La-Bas E-Book

Joris Karl Huysmans

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Cult curio about satanism in fin-de-siecle Paris. Time Out The classic tale of satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century Paris, in an attractive new edition...Strong meat for diseased imaginations (Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday) This superb new translation by Brendan King vividly recalls the allusive, proto-expressionist vigour of the original.

Leseprobe

Decadence from Dedalus

General Editor: Mike Mitchell

Là-Bas

J.-K. Huysmans

Là-Bas

A Journey into the Self

Translated with an introduction and notes by Brendan King

and an afterword and chronology by Robert Irwin

Published in the UK by Dedalus Ltd

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

Email: info@ dedalusbooks.com

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ISBN printed book 978 1 873982 74 7

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 30 7

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First published in France in 1891

First English edition in 1924

First published by Dedalus in 1986, reprinted in 1992

New translation by Brendan King in 2001, reprinted in 2006 and 2009

First e-book edition 2011

Translation, introduction and notes c copyright Brendan King 2001

Afterword and chronology copyright c Robert Irwin 1986

The right of Brendan King to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd

Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

THE TRANSLATOR

Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth-century French fiction.

He is currently working on a Ph.D. on the life and work of J. K. Huysmans.

He lives and works in London.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Selected further reading

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Notes

Chronology

Afterword

INTRODUCTION

Ever since its publication in 1891, J. K. Huysmans’ Là-Bas has provoked controversy. On its first appearance in print – it was serialised in the newspaper Écho de Paris – irate readers complained to the editor and threatened to cancel their subscriptions. When it was published in book form a few months later, it was banned from sale in railway station kiosks, which only had the effect of whetting the public’s appetite for it. The book’s subject matter was so daring that an English translation wasn’t even attempted until thirty years afterwards, and when it was, its American publisher was politely asked to withdraw it, following a complaint from the Society for the Suppression of Vice that it constituted an outrage on public morals. And this despite the fact that the translation had been toned down and some of its most controversial passages excised. Indeed, Là-Bas has never, until now, been publicly available in a complete and unexpurgated English translation.

But though there have been attempts to suppress Là-Bas, the book has never suffered from a shortage of readers. Even during periods when English translations of the book have been denied the usual channels of distribution, Là-Bas has still managed to find an audience through pirated editions (including an edition illustrated with Félicien Rops’ darkly Satanic etchings) and through special limited editions aimed at the bibliophile and the collector. Although there are numerous contenders, not least among them Huysmans’ earlier novel A Rebours (1884), Là-Bas surely has a claim to be the cult novel of the nineteenth century.

With its uncompromising depiction of acts of sexual intercourse, its graphic account of an orgiastic Black Mass, its equally graphic and repellent descriptions of child murder and mutilation, it is easy to see why the book became so notorious. Notoriety, however, isn’t always good for a book’s long-term reputation. Là-Bas’ subject matter may have ensured it a place in the canon of cult books dealing with Satanism, but it has also had the effect of preventing it from being taken seriously as a work of literature, and as a result it rarely finds its way onto college reading lists. The only work by Huysmans to have attained this status is A Rebours, which, validated by its influence on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, has become required reading for students of the fin de siècle period. At the time of its publication, however, A Rebours had a relatively small readership and the ideas it contained appealed to an equally small number of aesthetes. By contrast, Là-Bas was Huysmans’ first bestseller, capturing the public imagination and capitalising on a renewed interest in mysticism and the occult. With its allusions to, and fierce polemical discussions about, the occult, conspiracy theories, cultural imperialism in the shape of creeping Americanisation, mass murderers, female promiscuity, Satanic abuse, the shortcomings of materialism, hysteria, alchemy, alternative religions, homeopathy, mysticism and hypnotism, the novel is a compendium of the anxieties, fears and delusions of the late nineteenth century.

What is clear from this list is that if Là-Bas is firmly rooted in its time, it is also a remarkably contemporary novel: its concerns are still our concerns. Today, as in the 1890s, the authority of conventional religion is being undermined and alternative spiritualities are thriving; orthodox medicine is under attack from a flood of alternative or complementary therapies; and the issue of violence dominates our consciousness of ourselves and the society we live in. Reading Là-Bas, we are inevitably reminded of recent cases of juvenile murder and serial killing, or the seemingly endemic outbreaks of sexual abuse that are reported almost daily in the media. Là-Bas reminds us that we have always been capable of gross acts of violence that challenge our notion of what it means to be human, and that one of the functions of art in a civilised society is to find new metaphors to help us assimilate those aspects of humanity we find most problematic. Là-Bas is a book to make us look again at what we are and what we believe, and to decide whether we are on the road to heaven, là-haut, or on the road to hell, là-bas.

Là-Bas in context: from materialism to mysticism

The writer known to literary history as J. K. Huysmans was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans in 1848, in Paris. His decision to change his name was significant. Huysmans always felt himself to be a northerner by temperament – his father, Victor-Godfried Huysmans, was a Dutch-born commercial artist who had moved to Paris as a young man – so when he took on his new identity as a writer, he tried to emphasise his ancestry by spelling his Christian names in what he thought was their Dutch form: Joris-Karl.

Descended from a long line of painters on his father’s side, Huysmans was proud of his artistic heritage, and he often referred to the fact that a painting by Cornelius Huysmans, one of his ancestors, hung in the Louvre. Huysmans’ lifelong passion for art was not only reflected in what he wrote about – his first published journalism was a piece on contemporary landscape painters, and his last, posthumously published book was a volume on Flemish Primitive painters – but also in his method of writing. Indeed, he claimed that as a writer he was simply doing with his pen what his forefathers had done with brushes.

As with Charles Baudelaire, the defining moment of Huysmans’ childhood was the premature death of his father in 1857, and his mother’s hasty remarriage a year later. Huysmans rarely mentions his mother, Malvina, either indirectly in his fiction or directly in his correspondence, and it is probable that his deeply-entrenched feelings of misogyny stem from what he saw as this betrayal of his father’s memory. In contrast to the father he admired, Huysmans’ step-father, Jules Og, was a Protestant businessman with nothing of the artist about him. He and Malvina had two children, both girls, which further exacerbated the future writer’s sense of being an outsider in his own family.

Thanks to a family connection at the Ministry of the Interior, the eighteen-year-old Huysmans, after passing his Baccalaureate in 1866, entered the Civil Service as a clerk of the sixth class. He went on to work at the Ministry for over thirty years, retiring only in 1898 when his earnings from writing – his novel of the previous year, La Cathédrale, having become a runaway bestseller – outstripped his salary. It has always been one of the puzzling aspects of Huysmans’ personality how he managed to maintain his dual career as a writer and civil servant for so long, especially given the controversial and unconventional nature of his books. In 1876, for example, he had to apply for extra leave in order to go to Brussels to arrange the publication of his novel about a prostitute, which he felt would be prosecuted for immorality if it was published in Paris. Remarkably, his writings were rarely, if ever, brought up by his superiors, and some of his colleagues never even suspected he was a writer at all.

The only serious interruption to Huysmans’ life as a writer-cum-civil-servant was the advent of the Franco- Prussian war, in which he spent August and September of 1870 as a conscript in the sixth battalion of the Garde Mobile. He saw little action and was soon invalided out with dysentery. His experiences of the war did, however, furnish him with material for a short story, Sac au dos, which was later published in Les Soirées de Médan (1880), a collection of short fiction by Émile Zola and five of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, who used to meet regularly at the master’s country retreat in Médan.

One of the distinguishing traits of Huysmans’ fiction is that his male characters often experience a very strong mixture of attraction and repulsion towards women. Some biographers have traced this ambivalence to Huysmans’ first sexual experience, which was probably at the age of sixteen with a prostitute in her fifties. In any event, sex was always a problematic area for Huysmans and he once wrote to his friend the poet, Théodore Hannon, that he suffered from periodic bouts of impotence. Huysmans never married and he often resorted to prostitutes, something which weighed greatly on his mind later in life prior to his conversion to Catholicism.

It is possible that Huysmans first met his long-standing mistress, Anna Meunier, some time before the Franco- Prussian war, but it is certain that by 1872 she was regularly spending weekends at his flat in the Rue de Sèvres. She had two daughters from a previous relationship, and this was the closest Huysmans ever came to a conventional family of his own. His relationship with Anna was not a smooth one, however, not least because she suffered from a mysterious illness, which attacked her both physically and mentally. After prolonged suffering, she had to be hospitalised in 1893 and she died in the Sainte-Anne asylum in Paris in 1895. These traumatic events heightened Huysmans’ sense of disgust about the body, and about the female body in particular, and propelled him further into the spiritual world, a world in which physical corruption had no part.

Huysmans published his first book Le Drageoir à épices, a collection of prose poems and sketches, at his own expense in 1874. It sold very few copies, but attracted the attention of a number of influential critics. From then on, Huysmans quickly established himself in the Parisian literary scene, and by the end of the 1870s he was a frequent guest at Flaubert’s Sunday afternoon salons, had visited Goncourt’s exotic grenier at Auteuil, and had become an integral part of Zola’s Médan group, alongside writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Henry Céard and Léon Hennique.

During this period, Huysmans produced some of the blackest, most unrelentingly cynical works in the Naturalist canon. His first novel, Marthe, histoire d’une fille (1876), was a remarkable low-life portrait of a working class prostitute and her middle class lover. It anticipated Edmond de Goncourt’s novel of the same subject, La Fille Elisa (1877), and was the first in what seemed to be a new genre of eponymously-titled novels about prostitutes that culminated in Zola’s Nana (1881). Les Soeurs Vatard (1879), Huysmans’ next novel, was a bleak portrayal of two women working in a printing factory, and was followed in 1881 by En Ménage, a bitterly ironic tirade against the bourgeois institution of marriage.

By the early 1880s, however, Huysmans was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Naturalism, not so much in terms of form or style – Huysmans employed the same Naturalist techniques throughout his career, whether he was writing about Parisian prostitutes or saints in the Middle Ages – but as an intellectual, emotional and spiritual philosophy. Frustrated by Naturalism’s limitations, Huysmans began to push back the boundaries of what constituted the subject of a work of fiction. A Rebours (1884), like Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), was a novel without a plot, a compendium or encyclopaedia of sensation, which reflected, and arguably invented, the contemporary aesthetics of decadence. With En Rade (1887), Huysmans’ anomalous position as a Naturalist reached its breaking point, the book being unequally divided between Naturalist-style descriptions of the grim realities of rural life, and three highly-stylised dream sequences in which the erotic and the fabulous seem to have free play.

It was not, however, until the publication of Là-Bas (1891) that Huysmans made his break with the Naturalists public. The novel begins with a debate between two of its leading characters, Durtal and des Hermies, on the failures of Naturalism, a debate which can be seen as a specific refutation of the very ideas that Zola had outlined in his 1868 preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1867). Zola had famously written that in his novel he had “simply applied to two living bodies the analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses”. Huysmans felt that this kind of analysis, in which the remorse of his characters “really amounts to a simple organic disorder”, was grossly reductionist and took no account of the human soul or its aspirations. What Huysmans was searching for was a new aesthetic form, one that could synthesise the mundane and the transcendent, and he found it not by looking to the modern literary avant-garde, but to the Flemish Primitive painters of the sixteenth century. In 1888, Huysmans had visited a little museum gallery in Cassel where he saw Matthias Grünewald’s stunning Crucifixion. What captivated him was how Grünewald had managed not only to be completely Naturalistic in his technique, painting one of the most uncompromising, unromanticised views of Christ in the whole of Christian iconography, but also to infuse his paintings with a sense of transcendence, of the life of the soul to which Huysmans felt himself drawn. Inspired by Grünewald’s painting, Huysmans’ broke through the impasse of Naturalism to formulate a new aesthetic theory, “spiritual Naturalism”, which, in a letter to the art critic Jules Destrée, he defined as “absolute realism combined with flights of the soul”.

From one of his unpublished notebooks, it is clear that Huysmans intended his new book, which he entitled “Là-Bas, voyager en soi-même” (Là-Bas, a journey into the self), to be an exploration of Durtal’s state of consciousness. In contrast to des Esseintes in A Rebours, who tries to alter his state of mind by changing his surroundings, and Jacques Marles in En Rade, who tries to find an antidote to his mood of depression in the French countryside, Durtal’s existential discontent leads him to try to change the conditions of his life from within. In this sense, Huysmans’ novel of contemporary Satanism can be seen as a spiritual or psychological parallel to the novels of Jules Verne (1828–1905), whose “journeys” round the world or to the centre of the earth had captured the imagination of his generation. While Verne’s exploratory novels can be seen as symbols of capitalist expansionism, and seem to embody a positivist ethic of discovery and exploration of the outside world, the journey taken by Durtal in Là-Bas constitutes a different order of experience, one that privileges subjectivity over the objectivity of science. Durtal’s obsession with his own state of mind – and with the state of his soul – anticipates Modernism’s fascination with the ego and with the unconscious.

For Huysmans, the step from materialism to Christian mysticism was a large one, and it could only be bridged indirectly – and unconventionally – through his investigations into contemporary Satanism. Of course Huysmans was not alone in his interest in the occult. If Là-Bas is a reflection of a personal “search for the absolute”, it is also a reflection of the general explosion of interest in mysticism, spiritualism and the occult that was such a prominent feature of the 1880s and 1890s. As Joanny Bricaud, the author of J.-K. Huysmans et le satanisme (1912), said of the period, “hardly a month goes by without the press informing us about magic spells or Black Masses celebrated by sacrilegious maniacs who are secretly perpetrating the filthy rites of Satanism”. Huysmans himself kept a scrapbook of clippings from newspapers and journals of the day dealing with instances of vampirism, the Black Mass and the theft of Eucharists from Parisian churches.

Là-Bas is often described as one of the classic novels of the occult, but with hindsight it is clear that the book prefigures Huysmans’ later conversion. Indeed, it was instrumental in it, for having become convinced of the reality of the supernatural through his dealings with the occult, it was only logical that Huysmans should accept the reality of the supernatural in the shape of a Christian God. It is also apparent that what Huysmans had uncovered in the course of his researches for Là-Bas so disgusted and distressed him that he suffered a violent reaction against the book’s subject matter. He later described Là-Bas as a “black book” which he had attempted to exorcise by writing his “white book”, En Route (1895). This was the first of Huysmans’ ostensibly pro-Catholic works and took Durtal on to the next stage of his development, recounting his experiences during a retreat to a monastery. The remaining two volumes of this “spiritual autobiography” were La Cathédrale (1898), which established Huysmans firmly in the Catholic revival with its extended explorations of the aesthetics of Catholic symbolism, and L’Oblat (1901), which outlined Huysmans’ views on human suffering and introduced the doctrine of mystical substitution, the belief that through religious devotion, it is possible to take on the sufferings of those too weak to bear them.

In his last major works, most notably Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901) and Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), Huysmans dropped the fictional form altogether and embarked on explorations of mystical states of consciousness. In the former, which is in effect a modern-day hagiography, Huysmans traced the life of the early fifteenth-century mystic and provided a definitive statement of his fervently-held ideas about mystical substitution. In the latter, he looked at the contrast between the mystical visions of Bernadette Soubirous – whose sightings of the Virgin Mary were instrumental in the founding of the shrine at Lourdes – and their crass embodiment by the Catholic hierarchy and the mass of the faithful.

Huysmans died in 1907, after having been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth two years previously. His final years were lived in great pain, but, like the saint whose life he had portrayed a few years before, he refused to take pain-killing medicine to alleviate it, still believing in a form of mystical substitution, and that through his suffering he reduced the pain of others.

A note on the translation

Huysmans is a notoriously difficult writer to translate partly because, as the critic Jules Richpin noted in Gil Blas (21 April 1880), his prose is compounded of “rare nouns, curious adjectives, unexpected combinations of words, archaisms, neologisms, mutilated syntax, splashes of colour, flashes of wit, assonance and discord – everything under the sun, in fact!” Richpin exaggerates – anyone reading Huysmans’ journalism knows he could write perfectly lucidly when he wanted – but nevertheless a Huysmans text does provide a challenge. At the back of the book are a number of notes designed to give the general reader some assistance in navigating through the tide of unusual words, obscure references and arcane subject matter. To avoid distracting the reader with obtrusive footnotes, the notes have been arranged at the back of the book and arranged under chapter and page number.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

Antosh, Ruth B. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans, Editions Rodopi, 1986.

Baldick, Robert. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955.

Banks, Brian. The Image of Huysmans, AMS Press, 1990.

Beaumont, Barbara (ed). The Road From Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected letters of J.K. Huysmans. Ohio State University Press, 1989.

Birkett, Jennifer. The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France and Europe. 1870–1914, Quartet Books, 1986.

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and its Discontents, Viking, 2000.

Brookner, Anita. The Genius of the Future, Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans, Phaidon, 1971.

Griffiths, Richard. The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914, Constable, 1966.

Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism, Harvard University Press, 1997.

Kahn, Annette. J.-K. Huysmans: Novelist Poet and Art Critic, UMI Research Press, 1987.

Lloyd, Christopher. J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siècle Novel, Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

McIntosh, Christopher. Eliphas Lévi and the Occult Revival, Rider and Company, 1972.

Webb, James. The Flight from Reason: The Age of the Irrational, McDonald, 1971.

CHAPTER I

“So you believe in these ideas so completely, my friend, that you’ve abandoned adultery, love and ambition, all the subjects that the modern novel has made us only too familiar with, to write a history of Gilles de Rais?” Then, after a pause, he added, “I don’t reproach Naturalism for its prison slang or for using the vocabulary of the army latrine and the poorhouse, because that would be unjust and it would be absurd. In the first place, certain subjects call out for them, and in the second, such expressions and words are the plaster and pitch with which it’s possible to build immense and imposing works, as Zola proved with L’Assommoir. No, the problem lies elsewhere, what I reproach Naturalism for isn’t the thick stucco of its crude style, but the shoddiness of its ideas, what I reproach it for is for having embodied materialism in literature, and for having glorified the democracy of art.

“Oh, you can say what you like, my friend, but all the same, what sort of disreputable mind could have come up with such a philosophy, such a mean and threadbare set of ideas? To willingly confine oneself to the wash-houses of the flesh, to reject the suprasensible, to deny the ideal, not even to realise that the mystery of art begins right there, where the senses cease to be of any use.

“You shrug your shoulders, but come, what has your Naturalism revealed to us about all those disheartening mysteries that surround us? Nothing. When it has to explain a passion of any kind, when it has to probe some trauma, to treat even the most innocuous of the soul’s cuts and bruises, it puts everything down to the account of physical appetites and instincts. Lust and infatuation, those are its only diatheses. In short, it’s explored nothing but the parts below the navel and resorts to banal platitudes whenever it finds itself approaching the groin: it’s a surgical stocking for the emotions, a truss-maker for the soul, and that’s all!

“And then you see Durtal, it’s not just inept and dull, it’s rotten. It’s extolled our awful modern way of life, vaunted the current Americanisation of our manners, and ended up eulogising brute force in its deification of the cash-register. By a miracle of humility it has exalted the nauseous taste of the masses, and, as a result, repudiated style and rejected every high-minded thought, every yearning towards the transcendental and the world beyond. It has represented the ideals of the bourgeoisie so well, I swear it seems to be the product of a coupling between Lisa, the pork-butcher in Le Ventre de Paris, and Monsieur Homais …”

“You do go on,” broke in Durtal in an irritated tone. He relit his cigarette then added, “Materialism is just as repugnant to me as it is to you, but that’s no reason to deny the unforgettable services the Naturalists have rendered to art, because in the end it’s they who have rid us of the artificial puppets of Romanticism, who have rescued literature from a tedious idealism and the atrophied imagination of sexually-frustrated spinsters. In a word, following in Balzac’s footsteps, they’ve created visible and tangible characters and set them in their appropriate surroundings, they’ve helped in the development of language begun by the Romantics, they’ve known true laughter and occasionally even had the gift of tears, and finally, they haven’t always been carried away by this fanatical passion for vulgarity you talk about.”

“They have! They’re in love with their age, and that condemns them …”

“Oh come on! Neither Flaubert nor the Goncourts were in love with their age.”

“I grant you that, they are honest, rebellious, proud artists, and so I put them in a class apart. I admit, too, and without your prompting, that Zola is a great landscape painter, a marvellous handler of crowd scenes and a spokesman of the people. Besides, in his novels he hasn’t, thank God, pushed the theories he expounds in his articles – which advocate the intrusion of Positivism into art – to their logical limits. But the work of his best disciple, Rosny, the only novelist of talent who’s fully absorbed his master’s ideas, has become a tedious display of amateurish learning, the wisdom of a lab-technician written-up in a pseudo-scientific jargon. No, there’s nothing more to say. The whole school of Naturalism, such as it exists today, reflects the desires of a hideous age. With it, we’ve arrived at an art so shabby and so hackneyed I would rather call it ‘conciergism’. Why? Just read their latest books and what do you find? Simple anecdotes, scraps of news cut out of the papers, nothing but tired old stories and unreliable histories, without a single idea about life, about the soul, to prop them up, and all related in a style like that of a bad stained-glass window. I’ve reached the point where, after I’ve finished one of these books, I can’t recall any of the inconsequential descriptions, the insipid harangues, they contain. Nothing remains with me but the astonishing thought that a man can write three or four hundred pages, even though he has absolutely nothing to reveal to us, nothing to say to us.”

“Well des Hermies, if it’s all the same to you let’s talk about something else, because we’ll never agree about Naturalism, the very name of which drives you mad. Let’s see … that Matteï treatment, what’s happening with that? All your flasks of ‘green electricity’ and your pills, do they relieve one or two of your patients at least?”

“Oh, they work a little better than the standard panaceas of the medical formulary, but that’s not to say they’re reliable or that their effects are long-lasting. In any case, if it wasn’t this it would be something else … And on that note, my friend, I’ll take my leave, as the clock is striking ten and your concierge is going to turn off the gas on the stairwell. Good night … I’ll see you again soon, I hope.”

After the door had closed, Durtal threw a few shovelfuls of coke into the grate and began to reflect. This discussion with his friend was all the more irritating as he’d struggled over the same subject himself for months past, and his literary theories, which he had believed unshakeable, were now beginning to crumble away bit by bit, leaving his mind in ruins.

Despite the intemperate manner in which they were expressed, des Hermies’ conclusions troubled him. Certainly Naturalism, limited to monotonous studies of mediocre people who acted out their lives amid interminable inventories of drawing-room furniture or agricultural implements, led directly to the most complete sterility if the author was honest or clear-sighted, and if not, to the most tedious of repetitions, the most tiresome of reiterations. But Durtal couldn’t see what form the novel could possibly take outside of Naturalism, unless it was to return to the inflated nonsense of the Romantics, the adolescent productions of Cherbuliez and of Feuillet, or to the tear-jerking tales of Theuriet and George Sand.

What then? But Durtal came up against a brick wall of confused theories and doubtful hypotheses that were difficult to imagine, hard to define, and impossible to resolve. He was unable to say precisely what he felt, or rather, he’d reached a blind alley down which he was afraid to enter.

“One must preserve the documentary truthfulness, the precision of detail, the rich, sinewy language of Realism,” he told himself, “but one must also drive a well-shaft into the soul, and not feel the need to explain away its mystery in terms of diseases of the senses. The novel, if possible, should divide itself into two parts – albeit welded together or rather commingled as they are in life – that of the soul and that of the body, and concern itself with their relationship, their conflicts and their harmony. In short, one must follow the great highway so profoundly excavated by Zola, but it would also be necessary to trace a parallel road in the air, an alternative route, so as to reach things both down here and beyond, to create, in a word, a spiritual Naturalism that would be nobler, more complete, and more formidable.”

But, in a word, no one was doing this at the moment. At best, one might cite Dostoevsky as someone approaching this ideal. Even so, this sensitive Russian is less a first-rate Realist than an evangelical socialist. In France, at the present time, where the purely physical prescription of the Naturalists has fallen into disrepute, there remain two factions: the liberal faction, which is bringing Naturalism into the drawing-room by trimming it of its daring subject-matter, its fresh turns of phrase; and the Decadent faction, which, more extreme, rejects all limitations – whether of surroundings or even of the body itself – and, under the pretext of chatting about the soul, babbles away in a kind of unintelligible telegraphese. In reality, the latter confine themselves to hiding the incomparable poverty of their ideas under a deliberately confusing style. And as for the former, the Orléanists of the true-to-life technique, Durtal couldn’t think, without laughing, of the impenetrable schoolboy nonsense of these self-styled psychologists, who had never explored the higher provinces of the mind, never uncovered the least neglected aspect of any passion whatsoever. They limited themselves to throwing into Feuillet’s syrupy sentimentality, the smelling-salts of Stendhal’s irony. With their bitter-sweet taste, they were the literary equivalent of Vichy indigestion pastilles!

“In short, they’re simply repeating their philosophy homework and their college dissertations in their novels, as if one simple retort of Balzac’s – like that, for example, which he puts in the mouth of old Hulot in La Cousine Bette, ‘Can I bring the little girl?’ – didn’t throw more light on the depths of the soul than all the exercises put up for the school examination prize. But then it was no use expecting any flights of fancy, any zeal for the infinite, from them. The true psychologist of the century,” Durtal told himself, “was not their Stendhal, but rather that astonishing author, Ernest Hello, whose inexpugnable failure was a mark of his genius.”

And he was beginning to believe that des Hermies was right. It was true, in its present state of disarray there was nothing left standing in the world of letters, nothing except a yearning for the transcendental, which, in default of more elevated ideals, was tottering on all sides into spiritualism and the occult.

Brought to a standstill by these thoughts, Durtal was forced, in order to get closer to the ideal he wanted to reach, to veer off, to branch out into another art form entirely, that of painting. There, he found this ideal fully realised by the Primitives. In Italy, in Germany, and above all in Flanders, their work had cried out with a pure compassion one associates with the saints. In true-to-life scenes, patiently realised in a naturalistic style that was both masterful and sure in its expression, their subjects would leap out at you in poses drawn from the life, and the faces of these people, often common-looking, ugly even, but with powerfully evocative features, would radiate celestial joy and bitter sorrow, the doldrums of the spirit and the storms of the soul. It was as if matter had been transformed, was both more expansive and more concentrated, as if a vista had been opened out of the senses and onto infinite horizons.

The revelation of this form of Naturalism had come to Durtal the year before, when he was less worn out than he was now by the ignominious spectacle of the coming fin de siècle. It was in Germany, standing before a crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald.

Durtal shivered on his sofa and half-closed his eyes in pain. Now that he had evoked it, he could see the painting there before him with an extraordinary lucidity, and the cry of admiration that had escaped him on entering the small room in the Cassel museum echoed again in his mind as, in his study, this formidable Christ rose up on his cross, the upright of which was traversed by way of a brace with the branch of a tree, its bark half-peeled off, and sagging like an archer’s bow under the weight of the body. The branch seemed on the point of springing back, as if to hurl, from very pity, far from this scene of insults and abuse, this emaciated body which was being held down nearly to the ground by enormous nails that pinioned the feet.

Dislocated, almost ripped off at the shoulders, the arms of Christ seemed to be bound along their whole length by twisted sinews of muscle. His left armpit was broken, snapped; his hands were wide open, brandishing haggard fingers, which, even so, were offering their blessing in a gesture that combined entreaty and reproach in equal measure; his chest was trembling, greasy with sweat; his torso was striped by circular bands where the bones of the rib-cage showed through; his flesh was swollen, rotten and discoloured, streaked with flea bites and flecked, as with pin-pricks, by the scourging rods whose tips had broken off under the skin, piercing him again here and there like thorns.

The sanies stage had begun; the suppurating wound on his side was flowing thickly, covering his hip in blood like dark blackberry juice; pinkish serum, whey-coloured lymph and fluid like grey Moselle wine were oozing from his chest, soaking his stomach, underneath which was tied a tattered loin-cloth; further down, the knees were drawn together by force, knocking the knee-caps against each other, and the contorted legs arched down to the feet, which, twisted one onto the other, were stretching and writhing in an advanced state of putrefaction, turning green underneath streams of blood. These feet, sponge-like and congealing, were appalling, their flesh was bursting, rising above the head of the nail, and their contorted toes contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, cursing, almost scratching with the bruised crescent of their nails, the ochreous, iron-rich soil, red like the earth of Thüringen.

Above this putrefying body, the head appeared savage and immense; encircled by a ragged crown of thorns, it hung, exhausted, a haggard eye, half-opened in pain, still quivered with a look of sadness and fear; the face was rugged, the forehead drawn, the cheeks parched: its ruined features were bleeding, while the mouth, hanging open, grinned, the jaw contorted by excruciating, tetanic spasms.

The suffering had been dreadful and his death agonies had frightened away his cheerful persecutors.

Now, under the night-blue sky, the cross appeared to be sinking even lower, almost level with the earth, watched by two figures standing either side of Christ: one, the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of blood serum falling in tight folds over a loose, full-length azure robe, the Virgin austere and pale, face swollen with tears, eyes staring, sobbing, burying her nails into the fingers of her hands; the other, Saint John, a kind of vagrant with the swarthy complexion of a Swabian rustic, tall, with a wispy, curly beard, clothed in long strips of material that look as if they were cut from the bark of a tree, a scarlet robe and a yellow chamois cloak, the lining of which, where it was turned back at the sleeves, was a feverish green the colour of unripe lemons. Although stronger than Mary, he is bent and cast down, exhausted by weeping, though he still remains standing; his hands are joined together in a transport of grief as he strains towards the corpse, which he gazes at with his red, filmy eyes, and he chokes back a cry, silently, in his mute, quivering throat.

Standing before this Calvary, stained with blood and blurred by tears, one is far from those meek Golgothas which, since the Renaissance, have been adopted by the Church. This tetanic Christ was not the Christ of the Rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the well-fed dandy, the beautiful young man with ruddy locks, forked beard and pale cavalier-like features, who for four hundred years has been adored by the faithful. This was the Christ of Saint Justin, Saint Basil, Saint Cyril, and Tertullian, the Christ of the early years of the Church, a common Christ, ugly, because he took on himself the sum of all the world’s sins and assumed, in his humility, the most abject of appearances.

This was the Christ of the Poor, a man who compared himself to the most wretched of those he had come to redeem, to outcasts and to beggars, and to all those whose deformity or poverty makes them a target for the baseness of man; and he was also the most human of Christs, a Christ of the flesh, poor and weak, abandoned by a father who intervened only when no further torment was possible, a Christ attended solely by his mother, whom he had been obliged to call on, as do all those in torment, with an infant’s cry, a mother who was powerless now to be of any help.

By a supreme act of undoubted humility, he had embraced the fact that the Passion would take him to the limit of human endurance, and, in obedience to incomprehensible laws, he had accepted that his divinity should, in effect, be suspended during the beatings and the scourgings, the insults and the spitting, during all the outrages of his tormentors, even during the fearful torture of an interminable death struggle. He had thus to suffer all the more, to whimper, to die like a common thief, like a dog, cruelly, basely, enduring this downfall to the end, even to the ignominy of his own putrefaction, to the final insult of purulence.

Certainly, Naturalism had never ventured into such subjects before. Never had a painter dabbled with the charnel- house of the divine in this manner and so brutally dipped his brush in the glaze of his bodily secretions or in the bloody palette of his wounds. It was extreme and it was horrifying. Grünewald was the most fanatical of realists, but as one looked at this Redeemer of whores, this God of the morgue, everything changed. From that ulcerated head emanated glimmers of light; a superhuman expression illuminated the gangrened flesh, the eclampsia of his features. This carcass spread out before one was that of a God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, his only adornment a rough crown of thorns, speckled with red points by drops of blood, Jesus appeared in his celestial supraessence between the Virgin, grief-stricken and blinded by tears, and Saint John whose burnt-out eyes could find no more tears to shed.

Those faces, at first glance so commonplace, were now resplendent, transfigured by the unprecedented suffering of their souls. This was no longer a common criminal, a beggar- woman and a simple rustic, but superterrestrial beings in the presence of a God.

Grünewald was the most fanatical of idealists. Never had a painter so magnificently glorified the highest, or so fearlessly leapt from the very summit of the soul to the distracted sphere of heaven. He had gone to opposing extremes, and had, from the triumph of filth, extracted the purest cordial of love, the bitterest essence of tears. In this picture was revealed the masterpiece of an art pushed to its limit, one summoned up to express both the invisible and the tangible, to make manifest the lamentable impurity of the body and to refine the infinite distress of the soul.

No, this had no equivalent in any language. In literature, certain pages of Anne Emmerich on the Passion approached, though weakly, this ideal of a supernatural realism, of a life both truthful and exsurgent. Perhaps, too, some of Ruysbroeck’s mystical utterances, leaping off the page like twin jets of white and black flame, recalled at certain points Grünewald’s divine abasement, but again, no, the painter’s work remained unique, for it was at one and the same time out of reach and on a level with the earth.

“But then,” Durtal said to himself, rousing from his daydreams, “but then, if I take this to its logical conclusion, I end up in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, in a form of mystical naturalism. Ah, no … and yet, it may be …”

He found himself again facing that blind alley which, as soon as he recognised its entrance, he would turn his back on, for he had sounded himself out fully and hadn’t felt conscious of the least stirring of belief. Obviously, there was no premotion on God’s part, and he himself lacked the necessary will which would have allowed him to let go, to slip, without holding himself back, into the shadow of immutable dogmas.

Now and then, after reading certain books, when his distaste for the life around him grew more marked, he would long for a few soothing hours in the depths of some cloister, for sleep-inducing prayers borne aloft on a cloud of incense, for the enervation of thoughts floating adrift amid the chant of psalms. But to taste these joys of self-abandon one needed a simple soul relieved of every disappointment, a naked soul, and his was clogged up with filth, soaked in the concentrated juices of stale excrement. He could not but admit to himself that this momentary desire to believe, to find a refuge from the confusion of the age, often sprang from the compost-heap of petty thoughts, from the weariness of a constant round of insignificant details, from the exhaustion of a mind paralysed by middle age, by quarrels with laundry-women and cooks in cheap restaurants, by money troubles and worries over rent. He sometimes dreamed of escaping into a monastery, like those girls who enter a brothel to free themselves from the dangers of the street, from anxieties over food and rent, and from the bother of washing and ironing.

Still a bachelor and without independent means, caring little now for sensual pleasures, there were days when he cursed the life he’d made for himself. Especially at those times when, weary of wrestling over a phrase, he would throw down his pen, look before him and see nothing in the future but grounds for bitterness and fear. Then he would search for consolation, for reconciliation, and he’d been forced to admit that religion was the only thing left that could treat, with the gentlest of ointments, the most irritating of wounds, but it demanded in return such a renunciation of common sense, such a determination not to be surprised at anything, that he would shy away from it, though he still kept his eye on it.

Indeed he was constantly prowling round it, for if religion rests on no sure foundation, at least it bursts forth in such vigorous blooms that it’s impossible for the soul to wrap itself around a more vital stem and so climb heavenwards, to lose itself in ecstasy, beyond distance, beyond the world, in the summits of the unknown; and it also worked on Durtal through its ecstatic and intimate art, through the splendour of its myths, and through the simple radiance of the lives of the saints.

He didn’t believe and yet he acknowledged the supernatural, for how, on this self-same earth, could one deny the mysteries that surround us, in our homes, in those of our neighbours, in the streets, everywhere, when you think about it? It was really too easy to reject those invisible, extra-human communications, to simply put down to coincidence that which is, moreover, incomprehensible: unforeseen events, bad luck, strokes of fortune. Did not chance encounters often decide the whole course of a man’s life? What about love, and its incalculable and yet distinctive influences? And finally, wasn’t the most confounding of enigmas that of money?

Because here, you found yourself face to face with a primordial law, a cruel organic law, one that had been imposed and enforced since the world began. Its rules are unrelenting and always precise. Money attracts itself, seeks to accumulate itself in the same hands, going by preference to scoundrels and nonentities. And when, through an unfathomable exception, it heaps itself up in the house of a rich man whose soul is neither homicidal nor debased, then it remains unproductive, incapable of converting itself to any intelligible advantage, unable even in charitable hands to achieve a single elevated purpose. One could almost say that it revenges itself in this way for the wrong direction it’s taken, that it voluntarily paralyses itself when it belongs to neither the lowest of con men, nor to the most repellent of swindlers.

It’s stranger still when, by some extraordinary chance, it finds its way into the house of a poor man. Then instantly it soils all that is decent, it makes the most chaste of paupers wanton, acting at the same time on both the body and the soul, prompting in its possessor an unworthy egotism, an ignoble pride, urging him to spend his money on himself alone, turning the humblest man into an insolent lackey, and the most generous into a miser. In a split-second, it breaks every habit, upsets every conviction, and it transforms the most headstrong passion in the blink of an eye.

It’s the most nutritious food for serious sins and, at the same time, their most vigilant accountant. If it allows a shareholder to forget himself, to give to charity, to do a good turn to a poor man, it replaces avarice with ingratitude in order to re-establish the equilibrium, and so finely does it calculate the balance-sheet that not one sin fewer is committed.

But where it becomes truly monstrous is when, hiding the lustre of its name under the shadowy veil of a word, it calls itself ‘capital’. Then its actions are no longer limited to personal incitements, to conspiracies to steal and to kill, but are extended over the whole of humanity. With a word, capital establishes monopolies, founds banks, forestalls commodities, regulates lives and can, if it wishes, cause thousands of human beings to die of hunger.

And all this time it is feeding and fattening itself, reproducing itself alone inside a safe, and the New and the Old World alike adore it on bended knee, die of longing before it, as before a god.

“Well, either money, which is thus the master of our souls, is of the Devil, or it’s impossible to explain,” Durtal said to himself. “And how many other mysteries are there no less unintelligible than this, how many strange occurrences before which the thinking man must tremble? But if one was going to plunge into the unknown, why not believe in the Trinity, why reject the divinity of Christ? One could as easily accept the Credo quia absurdum of St Augustine and repeat with Tertullian that if the transcendental were comprehensible it would not be transcendent, and that it’s precisely because it surpasses the faculties of man that it is divine. But damn it, all things considered, it’s simpler not to think about it at all!” And once again, he drew back, unable to persuade his soul, when it found itself at the edge of reason, to take a leap into the void.

In truth, he’d wandered a long way from his starting point, from that Naturalism so reviled by des Hermies. He was returning now to a middle way, to Grünewald, telling himself that his painting was an extreme prototype of a new art form. It was pointless to go any further, to get bogged down, under the pretext of the ‘beyond’, in the most fervent Catholicism. It would be sufficient, perhaps, to be spiritualistic, to imagine that supranaturalism was the only approach that suited him.

He got up and walked around the small room. The sight of manuscripts piled up on his table, his notes on Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, otherwise known as Bluebeard, raised his spirits.

“All the same,” he said almost cheerfully, “there’s no happiness like being at home and beyond the reach of the present. Ah … to imprison oneself in the past, to relive bygone times, not even to read a newspaper, not to know that theatres so much as exist, what a dream! How much more Bluebeard interests me than the grocer on the corner, than all these bit-part players of an age that is symbolised so perfectly by the café waiter, who, to make his fortune in a good marriage, seduces the daughter of his patron, the ‘stupid little goose’, as he calls her.

“That and bed,” he added smiling, because he saw his cat, a beast perfectly well aware of the time, looking at him anxiously, reminding him of the mutual understanding between them, and reproaching him for not preparing the couch sooner. He shook the pillows and turned back the sheets, and the cat jumped onto the foot of the bed, but it remained seated, its tail curled round its two front paws, waiting until its master was stretched out before treading out its spot and making a place to sleep.

CHAPTER II

Nearly two years previously, Durtal had ended his involvement with the world of letters, a world that books, in the first place, then the gossip in the literary papers and the reminiscences of this writer or the memoirs of that, were striving to represent as if it was some kind of Holy See of the intellect, an aristocracy of the gifted. If you were to believe them, wit burst like fireworks and brilliant repartee crackled at their gatherings. Durtal couldn’t explain the persistence of this chorus of praise, because, judging from his own experience, writers at the present time seemed to be divided into two groups, the first composed of greedy bourgeois, the second of outrageous louts.

The first, indeed, were men pampered by the public – and ruined as a consequence – but successful. Hungry for esteem, they aped the ways of high finance, delighting in gala dinners, giving parties in full evening dress, talking of nothing but authors’ rights and new editions, discussing the latest plays, and jangling the money in their pockets.

The others simply splashed about en masse in the shallows. They were the riff-raff of the cafés, the dregs of the brasseries. Even as they cursed their fate, they would cry up their work, proclaiming their genius as they sat on their pub benches and gorged themselves with beer, extravasating and vomiting bile.

No other literary milieu existed. It was becoming singularly rare, that intimate retreat where you could talk at your ease with a few artists, far from the promiscuity of cafés and drawing rooms, without fear of betrayal or deceit, where you could concern yourself with nothing but art, secure from the company of women!

In the world of letters, in short, there was no aristocracy of the mind, no ideas that could unsettle anyone, no sudden or unexpected turns of thought. It was the same as the everyday conversation of the Rue de Sentier or the Rue Cujas. Having learnt from experience that no friendship was possible with these literary cormorants, who were always on the lookout for some prey to tear to pieces, he’d broken off relations that would have forced him to become either a scoundrel or a dupe.

But then it was true to say he’d never had anything in common with his contemporaries. Before, when he still accepted Naturalism’s shortcomings, with its stuffy short stories and its airless novels without doors or windows, he could at least discuss aesthetics with them, but now!

“Fundamentally,” des Hermies would say, “there’s always been such a difference of ideas between you and the other Realists that an absolute agreement couldn’t last long. You detest your generation and they adore theirs, and that’s all there is to it. It was inevitable that, one day, you’d feel the need to break away from this Americanised sphere of art and look further afield, to more spacious and less monotonous horizons. In all your books you’ve consistently laid into this tail-end of the century, but after a while one gets tired of beating against something so flabby it absorbs the blows and then resumes its old shape again. You needed to take a fresh breath and fix on another era, to wait until you discovered a subject that was more to your liking. All this clearly explains your mental confusion during these last few months, and why you suddenly recovered your health when you got carried away with Gilles de Rais.”

And it was true, des Hermies clearly understood him. The day Durtal had plunged into the terrifying and delightful era of the late Middle Ages, he had felt as if reborn. He began to live with a serene disregard for his surroundings, organised for himself an existence far from the brouhaha of the literary world, and, in short, mentally cloistered himself in the château at Tiffauges with Bluebeard, where he lived in perfect harmony – carrying on a flirtation as it were – with that monster.

In his mind, history now took the place of the novel, whose banal and conventional moral fables, parcelled out in chapters and packed up by the gross, pained him. And yet history seemed to be a poor substitute, for he had no faith in the reality of this science either. “Historical events,” he told himself, “are to a man of talent simply a springboard for his ideas and his style, seeing that all facts are played down or played up according to the demands of a particular cause, or according to the disposition of the writer who handles them. As for the documents propping them up, it’s worse still, because none of them are irrefutable, and all are subject to revision. If they’re not apocryphal in the first place, others, no less trustworthy are later unearthed to controvert them, waiting in their turn to be discredited by the excavation of more, equally unreliable manuscripts. At the present time, for all the obstinate scratching around in old archives, history serves no purpose but to quench the literary thirst of enthusiastic amateurs, who prepare those ragouts of the past to which a salivating Institute awards its medals of honour and its grand prizes.”

For Durtal, history was thus the most pompous of fictions, and the most childishly alluring. To his mind, the ancient Clio should be represented by the head of a Sphinx, sporting whiskers and capped by a baby’s bonnet. “The truth,” he told himself, “is that exactitude is impossible. How can we fathom the events of the Middle Ages when no one has been able to explain even the most recent of incidents, the roots of the Revolution, for example, or the foundation of the Commune?” There was nothing for it, but to construct one’s own vision of history, to imagine oneself among the inhabitants of another age, to incarnate oneself in them, to adopt, if possible, a semblance of their habits, and so finally to create, with artfully selected details, a deceptive composite. This is just what Michelet did in fact, and although he was a doddering old maid who strayed off into singular irrelevancies, pausing over trifles, gradually becoming delirious in the course of his anecdotes which he exaggerated and declared to be so wonderful, and although his fits of sentimentality and his attacks of patriotism undermined the credibility of his conclusions and the soundness of his conjectures, he was nevertheless the only person in France who had ever soared above the centuries and plunged from the heights into the dark byways of old fables.