OF THE U N I VLR5 ITY or ILLINOIS Tom Turner Collection 846W98 OeEp Cop,^ REMOTE STORAGE Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library JAN 02 SB L161— H41 1 \ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https ://archive,org/details/enroute00huys_0 EN ROUTE NEW EDITION OF JOHNSON’S LIVES OF THE POETS. JOHNSON’S LIVES OP THE POETS. A New Edition in 6 vols. The Original Text restored ; with about 30 Portraits. With Notes and Introduction by Arthur Waugh. Fcp. 8vo, 6j. per vol. \_In course of puhlication. In the matter of accuracy, in competent and discriminating scholar- ship, this is the edition of the ‘ Lives.’ ” — Publisher' s Circular^ 25th April, 1896, CHEAP REISSUE OF THE AVON SHAKSPERE. SHAKSPERE’S "WORKS. To be completed in Twelve Fort- nightly Volumes. Price \s. each (net). Printed from a new and graceful fount of type on good paper. The volumes are light and portable, and fit conveniently into the pocket. The text is mainly that of Delius. Each volume contains three or four Plays, and the Set of Twelve will take no more than nine inches space on the bookshelf. ELIZABETHAN" SONNET CYCLES. Edited by Mrs. Martha Crow, of Chicago^ L^’niversity. Printed on Hand-made Paper. With Title-page designed by Laurence Housman. A Series of Four Volumes, each containing two of the Sonnet Cycles published in the last decade of the Sixteenth Century. Fcp. 8vo, 5^. each (net). Only 350 Copies printed for England. MOLTKE’S LETTERS TO HIS WIFE. With an Intro- duction by Sidney Whitman, author of “ Imperial Germany,” &c. Portraits of Moltke and his Wife never before published, an account of Countess von Moltke’s Family, supplied by the Family, and a Genealogical Tree, in facsimile of the Field-Marshal’s Hand- writing. 2 vols. demy 8vo, 30s. HISTORY OP THE GERMAN PEOPLE AT THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. Translated from the First Volume of Johannes Janssen’s German History, by Mrs. Mitchell. 2 vols. demy 8vo, 25^. LIFE OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. By Edward Dowden, Author of “ Shakspere : his Mind and Art,” “ Studies in Literature,” &c. Cheap Edition. With Portrait. Post 8vo, 12^. HOME EDUCATION : A Course of Lectures to Ladies. By Charlotte M. Mason. New and Revised Edition. Demy 8vo, 6s. DOMESTIC SANITARY DRAINAGE AND PLUMBING. By ^ W. R. Maguire. Second Edition, tho- roughly Revised. With numerous Illustrations. Demy 8vo, 12s. LUCILLA : An Experiment. By Alice Spinner. Cheap Edition, i vol. crown 8vo, 3^. 6d. SPORTING STORIES AND SKETCHES. By G. G. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, 2^. ONLY A DRUMMER BOY. By Arthur Amyand. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, 2s. A FAIR EMIGRANT. By Rosa Mulholland. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, 2s. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ld. En Route J.-K. HUYSMANS TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY C. KEGAN PAUL “ Convolate ad urbes refugii, ad loca videlicet religiosa, ubi possitis de prae- teritis agere poenitentiam, in prsesenti obtinere gratiam et fiducialiter futuram gloriam praestolari.*’ BY Saint Bonaventure. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Lm PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD 1896 O&Sf REMOTE Colp TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. loIt is seldom fair to an author, nor does it raise the value of S^literature to imagine too readily that a writer is himself o depicted in his works. We rob Sir Walter Scott of much ^ of his creative power if we assert that in Redgauntlet are exact portraits of himself and his father, nor is it just criticism to declare that Shakspere left a portrait of him- self in Hamlet. No one can of course create any fictitious character unless he have in himself undeveloped possibilities, ^some of which he sketches in his books, and, at times, he ^.may have prophesied his own future course in the events sunder which he has brought the characters in his narrative. S- It would be intrusive and impertinent to declare that Huysmans has written an analysis of himself or a full -V description of his own conversion under the name of '^Durtal, because — though it is quite needless for the under- standing of “ En Route ” — Durtal is also the hero of a ^former book, La Bas,” wherein experience is made of Satanism, Black Masses ” and other forms of detestable impiety, known in France, and at this moment under " investigation in the law courts, but, so far as we are aware, (^unknown in England. ^ In France, as a rule, the population is Catholic; French ^Protestants, who answer very much to our Unitarians, are V. confined for the most part to certain centres, form and make ' isolated knots in other places ; they do not in any sense VI TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. leaven the people. Hence when a Frenchman loses Faith he has not as in England a Protestant sect handy, in joining which he may believe as much or as little as he please, but in which morals at least are upheld ; he plunges only too often into sinful excesses, now and then into some com- plicated and enormous crime, becoming actively hostile to the dominant religion of his country ; since it meets him at every turn, he cannot be indifferent to, nor ignore it. He is aided in his revolt, not by religious sects, bulwarks at least against the denial of God, but by societies of Free- thinkers, “ Solidaires,” Freemasons, etc., bound to an active warfare with the Church, and sworn to keep the priest away from their families, so far as in them lies ; especially at the hour of birth, by refusing baptism ; in the hour of death, by withholding the last sacraments ; and after death, by insisting on civil funerals. In the many episcopal approvals bestowed on an admir- able little French book setting forth devotions, a guild, and a cloistered community, in aid of the dying, much is said of the work of Freemasons. We are probably safe in saying that English Freemasons are only members of a convivial society, who, knowing nothing of the splendour of Church vestments, banners and furniture, or of confraternities in which even the laity may share, have adopted their own ornate badges and ritual. Freemasons in England might well be let alone by the Church, and would do no harm, were it not that it is the boast of every Mason that his society is one all the world over ; and in France, in Italy, and elsewhere, it has allied itself with much that is detestable and irreligious. We may take it, then, that when in France a man of position puts himself in distinct opposition to the Church, and this is of course very different to ignoring it, or taking it for granted without writing about it, he is appealed to, not as in England by Protestants, but by Freemasons, TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. vii “ Solidaires,” even by Satanism, and the more he thinks of religion, the viler and more terrible is the temptation that assails him, is the home which offers itself to his spirit. This M. Huysmans has realized : he is a Frenchman who knows his people, and in the book now presented to the reader he shows us a man, who having passed through the most terrible ordeals of unbelief, has been suddenly con- verted to faith, but has not reformed his life. “ En Route ” is a story of the struggles of such an one, while incidentally it contains also essays on Church music. Architecture, and other Arts, on Monasticism, on the Lives of the Saints, and on Mysticism. Faith is assumed, after a course of unbelief, and no ex- planation of the return to it is afforded. Many have taken in hand, particularly of late years, to give, each an Apologia pro Vita Sua, but it will be noticed that the exact process is as little explicable as the quickening of life in the womb. The soul awakes and says, “ I believe,’’ it has come about by the sudden irruption of Grace, and not by any statement of syllogisms, any admission of premisses, any conscious drawing of conclusions. Remembering this, the Catholic has no right to be disappointed if he feels tongue-tied in the presence of those who do not see as he sees ; he cannot argue, he cannot hope to do outwardly, what God did in his own case secretly, he recognizes that in spiritual matters men are not swayed by argument, which may well defend, but not carry, a position ; in religion debate seldom bears sway ; the daughter of debate is not concord, but discord. The Church collectively has learnt what each man indi- vidually learns, and to which he must perforce reconcile himself, that there is little active zeal for conversions among Catholic priests. Christ must be preached, the message has to be delivered, but in a nation where He is already known, all that the priest can do is to wait till the soul obeys divine grace, and then be ready with all necessary viii TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. help ; it is not the Church’s business to go forth and argue with the intellects of those to whose hearts God Himself appeals, whom discussion would only harden. Preaching does not necessarily carry the gift of Faith to the listener, however true it may be that God often uses it as a vehicle for conferring the gift. The gift of Faith is His greatest gift, and no Frenchman, no Italian, no Spaniard, no German — of that part of the great Teutonic nation which has remained Catholic — would hesitate for a moment to accept certain words of Cardinal Newman at which many of our own countrymen have cavilled. The Cardinal speaks of a beggar-woman who has the gift of Faith, but who may still have many vices, as nearer to the heart of God than many far more respectable than she. In M. Huysmans’ book Faith is taken as axiomatic, and there is little attempt to explain it, though love for Art and hereditary tendencies had some part to play in the ready acceptance of the gift ; the book is the account of the Route taken by such an one towards a holy life. -- There is another reason why we have no right to assume that this is an autobiography. The inviolability of the Confessional has two sides ; the penitent has, as a rule,moTight to make his verbal confession to the world as the hero is here; presented as doing, though a writer may naturally give an imaginary confession, just as, to teach a penitent how to confess, an imaginary form might be suggested in a manual of moral theology ; and of course in rare cases, as that of Saint Augustine, there may be occasional reasons for breaking through the rule of expedient reticence. The special trials in Durtal’s way are those of the Flesh, and here again we recognize a vast difference -between the temper and tone of the English and French nations. It is true that when the author brings his hero to actual state- ments and he asks “ Is it necessary that I go into^details ? ” the monk who is exercising his office says, “ No ; it is not TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. IX necessary,” thereby agreeing with an experienced Jesuit Father who, a year or two since, told his Retreatants that when they unburthened their sins and sorrows they must “ always be careful to respect the modesty of the Con- fessional,” and that the Priest would understand a veiled language ; yet Durtal writes in narrative certain matters which a translation must hide, and merely hint ; that can be said in French, openly, which English men would not say to each other in private. This arises from a fundamental difference in the manner in which the two nations view certain facts of human nature. A young Englishman, who goes wrong, throws as a rule some glow or glamour of imagination over his coarsest excesses, justifying his deeds, if he think of them, by his imagination, or by some over-mastering need ; a young Frenchman takes the same acts as matters of course, needing no veil, and no excuse. The present book is essentially intact, some half-dozen passages are softened in phrase ; it has not been considered necessary to the truth of rendering to give each word its exact equivalent, if, indeed, there be always such an equivalent. We have acted on the advice of the Trappist in the book, and the Jesuit in actual English life, to respect the modesty of the Con- fessional. But however outspoken a Frenchman may be about his sins, he admits that they are sins, and that if he have Faith it behoves him to lead a decent life. Hence M. Huysmans is bound by the exigencies of his story to make Durtal endeavour to reform. Led by his love of Art, Church Architecture and Church Services appeal to him ; and as in his former life he was attracted by the abnormal and the monstrous, so now the strange lives and experiences of the mystic saints help him on the road. The commonplace repels him. Hence he cannot away with the music in, and the architecture of, the churches of Paris, he is not attracted b X translator's note. by the secular clergy ; his retreat, his first confession, his first Communion since his childhood are made in a Trappist monastery, and the true interest in the book is its defence of the Monastic Orders, and the description of such a life as seen from very near. Here is, as it appears to us, the extra- ordinary value of the book for English readers. No one in England is likely to undervalue the secular clergy. It is they whom we know. Saint Thomas of Canterbury, one of the best known among our English heroes, is their patron ; from them, with one exception, are drawn the whole of our English Hierarchy, they have charge of the enormous majority of our parishes, and by consequence they, with the exceptions of the Oratorians, a Congregation, and the Jesuits, are the guides of our laity. The Friars — Dominicans, Franciscans and Servites — hold outposts of our London life, but Monks — Benedictines, Trappists, Cistercians, Carthusians — are known but to few. These are they whom this book upholds as the true masters of the spiritual life. Go to a monastery to make a Retreat, is in fact the teaching of this book, take a monk as your director, but if a director be needed in Paris, go to a Jesuit or a Sulpician. “You can never astonish a monk,” says one of them to Durtal, and indeed this may well be believed after reading the record of the trials to which those are subject who give themselves to the cloistered life. Some years ago a Nonconformist minister in England wrote a book called “ How to make the best of both Worlds,” and though few would put his thesis in so bold a form, this is really what most persons are endeavouring to do, both within and without the Church. They ignore the tremendous conflict now going on between the powers of Light and Darkness ; Satan and Hell are scarcely to be mentioned to ears polite. The late Canon Kingsley once began a sermon in Eversley Church much as follows : ‘ ‘ My friends, you believe translator’s note. XI in God, but there are few indeed here who believe in the Devil,’’ and the same might be said with absolute truth to almost all Christian congregations. It is not possible to ignore Satan in the Cloister. The hidden life is that which he most assails, the shades are deepest when the sun of righteousness is brightest. The cloister is the divinely appointed expiation for the sins of the world. Those who cannot understand the devotion of a Carmelite or a Trappist, and assert that an active life, whereof results may at once be seen, is the only one which ought to be consecrated to God, will do well to remember that in the expiatory life of Jesus Himself the years of His active ministry were in the exact proportion of one to ten of the years of His whole life. Those who have come nearest to Him in His sufferings have had the most acute conscious- ness that they were also taking on them a share of His expiatory life. The translation here presented to the reader is as full and as faithful as the genius of another language and another nation will allow. It has not seemed to the translator that it could be treated as a mere romance written for amusement only. It is indeed attractive, as is all written from the heart. May it speak to the heart of many men in England as it seems to have already done in France, and may it be acceptable to His Sacred Heart to whose com- passionate, redeeming, and expiatory love it is offered. ■'w EN ROUTE CHAPTER I. During the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o’clock in the evening. He often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained choir, and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few lamps — it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at home. Durtal sat down behind the higli ^Itar, on the left, in the aisle along the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his best known commonplaces. Why are they so devoid of eloquence ? ” thought Durtal. I have had the curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament, some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no such thing as a clever combination.” And he called to mind orators petted like tenors. Monsabre, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that bellicose booby the Abbe d’Hulst. “ Afterwards,” he continued, “ come the mediocrities, each puffed by the handful of devotees who listen to them. If B 2 EN ROUTE. those cooks of the soul had any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meals, theological essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this.” A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on the flags interrupted him. The sermon was over. Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ, which dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices. A slow and mournful chant arose, the “ De Profundis.” The blended voices sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass. Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse “ De profundis ad te clamavi, Do — ” and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables “ mine ” fall like a heavy tear ; then these voices of children, near breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, ‘‘ Domine exaudi vocem meam,” and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense, but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God. And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses, bellowed out, carrying all the voices in its torrent — baritones, tenors, basses, not now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices, but openly with full throated sound — yet the dash of the little soprani pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow. Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the verses mourned out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened with attention endeavour- ing to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes, Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears, before their final breaking. EN ROUTE/ Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the antiphon came — “Et lux perpetua luceat eis” — the children's voices broke into a sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word eis,” which remained suspended in the void. These children’s voices stretched to breaking, these clear sharp voices threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn, joining their pure, soft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing as with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers ; they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning salt of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress, balsamic freshness, lustral help ; they lighted in the darkness those brief gleams which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day ; they called up, anticipating the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin, passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that sequence. The “ De Profundis so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtaks nerves, and made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him of no effect, and he stammers forth ; “ If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe iniquities. Lord, who shall endure it?” ‘^ It is a pity,” said Durtal to himself, that this psalm, which in its first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes in those which follow more personal to King David. I know well,” he went on, ^^hat we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit that the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself, according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of Christ ; but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise he gives to his B 2 4 EN ROUTE. incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem. Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own, not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the present day, and of the ages which are no more.” The De Profundis ” had ceased ; after a silence, the choir intoned a motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old plain chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb, the solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music, however ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the “ De Profundis ” chanted in unison, the solemnity of the “ Magnificat,” the splendid warmth of the Lauda Sion,” the enthusiasm of the “ Salve Regina,” the sorrow of the Miserere,” and the Stabat Mater,” the majestic omnipotence of the ‘‘ Te Deum ” ? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred texts : Vittoria, Josquin de Pres, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel, Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages ; often indeed they have been uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages, for ever lost ; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the sober splendour of the Gregorian chant — with them the whole thing came to an end, for composers no longer believed. Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of Lesueur, Wagner, Berlioz, and Caesar Franck, and in these again we are conscious of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out. We feel our- selves in the presence of superior men, but men with their weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice oi their senses. In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth of the cloisters, was an extra- terrestrial well, without taint of sin or trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the slavery of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it EN ROUTE. 5 was also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appeal- ing like the Gospel itself at once to the most refined and the most humble. Ah ! the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had founded, an art which has never been surpassed ; in painting and sculpture the Early Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar ; all was reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts : to revere, adore and serve the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts. Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art, foster-child of the Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity, and to God, the divine concept and the heavenly form were guessed and half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for th^ last time by man. They answered and echoed each other — art calling to art. The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those ogives which the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense, their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming whirl- wind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth, to which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend their perfume. Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding together of souls. Painters associated themselves in the 6 EN ROUTE. same ideal of beauty with architects, they united in a;, indestructible relation cathedrals and saints, only reversing the usual process — they framed the jewel according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary. On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle affinities with the canvases of the Early Painters. Vittoria’s responses for Tenebrse are of a like inspiration and an equal loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys^ great work, the Entombment of Christ. The “ Regina Coeli of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same good faith, the same simple and strange attraction, as certain statues of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the Miserere of Josquin.de Pres, choir-master of Louis XII., has, like the panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient intention, a stiff, thread- like simplicity, but also it exhales like them a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very touching. The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by different means. As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with architecture is also certain ; it also bends from time to time like the sombre Romanesque arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The “ De Profundis,’’ for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins which form the smoky skeleton of the bays ; it is like them slow and dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of the crypts. Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to borrow from Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls, its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the amplitude of sorrow to an infinite joy ; at other times again, the plain music, and the Christian my sic to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like sculpture, to the gaiety of the P'^.ople, associate themselves with simple gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they take the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol ‘‘ Adeste Fideles” and in the Paschal hymn “O Filii et Filiae ; ” they become trivial and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday ^-une easy to catch, a running EN ROUTE. 7 melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ. Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir- schools of the Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters ; it is a winged transla- tion, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in the far-off olden time. Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly over- whelmed by the crash of organs, and is chanted, God knows how ! Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of the singers. The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and looked about him ; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet on the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a lamp, like a ruby in its red glass ; no sound save the military tread of the Suisse, making his round in the distance. Durtal sat down again ; the sweetness of his solitude was enhanced by the aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal recognized the ‘‘Dies irae,^’ that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages ; instinctively he bowed his head and listened. This was no more as in the “ De Profundis ” an humble supplication, a suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough not to tremble ; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror. And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke of 8 EN ROUTE. the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt -offerings. In this chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed, cried out in fear. A crystalline voice, a clear child’s voice, proclaimed in the nave the tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of trumpet, to purify by fire the rotten- ness of the world. Then, in its, turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill tones — the falsetto of a little boy — the name of Jesus went by, and a light broke in on the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies of the Saviour, and His pardon, pleading with Him for absolution, as formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen. But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the different ages of tears. At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne away on the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror, wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering “ Dona eis requiem,” they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ. What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such disasters ? And Durtal made answer to himself : No man.” In fact the attempt has been vain to discover the author both of the music and of the sequence. They have been attributed to Frangipani, Thomas of Celano, St. Bernard feN ROUTE. 9 and a crowd of others, and they have remained anonymous, simply formed by the sad alluvial deposits of the age. The “ Dies irae ” seemed to have, at first, fallen, like a seed of desolation, among the distracted souls of the eleventh century ; it germinated there and grew slowly, nurtured by the sap of anguish, watered by the rain of tears. It was at last pruned when it seemed ripe, and had, perhaps, thrown out too many branches, for in one of the earliest known texts, a stanza, which has since disappeared, called up the mag- nificent and barbarous image of an earth revolving as it belched forth flames, while the constellations burst into shards, and heaven shrivelled like a parched scroll. All this,” concluded Durtal, does not prevent these triple stanzas woven of shadow and cold, full of reverbera- ting rhymes, and hard echoes, this music of rude stuff which wraps the phrases like a shroud, and masks the rigid outlines of the work, from being admirable ! Yet that chant which constrains, and renders with such energy the breadth of the sequence, that melodic period, which without variation, remaining always the same, succeeds in expressing by turns prayer and terror, moves me less than the ‘ De Profundis,’ which yet has not its grandiose spaciousness nor that artistic cry of despair. But chanted to the organ the psalm is earthy and suffocating. It comes from out the very depths of the sepulchre, while the ‘ Dies irae ’ has its source only on the sill of the tomb. The first is the very voice of the dead, the second that of the living who inter him, and the dead man weeps, but takes courage a little, when those that bury him despair. To sum up,” Durtal concluded, I prefer the text of the Dies irae ” to that of the ‘ De Profundis,’ and the melody of the ‘ De Profundis ’ to that of the ‘ Dies irae.^ It is true also that this last sequence is modernized, and chanted theatrically here, without the imposing and needful march of unison. “ This time, for instance, it is devoid of interest,” he continued, ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern music which the choir was just then rendering. “ Ah, who will take on himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water which Gounod invented ! . , . There ought indeed to be astonishing 10 EN ROUTE. penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church. This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be present at the inter- minable funeral of an old banker ; they played a military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with trumpets and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and the decomposition of a financier ! . . . It is too absurd.” And listening no more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed in his dreams. “ Indeed,” he said to himself, “ the clergy make Jesus like a tourist, when they invite Him daily to come down into that church whose exterior is surmounted by no cross, and whose interior is like the grand reception-room at an hotel. But how can you make those priests understand that ugliness is sacrilege, and that nothing is equal to the frightful sin of this confusion of Romanesque and Greek, these pictures of aged men, that flat ceiling studded with skylights, from which filter in all weathers the spoiled gleams of a rainy day, to that futile altar surmounted by a circle of angels who, in discreet abandonment, dance in honour of our Lady, a motionless marble rigadoon ? ” Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and cleanses the impious ugliness of the place. And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he closed his eyes, at the end of the semi- circular apse, the procession of red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar, descending the steps together, making their way together to the catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the great gangway between the chairs. This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses, in mourning, their swords horizontal, and a generaPs epaulets in jet, advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels, and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them EN ROUTE. II seemed to march with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which accompanied them, twinkling above their heads. Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the De Profundis burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible singers. “ That was good,’^ said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the voices of the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and failing ; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all the same it was superb ; then what a moment was that of the priests’ com- munion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant antiphon — “ Requiem ceternam dona eis Domine Et lux perpetua laceat eis.” It seems that after all the lamentations of the De Profundis ” and the “ Dies irae,” the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without tears. The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution. Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable. Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul : Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo Domine ” — then after the amen given by the organ and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name of the dead : — “ Libera me ! ” and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in the “ Dies irae,” which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints, the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world. The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it 12 EN ROUTE* with beads of holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no waking, far from earth’s noises. Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted her up to the hour of his death. Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries : “ From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord ! ” but at the end of the general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back, is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children’s voices. Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said : We have done what we could, but . . . but . . .” And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at the factories. “ If,” continued Durtal, in opposition to these sad prayers, these eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and borrow from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impa- tience of a bride. Fancy the Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom ! ” EN ROUTE. 13 Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if, fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascen- sion, Epiphany and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God. As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only the regular way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is turned mechanically without thought of it. The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and considers how wearied he is ; the bellows-blower thinks, as he fills the pipes, of the half-pint which will dry his sweat ; the tenors and basses are careful of their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water of their voices ; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass ; and, moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they sing and abridge, as for instance the “ Dies irae,’’ of which they suppress a part of the stanzas. In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many, and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward, while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the relations^ and leave the dead. There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how terrible is that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid manure that stinks^ gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that re- mains ! And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins ? No one thinks of it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed in their own sorrow ; who in fact regret only the visible presence of the being they have lost ; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the EN ROUTE. 14 , ‘^Diesirae’’ and the Libera/^ of which they understand both the language and the meaning. Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts. There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman. At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left peculiar to Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous corpse, under- takers have their way. They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues of our Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green punch, tin candelabra at the end of a branch, like a cannon on end with its mouth upwards, supporting spiders on their backs, with burning candles set about their legs, all the funeral ironmongery of the First Empire, with curtain rods in relief, acanthus leaves, winged hour-glasses, lozenges and Greek frets. It is unfortunate, too, that to touch up the miserable furniture of these ceremonies they play Massenet and Dubois, Benjamin Godard and Widor, or, worse still, the sacristy orchestra, mystical bellowing, such as the women sing, who are affiliated to the confraternities of the month of May. And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs and the majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied classes ; for the poor, nothing — no choir, no organ, just a handful of prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and there is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away. But the Church knows that the carrion of the rich rots as EN ROUTE. 15 much as that of the poor, while his soul stinks more, but she jobs indulgences and haggles about masses ; she, even she, is consumed by the lust of gold. ‘‘Yet I must not think too ill of these wealthy fools,” said Durtal, after silent thought, “ for after all it is thanks to them that I can hear the admirable liturgy of the burial service, these people who perhaps have done no good action in their life, do at least this kindness to a few, with- out knowing it, after their death.” A noise recalled him to St. Sulpice ; the choir was going, the church was about to close. “ I might as well have tried to pray,” he said to himself, “ it would have been better than to dream in the empty church on a chair. Pray indeed ? I have no desire for it. I am haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the marrow by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very tired of myself, but it is a far cry from that to leading a different existence ! And yet — and yet ... If I am perturbed in these chapels, I become unmoved and dry again, as soon as I leave them. After all,” he said to himself, getting up, and following the few persons who were moving towards a door, driven out by the Suisse, “ after all, my heart is hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing.” CHAPTER II. How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point ? Durtal answered himself : “ I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe. Let us see,” he said to himself, “ let us try at least to consider if, however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense in it. After all, my surprise depends on preconceived ideas of conversions. I have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt, or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined. It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of these two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also a third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has used in my case. And I know not in what this consists ; it is something analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a crisis ; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without knowing how or why, the thing is done. “ Yes, but in fact this manoeuvre is very like that of the mine which only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that case the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved ; I might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread, but in this case, no ! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can be occult and silent, strange and EN Route. gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an act of which we are aware. ‘‘No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that there has been divine impulse, grace. “ But,’’ said he, “ in that case the psychology of conversion is worthless,” and he made answer to himself, — “That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages through which I have passed ; no doubt I can distin- guish here and there some landmarks on the road I have travelled : love of art, heredity, weariness of life ; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to the churches ; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has vanished, and left no trace. “ It is certain,” he continued, after silent thought, “ that in these cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in the hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so caressing, that the soul they have handled has felt nothing. “ On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my conversion, I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference, have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me in.” And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three causes : — “ First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered among the monasteries ; ” and the memories of childhood returned to him, of cousins, of aunts, seen in convent parlours ; gentle women and grave, white as wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their looks, and asked if he were a good boy. He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother’s skirts, trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss. C l8 EN ROUTE. Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews which had wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the bitter salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water ; and a thousand details came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he retained a somewhat con- fused memory of them, amid which was the vague recollec- tion of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone. It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind embellished them ; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty years, and now began to work. But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still more active. These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art ; and the disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness. After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having taken the impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at last chosen after much useless vagabondage ; he had become the intimate friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton, named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice. These friendships were not like those he had formerly made, entirely superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been roughly broken ; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that pros- EN ROUTE. tg trated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus. These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without an anchor, drifted ; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends are not made. So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude which he bore bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an armchair in the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams : then, especially, fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing panto- mimes of which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes. Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke from these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned him- self to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to him. “ Let me chase away these phantoms by work,’’ he cried. But at what should he work ? He had just published the ‘‘ Life of Gilles de Rais,” which might interest a few artists, and he now remained without a subject, on the hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism of the Middle Ages, in his account of Marshal de Rais,” he saw nothing so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which he had discovered in Gorres’ and Ribet’s “ Studies in Mysticism ” had put him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new documents. But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could he write the life of a saint ? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which he based his opinion seemed plausible. Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody, a translation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the coloured images of Bouasse. C 2 20 EN ROUTE. The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to plan it out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead. Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass Stainers, of the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters ? Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious imitations, nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains, whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint ; and this is at least doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less adroitly ; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would seem mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then . . • then . . . one must have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one’s heroine, if one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book. This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert’s admirable pages on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like a dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose apparent simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate skill. All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul. On the other hand. Hello’s Physionomies de Saints ” are worth reading. Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between the lines ; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them ; the meanness EN ROUTE. 21 of his style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is lacking which w:ould rescue the book from the category of pale and dead publications. The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever writers were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St. Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor and narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a task, it were better to be silent ; and he threw him- self back in his chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home again, and assured them a resting-place. No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose plan of labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by boast- ing the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble. In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate, and mourns over the enforced task of living. Ecclesias- ticus, Ecclesiastes, the book of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their every line, and the Middle Ages too in the Imitation of Jesus Christ cursed existence, and cried out loudly for death. More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there is nothing to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere catalogues of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations. “ Then,” he said to himself, ‘‘ if it be well considered, the vaunted argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God made it, but as man has refashioned it.” Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting to examine through what phases of consent, through what 22 EN ROUTE. voluntary falls the creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores. We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer ; we may well loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot down by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time of peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money market. But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror, the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a mystery no philosophy can explain. “Ah ! ” he went on, “when I think of that horror, that disgust of existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find shelter. “ Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the great winds of weariness blew ; I believed in my novels, I worked at my history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy, its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of comfort ; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age advances, when in- firmities declare themselves, when all around is crumbling. “ I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your disease.” Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than his disgust for life, art had been the irre- sistible magnet which drew him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in anti- phonal chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelsful of verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he had listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of All Souls, he had felt himself caught once for all ; but that which had put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more corn- EN ROUTE. pletely into bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week. He had visited the churches during that week ; and they had opened to him like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps. And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church, became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre. At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy of human justice and the fore- ordained death of a God, Durtal had followed the incom- parable offices of those mournful days, through all their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebrse by the slow chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at night-fall. The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and pros- trate before the Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother. By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to console her, mixing the tears of the Stabat Mater with her own, sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ Himself. Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his temptations to unbelief were gone ; he had no further doubt ; it seemed to him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been appeals to him ; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church where he had lived through hours so sweet and §ad, EN ROUTE. Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there ; it seemed to him too great and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages. Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner of the poorer part of Paris. He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were thoroughly at home. Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child’s voice flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ. There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague uneasiness steal over him ; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul. He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten o’clock. He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base, hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like celery. No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic roses, armorial flowers with open tracery ; and for more than four hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of the.se pillars was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered, the heraldic petals were panting, some keystones of the arches had only stratified EN ROUTE. 25 calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags like handfuls of russet lace. And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one, strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof the broken stems fell from above the arches. The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute panes darkened by the accumu- lated dust of years, rendered still more obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their surface. This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton trees, a conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up the memory of an impossible phoenix and unlikely palms ; but it also recalled by its half- moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a ship^s prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars, to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters. On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public filled the nave fcfore the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were beggars, the very poor, hucksters. Sisters of Charity, rag pickers, street arabs ; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe, who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them. Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the 26 EN ROUTE. choir, and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion, above the prostrate flock, when the verse Et homo factus est” took its slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ. At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order, more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys. At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself ; It is impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as to be super- human, and far from profane music, which has never attained to the solid grandeur of this naked chant.” The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The “ Kyrie eleison,” solemn and sumptuous, the “ Gloria in excelsis,” shared by the grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy ; the “ Sanctus,” concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the choir shouted the “Hosanna in excelsis,” and the “Agnus Dei ” was sung low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become loud. Indeed, except for a contraband “O Salutaris,” intro- duced there as in other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds from the deep. It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful sur- roundings of the Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he could not see. He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and all the bitterness of his life came up EN ROUTE. 27 before him ; full of vague fears, of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections. When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and was delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the super- human effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still visible. The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a crosier. The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary, some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been restored by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and a really touching simplicity. They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal foundries, and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and pensive, dressed in robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue, gooseberry- red, pumpkin 'purple and wine lees, and these are made still deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or de- stroyed, which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass. In one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light, between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by the wings of the two angels whose faces also seem cut in crystal and full of light. These windows differ from those of other churches, in that they absorb the rays of the sun, without refracting them. ^ No doubt they have been deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this church which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and thieves. Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the rnodern churches are useless, they remain deaf tQ the 28 EN ROUTE. prayers wliich break against the icy indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves, rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His promise to appear at the mofhent of consecration, and that He would retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not been built expVessly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him, in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, • the gift of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to those of His Saints. Ah, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those chapels damp and smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense ! In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of other years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith ; among these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever pray in earnest he could do it in that church ; and he said to himself that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is im- possible but that the burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for ever impregnated the pillars and stained the walls ; it is impossible but that the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of tears. As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this church remained intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from the Chateau Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the modern EN ROUTE. 2g rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and spirits. In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises, delicate and little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle, its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it appears, at least, from the Place Saint Andre des Arts. Symbolically it might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and that very real bell. “ They say,” thought Durtal, “ they say that ignorant architects and unskilled archaeologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived in its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was a monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas which are put up as a show in open spaces. “ Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and not standing ; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal twilight, out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels. Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete,” said Durtal, “but alas, here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists ! ” Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church which satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much overrun by tourists ; there were few ceremonies there, just the necessary amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels remained closed ; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted mending ; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still ; the shell of the church was charm- 30 EN ROUTE. ing, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack of sick beasts were growling ; as for the other sanctuaries on the right bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere ornamented with promiscuous tunes. Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches, for religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as you pass the bridges. In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent, and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in its turn had directed him to God. Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the other arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the breviaries, into the books of Ruysbrock, Angela da Foligno, Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had confirmed him in his belief. But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was too recent for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to set it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt the reality of his con version, and said : After all I am united to the church only on the side of art. I only go there to see or hear and not to pray ; I do not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as in a warm bath I do not feel the cold if I am motionless, but if I move I freeze, so in the church rny impulses are upset when I move, I am almost on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves, skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except Faith. But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to feeling, was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church, they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if EN ROUTE. 31 he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts, seeking to revive themselves, without his con- sciousness, by the cordial of a false piety. In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean miracle, when he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without connection of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let them burn themselves out, to resist them. He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came the reverse movement ; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went as far as the door and dared not enter. At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself, and cried in fury : “It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only pleasure that remained to me — the flesh. Once I amused myself without blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one more weariness to existence — would that I could undo it.” He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by suggesting doubts. “ Suppose all this were not true, if there were nothing in it, if I were deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right ? ” But he was obliged to be sorry for himself, for he felt distinctly to the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true Faith. “ These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for my filthinesses are odious,” he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm sprang up within him. How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church, for she commands assent ? First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the world began have had the flesh as their springboard. Logically and humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to God by the foulest un- cleanness. 32 EN ROUTE. All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to her. Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point. No, the more I think of her,” he cried, “ the more I think her prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the truth, that outside her are only weak- nesses of mind, impostures, scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly dispensary of souls ; she gives them s*uck, nourishes them, and heals them ; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that true life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible, before all things admirable, she is great — “Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments she orders ! ” And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer. CHAPTER III. Before his conversion he had said like all unbelievers : “ If I believed that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would not hesitate to change all my habits, to follow as far as possible the rules of religion, and, in any case, to live chaste.” And he was surprised that people he knew, who were in these conditions, did not maintain an attitude higher than his own. He who had so long indulgently forgiven himself became singularly intolerant, so soon as he had to do with a Catholic. He now understood the injustice of his judgments, and confessed that between faith and practice was a gulf difficult to overpass. He did not like to discuss this question with himself, but it returned and took possession of him all the same, and he was obliged to admit the meanness of his arguments, the despicable reasons for his resistance. He was still honest enough to say : “I am no longer a child ; if I have Faith, if I admit Catholicism, I cannot conceive it as lukewarm and unfixed, warmed up again and again in the saucepan of a false zeal. I will have no compromise or truce, no alternations of debauch and communions, no stages of licentiousness and piety, no, all or nothing ; to change from top to bottom, or not change at all.” Then he drew back in alarm, endeavoured to escape the part he was about to take, endeavoured to exculpate himself, cavilling for hours, invoking the most wretched motives for remaining as he was, and not budging a jot. “ What am I to do ? If I do not obey orders, which I feel with increasing force, I am preparing for myself a life of uneasiness and remorse, for I know well I ought not to D 34 EN route. remain for ever on the threshold, but to penetrate into the sanctuary and stay there. And if I make up my mind — no indeed — for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances, bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday, live like a bigot, and look like a fool.” And then to help his revolt, he thought of the air, the look of people who frequented the churches ; for two men who looked intelligent and clean, how many were without doubt rascals and impostors ! Almost all had a side-long look, an oily voice, downcast eyes, immovable spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all told thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than the wicked, took toll from their neighbours on leaving God. The devout women were still less reassuring, they invaded the church, walking about as if quite at home, disturbing everybody, upsetting chairs, knocking against you without begging pardon ; then they knelt down with much ado, in the attitude of contrite angels, mur- mured interminable paternosters, and left the church more arrogant and sour than before. “It is not encouraging to have to mix with this flock of pious geese,” he exclaimed. But soon, against his will, he made answer to himself : “You have nothing to do with others, were you more humble, these people would certainly seem less offensive ; at any rate they have the courage you lack, they are not ashamed of their faith, and are not afraid to kneel to God in public.” And Durtal remained dumfounded, for he had to admit that the riposte struck home. It was clear his humility was at fault, but what was worse, he could not free him- self from human respect. He was afraid of being taken for a fool ; the prospect of being seen on his knees, in church, made his hair stand on end ; the idea, that, if he ever had to communicate, he would have to rise and go to the altar in the sight of all, was intolerable to him. “ If that moment ever come it will be hard to bear,” said he ; “ and yet I am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not know ? ” but much as he might EN ROUTE. 35 repeat that his alarms were absurd, he could not get over them, or free himself from the fear of ridicule. “ After all,” he said, “ even if I decide to jump the ditch, to confess and communicate, that terrible question of the senses would always have to be resolved. I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh, and accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that. “ Without counting that in any case, the time would be ill-chosen were I now to make such an effort, for never have I been so tormented as since my conversion ; Catholicism unfortunately excites unclean suggestions when I prowl about it, without entering.” And to this exclamation another answered at once : ‘‘ Yes, but you must enter.” He was irritated at this change of front without change of place, and he tried to turn the conversation, as though it had been held with another, whose questions perplexed him ; but he came back to it all the same, and, in his annoyance, summoned all his reasoning powers to his aid. Come, let us try to take stock at any rate ! It is plain that as I have drawn near the Church, my unclean desires have become more frequent and more persistent ; and yet another fact is certain that I have been so used up by twenty years of debauchery that I ought not to have any further carnal appetites. In fact, if I chose it, I could per- fectly well remain chaste ; but then I must bid my miserable brain be silent, and I have no power to do so ! It is frightful all the same that I am more excited than in youth, for now my desires go a-travelling, and since they have not their ordinary shelter they go off in search of evil haunts. How may this be explained ? It is a sort of dyspepsia of the soul, which cannot digest ordinary meats, and tries to feed on spiced dreams, highly seasoned thoughts ; it is then want of appetite for wholesome meals which has begotten this greediness for strange dishes, this trouble of the mind, this wish to escape from myself, and jump were it but for a moment over the permitted limits of the senses. “ In that case Catholicism would play a part at once repellent and depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the same time, would give D 2 EN ROUTE. 36 me over to nervous emotions without strength to resist them.” Wandering thus in self-examination, he came to a dead stand where was no issue, arriving at this conclusion : “I do not practise my religion, because I yield to my baser instincts, and I yield to these instincts because I do not practise my religion.” Brought up thus by a dead wall, he resisted, asking if this last observation were indeed true ; for, after all, nothing proved that if he approached the Sacraments he would not be attacked with even greater violence. It was even probable he would be, for the devil makes a dead set at pious people. Then he rebelled against the cowardice of these remarks, and cried : “I lie, for I know well, that if I made the least sign of resistance, I should be powerfully aided from on high.” Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul, always on the same line. “ Suppose,” he said, “ for the sake of argument, that I have tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final obstacle terrifies me. ‘‘ Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly assistance, without advice ; I have been converted without the help of anyone, but now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest.” And once more, he drew back, for in former times he had been intimate with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre, so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at the very no- tion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements and his regrets. “ They will not understand me,” he thought ; “ they will answer that Mysticism was interesting in the Middle Ages, but has now become disused and is in any case quite out of touch with the modern spirit. They will think me mad, will assure me, moreover, that God does not want so much, will advise me with a smile, not to make myself singular, to do as others, and to think like them. I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of EN ROUTE. 37 Mysticism, but they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their middle-class ideal of a God. “For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that moderate religion that they offer us ; it is not composed only of petty cases and formulas ; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice ; it is far more exalted, far purer, but then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the art, the essence, and the very soul of the Church. “ Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to empty ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it ; we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments ; in a word, to be ready when the Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He will pour Himself into us. “ I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour, as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect ; but after all, every one, however un- worthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence alone is requisite. “ I see myself saying that to the priests ! They will tell me I have no business with mystical ideas, and will give me in exchange the petty religion of rich women ; they will wish to mix themselves up with my life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own tastes ; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of pious veal broth. “ I know what I am ; at the end of a couple of interviews I shall rebel, and become wicked.” Durtal shook his head, remained in thought, and began again,— “Yet one must be just ; perhaps the secular clergy are only the leavings, for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every year the pick of the spiritual basket ; the mystics, priests athirst for sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile themselves among savages whom they teach. So when the 38 EN ROUTE. cream is off, the rest of the clergy are plainly but skim milk, the scourings of the seminaries. “Yes, but after all,^’ he continued, “the question is not whether they are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the man ; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly suited to the under- standing of the crowd. Would it not be, after all, more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains you know the weakness ? “ And then . . . then ... I am not reduced to that, for indeed I know one in Paris, a true mystic. Suppose I go and see him ! And he thought of a certain Abbe Gevresin, with whom he had formerly some acquaintance ; he had often met him at a bookseller’s in the Rue Servandoni, old Tocane, who had rare books on liturgy and the lives of the saints. Learning that Durtal was looking for works on Blessed Lidwine, the priest was at once interested in him, and on leaving the shop they had a long conversation. The abbe was very old and walked with difficulty, therefore he willingly took Durtal’s arm, who saw him home. “ The life of that victim of the sins of her time is a magnificent subject,” he said; “you remember it, do you not ? ” and as they walked he sketched its lines, broadly. “ Lidwine was born towards the end of the fourteenth cen- tury, at Schiedam, in Holland. Her beauty was extraordinary, but she lost it through illness at the age of fifteen. She recovered, but while skating one day with her companions on the frozen canals, she fell and broke a rib. From the time of that accident to her death she was bed-ridden. She was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes became blind, and the other so weak that it could not bear the light. “While she was in this condition, the plague ravaged Holland, and decimated the town in which she lived ; she was the first attacked. Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. ‘ Two boils, it is well,’ she EN ROUTE. 39 said to the Lord, ‘ but three would be better in honour of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a third pustule broke out on her face. “For thirty-five years she lived in a cellar, taking no solid food, praying and weeping, so chilly in winter, that each morning her tears formed two frozen streams down her cheeks. “ She thought herself still too fortunate, and entreated the Lord not to spare her, and obtained from Him the grace that by her sufferings she might expiate the sins of others. Christ heard her prayers, visited her with His angels, com- municated her with His own hand, gave her the delight of heavenly ecstasies, and caused her festering wounds to exhale delicious perfumes. “ At the moment of her death He stood by her, and re- stored her poor body to its former soundness. Her beauty, so long vanished, shone out again, the town was moved, the sick came in crowds, and all who drew near were healed. “ She is the true patroness of the sick,” concluded the abbe, and, after a silence, he added, — “ From the point of view of the higher mysticism, Lidwine is wonderful, for in her we can verify that plan of substitu- tion which was, and is, the glorious reason for the existence of convents.” And as, without answering, Durtal questioned him with a look, he went on, — “You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered themselves to heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women, who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins of others by suffer- ings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is a task still more arduous and more painful than was desired by these admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others, but of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of those who are too weak to bear the shock. “ Read Saint Teresa on this subject ; you will see that she gained permission to take on herself, and without flinching, the temptations of a priest who could not endure them. This substitution of a strong soul freeing one who is not strong from perils and fears is one of the great rules of mysticism. 40 EN ROUTE. “ Sometimes this exchange is purely spiritual, sometimes on the contrary i^ has to do only with the ills of the body. Saint Teresa was the surrogate of souls in torment, Sister Catherine Emmerich took the place of the sick, relieved, at least, those who were most suffering ; thus, for instance, she was able to undergo the agony of a woman suffering from consumption and dropsy, in order to permit her to prepare for death in peace. “Well, Lidwine took on herself all bodily ills, she lusted for physical suffering, and was greedy for wounds ; she was, as it were, the reaper of punishments, and she was also the piteous vessel in which everyone discharged the overflowings of his malady. If you would speak of her in other fashion than the poor hagiographies of our day, study first that law of substitution, that miracle of perfect charity, that super- human triumph of Mysticism ; that will be the stem of your book, and naturally, without effort, all Lidwine’s acts graft themselves on it.’’ “ But,” asked Durtal, “ does this law still take effect ? ” “ Yes : I know convents which apply it. Moreover, Orders like the Carmelites and the Poor Clares willingly accept the transfer to them of temptations we suffer ; then these convents take on their backs, so to speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent souls whose debts they pay to the full.” “ All the same,” said Durtal, shaking his head, “ if you consent to take on yourself the assaults intended for your neighbour, you must make pretty sure not to sink.” “The nuns chosen by our Lord,” replied the abbe, “ as victims of expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them, for in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of God.” And after a silence the old priest added, — “ I believe I may speak with some experience in these matters, for I am one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their convents.” “ And yet,” cried Durtal, “ the world asks what is the good of the contemplative Orders.” “ They are the lightning conductors of society,” said the EN ROUTE. 41 abbe, with great energy. “ They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they absorb temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like ourselves, in sin ; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah ! while the sisters who devote themselves to nursing the sick and infirm are indeed admirable, their task is easy in comparison with that undertaken by the cloistered Orders, the Orders where penance never ceases, and the very nights spent in bed are broken by sobs.’’ “ This priest is far more interesting than his brethren,” said Durtal to himself as they parted ; and, as the abbe invited his visits, he had often called on him. He had always been cordially welcomed. On several occasions he had warily sounded the old man on several questions. He had answered evasively in regard to other priests. But he did not seem to think much of them, if Durtal might judge by what he said one day in regard to Lidwine, that magnet of sorrows. “ Notice,” he said, “ that a weak and honest soul has every advantage in choosing a confessor, not from the clergy who have lost the sense of Mysticism, but from the monks. They alone know the effects of the law of substitution, and if they see that in spite of their efforts the penitent succumbs, they end by freeing him by taking his trials on themselves, or by sending them off to some convent in the country where resolute people can use them.” Another time the question of nationalities was discussed in a newspaper which Durtal showed him. The abbe shrugged his shoulders, putting aside the patriotic twaddle. “ For me,” he said calmly, “ for me my country is that where I can best pray.” Durtal could not make out what this priest was. He understood from the bookseller, that the Abbe Gevresin on account of his great age and infirmity was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood. “ I know that, when he can, he still says his mass each morning in a convent ; I believe also he receives a few of his brethren for confession in his own house ; ” and Tocane added with dis- dain, “ He has barely enough to live on, and they do not look on him with favour at the archbishop’s because of his mystical notions.” 42 EN ROUTE. There ended all he knew about him. “ He is evidently a very good priest,” repeated Durtal ; his physiognomy declares it, and his mouth and eyes contradict each other ; his eyes certainly declare his entire goodness, his lips, somewhat thick, purple and always moist, have on them an affectionate but somewhat sad smile, and to this his blue eyes give the lie — blue, childlike eyes which laugh out astonished under white eyebrows in a rather red face, touched on the cheeks like a ripe apricot, with little points of blood. “ In any case,” said Durtal, waking from his medita- tions, “ I am very wrong not to continue the relations into which I have entered with him. “Yes, but then nothing is so difficult as to become really intimate with a priest ; first by the very education he receives at the seminary the ecclesiastic thinks himself obliged to disperse his affections and not concentrate him- self on particular friendships ; then, like a doctor, he is a man harassed with business, who is never to be found. You can catch them now and then between two confessions or two sick calls. Nor even then are you quite certain that the eager welcome of the priest rings true, for he is just the same to all who come to him, and indeed, since I do not call on the Abbe Gdvresin for his help or advice, I am afraid of being in his way, and of taking up his time, hence I am acting with discretion in not going to see him. “ Yet I am sorry ; suppose I write, or go to him one morn- ing, but what have I to say to him ? I ought to know what I want before I allow myself to trouble him. If I go only to complain, he will answer I am wrong not to be a com- municant, and I have nothing to answer. No : the better plan is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane’s, for then I can talk to him more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and regrets.” So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbe. He went to the bookseller’s, and pretended to look over his stock, but as soon as he pronounced the name Gevresin, Tocane exclaimed, “ I have heard nothing of him, he has not been here for the last two months.” “ I will not turn back, but just disturb him in his own house,” said Durtal, “ but he will wonder why I came back EN ROUTE. 43 after so long an absence. Besides the awkwardness I feel in calling on people whom I have neglected, I am also troubled by thinking the abbe may suspect some interested object in my visit. That is not convenient ; if I had but a good pretext ; there is certainly that life of Lidwine which interests him, I might consult him on various points. Yes, but which ? I have not concerned myself with that saint for a long time, and must read over again the meagre old books on her biography. After all, it will be simpler and better to be frank, and say, ‘ This is why I have come ; I want to ask advice, which I have not determined to follow, but I have so much need of speaking, of giving the reins to my soul, that I beg you to be so kind as to lose an hour for my sake.’ “ He will do it certainly and willingly. “ Then that is agreed on ; suppose I go to-morrow ? ” But he checked himself at once. “ There was nothing pressing ; there was plenty of time ; better take time and think ; ah, yes, here is Christmas close upon us, I cannot decently trouble a priest who has his penitents to confess, for there are many communicants on that day. Let him get his hard work over, and then we will see.” He was at first pleased at having invented that excuse, then he had to admit in his heart that, after all, there was not much in it, for there was nothing to show that this priest, who was not attached to a parish, was busy in hearing confessions. It was hardly probable, but he tried to convince himself that it might be so after ail, and his hesitation began again. Angry at last with the discussion, he adopted a middle course. For greater certainty, he would not call on the abbe till after Christmas, but he would not be later than a given time ; he took an almanack, and swore to keep his promise — three days after that feast. CHAPTER IV. Oh ! that midnight mass ! He had had the unfortunate idea of going to it at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies’ day school installed there, instead of the choir, who, with sharp voices like needles, knitted the worn-out skeins of the canticles. He had fled to St. Sulpice, and plunged into a crowd which walked and talked as if in the open air ; had heard there choral-society marches, tea-garden waltzes, firework tunes, and had come away in a rage. It had seemed to him superfluous to try St. Germain- des-Pres, for he held that church in horror. Besides the weariness inspired by its heavy, ill-restored shell, and the miserable paintings with which Flandrin loaded it, the clergy there were specially, almost alarmingly, ugly, and the choir was truly infamous. They were like a set of bad cooks, boys who spat vinegar, and elderly choir-men, who cooked in the furnace of their throats a sort of vocal broth, a thin gruel of sound. Nor did he think of taking refuge in St. Thomas Aquinas, where he dreaded the barking and the choruses ; there was indeed St. Clotilde, where the psalmody, at least, is upright, and has not, like that of St. Thomas, lost all shame. He went there, but again encountered dance music and profane tunes, a worldly orgie. At last he went to bed in a rage, saying to himself, “ In Paris, at any rate, a singular baptism of music is reserved for the New-Born.” Next day, when he woke, he felt he had no courage to face the churches ; the sacrileges of last night would, he thought, continue ; and as the weather was almost fine, he went out, wandered in the Luxembourg, gained the square EN ROUTE. 4 \ of the Observatoire, and the Boulevard de Port Royal, and \ mechanically made his way along the interminable Rue de la Sante. He knew that street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in it, attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town ; then it was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de la Sante and Sainte Anne’s mad- house, and on the left by convents. Light and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black ; it was a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own free will, suffered lasting sorrows. “ I can imagine,” thought Durtal, “ how it would have been painted by an Early Flemish master ; the long street paved by patient pencils, the stories open from top to bottom, and the cupboards the same ; and on one side massive cells with iron bedsteads, a stoneware jug ; little peepholes in the doors secured by strong bolts, inside, scoundrels and thieves, gnashing their teeth, turning round and round, their hair on end, howling like caged animals ; on the other side little rooms, furnished with a pallet-bed, a stoneware jug, a crucifix, these also closed by doors iron- banded, and within nuns or monks, kneeling on the flags, their faces clean cut against the light of a halo, their eyes lifted to heaven, their hands joined, raised from the ground in ecstasy, a pot of lilies at their side. Then at the back of the canvas, between these two rows of houses, rises a great avenue, at the end of which in a dappled sky sits God the Father with Christ on His right, choirs of Seraphim playing on guitar and viol ; God the Father immovable under his lofty tiara. His breast covered by His long beard, holds scales which balance exactly, the holy captives expiating precisely by their penances and prayers the blasphemies of the rascals and the insane. “ It must be admitted,” thought Durtal, “that this street is very peculiar, that there is probably none like it in Paris, for it unites in its course virtues and vices, which in other quarters, in spite of the efforts of the Church, trend apart as far as possible from each other.” Thus thinking he had come as far as St. Anne’s, where the street grows lighter and the houses are lower, with only one or two stories, then, gradually, there is greater space 46 EN ROUTE. between them, and they are only joined to each other by blank ends of walls. ‘‘At any rate,’’ thought Durtal, “ if this street has no distinction, it is very private ; here at least one need not admire the impertinent decoration of those modern shops which expose in their windows as precious commodities, chosen piles of firewood, and in glass sweetmeat jars, coal drops and coke lollipops.” And here is an odd lane, and he looked at an alley which led down a sharp decline into a main street, where was to be seen the tricolor flag in zinc on a washhouse ; he read the name : Rue de I’Ebre. He entered it, it was but a few yards long ; the whole of one side was occupied by a wall, behind which were half seen some stunted buildings, surmounted by a bell. An entrance-gate with a square wicket was placed in the wall, which was raised higher as it sloped downwards, and at the end was pierced by round windows, and rose into a little building, surmounted by a clock-tower so low that its point did not even reach the height of the two-storied house opposite. On the other side three hovels sloped down, closely packed together ; zinc pipes ran everywhere, growing like vines, ramifying like the stalks of a hollow vine along the walls, windows gaped on rusty leaden hinges. Dim courts of wretched hovels could be seen ; in one was a shed where some cows were reposing ; in two others were coach-houses for wheel-chairs, and a rack behind the bars of which appeared the capsuled necks of bottles. “ But this must be a church,” thought Durtal, looking at the little clock tower, and the three or four round bays, which seemed cut out in emery paper to look like the black rough mortar of the wall ; “ where is the entrance ? ” He found it on turning out of the alley into the Rue de la Glaciere. A tiny porch gave access to the building. He opened the door, and entered a large room, a sort of closed shed, painted yellow, with a flat- ceiling, with small iron beams coloured grey, picked out with blue, and orna- mented with gas-jets like a wine shop. At the end was a marble a Itar, six lighted tapers, and gilt ornaments, can- delabra full of tapers, and under the tabernacle, a very small monstrance, which sparkled in the light of the tapers. EN ROUTE. 47 It was almost dark, the panes of the windows having been crudely daubed with bands of indigo and yellowish green ; it was freezing, the stove was not alight, and the church, paved like a kitchen floor, had no matting or carpet. Durtal wrapped himself up as best he could and sat down. His eyes gradually grew accustomed to the obscurity of the room, and what he saw was strange ; in front of the choir on rows of chairs were seated human forms, drowned in floods of white muslin. No one stirred. Suddenly there entered by a side door a nun equally wrapped from head to foot in a large veil. She passed along the altar, stopped in the middle, threw herself on the ground, kissed the floor, and by a sudden effort, without helping herself by her arms, stood upright, advanced silently into the church, and brushed by Durtal, who saw under the muslin a magnificent robe of creamy white, an ivory cross at her neck, at her girdle a white cord and beads. She went to the entrance-door, and there ascended a little staircase into a gallery which commanded the church. He asked himself what could be this Order so sumptu- ously arrayed, in this miserable chapel, in such a district ? Little by little the room filled, choir-boys in red with capes trimmed with rabbit’s skin lighted the candelabra, went out, and ushered in a priest, vested in a grand cope, with large flowers, a priest tall and young, who sat down, and in a sonorous tone chanted the first antiphon of vespers. Suddenly Durtal turned round. In the gallery an harmonium accompanied the responses of voices never to be forgotten. It was not a woman’s voice, but one having in it something of a child’s voice, sweetened, purified, sharpened, and something of a man’s, but less harsh, finer and more sustained, an unsexed voice, filtered through litanies, bolted by prayers, passed through the sieves of adoration and tears. The priest, still sitting, chanted the first verse of the unchanging psalm, “ Dixit Dominus Domino meo.” And Durtal saw in the air, in the gallery, tall white statues, holding black books in their hands, chanting slowly with eyes raised to heaven. A lamp cast its light on one of these figures, which for a second leant forward a little, and he saw under the lifted veil a face attentive and sorrowful, and very pale. 48 EN ROUTE. The verses of the vesper psalms were now sung alter- nately, by the nuns above and by the congregation below. The chapel was almost full ; a school of girls in white veils filled one side ; little girls of the middle-class, poorly dressed brats who played with their dolls occupied the other. There were a few poor women in sabots^ and no men. The atmosphere became extraordinary. The warmth of the souls thawed the ice of the room ; here were not the vespers of the rich, such as were celebrated on Sundays at St. Sulpice, but the vespers of the poor, domestic vespers, in the plain chant of the country side, followed by the faithful with mighty fervour in silent and singular devotion. Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the depths of some village cloister ; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the psalms by the return of the doxology, the “ Gloria Patri et Filio,” which separated them from each other. He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable, penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, Thou art not worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus : ‘ Qui plasmasti me miserere rnei ; ’ Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me.” He stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go, regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord’s Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours’ trespasses. Now how many who use these words forgive others ? How many Catholics do not lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one ? He was roused from these reflections by sudden silence ; vespers were over. Then the organ played again, and all the voices of the nuns joined, those in the choir below and in the gallery above, singing the old carol Unto us a child is born.” EN ROUTE. 49 He listened, moved by the simplicity of the strain, and suddenly, in a minute, brutally, without understanding why, infamous thoughts filled his mind. He resisted in disgust, wished to repulse the assault of these shameful feelings, and they were persistent. He seemed to see before him a woman whose perverse ways had long maddened him. All at once this hallucination ceased ; his eye was me- chanically attracted towards the priest, who was looking at him, while speaking in a low voice to a beadle. He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his thoughts and was turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this convent of women, and that the abbe who had seen him was sending the beadle to beg him to leave. The beadle came straight to him ; Durtal was ready to take his hat, when in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the procession was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the abbe thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to start. Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in which the beadle seemed to see assent. “ No,’’ he thought as soon as he was left alone ; “ I will not meddle with the ceremony ; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all, and again I will not make a fool of myself.” He prepared to slip away quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention ; the usher brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was blushing all over, he followed the beadle to the altar. There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The whole congregation was now standing, the girls’ school divided into two files, preceded by a woman carry- ing a banner. Durtal came in front of the first rank of nuns. Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at these sisters for a moment ; at E 50 EN ROUTE first his disillusion was complete. He had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all seemed at the beginning or end of a cold ; they were evidently country girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil, were still more common looking ; they had certainly been accustomed to farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the poverty of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their broken nails, injured in the wash, dis- appeared ; their eyes, modest and humble under their long lashes, changed their coarse features into pious simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks, and did not even suspect a man was there examining them. Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who alone understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought : “ Ignorance leads to the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the vainness of its joys ; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same meeting- place. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their entrance into an Order ! for if indeed they had not been gathered by Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls ? Married to drunkards and hammered by beatings ; or perhaps maids in taverns, ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants, destined to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience which is not ignoble, disposed by their very way of life to experience, should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any rate God^s beasts of burthen.’’ He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned to him. The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little monstrance ; the girls’ procession was moving before him. Durtal passed in front of the line of EN ROUTE. 51 nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an open white silk parasol. Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its drawling tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the “ Adeste Fideles,” while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the sweet chorus of invitation, “ Venite adoremus.’^ The procession went several times round the chapel, above the heads bowed in the smoke from the censers, which the choir boys swung, turning at each pause to face the priest. “ Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it,’’ said Durtal to himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked him to kneel at the com- munion rail in front of the altar. He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel ; it seemed as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarrassed .by his taper, which was guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his position quietly, trying to make himself more comfort- able by slipping the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps ; but in moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling ; while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but he listened no more and deplored the length of the service. At last the moment of Benediction approached. Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to God, Durtal forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden troop ; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to E 2 5 ^ EN ROUTE. hide himself, to make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious crowd. The psalm “ Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes,’’ rang out when the beadle came to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to stand up ; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly work. Yet he regained his place somehow ; let the crowd pass, and approaching the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which the nuns belonged. “ They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary,’^ answered the man, “ but the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think ; it is a chapel of ease for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche : it is only joined by a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue de TEbre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do, and they keep a school for the children of the district.’’ “ It is a touching little chapel,” thought Durtal, when he was alone. “ It is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la Glaciere. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what its neighbour the Bievre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship. “ How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns’ voices, which seem non-sexual and mellow ! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and the man. EN ROUTE. S3 “ Yet in convents of women, that is changed ; it is certain that prayer, communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood. “In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few twigs ; ” and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes, voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones. Ah ! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de la Glaciere, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents. He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not pass through them. At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps ; on the left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain, and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty. That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by groves of candles ; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke ; it was crammed with people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, passing up the 54 EN ROUTE. nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab’s claw. He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a prie-Dieu, then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn ; behind the high grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to the grating a woman’s form, kneeling motion- less on the ground, she too holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the star shook ; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if de- capitated, filled the square of the wicket opened in the arch. Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face, with closed lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away, as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand. All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming ; the mass was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants drawn out, weep- ing, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to her place, and was kneel- ing before him behind the grating. He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole congregation bent to listen to the novice as she pro- nounced her vows, but only a long murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers, while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse. “It is admirable,” he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women ! To lie on an hair matress without pillow EN ROUTE. 55 or sheets, to fast seven months out of the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts ; always to eat, standing, vegetables and abstinence fare ; to have no- fire in winter, to chant for hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as, however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools, for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these. “ We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the Carmelites, or even of those humble Franciscan Tertiaries, who are after all more vulgar. It is true they do not belong to a contemplative order, but all the same their rules are very strict, their existence is so hard that they too can atone by their prayers and good works for the crimes of the city they protect.” He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah ! to be earthed up among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear, what newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside one’s cell, among men — to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life, nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies. Then, who knows ? By force of good will, and by ardent prayer, to succeed in coming to Him, in entertaining Him, feeling Him near us, perhaps almost satisfied with His creature. And he called up before him the joys of those abbeys in which Jesus abode. He remembered that astonishing convent of Unterlinden, near Colmar, where in the thirteenth century not only one or two nuns, but the whole convent, rose distractedly before Christ with cries of joy, nuns were lifted above the ground, others heard the songs of seraphim, and their emaciated bodies secreted balm ; others became transparent or were crowned with stars ; all these phenomena of the contemplative life were visible in that cloister, a high school of Mysticism. Thus wrapped in thought, he found himself at his own door, without remembering the road he had taken, and as soon as he was in his room, his whole soul dilated and 56 EN ROUTE. burst forth. He desired to thank, to call for mercy, to appeal to someone, he knew not whom, to complain of he knew not what. All at once the need of pouring himself forth, of going out of himself, took shape, and he fell on his knees saying to Our Lady, ^‘Have pity on me, and hear me ; I would rather any- thing than continue this shaken existence, these idle stages without an aim. Pardon me. Holy Virgin, unclean as I am, for I have no courage for the battle. Ah, wouldest thou grant my prayer ! I know well that I am over bold in daring to ask, since I am not even resolved to turn out my soul, to empty it like a bucket of filth, to strike it on the bottom, that the lees may trickle out and the scales fall off, but . . . but . . . thou knowest I am so weak, so little sure of myself, that in truth I shrink. ‘‘ Oh, all the same I would desire to flee away, a thousand miles from Paris, I know not where, into a cloister. My God ! yet this is very madness that I speak, for I could not stay two days in a convent ; nor indeed would they take me in.” Then he thought, — Though this once I am less dry, less unclean than is my wont, I can find nothing to say to Our Lady but insanities and follies, when it would be so simple to ask her pardon, to beg her to have pity on my desolate life, to aid me to resist the demands of my vices, not to pay as I do the royalties on my nerves, the tax on my senses. All the same,” he said, rising, “ enough of this, I will at least do what little I can ; without more delay I will go to the abbe to-morrow. I will explain the struggle of my soul, and we will see what happens afterwards.” CHAPTER V. He was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur I’Abbe was at home. He entered a little drawing- room, and waited till the priest, whom he heard speaking to someone in the next chamber, was alone. He looked at the little room, and marked that nothing was changed since his last visit. It was still furnished with a velvet sofa, of which the red, once crimson, had become the faded rose colour of raspberry jam on bread. There were also two tall arm-chairs on either side of the chimney, which was ornamented by an Empire clock, and some china vases filled with sand, in which were stuck some dry stalks of reed. In a corner against the wall, under an old wooden crucifix, was a prie-dieu, marked by the knees, an oval table in the centre, some sacred engravings on the walls ; and that was all. ‘‘ It is like an hotel, or an old maid’s lodging,” thought Durtal. The commonness of the furniture, the curtains in faded damask, the panels hung with a paper covered with bouquets of poppies and field-flowers in false colours, were like lodgings by the month, but certain details, above all the scrupulous cleanliness of the room, the worked cushions on the sofa, the grass mats under the chairs, an hortensia like a painted cauliflower placed in a flower-pot covered with lace, looked on the other hand like the futile and icy room of a devout woman. “ Nothing was wanting but a cage of canaries, photographs in plush frames, shell-work and crochet mats.” Durtal had got so far in his reflections when the abbe came in with extended hand, gently finding fault with his long absence. Durtal made what excuses he could, unusual occupations, long weariness. “ And our Blesed Lidwine, how do you get on with her ? Ah, I have not even begun her life ; I am not in a state of mind which allows me to engage in it.” 58 EN ROUTE. Durtal’s accent of discouragement surprised the priest. “ Come, what is the matter ? Can I be of any use to you ? ” ‘‘ I do not know, Monsieur PAbbd. I am almost ashamed to talk to you about such troubles,” and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from all yokes. The abbe listened without moving, his chin on his hand. You are more than forty,” he?said, when Durtal was silent ; you have passed the agei when without any im- pulse from thought, the awakening of the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping, body than your imind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or children to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy, you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been placed ; you try to appease your soul’s hunger in chapels, and as you hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break once for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange compromise ; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for woman only with your bodily senses ? When Heaven has given you grace to be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a little effort of will.” “ This is an indulgent priest,” thought Durtal. ^‘But,” continued the abbe, ‘^you cannot always sit between two stools, the moment will come when you must stick to the one, and push the other away.” And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering, — Do you pray ? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers, for not all those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake. At EN ROUTE. 59 break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is with the soul as with the body when it is sick. When night comes our sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which slept blazes up again, filth revives and wounds bleed anew, and then it thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray in the evening ? ” “ Sometimes — and yet it is very difficult ; the after- noon is tolerable, but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain ; how can any one be recollected at such moments ? ” If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home, why do you not take refuge in the churches ? ” But they are closed when one has most need of them ; the clergy put Jesus to bed at nightfall.’’ “ I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few which remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who visit it are always sure of prayers and Benediction : Notre Dame des Victoires, I think you know it.” Yes, Monsieur I’Abbe. It is ugly enough to cause tears, it is pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine of rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St. Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old ‘ Praisers of God,’ to listen, even if they are incorrectly given, to the broad, familiar melodies of plain chant. Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the aesthetic point of view, and* yet I go there from time to time, because alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one goes there people are pray- ing there, prostrate in absolute silence ; it is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing, there is a constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith whose flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till evening, before Our Lady. 6o EN ROUTE. “ Well, I who seek the most deserted corners and the darkest places in the chapels, I who hate mobs, mix almost willingly with those I find there ; because there everyone is isolated, no one is concerned with his neighbour, you do not see the human bodies which throng you, but you feel the breath of souls around. However refractory, however damp you may be, you end by taking fire at this contact, and are astonished to find yourself all at oncei less vile ; it seems to me that the prayers which elsewhere when they leave my lips fall back to the ground exhausted and chilled, spring upwards in that place, are borne on by others, grow warm and soar and live. “ At St. Severin I have indeed experienced the sensa- tion of a help spreading from the pillars and running through the arches, but, as I think, the aid is less strong. Perhaps since the Middle Ages that church makes use of, but cannot renew the celestial effluvia with which it is charged ; while at Notre Dame the help which springs up from the very pavement is for ever vivified by the unin- terrupted presence of an ardent crowd. In the one it is the impregnate stone, the church itself which brings consola- tion, in the other it is above all things the fervour of the crowds which fill it. “ And then I have the strange impression that the Virgin, attracted and retained by so great faith, only spends a little while in other churches, goes there as a visitor, but has made her home, and really resides in Notre Dame.” The abbe smiled. “ Come, I see that you know and love it ; and yet the church is not on our left bank, beyond which, you said to me one day, there is no sanctuary worth having.” “ Yes, and I am surprised at it, especially as it is placed in a thoroughly commercial quarter, two paces from the Exchange, whose ignoble shouts can be heard in it.” It was itself an Exchange,” said the abbe. “ In what way ? ” ‘‘ After having been baptized by the monks, and having served as a chapel for the discalced Augustinians, it was horribly desecrated in the Revolution, and the Exchange was set up within its walls.” I was not aware of that detail,” said Durtal. “ But,” continued the abbe, it was with it, as with those EN ROUTE. 6i holy women, who, if we believe their biographers, recovered by a life of prayer the virginity they had formerly lost. Our Lady washed it from its violation, and though it is comparatively modern, it is at the present day saturated with emanations, infused by effluences of angels, penetrated with divine drugs, it is for sick souls what certain thermal springs are for the body. People keep their season there, make their novenas, and obtain their cure. “ Now to come back to our point ; I tell you you will do wisely, if on your bad evenings you will attend Benediction in that church. I shall be surprised if you do not come out cleansed and at peace.” “ If he have only that to offer me, it is little enough,” thought Durtal. And after a disappointed silence he rejoined, “ But, Monsieur PAbbe, even were I to visit that sanctuary, and follow the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I to confess and draw near the Sacra- ments, how would that advantage me ? I should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my senses, and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved ; the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy me, and I should fall back into sin.” “ What do you know about it ? ” and the priest suddenly rose, and took long strides through the room. “You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the Sacrament is formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed against others and defended against himself,” and crossing his arms before Durtal he exclaimed, — “ To lose one’s soul for the pleasure of momentary gratification ! what madness. And since the time of your conversion, does not that disgust you ? ” “Yes, I am disgusted with myself, but only after my swinish desires are satisfied. If only I could gain true repentance.” “ Rest assured,” said the abbe, who sat down again, “you will find it.” And, seeing that Durtal shook his head, “ Remember what Saint Teresa said : ‘ One trouble of those who are beginning is, that they cannot recognize whether they have true repentance for their faults ; but 62 EN ROUTE. they have it, and the proof is their sincere resolution to serve God.^ Think of that sentence, for it applies to you ; that repugnance to your sins which wearies you is witness to your regret, and you have a desire to serve the Lord, since you are in fact struggling to go to Him.” There was a moment of silence. ‘‘ Well, then. Monsieur PAbbe, what is your advice ? ” “ I advise you to pray in your own house, in church, everywhere, as much as you can. I do not prescribe any religious remedy, I simply invite you to profit by some precepts of pious hygiene, afterwards we will see.” Durtal remained undecided, discontented, like those sick persons who find fault with doctors, who, to satisfy them, prescribe only colourless drugs. The priest laughed. “ Confess,” he said, looking him in the face, confess that you are saying to yourself, ‘ It was not worth while to put myself out, for I am no further advanced, this good fellow, the priest, practises expectant medicine ; instead of cutting short my crises with energetic remedies, he palters, advises me to go to bed early, not to catch cold — ’ ” “ Oh, Monsieur PAbbe,” protested Durtal. “ Yet I do not wish to treat you like a child, or talk to you like a woman ; now attend to me ! “ The way in which your conversion has worked leaves me in no doubt whatever. There has been what Mysticism calls, the divin touch, only — note this — God has dispensed with human intervention, even with the interference of a priest, to bring you back into the road you have left for more than twenty years. “ Now we cannot reasonably suppose that the Lord has acted lightly, and that He will now leave His work unaccom- plished. He will carry it through if you put no obstacle in His way. “ In fact you are at this moment like a block in His hands ; what will He do with it ? I do not know, but since He has kept to Himself the conduct of your soul, let Him act ; be patient. He will explain His action ; trust in Him, He will help you ; be content to protest with the Psalmist : ‘ Doce me facere voluntatem tuam, quia Deus meus es tu.’ I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the formal power of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Pere Milleriot, who obliged those persons to com- EN ROUTE. 63 municate whom he thought would afterwards fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic and exalted. “ But reassure yourself,” continued the abbe, looking at Durtal, who seemed wearied, “ I do not intend to experiment on you in this way ; on the contrary, my advice is that in the state of ignorance in which we are of God’s will, you abstain from the Sacraments. “ For you should desire them, and it should come from you rather than from Him ; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance, hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself longer, you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy Table, we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order to save you.” “ But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and communicating ? ” “Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say . . . but . . .” And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words. “It is quite certain,” he began again, “ that art has been the principal means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has taken you on your weak side — or strong side, if you like that better. He has infused into your nature the chief mystical works ; he has persuaded and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the senses ; and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into account. “ On the other hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are a sort of ‘ sensitive,’ whom the least imprudence, the least stupidity of a confessor would at once repel. “ Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression, certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word, antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout you — is it not so ? ” “ Alas ! ” sighed Durtal, “ I am obliged to answer that you are right ; but. Monsieur I’Abbe, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my confession to you.” The priest was silent for a while ; then said, “ No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be 64 EN ROUTE. useful to you, but I have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as you have begun, without help, alone.” The abbe remained in thought, then shook his head, and went on : “ Let us leave the subject, however, for we cannot anticipate the designs of God ; to sum up, try to stifle in prayer your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at the moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so.” Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal, whom he saw to be depressed, “ If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash, and which are conse- quently expiated in part at least before death. Say to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not wait ; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most powerful instrument of sorrow which God has given to man. ‘‘ It is the same with the passion for gain. Every being who allows himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule before his death. Look at the Panama busi- ness. Cooks, housekeepers, small proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that business. They had one only thought, to gain money ; the chastisement of their cupidity was, as you know, sudden.” “Yes,” said Durtal, laughing, “ the de Lesseps were the agents of providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got them probably by thieving.” “In a word,” said the abbe, “I repeat my last advice : do not be at all discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much ; have the courage to enter a church afterwards ; for the devil catches you by cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish, maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure. “Well ! no good-bye ; come and see me soon again.” EN ROUTE. 65 Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. It is evident,” he murmured, as he stalked along, “ that the Abbe Gevresin is a clever spiritual watchmaker. He has dex- terously taken to pieces the movement of my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but, after all, his advice comes only to this : stew in your own juice and wait. Indeed he is right ; if I had come to the point I should not have gone to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the wash-tub ; and to whom does he mean me to go — to the first comer who will wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big hands without seeing clearly ? “ Well, well. . . what is the time ? ” He looked at his watch. “ Six o’clock, and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner ? ” He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his thoughts a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour was almost empty. He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the great arch of marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated grotto, on plaster clouds. Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from him, and meditated, their heads between their hands. He thought as he looked at them, — “ Those souls are to be envied who can thus be ab- stracted in prayer. How do they manage it ? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good ; in fact, we do not know Him — we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact. He can only be, immanent, permanent, and inacces- sible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He is one ; He is each and He is all ; He is without beginning, and He will be without end ; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we try to picture Him to ourselves F 66 EN ROUTE. and give Him a human wrappage, we come back to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father Tourgeneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is the likeness of God the Father. “ He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses, that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more compassionate to our sorrows. “As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first. He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were, breathe Him forth ? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath ; we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on the two occasions that He took to Himself a body. He showed Himself under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He might assume. “ Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbrock has moreover said admirably, ‘ Let those who would know and study what God is, know that it is forbidden ; they will go mad.^ “ So,” he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now telling their beads, “ these good women are right not to try to understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to the Mother and the Son. “ Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have read, they have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to console and strengthen them. “ In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to the two others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however, special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in the threefold distinction of the Persons ; but, again, what is the use of fathoming the Impenetrable ? “ Yet,” he continued, remembering the interview he had jUvSt had with the priest, “ how will all this end ? If the EN ROUTE. 67 abbe be right, I no longer belong to myself ; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me. If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence” — and he thought of a woman to whose vagaries he was riveted — “ continues to walk about in my brain. T see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think of her I am a terrible coward.” He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at the sight of her. He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his illusions excited him ; he left her disgusted with her and with himself ; he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve. He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him. He recoiled, struggling to free himself ; but his dream continued mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he saw. Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at St. Sulpice, in the chapel. “It is disgusting that I should come here to soil the church with my horrible dreams ; I had better go.” He went out in confusion, thinking, “ Perhaps if I visit Florence once again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence, seeing and knowing the reality.” And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming idiotic, for he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is nourished. “ No, the abbe was right ; I have to become and to remain penitent. But how ? Pray ? How can I pray, when evil imagina- tions pursue me even in church ? Evil dreams followed me to La Glaciere ; here they appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and if He listens. The abbe tells me to wait an indication, an order from on high ; but, alas ! they come to me from below.” F 2 CHAPTER VI. Many months passed. Durtal continued his alternation ot wanton and pious ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. “ All this is far from clear,” he cried, one day, in a rage, when, less apathetic than usual, he forced himself to take stock. “ Now, Monsieur PAbbe, what does this mean ? Whenever my sensual obsessions are weaker, so also are my religious impressions.” “ That means,” said the priest, that your adversary is holding out to you the most treacherous of his baits. He seeks to persuade you that you will never attain to any- thing unless you will give yourself up to the most repug- nant excesses. He tries to convince you that satiety and disgust of these acts alone will bring you back to God ; he incites you to commit them that they may, so to speak, bring about your deliverance ; he leads you into sin under pretext of delivering you from it. Have a little energy, despise these sophistries and resist him.” He went to see the Abbe Gevresin every week. He liked the patient discretion of the old priest, who let him talk when he was in a confidential humour, listened to him carefully, manifested no surprise at his frequent temptations and his falls. Only the abbe always returned to his first advice, insisted on regular prayer, and that Durtal should each day, if possible, visit a church. He also now said, “ The hour is important for the success of these practices. If you wish that the chapels should be favourable to you, get up in time to be present at daybreak at the first mass, the servants’ mass, and also be very often in the sanctuaries at nightfall.” The priest had evidently formed a plan ; Durtal did not yet wholly understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of temporizing, this constant call to thought EN ROUTE. 69 always directed to God, by his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by little softened his soul. One fact proved it : that he who for so long a time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized with the need of speaking humbly with God, with an irresistible desire to ask His pardon and . implore His help. It seemed then that the Lord knocked at his door with gentle touches, wishing so to recall his attention, and draw him to Him ; but when, softened and troubled, Durtal would enter into himself to seek God, he wandered vaguely, not knowing what he said, and thinking of other things while speaking to Him. He complained of these wanderings and distractions to the priest, who answered, — “You are on the threshold of the probationary life ; you cannot yet experience the sweet and familiar friendship of prayer. Do not sadden yourself because you cannot close behind you the gate of your senses. Watch and wait ; pray badly if you can do nothing else, but pray all the same. “ Be very sure too that every one has experienced the troubles which distress you ; above all, believe that we do not walk blindfold, that Mysticism is an absolutely exact science. It can foretell the greater part of the phenomena which occur in that soul which the Lord intends for a perfect life ; it follows also spiritual operations with the same clearness as physiology observes the different states of the body. For ages and ages it has disclosed the progress of grace and its effects, now impetuous and now slow ; it has even pointed out the modifications of material organs which are transformed when the soul entirely loses itself in God. “ Saint Denys the Areopagite, Saint Bonaventure, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bernard, Ruysbrock, Angela of Foligno, the two Eckharts, Tauler, Suso, Denys the Carthusian, Saint Hildegarde, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, Saint Gertrude, and others have set forth in a masterly way the principles and theories of Mysticism, and it has found at last an admirable psychologist to sum up its rules and their exceptions ; a Saint who has verified in her own person the supernatural phases she has described — 70 EN ROUTE. a woman whose lucidity was more than human — Saint Teresa. You have read her life, and her ^Castles of the SoulM^’ Durtal nodded assent. “ Then you have your information ; you ought to know that before reaching the shores of Blessedness, before arriving at the fifth dwelling of the interior castle, at that prayer of union wherein the soul is awakened in regard to God, and completely asleep to all things of earth and to herself, she must pass through lamentable states of dryness, and the most painful strainings. Take heart therefore ; say to yourself that this dryness should be a source of humility, and not a cause of disquietude ; do, in fact, as Saint Teresa would have you : carry your cross, and not drag it after you.” That magnificent and terrible Saint frightens me,” sighed Durtal. “ I have read her works, and, do you know, she gives me the idea of a stainless lily, but a metallic lily, forged of wrought iron ; you will admit that those who suffer have scant consolations to expect from her.” “ Yes ; in the sense that she does not think of the creature except in the way of Mysticism. She supposes the fields already ploughed, the soul already freed from its more vehement temptations, and sheltered from crises ; her starting-point is as yet too high and too distant for you, for, in fact, she is addressing nuns, women of the cloister, beings who live apart from the world, and who are consequently already advanced on those ascetic ways wherein God is leading them. ‘‘ But make an effort in the spirit to free yourself from this mud, cast away for a few moments the memory of your im- perfections and your troubles, and follow her. See then how experienced she is in the domain of the supernatural, how, in spite ofher repetitions and tediousness, she explains wisely and clearly the mechanism of the soul unfolding when God touches it. In subjects where words fail and phrases crumble away, she succeeds in making herself understood, in showing, making felt, almost making visible, the incon- ceivable sight of God buried in the soul, and taking His pleasure there. “ And she goes still further into the mystery, even to the end ; bounds with a final spring to the very gates of heaven. EN route. n but then she faints on adoration, and being unable to express herself further, she soars, describing circles like a frightened bird, wandering beyond herself, in cries of love.” “ Yes, Monsieur FAbbe, I recognize that Saint Teresa has explored deeper than any other the unknown regions of the soul ; she is in some measure its geographer, has drawn the map of its poles, marked the latitudes of contemplation, the interior lands of the human sky. Other Saints have explored them before her, but they have not left us so methodical nor so exact a topography. “ But in spite of this I prefer those mystical writers who have less self-analysis, and discuss less, who always do throughout their works what Saint Teresa did at the end of hers — that is, who are all on fire from the first page to the last, and are consumed and lost at the feet of Christ. Ruysbrock is among these. The little volume which Hello has translated is a very furnace ; and, again, to quote a woman, take Saint Angela of Foligno, not so much in the book of her visions which may not be always effectual, as in the wonderful life which she dictated to Brother Armand, her confessor. She too explains, and much earlier than Saint Teresa, the princi- ples and effects of Mysticism ; but if she is less profound, less clever in defining shades, on the other hand she is wonder- fully effusive and tender. She caresses the soul ; she is a Bacchante of divine love, a Maenad of purity. Christ loves her, holds long conversations with her ; the words she has rej:ained surpass all literature, and are manifestly the most beautiful ever written. This is no longer the rough Christ, the Spanish Christ who begins by trampling on His creature to make him more supple ; He is the merciful Christ of the Gospels, the gentle Christ of Saint Francis, and I like the Christ of the Franciscans better than the Christ of the Carmelites.” “ What will you say, then,” said the abbe, with a smile, “ of St. John of the Cross ? You compared Saint Teresa just now to a flower in wrought iron ; he too is such, but he is the lily of tortures, the royal flower which the executioners were wont of old time to stamp on the heraldic flesh of convicts. Like red- hot iron, he is at the same time burning and sombre. As you turn over the pages. Saint Teresa now and then bends over and sorrows and compassionates us ; he remains impenetrable, buried in his internal abyss, occupied, above all things, in n EN ROUTE. describing the sufferings of the soul which, after having crucified its desires, passes through the ‘ Night obscure,’ that is to say, through the renunciation of all which comes from the sensible and the created. He wills that we should extinguish our imagination — so lethargize it that it can no longer form images — imprison our senses, annihilate our faculties. He wills that he who desires to unite himself to God should place himself under an ex- hausted receiver, and make a vacuum within, so that, if he choose, the Pilgrim should descend therein, and purify himself, tearing out the remains of sins, extirpating the last relics of vice. ‘‘ Then the sufferings which the soul endures overpass the bounds of the possible, it lies lost in utter darkness, falls under discouragement and fatigue, believes itself for ever abandoned by Him to whom it cries, who now hides Himself and answers not again, happy still when in that agony, the pangs of the flesh are not added, and that abominable spirit which Isaias calls the spirit of confusion, and which is none other than the disease of scrupulousness pushed to its extreme. “ Saint John makes you shudder when he cries out that this night of the soul is bitter and terrible, and that the being who suffers it is plunged alive into hell. But when the old man is purged out, when he is scraped at every seam, raked over every face, light springs out, and God appears. Then the soul casts itself like a child intojHis arms, and the incomprehensible fusion takes place. “ You see Saint John penetrates more deeply than others into the depths of mystical initiation. He also, like Saint Teresa and Ruysbrock, treats of the spiritual marriage, of the influx of grace, and its gifts ; but he first dared to describe minutely the dolorous phases which till then had been but hinted at with trembling. “Then if he is an admirable theologian, he is also a rigorous and clear-sighted saint. He has not those weak- nesses which are natural to a woman ; he does not lose himself in digressions, nor return continually on his own steps ; he walks straight forward, but you often see him at the end of the road, blood-stained and terrible, with dry eyes.” “ But, but,” said Durtal, “ surely not all souls whom Christ will lead in the ways of mysticism are tried thus ? ” EN ROUTE. 73 Yes, almost always, more or less.” “ I will confess that I thought the spiritual life was less arid and less complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one’s best, and communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to taste the in- finite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to possess the Lord, and live, at least, near Him, at rest. “ And I should be quite content with this middle class joy. The price paid in advance for the exaltation described by Saint John disconcerts me.” The abbe smiled, but made no answer. “ But do you know that if it be so,” replied Durtal, ‘‘ we are very far from the Catholicism that is taught us ? It is so practical, so benign, so gentle, in comparison with Mysticism.” “ It is made for lukewarm souls — that is to say, for almost all the pious souls which are about us ; it lives in a moderate atmosphere, without too great suffering or too much joy ; it only can be assimilated by the masses, and the priests are right to present it thus, since otherwise the faithful would cease to understand it, or would take flight in alarm.” “But if God judge that a moderate religion is amply sufficient — for the masses believe that he demands the most painful efforts on the part of those whom he deigns to initiate into the supremely adorable mysteries of His Person — it is necessary and just that he should mortify them before allowing them to taste the essential intoxication of union with Him.” “ In fact, the end of Mysticism is to render visible, sensible, almost palpable, the God who remains silent and hidden from all.” “And to throw us into His deep, into the silent abyss of joy ! But in order to speak correctly, we must forget the ordinary use of expressions which have been degraded. In order to describe this mysterious love, we are obliged to draw our comparisons from human acts, and to inflict on the Lord the shame of our words. We have to employ such terms as ‘ union,’ ^ marriage,’ ‘ wedding feast ’ ; but it is impossible to speak of the inexpressible, and with the baseness of our language declare the ineffable immersion of the soul in God.” “ The fact is,” murmured Durtal . . . “ but to return to Saint Teresa. . . .” 74 EN ROUTE. “ She too,” interrupted the abbe, “ has treated of this ^ Night obscure ^ which terrifies you ; but she only speaks of it in a few lines. She calls it the souks agony — a sadness so bitter that she strove in vain to depict it.” ‘‘ No doubt, but I prefer her to Saint John of the Cross, for she is not so discouraging as that inflexible saint. Admit that he belongs too much to the land of those large Christs who bleed in caverns.” “ Of what nationality then was Saint Teresa ? ” ‘‘Yes, I know she was a Spaniard, but so complex, so strange, that race seems obliterated in her, less clearly defined. “ It is clear she was an admirable psychologist, but also how strange is in her the mixture of an ardent mystic and a cool woman of business. For, in fact, she has a double nature ; she is a contemplative outside the world, and at the same time a statesman, a female Colbert of the cloister. In fact, never was woman so consummate a skilled artisan and so powerful an organizer. When we consider that, in spite of incredible difficulties, she founded thirty-two nun- neries, that she put them all under obedience to a rule which is a model of wisdom, a rule which foresees and rectifies the most ignored mistakes of the heart, it is astonishing to hear her treated by strong-minded people as an hysterical madwoman.” “ One of the distinctive marks of the mystics,” answered the abbe, with a smile, “ is just their absolute balance, their entire common sense.” These conversations cheered Durtal ; they planted on him seeds of reflection which sprang up when he was alon6 ; they encouraged him to trust to the advice of this priest, and follow his counsels. He found himself all the better for this conduct, in that his visits to the churches, his prayers and readings occupied his objectless life, and he was no longer wearied. “ I have at least gained peaceable evenings and quiet nights,” he said to himself. He knew the soothing help of a pious evening. He visited St. Sulpice at those times when, under the dull gleam of the lamps, the pillars opened out and threw long panels of darkness on the ground. The chapels which remained open were in shade, and in the nave before the EN ROUTE. 75 high altar a single cluster of lamps, above in the darkness, shone out like a luminous bunch of red roses. In the stillness no sounds were heard but the dull thud of a door, the creaking of a chair, the short paces of a woman, the hurried stride of a man. Durtal was almost isolated in the obscure chapel which he had chosen ; he kept himself there so far from all, so far from the city whose full pulse was beating only two paces from him. He knelt down and remained still, he prepared to speak, and had nothing to say, felt himself carried away by an impulse, but no words came. He ended by falling into a vague languor, experiencing that indolent ease, that dim sense of comfort, which the body feels in a medicated bath. He fell a-dreaming of the lot of the women who were round about him here and there, in chairs. Ah ! those poor little black shawls, those miserable pleated caps, those wretched tippets, those doleful seed rosaries they fingered in the shade. Some in mourning, sobbed still inconsolable ; others, over- whelmed, bent their backs and hung their heads on one side ; others prayed, their shoulders shaking, their head in their hands. The task of the day was over ; those wearied of their life came to ask for mercy. Everywhere misfortune was kneel- ing, for the rich, the healthy, the happy hardly pray ; all around in the church were women, widowed or old, without love, women deserted, women whose home was a torture, praying that existence might become more merciful, that the dissoluteness of their husbands might cease, the vices of their sons amend, the health of those they loved grow stronger. A lamentable perfume went up like incense to Our Lady from a very sheaf of woes. Few men came to this hidden meeting-place of trouble ; still fewer young people, for these have not yet suffered enough ; there were only a few old men, and a few sick who dragged themselves along by the backs of the chairs, and a little hunchback, whom Durtal saw coming there every evening, an outcast who could only be loved by Her who does not even see the body. A burning pity seized on Durtal at the sight of those unhappy ones who came to beg from Heaven a little of the 76 EN ROUTE. love refused them by men ; and he who could not pray on his own account ended by joining himself to their pleadings, and praying for them. So indifferent in the afternoon, the churches were truly persuasive, truly sweet, in the evening ; they seemed to bestir themselves at nightfall, and to compassionate in their solitude the sufferings of those sick creatures whose complaints they heard. And their first mass in the morning, the mass of working women and servant maids was no less touching ; there were there no bigots nor curious persons, but poor women who came to seek in communion strength to live their hours of onerous tasks and servile needs. They knew as they left the church that they were the living custodians of a God, of Him who was ever while on earth the Poor Man, who took pleasure only in souls who had scarce where to lay their head ; they knew themselves His chosen, and did not doubt that when He entrusted to them under the form of bread the memorial of His suffering. He demanded of them in exchange that they should live in sorrow and humility. And what harm then could do to them the cares of a day spent in the salutary shame of base occupations ? “ I now understand,” thought Durtal, “ why the abbe made such a point of my seeing the churches early or late ; those are, in fact, the only times in which the soul expands.” But he was too idle to be often present at early mass ; he was content to take his relaxation after dinner in the chapels. He came out with a feeling of peace, even if he had .prayed badly or not prayed at all. On other evenings, on the contrary, he felt tired of solitude, tired of silence, tired of darkness, and then he abandoned St. Sulpice and went to Notre Dame des Victoires. In this well-lighted sanctuary there was no longer that depression, that despair of poor wretches who dragged themselves to the nearest church and sat down in the shade. The pilgrims to Notre Dame des Victoires brought a surer confidence, and that faith softened their sorrows, whose bitterness was dissipated in the explosions of hope, the stammering adoration, which spouted up all around. There were two currents in that refuge, that of people who asked for favours, and that of those who, having gained them, were profuse in thankfulness EN ROUTE. 77 and in acts of gratitude. Therefore, that church had its especial physiognony, more joyous than sad, less melancholy, more ardent under all circumstances than that of other churches. It had, moreover, the peculiarity of being much frequented by men, but less by hypocrites, who will not look you in the face, or with upturned eyes, than by men of all classes whose features were not degraded by false piety. There alone were to be seen clear expressions and clean faces ; there, above all, was not that horrible grimace of the working man of the catholic clubs — that hideous creature in a blouse, whose breath belies the ill-defined unction of his features. In that church, covered with ex votos^ plastered even above the arches with inscriptions on marble celebrating the joy for prayers granted and benefits received, before that altar of Our Lady where hundreds of tapers pierced the air blue with incense with the gilded blades of their lances, there were public prayers every evening at eight. A priest in the pulpit said the rosary, sometimes the Litany of Our Lady was sung to a singular air, a sort of musical cento, but it was impossible to say whence it was constructed, very rhythmical, and continually changing its tone, now fast, now slow, bringingwith it, for a moment, a vague recollec- tion of seventeenth-century airs, then turning sharply at a tangent, to a barrel-organ tune, a modern, almost vulgar, melody. Yet, after all, there was something taking in this singular confusion of sounds after the “ Kyrie eleison and the open- ing invocations. The Virgin came upon the scene to a dance measure like a ballet girl ; but when certain of her attributes were paraded, and certain of her symbolical names declared, the music became singularly respectful ; it became lower, halt- ing and solemn, thrice repeating, on the same motive, some of her attributes, the “Refugium Peccatorum” amongothers ; then it went on again, and began her graces again with a skip. When by chance there was no sermon, the Benediction took place immediately afterwards. Then with raspings of the choir, a bass with a cold, and two boys who snivelled began their liturgical chants : “ Inviolata,” that languishing and plaintive Sequence, with its clear and drawling tune so weak, so frail, that it would 78 EN ROUTE. seem as if it should only be sung by voices in a hospital ; then the ‘ Parce Domine/^ that antiphon so suppliant and so sad ; lastly, that scrap, detached from the “ Panga Lingua,’^ the Tantum ergo,” humble and thoughtful, attentive and slow. When the organ sounded out the first chords, and that plain chant melody began, the choir had only to cross their arms and hold their tongues. As tapers which are lighted by threads of fulminate attached one to the other, the faithful caught fire, and, accompanied by the organs, struck up for themselves the humble and glorious strains. They were then kneeling on the chairs, prostrate on the pavement, and when, after the exchange of antiphons and responses, after the “ oremus,” the priest ascended to the altar, his shoulders and hands enfolded in the white silk scarf, to take the monstrance, then, at the shrill and hurried sounds of the bells, a wind passed which at once bent every head like the mowing of grass. In these groups of souls on fire there was a fulness of devotion, a complete and absolute silence, till the bells again rang out, and invited human life which had been inter- rupted to wrap itself in a great sign of the Cross and resume its course. The “ Laudate ” was not ended when Durtal left the church, before the crowd began to move. “ Verily,” he said, as he entered his lodgings, the fervour of that congregation, who do not come as in other churches from the districts, but are pilgrims from every- where and one knows not where, is out of tune with the blackguardism of this foolish age.” Then at Notre Dame at least one hears curious singing, and he bethought him of those strange litanies which he had heard nowhere else, and yet he had experienced all kinds, in churches. At St. Sulpice, for example, it was recited to two tunes. When the choir sang it was set to a plain chant melody, bellowed by the gong of a bass to which the sharp fife of the boys made answer ; but during Rosary month, on every day except Thursday the task of singing it was entrusted to young ladies ; then in the evening round a wheezy old harmonium, a troup of young and old geese, made Our Lady run round on her litanies as on hobby horses to the music of a fair. EN ROUTE. 79 In other churches, at St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, where they were also dropped out by women, the litanies were sprinkled with powder and perfumed by bergamot and ambergris. They were, in fact, adapted to a minuet tune, and therefore did not disagree with the operatic architecture of the church, where they presented a Virgin walking with mincing steps, pinching her petticoat with two fingers, bending in beautiful curtseys, and recovering herself with a fine bow. This has evidently nothing to do with church music, but it was none the less disagreeable to hear. It would have made the whole performance complete if the harpsichord had been substituted for the organ. Far more interesting than this lay quavering was the plain chant, given more or less badly, as it was moreover given, but yet given, when there was no special ceremony at Notre Dame. It was not arranged there as at St. Sulpice and the other churches where the ‘‘ Tantum ergo ’’ is almost always dressed up in foolish flourishes, tunes for military ceremonials or public dinners. The Church has not allowed the actual text of Saint Thomas Aquinas to be altered, but she has let any and every choirmaster suppress the plain chant in which it has been wrapped from its birth, which has penetrated to its marrow, has clung to each of its phrases, and become with it one body and one soul. It was monstrous, and it must really be that these cures have lost, not the sense of art, for that they never had, but the most elementary sense of the liturgy, to accept such heresies, and tolerate such outrages in their churches. These thoughts enraged Durtal, but he returned little by little to Notre Dame des Victoires and grew calmer. It was well he should examine it under all aspects, but it remained none the less mysterious nor the less unique in Paris. At La Salette, at Lourdes, there have been apparitions. “ Whether these have been authentic or controverted matters little,’’ he thought. “ For even supposing Our Lady were not thereat the moment her coming was announced, she was attracted there, and dwells there now, retained there by the tide of prayer and the emanations cast up by the faith 8o EN ROUTE. of crowds. Miracles have happened there ; it is therefore not astonishing that pious crowds flock thither. But here at Notre Dame des Victoires has been no apparition ; no Mdanie, no Bernadette, have seen and described the luminous appearance of a ‘ beautiful Lady.’ There are no piscinas, no medical staff, no public cures, no mountain top, no grotto, nothing. One fine day in 1836 the cure of the parish, the Abbe Dufriche Des Genettes, declared that while he was celebrating mass Our Lady manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially con- secrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of ex votos declare the graces which since that day the Madonna has accorded to the visitors.” “Yes, but in fact,” concluded Durtal, “all these sup- pliants are not specially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are like me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for Her.” And he remembered the answer of the Abbe Gevresin, to whom he had already made the observation. “You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection if you go there for Her only. ” Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was a reaction ; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took fire, and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible. Florence seemed present, to Durtal’s imagination, at his lodgings, in the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the watch against her recurrent attractions. The weather was mixed up with it all ; the heaven broke up, a stormy summer raged, shattering the nerves, enfeebling the will, letting the awakened troop of vices loose in their gloomy moisture. Durtal blenched before the dread of long evenings and the abominable melancholy of days that never ended. ‘ At eight o’clock in the evening the sun had not set, and at three in the morning it seemed to wake again ; the week was only one uninterrupted day, and life was never arrested. Oppressed by the ignominy of this angry sunshine and these blue skies, disgusted at bathing in Niles of sweat, and feeling “Niagaras run from his hat, he did not stir EN ROUTE. 8l from home, and then, in his solitude, foul thoughts assailed him. It was an obsession by thought, by vision, in all ways, and the haunting was all the more terrible that it was so special, that it never turned aside, but concentrated itself always on the same point, the face and figure of Florence. Durtal resisted, then in distraction, took to flight, tried to tire himself out by long walks, and to divert his mind by excursions, but the ignoble desire followed him in his course, sat before him in the Cafe, came between his eyes and the newspaper he strove to read, becoming ever more definite. He ended, after hours of struggle, by giving way and going to see this woman ; he left her over- whelmed, half dead with disgust and shame, almost in tears. Nor did he thus find any solace in his struggle, but the contrary ; far from escaping it, the hateful charm took more violent and tenacious possession of him. Then Durtal thought of and accepted a strange compromise, to visit another woman he knew, and in her society to break this nervous state, to put an end to this possession, this weariness and remorse ; and in doing so he strove to persuade himself that in thus acting he would be more pardonable, less sinful. The clearest result of this attempt was to bring back the memory of Florence, and her vicious charm. He continued therefore his intimacy with her, and then he had, during a few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself from the sewer, and stood on firm ground. He succeeded in recovering and pulling himself to- gether, and he loathed himself. During this crisis he had somewhat neglected the Abbe Gevresin, to whom he dared not avow his foulness, but since certain indications warned him of new attacks, he took fright, and went to see him. He explained his crises in veiled words, and he felt so unnerved, so sad, that tears stood in his eyes. “ Well, are you now certain that you have that repent- ance which you assure me you have not experienced up to this time ? ” “ Yes, but what is the good of it, if one is so weak, that in spite of all efforts one is certain to be overthrown at the first assault ? ” G 82 EN ROUTE. That is another question. Come, I see that at present you are in fact in a state of fatigue requiring help.” “ Comfort yourself therefore ; go in peace and sin less, the greater part of your temptations will be remitted you ; you can, if you choose, bear the remainder, only take care, if you fall henceforward, you will be without excuse, and I do not answer for it, that instead of mending, your condition will not be aggravated.” And as Durtal, stupefied, stammered out: “You be- lieve — ” “ I believe,” said the priest, “ in the mystical substitution of which I spoke to you ; you will moreover experience it in yourself ; the saints will enter into the lists to help you ; they will take the overplus of the assaults which you cannot conquer ; without even knowing your name, from their secluded province, nunneries of Carmelites and Poor Clares will pray for you, on receiving a letter from me.” And in fact, from that very day the most acute attacks ceased. Did he owe that cessation, that truce, to the inter- cession of the cloistered Orders, or to a change in the weather, which then took place, to the less heat of the sun, which gave way to floods of rain ? He could not tell, but one thing was certain, his temptations were less frequent, and he could bear them with impunity. This idea of convents in their compassion dragging him out of the mud in which he had stuck, and by their charity bringing him to the bank, excited him. He chose to go to the Avenue de Saxe, to pray in the home of the sisters of those who suffered for him. This time there were no lights, no crowds, as on the morning when he had been present at a Procession, no odour of wax or incense, no sweeping by of robes of scarlet and cope of gold, all was deserted and dark. He was there alone, in the sombre and dank chapel, smelling like stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus pulled him- self together, far-oflF voices came behind the grating, drew nearer and nearer, passed by the black sieve of the veil. EN ROUTE. 83 and dropped round the altar, whose form rose dimly in the shadow. These voices of the Carmelites aided Durtal to probe his despair deeply. Seated in a chair, he said to himself : ‘‘ When any one is as incapable as I am when I speak to Him, it is almost shameful to dare to pray, for indeed, if I think of Him, it is that I may ask for a little happiness ; and that is foolish. In the immediate shipwreck of human reason, wishing to explain the terrible enigma of the meaning of life, one only idea comes to the surface, in the midst of the wreckage of thoughts which sink, the idea of an expiation felt rather than understood, the idea that the sole end assigned to life is sorrow. “ Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death ; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid ; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows. Who knows in that case whether anaesthetics which suppress corporal pain do not bring into debt those who use them ? Who knows whether chloroform is not a means of revolt, and if the shrinking of the creature from suffering is not seditious, a rebellion against the will of Heaven ? If this be so, the arrears of torture, the balance of distress, the warrants of pain avoided must accumulate terrible interest above, and justify the war cry of Saint Teresa, ‘ Lord, let me always suffer, or die ; ^ this explains why, in their trials, the saints rejoice, and pray the Lord not to spare them, for they know that the purifying amount of ills must be paid in order to be free from debt after death. “To be just, human nature would be too ignoble with- out pain, for it alone can raise the soul while purifying it, but all that is nothing less than consoling,’’ he added. “ What an accompaniment to these sad thoughts are the wailing voices of these nuns ; it is truly frightful.” He ended by fleeing, and taking refuge, to shake off his depression, in the neighbouring convent at the bottom of the alley de Saxe, in a suburban lane, full of little cottages with gardens in front, where serpentine paths of pebbles wound round tufts of pot-herbs. This was the convent of the Poor Clares of the Ave Maria, G 2 84 EN ROUTE. an Order still more strict than that of the Carmelites, poorer, less fashionable, more humble. This cloister was entered by a little door, partly ajar ; you ascended to the second storey without meeting anyone, and found a little chapel, through whose windows trees were visible, rocking to the chirping of riotous sparrows. This too was a place of burial, but no longer, as though opposite a tomb at the bottom of a dark cavern, but rather a cemetery where birds sang in the sun among the branches, you might have thought yourself in the country, twenty miles from Paris. The decoration of this bright chapel tried, however, to be gloomy ; it was like those wine shops whose walls are made to look like those of caves, with false stones painted in the imitation plaster. Only the height of the nave manifested the childishness of the imposture, and declared the vulgarity of the deception. At the end was an altar above a smooth waxed floor, and on either side of it a grating with a black veil. According to the rule of Saint Francis, all the ornaments, the crucifix, the candlesticks, the tabernacle, were of wood, no object was to be seen in metal, no flower, the only luxury in the chapel consisted of two modern stained windows, one of which represented Saint Francis, the other Saint Clare. Durtal thought the sanctuary airy and delightful, but he only stayed there a few minutes, for there was not here, as at the Carmelites, an absolute solitude, a sombre peace ; here there were always two or three Poor Clares trotting about the chapel, who looked at him while they were arranging the chairs, and seemed surprised at his presence. They were annoying to him, and he feared he was the same to them, so much so that he went away ; but this short stay was enough to efface, or at least to lessen the funereal impression of the neighbouring convent. Durtal returned home, at once much appeased and much disquieted — much appeased in regard to his temptations, much disquieted about what he should do next. He felt rising in him, and increasing ever more and more, the desire to have done with these strifes and fears, but he grew pale when he thought of reversing his life, once for all. But if he still had hesitation and fear, he had no longer EN ROUTE. 8S the firm intention of resisting ; he now accepted in principle the idea of a change of existence, only he tried to retard the day, and put off the hour ; he tried to gain time. Then like people who grow angry at having to wait, on other days he wished to put off the inevitable moment no longer, and cried within himself that this must end ; anything rather than remain as he was. Then as this desire did not seem heard, he grew dis- couraged, would no longer think of anything, regretted the time past, and deplored that he felt himself carried along by such a current. And when he was rather more cheerful, he tried again to examine himself. “ In fact I do not at all know how I stand, he thought ; “ this flux and reflux of different wishes alarms me, but how have I come to this point, and what is the matter with me ? ” What he felt, since he became more lucid, was so intangible, so indefinite, and yet so continuous that he was obliged to give up understanding it. Indeed every time he tried to examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen and silent approach of he knew not what. The only impression which he carried with him as he rose, was that it was less that he advanced towards the unknown, but that this unknown invaded him, penetrated him, and little by little took possession of him. When he spoke to the abbe of this state, at once cowardly and resigned, imploring and fearful, the priest only smiled. “ Busy yourself in prayer, and bow down your back,” he said one day. “ But I am tired of bending my back, and of trampling always on the same spot,” cried Durtal. “I have had enough of feeling myself taken by the shoulders and led I know not where, it is really time that in one way or another this situation came to an end.” “ Plainly.” And standing up, and looking him in the face, the abb^ said, impressively, “ This advance towards God which you find so obscure and so slow is, on the contrary, so luminous and so rapid that it astonishes me, only as you yourself do not move, you do not take account of the swiftness with which you are borne along. 86 EN ROUTE. Before long you will be ripe, and then without need to shake the tree you will fall off of yourself. The question we have now to answei is into what receptacle we must put you, when at last you fall away from your life.’^ CHAPTER VII. But . . . but . . thought Durtal, “ we must at any rate come to an understanding ; the abbe wearies me with his quiet assumptions, his receptacle in which he must place me. He does not, I suppose, think of making me a seminarist or a monk ; the seminary, at my age, is devoid of interest, and as to the convent, it is attractive from the mystical point of view, and even enticing from the artistic standpoint, but I have not the physical aptitudes, still less the spiritual pre- dispositions to shut myself up for ever in a cloister ; but putting that aside, what does he mean ? “ On the other hand he has insisted on lending me the works of Saint John of the Cross, and has made me read them ; he has then an aim, for he is not a man to feel his way as he walks, he knows what he wishes and where he is going ; does he imagine that I am intended for the perfect life, and does he intend to put me on my guard by this course of reading against the disillusions which, according to him, beginners experience ? His scent seems to fail him there. I have a very horror of bigotry, and pious polish, but though I admire, I do not feel at all drawn towards the phenomena of Mysticism. No, I am interested in seeing them in others, I like to see it all from my window, but will not go downstairs, I have no pretension to become a saint, all that I desire is to attain the intermediate state, between goody-goodiness and sanctity. This is a frightfully low ideal, perhaps, but in practice it is the only one I am capable of attaining, and yet ! “ Then these questions have to be faced ! If I am mis- taken and am obeying false impulses, I am, as I advance, on the verge of madness. How, except by a special grace, am I to know whether I am in the right way, or walking 88 EN ROUTE. in the dark towards the abyss ? Here, for instance, are those conversations between God and the soul so common in the mystical life ; how can one be sure that this interior voice, these distinct words not heard with bodily ears, but perceived by the soul in a clearer fashion than if they came by the channels of sense, are true, how be sure that they emanate from God, not from our imagination or from the devil himself? “ I know, indeed, that Saint Teresa treats this matter at length in her ‘ Castles of the Soul,^ and that she points out the signs by which we can recognize the origin of the words, but her proofs do not seem to me always as easy to discern as she thinks. ‘‘‘If these expressions come from God,’ she says, ‘they are always accompanied by an effect, and bring with them an authority which nothing can resist ; thus a soul is in affliction, and the Lord simply suggests the words “ trouble not thyself,” and at once the whirlwind passes, and joy revives. In the second place, these words leave an indis- soluble peace of mind, they engrave themselves on the memory, and often cannot be effaced. “ ‘ In the other case,’ she continues, ‘ if these words pro- ceed from imagination or from the demon, none of these effects are produced, a kind of uneasiness, anguish and doubt torments you, moreover the expressions evaporate in part, and fatigue the soul which endeavours in vain to recall them in their entirety.’ “ In spite of these tokens, we are, in fact, standing on shifting ground in which we may sink at every step, but in his turn Saint John of the Cross intervenes, and tells you not to move. What then is to be done ? “ ‘ No one,’ he says^ ‘ ought to aspire to these supernatural communications and rest there, for two motives ; first, humility, the perfect abnegation of refusing to believe in them ; the second, that in acting thus, we deliver ourselves from the labour necessary to assure ourselves whether these vocal visions are true or false, and so we are dispensed from an examination which has no other profit for the soul than loss of time and anxiety.’ “ Good — but if these words are really pronounced by God, we rebel against His will if we remain deaf to them. And then, as Saint Teresa declares, it is not in our power not to EN ROUTE. 89 listen to them, and the soul can only think of what it hears when Jesus speaks to it. Moreover, all the discussions on this subject are uncertain, for one does not enter of one’s own will into the strait way, as the Church calls it, we are led, and even thrown into it often against the will, and re- sistance is impossible, phenomena occur, and nothing in the world has power to check them ; witness Saint Teresa, who, resist as she would by humility, fell into ecstasy under the divine breath, and was raised from the ground. “ No, these superhuman conditions alarm me, and I do not hold to knowing them by experience. As to Saint John of the 'Cross, the abbe is not wrong in calling him unique, but though he sounds the lowest strata of the soul, and reaches where human auger has never penetrated, he wearies me all the same in my admiration, for his work is full of nightmares which repel me ; I am not certain that his hell is correct, and some of his assertions do not convince me. What he calls the ‘ night obscure ’ is incomprehensible ; ‘ The sufferings of that darkness surpass what is possible,’ he cries on each page. Here I lose foothold. I can imagine, though I have not experienced them, the moral and terrible pangs, of the deaths of friends and relations, love betrayed, hopes which failed, spiritual sorrows of all kinds, but such a martyrdom as he proclaims as superior to all others, is beyond me, for it is outside our human interests, beyond our affections ; he moves in an inaccessible sphere, in an un- known world very far off. “ I am certainly afraid that this terrible saint, a true man of the south, abuses metaphor, and is full of Spanish affectation. “ Moreover I am astonished at the abbe on another point. He, who is so gentle, shows a certain leaning to the dry bread of Mysticism ; the effusions of Ruysbrock, of Saint Angela, of Saint Catherine of Genoa, touch him less than the arguments of saints who are hard reasoners ; yet by the side of these he has advised me to read Marie d’Agreda, whom he ought not to fancy, for she has none of those qualities which are admired in the works of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. “ Ah ! he may flatter himself that he has inflicted on me a complete disillusion, by lending me her ‘ Cite Mystique.’ “ From the renown of this Spanish woman, I expected the 90 EN ROUTE. breath of prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all ; her book is simply strange and pompous, weari- some and cold. Then the phraseology of her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those ponderous volumes, ^ my divine princess,^ ‘ my great queen, ^ when she addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as ‘ my dearest,’ just as Christ calls her ‘ my spouse,’ ‘ my well-beloved,’ and speaks of her continually as ‘ the object of my pleasure and delight,’ the way in which she speaks of the angels as ‘ the courtiers of the great King,’ set my nerves on edge and weary me. They smell ofperriwigs and ruffles, bows and dances like Versailles, a sort of court mysticism in which Christ pontifi- cates, attired in the costume of Louis XIV. “ Moreover Marie d’Agreda enters into most extravagant details. She tells us of the milk of Our Lady which cannot grow sour, of female complaints from which she was exempt, she explains the mystery of the conception by three drops of blood which fell from the heart into the womb of Mary, and which the Holy Ghost used to form the child ; lastly, she declares that Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel played the part of midwives, and stood living, under human forms, at the lying-in of the Virgin. This is too strong. I know well that the abb^ would say that we need not concern ourselves with these singularities and these errors, but that the ‘ Cite Mystique ’ is to be read in relation to the inner life of the Blessed Virgin. Yes, but then the book of M. Ollier, which treats of the same subject, seems to me curious and trustworthy in quite a different way.” Was the priest forcing the note, playing a part ? Durtal asked himself this, when he saw how determined he was not to avoid the same questions during a certain time. He tried now and then, in order to see how the matter was, to turn the conversation, but the abbe smiled, and brought it back to the point he wished. When he thought that he had saturated Durtal with mystical works, he spoke of them less, and seemed to attach himself mainly to the religious Orders, and especially to that of Saint Benedict. He very cleverly induced Durtal to become interested in this institution, and to ask him about it, and when once he had entered on this ground, he did not depart frorn it, EN ROUTE. 91 It began one day when Durtal was talking with him about plain chant. “ You have reason to like it,’’ said the abbe, “ for even independently of the liturgy and of art, this chant, if I may believe Saint Justin, appeases the desires and concupiscences of the flesh, ‘ affectiones et concupiscentias carnis sedat,’ but let me assure you, you only know it by hearsay, there is no longer any true plain chant in the churches, these are like the products of therapeutics, only more or less audacious adulterations presented to you. “None of the chants which are to some extent respected by choirs, the ‘ Tantum ergo,’ for example, are now exact. It is given almost faithfully till the verse ‘ Praestet fides,’ and then it runs off the rails, taking no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of reason and the powerful aid of Faith ; these adulterations are still more apparent, if you listen to the ‘ Salve Regina ’ after Compline. This is abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you had even heard this magnificent chant among the Trappists, you would weep with disgust at hearing it bawled in the churches at Paris. “ But besides the textual alteration of the melody as we now have it, the way in which the plain chant is bellowed is everywhere absurd. One of the first conditions for rendering it well, is that the voices should go together, that they should all chant in the same time syllable for syllable and note for note, in one word it must be in unison. “ Now, you can verify it yourself, the Gregorian melody is not thus treated ; every voice takes its own part, and is isolated. Next, plain music allows no accompaniment, it must be chanted alone, without organ, it bears at most that the instrument should give the intonation and accompany it very softly, just enough if need be to sustain the pitch taken by the voices ; it is not so that you will hear it given in the churches.” “Yes, I know it well,” said Durtal. “ When I hear it at St. Sulpice, St. Severin, or Notre Dame des Victoires, I am aware that it is sophisticated, but you must admit 92 EN ROUTE. that it is even then superb. I do not defend the tricks, the addition of fiorituri, the falseness of the musical pauses, the felonious accompaniment, the concert-room tone inflicted on you at Saint Sulpice, but what can I do ? in default of the original I must be content with a more or less worthless copy, and I repeat, even executed in that fashion the music is so admirable that I am enchanted by it.” “ But,” said the abbe quietly, “ nothing obliges you to listen to the false plain chant, when you can hear the true, for saving your presence, there exists, even in Paris, a chapel where it is intact, and given according to the rules of which I have spoken.” “ Indeed, and where is that ? ” “ At the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament in the Rue Monsieur.” “ And can anyone enter the convent and be present at the offices ? ” “ Anyone. Every day in the week. Vespers are sung at three o’clock, and on Sundays High Mass is said at nine.” “ Ah, had I but known this chapel earlier,” said Durtal, the first time he came out. In fact it combined all the conditions he could wish. Situated in a solitary street, it had the completest privacy. The architect who built it had introduced no innovations or pretentiousness, had built a Gothic church, and introduced no fancies of his own. It was cruciform, but one of the arms was scarcely the full length, for want of room, while the other was prolonged into a hall, separated from the choir by an iron grating above which the Blessed Sacrament was adored by two kneeling angels, whose lilac wings were folded over thin rose-coloured backs. Except these two figures, of which the execution was truly sinful, the rest was at least veiled by shadow, and was not too afflicting to the eyes. The chapel was dim, and always at the time of the offices, a young sacristan-sister, tall and pale, and rather bent, entered like a shadow, and each time that she passed before the altar she fell on one knee and bowed her head profoundly. She seemed strange and scarcely human, gliding noise- EN ROUTE. 93 lessly over the pavement, her head bowed, with a band as low as her eyebrows, and she seemed to fly like a large bat when standing before the tabernacle she turned her back, moving her large black sleeves as she lighted the tapers. Durtal one day saw her features, sickly but charming, her eyelids dark, her eyes of a tired blue, and he guessed that her body was wasted by prayers, under her black robe drawn together by a leathern girdle ornamented by a little medal of the Blessed Sacrament of gilt metal, under the trimming, near her heart. The grating of the enclosure, on the left of the altar, was large, and well lighted from behind, so that even when the curtains were drawn it was possible to see the whole chapter drawn up in file in their oaken stalls surmounted at the end by a higher stall in which the abbess sat. A lighted taper stood in the middle of the hall, and before it a nun prayed day and night, a cord round her neck, to expiate the insults offered to Jesus under His Eucharistic form. The first time Durtal had visited the chapel, he had gone there on Sunday a little before the time of Mass, and he had been thus able to be present at the entry of the Benedictine nuns, behind the iron screen. They advanced two and two, stopped in the middle of the grating, turned to the altar and genuflected, then each bowed to her neigh- bour, and so to the end of this procession of women in black, only brightened by the whiteness of the head-band and the collar, and the gilt spot of the little monstrance on the breast. The novices came last, to be recognized by the white veils which covered their heads. And when an old priest, assisted by a sacristan, began the mass softly at the end of the chapter, a small organ gave the tone to the voices. Then Durtal might well wonder, for he had never before heard a sole and only voice made up of perhaps some thirty, of a tone so strange, a superterrestrial voice, which burnt upon itself, in the air, and intertwined its soft cooings. This bore no resemblance to the icy and obstinate lament of the Carmelites, nor was it like the unsexed tone, the child’s voice, squeaking, rounded off at the end of the Fran- ciscan nuns, but quite another thing. 94 EN ROUTE. At La Glaci^re in fact those raw voices, though softened and watered by prayers, kept somewhat of the drawling, almost vulgar, inflexion of the people from whom they came ; they were greatly purified, but remained none the less human. Here the tenderness of tones was rendered angelic, that voice with no defined origin long bolted through the divine sieve, patiently modelled for the liturgical chant, caught fire as it unfolded, blazed in virginal clusters of white sound, died down, flowered out again in pale pleadings, distant, seraphic at the end of certain chants. Thus interpreted the Mass gave a special accent to the sense of the sequences. Standing, behind the grating, the convent answered the priest. Durtal had then heard, after a mournful and solemn “ Kyrie Eleison,’’ sharp and almost tragic, the decided cry, so loving and so grave, of the “ Gloria in Excelsis,’’ to the true plain chant ; he had listened to the Credo, slow and bare, solemn and pensive, and he was able to affirm that these chants were totally different from those which were sung everywhere in the churches. St. Severin and St. Sulpice now seemed to him profane ; in the place of their gentle warmth, their curls and their fringes, the angles of their polished melodies, their modern endings, their inco- herent accompaniments arranged for the organ, he found himself in the presence of a chant, thin, sharp and nervous, like the work of an early master, and saw the ascetic severity of its lines, its sonorous colouring, the brightness of its metal hammered out with the rude yet charming art of Gothic jewels, he heard under the woven robe of sound, the beating of a simple heart, the ingenuous love of ages, and he noticed that curious shade in Benedictine music ; it ended all cries of adoration, all tender cooingsin a timid murmur, cut short, as though shrinking in humility, effacing itself modestly as though asking pardon of God for daring to love Him. “ Ah, you were very right to send me there,” said Durtal to the abbe when next he saw him. “ I had no choice,” answered the priest, smiling, ‘Hor the plain chant is respected only in convents under the Bene- dictine rule. That grand Order has restored it. Dom Pothier has done for it what Dom Gueranger has done for the liturgy. EN kOUTE. 95 Moreover, beyond the authenticity of the vocal text, and the manner of rendering it, there are still two essential con- ditions for restoring the special life of these melodies, and they are hardly found except in cloisters, first Faith, and next the understanding the meaning of the words sung.” “But,” interrupted Durtal, “ I do not suppose that the Benedictine nuns know Latin.” “ I beg your pardon, among the nuns of Saint Benedict, and even among the cloistered sisters of other Orders there are a certain number who study the language enough to understand the Breviary and the Psalms. That is a serious advantage which they have over the choirs, composed for the most part of artisans without instruction and without piety, only simple workers with their voices. “ Now without wishing to abate your enthusiasm for the musical honesty of these nuns, I am bound to say, that in order to understand this magnificent chant in its height and breadth, you must hear it, not winnowed by the mouths of virgins, even if unsexed, but as it issues, unsmoothed, un- trimmed from the lips of men. Unfortunately, though there are at Paris, in the Rue Monsieur and the Rue Tournefort, two communities of Benedictine nuns, there is not on the other hand a single monastery of Benedictine monks.” “ At the Rue Monsieur do they absolutely follow the rule of Saint Benedict ? ” “ Yes ; but over and above the usual vows of poverty, chastity, remaining in the cloister, obedience, they make a further vow of separation and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, as formulated by Saint Mechtilde. “ And so they lead the most austere existence of any nuns. They scarcely taste flesh ; they rise at two in the morning to sing Matins and Lauds, night and day, summer and winter, they take turns before the taper of reparation, and before the altar. It need not be said,” continued the abbe after a pause, “ that woman is stronger and braver than man ; no male ascetic could live 3nd lead such a life, especially in the enervating atmosphere of Paris.” “ What perhaps astounds me still more,” said Durtal, “ is the kind of obedience exacted of them. How can a creature endowed with free will annihilate herself to such an extent ? ” “ Oh,” said the abbe, “the obedience is the same in all 96 EN ROUTE. the great Orders, absolute, without reserve ; its formula is well summed up by Saint Augustine. Listen to this sentence which I remember to have read in a commentary on his rule : “ ‘ We must enter into the feelings of a beast of burthen, and allow ourselves to be led like a horse or a mule, which have no understanding ; or rather, that obedience may be, still more perfect, since these animals kick against the spur, we must be in the hands of a superior like a block, or the stock of a tree, which has neither life, nor movement, nor action, nor will, nor judgment.’ Is that clear ? ” “ It is most frightful ! I quite admit,” said Durtal, “ that in exchange for such abnegation, the nuns must be power- fully aided from on high, but are there not some moments of falling away, some cases of despair, some instants in which they pine for a natural life in the open air, in which they lament that death in life which they have made for themselves ; are there not days in which their senses wake and cry aloud ? ” No doubt ; in the cloistered life the age of twenty-nine is terrible to pass, then a passionate crisis arises ; if a woman doubles that cape, and she almost always does so, she is safe. “ But carnal emotions are not, to speak correctly, the most troublesome assault they have to undergo. The real punishment they endure in those hours of sorrow is the ardent, wild regret for that maternity of which they are ignorant ; the desolate womb of woman revolts, and full of God though she be, her heart is breaking. The child Jesus whom they have loved so well then appears so far off and so inaccessible, and His very sight would hardly satisfy them, for they have dreamed of holding Him in their arms, of swathing and rocking Him, of giving Him suck, in one word, of being mothers. “ Other nuns undergo no precise attack, no assault to which a name can be given, but without any definite reason they languish and die suddenly, like a taper, blown out. The torpor of the cloister kills them.” “ But indeed. Monsieur I’abbe, these details are far from encouraging.” The priest shrugged his shoulders. “ It is the poor reverse of a splendid stuff,” he said, “ wonderful recom- EN ROUTE. 97 penses are granted, even in this world, to souls in con- vents.’’ “Nor do I suppose that if a nun fall, stricken in the flesh, she is abandoned. What does the Mother abbess in such a case? ” “ She acts according to the bodily temperament and state of the soul of the sick person. Note that she has been able to follow her during the years of her probation, that she has necessarily gained an influence over her ; at such times therefore she will watch her daughter very closely, en- deavour to turn the course of her ideas, breaking her by hard work, and by occupying her mind ; she must not leave her alone, must diminish her prayers, if need be, restrict her hours of office, lessen her fasts, give her, if the case demands it, better food. In other cases, on the contrary, she will have recourse to more frequent communions, lessen her food or cause her to be blooded, mix cooling meats with her diet, and above all things she and all the community must pray for her. “An old Benedictine abbess, whom I knew at Saint- Omer, an incomparable guide of souls, limited before all things the length of confessions. The moment she saw the least symptoms arise she gave two minutes, watch in hand, to the penitent, and when the time was up she sent her back from the confessional, to mix with her companions.” “Why so?” “ Because in convents, even for souls which are well, confession is a most dangerous relaxation, it is as it were too long and too warm a bath. In it nuns go to excess, open their hearts uselessly, dwell upon their troubles, accentuate them, and revel in them ; they come out more weakened and more ill than before. Two minutes ought indeed to be enough for a nun in which to tell her little sins. “ Yet . . . yet ... I must admit it, the confessor is a danger for a convent, not that I suspect his honour, that is not at all what I mean, but as he is generally chosen from among the bishop’s favourites, there are many chances that he may be a man who knows nothing, and quite ignorant of how to deal with such souls, ends by unsettling them while he consoles them. Again, if demoniac attacks, so common in nunneries, occur, the poor man can only gape, gives all sorts H 98 EN ROUTE. of confused counsel, and hinders the energy ot the abbess, who in such matters knows far better than he.” “ And,” said Durtal, who chose his words carefully, “ tell me, I suppose that tales like those which Diderot gives in his foolish volume ‘ La Religieuse ’ are incorrect ? ” “ Unless a community is rotted by a superior given over to Satanism, which, thank God, is rare, the filthy stories told by that writer are false, and there is moreover a good reason why it should be so, for there is a sin which is the very antidote of the other, the sin of zeal.” “ What ? ” “ Yes : the sin of zeal which causes the denunciation of our neighbour, gives scope to jealousy, creates spying to satisfy hate, that is the real sin of the cloister. Well, I assure you that if two sisters became quite shameless they would be denounced at once.” “ But I thought. Monsieur TAbbe, that tale-bearing was allowed by the rules of most orders ? ” “ It is, but perhaps there is a temptation to carry it somewhat to excess, especially in convents of women ; for you can imagine that if nunneries contain pure mystics, real saints, they have in them also some nuns less advanced in the way of perfection, and who even still retain some faults ...” “ Come, since we are in the chapter of minute details, dare I ask if cleanliness is not just a little neglected by these good women ? ” “ I cannot say ; all that I know is, that in the Benedictine abbeys I have known, each nun was free to act as seemed good to her ; in certain Augustinian constitutions, the case was provided for in contrary fashion, it was forbidden to wash the body, except once a month. On the other hand, amongst the Carmelites cleanliness is exacted. Saint Teresa hated dirt, and loved white linen, her daughters have even, I think, a right to have a flask of Eau de Cologne in their cells. You see this depends on the order, and probably also, when the rule does not expressly mention it, on the ideas which the superior may have on the subject. I will add that this question must not be looked at only from the worldly point of view, for corporal dirt is for certain souls an additional suffering and mortification which they impose on themselves, as Benedict Labre.” EN ROUTE. 99 “ He who picked up vermin which left him, and put them piously in his sleeve. I prefer mortifications of another kind.” “ There are harder ones, believe me, and I think they would suit you better. Would you like to imitate Suso, who, to subdue his passions, bore on his naked shoulders, for eighteen years, an enormous cross set with nails, whose points pierced his flesh? More than that, he imprisoned his hands in leather gloves which also bristled with ! nails, lest he should be tempted to dress his wounds. Saint Rose of Lima treated herself no better, she bound a chain so tightly round her body that it penetrated the skin, and hid itself under the bleeding pad of flesh, she wore also a horse- hair girdle set with pins, and lay on shards of glass ; but all these trials are nothing in comparison of those inflicted on herself by a Capuchin nun, the venerable Mother Pasidee of Siena. “ She scourged herself with branches of juniper and holly, then poured vinegar into her wounds, and sprinkled them with salt, she slept in winter on the snow, in summer on bunches of nettles, or pebbles, or brushes, put drops of hot lead in her shoes, knelt upon thistles, thorns and sticks. In January she broke the ice in a cask and plunged into it, and she even half-stifled herself by hanging head downwards in a chimney in which damp straw was lighted, but that is enough ; indeed,” said the abbe laughing, “ if you had to choose, you would like best the mortifications which Benedict Labre imposed on himself.” “ I would rather have none at all,” answered Durtal. There was a moment’s pause. Durtal’s thoughts went back to the Benedictine nuns : “But,” said he, “ why do they put in the ‘ Semaine reli- gieuse,’ after their title Benedictine Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, this further name, ^ Convent of Saint Louis du Temple ? ’ ” “ Because,” said the abbe, “ their first convent was founded on the actual ruins of the Temple prison, given them by royal warrant, when Louis XVIII. returned to France. “ Their foundress and superior was Louise Addaide de Bourbon Conde, an unfortunate princess of many wanderings, almost the whole of whose life was spent in exile. Expelled from France by the Revolution and the Empire, hunted in H 2 lOO EN ROUTE. almost every country in Europe, she wandered by chance among convents seeking shelter, now among the nuns of the Annunciation at Turin and the Capuchins in Piedmont, now among the Trappistines in Switzerland and the Sisters of the Visitation at Vienna, now among the Benedictines of Lithuania and Poland. At last she found shelter among the Benedictines in Norfolk, till she could again enter France. She was a woman singularly trained in monastic science and experienced in the direction of souls. “ She desired that in her abbey every sister should oflFer herself to heaven in reparation for crimes committed ; and that she should accept the most painful privations to make up for those which might be committed ; she instituted there the perpetual adoration, and introduced the plain chant, in all its purity, to the exclusion of all others. It is, as you have been able to hear, there preserved intact ; it is true that since her time, her nuns have had lessons from Dom Schmitt, one of the most learned monks in that matter. “ Then, after the death of the princess, which took place, I think, in 1824, it was perceived that her body exhaled the odour of sanctity, and though she has not been canonized her intercession is invoked by her daughters in certain cases. Thus, for example, the Benedictine nuns of the Rue Monsieur ask her assistance when they lose anything, and their experience shows that their prayer is never in vain, since the object lost is found almost at once. “ But,’’ continued the abbe, since you like the convent so well, go there, especially when it is lighted up.” The priest rose and took up a “ Semaine religieuse,” which lay upon the table. He turned over the leaves. “ See,” he said, and read, ‘‘ ‘ Sunday 3 o’clock. Vespers chanted ; ceremony of clothing, presided over by the Very Reverend Father Dom Etienne, abbot of the Grande Trappe, and Benediction.’ ” “ That is a ceremony which interests me much.” “ I too shall probably be there.” “ Then we can meet in the chapel ? ” “ Just so.” “ These ceremonies of clothing have not now the gaiety they had in the eighteenth century in certain Benedictine EN ROUTE. lOI institutions, amongst others the Abbey de Bourbourg in Flanders,” said the abbe smiling, after a silence. And since Durtal looked at him questioningly — ‘‘Yes, there was no sadness about it, or at least it had a special sadness of its own ; you shall judge. On the eve of the day that the postulant was to take the habit, she was presented to the abbess of Bourbourg by the governor of the town. Bread and wine were offered to her, and she tasted them in the church itself. On the morrow she appeared, magnificently dressed, at a ball which was attended by the whole community of nuns, where she danced, then she asked her parents’ blessing, and was conducted, with violins playing, to the chapel, where the abbess took possession of her. She had for the last time seen, at the ball, the joys of the world, for she was immediately shut up, for the rest of her days in the cloister.” “ The joy of the Dance of Death,” said Durtal, “ monastic customs and congregations were strange in old days.” “ No doubt, but they are lost in the night of time. I remember, however, that in the fifteenth century there existed under the rule of Saint Augustine an order strange indeed, called the Order of the Daughters of Saint Magloire, whose convent was in the Rue Saint Denys at Paris. The conditions of admission were the reverse of those of all other charters. The postulant had to swear on the holy Gospels that she had been unchaste, and no one believed her oath ; she was examined, and if her oath were false, she was declared unworthy to be received. Nor might she have brought about this condition expressly in order to enter the convent, she must have well and truly given herself over to sin, before she came to ask the shelter of the cloister. “ They were in fact a troop of penitent girls, and the rule of their subjection was savage. They were whipped, locked up, sulyected to the most rigid fasts, made their confessions thrice in the week, rose at midnight, were under the most unremitting surveillance, were even attended in their most secret retirement ; their mortifications were incessant and their closure absolute. I need hardly add that this nunnery is dead.” “ Nor likely to revive,” cried Durtal. “ Well then. Monsieur I’Abbe, we meet on Sunday in the Rue Monsieur ? ” 102 EN ROUTE. And on the assent of the abbe, Durtal went his way, with the strangest ideas in his head about the monastic orders. The thing would be, he thought, to found an abbey where one could work at ease in a good library, there should be several monks, with decent meals, plenty of tobacco, and permission to take a turn on the quays now and then. And he laughed ; but then that would not be a monastery ! or only a Dominican monastery, with monks who dine out, and have, at least, the amusement of preaching. CHAPTER VIII. On Sunday morning, on his way to the Rue Monsieur, Durtal chewed the cud of his reflections on the Monasteries. It is certain,^’ he thought, “ that in the accumulated filth of ages, they alone have remained clean, are truly in relation with heaven, and serve as interpreters between it and earth. But we must thoroughly understand and specify that we are speaking only of the cloistered orders, which have remained, as far as possible, poor ...” And thinking of the communities of women, he murmured as he hastened his steps : “ Here is a surprising fact, which proves once more the incomparable genius with which the Church is endowed ; she has been able to bring into common life women who do not assassinate each other, and obey without recalcitrancy the orders of another woman — wonderful ! “Well, here I am ” — and Durtal, who knew he was late, hastened into the court of the Benedictine nunnery, took the steps of the little church four at a time, and pushed the door open. He paused in hesitation on the threshold, dazzled by the blaze of the lighted chapel. Lamps were lit everywhere, and overhead the altar flamed with a forest of tapers against which stood out as on a gold ground, the ruddy face of a bishop all in white. Durtal glided among the crowd, elbowing his way till he saw the Abbe Gevresin beckoning to him. He joined him, and sat down on the chair the priest had kept for him, and examined the abbot of Grande Trappe, surrounded by priests in chasubles, and choir boys some in red and others in blue, followed by a Trappist with shaven crown, surrounded by a fringe of hair, holding a wooden cross, on the reverse of which was carved the small figure of a monk. Clad in a white cowl, with long sleeves and a gold button i04 EN ROUTE. on his hood, his abbot’s cross on his breast, his head covered with an old French mitre of low form, Dom Etienne, with his broad shoulders, his greyish beard, his ruddy colour, had a look of an old Burgundian, tanned by the sun while working at his vines ; he seemed, moreover, a good sort of man, uneasy under his mitre, oppressed by his honours. A sharp perfume which burnt the nose as a spice burns the tongue, the perfume of myrrh, floated in the air, the crowds surged ; behind the grating from which the curtain was withdrawn, the nuns standing sang the hymn of Saint Ambrose, “ Jesu corona virginum,” while the bells of the abbey rang a peal ; in the short aisle leading from the porch to the choir, a bending line of women on either side, a cross- bearer and torch-bearers entered, and behind them appeared the novice dressed as a bride. She was dark, slight, and very short, and came forward shyly with downcast eyes, between her mother and sister. At first sight Durtal thought her insignificant, scarcely pretty, a mere nobody ; and he looked instinctively for the other party, put out in his sense of fitness, by the absence of a man in the marriage procession. Striving against her agitation the postulant walked up the nave into the choir, and knelt on the left before a large taper, her mother and sister on either side as bridesmaids. Dom Etienne genuflected to the altar, mounted the steps, and sat down in a red velvet arm-chair, placed on the highest step. Then one of the priests conducted the girl, who knelt alone, before the monk. Dom Etienne was motionless as a figure of Buddha ; with the same gesture, he lifted one finger, and said gently to the novice, — ‘‘ What is it you ask ? ” She spoke so low as scarcely to be heard. “ Father, feeling in myself an ardent desire to sacrifice myself to God, as a victim in union with our Lord Jesus Christ, immolated on our altars, and to spend my life in perpetual adoration of His divine Sacrament, under the observance of the rule of our glorious Father Saint Benedict, I humbly ask of you the grace of the holy habit.” “I will give it you willingly if you believe you can EN ROUTE. 105 conform your life to that of a victim devoted to the Holy Sacrament.” And she answered in a firmer tone, “ I trust so, leaning on the infinite goodness of my Saviour Jesus Christ.” “ God give you perseverance, my daughter,” said the prelate ; he rose, turned to the altar, genuflected, and with uncovered head began the chant “ Veni Creator,” taken up by the voices of the nuns behind the light screen of iron. Then he replaced his mitre, and prayed, while the chanted psalms rose under the arches. The novice, who in the meantime had been reconducted to her place at the prie-Dieu, rose, genuflected to the altar, and then knelt between her two bridesmaids before the abbot of La Trappe, who had reseated himself. Her two companions lifted the veil of the bride, took off* her wreath of orange flowers, unrolled the coils of her hair, while a priest spread a napkin on the knees of the prelate, and the deacon presented a pair of long scissors on a salver. Then before the gesture of this monk, making himself ready, like an executioner, to shear the condemned person, whose hour of expiation was at hand, the terrible beauty of innocence becoming like crime, in substitution for sins of which she was ignorant, which she could not even understand, was evident to the public who had come to the chapel out of curiosity, and in consternation at the superhuman denial of justice, it trembled when the bishop seized the entire handful of her hair, and drew it towards him over her brow. Then there was as it were a flash of steel in a dark shower. In the death-like silence of the church the grinding of the scissors was heard in the mass of hair which fell under the blades, and then all was silent. Dom Etienne opened his hand, and the rain fell on his knees in long black threads. There was a sigh of relief when the priests and brides- maids led away the bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her neck bare. The procession returned almost immediately. There io6 EN ROUTE. was no longer a bride in a white skirt, but a nun in a black robe. She bowed before the Trappist, and again knelt between her mother and sister. Then, while the abbot prayed the Lord to bless his handmaid, the master of the ceremonies and the deacon took, from a credence near the altar, a basket, wherein under loose rose leaves were folded a girdle of untanned leather, emblem of the end of that luxury which the Fathers of the Church placed in the region of the reins, a scapular, symbol of a life crucified to the world, a veil, which signifies the solitude of the life hidden in God, and the prelate explained the sense of these emblems to the novice, then taking the lighted taper from the candlestick before her, he gave it to her, declaring in one phrase the meaning of his action : Accipe, charissima soror, lumen Christi.^^ Then Dom Etienne took the sprinkler which a priest handed him with an inclination, and as in the general absolution of the dead, he sprinkled the girl with holy water in the form of a cross, then he sat down and spoke gently and quietly without using a single gesture. He spoke to the postulant alone, praising the august and humble life of the cloister. “ Look not back,” he said, ‘‘ have no regrets, for by my voice Jesus repeats to you the promise once made to the Magdalen, ‘ yours is the better part, which shall not be taken away from you.^ Say also to yourself, my daughter, that, henceforward, taken away from the eternal trifling of labours in vain, you will accomplish a useful work upon earth, you will practise charity in its highest form, you will make expiation for others, you will pray for those who never pray, you will aid, so far as your strength* permits, to make amends for the hate the world bears to the Saviour. “ Suffer and you will be happy ; love your spouse, and you will see how tender He is to His elect. Believe me. His love is such that He will not even wait till you are purified by death to recompense you for your miserable mortifications, your poor sufferings. Even before your hour is come. He will heap His graces upon you, and you will beg Him to let you die, so greatly will the excess of these joys exceed your strength.” EN ROUTE. 107 Little by little the old monk grew warm, and returned to the words of Christ to the Magdalen, showing how in reference to her Jesus set forward the excellence of the contemplative over the other Orders, and gave brief advice, dwelling on the necessity of humility and poverty, which are, as Saint Clare says, the two great walls of cloistered life. Then he blessed the novice, who kissed his hand, and when she had returned to her place, he prayed to the Lord, lifting his eyes to heaven, that He would accept this nun, who offered herself as a victim for the sins of the world. Then, standing, he intoned the “ Te Deum.” Every one rose, and preceded by the cross and torch bearers, the procession passed out of the church, and was massed in the court. Then Durtal might have believed himself carried back far from Paris, into the heart of the Middle Ages. The court, surrounded by buildings, was closed opposite the entrance-gate by a high wall, in the midst of which was a folding-door ; on each side six thin pines rocked to and fro, and chanting was heard behind the wall. The postulant, in front, alone, near the closed door, held her torch, with her head bent. The abbot of La Trappe, lean- ing on his crosier, waited, unmoving, a few paces from her. Durtal examined their faces, the girl, so commonplace in her bridal costume, had become charming, her body was now full of a timid grace, the lines, somewhat too marked under her worldly dress, were softened, under her religious shroud her outline was only a simple sketch, it was as though the years had rolled back, and as though there was a return to the forms only prophesied in childhood. Durtal drew near to examine her better, he tried to look at her face, but under the chill bandage of her head-dress, she remained mute, and as if absent from life, with her eyes closed, and as though she lived only in the smile of her happy lips. Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the chapel, seemed also changed, his frame re- mained robust, and his complexion bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common ex- pression of his features, and took away from him that look of a vine-dresser which he had at a distance. io8 EN ROUTE. It is clear,” thought Durtal, that the soul is every- thing in these people, and their faces are modelled by it. There is a holy clearness in their eyes, and their lips, in those only apertures through which the soul comes to look out of the body, and almost shows itself.” The chants behind the wall suddenly ceased, the girl made a step forward, and knocked with her closed fingers at the door, and then with a failing voice she sang, — “ Aperite mihi portas justitiae : Ingressa in eas, confitebor Domino.” The door opened. Another large court, paved with pebbles was seen, bounded at the end by a building, and all the community, in a sort of semicircle, with black books in their hands, cried, — “ Haec porta Domini : Justi intrabunt in earn.” The novice made another step to the sill and answered in her far-away voice, — “ Ingrediar in locum tabernaculi admirabilis : usque ad domum Dei.” And the choir of nuns, unmoving, answered, — “ Haec est domus Domini firmiter aedificata : Bene fundata est supra firmam petram.” Durtal hastily looked at those faces which could only be seen for a few minutes and on the occasion of such a cere- mony. It was a row of dead bodies standing in black shrouds. All were bloodless, with white cheeks, lilac eyelids and grey lips, the voices of all were exhausted and fined down by prayer, and most of them, even the young, were bent. “ Their poor bodies are worn with austere fatigue,” thought Durtal. But his reflections were cut short, the bride, now kneeling on the threshold, turned to Dom Etienne and chanted in a low voice, — “ Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi : Hie habitabo quoniam elegi earn.” The monk laid aside his mitre and crosier and said, — “ Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis.” And the postulant murmured, — “ A templo sacro tuo quod est in Jerusalem.” Then before re-covering his head and resuming his crosier, the prelate prayed God Almighty to pour the dew of His blessing on His handmaid ; then directing the girl EN ROUTE. 109 towards a nun who left the group of sisters and advanced to the threshold, he said to her, — “ Into your hands, Madame, we commit this new bride of the Lord, sustain her in the holy resolution she has so solemnly taken upon her, in asking to sacrifice herself to God as a victim, and to dedicate her life in honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, sacrificed on our altars. Lead her in the way of the divine Commandments, in the practice of the counsels of the Holy Gospel, and in the observance of the monastic rule. Prepare her for the eternal union to which the heavenly Spouse invites her, and from this blessed increase of the flock committed to your charge draw a new motive for maternal care. The peace of the Lord rest upon you.’’ This was all : the nuns one by one turned and dis- appeared behind the wall, while the girl followed them like a poor dog, who with drooping head accompanies at a distance a new master. The folding doors closed. Durtal remained stupefied, looking at the outline of the white bishop, the backs of the priests who were mounting the steps to give Benediction in the church, while behind them came in tears, their faces in their handkerchiefs, the mother and sister of the novice. Well?” said the abbe, passing his arm through Durtal’s. “ Well, this scene is to my mind the most touching alibi of death that it is possible to see, this living woman, who buries herself in the most frightful of tombs — for in it the flesh continues to suffer — is wonderful. “ I remember that you have yourself told me of the pressure of this observance, and I shivered in thinking of perpetual Adoration, in those winter nights, when a child like this is awakened out of her first sleep, and cast into the darkness of a chapel where unless she faints from weakness or terror, she must pray alone, through the freezing hours on her knees on the pavement. “ What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that interview with the Shadow ? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted to the soil ? no EN ROUTE. “We figure her to ourselves, her face bent forward, her hands joined, making appeal to herself, concentrating herself, in order to pour herself forth the better, and we imagine her thus sickly, with no strength left, trying to set her soul on fire in a shivering frame. But who can tell if on certain nights she attains to it ? “ Ah ! those poor lamps of exhausted oil, of flames almost dead, which tremble in the obscurity of the sanctuary, what will God make of them ? “ Then there was the family present at the taking the habit, and if the daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would embrace her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it would at least not be with her own good will ; but in this case it is not the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous end of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard.” “ Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most equitable repartition of human love ? Think that this elect creature becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of offences and crimes. Ah ! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me : ‘ Since our tears are not holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our bodies.’ Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which doctors fail to understand, and we make thus much expiation for others. “ But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended, you need not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well- known ceremonies of a funeral ; the postulant whom you saw has not yet pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead child. EN ROUTE. 1 1 1 “ You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that door which closed upon her.” “ Therefore in the Benedictine convent in the Rue Tournefort, the scene takes place in the interior of the convent, and the family is not present, the mother is spared, but mitigated thus, the ceremony is but a mere form, almost a foolish rule in the seclusion wherein the Faith is hidden.” ‘‘Those nuns are also Benedictines of the perpetual Adoration, are they not ? ” “ Yes, do you know their convent ? ” And as Durtal shook his head, the abbe continued, — “ It is older, but less interesting than that in the Rue Monsieur, the chapel is mean, full of plaster statuettes, cotton flowers, bunches of grapes and ears of corn in gold paper, but the old building of the nunnery is curious. It contains, what shall I call it ? a school dining-room, and a retreatant’s drawing-room, and so gives at once the impression of old age and childhood.” “ I know that class of convents,” said Durtal. “ I used often to see one, when I used to visit an old aunt at Versailles. It always used to impress me as a Maison Vauquer, brought to devotional uses, it had the air at once of a table d^hote in the Rue de la Clef and the sacristy of a country church.” “ Just so,” and the abbe went on with a smile, — “I had many interviews with the abbess in the Rue Tournefort ; you guess at rather than see her, for you are separated from her by a screen of black wood, behind which is stretched a black curtain which she draws aside.” “ I can see it,” thought Durtal, who, remembering the Benedictine custom, saw in a second a little face confused in neutral tinted light, and lower, at the top of her habit, the gleam of a medal of the Blessed Sacrament in red enamelled in white. He laughed and said to the abbe, — “ I laugh, because having had some business to transact with my nun aunt of whom I was speaking, only visible like your abbess through a trellis, I found out how to read her thoughts a little.” “ Ah ! how was that ? ” “ In this way. Since I could not see her face, which II2 EN ROUTE. was hidden behind the lattice of her cage, and disappeared behind her veil, and if she should answer me, having nothing to guide me but the inflexions of her voice, always circumspect and always calm, I ended by trusting only to her great glasses, round, with buff frames, which almost all nuns wear. Well, all the repressed vivacity of this woman burst out there ; suddenly in a corner of her glasses, there was a glimmer, and I then understood that her eye had lighted up, and gave the lie to the indifference of her voice, the determined quietness of her tone.’’ The abbe in his turn began to laugh. “ Do you know the Superior of the Benedictines, in the Rue Monsieur? ” said Durtal. “ I have spoken with her once or twice ; there the parlour is monastic, there is not the provincial and middle- class side of the Rue Tournefort, it is composed of a sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom.” “ The abbess is, I suppose, the nun, elderly, fragile and very short, to whom Dom Etienne committed the novice ? ” “ Yes. She is a remarkable shepherdess of souls, and what is more, a very well educated woman of most dis- tinguished manners.” “ Oh,” thought Durtal : I can imagine that these abbesses are charming, but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she speaks in her ‘Way of Perfection ’ of nuns who band themselves together to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot to souls.” Thus talking they had reached the end of the Rue de Sevres, and the abbe stopped to rest. “ Ah,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “ had I not had all my life heavy expenses, first a brother, then nephews to maintain, I should many years ago have become a member EN ROUTE. II3 of Saint Benedict’s family. I have always had an attrac- tion towards that grand Order, which is, in fact, the intellectual Order of the Church. Therefore, when I was stronger and younger, I always went for my retreats to one of their monasteries, sometimes to the black monks of Solesmes, or of Liguge, who have preserved the wise traditions of Saint Maurus, sometimes to the Cistercians, or the white monks of La Trappe.” “ True,” said Durtal, La Trappe is one of the great branches of the tree of Saint Benedict, but how is it that its ordinances do not differ from those which the Patriarch left ? ” “ That is to say that the Trappists interpret the rule of Saint Benedict, which is very broad and supple, less in its spirit than in its letter, while the Benedictines do the contrary. “ In fact. La Trappe is an off-shoot of Citeaux, and is much more the daughter of Saint Bernard, who was during forty years the very sap of that branch, than the descendant of Saint Benedict.” “ But, so far as I remember, the Trappists are themselves divided, and do not live under a uniform discipline.” “ They do so now, since a pontifical brief dated March 17th, 1893, sanctioned the decisions of the general Chapter of the Trappists assembled in Rome, and ordered the fusion into one sole order, and under the direction of a sole superior, of the three observances of the Trappists, who were in fact ruled by discordant constitutions.” And seeing that Durtal was listening attentively, the abbe continued, — “ Among these three observances, one only, that of the Cistercian Trappists, to which belonged the abbey of which I was a guest, followed in their integrity the rules of the twelfth century, and led the monastic life of Saint Bernard’s day. This alone recognized the rule of Saint Benedict, taken in its strictest application, and completed by the Charte de Charite, and the use and customs of Citeaux ; the two others had adopted the same rule, but revised and modified in the seventeenth century by the Abbe de Ranee, and again one of them, the Belgian congregation, had changed the statutes imposed by that abbot. 1 EN ROUTE. II4 At the present day, as I have just said, all the Trappists form only one and the same institute under the name, Order of Reformed Cistercians of the Blessed Virgin Mary of La Trappe, and all resume the rules of Citeaux, and live again the life of the cenobites of the Middle Ages.” But if you have visited these ascetics,” said Durtal, you must know Dom Etienne ? ” ^‘No, I have never stayed at La Grande Trappe, I prefer the poor and small monasteries where one is mixed up with the monks, to those imposing convents where they isolate you in a guest-house, and in a word keep you separate. “ There is one in which I make my retreats, Notre Dame de I’Atre, a small Trappist monastery a few leagues from Paris, which is quite the most seductive of shelters. Besides that the Lord really abides there, for it has true saints among its children, it is delightful also with its ponds, its immemorial trees, its distant solitude, far in the woods.” “ Yes, but,” observed Durtal, “ the life there must be un- bending, for La Trappe is the most rigid order which has been imposed on men.” For his only answer the abbe let go Durtal’s arm, and took both his hands. ‘‘ Do you know,” he said, looking him in the face, it is there you must go for your conversion ? ” “ Arejyou serious. Monsieur FAbbe ? ” And as the priest pressed his hands more strongly Durtal cried, — ^‘Ah, no indeed, first I have not the stoutness of soul, and if that be possible I have still less the bodily health needed for^such a course, I should fall ill on my arrival, and then . . . and then ...” “ And then, what ? I am not proposing to you to shut you up for ever in a cloister.” “ So I suppose,” said Durtal, in a somewhat piqued tone. But just to remain a week, just the necessary time for a cure. Now a week is soon over, then do you think that if you make such a resolution God will not sustain you ? ” “ That is all very fine, but ...” Let us speak on the health question, then ; ” and the abbe smiled a smile of pity that was a little contemptuous. EN ROUTE. IIS I can promise you at once that as a retreatant, you will not be bound to lead the life of a Trappist in its austerest sense. You need not get up at two in the morning for Matins, but at three, or even at four o’clock, according to the day.” And smiling at the face Durtal made, the abbe went on, — “As to your food it will be better than that of the monks ; naturally you will have no fish nor meat, but you may certainly have an egg for dinner, if vegetables are not enough for you.” “ And the vegetables, I suppose, are cooked with salt and water, and no seasoning ? ” “No, they are dressed with salt and water only on fast- ing days ; at other times you will have them cooked in milk and water, or in oil.” “Many thanks,” said Durtal. “ But all that is excellent for your health,” continued the priest, “ you complain of pains in the stomach, sick head- aches, diarrhoea, well, this diet, in the country, in the air, will cure you better than all the drugs you take. “ Now let us leave, if you like, your body out of the question, for in such a case, it is God’s part to act against your weakness. I tell you, you will not be ill at La Trappe, that were absurd ; it would be to send the penitent sinner away, and Jesus would not then be the Christ ; but let us talk of your soul. Have the courage to take its measure, ‘ to look it well in the face. Do you see that ? ” said the abbe after a silence. Durtal did not answer. “ Admit,” said the priest, “ that you are horrified at it.” They took a few steps in the street, and the abbe con- tinued, — “You declare that you are sustained by the crowds of Notre Dame des Victoires and the emanations of St. Severin. What will it be then, in the humble chapel, when you will be on the ground huddled together with the saints ? I guarantee you in the name of the Lord an assist- ance such as you have never had ; ” and he went on with a laugh, “I may add that the Church will take pleasure in receiving you, she will bring out her ornaments which she has now left off : the authentic liturgies of the Middle Ages, true plain chant, without solos or organs.” ii6 EN ROUTE, “ Listen, your propositions astound me,” said Durtal with an effort. ‘‘No : I assure you I am not at all disposed to imprison myself in such a place. I know well that at Paris I shall never come to any good. I swear to you that I am not proud of my life, nor satisfied with my soul, but from thence . . . to . . , where I cannot tell ; I want at least a mitigated asylum, a quiet convent. There must be, on those conditions, somewhere, hospitals for souls.” “ I could only send you to the Jesuits, who make a specialty of retreats for men : but knowing you as I think I know you, I feel sure you would not stay there two days. You would find yourself among amiable and very clever priests, but they would overwhelm you with sermons, would wish to interfere with your life, mix themselves up with your art, they would examine your thoughts with a magnifying glass, and then you would be under treatment with good young people, whose unintelligent piety would horrify you, and you would flee in exasperation. “AtLaTrappe it is the contrary. You would certainly be the sole retreatant there, and no one will have the least idea of troubling himself about you ; you will be free, you can if you choose leave the monastery just as you entered it, without having confessed or approached the Sacraments, your will will be respected there, and no monk will attempt to sound it without your authority. To you only it will appertain to decide whether you will be converted or no. “ And you will like me to be frank to the last, will you not? You are, as indeed I have already said to you, a sensitive and distrustful man ; well, the priest as you see him in Paris, even the religious not cloistered, seem to you, how shall I express it ? second rate souls, not to go further ...” Durtal protested vaguely, with a gesture. “ Let me go on. An afterthought will come to you in regard to the ecclesiastic to whom will fall the task of cleansing you, you will be quite certain that he is not a saint ; this is not very theological, for were he even the worst of priests his absolution would have just the same value, if you merit it, but indeed here is a question of sentiment which I respect, you will think of him in a word : he lives as I do, he is not more self-denying than I am, nothing shows that his conscience is very superior to mine, EN ROUTE. II7 and thence to losing all confidence, and throwing up the whole thing there is but a step. At La Trappe, 1 will defy you to reason in this way, and not to become humble. When you see men, who after having abandoned every- thing to serve God, lead a life of privations and penance such as no government would dare to inflict on its convicts, you will indeed be obliged to admit that you are no great thing by their side.” Durtal was silent. After the astonishment he had felt at the suggestion of such an issue, he became dully irritated against this friend, who hitherto so discreet, had suddenly rushed upon his soul and opened it by force. There came out the disgusting vision of an existence stripped, used up, reduced to a state of dust, a condition of rags. And Durtal shrank from himself, convinced that the abbe was right, that he must at any rate stanch the discharge of his senses, and expiate their inappeasable desires, their abominable covetousness, their rotten tastes, and he was seized with a terror irrational and intense. He had the giddy fear of the cloister, a terror which attracted him to the abyss over which Gevresin made him lean. Enervated by the ceremony of taking the habit, stunned by the blow with which the priest had assailed him as they left the church, he now felt an anguish almost physical, in which everything ended in confusion. He did not know to what reflections he should give himself, tod only saw, swimming on this whirlpool of troubled ideas, one clear thought, that the moment had come so dreaded by him in which he must make a resolution. The abbe looked at him, saw that he was realty suffering, and was full of pity for a soul so unable to support a struggle. He took Durtal’s arm, and said gently, — “ My son, believe me that the day you go yourself to the house of God, the day you knock at its door, it will open wide, and the angels will draw aside to let you pass. The Gospel cannot lie, and it declares that there is more joy over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance. You will be much better welcomed than you expect, and be sufficiently my friend to think that the old priest you leave here will not remain inactive, and that he and the ii8 EN ROUTE. convents he can influence will pray their best for you.’^ “ I will see,” said Durtal, really moved by the affectionate tone of the priest, I will see. I cannot decide thus, unexpectedly ; I will think. Ah ! it is not simple.” Above all things pray,” said the priest, who had reached his door. “ I have on my side sought the Lord much that He would enlighten me, and I declare to you that the solution of La Trappe is the only one He has given me. Ask Him humbly, in your turn, and you will be guided. I shall soon see you again, shall I not ? ” He pressed Durtal’s hand, who, left alone, recovered himself at last. Then he recalled the strategic smiles, the ambiguous phrases, the dreamy silences of the Abbe Gevresin, he understood the kindness of his counsels, the patience of his plans ; and a little put out at having been, without knowing it, led so wisely, he exclaimed in spite of himself, “ This, then, was the design the priest was ripening, with his air of not concerning himself with it at all.” CHAPTER IX. He experienced that painful awakening of a sick man whom a doctor deceives for months, who learns some fine morning that he is to be taken at once to an hospital to undergo an urgent surgical operation. “ But that is not the way things should be done,” cried Durtal, “ people should be prepared, little by little, accustomed by words of warning, to the idea that they are to be cut up on a table, they are not struck down thus unexpectedly ! “Yes, but what does that matter? since I know very well, in the depths of my soul, that this priest is right ; I must leave Paris if I wish to amend ; but all the same, the treatment he inflicts is hard indeed to follow ; I know not what to do.” And from this moment his days were haunted by Trap- pists. He turned over the thought of his departure, and examined it on all sides, chewed the cud of for and against, and ended by saying to himself, “ That he would take stock of his reflections and open an account, and this with a debit and credit side, that he might know himself the better. “ The debit is terrible. To gather up his life, and cast it into the stove of a cloister ; and again, he ought to know if his body were in a state to bear such a remedy ; mine is frail and soft, accustomed to rise late ; it becomes weak if not nourished by flesh meat, and is subject to neuralgia at any change of the hour of meals. I should never be able to hold out down there with vegetables cooked in warm oil or in milk ; first I detest oily cookery, and I hate milk still more, which I cannot digest. “ Then I think I see myself on my knees, on the floor for hours, I who suffered so much at La Glaciere in remaining in that posture, on a step, for scarce a quarter of an hour. “ Again, I am so accustomed to cigarettes that it is 120 EN ROUTE. absolutely impossible to give them up, and it is pretty certain they will not let me smoke in a monastery. “ No, indeed, from the bodily point of view, this plan is madness ; in my state of health there is no doctor who would not dissuade me from undertaking such a risk. “ If I place myself in a spiritual point of view I must then again recognize that it is terrible to enter La Trappe. I am afraid indeed that my dryness of soul, my want of love will remain, and then what would become of me in such surroundings ? then it is equally probable, that in that solitude and absolute silence, I should be wearied to death, and if it be so, what a miserable existence is it to stalk about a cell and count the hours. No, for that one needs to be firmly fixed on God, to be dwelt in wholly by Him. “ Moreover, there are two formidable questions which I have never properly weighed, because it has been painful to think of them, but now that they come before me, and stop the road, I must face them, the questions of Confession and Holy Communion. “ Confession ? Yes, I will consent to it, I am so tired of myself, so disgusted with my wretched existence that this expiation appears to me as deserved, even necessary. I desire to humble myself, I would ask pardon with all my heart, but again this penance must be assigned me under possible conditions. At La Trappe, if I believe the abbe, no one will trouble himself about me, in other words no one will encourage me, and aid me to submit to this sorrowful ex- traction of my shames. I shall be somewhat like a sick man operated on in hospital, far from his friends and relatives. “ Confession,’^ he went on, ‘‘ is an admirable discovery, for it is the most sensitive touchstone of souls, the most intolerable act which the Church has ever imposed on the vanity of men. “ Is this strange ? We speak easily of our lapses, of our grosser actions, even, indeed, to a priest in conversation, that does not seem to lead to any consequences, and perhaps a little bragging enters into our admission of easy sins, but to tell the same thing on one’s knees, accusing oneself, after prayer, is different, that which was only rather amusing becomes a very painful humiliation, for the soul is not the dupe of this false seeming, it knows so well in its inner EN ROUTE. I2I tribunal that all is changed, it feels so well the terrible power of the Sacrament, that he who but now smiled, now trembles at the very thought. “ Now, were I to find myself face to face with an old monk who emerges from an eternity of silence to listen to me, a monk who will not aid me, perhaps cannot even understand me, this will be terrible. I shall never get to the end of my troubles if he does not hold out a staff to me, if he lets me stifle and gives no air to my soul, nor brings me help. “The Eucharist also seems terrible. To dare to come forward, to offer Him as a tabernacle the sewer of self scarce purified by repentance, a sewer drained by absolution, but still hardly dry, is monstrous. I am quite without such courage as to offer Christ this last insult, and so there is no good in fleeing to a monastery. “ No ; the more I think of it, the more I am obliged to conclude that I should be mad if I ventured into a Trappist house. “ Now for the Credit side. The only proper work of my life would be to make a parcel of my life, and take it to a cloister to disinfect it, and if that cost me nothing, where is the merit ? “ Nothing shows me, on the other hand, that my body, however weakened, cannot support the regimen of La Trappe. Without believing or pretending to believe with the Abbe Gevresin that that kind of food will be even helpful to me, I ought to count on Divine consolations, to admit the principle that, if I am sent there, it is not that I may take at once to my bed, or be obliged to leave again as soon as I arrive — at least, unless that is the chastisement pre- pared me, the expiation demanded, and again no, for that would be to ascribe to God pitiless tricks, and would be absurd ! “ As to the cookery, it matters little that it is uncivilized, if my stomach can digest it ; to have bad food, and get up in the middle of the night is nothing, provided the body can stand it, and no doubt I shall find some means of smok- ing cigarettes by stealth in the woods. “ After all, a week is soon over, and I am not even obliged, if I feel poorly, to remain a week. “ From the spiritual point of view, I must again count on the mercy of God, believe that it will not abandon me, will 122 EN ROUTE. dress my wounds, and change the very foundation of my soul. I know well that these arguments do not rest on any earthly certainty, but yet if I have proofs that Providence has already taken part in my affairs, I have no reason to suppose that these arguments are weaker than the purely physical motives which served to support my other thesis. Now I must recall that conversion, so outside my will ; I must take account of a fact which should encourage me, the weakness of the temptations which I now experience. “It is difficult to have been more rapidly and more com- pletely heard. Whether I owe this grace to my own prayers or to those of the convents which have shielded me without knowing me, it is the case that for some time past my brain has been silent and my flesh calm. That monster Florence appears to me still at certain times, but she does not approach me, she remains in the shade, and the end of the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘ ne nos inducas in tentationem,’ puts her to flight. “ That is an unaccustomed fact, and yet a precise one. Why should I doubt, then, that I shall be better upheld at La Trappe than I am in Paris itself ? “ There remain confession and communion.” “ Confession ? It will be what the Lord chooses it should be. He will choose the monk for me ; I shall only be able to make use of him ; and then the more disagreeable it is, the better worth it will be ; and if I suffer much, I shall think myself less unworthy to communicate. “ That is,” he went on, “ the most painful point ! Com- municate ! But let us consider, it is certain that I shall be base in proposing to Christ that He should descend like a scavenger into my ditch ; but if I wait till it is empty, I shall never be in a state to receive Him, for my bulkheads are not closed, and sins would filter through the fissures. “All this well considered, the abbe spoke truth when he answered me one day : ‘JBut I too am not worthy to approach Him ; thank God, I have not those sewers of which you speak, but in the morning, when I go to say my mass, and think of all the dust of the evening, do you not think that I am ashamed ? fit is always necessary, you see, to go back to the Gospels, and say to yourself that He came for the weak and the sick, the publicans and lepers ; and, in fact, you must convince yourself that the Eucharist is a look- out post, a help, that it is given, as it is written in the EN ROUTE. 123 ordinary of the Mass “ ad tutamentum mentis et corporis et ad medelam percipiendam.’’ It is, if I may say so, a spiritual medicine ; you go to the Saviour just as you go to a doctor, you take your soul to Him to care for it, and He does so ! ’ “ I stand before the unknown,” pursued Durtal, I com- plain that I am arid, and have wandered from the right way, but who will declare to me that, if I determine to communi- cate, I shall remain in the same mind ; for indeed, if I have Faith, I ought to believe in the occult work of Christ in the Sacrament. Lastly, I am afraid of being wearied by solitude ; I am not much amused here as it is, but at La Trappe I shall no longer have those vacillations at every minute, those constant fears ; I shall at least have the advantage of having my time to myself ; and then . . . and then . . . how well I know solitude. Have I not lived apart since the deaths of des Hermies and Carhaix ? Indeed, whom do I see ? A few publishers, a few literary men, and my relations with these people are not interesting. As to silence, it is a blessing. I shall not hear any foolish sayings at La Trappe ; I shall not listen to pitiable homilies and poor sermons ; but I ought to rejoice on being at last isolated, far from Paris, far from men.” He was silent, and made, as it were, a return in upon himself ; and said to himself, in a melancholy manner : These strifes are useless, these reflections vain. I need not try to take account of my soul, to make out the debit and credit ; I know, without knowing how, that I must go ; I am thrust out of myself by an impulse which rises from the very depths of my being, to which I am quite certain I have to yield.” At that moment Durtal had decided, but ten minutes afterwards the attempt at resolution vanished. He felt his cowardice gain on him once more, he chewed once more the cud of arguments against his moving ; came to the conclusion that his reasons for remaining in Paris were palpable, human, certain, while the others were intangible, extra-natural, and consequently subject to illusions, perhaps false. And he invented for himself the fear of not obtaining the thing he feared, said to himself that La Trappe would not receive him, or certainly that it would refuse him communion ; and then he suggested to himself a middle term : to confess at Paris and communicate at La Trappe. 124 EN ROUTE. But then there passed in him an incomprehensible fact : his whole soul revolted at this idea, and the formal order not to deceive himself was truly breathed into him, and he said to himself : ‘‘No, the bitter draught must be drained to the last drop, it is all or nothing ; if I confess to the abbe it will be in disobedience to absolute and secret directions ; I should be capable of not going afterwards to Notre Dame de I’Atre. “ What shall I do And he accused himself of distrust, called to his aid once more the memory of benefits received, how scales had fallen from his eyes, his insensible progress towards Faith, his encounter with that singular priest, perhaps the only one who could understand him, and treat him in a way so benign and so elastic ; but he tried in vain to reassure himself, then he called up the dream of the monastic life, the sovereign beauty of the cloister ; he imagined the joy of renunciation, the peace of exalted prayers, the interior intoxication of the spirit, the delight of not being at home any longer in his own body. Some words of the abbe about La Trappe served as a spring-board for his dreams, and he perceived an old abbey, grey and warm, immense avenues of trees, clouds flying confusedly amid the song of waters, silent strolls in the woods at nightfall ; he called up the solemn liturgies of Saint Benedict's time ; he saw the white pith of monastic chants rise under the scarcely pruned bark of sound. He succeeded in his decision, and cried : “ You have dreamed for years of the cloisters, now rejoice that you will know them at last,’^ and he wished to go at once and live there ; then suddenly he fell down into reality, and said to himself : “ It is easy to wish to live in a monastery, to tell God that you would desire to take shelter therein, when life in Paris weighs you down, but when it comes to the real point of emigration, it is quite another matter.” He turned over these thoughts everywhere, in the street, at home, in the chapels. He hurried like a shuttle from one church to another, hoping to solace his fears by changing his place, but they persisted, and rendered everyplace intolerable. Then in the sacred places came always that dryness of soul, the broken spring of impulse, a sudden silence within, when he desired consolation in speaking to Him. His best moments, his pauses in the hurly-burly, were a EN ROUTE. 125 few minutes of absolute torpor, which rested like snow on the soul and he heard nothing. But this drowsiness of thought lasted but a while, the whirlwind blew once more, and the prayers which were wont to appease it refused to leave his lips, he tried religious music, the despairing sequences of the psalms, pictures of the Crucifixion by the Early Masters, to excite him, but his prayers ran on and became confused on his lips, were divested of all sense, mere words, empty shells. At Notre Dame des Victoires, where he dragged him- self that he might thaw a little under the warmth of his neighbours’ prayers, he did in fact feel less chilly, and seemed to break up a little, fell drop by drop into sorrows which he could not formulate, and were all summed up in the cry of a sick child, in which he said to Our Lady, in low tones : “ My soul is sorrowful.” Thence he returned to St. Severin, sat down under those arches browned by the rust of prayers, and, haunted by his fixed idea, he pleaded for himself extenuating circumstances, exaggerated the austerities of La Trappe, tried almost to exasperate his fear to excuse his weakness in a vague appeal to Our Lady. “ But I must go and see the Abbe Gevresin,” he murmured, but his courage still failed him to pronounce the “Yes” which the priest would surely require from him. He ended by discovering a reason for his visit, without thinking himself obliged to promise just yet. “ After all,” he thought, “ I have no precise information about this monastery ; I do not even know whether it may not be necessary to take a long and expensive journey to get there ; the abbe indeed declares that it is not far from Paris, but it is impossible to decide on this simple declara- tion ; it will be useful also to know the habits of these cenobites before going to stay with them.” The abbe smiled when Durtal mentioned these objections. “The journey is short,” he said. “You start from the Gare du Nord at eight o’clock in the morning for Saint Landry, where you arrive at a quarter to twelve ; you lunch at an inn close to the station, and while you are drinking your coffee they get you a carriage, and after a drive of four hours you arrive at Notre Dame de I’Atre for dinner. There is no difficulty there. 126 EN ROUTE. “ Then the cost is moderate. As far as I remernber the railway fare is about fifteen francs, add two or three francs for lunch, and six or seven for the carriage . . . And as Durtal was silent, the abbe went on : Well ? ” Ah yes, yes ... if you knew ... I am in a pitiable state, I will and will not, I know well that I ought to take refuge there, but in spite of myself, I wish to gain time and put off the hour of departure.” And he continued : “ My soul is out of gear, when I would pray, my senses go all astray, I cannot recollect myself, and if I succeed in pulling myself together, five minutes do not pass but I am all astray again ; no, I have neither fervour nor true contrition, I do not love God enough, if it must be said. “ And, indeed, during the last two days, a frightful certainty has grown up in me ; I am sure that, in spite of my good intentions, if I found myself in the presence of a certain person, whose sight troubles me, I should send religion to the devil, I should return eagerly to my vomit ; I only hold on because I am not tempted, I am no better than when I was sinning. You will admit that I am in a wretched state to enter a Trappist monastery.” “Your reasons are at least weak,” answered the abbd “You say first that your prayers are distracted, that you are unable to concentrate your attention ; but in fact you are just like everybody else. Even Saint Teresa declares that often she was unable to recite the Credo without dis- traction, it is a weakness in which we must just take our portion humbly : above all things it is necessary not to lay too much stress on these evils, for the fear of seeing them return ensures their assiduity ; you are distracted in prayer by the very fear of distraction, and by regret for it ; go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as best you can, and do not trouble yourself. “ Again, you declare that if you meet a certain person whose attraction is a trouble to you, you will succumb. How do you know that ? why should you take care about seductions which God does not yet inflict upon you, and which He will perhaps spare you ? Why doubt His mercy ? Why not believe, on the contrary, that if He judge the temptation useful. He will aid you enough to prevent your sinking under it ? EN ROUTE. 127 “In any case you ought not, by anticipation, to fear dis- gust at your weakness ; the Imitation declares ‘ There is nothing more foolish and vain, than to afflict ourselves about future things which may perhaps never happen.’ No, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the present, for ‘ Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,’ — ‘ sufficit diei malitia sua. “Finally you say you do not love God; again I answer, what do you know about it? You have this love by the very token that you desire to have it, and that you regret you have it not ; you love our Lord by the very fact that you desire to love Him.” “ That is special pleading,” murmured Durtal. “ But indeed,” he went on, “ suppose at La Trappe, the monk revolted at the long outrage of my sins, refused me absolution, and forbade me to communicate.” The abbe burst out laughing. “ You are mad ! What is your notion of Christ ? ” “ Not of Christ, but of His intermediary the human being who replaces Him.” “You can only chance upon a man pointed out before- hand from above to judge you ; moreover, at Notre Dame de I’Atre you have every chance of kneeling at the feet of a saint, therefore God will inspire him, will be present, you have nothing to fear. “As to the Communion, the prospect of being rejected terrifies you, but is not that one proof the more that, contrary to your opinion, God does not leave you insei>- sible ? ” “ Yes, but the idea of communicating alarms me none the less.” “ I say to you again : if Jesus were indifferent to you, it would be just the same to you, to consume or not to con- sume the sacred species.” “ All that does not convince me,” sighed Durtal. “ I do not know where I am ; I am afraid of a confessor, of others, of myself ; it is foolish, but it is stronger than I. I cannot gain the upper hand.” “You are afraid of the water ; imitate Gribouille, throw yourself in boldly ; look, suppose I write to La Trappe this very day to say you are coming ; when ? ” “ Oh ! ” cried Durtal, “wait a while.” 128 EN ROUTE. To get an answer, we need two days each way ; will you go there five days hence ? ” And, as Durtal was astounded and silent. Is that settled ? ” Then, at that moment, Durtal had a strange experience, as often at St. Severin, a sort of caressing touch and gentle push ; he felt a will insinuate itself into his own, and he drew back disquieted at seeing he had a double self, to find he was no longer alone in the depth of his being ; then he was inexplicably reassured, and gave himself up, and as soon as he had said “ Yes ” he felt immensely relieved ; then passing from one extreme to the other, he was troubled at the idea that his departure could not take place at once, and was sorry that he had still to pass five days in Paris. The abbe laughed. But the Trappists must have notice, it is a simple formality, for with a word from me, you will be received at once, but wait at least until I have sent this word ; I will post it this evening, so have no anxiety, and sleep in peace.” Durtal in his turn laughed at his own impatience. You must think me very ridiculous,” he said. The priest shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘ Come, you asked me about my little monastery ; I must try to satisfy you. It is very small, if compared with the grande Trappe at Soligny, or the establishments at Sept Fonds, Meilleray or Aiguebelle, for there are only about ten choir fathers, and about thirty lay brothers or ‘conversi.^ There are also a certain number of peasants who work with them, and help them to till their land, and make their chocolate.” They make chocolate ! ” That surprises you. How do you think they live ? Ah ! I warn you, you are not going into a sumptuous monastery.” “ I like it so. But in regard to the stories of La Trappe, T suppose the monks do not greet each other with ^ Brother, we must die,^ and that they do not dig their graves every morning ? ” “ All that is false. They take no trouble about their graves, and they salute each other silently, since they are forbidden to speak.” “ Then what am I to do if I need anything ? ” EN ROUTE. 129 The abbot, the confessor, and the guestmaster have the right of conversing with the guests, you will have to do with them alone ; the others will bow when you meet them, but if you speak to them they will not answer.’’ It is well to know that. What is their dress ? ” Before the foundation of Citeaux, the Benedictines wore, or so it is supposed, the black habit of Saint Benedict ; the Benedictines properly so-called wear it still, but at Citeaux the colour was changed, and the Trappists, who are a twig of this branch, have adopted the white robe of Saint Bernard.” “ Pray pardon all these questions, which must seem childish, but since I am about to visit these monks, I ought to be in some measure acquainted with the customs of their order.” “I am wholly at your disposition,” replied the abbe. Durtal asked him about the situation of the abbey itself, and he replied, “ The present monastery dates from the eighteenth century, but you will see in the gardens the ruins of the old cloister, which was built in the time of Saint Bernard. In the Middle Ages there was a succession of Blessed in this convent ; it is a truly sanctified land, fit for meditation and regret. “ The abbey is situated at the bottom of a valley, accord- ing to the orders of Saint Bernard ; for you know that if Saint Benedict loved the hills. Saint Bernard sought the low and moist plains wherein to found his convents. An old Latin line has preserved the different tastes of these two saints : ‘ Bernardus valles, colles Benedictus amabat.’ ” “ Was it on account of his own personal liking, or for a pious end, that Saint Bernard built his hermitages in un- wholesome and flat places ? ” “ In order that his monks, whose health was enfeebled by the fogs, might have constantly before their eyes the salu- tary image of death.” “ The deuce he did ! ” “ I may add at once that the valley in which Notre Dame de I’Atre rises is now drained, and the air is very pure. You will stroll by delightful ponds, and I may recommend you, on the borders of the enclosure, an avenue of secular K 130 EN ROUTE. chestnuts, where you may take some refreshing walks at daybreak. And after a silence the Abbe Gevresin continued, — ‘‘Walk there a good deal, traverse the woods in all directions ; the forests will tell you more about your soul than books : ‘ Aliquid amplius invenies in sylvis quam in libris,^ wrote Saint Bernard — ‘ pray and your days will seem short. ^ ” Durtal went away from the priest’s house comforted, almost joyful ; he felt at least the solace of a fixed decision, a resolution taken at last. He said to himself that the only thing now to be done was to prepare himself as best he could for the retreat, and he prayed and went to bed for the first time for months with his mind at rest. But next day, when he woke, his mood changed, all his preconceived ideas, all his fears returned ; he asked himself if his conversion were ripe enough to allow him to cut it separate, and carry it to La Trappe ; the fear of a confessor, the dread of the unknown, assailed him afresh. “ I was wrong to have answered so soon,” and he asked himself, “Why did I say ‘ yes ’ ? ” The recollection of this word pronounced by his lips, conceived by a will which was still his own and yet other than his, came back to his mind. “ It is not the first time that such a thing happened to me,” he thought, “ I have already experienced when alone in the churches unexpected counsels, silent orders, and it must be admitted that it is terrifying to feel this infusion into self of an invisible being, and to know that he can, if he choose, almost turn you out of the domain of your personality. “ But no, it is not that, there is no substitution of an exterior will to one’s own, for one’s free will is absolutely intact ; neither is it one of those irresistible impulses en- dured by certain sick persons, for nothing is more easy than to resist it ; it is still less a suggestion, since, in this case, there are no magnetic passes, no somnambulism induced, no hypnotism ; no, it is the irresistible entrance into one- self of a strange will, the sudden intrusion of a precise and discreet desire, a pressure on the soul at once firm and gentle. Ah ! again I am incorrect, and play the fool, but nothing can describe that close pressure, which vanishes at the least movement of impatience — it is felt but cannot be expressed. EN ROUTE. I31 Its introduction is always attended by surprise, almost with anguish, since it does not make use of even an interior voice to make itself heard, and is formulated without the aid of words, all is blotted out, the breath which has thrilled you disappears. You would wish that this incitement should be confirmed, that the phenomenon should be repeated in order to be more closely observed, to try to analyze it and under- stand it, when lo ! it is gone ; you remain alone with yourself, are free not to obey, your will is unfettered and you know it, but you know also that if you reject these in- vitations you take on yourself unspeakable risks for the future. In fact,^’ pursued Durtal, it is an angelic influx, a divine touch, something analogous to the interior voice so well known by the mystics, but it is less complete, less precise, and yet it is quite as certain.’^ He ended his dreams concluding, I am consumed and collared by myself, before being able to answer this priest, whose arguments would scarce persuade me, unless I had had this help, this unexpected succour. “ But then, since I am thus led by the hand, what have I to fear ? ’’ He feared all the same, and could not be at peace with himself ; then if he profited by the comfort of a decision, he was consumed for the moment by the expectation of his departure. He tried to kill time in reading, but he had to admit once more that he could not expect consolation from any book. None came even distantly into relation with his state of mind. High Mysticism was so little human, soared at such heights far from our mire, that no sovereign aid could be expected from it. He ended by falling back on the “ Imita- tion,’’ in which Mysticism, placed within the reach of the crowd, was like a trembling and plaintive friend who stanched your wounds within the cells of its chapters, prayed and wept with you, and in any case compassionated the desolate widowhood of souls. Unfortunately, Durtal had read so much, and was so saturated with the Gospels, that he had temporarily ex- hausted their sedative and soothing virtues. Tired of reading, he again began his courses in the churches. “ And K 2 132 EN ROUTE. suppose the Trappists will not have me,” he thought, “ what will become of me ? ” “ But I tell you that they will receive you,” said the abbe, whom he went to see. He was not easy till the day the priest handed him the answer from La Trappe. He read : — We will receive with pleasure, for a week, in our guest- house the retreatant whom you wish to commend to us, and I do not see at the moment any reason why the retreat should not begin next Tuesday. “ In the hope. Monsieur I’Abbe, that we shall also have the pleasure of seeing you again in our solitude, I beg to assure you that I am yours most respectfully, “ F. M. Etienne, “ Guestmastery He read and re-read it, at once delighted and terrified. “ There is no further doubt ; it is irrevocable,” he said, and he went at once in haste to St. Severin, having less need of prayer than of going near to Our Lady ; of showing himself to her, paying her, as it were, a visit of thankfulness, and expressing his gratitude by his very presence. He was taken by the charms of that church, its silence, the shadow which fell on the apse, from the height of its palm trees of stone, and he ended by caring for nothing and sinking on a chair, filled with one sole desire, not to enter again on the life of the streets, never to leave his refuge, never to move. The next day, which was a Sunday, he went to the Benedictine nuns to hear High Mass. A black monk celebrated; he recognized a Benedictine when the priest chanted “IDominous vobiscoum,” for the Abbe Gevresin had told him that the Benedictines pronounced Latin like Italian. Though he was not inclined to like that pronunciation which took away from Latin the sonorous tones of its words, and turned after a fashion the phrases of that tongue into a ring of bells with their clappers muffled or their vases stuffed with tow, he let himself go, taken hold of by the unction, by the humble piety of the monk, who almost trembled with reverence and joy when he kissed the altar, EN ROUTE. 133 and he had a deep voice, to which, behind the grating, answered the clear high voices of the nuns. Durtal panted, listening to the fluid pictures of the Early Masters sketch and form and paint themselves on the air ; he was affected to his very marrow, as he had formerly been during High Mass at St. Severin. He had lost that emotion now in that church, where the flower of melody had faded for him since he knew the Benedictine plain song, and he now found it again, or rather he took it with him from St. Severin to this chapel. And for the first time he had a wild desire, a desire so violent that it seemed to melt his heart. It was at the moment of the Communion. The monk, elevating the Host, uttered the “ Domine non sum dignus.’’ Pale, with drawn features, sorrowful eyes, and serious mouth, he seemed to have escaped from a monastery of the Middle Ages, cut out of one of those Flemish pictures where the monks are standing in the background, while, before them, nuns are praying on their knees with joined hands, near the donors, to the child Jesus on whom the Virgin smiles, while lowering her long lashes under her arching brow. And while he descended the steps and communicated two women, Durtal trembled, and his desires went forth towards the ciborium. It seemed to him that if he were nourished on that Bread, there would be an end of all his dryness and all his fears ; it would seem to him that the wall of his sins, higher and higher from year to year, and now barring his view, would roll away, and at last he would see. And he was in haste to set off for La Trappe, that he too might receive the Sacred Body from the hands of a monk. That mass gave him new strength like a tonic, he came out of the chapel joyful and firmer, and when the impression grew somewhat feebler in the course of hours, he remained perhaps less affected, but still resolute, joking in the even- ing with a gentle melancholy about his condition : “ There are many people who go to Bareges or Vichy to cure their bodies, and why should not I go and cure my soul in a Trappist monastery ? ” CHAPTER X. I SHALL make myself a prisoner in two days,- ’ sighed Durtal ; “ it is time to think about packing. What books shall I take to help me to live down there ? He searched his library, and turned over the mystical books, which had, by degrees, replaced profane works on the shelves. will not talk of Saint Teresa,” he thought ; “ neither she, nor Saint John of the Cross, would be indulgent enough to me in solitude ; I have need of more pardon and con- solation.” “ Saint Denys the Areopagite, or the apocryphal book known under that name ? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest in his theological defini- tions. He lives in the rarefied air of the mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid, undazzled in the blaze of light around him. “ It seems that in his ‘ Celestial Hierarchies,’ in which he brings out in procession the armies of heaven, and shows the meaning of angelic attributes and symbols, he has already passed the limits assigned to man, and yet in his ‘ Divine Names ’ he ventures even a step further, and then he raises himself into the super-essence of metaphysics at once calm and stern. “ He over-heats the human word to give it greater force, but when after all his efforts he endeavours to define the Indescribable, to distinguish those never to be confounded Persons of the Trinity who in their plurality never lose their unity, words fail on his lips, and his tongue is paralyzed under his pen ; then tranquilly and without any astonish- ment he makes himself again a child, comes down from EN ROUTE. ^3S those heights among us, and in order to try and explain to us what he understands, he has recourse to comparisons with domestic life ; and that he may explain the Trinity in Unity he notices how, if many torches be lighted in one hall, lights, though distinct, mingle in one, and are in fact no more than one. ‘‘Saint Denys,” thought Durtal, “is one of the boldest explorers of the eternal regions, but he would be dry reading at La Trappe.” “ Ruysbrock ? ” he thought — “ perhaps, and yet I hardly am sure — I might put him in my bag as well as for a cordial the little collection distilled by Hello ; as for the Spiritual Marriages, so well translated by Maeterlinck, they are disconnected and obscure, they stifle me, this Ruysbrock oppresses me less. This hermit is singular, all the same, for he does not enter into us, but rather goes round about us ; he endeavours, like Saint Denys, to arrive at God, rather in heaven than in the soul, but in wishing to take such a flight, he strains his wings, and stammers incomprehensibly when he comes down. “ We will leave him behind, then. Now let us see. Saint Catherine of Genoa ? Her discussions between the soul, the body, and self-love are unmeaning and confused, and when in her ‘ Dialogues,’ she treats of the operations of the interior life, she is greatly below Saint Teresa and Saint Angela. On the other hand her Treatise on Purgatory is clear. It declares that she alone has penetrated into the spaces of unknown sorrows, and that she has disentangled and taken hold of the joys ; she has in fact succeeded in reconciling two contraries which seemed eternally repug- nant ; the suffering of the soul in its purification from sin, and the joy of the same soul, which at the very moment it is enduring frightful torment experiences immense happiness, for little by little it draws near to God, and feels His rays attract it more and more, and His love inundate it with such excess, that it would seem the Saviour desires nought but only it. “ Saint Catherine sets forth also that Jesus forbids heaven to none, that it is the soul herself who, deeming herself unworthy to attain it, flings herself by her own motion into Purgatory there to cleanse herself, for she has only one end, to re-establish herself in her primitive purity, only one 136 EN ROUTE. desire, to attain her last end, by destroying herself, annihi- lating herself, losing herself in God. “ This is a conclusive study,” murmured Durtal, “ but not that which would lead to La Trappe. We must try again.” He touched other volumes in the book-cases. ‘‘ Here, for instance, is one which obviously I should use,” he went on, as he took down the Seraphic Theology ” of Saint Bonaventure, “for he condenses the means of self- examination, of meditation for communion, of thoughts on death, then in these ‘ Selections ^ is a treatise on the Contempt of the World, whose terse phrases are admirable ; it is the true essence of the Holy Spirit, a jelly of unction firm set — we will put that on one side. “ I shall hardly find a better help to remedy the probable weariness of solitude,” murmured Durtal, turning over new ranks of volumes. He looked at the titles. “ The Life of the Blessed Virgin,” by M. Olier. He hesitated, saying to himself, “ Under a style which is like water with scarcely the chill off, there are some interesting observations, some tasteful comments. M. Olier has in a way traversed the mysterious territory of hidden designs, and has there discovered the unimaginable truths which the Lord is sometimes pleased to reveal to His saints. He has made himself the liege-man of Our Lady, and living near her has made himself also the herald of her attributes, the legate of her graces. His Life of Mary is certainly the only one which seems really inspired and is possible to read. Where the abbess of Agreda wanders, he alone remains vigorous and clear. He shows us the Virgin existing from all eternity in God, conceiving without ceasing to be immaculate, like the crystal which receives and reflects the rays of the sun, yet loses nothing of its lustre, and indeed shines with greater brightness, bringing forth without pain, but suffering at the death of her Son the pangs she would have borne at His birth. Then he gives us learned disserta- tions on Her whom he calls the Treasure-house of all good, the Mediatrix of love and impetration. Yes, but to converse with Her nothing is so good as the ^ Officium parvum beatae Virginis,’ and that,” concluded Durtal, “I will put in my bag with my Prayer-book ; we will not disturb M. Olier^s volume.” EN ROUTE. 137 “My stock begins to give out/’ he continued. “ Angela of Foligno ? Certainly she is a brasier at which one may warm one’s soul. I will take her with me. What more — Tauler’s Sermons ? I am tempted to do so, for never has any treated better than this monk the most abstruse subjects with a more perfectly lucid mind. By aid of familiar images, humble analogies, he has rendered accessible the highest speculations of Mysticism. He is homely and deep, then he borrows a little from quietism, and, perhaps, it will be no bad thing to absorb, down there, a few drops of that mixture. Yet on the whole, no ; I have rather need of nerve tonics. As to Suso, he is a remedy far inferior to Saint Bonaventure, or Saint Angela. 1 put aside also Saint Bridget of Sweden, for in her con- versations with heaven she seems aided by a God morose and tired, who reveals to her nothing unexpected, nothing new. “ There is also Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, that voluble Carmelite whose work is a series of apostrophes. An exclamatory person, clever at analogies, expert in coin- cidences, a saint infatuated with metaphors and hyperboles. She talks directly with God the Father, and stammers out in ecstasy explanations of the mysteries revealed to her by the Ancient of days. Her books contain one sovereign page on the Circumcision, another magnificent one, entirely made up of antitheses, on the Holy Spirit, others, very strange, on the deification of the human soul, on its union with heaven, and on the part assigned in this operation to the wounds of the Word. “ These are inhabited nests ; the eagle which is the symbol of Faith resides in the eyrie of the left foot ; in the hole of the right foot resides the melancholy sweetness of the turtle-doves ; in the wound of the left- hand the dove ensconces herself, the symbol of surrender, and in the cavity of the right hand reposes the pelican, the emblem of love. “ These birds leave their nests and come to seek the soul that they may lead it to the nuptial chamber of the wound which bleeds in the side of Christ. “ Was it not also that Carmelite nun who, ravished by the power of grace, despised so greatly the certitude acquired by the way of the senses, as to say to the Lord ; EN ROUTE. 138 ‘ If I saw Thee with mine eyes, I should have Faith no more, because Faith ceases where evidence comes in ’ ? “All things considered,” he said Magdalen of Pazzi, with her dialogues and contemplations, opens eloquent horizons, but the soul, snared in the bird-lime of its sins, cannot follow her. No ; this saint cannot reassure me in the cloister. “ Ah ! ” he went on, shaking the dust from a volume in a grey cover ; “ ah ! it is true I have The Precious Blood, of Father Faber.” And he began to dream as he turned over its pages where he stood. He remembered the impression, till now forgotten, produced on him when he read it. The work of this Oratorian was at least strange. The pages boiled over, ran forth tumultuously, carrying with them grandiose visions, such as Hugo conceived, developing historical perspectives such as Michelet loved to paint. In this volume was seen advancing the solemn procession of the Precious Blood, starting from the confines of humanity, from the origin of the ages, and it broke the bounds of the worlds, overwhelmed the nations, submerged history. Father Faber was less a mystic, properly so-called, than a visionary and a poet ; in spite of the abuse of rhetoric transferred from the pulpit to a book, he tore up souls by roots, carried them away on the rush of the stream, but when one regained footing, and sought to remember