The Oblate E-Book

J.-k. Huysmans

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus European Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 671

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This is the final part in the spiritual journey of Durtal, J.-K. Huysmans' alter ego. From the satanism of La-Bas (1891), he makes his way to the foot of the cross and embraces Roman Catholicism, first retreating to a Trappist monastery in En Route (1895), then living in Chartres and studying Catholic symbolism in The Cathedral (1898), and finally joining a community of monks in The Oblate (1903). Here, Durtal's spiritual quest collides with contemporary political reality when the monastery is closed down by an anti-clerical Republican government and the religious community at Val-des-Saints is forced to disperse.

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First published in France in 1903

First published by Dedalus in 2022

Translation, Introduction, and Notes copyright © Brendan King 2022

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 Patent Acts, 1988

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Typeset by Brendan King

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ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth-century French fiction. His Ph.D. was on the life and work of J.-K. Huysmans.

His previous translations of Huysmans’ work for Dedalus include Là-Bas: A Journey into the Self, Parisian Sketches, Marthe, Against Nature, Stranded, The Cathedral (a revised and updated edition of Clara Bell’s 1898 translation), The Vatard Sisters, Drifting, Modern Art and Certain Artists.

He also edited Robert Baldick’s definitive biography The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, which was published in paperback by Dedalus in 2005.

CONTENTS

I

NTRODUCTION

T

RANSLATOR’S

N

OTE

T

HE

O

BLATE

(L’O

BLAT

)

C

HAPTER

I

C

HAPTER

II

C

HAPTER

III

C

HAPTER

IV

C

HAPTER

V

C

HAPTER

VI

C

HAPTER

VII

C

HAPTER

VIII

C

HAPTER

IX

C

HAPTER

X

C

HAPTER

XI

C

HAPTER

XII

C

HAPTER

XIII

C

HAPTER

XIV

C

HAPTER

XV

C

HAPTER

XVI

N

OTES

INTRODUCTION

Published in 1903, L’Oblat (The Oblate) was J.-K. Huysmans’ final novel and brought to a close his trilogy (or quartet if you include Là-bas of 1891) that chronicled the spiritual journey of his alter-ego protagonist, Durtal. Its position in the canon of Huysmans’ works is an anomalous one: it was overshadowed commercially and in the public imagination by its predecessors in the series, especially La Cathédrale of 1898 which was a runaway bestseller, and it remains the least well-known of his novels.

La Cathédrale – famously a book in which, almost literally, nothing happens – owed some its popular success to the fact that it deliberately didn’t engage with the contemporary political issues that were tearing France apart at the time. Although the Dreyfus Affair was in full swing during the novel’s composition, and it was published in the same year as Émile Zola’s J’accuse, you would get no idea of this from reading it. By contrast, L’Oblat could not be accused of shying away from the political controversies of the day, with the fallout from the Dreyfus Affair and the Republican government’s subsequent move to separate Church and State, and thereby effectively curtail the Catholic Church’s political influence, featuring centre stage. The novel’s characters not only discuss ongoing contemporary political events, they live out the consequences of the government’s radical political decisions.

Of course Huysmans’ view of the Affair – that it was, as Christopher Lloyd puts it in J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel, ‘a conspiracy got up by Jews, Freemasons and Protestants with the aim of subverting the Church’ – is not one that is accepted today, but however misguided his opinion was, it nevertheless reflects the attitude of a significant part of the French population at that period. It helps us to understand why passions surrounding the Affair were so high, and why the social divisions that resulted were so deep, traumatic and long-lasting.

Huysmans was not primarily a political novelist. He was not a writer like Zola, who could take social situations of great moment and deliberately weave them into the metaphorical web of his fiction. While other novelists might have found sufficient material to craft a dramatic narrative from such contentious events, that was neither Huysmans’ style nor his intention. His focus of interest lay elsewhere, as Robert Baldick explains in his biography:

One of Huysmans’ objects in writing L’Oblat was to present a vivid but accurate account of the life of a French religious community at the beginning of the century. He wished, in fact, to emulate the Flemish sculptors who, in the figurines in Dijon Museum which are described in the book, had represented ‘the monastic humanity of their time, merry or melancholy, phlegmatic or fervent’.

(Life of J.-K. Huysmans, Dedalus Books, 2006, p. 427)

Huysmans’ previous two novels, En Route and La Cathédrale, were similarly didactic in this sense, introducing his readers to plainchant and Christian symbolism respectively. In L’Oblat he aimed to do the same for the splendours of the liturgy. It’s true that fiction and the liturgy were not obvious bedfellows, but Huysmans had started out as a writer in Zola’s Naturalist school, in which research and documentation were considered integral to the writing process. As Elizabeth Emery puts it:

For Huysmans, the novel was a form that allowed him to transmit information to his readers, while giving them a bit of entertainment. He understood all along that he would have to push the limits of the genre, but he was willing to take his chances in order to initiate his contemporaries into the medieval practices of the Catholic Church. […] Huysmans saw the novel as the form best positioned to resuscitate the moralizing function of medieval art in the modern world.

(Romancing the Cathedral, University of New York, 2001, p. 123)

Indeed, one contemporary critic was so struck by the documentary aspect of the novel that, in an otherwise hostile review, he conceded:

It seems to me that the best chance L’Oblat has to last is that, in four or five hundred years, it may be used as a convenient document on the life of religious communities. Armed with L’Oblat an expert scholar could even reconstruct, in its entirety, the liturgy of some Benedictine ceremonies. I’m not making a joke: that’s a great thing.

(Léon Blum, Gil Blas, 9 March 1903)

Nevertheless, Huysmans was aware that presenting such specialised and often abstruse material wasn’t going to be easy, and that to make it palatable to the reader he had to sugar-coat the pill, so to speak, through various fictional devices. As he told his friend Henri d’Hennezel, who was also writing a book on a similar theme:

The devices that can be used, conversations, soliloquies, or personal chapters, are not very varied, but after all they suffice. Obviously, as we’ve said before, a novel conceived in this way is a ‘mongrel’ and a hybrid, but there’s nothing else to be done. Otherwise your book is certain to be a flop, because no one will read a brochure on the liturgy, least of all the clergy, and besides, we’re doing a useful job in masking the taste of technique with an appetising sauce.

(Huysmans to Henri d’Hennezel, 26 June 1903)

L’Oblat does indeed contain some of the trademark ‘devices’ of Huysmans’ earlier novels, albeit in a slightly lower key. There is the phantasmagoric blending of art and mythical history in the description of Khosrow’s palace, for example, or the often comical interludes with Monsieur Lampre and Mlle de Garambois, which serve a similar function as the scenes with Carhaix and his wife in Là-bas, or with Madame Bavoil in La Cathédrale.

Undoubtedly one of the ingredients of the ‘appetising sauce’ for many readers is the identification of Durtal with his creator. En Route, La Cathédrale and L’Oblat are generally taken to constitute a faithful account of Huysmans’ own conversion, or more accurately re-conversion, to Catholicism. Contemporary reviewers especially tended to see the fictional Durtal and Huysmans the writer as practically interchangeable:

Durtal, the mystic in Là-Bas, is no other than M. Huysmans himself, and he makes no secret whatever of the fact. He appears again in En Route and in La Cathédrale, both of which have been translated into English, and he will finally be seen in L’Oblat, a forthcoming study of the Benedictine life upon which M. Huysmans is at present engaged.

(Academy, 28 August 1898)

But as with most autobiographically inspired novels, the relationship between life and fiction is rarely so simple. It’s true that L’Oblat tells the story in broad outline of the two years Huysmans spent at a monastery in Ligugé, and it’s also true that, like the sequence of novels that preceded it, L’Oblat is a roman à clef, with many of its characters and settings based on real-life originals. The Burgundian abbey of Val-des-Saints in the novel, for example, is a thinly disguised description of the abbey of Saint Martin in Ligugé where Huysmans took his vows as an oblate. Madame Bavoil, who also appears in La Cathédrale, was based on Huysmans’ housekeeper, Julie Thibault; Mlle de Garambois was a fictional portrait of Madame Godefroy, a ‘sister oblate’ who Huysmans had somewhat begrudgingly come to respect at Ligugé; and fictional monks such as Dom Felletin and Dom de Fonneuve were based on monks that Huysmans actually knew, such as Dom Besse and Dom Chamard. Even so, Huysmans was keen to make a distinction between himself and his fictional alter ego:

L’Oblat is sort of my story, or rather it’s the story of an imaginary character in a milieu which I’ve known and which I’ve loved, and which I miss.

(Gil Blas, 1 February 1903)

As Elizabeth Emery points out, the differences between Durtal and Huysmans, and between the settings of the novels and those of Huysmans’ life, are as significant as the similarities:

Huysmans wrote at work and during vacations; Durtal lives from his writing and has no other obligations. Huysmans went to churches accompanied by his friends George Landry and Gustave Boucher; Durtal is always alone in En Route, a solitary observer of church art and ceremony. While Huysmans shared a house with a married couple, the Leclaires, during his time as a Benedictine oblate at Ligugé, in L’Oblat Durtal lives with no one but his housekeeper. Durtal is a purified, simplified version of Huysmans, with no responsibilities. Although the outline of their conversion is similar, Durtal is not Huysmans, but an idealized alter ego from which all complications except the spiritual have been removed.

(Romancing the Cathedral, p. 96)

If the line between fact and fiction is not always easy to determine, what is clear is that with L’Oblat Huysmans had reached the end of his spiritual journey, or rather his presentation of it in the guise of fiction. Some critics, such as Jean-Marie Seillan, have nevertheless argued that in the wake of L’Oblat Huysmans was ready to shift direction again, and that while there is no evidence he was planning to write a novel of ‘de-conversion’, there are certain thematic and stylistic signs in his later work that allow us to speculate ‘that an evolution of this sort was likely to happen’. Whether Huysmans would indeed have found further terrain in which to explore his alter ego’s psychological and spiritual state had he not died in 1907 at the age of only fifty-nine, must however remain a moot question.

The Writing of L’Oblat

Huysmans conceived the idea of writing L’Oblat many years before its eventual publication, indeed before he had even finished La Cathédrale. In an interview given to L’Echo de Paris in 1896, the author laid out his plans after the publication of En Route the year before, explaining how La Cathédrale would continue Durtal’s story, and centre on the symbolic aspect of religious architecture:

Ultimately, whatever happens, the influence of the cathedral on Durtal will be such that it will inevitably lead my hero to the Trappists, where he will enter definitively, though without taking the definitive vows of a monk. That will be the subject of L’Oblat.

(L’Echo de Paris, 28 August 1896)

In what might be considered a case of life imitating art, the experiences that primarily form the backdrop to L’Oblat would date to the two-year period Huysmans spent at Ligugé in the south-west of France between 1899 and 1901, three years after the novel’s initial conception. It was here, at the abbey of Saint Martin, that Huysmans and his friend Gustave Boucher began their year-long novitiate in March 1900, and where both made their professions of oblatehood on 21 March 1901. Boucher, who had first introduced Huysmans to Ligugé in 1898, also helped to arrange the purchase of land and the construction of a house there, which the author bought jointly with his friends Léon Leclaire and his wife. The newly-built house, named the Maison Notre-Dame, was effectively divided into two apartments: Huysmans occupying the upper floor, with a view of the monastery situated conveniently close by, and the Leclaires occupying the ground floor, though as it turned out the couple would spend relatively little time there.

Following the success of La Cathédrale, Huysmans was increasingly seen as something of a literary celebrity, and his plan to become an oblate was the subject of news reports, profiles and even cartoons in the press. Inevitably, expectations regarding his new novel were raised, particularly among Catholics who felt that the work of high-profile converts such as Huysmans could present their embattled cause in a positive light. As the secretary to the bishop of Poitiers, Canon Omer Péret, told the writer during his negotiations to buy the house:

Yes indeed, my dear Huysmans, you have promised L’Oblat to your public: you must live it and write it here!

(Quoted in Baldick, Life of J.-K. Huysmans, p. 372)

When Huysmans moved into the Maison Notre-Dame during the summer of 1899, his intention was to spend the rest of his life there and write; he had even formed plans to found an artistic religious community there. As it turned out, however, his stay would be short-lived. In the wake of political and social divisions exacerbated by the Dreyfus Affair, the newly-formed Republican coalition government of 1899, led by the anti-clerical Réne Waldeck-Rousseau, sought to neuter the political power of religious associations, particularly those allied to the Catholic Church. Consequently, with the passing of Waldeck-Rousseau’s Law of Associations in 1901, the monks of Saint Martin were effectively forced to relocate to a monastery in Belgium. Huysmans had little alternative but to move out also, and by the end of 1901 he had reluctantly returned to Paris.

Ironically, Huysmans only got around to starting L’Oblat a few months before he was due to leave Ligugé. The delay was no doubt the result of having to complete a number of other works he was already committed to, principally his hagiography of a fourteenth century mystic, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901), which he’d begun working on in 1897, but which was mostly written during the summer and autumn of 1900 in the Maison Notre-Dame. By the time he started collecting notes for L’Oblat, therefore, he was aware that the rapidly evolving political developments would play a decisive part in shaping the novel’s narrative arc. As he told his Dutch friend Arij Prins:

I’m still plunged into studies on the liturgy for L’Oblat, which I’m hoping to write; basically, I’m living it every single day, and the end of the book will be furnished to me by events.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 1 August 1901)

Around this time, Huysmans decided he was going to set his novel not in Ligugé, which he had come to dislike, but in Dijon, which he had first visited in 1895, in the company of Boucher. The city’s Carthusian monastery, together with its Musée des Beaux Arts which contained a number of Flemish devotional works dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, no doubt offered the novelist more scope to explore medieval lore, art and history than Ligugé.

By the autumn of 1901 Huysmans and the Leclaires were finalising their plans to quit the Maison Notre-Dame. A diary entry written at the time shows how much the move and the current political events were affecting the author:

I feel utterly forsaken … truly it’s time that I went. One week more. My head aches and I feel sick at heart, as though I were suffocating. I didn’t know that this disaster the monastery has suffered would affect me so deeply. Ah! however weak he may be, the Abbot was Jesus Christ being driven away – was Our Father himself. I kissed his hand and was close to tears. Even Houllier [the monk left behind as caretaker to look after the land and buildings], mediocre though he is, seems lovable now that he’s there alone, for he represents monk and monastery. Never would I have suspected that I loved them so much, that they had entered so deeply into my life.

(Diary entry for 29 September 1901)

For Huysmans, the return to Paris was a huge disruption. He had to find a new place to live, and arrange the transportation of the thousands of books he possessed, not to mention his numerous pictures and objets d’art. Unsurprisingly, all this prevented any serious work on the novel, however by the start of 1902 he was definitively installed in Paris, at 20 Rue Monsieur, in a large apartment in the annexe of the Benedictine convent there:

Finally, by the grace of God. I can get back into my new book L’Oblat, perhaps I’ll be able to finish it in peace in this place …

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 5 January 1902)

In February, however, Huysmans laid aside work on L’Oblat again in order to devote himself to a short life of the Italian priest Don Bosco, who had dedicated his life to helping the disadvantaged youth of Turin. However, this brief hagiographical essay, which was published later that same year, did not take up much of his time, and by the end of spring he was back at work on the novel:

I am hitched into my book L’Oblat, but it progresses very slowly. The subject is so specialised that I ask myself, aside from me and a few monks, who the devil could it possibly interest? It’s true that for a number of years I’ve only done books of this sort, and that nevertheless there’s a public that finds it interesting – many of them, I believe, out of disgust at the state this unfortunate country of France is in, and out of hatred of the persecutors and the sectarians.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 17 May 1902)

During the summer of 1902 there was another delay, this time the result of a bizarre incident involving a supposed legacy, a Satanic doctor, and a young misguided woman in Marseilles. The affair of the mysterious Dr Rodaglia and his attempt to marry his goddaughter to Huysmans, which resulted in the author having to travel to Marseilles to sort the whole matter out, is recounted in full by Robert Baldick in his biography.

Despite this, work on the novel continued throughout the rest of the summer:

I’m still working on L’Oblat, but it’s long and difficult to put together, and it will be a bit boring with the work on the liturgy of the Middle Ages – but I’ve a public who I can fortunately make swallow it all. If they’ve accepted La Cathédrale and Sainte Lydwine, there’s no reason why I can’t make them devour all this too.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 25 July 1902)

In August, Huysmans moved once more, this time to 60 Rue de Babylone, a fourth floor flat less than five minutes away from the Rue Monsieur. Initially at least, he found the new apartment more peaceful and comfortable, but even so he continued to find work on the novel difficult, aware that his book was likely to stir up controversy. As Huysmans saw it, the Catholics of France were no less guilty than the Republican government, and in a letter to Leclaire he told his friend that he intended to pillory everyone, laymen, priests and monks alike, for having failed, as he saw it, in their duty to God and the Church:

This guttersnipe government hasn’t sprung from a self-sown seed, but from the general cowardice and stupidity of the Catholics […]. By heaven, but the Catholics are going to cop it in L’Oblat! They may howl as much as they like, but they, the clergy and the religious Orders are all going to hear a few home truths.

(Quoted in Life of J.-K. Huysmans, p. 427)

At one point, Huysmans even lost patience with Pope Leo XIII, who in his opinion should have threatened the French president with excommunication. Consequently, he extended the scope of his indictment to the Vatican, telling Leclaire:

Before the year is out there won’t be a monastery left in this filthy country. I’m slating it, the government, the Pope, the clergy, everything, in L’Oblat. The book is going to create a tremendous stink.

(Huysmans to Léon Leclaire 28 August 1902)

By October, the book was nearly complete, and Huysmans informed Prins:

I’m working hard and I’ve only got two chapters left to do, but everything will have to be recopied and tidied up. I’m trying to get it ready for the start of the year. And then it will be a right storm on all sides! Because L’Oblat is the most violent book I’ve ever written. In it, everyone gets it in the neck, the Catholics who are behind everything, as much as the government of crooks who lead us.

Since that diabolical Dreyfus Affair, France has become a right sink of corruption. It’s impossible to see how it will all end, if not in total bankruptcy or a war.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 18 October 1902)

On 24 November, Huysmans told Leclaire that he had just written finis to the book. The first three weeks of December were spent revising and copying out the manuscript, and it was delivered to his publisher, Stock, on Christmas Day. At the end of the year, Huysmans gave Prins another update on the book and predicted how it would be received:

I’ve finished my book which has gone off to the printer. I’m hoping it will appear in the first months of the new year. I’m expecting a general uproar with it because everyone, the Pope and President Loubet, gets it in the neck. I’ll be lucky this time if I avoid getting put on the Index in Rome, which I narrowly escaped before with La Cathédrale.

I’m exhausted. L’Oblat is a big book, and the enormous amount of research was a real headache …

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 29 December 1902)

On its publication in March, L’Oblat received a significant amount of coverage in the press – Lucien Descaves refers to more than a hundred articles in the space of four months in France and Belgium alone – and though it sold relatively well initially, its sales tailed off and it never reached the sustained levels of En Route or La Cathédrale. For the most part, the critical response to the novel was respectful, but muted. As always, there were those who took issue with Huysmans’ style, or found his invective too strong for their tastes. Huysmans himself was more concerned about what he saw as the hostile reaction in the Catholic and Benedictine press:

There’s an unleashing of fury against L’Oblat here. The Catholics above all, exasperated that one of their own has told them such harsh truths. As for the Benedictines, they feel they haven’t been flattered enough, and are protesting against the book. What can you say about the pride and incomprehension of these people!

It’s always a continuous stream of attacks against me. But I don’t care. I write books to tell the truth, to say what I think; I am loyal to no party and never will be. Let them shout! […]

What a country of idiots and scoundrels this beautiful France is.

(Huysmans to Arij Prins, 21 April 1903)

After the novel’s publication, Huysmans travelled to Lourdes to stay with the Leclaires, who had set up house there after leaving Ligugé. A week later he reported to his friend Georges Landry:

I’m living next to the Leclaires, in a villa belonging to the Carmelite monastery located close by, and I’ve got a view from my window of the Basilica, the Grotto blazing with light day and night, and the chain of the Pyrenees […]

I’m going to stay here for the rest of the month. I’ve worked hard enough to deserve a little holiday.

(Huysmans to Georges Landry, 11 March 1903)

Despite feeling overwhelmed by weeks of proof-reading and the complicated legal arrangements involved in setting up the Académie Goncourt, of which he was the president, during his stay at Lourdes Huysmans had already started making notes for his next and final book. This time he had no thought of using his experiences there to continue the Durtal cycle, and the book, entitled Les Foules de Lourdes (The Crowds of Lourdes), would be framed as a piece of reportage. It would be published in October 1906, less than eight months before his death.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

L’Oblat was first translated into English as The Oblate of St Benedict in 1924 by Edward Perceval. This translation was, however, not particularly well received at the time, as the text contained a number of errors and omissions. This new translation is based on the edition of L’Oblat in Volumes XVII and XVIII of Huysmans’ Oeuvres complètes (Crès, 1928–34). A section of Notes is included at the end of the book to provide additional information for references or allusions in the text that might be unfamiliar to the reader.

The Oblate

(L’Oblat)

Ut quid, Deus, repulisti in finem?

Iratus est furor tuus, super ovees pascuæ tuæ?

Memor esto congregationis tuæ …

Psaume LXXIII.

O God, why have you cast us off unto the end?

Why is thy wrath enkindled against the sheep of thy pasture?

Psalm 73

CHAPTER I

For more than eighteen months now, Durtal had been living in Val-des-Saints. Tired of Chartres, where he had provisionally settled, and plagued by desultory longings for the cloister, he’d left for the abbey of Solesmes.1

Recommended to the head of the monastery by Abbé Plomb, one of the curates at Chartres who had known his reverence for a number of years, Durtal had been cordially received and had stayed at the monastery on several occasions for more than a fortnight, but he always came back more ill at ease, more uncertain than before. He would meet up again joyfully with his old friends, Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper, Madame Bavoil; he would return to his lodgings with a sigh of relief, and then the same thing would happen: little by little he was seized again by memories of the conventual life at Solesmes, so utterly different from that which he’d experienced at La Trappe.2

Indeed, there was none of the iron rule of the Cistercians, the perpetual silence, the rigorous fasts and never-ending abstinence, the sleeping fully clothed in a dormitory, the getting up in the dark at two in the morning, working at some trade or labouring on the land; the Benedictines could speak, and on certain days eat meat; they could sleep undressed and each had his own private cell; they would rise at four, and devote themselves to intellectual work, toiling away in a library rather than in a workshop or a field.

The Rule of St Benedict, so inflexible among the White Monks, had been tempered by the Black Monks;3 it easily adapted itself to the dissimilar needs of the two Orders, the aims of which, indeed, were not the same.

The Trappists were more particularly devoted to the work of mortification and repentance, whereas the Benedictines, properly called, to the divine service of praising God; consequently, the former, under the impetus of St Bernard,4 had emphasised all that was strict and harsh in the rule; whereas the latter, on the contrary, had adopted, and even relaxed, the more appealing and indulgent dispositions it contained.

Guests and those on retreat would keenly feel this difference; to the same degree that his reception had been curt and austere when Durtal had first visited La Trappe – already ten years ago now – in order to convert, so his welcome at Solesmes, when he’d gone with a plan to test out his vocation, had been affable and friendly.

He’d profited when at the Benedictines from the good-natured aspect of their observances; he had been given almost complete liberty as regards getting up in the morning, going out for a walk, or attending services; he would eat his meals with the monks, not, as at the Cistercians, in a room apart; he was no longer kept at a distance, on the outskirts of the community, or on the fringes of the cloister, but was right inside it, living with the fathers,5 talking and working with them. The duties of hospitality, so expressly recommended by the Order’s patriarch, were truly carried out to the letter by the Black Monks.

This paternal characteristic made him smile when he got back to Chartres; over time, the image of Solesmes clarified in his mind, would become idealised in proportion to its distance.

‘There’s no place like Solesmes!’ he would exclaim, ‘the only monastic life possible for me is there.’

And yet he couldn’t forget that every time he’d left the abbey and was sitting in the cab that would take him to Sablé station, he’d exhaled deeply, like a man relieved of an insupportable burden, and once installed on the train would say to himself: ‘My God, what luck, here I am free again!’ – and yet he would continue to miss the embarrassment of being with others, the relief of fixed hours with no unexpected amusements and no unforeseen disturbances.

He found it difficult to analyse these changing impressions, these opposing feelings. ‘Yes, certainly,’ he would declare, ‘Solesmes is unique in France; religious art shines here like nowhere else; its plainchant is perfect; its services are conducted with a matchless pomp; and what’s more nowhere else would I come across an abbot of Dom Delatte’s stature, or musical palaeographers more skilled or learned than Dom Mocquereau and Dom Cagin,6 and I could also add, monks that were more helpful and pleasant – yes, but …’

But what? And then, by way of response, his whole being seemed to recoil with a sort of instinctive repulsion for this monastery, whose splendidly illuminated façade, by contrast, made the unlit outbuildings that adjoined it darker still; and so he advanced with precaution, like a cat that sniffs around a strange appartment, ready to bolt at the slightest alarm.

‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t have a shadow of a proof that the inside of a cloister differs in spirit to that of its façade; it’s strange what’s going on inside me.’

‘Come on, let’s have it out: what is it that I don’t like?’ And he answered himself: ‘Everything and nothing.’ Nevertheless, certain observations stood out in the light, came to the fore as regards the setting of the abbey. First of all, the grandeur of this monastery and its army of monks and novices, which detracted from the intimacy and charm possessed by less-imposing retreats, such as La Trappe at Our Lady of the Hearth,7 for example. With its huge buildings, and the crowd of monks that cluttered them, Solesmes inevitably took on the air of an army barracks. It felt like you marched to a service as if you were on parade; like the abbot was a general surrounded by his staff, and that the others were no more than humble privates. No, one could never feel at ease, and one could never be sure of the morrow, if one belonged to that religious garrison, which has something uneasy and fearful about it, always on its guard; and indeed, one fine morning you could, if you ceased to please, be sent off, like a mere package, to some distant cloister.

Then, what was there to say about the unutterable dreariness of those recreation periods, of those supervised and inevitably gloomy conversations, the irritation produced over time by the lack of the solitude that is so delightful at La Trappe, but which is impractical at Solesmes, where there are neither ponds nor woods, and where the garden is flat and bare, with no winding path, no alcove where one could mediate, hidden from sight, alone.

‘That’s all well and good,’ he continued, ‘but to be fair, I ought to admit now that, with the exception of the place itself – and again everyone except me likes it – my other grievances are devoid of meaning. Indeed, how would it be possible to get the effect of Solesmes as a whole, the solemnity of its services and the glory of its plainchant, without that serried mass of monks? How, without a grip of iron, could you direct an army of nearly a hundred men, whose different temperaments, by dint of constant contact, are ready to burst into flame? So it’s essential that discipline be as strict in a monastery – more even – than in an army camp; and lastly, it has to help out other monastries in the congregation that are less well staffed, sending them those they lack, whether it’s a director of liturgy, a precentor, or a nurse – in short, the specialist they need.

‘That the inmates of Solesmes dread such an exile proves that they are happy in their abbey, and isn’t that the highest praise you can make? In any case, such enforced departures are, for the most part, less down to disgrace than loans from monastery to monastery, necessitated by the very interests of the Order.

‘As to the repugnance I feel about living among that ever-changing crowd, a priest to whom I spoke quite openly about it judiciously replied: “Where would the merit be if we didn’t suffer from being rolled around like a pebble on the shore of the great cloister?”

‘Well, yes, I can’t deny it, but that doesn’t stop me from preferring something else …’

And Durtal would reflect and then bring out more substantial arguments, more conclusive reasons to justify his apprehensions.

‘Suppose,’ he said to himself, ‘that the abbot allows me to work on my books in peace, and agrees not to interfere in literary matters – and he is so broadminded he would no doubt allow this dispensation – it would count for nothing because I’d be absolutely incapable of writing a book in this abbey.

‘I’ve tried the experiment on several occasions, but the mornings and afternoons are so chopped up by services, it makes all artistic work impossible. This life, divided into little slices, may be excellent for collecting materials and for putting together notes, but to work on actual pages, no.’

And he remembered those sad occasions when, escaping from a service, he’d wanted to get down to work on a chapter, only to be discouraged by the thought that as soon as he started to get underway, he’d have to leave his cell and go back to the chapel for another service, and he concluded: ‘The cloister is useful when preparing a book, but it’s best to write it elsewhere.’

And what did it mean to be an oblate anyway? He’d never been able to get a clear answer. ‘It depends on the goodwill of the abbot, and consequently can change according to the monastery; but was that seriously the case? The profession of oblate among the Benedictines has existed since the eighth century, and is governed by age-old regulations, but where were they? No one seems to know.

‘The goodwill of an abbot! But that would be to surrender oneself, bound hand and foot, to a man who, in short, one knows only by hearsay; and if the man in whose monastery you were interned was either old and narrow-minded, or young, arrogant and unpredictable, it would be worse than being a monk, because a monk is at least protected by strict ordinances that his superior can’t infringe. But what an ambiguous state of affairs – neither flesh nor fowl – is that of an oblate in a monastery! Halfway between the fathers and the lay brothers, he would in all likelihood be accepted by neither one nor the other.

‘Being an oblate in an abbey is not therefore something to be envied.

‘Ah, and then there’s always the heavy, rarefied atmosphere of the cloister; no, that’s definitely not for me.’ How often had he repeated this phrase to himself; but he would nevertheless return to Solesmes, because as soon as he was settled back at Chartres, he was overtaken by a nostalgia for the divine office, for those days that are so precisely and wisely split up by the liturgy to lead the soul back to God, to prevent those who don’t work from drifting too far away.

At Chartres, in the evenings, he had the impression that he hadn’t prayed, that he had wasted his time, and the haunting plainchant he had heard came back to his mind in snatches, fuelling his desire to hear them again, stirring up, along with the recollection of those splendid services, his regret at having lost them.

Never had he so well understood the necessity of communal prayer, of liturgical prayer, of that prayer for which the Church has appointed the time and decided the text. He would tell himself that everything was in the Psalms, joy and contrition, adoration and ecstasy; that their verses adapted themselves to all states of the soul, corresponded to every need. He began to realise the power inherent in these supplicatory prayers, by virtue of the divine inspiration they possessed, by the fact that they were formulated by the Son to be offered to his Father by his faithful precursors. Now that he was deprived of them, he felt a weakness in his whole being, a feeling of implacable discouragement, of overwhelming dejection.

“Oh, yes,” he would say to his confessor, Abbé Gévresin, “yes, I’m haunted by fantasies of the past; I’ve inoculated myself with the seductive poison of the liturgy and I’ve got it now in the blood of my soul and I’ll never be rid of it. I’m a morphine addict of the divine office; what I’m telling you sounds stupid, but that’s the way it is.”

“And the abbot of Solesmes, what does he think of these hesitations?” the old priest asked.

“Dom Delatte’s eyes smile and his mouth puckers with just a hint of scorn when he listens to the history of my fickleness. Perhaps he thinks it’s a matter of temptation in my case, as I myself used to believe in the past.”

“And me too,” said Abbé Gévresin.

“But you no longer think that surely? Don’t you remember how we implored Our Lady of the Crypt to enlighten us; and every time I went back to Solesmes the feeling was the same, but yet again, no; it was aggravated by an unreasonsble aversion, a recoil. Certainly, it was neither a sign of vocation, nor an invitation …”

After a pause, Durtal continued: “There is, of course, the fearful argument put forward by some of the good Lord’s henchmen: reason proves to you that the monastic life is superior to any other existence, so there’s no need to know anything more, that suffices; you must therefore start off down that path and have the strength of will to suffer the disillusions it entails and the sacrifices it demands.

“Obviously, this is a theory pitched at a very high level; it assumes an exceptional generosity of spirit, a complete renunciation of the self, an infallible faith, and a rare firmness of character and power of endurance. But that’s like jumping into the sea for the love of God and forcing him to fish you out.

“It’s also to put the cart before the horse; it puts our Lord after and not before; it’s to deny vocation, the touch, impetus, and attraction of the divine; it’s to obey without waiting for the call of Christ, on whom one claims to inflict one’s views.

“I’m not getting mixed up in any of that; besides, I haven’t been led in that way by the Holy Virgin, my Mother.”

“And you’re not mistaken in not wishing to tempt the Lord,” said Abbé Gévresin, “but let’s look at the question, please, from another angle. Nothing obliges you to don the habit of an oblate or shut yourself up in a cloister; you can lodge outside and still attend the services.

“I’ve told you before that this is the only solution that would suit you; you’re past the age of illusions; you’re too keen an observer for living side-by-side with monks to be good for you, you’d become aware of their hidden failings too quickly: live near them, not among them. Public opinion about the monks runs from one extreme to the other, and both extremes are equally foolish. Some people imagine them like those coloured engravings you’ve seen, chubby-cheeked and fat, holding a pie in one hand and clutching a wicker-covered wine bottle against their heart with the other, and nothing could be more inaccurate or more stupid. Others imagine them as angelic beings, hovering above the world, and that’s no less inaccurate and no less stupid. The truth is that they are men, better than most laymen, but still just men, subject therefore to all a man’s frailties when they are not absolute saints, and Lord knows …

“But no, to go back to what I was saying, prudence consists in adopting the middle way, in becoming an oblate, outside but in the vicinity of the cloister at Solesmes.”

“At Solesmes? No. There’s not a single habitable house to rent. Abbé Plomb, who went there, knows it; what’s more, Solesmes is a bit of a hole; living outside the cloister would be horrible, because there aren’t even any paths where you can wander around in the shade in summer. Added to which, the nearest town, Sablé, is of the worst sort, and the slowness of the trains to get to Le Mans or Paris! No, at Solesmes, there’s no middle ground, it’s the abbey or nothing.”

“Then go to another monastery, in a region that’s more attractive and easier to reach … Burgundy, for instance, at Val-des-Saints, which Abbé Plomb told you about.”

“Well, that remains to be seen …”

And in due course it did end up being seen. One of the fathers from the abbey passed through Chartres and stayed with Abbé Plomb, who had immediately put him in touch with Durtal.

The two men were made for each other.

Dom Felletin was a monk over sixty-five years old, but still young and active, tall and strongly built, a ruddy complexion with cheeks flecked with crimson spots like the skin of an apricot; his nose was large, and when he laughed the tip of it wiggled; with light blue eyes and firm mouth, this priest diffused a feeling of tranquil gaiety, the joy of a healthy, selfless soul, a soul at ease with itself. Full of enthusiasm for his Order, enamoured of the liturgy and mysticism, he dreamed of groups of oblates forming a community around his own.

He pounced, so to speak, on Durtal, and as if by magic all questions were swiftly resolved. All that was left was to rent, at a good price, a house near the monastery, with an old garden; and he boasted of the paternal aspect of his abbey, the probity of its services.

“Obviously,” he said, “with us you won’t find the refined art of Solesmes; we don’t have a master like Father Mocquereau to direct the choir; but even so, the Mass is beautifully sung, and the ceremonies are, as you’ll see, magnificent; and lastly, not far from Val-des-Saints you have a town full of medieval treasures and ancient churches, and what’s more, a town that is very lively and well-stocked with all modern conveniences, Dijon.”

And Durtal, won over by this jovial priest, undertook a retreat at his convent for a fortnight, and on the advice of the abbot he’d rented the house and garden adjoining the cloister.

And life there was indeed very pleasant.

The abbey was homely, with none of the feeling of crowdedness and dull panic that had so oppressed him at Solesmes; indeed, Val-des-Saints went a bit too far in the opposite direction, in that everyone had almost too much freedom, though Durtal, who benefitted from it, wasn’t about to complain. The abbot, Dom Anthime Bernard, was an old man of nearly eighty, well-known for his saintly character and, in spite of his incessant problems, his attentive benevolence and unfailing cheerfulness. He welcomed Durtal with open arms, and after a month told him that the monastery was now his home, and to assure him this wasn’t an idle phrase he gave him a key to the main entrance. It meant that, even aside from the friendship that soon bound him to some of the inmates of the cloister, Durtal could take advantage of his exceptional position as a postulant, then as novice oblate; it would introduce him, on terms of equality, into the Order of which he would become a member, as soon as his term of probation was over.

The obscure question of the oblate’s status had indeed come up almost immediately; but if he hadn’t completely resolved it, the abbot at least dealt with it by a simple, common-sense solution.

“Begin your novitiate,” he told Durtal, “we’ll discuss it afterwards. Like that of the monks, it will last a year and a day; during this period you will follow a course of liturgy with Dom Felletin and attend the services. In the meantime, we shall no doubt have unearthed the regulations and the texts which you can study yourself with the novice master.”

And Durtal having accepted this arrangement, every feast day now served as a pretext to invite him to dine at the monastery.

The work, the services, the discussions, and his researches in the monastry’s library, which contained nearly thirty thousand volumes, occupied him sufficiently that it was impossible to be bored. Then, on certain days when life seemed a little dull to him, he would take the train to Dijon; at other times, he liked to daydream in the garden, part of which had remained fallow, despite the protests of the gardener; this was a veritable wilderness of weeds and wild flowers that had sprung up from nowhere; and Durtal enjoyed himself amid this tangle of vegetation, limiting himself to pulling up only nettles and briars, hostile plants that threatened to choke the others; and he imagined that, in spring, he would nevertheless prune some of these intruders in order to establish in their place a liturgical garden with a small enclosure of medicinal herbs, copied from the one that Walafrid Strabo8 had, in days gone by, planted near the outbuildings of his convent.

Only one thing was left to be desired in the solitude of his refuge: domestic service. Mother Vergognat, a peasant woman from the hamlet who kept house for him, was quite impossible. Lazy and with a fondness for drink, she made the pitiful quality of the food even worse by her lackadaisical way of cooking it; she was a stranger to moderation, you’d either gum up your teeth in a gelatinous paste or shatter them chewing something as hard as wood. Durtal, unable to do anything else, had chosen the path of offering up to the Lord the penitential misery of these dishes as an expiation for his former sins, when he learned, via telegram, of the sudden death of Abbé Gévresin. He hurriedly threw himself onto the express train to Paris, and from there reached Chartres in time to see, one last time, on his death-bed, the man he had perhaps loved the most. He had stayed in town for a few days, and seeing that Abbé Plomb, one of their mutual friends, couldn’t take the deceased’s domestic, Madame Bavoil, into his service – having six months previously appointed his aunt to run his house – had offered to take the good woman to Val-des-Saints in the capacity of housekeeper and friend.

He had left Chartres without a definite answer, because she couldn’t make up her mind; then, a few weeks after his return to Val-des-Saints, he’d received a letter from her announcing her arrival.

He’d gone to meet her at Dijon station; he was fully expecting to see a somewhat comical descent from the train, because Mme Bavoil was devoid of all preconceived ideas in matters of dress and couldn’t take into account the bizarreness of her outfit, but even so she amazed him when he saw her waving in the doorway of the carriage, wearing an astounding black frilled bonnet and brandishing a grey umbrella; then she alighted from the train, dragging after her a sort of carpetbag from beneath the flaps of which the neck of an uncorked bottle emerged; and this, along with her luggage, greatly amused the porters unloading her strange trunk, a cross between a sideboard and a sarcophagus, an enormous long object which was also hairy, because on closer examination one noticed that bristles of hog’s hair were sticking up on the lid, sprouting in large patches over the worn planks of wood.

“What have you got in there?” he cried in alarm.

“Why, my linen and my things,” she replied calmly.

And while, a little embarrassed, he entrusted this absurd monument to the station attendants, she got her breath back, drew from her pocket a handkerchief as big as a tablecloth, chequered in a Nankin-yellow and brown pattern, and proceeded to dust the tin crucifix that was swinging on a chain against her blouse.

“Would you like to have something to eat or drink?” Durtal suggested. “We have time.”

“You must be joking!” – and from her carpet-bag she extracted a crust of bread and pulled out her litre bottle of water, which was still half full. “I ate and drank on the way, and here’s the proof …” – and she calmly poured the remaining water over her hands, which she then shook, on the platform, to dry them.

“Now, my friend,” she said, “I’m at your service.”

Durtal, not without a few misgivings, somehow doubted it. The arrival at Val-des-Saints had been a noisy one. The villagers stared in amazement on their doorsteps at this thin little woman, dressed in black, who would gesticulate and stop to kiss their children, asking them their names and their ages, and then bless them, making the sign of the cross on their foreheads with her thumb.

CHAPTER II

“Well, Madame Bavoil, aren’t you surprised to find yourself sitting here with me, two steps from a monastery?”

“But why should I be surprised, my friend? It’s a long while since anything surprised me. When the dear Abbé Gévresin died, I said to God: Should I stay at Chartres, return to Paris, or rejoin my good friend Durtal who offers me a home? What seems best to you? Since you are the appointed steward of my poor soul’s effects, direct them in your own fashion and guide me on my new path without too many hitches. However, if this is an act of your goodness my diligent Lord, I’d rather not be messed about by long delays, so if it pleases you act quickly.”

“And here you are.”

“Well, unless I’m mistaken, that’s the answer I believe I heard; but that’s beside the point. If I’m here, with you at Val-des-Saints it’s to look after your household and be of service to you, so let’s talk a bit about this place, the sort of life they lead here, the resources it has at its disposal, so as to organise our daily routine and feed ourselves.”

“The village you’ve seen as you came out of the station; it comprises one street and a few lanes bordered by thatched cottages; it contains some two hundred dwellings, possesses a butcher’s shop, a baker’s, and a grocer’s where you can also buy tobacco and haberdashery; such are its resources; food is available, but while it’s not expensive, it’s also wretched quality and you have to go to Dijon every week in order to get provisions. But in any case, Mother Vergognat, who to date had prepared my meals, will be able to inform you better than I about the choice and price of food; she’s coming this evening, so you can question her at your leisure.”

“The house isn’t bad, as far as I can judge at first glance, and the garden is spacious and planted with fine old trees,” replied Mme. Bavoil after a pause, “so all is for the best; and what about your Benedictines?”

“They live over there; look out of the window, you can see the long row of casement windows of the monastery and the steeple of the church … you won’t be long in getting to know them, because it’s rare that any of them crosses the village without passing through here to shake my hand; they are pious men and their company is a great comfort.”

“Are there many of them?”

“About fifty, including novices and lay brothers.”

“So, my friend, it’s a big abbey, this convent of Val-des-Saints!”

“Yes, it’s one of the most important institutions that Solesmes has ever founded; it’s the finest cloister in Burgundy.”

“Is it of ancient origin?”

“Yes, there was once a priory on this site that was part of the illustrious abbey of Saint-Seine, located about five leagues from Dijon, whose restored buildings – or rather altered from top to bottom – have been transformed into hydropathic factories and warehouses for patients in need of a water cure. Saint-Seine, which was founded in 534 by the saint of that name, counted among its monks St Benedict of Aniane,1 who reformed the Order of St Benedict in the ninth century; his priory at Val-des-Saints was flourishing at the time; it still existed up to the period of the Revolution, but it was dragging along in languishing piety and ultimately its life drained out in obscurity. It disappeared in all the turmoil. It was exhumed only thirty years ago. Dom Guéranger,2 the abbot of Solesmes, to whom its ruins were given, rebuilt it and populated it with monks, and from the insignificant priory it was in its beginnings, it’s become an influential abbey.”

“And that friend of Abbé Plomb, the one who came to see us at Chartres, Dom … what was it …? Ah, I’ve no memory for names …”

“Dom Felletin.”

“That’s the one, is he here?”

“Yes, he’s the novice master.”

“I’d be happy to meet him.”

“You’ll see him, I told him you were coming.”

“So, for company you have the monks; and aside from them, who else?”

“Aside from them? Well, the list is fairly short. In the village there’s an old bachelor, very odd and somewhat gruff, but a good fellow, Monsieur Lampre. He lives in a rather fine house next to the monastery. He’s always criticising the Benedictines, but he adores them, it’s only his way of talking; when he says of a father that ‘he’s a pious dolt’, you have to translate it: it means he’s a monk whose ideas don’t absolutely coincide with his; the main thing is to understand him.”

“How do the monks get on with him?”

“They know him and are fully aware that no one is more devoted to them; he has proved it time and time again; first of all by gifting them the abbey itself, of which he was the owner, then by supplementing their income with considerable sums of money when they were going through a difficult period; the truth is that he dreams of an ideal perfection that cannot exist, and the human side that every monk inevitably has irritates him. Nonetheless, despite this shortcoming he’s a helpful and pious Christian; he’s very knowledgeable, moreover, about monastic usages and customs, and he possesses a specialist library of monographs on the monastic life, and an exceptionally fine collection of rare illuminated manuscripts.

“Aside from this layman, who is the only person it’s a pleasure to visit, there’s a lady oblate, Mademoiselle de Garambois, who is really the most charitable creature and the most indulgent of old maids. Beneath her exterior, this stout, somewhat elderly lady, conceals a soul as youthful and innocent as that of a little child; people laugh a bit at her in the village and in the abbey, on account of her mania for wearing clothes that match the liturgical colour of the day; she’s a living Ordo,3 a walking eccesiatical calendar; she’s a regimental pennant; you know you’re going to celebrate the feast of a martyr when she decorates her hat with red, or that of a confessor when she bears a white ribbon; unfortunately the number of ecclesiastical colours is limited and she laments it so often they tease her about it; but everyone is in accord when it comes to admiring her good nature and her indefatigable kindness.

“You’ll meet her and it won’t take long to discern her two ardent passions: fine cuisine, and the divine office; she is crazy about dainty dishes and liturgical pomp; and on these matters she could teach a thing or two to the most accomplished of chefs and the most learned of monks.”

“So, my friend, she’s no commonplace person, this lady oblate of yours …”

“And how fond she is of her Benedictines! In times past she had a vocation to be a nun, and she did her novitiate at the abbey of Saint Cecilia at Solesmes, but before she completed it she fell ill, and on her doctor’s orders had to abandon it; she consoles herself now by living in the vicinity of a monastery; the wilted nun has bloomed again as an oblate.”

“But to understand the liturgy like that she must be a scholar?”

“She knows Latin, she learned it during her novitiate at Solesmes, and I believe she has worked on it since; but outside treatises on plainchant and the Mass, nothing interests her; nevertheless, as I mentioned, she rejoices when it comes to tasty cuisine; so she’s a convent cordon bleu, a Mother Blémeur of the stove;4 she can just as easily recite recipes from cookery books as antiphons from the Psalter.”

“Why doesn’t she live at Solesmes where she began her novitiate?”

“Because, like me, she couldn’t find a suitable house to rent in that town; added to which, she’s the niece of Monsieur Lampre, the old character I told you about; he’s her only living relative, and she came here to be near him and the monastery.”

“And they live in the same house?”

“No, although they’re fond of each other, if they lived together side by side they’d be at each other’s throats; I leave you to imagine how she’d fight tooth and nail with him whenever he maligns her dear monks.