semitism played no small part in shaping people’s alliances, and the increasing tide of anti-Semitic feeling that crystallised around the Dreyfus Affair was also reflected in Huysmans’s novel. That Catholicism gave a respectable front to such feelings is clear, and the references to Jews in La Cathédrale show the way in which anti-Semitism could be concealed behind historical appeals to the ‘fact’ of Jewish complicity in the murder of Christ.

Note on the translation

Clara Bell’s translation has formed the basis of most English readers’ perception of La Cathédrale as it is the only translation of the work to have been published. Although in parts the translation is solid, if somewhat old-fashioned, the combination of Huysmans’s vast range of allusions, often to recondite aspects of theology or Church history, and his habit of using unusual images and metaphors in his descriptions, has resulted in a number of errors creeping into Bell’s text. I have tried to iron out these errors and in places this had necessitated not so much an amendment of the existing text as a rewriting of it.

Given the central importance in the book of the figure of the Virgin Mary, I have chosen to translate all the church names into English, as their traditional form ‘Our Lady of…’ emphasises the symbolic role and significance of the Virgin in French culture better than if the names were kept in the original ‘Notre-Dame de…’ form. A case in point is ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’: although it is just one of thousands of Notre-Dames across France, English speakers have become so habituated to referring to the cathedral by its French name that few consciously think of its original meaning of ‘Our Lady of Paris’.

In Bell’s original text, Durtal’s frequent and often lengthy interior monologues were placed within speech marks, making it difficult to know whether Durtal was actually speaking to someone or not. I have removed these speech marks, using them only for actual spoken conversations between characters, as this helps to emphasise the cerebral nature of the book, where the line between Durtal’s consciousness and the ostensibly third person narrative is often blurred.

I

At Chartres cathedral, on leaving the little square which is swept in all weathers by a surly wind from the plains, a gentle whiff of the cellar, attenuated by the soft, almost stifled scent of incense, blows in your face when you enter the solemn gloom of its cool forests.

Durtal knew it well, that delightful moment when one breathes in again, still dazed by the sudden transition from a stinging north wind to a velvety caress of air. Every morning, at five, he left his rooms, and to reach the borders of that strange wood he had to cross the square; and always the same people appeared, emerging from the same streets: nuns bowing their heads, leaning forward, the edges of their wimples blown back and flapping like wings, the wind swelling skirts that were held down with great difficulty; then, almost bent double, wizened women clutching their clothes around them would make their way, their curved backs lashed by the squalls.

At that hour, he’d never seen a single woman who held herself upright and walked without straining her neck and bowing her head; and all these scattered women ended up uniting into two lines, one turning to the left and disappearing under a lighted porch, opening onto a lower level from the square; the other going straight on, plunging into the darkness of an invisible wall.

And bringing up the rear hurried a few belated priests, gripping their cassocks which ballooned up behind them with one hand, the other pressing down on their birettas, stopping periodically to catch at a breviary slipping from under an arm, shielding faces bent down into their chests, darting forward, head first, as if to cleave the wind, ears red, eyes blinded by tears, clinging desperately, whenever it was raining, to umbrellas that would sway above them, threatening to lift them off the ground and jerking them in every direction.

This particular morning, the passage had been more than usually difficult; the gusts that race across the Beauce region without anything to stop them had been bellowing non-stop for hours; it had rained and one had to splash through puddles; it was difficult to see ahead, and Durtal had thought he’d never get past the murky mass of wall that formed one side of the square as he pushed open the door, behind which lay that strange forest blooming with candles and tombs, sheltered from the winds.

He let out a sigh of satisfaction and followed the immense path that led through the gloom. Even though he knew the way, he advanced with caution down this avenue bordered by enormous trunks whose summits were lost in the shadows. One could have fancied one was in a hothouse topped with a dome of black glass, because one was walking on flagstones and no sky could be seen, no breeze was stirring overhead. Even the few stars whose glimmers winked in the distance belonged to no firmament, for they were quivering almost at ground level, springing from the earth, as it were.

In this obscurity one could hear nothing but the hushed sound of footsteps; one could make out nothing but silent shadows, molded out of the backdrop of evening by outlines darker than the twilight.

Eventually, Durtal ended up in another wide avenue cutting across the one he’d just left. There, he found a pew backed against the trunk of a tree and he leaned on it, waiting until the Mother awoke, until the sweet dialogue, interrupted the day before by nightfall, should begin again.

He thought of the Virgin, whose watchful attentions had so often preserved him from unforeseen risks, from careless slips, from great falls. Was she not a Well of Kindness that never ran dry, a Benefactress of the blessing of Patience, a Visiting Sister for hearts that are dried up and closed? Was she not, above all, a living and benevolent Mother?

Always leaning over the squalid bed of the soul, she bathed the sores, dressed the wounds, consoled the fainting weakness of converts. Through all ages, she remained the eternal supplicant, eternally praying, merciful and grateful at one and the same time: merciful to the unfortunates she alleviated, and grateful to them, too. Indeed, she was thankful for our sins, because if it were not for the sinfulness of man, Jesus would never have been born under the corrupt semblance of our image, and she would never have been the immaculate Mother of God. Our misfortune was thus the initial cause of her joy, and indeed this was the most bewildering of mysteries, that this supreme Good should result from the very excess of Evil, that this touching, though supererogatory, bond should link us to her, because her gratitude might seem unnecessary since her inexhaustible mercy was enough to attach her to us for ever.

Thenceforth, through a prodigious act of humility, she had put herself within reach of the masses; at different periods she had appeared in the most diverse spots, sometimes seeming to rise from the earth, sometimes floating over the abyss, or descending onto desolate mountain peaks, bringing multitudes in her wake and working cures; then, as if tired of these ambulatory adorations, it seemed that she had wanted to fix them in one place and had practically deserted her ancient haunts in favour of Lourdes.

In the nineteenth century that town had been the second stage of her progress through France. Her first visit had been to La Salette.

That had been years ago. On the 19th of September, 1846, the Virgin had appeared to two children on a mountainside; it was a Saturday, the day dedicated to her, which, that year, was a day of penance because of the Ember days. By another coincidence this Saturday was also the eve of the feast of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, the first vespers of which were being chanted when Mary emerged from a cocoon of light above the ground.

And she appeared as the Weeping Madonna in that desert landscape, on those stubborn rocks and dismal hills; sobbing, she had uttered reproaches and threats, and a spring, which had never flowed in the memory of man except with the melting of the snows, had streamed without ceasing ever since.

The fame of this event spread far and wide; frantic multitudes scrambled up fearful paths into regions so high that trees no longer grew. Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across ravines to drink the water; and crippled limbs straightened and tumours melted away to the chanting of psalms.

Then, little by little, after the arcane debates of a despicable lawsuit, the vogue for La Salette dwindled; there were fewer pilgrimages, attested miracles became increasingly rare. It seemed that the Virgin had gone; that she had ceased to care for this spring of piety and for these mountains.

At the present day it’s only a few natives of Dauphiné, a few tourists wandering through the Alps, a few invalids who come to pamper themselves at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe, who make the climb to La Salette; conversions and spiritual graces still abound, but of bodily cures there are almost none.

In short, Durtal said to himself, the vision at La Salette became famous without it ever being known exactly how. One can imagine, though, that it was something like this: the report, at first confined to the village of Corps at the foot of the mountain, permeated the whole department, was taken up by the surrounding provinces, filtered from there throughout France, overflowed its frontiers, spread into Europe, and finally crossed the seas to land in the New World, which succumbed in its turn and also came to this wilderness to acclaim the Virgin.

And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might have daunted the determination of the most tenacious. To reach the little hostelry, perched on high near the church, one had to submit to the lazy rumbling of slow trains for hours on end, to put up with repeated changes; one had to endure days spent in diligences, and sleep at night in those breeding-grounds of fleas, the country inn; and after flaying your back as if with a carding comb on impossible beds, you then had to get up at dawn and start out on a giddy climb, by foot or on the back of a mule, up zigzagging bridle paths hanging over precipices; and when you finally arrived there were no fir trees, no beeches, no meadows, no streams; nothing; nothing but total solitude, a silence unbroken even by the cry of a bird, because at that height there were no birds to be found.

What a landscape! thought Durtal, calling up the memory of a journey he had made, since his return from La Trappe, with the Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper. He recalled the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint-Georges-de-Commiers and La Mure, his fear in the carriage as the train crossed slowly over the abyss.

Below, the darkness had fallen away, spiralling into an immense well; above, clusters of mountains climbed into the sky as far as the eye could see.

The train ascended, puffing away, turning around itself like a top, descended into tunnels, was swallowed up by the earth, seemed to push the light of day ahead of it, till it suddenly came out into a blare of sunshine, went back on itself, slunk into another hole, then re-emerged again with a strident yell of its whistle and a deafening clatter of its wheels, and raced along the rails cut into the hard rock of the mountainside.

And then suddenly the peaks parted, an enormous opening inundated the train with light; the landscape loomed into view, terrifying, on all sides.

“The river Drac!” exclaimed the Abbé Gévresin, pointing to a sort of liquid snake at the bottom of the precipice, colossal, twisting and crawling between rocks, as if between the very jaws of the pit.

Now and again the reptile straightened, hurled itself onto groups of rocks which bit into it as it passed, and, as if poisoned by these bites its waters changed; they lost their steely colour, turned white, foaming like a bran bath; then the Drac hurried to escape, flinging itself headlong into the shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches and wallowed in the sun; presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way, shedding scales like an iridescent flux of boiling lead, till, further off, it unfurled its coils and disappeared, sloughing its skin, leaving behind it on the ground a white granulated epidermis of pebbles, a skin of dry sand.

Leaning out of the carriage window, Durtal had looked straight down into the abyss; on this narrow track with only one line of rails, the train brushed the towering hewn rock on one side and the void on the other. Lord! if it derails, what a smash, he thought.

And what was no less overwhelming than the monstrous depth of these chasms was, when you looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the peaks. In this carriage, one was truly between earth and sky, and the ground over which one rolled was invisible, its whole width being covered by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at vertiginous heights along interminable balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped avalanche-like, fell straight down, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a tree; in places, they looked as if they’d been split by blows of an axe into immense heaps of petrified wood; in others, sliced into shaley layers of slate.

And all round, an amphitheatre of endless mountains opened out, screening the heavens, piling up one above the other, barring the passage of clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their rugged grey crests, giant heaps of oyster shells; others, with scorched summits like burnt pyramids of coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with forests of pine that spilled over into the abyss; they were also quartered by the white crosses of paths, dotted here and there with red-roofed hamlets, like doll’s houses, and sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling headlong, keeping their balance Lord alone knew how, that had been thrown at random onto patches of green carpet stuck to the steep slopes; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast charred hayricks, like barely extinct craters still brooding internal fires, smoke seeming to escape from their summits whenever great clouds blew past.

The landscape was ominous; one experienced an extraordinary unease in looking at it, perhaps because it confused the sense of the infinite that is within us. The firmament now became nothing more than a detail, cast aside like a piece of rubbish on the abandoned peaks of the mountains; the abyss was everything. It made the sky look small and trivial, substituting the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.

Indeed, the eye turned away in disappointment from this sky which lost the infinitude of its depths and the limitlessness of its breadth because the mountains seemed to touch it, to pierce it and to hold it up; they cut it into pieces, sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, letting through, in any event, only skimpy bits of blue and scraps of cloud.

The eye was involuntarily drawn to these precipices, and the head swam at the sight of those vast pits of blackness. This displaced immensity, subtracted from the heights and carried over into the depths, was horrible.

“The Drac,” the Abbé had said, “is one of the most formidable torrents in France; it’s placid now, almost dried up; but come the season of storms and snows it wakes up again and flashes like an avalanche of silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, swallows up villages and dikes in an instant.”

It’s terrible, thought Durtal, this bilious flood must carry fever; it’s cursed, rotten, with its sheets of soapy foam, its metallic hues, its rainbow shards stranded in the mud.

All these details came to life now in Durtal’s head, and as he closed his eyes he saw before him the Drac and La Salette. Ah, he thought, they can pride themselves on the pilgrims who venture into those desolate regions and go to pray on the same spot as the apparition, because once they arrive they’re packed into a little plot of ground no bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a rough stone church daubed with cement the colour of Valbonnais mustard, and on the other by a graveyard. As for the horizon, nothing but barren cones, covered in ash, like pumice stones, or by weeds; higher still, glassy blocks of ice, eternal snows; before one, to walk on, a balding patch of grass moth-eaten by sand; one could sum up this landscape in a sentence: It’s a scab of nature, a leper among beauty spots!

And from the point of view of art, along this tiny promenade, near the spring whose waters are now held captive by pipes and taps, three bronze statues have been erected in different places. A Virgin, got up in the most ridiculous garments and topped by a kind of molded cake-tin or Mohican headdress, on her knees, weeping, her head in her hands. Then the same woman, standing, hands joined ecclesiastical-fashion in her sleeves, looking at two children to whom she is speaking: Maximin, curly hair like a poodle, turning a pie-shaped cap between his fingers, and Mélanie, in an ungainly ruched bonnet, accompanied by a tiny bow-wow, like a bronze paper-weight; and lastly, the same woman again, alone, standing on the tips of her toes, raising her eyes to heaven with a melodramatic expression.

Never has that frightful appetite for the hideous which disgraces the Church of the present day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if, standing before the mind-tormenting outrage of these contemptible group portraits — perpetrated by a certain Monsieur Barrême of Angers and cast in the railway foundries of Creusot — the soul groaned, the body suffered, too, on this plateau, amid the suffocating mass of hills that barred the view.

And yet it was here that thousands of the sick had hauled themselves, to face this cruel climate, where, in summer, the sun burns you to a cinder while two steps away, in the shade of the church, you freeze.

The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette consisted in getting crowds of people to invade this precipitous spot in the Alps, because everything combined to keep them away.

And yet they came, year after year, until Lourdes monopolised them, because La Salette’s decline dates from the Virgin’s apparition there.

Twelve years, in fact, after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself again, not in the Dauphiné this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After the Mother of Tears, after Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, it was the Smiling Madonna, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, the Madame of Glorious Joys, who appeared; and here again she revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases to a shepherdess.

And it’s here that a sense of bewilderment sets in. Lourdes could be described as the complete opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the surrounding area is covered with verdure, the tamed mountains are easily climbed; everywhere, there are shady avenues, magnificent trees, flowing waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, there’s a town where all the resources necessary for the sick are obtainable. Lourdes can be reached without venturing into swarms of insects, without enduring nights in country inns, without having to put up with days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without crawling along the face of a precipice: you’ve arrived at your destination as soon as you step down from the train.

This town, then, was admirably chosen to bring in the crowds, and it seems that Providence didn’t have to intervene that much in order to attract them.

But God, who imposed La Salette on the world without recourse to the methods of fashionable publicity, now changed tactics and with Lourdes advertising appeared on the scene.

It’s this that really confounds the mind: Jesus resigning himself to employ the wretched artifices of human commerce, adopting the repulsive tricks we use to launch a product or a business!

And we wonder whether this may not be the harshest lesson in humility ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproach ever hurled at the American gaudiness of the present day — God reduced to lowering himself once more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices in order to make himself heard, in order to be obeyed, God no longer even trying to make us understand his designs through himself, to raise us up to him.

In actual fact, the way in which the Saviour set about revealing the mercies peculiar to Lourdes is astounding.

To make them known he no longer limits himself to spreading the report of its miracles by word of mouth; no, you’d think that, to him, Lourdes was harder to promote than La Salette, because he adopted strong measures from the very first. He raised up a man whose book, translated into every language, carried news of the vision to far-off countries and certified the truth of the cures effected at Lourdes.

In order that this work should stir up the masses, it was necessary that the writer destined to the task should be a clever organiser, but at the same time a man devoid of any individual style or any novel ideas. In a word, what was needed was a man without talent; and that’s quite understandable since, from the point of view of appreciating art, the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the secular public. And Our Lord did the thing well: he chose Henri Lasserre.

So consequently the desired detonation exploded, bursting open souls and precipitating multitudes along the path to Lourdes.

Then the years went by, the fame of the sanctuary is taken for granted; incontestable cures accomplished by supernatural means and certified by clinical authorities whose good faith and scientific skill are above suspicion are produced. Lourdes is at its height; and yet, little by little over time, even though the flow of pilgrims doesn’t cease, the commotion surrounding the grotto diminishes. It grows weaker, if not in the religious world, at least in the larger world of the indifferent and the uncertain which needs to be convinced. And so Our Lord thinks it good to remind us of the benefits dispensed by his Mother.

Lasserre was no longer the instrument by which the half-exhausted vogue for Lourdes could be renewed. The public was saturated by his book; it had absorbed it in every medium and in every form; its goal had been fulfilled; the once indispensible tool that was this court recorder of miracles had to be laid aside.

What was needed now was a book that differed completely from his; a book that would act on that immense public which his sacristan’s prose would never reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable strata, to a public that was less commonplace and more difficult to please. It was necessary, therefore, that this new book be written by a man of talent, but whose style was not so transcendental as to frighten people off. And it would also be advantageous if this writer was very well known, and that his prodigious print-runs could counterbalance those of Lasserre.

Now in all literature there was only one man who could fulfill these imperious conditions: Emile Zola. One would search in vain for another. He alone was able, with his broad shoulders, his huge sales, his powerful appeal, to relaunch Lourdes.

It mattered little that he would deny the supernatural and endeavour to explain inexplicable cures by the most paltry conjectures; it mattered little that the cement that held his wretched theory together would be mixed with the medical manure of men like Charcot; the main thing was that noisy debates would begin around his book, of which more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies would proclaim the name of Lourdes throughout the world.

What’s more, the very confusion of his arguments, the poverty of his “healing spirit of the crowd”, invented, in contradiction to all the data of that positivist science on which he prided himself, in order to try and understand these extraordinary cures which he’d seen and which he didn’t dare deny the reality or the frequency of, were they not an admirable means of persuading the unprejudiced, the people of good faith, of the authenticity of the miracles effected every year at Lourdes?

Such avowed testimony to these astounding facts was enough to give a fresh impetus to the masses. It should be noted, too, that the book betrays no hostility to the Virgin, of whom it speaks only in respectful terms on the whole; so isn’t it permissible to think, after all, that the scandal provoked by the book was profitable?

In short, one could maintain that Lasserre and Zola were both useful instruments; one devoid of talent, and for that very reason stirring the very lowest strata of Catholic dullards; the other, on the contrary, getting himself read by a more intelligent and literate public thanks to those magnificent pages in which processions of torch-bearing multitudes unfurl, in which, amid a storm of suffering, the triumphant faith of those ranks in white rejoices.

Ah! she’s faithful to her Lourdes, is Our Lady, she pampers it. She seems to have centred all her powers there, all her mercies; her other sanctuaries end up dying that this one may live!

But why?

Above all, why create La Salette and then sacrifice it afterwards, as it were?

That she should have appeared there, that’s understandable, thought Durtal, answering himself, the Virgin is more highly venerated in the Dauphiné than in other provinces; chapels dedicated to her worship abound in those parts and perhaps she wanted to reward their zeal by her presence.

On the other hand, she appeared there specially with a precise, clearly determined goal, that of preaching repentance to men, and above all to priests. She ratified by miracles the truth of the mission she confided to Mélanie, and then, once this mission was fulfilled, she could dissociate herself from this place which she had certainly never had any intention to remain in.

In essence, he continued, after a moment’s reflection, couldn’t one admit an even simpler solution, namely this:

Mary deigned to manifest herself under various aspects in order to satisfy the tastes and cravings of the soul of each one of us. At La Salette, where she revealed herself in a distressed landscape, in tears, she bore witness to a certain few, more particularly perhaps to those souls in the grip of sorrow, to those mystical souls who delight in reviving the sufferings of the Passion, in following the Mother in her heartbreaking stations of the cross. There, she was less attractive to the common people, who don’t like sadness or tears; and one should add that they like reproaches and threats still less. By reason of her attitude and language, the Virgin of La Salette could not become popular, while the Virgin of Lourdes, who came with a smile and prophesied no catastrophes, was easily accessible to the hopes and joys of the masses.

In this sanctuary she was, in short, the Virgin for the many, no longer the Virgin for mystics and artists, the Virgin of the few, as at La Salette.

What a mystery this direct intervention of the Mother of Christ here below is, reflected Durtal.

And he continued: Thinking about it, one realises that the churches she has founded can be divided into two very distinct groups.

The first, where she reveals herself to a few select people, where spring waters flow and bodily cures are effected: La Salette and Lourdes.

The second, where she has not been gazed on by human beings, or rather where her apparitions date back to immemorial times, to forgotten centuries, to dead epochs. In these chapels, prayer alone comes into play, and Mary grants them without the help of any spring water; here, she dispenses cures that are more moral than physical: Our Lady of Fourvière at Lyon, Our Lady of the Crypt at Chartres, Our Lady of Victories at Paris, to name but three.

Why these differences? No one knows, and doubtless no one ever will. At most one might think that, taking pity on the eternal craving of our poor souls, so tired of praying and never seeing anything, she wanted to reaffirm our faith and help to gather in the flock by showing herself.

Amid all this uncertainty, Durtal went on, is it at least possible to discern some vague landmarks, some tentative rules?

On probing these shadows, we can perceive two points of light, he answered himself.

First of all this. She appears to none but the poor and humble; she addresses herself, above all, to simple souls who uphold, so to speak, the original calling, the biblical function of the patriarchs; she reveals herself, above all, to children in the countryside, to shepherds, to girls who keep watch over the flock. At La Salette as at Lourdes, it was young shepherdesses she chose for her confidants, and this is understandable, because by acting in this way she confirms the known will of her Son: shepherds were the first to behold the infant Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem, and it was from among men of the lowest class that Christ chose his apostles.

And the water that serves as a medium for cures, was it not prefigured in the Holy Bible: in the Old Testament by the river Jordan, which cleansed Naaman of his leprosy, and in the New Testament by the healing Pool of Bethesda, stirred by an angel?

This second rule also seems probable. The Virgin respects, as far as possible, the temperament and individual character of the persons she appears to. She places herself on the level of their intellect, incarnates herself only in a material form they can understand. She manifests herself in a paltry image that the meek love, taking on the robes of blue and white, the crowns and garlands of roses, the trinkets and rosaries, the gewgaws of a first Communion, the ugliest of adornments.

There’s not a single case, in short, where the shepherd girls who saw her describe her as anything other than a “beautiful lady”, as anything other than a Virgin with the features of village church statue, a Madonna from the shops on the Rue Saint Sulpice, a street-corner Queen of Heaven.

These two rules are more or less universal, Durtal said to himself. As to the Son, it seems that he doesn’t want to reveal himself now in human form to the masses. Since his appearance to the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, whom he employed as a mouthpiece to address the people, he has stepped aside, giving way to his Mother.

It’s true that he reserves for himself a dwelling in those inner storehouses, those secret demesnes, those strongholds of the soul, as Saint Theresa calls them; but his presence is within and his words spoken inside us, inaccessible, for the most part, by way of the senses.

Durtal fell silent, shaking his head, avowing the inanity of these reflections, the powerlessness of human reason to explore the unintelligible designs of the Almighty; and he thought again of that journey through the Dauphiné, the memory of which haunted him.

Ah, he said to himself, those peaks in the High Alps, those mountains at La Salette, that great white hostelry, that church distempered with dirty yellow lime-wash, vaguely Byzantine and vaguely Romanesque in its architecture, and that little cell with its plaster Christ nailed to a black wooden cross, that miniscule, white-washed room, so small that one couldn’t take two steps in any direction — how impregnated they were by her presence, all the same!

Surely she’d revisited that spot, in spite of her apparent abandonment, to comfort its pilgrims? She seemed so close at hand, so attentive and so plaintive during those evenings as you sat alone by the light of a candle, that the soul seemed to burst open like a pod, shedding the fruit of its sin, the seed of its faults; and repentance, so slow in coming, so doubtful at times, became so despotic, so certain that, overcome by tears, you would fall to your knees before the bed and bury your head, sobbing, in the sheets.

Those were evenings of mortal sadness, and yet so sweet! The soul was ravaged, its very fibres laid bare, but was one not also aware of the Virgin by one’s side, so compassionate, so motherly, and that after the crisis she’d take that bleeding soul in her arms and rock it to sleep like a sick child?

Then, during the day, the church afforded a refuge from the vertiginous madness that came over you; the eye, bewildered by all those precipices it could see on every side, distracted by the sight of those clouds that suddenly formed beneath it, that steamed in white billows over the rocky mountain sides, would become calm, once sheltered within its walls.

And finally, to compensate for the horrors of the scenery and the statues, to mitigate the comical aspect of the hostel’s servants who were bearded like sappers but dressed like boys in caps, grey belted jackets, and the stiff black breeches of the pupils at the Saint Nicolas seminary in Paris, were not souls of an extraordinary nature, souls of a divine simplicity, revealed there?

And Durtal remembered the admirable scene he had watched there one morning.

He was sitting on the little plateau, in the icy shade of the church, gazing at the graveyard in front of him and the motionless swell of mountain tops. Far off in the distance, up in the sky, a string of beads was threading its way, one by one, along a path bordering the precipice. And little by little, these beads, dark at first, took on the garish tones of dresses, assumed the form of coloured bells topped by snowballs, and at last changed into a line of peasant women wearing white caps.

And still in single file, they came down into the square.

After crossing themselves as they passed the cemetery, they went to drink a cup of water at the spring and then turned round; and Durtal, who was watching them, saw this:

At their head walked an old woman, a hundred years old at least, very tall and still upright, her head covered by a sort of hood from which her stiff, wavy hair escaped in tangled grey locks like steel wool. She had a crinkled face, like the peel of an onion, and she was so thin that, at a first glance, it seemed like you could see daylight through her skin.

She knelt down in front of the first statue, and behind her, her companions, girls of about eighteen for the most part, clasped their hands and shut their eyes, and, slowly, a change came over them.

Under the breath of prayer, the soul, buried beneath the ashes of worldly cares, took flame, and the air that fanned it made it glow, like an inward fire, lighting up the opaque skin of their cheeks, their stolid, heavy features.

Smoothing out the craquelure of wrinkles, softening, in the younger girls, the vulgarity of their chapped red lips, clarifying the dull brown of their complexions, it overflowed into smiles on lips half-parted in silent prayer, into timid kisses offered in simple good faith and returned, no doubt, in an ineffable embrace, by the holy infant so cherished by them since his birth, who had grown to become, after the martyrdom of Calvary, the Spouse of Sorrows.

They shared a little, perhaps, in the joys reserved to the Virgin, who is both the Mother and Bride, as well as the rapturous Handmaid, of God.

And in the silence a voice, which came from ages long past, was raised up and the ancestress said: Pater Noster…and all repeated the prayer and, dragging themselves on their knees, climbed the steps of the stations of cross, whose fourteen posts fitted with cast iron medallions formed a winding line separating them from the statues; the women advanced in this way, stopping on each step they climbed long enough to recite an Ave, and then, supporting themselves with their hands, mounted to the next step. And when the rosary was finished the old woman stood up, and all the women slowly followed her into the church, where they prayed for a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the ancestress got up, gave out holy water at the door, led her flock to the spring where they all drank again and then they left, without speaking a word, going back up the narrow path, one after the other, ending up as the black specks they were when they were coming down, and then vanished on the horizon.

“Those women have spent two days and two nights crossing the mountains,” said a priest who had come up to Durtal, “they started out from the depths of Savoy, and they’ve travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes here; they’ll sleep tonight in some stable or cave, and tomorrow, at daybreak, they’ll begin again on their exhausting journey.”

Durtal was humbled by the radiant splendour of such faith. So it was possible, then, outside of absolute solitude and outside the cloister, in the wasteland of these summits and gorges, among this population of stern and rugged peasants, to find souls still young and vigilant, souls still fresh, the souls of eternal children. These women, without even knowing it, were living the contemplative life in union with God, and all the while toiling away, on these prodigious heights, at the barren slopes of some little plot. They were Leah and Rachel at the same time, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed naively, sincerely, as people believed in the Middle Ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their poorly-constructed ideas, who barely knew how to express themselves or how to read, would weep with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, which was compelled by their humility and by their candour, to reveal itself, to appear before them.

How right it is that the Virgin should cherish them and choose them, above all others, to be her favourites.

Ah, it’s because they are unburdened by the dreadful weight of doubt, it’s because they have an almost total ignorance of Evil; but there must be some souls who, alas, are too experienced in the cultivation of error who nevertheless find mercy before her? Hasn’t Mary also got sanctuaries, less frequented, less well-known, which have resisted the wear and tear of the centuries, the changing caprice of time, ancient churches where she welcomes you if you love her, alone and in silence? And Durtal, back in Chartres once more, looked around him at the people who were waiting, amid the warm shadows of this gloomy forest, for the reawakening of the Virgin, in order to worship her.

With dawn now beginning to break, the forest of this church, beneath whose shade he was sitting, was becoming really muddled. Forms that had been sketched out in the gloom began to distort as it faded, blurring every outline. Lower down, in the dissipating mist, the age-old trunks of fabulous white trees sprang up, as if planted in wells that constrained them within the rigid collar of their coping stones; but the night, almost diaphanous at the level of the ground, was thicker higher up, and cut them off at the start of their branches, which one couldn’t see at all.

Raising his head to the heavens, Durtal was plunged into a profound darkness lit by no star or moon.

Still staring into the air, he could make out just in front of him, through the haze of twilight, the already illuminated blades of swords, enormous blades without hilts or handles, tapering as they rose to a point; and these blades, standing upright in the immeasurable heights, seemed, amid the mist through which they were slicing, to be engraved with nebulous patterns or vague reliefs.

And by peering into space, both to the right and the left, he beheld, at a vast height on either side, two gigantic panoplies, hung on patches of darkness and each composed of a colossal shield riddled with holes, above five large swords, without pommels or hand-guards, but damascened on their flat blades with faint designs of intricate niello work.

Little by little the tentative sunlight of an unsettled winter's day pierced the fog, evaporating into blueness; the panoply that hung to the left of Durtal, to the north, was the first to come to life; rosy embers and flames of punch caught fire in the hollows of the shield, while beneath it, in the middle blade, within its ogive of steel, surged the giant figure of a negress, dressed in a green robe with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a blue headscarf, was surrounded by a golden aureole, and she was staring straight ahead, hieratic, fierce, with white, wide-open eyes.

And this enigmatic, dark-skinned woman was holding on her knees a black infant, whose eyes stood out like two snowballs against its dark face.

Around her, gradually, the other swords, still cloudy, lit up and blood streamed from their reddened tips as if from recent slaughter; and this trickling red outlined the contours of beings who had, no doubt, issued from the distant shores of some oriental river: on one side, a king playing a golden harp; on the other, a monarch wielding a sceptre tipped by the turquoise petals of an incredible lily.

Then, to the left of the royal musician, stood another bearded man, with a walnut coloured face, eye-sockets vacant and covered by the lenses of round spectacles, his head ringed by a crown and diadem, his hands bearing a chalice and a paten, a censer and a loaf; while to the right of the other sovereign holding the sceptre, a figure more disconcerting still stood out against the blue background of the sword, a kind of brigand, probably escaped from a workhouse for slaves in Persepolis or Susa, some bandit, wearing a small scarlet cap shaped like an upside-down jam-jar edged with yellow, and dressed in a tan-coloured robe with white stripes at the bottom; and this fierce, gauche person was carrying a green palm and a book.

Durtal turned round and peered into the darkness, and before him, at a giddy height in the distance, more sword-blades gleamed. The designs which might have been mistaken in the gloom for patterns embossed or incised on the surface of the steel, transformed themselves into figures draped in long, pleated robes; and at the highest point in the firmament there hovered, amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires, a crowned woman with a pale face, dressed, like the Moorish mother in the north transept, in Carmelite-brown and green; and she too was holding an infant, a child, like herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand and extending the other in benediction.

Eventually, this still dark side, the side last to get the sun, situated to Durtal’s right at the end of the south transept, still blurred by the half-evaporated morning mist, lit up; the shield which faced that of the north side caught fire and, below it, in the polished metal of a broad blade, standing face-to-face with the sword containing the Magrebin queen, appeared a woman with slightly swarthy cheeks, a vague mulatress, dressed like the others, in myrtle-green and brown, holding a sceptre, and she too was accompanied by a child.

And around her images of men were emerging, still blurry, almost seeming to overlap each other, as if jostling one against the other in the restricted space they occupied.

A quarter of an hour passed without anything becoming more defined; then their true forms revealed themselves. In the centre of these swords, which were in fact blades of stained-glass, figures stood out in broad daylight; everywhere, in the middle of each window with its pointed arch, bearded faces flamed, motionless in the fire and, as in the burning bush of Horeb where God shone before Moses, everywhere amid these thickets of flame, in her immutable attitude of imperious sweetness and melancholy grace, the Virgin appeared, mute and still, head crowned with gold.

She was multiplied everywhere; descending from the empyrean to lower levels, to be closer to her flock, eventually finding a place where they could almost kiss her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in gloom; but here she assumed a different aspect.

She stood out in the middle of the window, like a tall, blue plant, and her illusory garnet-red foliage was supported by stakes of black iron.

Her features were lightly copper-coloured, almost Chinese, with her long nose and slightly narrowed eyes, her head covered in a black coif, and she was staring straight in front of her; and the lower part of her face, with her drawn mouth and the two deep furrows of her short chin, gave her the appearance of a suffering woman, a little sour-faced. And she, too, known under the time-honoured name of Our Lady of the Beautiful Window, was holding an infant in a purple robe the colour of dried grapes, a child barely visible amid the confusion of dark hues surrounding it.

In short, she to whom all appealed was here. Everywhere under the forest roof of this cathedral the Virgin was present. She seemed to have come from all corners of the earth, under the semblance of every race known in the Middle Ages: black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian, pale coffee colour as a half-caste, and white as an European, attesting that as mediatrix of the whole human race, she was everything to everybody, everything to all; and ensuring through the presence of her Son, whose features bore the character of each race, that the Messiah had come to redeem all men without distinction.