The Cathedral

Contents

Title

Introduction

Note on the translation

The Cathedral

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

Selected bibliography in English

Chartres Cathedral in Pictures

Copyright

Introduction

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

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

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

(Studies in Foreign Literature, Duckworth, 1899.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Note on the translation

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah! she’s faithful to her Lourdes, is Our Lady, she pampers it. She seems to have